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EARLY WRITINGS
AN ACADEMIC JOURNAL
�!
�Early Writings:
An Academic Journal
St. John's College Graduate Institute
Santa Fe, New Mexico
2013
STJOHN’S
College
ANNAPOLIS . SANTA FE
This project is dedicated to Susan Olmsted,
a fisher of like-minded souls,
who with her gentle steadfastness and quiet kindness
helped each of us to make St. John's College our home.
��Early Writings:
An Academic Journal
St. John's College Graduate Institute
Santa Fe, New Mexico
2012
Publishers
Casey Carr
Jeff Ondocsin
Editors
Casey Carr
Brian Connolly
Jeff Ondocsin
Jesse Wilhite
Matthew Zehnder
Selection Committee
Chelsea Allen
Elliot Bernstein
Brian Connolly
Thomas Conroy
Kevin Cowling
Jeffrey Ondocsin
Eduardo Vera
Joan Marie Wood
Matthew Zehnder
Cover Design
Alycia Smith
��Contents:
A Note About Our Project
Casey Carr and Jeff Ondocsin
vi
Sweet Showers, Sweet Breath
Joan Marie Wood
1
Antinomian Sentiment in the Bhagavad Gita, Book II
Elliot Bernstein
7
The Death of Kings:
History and the Individual in Shakespeare's Richard II
William Leavy
12
Seeing-Time
April Olsen
22
Life Experience by the Books, or How to Read Nabokov’s Speak,
Memory
Grant Wycliff
33
�Searching for Geometrical "Truth" in Einstein's Relativity
Jules Mancini
44
Nietzsche's Philosopher: The Antagonistic Redeemer
Mary Creighton
54
Prince Myshkin's Beautiful Horizon: Exploring Death and the
Infinite in Dostoevsky's The Idiot
Kevin Cowling
65
A Proposed Atlas to the On-ramps and Off-ramps of the Road to
Serfdom
Jesse Wilhite
86
The Faith of the Poet
Anthony Eagan
97
The Two Prakrtis
Jeff Ondocsin
111
Chaucer's Grisild: Constreyned by Maistrie
Leah Weed
116
IV
�i’l-
5??
V
�A Note About Our Project
Early Writings: An Academic Journal 2013 marks the third
edition of this project in the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College,
Santa Fe. This unique collection of essays reflects the various ideas
and texts that our graduate students encounter in both the Liberal
Arts and Eastern Classics programs.
Why do we study Great Books? The fact is that the pursuit
of knowledge edifies not only the mind, but also the soul. We read
carefully and rely on involved discussion with one another to work
through the implications of the texts. This is not an attempt to be
authoritative; we leave that province to the rest of the academic
world. Our graduate students ask questions only to find that the
process of asking questions of our authors begets yet more
questions. Mastery is not the goal. We are interested in letting the
books speak to us without imposing preconceived ideas or
prejudices upon them. In this way, we attempt to explore the ideas
of the authors for the pleasure and reward of inquiry itself.
This, the third edition of the Journal, features such questions
as: What happens when a king places love of himself above duty to
country? Can a return to once abandoned values save a crumbling
political system? Why is the philosopher necessary for society?
What is the consequence of a theological doctrine that does not
bind salvation to adherence to a specific moral code? Is there only
one kind of knowledge that gives man access to God?
Our questions are not strictly limited to political or
theological matters. How does Chaucer’s general prologue presage
the rest of the tales? How is understanding achieved through
confounding the reader’s experience of both being and time? How
do the truth and beauty of human experience manifest themselves
in the various literary devices of both fiction and autobiography?
What role can geometrical truth play in modern mathematics? Is
experience transmissible between individuals? Does the poet make
the poem or does poetry make the poet? What does the telling of
the same story in two different moral systems tell us about the
authors and their societies?
Our design for this project is not only to showcase the
efforts of our graduate students and the St. John’s program itself.
VI
�but also to invite the reader—whoever he may be—to use these
essays as a springboard to embark on his own quest toward
knowledge. It is therefore our pleasure to present you with the
2013 Graduate Institute Academic Journal.
As with the first and second editions, this edition of the
Journal was crafted according to a specific set of selection and
editing standards. By means of these we aim to preserve the
integrity of our project.
A selection committee received
anonymous submissions from our graduate student body to review
for content, style, and coherence. Using a numerical rubric system,
the committee voted on those essays which most conformed to our
standards of academic writing and the St. John's process of inquiry.
Those who submitted essays and were also part of the selection
committee forfeited their right to vote on their own work. Upon
selection, a smaller group of editors carefully combed the selected
essays for necessary grammatical and syntactical changes. It is
important to note that this editing, however thorough, was
performed with great caution. It is our foremost aim to ensure that
the original intention and style of the authors are preserved. Next,
the publishers put together the actual design and format of a
manuscript that was then sent to the press.
We would like to thank all of the students who have
contributed to this important project, as well as our Graduate
Director, Mr. Carl. Early Writings would not be possible without the
seriousness and sincerity of the St. John's College community.
Your Publishers and Executive Editors,
Casey Carr
Jeff Ondocsin
Jesse Wilhite
�Vlll
�Sweet Showers, Sweet Breath
Joan Marie Wood
Whan thatAprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
5
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
Tendre croppes, and theyonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halve coursyronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
w
(so priketh hem Nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To feme halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
15
OfEngelond to Caunterbury they wende.
The hooly blisful martirfor to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seekeJ
The first eighteen lines of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales may
be presumed to set a context for the Tales, and, moved by a
mysterious delight, 1 have found myself repeatedly drawn back to
them. 1 propose to consider these lines in detail, with the goal of
deepening my understanding of why Chaucer chose to begin his
epic this way.
First 1 will give an overview of this passage, and then 1 will
take a look at each line in order to tease out some of the richness
that Chaucer offers us.
We start at the beginning—of the epic, of the journey to
Canterbury, of the series of Tales. Beginnings are portentous: it is a
launch time, a time for alertness, excitement, and perhaps, a time of
openings, of new possibilities. These beginning lines, which
comprise one very long sentence, can be divided into three
1
�sections. Each has progressively more focused content, and each is
marked off from the others with a semi-colon (though there is an
additional semi-colon after line 4, allowing Chaucer to begin line 5
with another “Whan," thus emphasizing the time element]. Lines 1
through 11, "Whan that April. . .nature in hir corages;" tell us that
the season of this epic is spring, when warm rain produces flowers
and new crops come forth. In this first section, Chaucer uses
natural images2 and pagan references^; there are no overtlv
Christian references.
^
Lines 12 through 14, "Thanne longen folk . . .in sundry
londes; are a general response to lines 1 through 11- "Whan" it is
this particular season, "thanne" folk long to go on pilgrimages.
Here we have the first Christian reference in the word "palmers"
returnees from the Holy Land, for whom spring, apparent^,
refreshes the wish to wander to foreign shores as pilgrims. These
three lines narrow the focus to the longing provoked in "folk"—in
many people, we may presume—in response to the spring's
quickening; specifically to Christians, including those who have
been on pilgrimages before.
Lines 15 through 18 bring us to a specific place and kind of
Christian pilgrimage: that of persons who have been sick, and are
now traveling from every shire in England to Canterbuiy.
Presumably they travel to visit the shrine of the Catholic martyr
Thomas Becket, as they have vowed. The following lines detail that
the narrator himself has been on a pilgrimage to Canterbury and
like thanne longen folk" can be presumed to understand why one
would do so. And we are off
^
The first word.
Whan repeated at the beginning of line 5, is a temporal signifies
oes this indicate that time will be important in this epic? I cannot
elp but make a parallel here with the first word of the Iliad
wrath an emotive word around which that epic hinges. Aiournev
takes place over time; it takes time to tell a story. But soecificallv
With this 'man" Chaucer singles out the season'of early sS""'
crucially important for the existence of the urge to go on a
pilgrimage, or at least the kind of pilgrimage he will present
Jhe first line reads: "Whan that Aprill with his shoures
soote. On the literal level April brings showers that soften and
2
�moisten the soil for planting. That Chaucer uses the word "soote,"
meaning "sweet," intrigues me; why not "warm" or "fresh?" Looking
back in the line to "Aprill," we see that at that time, astrologically
speaking, April was in the sign of Taurus, which is ruled by Venus,
the goddess of love. "Soote" connotes delectability, sensuous
delight, and by extension, desire. Since astrological signs are
important throughout the Tales, it seems that Chaucer signals in
this first line that love, and perhaps especially erotic love, will be of
major purport in this epic."^
In the second line, "The droghte of March hath perced to the
roote," I am struck by the word "droghte." Literally, one could say
there has been no rain, though perhaps slushy snow, in March, and
the ground, still icy, has begun to thaw into mud. But why a
drought? There is water left over from melting snow, but no water
falls from the sky. Nothing grows yet, last year's root cellars are
depleted, and humans, their resources exhausted, look to the signs
of replenishment which spring brings. Astrologically speaking,
March is the month of Mars, the god of war, who is also the lover of
Venus. Here is something quite interesting: The sweet (erotic)
rains of April "perce to the roote" the drought of March. This is an
opposite image to the obvious one connoted by the word "perce,"
with its association of masculine penetration. Instead, the feminine
water penetrates the masculine drought. 1 am still confused by the
meaning of the word "droghte." Could this be a drought of life, i.e.
Mars is a killer, or a drought of spirit? Is the sweet rain of
quickening time penetrating physically or spiritually exhausted life
forms?
Line 3, "and bathed every veyne in swich licour," gives us an
image of dessicated tissues being revitalized by moisture, and
dormant desires moistened into presence. Furthermore, in line 4,
"Of which vertu engendred is the flour" Chaucer presents us with
the result of the activity detailed in the first three lines: the flower,
something beautiful, a stage on the way to fruiting, attractive to
insects and humans. The blooms emerge because the natural world
is refreshed by sweet rain, or, seen metaphorically or astrologically,
a drenching which produces the juices of desire. The flower image
also connotes maidenhood and youth, times of sexual potency and
urge.
3
�The next seven lines complete this first section
underscoring and extending the theme of erotic desire. Zephirus
the Greek god of the West Wind that blows In spring, has -s^ete"
breath and quickens new growth.^ The image of sweet breath
signifies erotic intimacy as well as the warmth of spring To
experience the “sweete" breath of another we need the kind of
closenGss associated with desire.
Chaucer's first direct astrological reference, the Ram
indicates the month of March, ruled by Mars. The "yonge sonne"'
has passed out of Ram, which means into Taurus, the time of Venus,
n the next three lines, Chaucer gives us the image of small birds
singing, who sleep all night with open eyes. It continues, "so priketh
hem nature m hir corages." What does this mean? If one sleeps
with open eyes, one is restless. Does this mean one is worried? Or
rather, since the birds have been singing, is it not likely that they
are possessed by a distracted delight, as when a lover is first falling
prevents one’s eyes from
uttmg
In this line Chaucer seems to suggest something
inescapable about being a living being—that all of us will be kept
up some nights because of erotic desire, whether we want it or not
rniv^v- ?
^*”6, these images of nature and natural desire
minate in the somewhat surprising statement, "Thanne longen
folk to goon on pilgrimages." As a practical matter, it would make
sense that those moved to keep a vow to the saint who has helped
them would choose to travel in the spring.
Chaucer has
emphasized the bursting forth of life, however, using images and
symbols of erotic desire. This opens up the question, in what way is
the longing to go on pilgrimages predicated on the quickening^of
nature and the flow of erotic desire? In other words what is the
rromres?'’
“
"longen" seems particularly Significant. Is Chaucer
nviting us to consider the various motives that induce "folk" to
participate m a pilgrimage? What might the motive be, if not the
eepmg of a promise? Could these motives include the wish to
find?
^
establish a reputation
nd a wife or husband? Alternatively, if folk are "priked by nature’’
to keep a vow ii. spring, could Chaucer be inviting us to poXr
4
�whether the renewal of desire in springtime is providential, i.e. it
aligns with the urge to keep a religious promise? Whatever the
case, Chaucer seems to suggest that as readers we must keep our
eyes open, for people who take pilgrimages, and this one in
particular, may not be what they seem.
The specific "folk” mentioned in the last six lines of this text
are palmers. They hail from every shire’s end in England and are
going to Canterbury to visit St. Thomas Becket, the saint and
martyr. "That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke." One
wonders why Chaucer devotes two lines out of eighteen to palmers,
who visit "straunge strondes, to feme halwes, kowthe in sondry
londes." One might call palmers, who are fulltime wandering
votaries, professional pilgrims. If the palmers are professional
pilgrims, how do they make money to support their wanderings?
Perhaps they beg. On the other hand, there are many other ways of
making money, licit and not. Here Chaucer may be inviting us to
consider what spring’s rejuvenating pulse has to do with making
money, and thus what it is to be any kind of professional, especially
a religious professional.
Finally, people from all walks of life come from every part of
England to this Canterbury pilgrimage. These pilgrims, as the
narrator makes explicit, are journeying to fulfill vows made when
they were sick. Their illnesses, if indeed they existed, are not
mentioned very often. The impetus for going on this pilgrimage,
then, is not focused primarily on recovering from an illness, but
rather the fulfillment of a religious vow.
These first eighteen lines link the urge to go on pilgrimages
to other natural [especially erotic) desires, yet presumably pilgrims
travel due to a promise that they have made. Chaucer invites us to
ask how we might live in a world of natural desires, a world in
which we are able to make promises that often conflict with these
desires. Desire, as a natural phenomenon, is like the sweet showers,
the sweet wind, and the young sun that Chaucer speaks of in the
first eight lines. It is basic, ancient, and inescapable. This being the
case, could desire also be part of divine providence? If the renewal
of the world through springtime is providential, then we are led to
consider a paradox: human desire moves us to do things that are
5
�outside of our human agreements. How do we inhabit such a
world?
If the spring rains are filled with the spark of divinity, do we
not need to find some way to honor both natural desires and our
need to fulfill religious promises? Because Chaucer begins the
Prologue with eleven lines of natural images, he seems to say that
natural, erotic desires are a given, and must be attended to and
respected. Because Venus is a goddess, and because she appears as
Aprill" in the first line, this may suggest to us that we must look to
women to discover how human desires should be honored.
Returning to the mysterious delight that has drawn me back
repeatedly to consider the beginning of the Prologue, the strongest
images are those of water soaking the dry, cold earth into vernal
juiciness, the wind encouraging new shoots, and the birds awake all
night. Chaucer begins with natural images that can be taken
literally, images familiar to everyone in all times. Yet, implicit in
every line are resonances from the world of astrology, the realms of
the gods of antiquity and, later, from the Christian world. The
simple, natural renewal of springtime has cosmic significance. That
erotic desire arises and challenges human promises is to be
expected, and in fact, welcomed. The tensions that ensue are ours
with which to come to grips. In choosing to start his epic this way
Ch^aucer has opened the door for us to contemplate this paradox
when, as readers on our own thoughtful pilgrimage, we begin our
journey through these Canterbury tales
Endnotes
1. Chaucer. Canterbury Tales. A. C. Cawley, ed. New York: Eveiyman’s Library, 1992. 1-18
2. Shoures, droghte, roote, ’ “flour,” “sonne,” “fowles.”
3. The god “Zephirus ” the astrological terms “Ram” and by extension April and March
4. See for example, The Wife ofBath's Tale and The Merchant's Tale
5. In the Odyssey, Zephirus starts the fruits, and later brings them to ripeness. [Book 7:118]
Primary Texts
Chaucer, Geoffrey. Canterbury Tales. Edited by A.C. Cawley Everyman’s
Library. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1992.
6
�Antinomian Sentiment in the Bhagavad Gita, Book II
Elliot Bernstein
Therefore shall ye keep mine ordinance,
that ye commit not any one of these
abominable customs, which were
committed before you, and that ye defde
not yourselves therein: I am the Lord
your God.
—Leviticus 18:30 (KJV)
In the West we often talk of the separation between the
nomian and antinomian^ streams of a given religion. This
breakdown does not necessarily apply to every tradition present all
over the world— it would be hard, for instance, to imagine an
antinomian version of Confucianism or Judaism, or a nomian
version of Shinto— but in the case of the two major religions
emerging from South Asia, viz. Hinduism and Buddhism, this
dichotomy is extremely relevant. The second book of the Bhagavad
Gita, in my opinion, is an antinomian programmatic for Hinduism.
This sentiment is most famously summed up by the last pada of
sloka 18.63, yathecchasi tathd kuruf which of course occurs much
later. To read consequent books as being more nomian is quite easy
as well, and there is an argument that will be considered
throughout that the antinomianism of Book 11 is merely an attack
on the Vedas and those who follow them as hidebound and
ridiculous— not that law is not in effect.
One of the antinomian themes presented in Book II is a
degradation of the Vedas. Buddhayo 'vyavasdyindm are bahusdkhd
hyanatds ca (2.41)3; bahusdkhd is a common epithet of the Vedas,
whose various parts are described as branches.^ The chief
complaint of the Gita appears to be the superfluous nature of the
Vedas:ydvdn artha udapdne sarvatah sarnplutodake/ tdvdn sarvesu
vedesu brdmanasya vijdnatah (2.46).3 The image of the well
overflowing is a potent statement of this particular criticism—
7
�presumably a wise man would be able to simply take the water
from anywhere and not need to go through the labor of drawing
from the well. Here we also see that the person who doesn’t need
the Vedas is a vijanatah. This term has an overly literal
interpretation of something like "totally wise," from the root ina
know plus the vi preverb, "away from," here used as an
intensifier.
This is echoed elsewhere in Book II; for example, where
Krishna admonishes Arjuna that apvipascitah / vedavMarantah
I ■
presumably a vijdnan would not enjoy such things. The
Veda-bound are described as bhogaisvaryaprasaktdh r2 4417
indicating perhaps that the Gita does not reject that the Vedas do
what they are stated to do, but does reject those goals as
worthwhile. As is written just a little further down: traigunyavisaya
veda nistraiguno bhavdrjuna C2.45),8 which is to say any goal
involving the three gunas or the worlds they create cannot be
considered worthwhile. The Gita goes on to elaborate on the
condition of nistraigunah with nirdvandvo nityasattvastho
niryogaksema dtmavdn [ibid.],’^ putting the various qualities in
apposition to each other and giving the reader the information that
a^d the^resV"
equivalent to nirdvandvo
The prefix nir-, "without," recurs in sloka 45, which was just
quoted, four times, but one of those occurrences is false because
niryasattvasthah does not actually include this morpheme, but
simulates It no doubt intentionally, with nityah, which means
eternal. In 2.45 we see the author of the Gita refer to the desirable
state for a heroic individual as nistraiguno, which clearly parallels
with the other nir- words, and the undesirable as traigunyavisayl
The desirable state is summed up as dtmavdn. Without [nir-] all
these other things, we see that the person is finally left with dtman
and nothing further. This line of reasoning would be picked up by
the non-duahst or Vedantist schools of Hinduism, e.g. in the
writings of Gaudapada.
^
In light thereof, the antinomian interpretation of the Gita
does not go unqualified. Obviously, being guna-less is good and
bemg en-guna-ed, as it were, is bad. So there is some kind of law
here, and in fact m various places the Gita uses the word dharma to
8
�refer to it. However, it is not what we would normally think of as a
ritual requirement, in recognition whereof, the Gita often uses
prajfia to refer to this ethical ideal. At times this begins to approach
Stoicism or Taoism in its insistence on passively “going with the
flow" and on the influence of the internal state of the person on
their outward actions, such as where it is written: tasmdd yasya
mahdbdho nigrhitdni sarvasah / indhydnmdriydrthebhyas tasya
prajnd pratisfhitd (2.68).io But there is another character to this; it
is not mere immobility but ascesis, as the Gita recommends:
svadharmam api cdveksa... dharmydd dhi yuddhdcchreyo 'nyat
(2.31).^^ That is to say, do not merely be content with withdrawal
but find your svadharma and obey it. Many commentators insist
that svadharma means something like "caste obligations," as it does
elsewhere, but it seems to me that this interpretation might be
missing the point. The prefix sva- indicates properness— proper,
almost invariably, to an individual, not to a group. Each person has
an internal law in the conception of the Gita. But Arjuna’s
svadharma must involve battle because of his status in the ksatriya
varna [ibid.). It is not merely whatever one wishes, but rather that
one's wishes will, having been cleared of all obstructions, come into
line with the caste law!
Often salvation in an antinomian system is achieved through
some kind of feeling or grace; in the Gita we see Krishna say that
srutivipratipannd te yadd sthdsyati niscald / samddhdv acald
buddhis taddyogam avdpsyasi (2.53).^^ Samddha somehow leads to
the attainment of yoga— a word that literally means "yoke," but
here is perhaps being used for ironic contrast with the nomian
position, since there is no "yoke" as one would typically think, but
instead one’s inner feeling.
The justification given for antinomianism is simple: nothing
can actually change; therefore no action can be forbidden. In 2.18,
we seeya enarp vetti hantdrarp yascainarp manyate hatam / ubhau
tau na vijdnito ndyarp hanti na hanyate^^; presumably this would
apply to other actions as well. If nothing can ever change, what is
the sense in acting, or in not acting? Arjuna has to go ahead with his
pre-determined course, his path of least resistance, as it were,
because that is the lawful thing to do. His downhill course,
fashioned by his nature and the circumstances of his life, can be
9
�fought, but there is no sense in it. A man who has withdrawn totally
into himself, detaching himself from his senses, simply rolls down
his svadharma without resistance, knowing that whatever he is
about to do would not be so easy if it were not foreordained by the
Bhagavad.
This answer is somewhat unsatisfying to the Western mind.
If the path of least resistance is the optimal one, would that not
justify any kind of crime, any kind of theft or violence? This
objection can be answered by insisting that we look at the cultural
context of Classical India, or of any pre-modern civilization. Each
person was born into a given role, and was expected to absolutely
follow that role to its bitter end. Who was born a stonemason lived
a stonemason and would die a stonemason— not only that, but his
sons would do the same. In a sufficiently stratified society, the path
of least resistance is one that is at least moderately productive.
Attempts to apply this philosophy to the modern world, where the
individual is expected to find his svadharma without any hint given
to him by the surrounding world, have proven unanimously
disastrous. One attempting to follow the course of least
resistance— an imperative common to many ancient and Eastern
philosophies— in the United States in 2012 will find himself
shuffled off to a housing project or incarcerated, which are
increasingly popular options. A vine follows the path of least
resistance too, but without the lattice it simply turns into a kind of
dense undergrowth. This trackless wilderness of the world of the
revolt of the third estate is an aberration, and the philosophies of
the past can therefore only be understood by placing ourselves in
the past. The intention of the Gita was not to justify any kind of
brutality or mere anarchy, but to encourage people to make use of
the existing structures— without those structures, these
philosophies become meaningless.
Endnotes
1. "Antinomianism” is the belief that salvation, or its local equivalent, happens
independently of the obedience, or lack thereof, to a certain law or moral code.
Nominianism is, of course, its opposite.
2. Translated by Aleister Crowley as "do what thou wilt."
10
�3. "The wisdom of the wavering is many branched and infinite."
4. For example, in Mahabharata we see someone who is very wise described as a "master
of the branches," viz., of the Vedas. Usually, each Brahmanic family was associated with a
particular "branch." Each branch has its own corpus of literature and its own Upanishads
to describe that corpus.
5. "So much usefulness as there is in a well when water is overflowing everywhere is there
in all the Vedas for the man of God."
6. "The ignorant delight in Veda-quotations."
7. "Pleasure-and-power-bound"
8. "The vedas are of the three-guna category; 0 Arjuna, be guna-less!"
9. "Non-dual, abiding in truth, without business, full of the self'
10. "Therefore, 0 strong-arm, whose senses are withheld totally from the objects of those
senses, his wisdom is established."
11. "Having apprehended your own law, because of that law, indeed nothing is better than
battle."
12. "Anti-revelation is unto you; where the fixed, meditating, and unmovable intellect
stands, there you will reach the yoke."
13. "Who imagines this one a slayer, who imagines this one slain— both are unknowing,
they neither slay nor are slain."
Primary Texts
Van Buitenen, J.A.B. Trans. The Bhagavadgita in the Mahabharata.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1981.
�The Death of Kings;
History and the individual in Shakespeare's The Tragedy of
Richard II
William Leavy
Is Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Richard II regarded as tragic
because of what happens to Richard, the King? Or would Richard of
Bordeaux, who was better loved, have been a better king, if he had
ruled England in another time? Is it a tragedy because of what
happens to England as a result the misrule of King Richard? If it is
the case that Richard of Bordeaux would have been a good king in
another time, then one must acknowledge that he is indeed an
historical figure. Unlike later kings such as Henry V and Richard III,
who essentially invented themselves, remaking history in the
process, Richard II is depicted in Shakespeare’s play as a king
acting and reacting within the historical parameters of the time in
which he reigned. In other words, Richard is an historical king,
whereas Henry V and Richard III are not constrained by the
parameters of their time. All three kings, as they are dramatized in
Shakespeare’s history plays, are individuals in the sense that they
exist outside of the expectations and limitations that are imposed
upon England’s sovereign by the nobility, the Church, and the royal
family itself. But in Richard II s case he is both ahistorical, in the
sense that he rules according to his own whims regardless of the
expectations that come with the throne, and historical, in the sense
that he is compelled to surrender his crown by virtue of his
defiance of these concerns and expectations, sowing the seeds of
rebellion through his misrule.
This discussion of Shakespeare’s Tragedy of Richard II will
examine the sense of the tragic from the perspective of King
Richard as an individual in his own time. Additionally, I will
examine how the idea of Richard, as such an individual, intersects
with England, Christianity, divinity, nature, paganism and sex. 1
shall begin the discussion by examining Shakespeare’s tragic
individual and his relationship with time.
In his only soliloquy in the play, Richard reflects on his life,
saying, "I wasted time, and now doth time waste me."i What are we
12
�to make of this king who, now imprisoned, reflects on neither how
he has wasted the resources of his kingdom to fight a war nor on
his wasted chance at greatness? Richard remarks instead, in what
seems to be the closest he shall ever come to feelings of remorse,
that he has “wasted time." But to waste time, in this case, is not a
reflection on the corporeal, outer world, but rather a reflection on
the consciousness of the man, the self. To Richard, the kingdom
over which he had ruled before his deposition was never truly his
realm. Instead, Richard’s empire is Richard himself, as well as the
world that he perceives from his own vantage point.
If we regard the essence of tragedy as that which inevitably
happens when an individual arrives on the scene and fails to live up
to the role of a god, then Shakespeare's Tragedy of Richard // differs
from Greek tragedy as to the root cause of its inevitability. Unlike
the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles, in which the protagonist
is inevitably destroyed by fate, Richard II is inevitably destroyed by
his ego, or by his idea of himself. Richard’s sense of self is not
grounded in the way the king is regarded by the rest of his
kingdom, and it wastes time to such an extent that fate never has
any need to intervene. His ego, in the sense of his individuality,
inevitably brings about his downfall.
That Shakespeare’s Richard is inevitably a tragic figure
because of his ego, rather than as a result of fate or the gods, might
explain why Richard bemoans the loss of time, rather than the loss
of England’s wealth and reputation. Richard II is isolated in time by
his historical context. He understands while he is incarcerated that
he is an historical figure and not an ahistorical one: the tragedy,
therefore, is that while still the King, Richard has acted as though
he were an ahistorical king, when in reality, history and time [in
and of themselves) reduce Richard to an historical figure. Only too
late does Richard acknowledge that he "wasted time, and now doth
time waste me.’’^
Does Richard of Bordeaux feel guilt in Shakespeare’s play? Is
he merely ashamed that he has been deposed? Unlike his rival
Bolingbroke, who became king well into his adulthood, Richard was
a king long before he became a man; he was still a boy when he was
crowned. Richard, therefore, as king, never had any higher
authority to which he was compelled to answer. By virtue of the
13
�doctrine of the Christian Church, which declared him sovereign
through God, Richard never had any occasion to learn guilt. Richard
the man is incapable of experiencing feelings of guilt; he can only
experience a sense of shame. This, Shakespeare reveals to his
audience, is an essential facet of Richard the individual, one that
condemns him to the role of a tragic player in England’s history.
Richard is a stranger to guilt, but he embraces his shame.
The ego in this case may have decided in hindsight that it was fated
to be deposed.
Shakespeare, however, asserts through his
portrayal of Richard as wasteful, overreaching, and imprudent, that
the inability of the self to feel guilt is characteristic of tragedy.
Richard, as has been mentioned, is an historical figure: he is a king
who reacts to, and is shaped by, time. He does not invent his ego
successfully in the same sense that Henry V and Richard III would
later invent theirs. But as a tragic figure, Richard H isn’t starcrossed; he "pluck[s] a thousand dangers"^ onto his head, in the
words of his uncle, the Duke of York.
The individual that is Richard of Bordeaux is dramatically,
as well as historically, "we” rather than "I," referring of course to
the royal "we" of England. Hence, in the early acts of the play
Richard speaks of "our justice’’^ and alludes to himself as the Lion,
the emblem of the kings of England. The royal "we," however, is
not limited to Richard, but rather is shared by all of England’s
monarchs. The "I” that is Richard himself, who attempts to rule the
kingdom as an individual, forsakes the counsel and advice of his
uncles and other older, wiser heads. He wishes to be an ahistorical
king. Richard is unaccountable and unconcerned with the welfare
of England. After all. King Richard speaks on behalf of England, so
why should he spend time concerning himself with what his
England happens to think? Richard is king by divine right. He does
not, therefore, have to maintain the approval of his subjects to
claim legitimacy. Rather than the "we," it is this "I” that plucks
disaster down onto his crown, and not fate. This suggests that
Richard is a tragic king because he is an ahistorical ruler at a time
in history that demands an historical one. Perhaps it is this sense
of the needs of history that Richard understands, only too late,
when he laments that he "wasted time.”
14
�Richard looks like a lion and plays the role of the lion, but he
has neither the favor of the nobility nor the popularity with the
commoners that his successor enjoys. The "I” who is King Richard
wastes time that should have been devoted to winning the loyalty,
admiration, and love of his subjects. As a result, England rebels, so
that the royal "we” of Richard’s sovereignty is reduced to the "I” of
a solitary subject when Richard is dethroned. In this regard, it is
not surprising that Richard orders a mirror with which to look at
himself at the moment he loses his kingship. If this incident is an
invention of the pla3Avright, it is revealing of Richard’s character
that he is more concerned with his own welfare than that of his
kingdom. Richard loves Richard—as long as Richard sees England
when he looks in the mirror. When England is no longer seen in the
reflection, as is the case when Richard surrenders his crown,
Richard smashes the mirror, and the illusion.
Richard, as Shakespeare shows, is a vain individual, and the
young king indeed has the preoccupations that are the province of
most young men. Sex, at first read, does not seem to figure as
prominently in Richard II as it does in the other history plays, but
the sexual relationships that are intimated in the play should cause
the reader to think again. Richard’s marriage to his young queen,
Isabella, in what appears to have been an arranged marriage, is
opposed to that of Henry V’s pursuit of Kate in a later play in the
cycle. In Richard II there is a tender scene of parting in Act V when
Richard is led off to prison and Isabella is sent back to France.
However, Richard’s lack of progeny, his seeming lack of interest in
producing an heir to the throne, and the language used in this
scene, "set forth in pomp / She came adorned hither like sweet
May," suggest a platonic relationship with the queen, devoid of heat
or lust.5 The implication, then, is that Richard prefers the company
of his favorites. Bushy, Bagot, and Green. In the eyes of both the
nobility and the commoners, the "natural" relationship between
Richard and Isabella has been replaced with an "unnatural”
relationship.
When Bolingbroke condemns two of Richard’s favorites.
Bushy and Green, in Act III, he accuses them, among other offenses,
of destroying the marriage between the king and his queen:
15
�You have in manner with your sinful hours
Made a divorce betwixt his queen and him.
Broke the possession of a royal bed,
And stained the beauty of a fair queen’s cheeks
With tears drawn from her eyes by your foul wrongs...^
Here, Richard is able to put the interests of his favorites ahead of
his kingly duties and conjugal obligations without any qualms. He
is never made to feel ashamed about his illicit affairs with Bushy,
Bagot, and Green, nor about his neglect of Queen Isabella. It is the
Earl of Northumberland, however, who describes the harmful effect
Richard’s extra-marital affairs are having on the realm. "The King
is not himself, but basely led / By flatterers.”'^ Inside his closet, his
personal quarters, Richard’s self comes before the responsibilities
of the Crown.
The ego who is Richard sees no schism between himself, the
Crown, and the Church. To engage knowingly in such a relationship
with one’s favorites is a mortal sin in the eyes of the Church, the
institution that validates Richard as King of England. While he is
still king, Richard shows no remorse for calling on God to have John
of Gaunt die quickly so he can seize his wealth to pay for his
military campaign in Ireland. Lastly, it is Bishop Carlisle who has to
remind the king, when they have returned from Ireland to face
rebellion at home, that the "Power that made you king/Hath power
to keep you king in spite of all.”^ The Bishop voices this opinion
after King Richard has revealed his pagan sensibilities in response
to the threat of rebellion. The reminder works, momentarily, at
least, as Richard concurs:
Not all the water in the rough rude sea
Can wash the balm off from an anointed king;
The breath of worldly men cannot depose
The deputy elected by the Lord...^
By contrast, after Richard surrenders his crown, he is content to
play the role of the martyr, going so far as to liken himself to the
Redeemer, particularly in the deposition scene:
16
�Though some of you, with Pilate, wash your hands.
Showing an outward pity, yet you Pilates
Have here deliver’d me to my sour cross.
And water cannot wash away your sinA^
Unlike Richard 111, whom Shakespeare depicts as someone
incapable of self-pity, Richard 11 raises self-pity, with the absence of
guilt, to a biblical level: "So Judas did to Christ; but He, in twelve, /
Found truth in all but one; 1, in twelve thousand, none."ii Although
these divine sentiments, expressed upon his abdication, clash with
his pagan sensibilities, this new martyr role is consistent with
Richard’s inability to feel guilt over his inadequate rule, and he
instead attempts to place the source of his shame on those who are
forcing him to step down. Self-pity typically makes it difficult for
the individual who engages it to have pity for others. Such is the
case with Shakespeare’s Richard II. The self has a divine right to be
king, and when that is no longer the case perforce, it reserves the
right to be the wronged late king.
Richard does allow himself, while imprisoned in Pomfret
Castle, to contemplate what role his ego ought to play. In the
aforementioned soliloquy, after meditating on divinity, Christianity,
and the seemingly inherent contradictions in Scripture, he comes to
the conclusion, "But what e’er I be, / Nor I, nor any man that but
man is, / With nothing shall be pleas’d, till he be eas’d / With being
nothing.’’i2 This is a reversal of Richard’s ego which was
inextricably identified with his role as king. The power to be
nothing is power nevertheless. Time and the ego’s destruction
result in the movement of the ego through a series of successive
states: nihilism succeeds power, and power, albeit in a new,
spiritual form, succeeds nihilism. Shakespeare has ascribed an arc
to Richard’s individuality, revealing with this new facet of his
character why the role demands such great range from actors. The
character of Richard is one of the most complex and seemingly
contradictory in all of Shakespeare’s plays. Richard, the individual,
is as conflicted and full of factions as is his kingdom.
Richard never vacillates more in emotion and in identity
than when he returns home from Ireland in Act III. Faced with the
17
�news of the rebellion, Richard, the Christian king, calls upon the
earth to “[f)eed not thy sovereign’s foe."i3 This speech, directed
towards nature and earthly things, is filled with pagan sentiment:
But let thy spiders, that suck up thy venom.
And heavy-gaited toads lie in their way.
Doing annoyance to the treacherous feet.
Which with usurping steps do trample thee.
Yield stinging nettles to mine enemies;
And when they from thy bosom pluck a flower.
Guard it, I pray thee, with a lurking adder.
Whose double tongue may with a mortal touch
Throw death upon thy sovereign’s enemies.^'’^
As a result of expressing such language, the king is rebuked by the
Bishop and reminded by his friends that he is both a Christian and
the King, which Richard seems to appreciate. But Shakespeare
again reveals Richard as an individual who will uncrown himself, as
the next piece of information the king receives discourages and
disheartens him. Richard ultimately falls into such despair that he
exclaims, "By heaven. I’ll hate him everlastingly / That bids me be
of comfort any more.’’^^ Richard has given up, and he seems to
prefer this new state of despair over one that would have him
continuing to fight to hold onto his crown:
Let’s talk of graves, of worms, of epitaphs.
Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.
When Richard invokes heaven, it is to surrender himself to the
rebellion as its sacrifice. When he defies the rebellion, he invokes
the earth to destroy his enemies. Richard’s sense of divinity is more
pagan than Christian.
Other characters in the play invoke metaphors of nature to
describe the King, such as the language that Richard’s uncle John of
Gaunt uses to describe Richard’s recklessness:
His rash fierce blaze of riot cannot last.
18
�For violent fires soon burn out themselves;
Small show’rs last long, but sudden storms are short;
He tires betimes that spurs too fast betimes;
With eager feeding food doth choke the feeder;
Light vanity, insatiate cormorant.
Consuming means, soon preys upon itselfd^
Richard’s despairing uncle compares him to animals (cormorants,
horses] as well as to the elements (storms, fires]. His tempestuous
disposition is regarded similarly by another uncle, York: "Deal
mildly with his youth, / For young colts being rag’d do rage the
more.’’!^ The kings uncles reveal sensibilities that are natural in
origin, but not necessarily pagan. There is no appeal to divinity
involved. Instead, these are observations of an appetite that is out
of control and unnatural in its gluttony. "Now comes the sick hour
that his surfeit made.”^^ The natural result is dissolution. Perhaps
it is this conception of nature and appetite that sees Richard equate
loss of power with loss of abundance: "Our sighs and they shall
lodge the summer corn, / And make a dearth in this revolting
land."2o For it is in such language that Richard realizes that he has
lost his power:
1 live with bread like you, feel want.
Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus.
How can you say to me I am a king?2i
Richard’s pagan sensibilities contrast with his previous remark
concerning the rebellion: "Revolt our subjects? That we cannot
mend, / They break their faith to God as well as us.’’^^ Richard’s ego
is pagan when it suits him, and at other times Christian to suit his
pleasure. Divinity serves Richard, not the other way around.
Shakespeare’s Richard sees his crown as his identity, instead
of his office. It is his privilege, not his duty. He is outraged that
anyone could be so bold as to mount a rebellion against him. The
notion of revolt taints his England as though the land itself were a
disloyal subject or an unfaithful lover: "Dear earth, I do salute thee
with my hand, / Though rebels wound thee with their horses’
hoofs.Although "this traitor’’^^ Bolingbroke maintains that he
19
�has returned seeking only his inheritance and not the crown,
Richard realizes that if one of his subjects can amass sufficient
power to force him to give back what he has taken from him, then
he is no longer the King. This is both a political realization as well
as an emotional one: Richard’s ego has been humiliated and
shamed into the loss of sovereignty. But along with the shame of
losing the crown, Richard still manages to retain his personal pride
and regal bearing, even as he accedes; "Now mark me how I undo
myself.”25 He is thus able to revolt against the rebels, by retaining
the identity of a king even as he is undone.
Having examined Shakespeare’s tragic rendering of Richard
II as an individual who attempted but failed to become an
ahistorical king, this discussion finally raises additional questions
about how the playwright expects his audience to think about
Richard. The story ends in the last act of the play, but his
deposition results in a series of civil wars and discord throughout
the kingdom for the next eighty-five years.
Shakespeare
foreshadows the decades of ensuing bloodshed in speeches he
gives to the Bishop of Carlisle as well as to Richard. Richard II
becomes a prologue to the civil wars, plots and power struggles
dramatized in the subsequent plays in Shakespeare’s history cycle.
The question remains, does Shakespeare see the wasteful and
riotous rule of King Richard II as the tragedy that befell England, or
rather, is it the ensuing violence and war that results following
Richard’s deposition that is England’s tragedy? Which is the more
tragic; the division of a king, or the division of the kingdom?
Endnotes
1. Shakespeare. The Riverside Shakespeare: The Tragedy ofRichard II. Evans, Blakemore,
ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1974. V.v, 79
2. Ibid., V.v, 49
3. Ibid., Il.i, 893
4. Ibid., I.iii, 535
5. ibid., V.i, 78-79
6. Ibid., Ill.i, 11-15
7. Ibid., Il.i, 241-242
8. Ibid., Ill.i, 27-28
9. Ibid., Ill.i, 54-57
10. Ibid., IV.i, 239-242
11. Ibid., IV.i, 170-171
12. Ibid., V.v, 38-41
20
�13. Ibid., Ill.ii, 12
14. Ibid., Ill.ii, 14-22
15. Ibid., Ill.ii, 207-208
16. Ibid., Ill.ii, 145-147
17. Ibid., Il.i, 33-39
18. Ibid., Il.i, 69-70
19. Ibid., Il.i, 84
20. Ibid., Ill.iii, 162-163
21. Ibid., Ill.ii, 175-177
22. Ibid., Ill.ii, 100-101
23. Ibid., Ill.ii, 6-7
24. Ibid., Ill.ii 1455
25. Ibid., IV.I, 203
Primary Text
Evans, Blakemore, Ed. The Riverside Shakespeare: The Tragedy of Richard
II. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1974.
�Seeing-Time
April Olsen
With the first sentence of Uji, Dogen gives the reader a gloss
of the repeated phrase found in the ancient Chinese poem which
introduces his essay, and in that same opening sentence he
summarizes the meaning of the entire essay itself: "'For the time
being’ here means time itself is being, and all being is time.”i Dogen
recognizes that many people will misunderstand "for the time
being," so he must clarify the definition of time-being in the
sentences that follow. Yet every subsequent sentence is the
opposite of a clarification. As one reads Uji the simple statement
that time is being and being is time becomes more and more
complicated. Why does Dogen attempt to explain the meaning of
time-being by confounding the reader's understanding of both time
and being?
Our everyday understanding of time and its relationship to
the beings we see around us is the great obstacle to a complete and
true understanding of time-being. We do not see time, as we see
beings, but we should. According to Dogen, time's "glorious golden
radiance” can be seen once one realizes that "the sixteen-foot
golden Buddha body is time."^ In other words, seeing time means
seeing time's beauty, and one is able to see time's beauty when one
understands that time itself is not separate from the radiant being
of the Buddha, or any other being. Dogen insists upfront that time
and being are not separate, but simply stating such an identity is
not sufficient to dispel our everyday understanding of time as
something separate from us. One may hear and repeat the words
"time is being and being is time” without understanding them,
seeing them merely as a conceptual relation represented by the
term time-being.
As Dogen offers more complex reiterations of time-being, it
becomes increasingly difficult for the reader to swallow the
concepts and spit them back out. Once one progresses past the first
sentence of Uji, it is impossible to hear the words Dogen uses to
explain time-being without either dismissing his explanation as
nonsense masquerading as wisdom or dismissing one's own
22
�unquestioned assumptions about the experience of time.
Therefore, perhaps the most important aspect of Dogen's essay, at
least for an ordinary being such as myself, is his proof that our
everyday understanding of time is mistaken. Uji problematizes our
notion of time in order to clarify the meaning of time-being. But
even this "in order to" is misleading. The essay does not offer clear
premises and conclusions, and attempting to pull out such a
philosophical argument from Dogen's writing may destroy the
teaching meant to be transmitted through it. On the other hand, as
in many of Dogen's essays, he directs the reader to examine,
investigate, study, and reflect upon the instruction he has offered.
Uji presents our everyday understanding of time as a problem for
us to examine, and that examination should lead us to confirm that
time is being and being is time.
Before the reader understands "for the time being,” she
must first realize that the simplicity of time-being is not simple in
the ordinary sense. Ordinarily we think of time as an obvious
occurrence and of being as an obvious existence, and it is a mistake
for the ordinary person to understand time-being as simply the
equation of these two obvious thoughts. The obvious occurrence of
time separated from being and the obvious existence of beings
separated from time are both mistaken, so any understanding of
time-being that attempts to preserve these two abstractions by
merely conceptually combining them will fail.
The absence of doubt can be the greatest obstacle to
understanding because the reader will have no reason to examine
closely an experience that is obvious and free from doubt. Hence
Dogen must first provoke his reader to doubt the "obvious”
experience of time. "Even though you do not measure the hours of
the day as long or short, far or near, you still call it twelve hours.
Because the signs of time's coming and going are obvious, people
do not doubt it. Although they do not doubt it, they do not
understand it.”^ Dogen points out that the ordinary person's lack of
doubt regarding time is not based on some deep understanding of
time, but rather on the superficial acceptance of obvious evidence.
The "signs of time's coming and going” are taken to be time itself.
People do not doubt the fact that time comes and goes because they
23
�accept obvious signs as proof of their limited understanding of
time. One aspect of time is taken to be all of time.
(The section on the lack of doubt regarding time is
immediately followed by a discussion of time's relation to the self
and to the entire world. For the time being, I will skip an
examination of this.]
When one begins to doubt the superficially obvious
experience of time, the doubt itself does not guarantee that one will
come to understand time-being. The ordinary person may still
mistakenly simplify the expression "for the time being” by
imagining it to say "for a while I was [one thing] ... for a while 1 was
[another].The ordinary person who is beginning to doubt time
will still think of time as a crossing or passing; "This is like having
crossed over rivers and climbed mountains. Even though the
mountains and rivers still exist, 1 have already passed them and
now ... those mountains and rivers are as distant from me as
heaven is from earth.”^ This seems to be a reasonable account of
time. If 1 travelled here from San Diego, crossing the Cuyamaca
mountains and the Colorado River during my journey, then now, as
I sit here in Santa Fe, 1 can say that the time of my traveling and the
place of those mountains and that river are distant from me. In
feet, this account of time already acknowledges a relationship
between time and being. Both the moment when I crossed the
Colorado River and the place where the river flowed under my car
are described as distant from me here and now. Thus the
beginner's understanding of time-being does equate the abstract
occurrence of time with the abstract existence of a being; they are
identified in that they both occupy some distant when and where
from my present when and where. Hence an ordinary person
succeeds in accepting that time is not fundamentally separate from
being, but gets stuck in thinking that the self occupies one specific
time-being while other time-beings occupy places at varying
distances to the time-being of the self here and now.
"It is not that simple. At the time the mountains were
climbed and the rivers crossed, you were present. Time is not
separate from you, and as you are present, time does not go away.”^
The distance imagined in the ordinary person's account of time is
only possible if time is understood to be passing away. We
24
�experience the present moment, and imagine that past moments,
having flown away, are now far from us. If this notion that time
flies away is maintained, then one's understanding of time-being
will not be complete. "Do not think that time merely flies away. Do
not see flying away as the only function of time. If time merely flies
away, you would be separate from time. The reason you do not
clearly understand the time-being is that you think of time only as
passing."^ Dogen admits that flying away is one function of time,
but he insists that understanding all of time to be embodied in that
one function is a great mistake. When an ordinary person blindly
accepts the obvious evidence of time's coming and going in the
everyday signs that we measure, then time becomes understood as
merely a flying away of moments. Time ends up being only
experienced in the present moment and all other moments are
distant from the present self.
One can rectify this
misunderstanding by rejecting one of the consequences of thinking
about time as flying away; namely, the separation of your self from
time. We imagine that time flies away because we imagine that we
are separate from time, so in order to understand that time does
not merely fly past, we must understand that time is not separate
from us.
This is confusing. Here is an alternative translation of the
first quotation cited in the previous paragraph: "But the true state
of things is not found in this one direction alone. At the time the
mountain was being climbed and the river being crossed, I was
there [in time]. The time has to be in me. Inasmuch as I am there, it
cannot be that time passes away.”® The simplistic understanding of
time makes the mistake of looking for time in one direction only.
When I think about my travels over the mountains and across the
river, if I only look back and measure time-being from my present
moment and place, then I arrive at the conclusion that those
mountains and that river are distant from me and that time must
have passed away in order to make that separation possible.
Finding time in that one direction alone ignores the fact that the
mountain was climbed and the river crossed by me while 1 was in
the present. Somehow, in order for that to be the case, time must
be in me rather than passing away outside of me. Time must be
passing through me, but without passing into me or passing out of
25
�me. "As I am present” or "Inasmuch as I am there [in time]," time
cannot pass away. If time were passing away, then I could not find
myself in the present moment. Since I find myself in the present
moment, time should not be understood as merely passing away.
There appears to be a necessary relationship between the existence
of the present self and time's not merely passing away, but the
reason for this necessity is still unclear.
Here is the alternative translation of the second quotation
cited above: "You should not come to understand that time is only
flying past. You should not only learn that flying past is the virtue
inherent in time. If time were to give itself to merely flying past, it
would leave gaps. You fail to experience the passage of being-time
and hear the utterance of its truth, because you learn only that time
is something that goes past.”^ The ordinary person fails to hear the
truth of "for the time being” and fails to experience the passage of
being-time within himself because he imagines that flying past is
the functional virtue of time and that as time's virtue, the function
of flying past is the best understanding of time. Now where
Tanahashi translates, "If time merely flies away, you would be
separate from time,” Waddell and Abe render the same characters,
"If time were to give itself to merely flying past, it would leave
gaps.” The latter makes it sound as if time itself would have gaps,
while the former results in a gap between oneself and time. Both
accounts may say the same thing. If time were merely flying past,
then there would be a gap (the distance) between myself and time,
and if there is a gap between me and time, then time itself would
have gaps (the distances between the times of my past). If time has
gaps, then it cannot be unified and would merely be the scattering
of isolated times that have flown past. If time is not unified then it
would not have the opportunity to fly past in the first place.
Therefore, in order for time to be one, without gaps, time must not
be separate from myself.
Now is a good time to return to the section that was skipped
earlier.
After criticizing the ordinary person's unexamined
understanding of time for its inability to doubt the "obvious”
evidence of time's passage, Dogen somewhat abruptly makes a few
strong assertions about the self: "The way the self arrays itself is
the form of the entire world. See each thing in this entire world as a
26
�moment of time. Things do not hinder one another, just as
moments do not hinder one another ... Thus the self setting itself
out in array sees itself. This is the understanding that the self is
time.''io So, in the explanation for why one should not understand
time as passing away, Dogen argued that such an understanding
makes time's unity impossible. Now, Dogen explains that because
the self is what it is, and time is what it is, the self and time are one.
This is the meaning of time-being. One cannot understand time
being while maintaining the separate occurrence of time, the
separate existence of beings, nor the separate experience of the
self. Time and being, while never actually separated, appear to
merge in the self as the ordinary person comes to understand time
being. Because the self arrays itself, the entire world has the form
that the self sees; in turn, because the self arrays itself as the entire
world, the self is able to see itself; and finally, because the self is
time, then as the self arrays itself it is able to see time.
The self arrays itself, and the self that examines this truth is
able to see the entire world, see oneself, and see the glorious
golden radiant illumination of time. Time, the world, and the self
are all time-being.
That last sentence appears to be stuck in another
swallowing up and spitting out of mere concepts. This essay began
with the simple and misunderstood equation: (time) + (being) =
(time-being). Now, rather than foolishly adding the abstract
concepts of time and being together in an attempt to understand
time-being, such an understanding is supposed to be reached
through a series of equations; (time-being) = (time) = (being) =
(self). It all appears to be equal, and yet what Dogen teaches us
about time-being feels like more than a simple "all is one, one is all"
doctrine. Or even if such a brief statement is true, Uji at least shows
the reader that memorizing a trite formula is not enough. So once
again, rather than regurgitating the simple idea that time is the self
is the world, one must investigate this further.
Dogen goes on to say, "Each moment is all being, is the
entire world. Reflect now whether any being or any world is left
out of the present moment.”ii This reflection could be the self
seeing itself in its array. Whenever Dogen urges the reader to
reflect, examine, investigate, study, etc. he may be referring to this
27
�character of the self. But this arraying is more than a "character” of
the self; the self is what it is because it arrays itself so that it can see
itself as the entire world, as each moment. Conceptually this
sounds beautiful, albeit confusing, but what does it mean for the
self to see all beings and all times, and thus see itself in its array?
The self-array section is translated by Waddell and Abe as
follows: "We set the self out in array and make that the whole
world. We must see all the various things of the whole world as so
many times. These things do not get in each other’s way any more
than various times get in each other's way ... We set our self out in
array, and we see that. Such is the fundamental reason of the
Way—that our self is time.’’^^ The first person plural makes this
arraying appear to be a project which many people engage in
rather than the functioning of some abstract individual self.
Moreover, the "that” which we "see” when we array the self may be
either the sight of the formed world or the sight of the active
arraying. Or perhaps both of these sights are aspects of the same
thing: the world is not merely a passive object to be observed, nor
is the self merely the action of arraying; both are time.
"The way the self arrays itself is the form of the entire
world” or "We set the self out in array and make that the whole
world.” Although the self array forms or makes the world, this is
not an account of its creation. Because time is being and being is
time, Dogen is not concerned with figuring out when this world
began, as if the moment of the world's creation were as distant
from the present moment of the world as those moments of
climbing and crossing are from me now. Inasmuch as the world is
right now, and inasmuch as 1 am my present self, this moment is
the moment of the world's "creation” because the forming of the
world is the arraying of the self. But even this may be saying too
much. Insisting on an account of the beginning of the world is
already limiting one's understanding of time-being. It is separating
the beginning of the world from every other moment of the world
and each of those moments from each other.
The "self arraying itself is a strange concept. One might
imagine the self as a projector that radiates time to make objects
appear around it, or the self as a ghostly spirit that drapes itself
with the ornamentation stuff of the world, or the self as a great
28
�conglomeration that breaks itself up and arranges the pieces to
create the order of the world. And then one can also imagine
Dogen objecting to each of these visuals. Is the self an agent? Does
the understanding of time-being give one greater control over the
arraying? Can the enlightened self radiate, ornament, or arrange
the world at will? No, there does not seem to be much of a "will”
behind this arraying of the self. Nor is the self array a kind of
instrument that an ordinary person can learn to use more skillfully.
In this section on the self array, Dogen does not imply that we
should stop understanding time as passing away and begin
understanding the self as time so that we can take control of the
world through this self array. Therefore the realization that the
self is time and that the self array makes the world does not give
the self greater world-creating powers, but it does enable the self to
see what is being arrayed and to identify with it.
In order to see, one needs to make distinctions. If the self
and time and the world are all just one undifferentiated time-being,
then there can be no real sight. Somehow the self is time, is the
world, in such a way that the self is able to see itself as the world
because it has time. The self can make the necessary distinctions in
its array because things "do not hinder one another.''^^ Ordinarily I
like to think that I see separate objects around me because they are
independently lined up next to each other, and the fact that my
eyes can detect their edges allows me to see the world truly. "Not
hindering one another" would be a silly way to describe this
ordinary person's understanding of objects. However, the ordinary
person's view of the world runs into trouble when one examines
those obvious edges between objects. The world ends up with
spatial gaps in the same way that time ended up with temporal
gaps. Therefore, we must "See each thing in this entire world as a
moment of time” because "Things do not hinder one another, just
as moments do not hinder one another.If we do not see things
as times, then we end up with gaps in time and space, and we
continue seeing superficially because we blindly accept partial
(obvious] evidence as the whole truth.
According to Dogen, the whole truth is this: "In essence, all
things in the entire world are linked with one another as moments.
Because all moments are the time-being, they are your time-being.
29
�The time-being has the quality of flowing ... Because flowing is a
quality of time, moments of past and present do not overlap or line
up side by side.”i5 The fact that all things are "linked” as moments,
solves the problem of gaps in between objects in space while
preserving our ability to see distinctions in the world. Moments
are able to provide this linkage that distinguishes things from each
other without separating them because they are time-being within
me. My time-being holds together time so that it does not suffer
gaps, and time's unity allows for the unity of the world. In that
sense both times and beings are "created" by my self arraying itself.
The array is the perfection of arrangement because things and
moments neither overlap with each other nor do they separate in a
row. This is the flowing of time that allows the world to appear as
it does. Before one begins to doubt time, the world's appearance
may be taken for granted and the self is able to separate being and
time from each other, and one thing from other things, and one
moment from other moments, not realizing that if such separation
were true then there would be no unity with which to see at all.
The ordinary person sees, but also fails to see what makes
seeing possible. "Altbough the views of an ordinary person and the
causes and conditions of those views are what the ordinary person
sees, they are not necessarily the ordinary person's truth. The truth
merely manifests itself for the time being as an ordinary person.
The ordinary person's assumptions about time and being are not
untrue because even the limited understanding of time-being is
made possible by the truth of time-being. Similarly, in the section
on doubt discussed above, Dogen claims, "When sentient beings
doubt what they do not understand, their doubt is not firmly fixed.
Because of that, their past doubts do not coincide with the present
doubt. Yet doubt itself is nothing but time.'’^^ Seeing the obvious
signs of time's coming and going without doubt, or seeing those
"obvious" signs with doubt, or seeing times as beings and beings as
times with doubt, or seeing the truth of time's flowing without
doubt—all of these ways to see time are time-being. Even when
one is merely swallowing up words and spitting them back out, this
is also time-being. In fact this way of understanding truth is similar
to the understanding of time's flowing: "Does this time-being not
swallow up the moment when you climbed the mountain [and the
30
�moment before you were doubting time and the moment when you
simply regurgitated Dogen's words]? Does it not spit them out?”i8
Thus the ordinary person's truth is not separate from
enlightened truth, just as time and self and being are not separate
from each other. Truth must flow in the same way that time flows.
There is no separation between one's unenlightened self and one's
enlightened self; they do not overlap nor do they line up side by
side. You should see the glorious golden radiance of time, and you
should also see that radiance in yourself because each ordinary
person is the sixteen-foot golden body of the enlightened buddha.
"Because you think your time or your being is not truth, you believe
that the sixteen-foot golden body is not you. However, your
attempts to escape from being the sixteen-foot golden body are
nothing but bits and pieces of the time-being. Those who have not
yet confirmed this should look into it deeply."!^ Although getting
rid of the distance that separates yourself from the Buddha, and the
distance that separates the present moment from the moment of
enlightenment, may seem like an unconditional boon, we must also
get rid of the self that we imagine to be outside of time and
separate from other beings. An ordinary person may want the
reflection of the self arraying itself to instill some greater world
controlling power on the self, but to reflect on this truth one must
no longer see oneself as entering time from outside in order to act
in the world. Increased control makes no sense if there is no
separation between self and time. Rather than accept this, the
ordinary person refrains from doubting in order to escape
reflecting about the self that arrays itself. Yet even this "escape” is
time-being and therefore no escape at all.
Once the ordinary person begins to doubt the obviousness
of everyday experience [possibly with the aid of Dogen's essay], he
should continue to look deeply, to examine, to see time-being in
order to make his understanding of it firm. That confirmation of
time-being must be in the second half of Uji. For the time being, I
will content myself with this half-examination of Dogen's essay.
31
�Endnotes
1. Dogen. Moon in a Dewdrop: Writings ofZen Master Dogen. Kazuaki Tanahasi, ed. New
York: North Point Press, 1985. 76
2. Dogen. The Heart ofDogen's Shobogenzo. Trans. Norman Waddell and Masao Abe.
Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. 48
3. Tanahashi, 76
4. Ibid., 77
5. Ibid., 77
6. Ibid., 77
7. Ibid., 78
8. Waddell and Abe, 8
9. Ibid., 51
10. Tanahashi, 77
11. Ibid., 77
12. Waddell and Abe, 49
13. Tanahashi, 77
14. Ibid., 77
15. Ibid., 78
16. Ibid., 79
17. Ibid., 77
18. Ibid., 78
19. Ibid., 79
Primary Texts
Dogen. Moon in a Dewdrop: Writings of Zen Master Dogen. Kazuaki
Tanahashi, ed. New York; North Point Press, 1985.
Dogen. The Heart of Dogen's Shobogenzo. Trans. Norman Waddell and
Masao Abe. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002.
32
�Life Experience by the Books, or How to Read Nabokov's Speak,
Memory
Grant Wycliff
Because not all artists offer their audience a proviso
detailing which elements of their work to pay attention to or
declaring a specific method for consumption, 1 see no reason for
this to be a requirement for artists. In fact, the popular consensus
seems to be quite the contrary: individuals are allowed and even
encouraged to engage art and interpret it however they please.
Despite this we often do look to certain authorities, whether they
be academics or contemporaries of an artist, in an attempt to gain
greater understanding of that artist concerning both generalities
and particulars. Although balancing one's approach to art between
these tensions is not usually problematic, 1 find it difficult to decide
what to make of Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. This book is
an autobiographical work he initially describes as "a systematically
correlated assemblage of personal recollections" that, while
initially published serially, has been rearranged from its sequence
of publication to be read as a proper way to interpret Nabokov’s life
"from August 1903 to May 1940.
The specific difficulties 1 have in interpreting this book stem
from my need to discern whether this should be read according to
the approach laid out in Nabokov’s essay "Good Readers and Good
Writers,” and what the various implications of understanding
Speak, Memory are based on whether these two works are read as
complementary or exclusive.^ That essay, written as a preface to
selected lectures on his literature, holds advice that can clearly be
applied to fiction writing in general. At the same time, the essay
waffles in its disposition between concern for readership of fiction
and readership in general. Speak, Memory espouses a similar
vagueness of identity: while ostensibly maintaining a fidelity to
autobiography insofar as he attempts to accurately represent his
life, Nabokov does not actively admit of any difference between
how this art form and fiction ought to function, even going so far as
to say that "The following of... thematic designs through one’s life
should be, 1 think, the true purpose of autobiography.”^ The
33
�objectives of this paper are twofold: to determine whether
Nabokov intends for the reader to apply the principles in "Good
Readers and Good Writers" to his or her understanding of Speak,
Memory, and to reflect on Nabokov’s understanding of how closely
an autobiographical project ought to resemble the major aesthetic
qualities of prose fiction. While I will evaluate his autobiography, I
will do so holistically, only referring to particular moments of
Nabokov’s life as he describes them in order to illustrate larger
points about his approach to autobiography as a discipline.
Ultimately the goal of this paper is to explore Nabokov’s
understanding of human experience by abstraction, and to identify
important elements of experience that are made available in these
two works in ways that his fiction might neglect.
Anyone familiar with Nabokov’s fiction would find his
arguments in "Good Readers and Good Writers” hardly surprising;
they are dogmatic yet convincing, focusing heavily on writers who
are highly concerned with art and readers who take literature to be
a very serious enterprise. Among the many aphorisms he offers,
one is immediately relevant to the problem I seek to confront.
After describing a division between "writers of genius” and "minor
authors,” Nabokov offers a rule he considers highly pertinent:
The art of writing is a very futile business if it does
not imply first of all the art of seeing the world as the
potentiality of fiction. The material of this world may
be real enough [as far as reality goes] but does not
exist at all as an accepted entirety: it is chaos, and to
this chaos the author says 'go!’ allowing the world to
flicker and to fuse.^
The first relevant element of this view is that it appears to apply to
all writing, not fiction writing exclusively. This means that for all
writers, even those who are pursuing a project as personal as
autobiography, there is something about the art of writing that
naturally distorts "reality,” transfiguring our world of experience
and recreating it for the reader in a more palatable form. But while
the author does offer the reader the chance to make sense of the
world in a way that would otherwise be simply unavailable, he
34
�seems to do so at the cost of breaking down the boundary between
truth and fiction. This is not to say that I think writing cannot
accurately report the facts of reality according to this Nabokovian
principle; I am confident that Nabokov accurately represents the
objective truths of his history to the best of his ability. However,
maintaining that writing is futile without treating the world as "the
potentiality of fiction" does two things to autobiography: It
paradoxically encourages the writer to willfully misrepresent the
world in order to furnish greater understanding of the world, while
forcing the reader to accept these rather subjective interpretations
of reality from the author.
In Chapter 8 of Speak, Memory we find Nabokov recalling a
series of tutors he had as a child. Several instances of reflection in
this chapter stand out as examples of Nabokov admitting to the
troubles that arise in attempting to convert the "chaos” of reality
into writing, either directly or through the aforementioned
misrepresentation of facts for the reader’s sake. Nabokov relates
several short recollections of one tutor he had called Ordo, and
admits that in his attempt to recall one particular memory of the
man, he may have unintentionally transferred the detail of Ordo's
wearing a particular cloak from a previous experience. Nabokov is
rather self-aware in admitting to potential inaccuracy in this
passage, saying, "It seldom happens that I do not quite know
whether a recollection is my own or has come to me secondhand,
but in this case I do waver.On the basic level of his attempting to
recall this specific person there is nothing problematic; he has
shared these memories of Ordo while supplying the necessary
caveats. What this passage illuminates is the set of tendencies we
all share in memory recollection.
No matter what the causes might be, it is a widely
documented phenomenon that we often do revise our memories
and filter them in a way that fails to accurately recall our actual
experience. This problem is one that every autobiographer faces,
for memory is really the only means by which one can know
oneself. But Nabokov only seems to treat this as a problem in this
particular instance; the rest of the book is written with a complete
confidence in the accuracy of his recollections. It should not be
surprising that Nabokov does not continually address the issues
35
�related to memory because confidence in one’s assertions is not
only necessary for this sort of project, but also for being able to
maintain a sense of self. While the basis for his having selected
many of the memories we read in this book remains mysterious, it
is particularly puzzling that he would limit the discussion of this
major issue to something as trivial as the recollection of a tutor he
had only briefly.
Another kind of misrepresentation occurs soon after this
one in the series of his childhood tutors we meet. Nabokov tells us
about two tutors he had who appear to have been renamed by him
for the purposes of this book. The first one is a medical student,
described as having a resemblance to a French actor named Max
Linder, whom he proceeds to call Max. The second tutor, who
seems to have been quite important to Nabokov as he is discussed
at length, appears to have been assigned a false name as well.
Nabokov merely says "he will have to figure here under the name of
Lenski.”^ He has no problem telling of his personal experiences
with these characters, nor does he have an issue with furnishing
plenty of background details about the tutors independent of his
experience with them. In my view, these issues in Speak, Memory—
his refusal to accurately name these two tutors as well as his lack of
explanation for why he would rename them—are not symptoms of
a failure of memory. 1 imagine that while writing this book he did
have many failures of memory, but that in most cases those failures
entailed omission of certain stories rather than their modification.
A more reasonable explanation for his justifying such
behavior is that Nabokov’s sense of human experience is quite
similar to the model of artistic sensibility described in "Good
Readers and Good Writers.’’ In addition to treating the world as
pregnant with artistic meaning and possibilities for storytelling,
writers and readers alike should experience it with imagination.
Nabokov did not name the tutor for Max Linder because the man’s
parents wanted to name their child after the actor, but because it
enabled the "artistic harmonious balance between the reader’s
mind and the author’s mind’’ that Nabokov determined to be most
appropriate for gaining understanding of his life in that setting.
While it seems unfair to consider that tutor’s full life as trivial, the
emphasis on Nabokov’s experience of him seems far more relevant
36
�to the autobiography. That he would arrange this instance, as well
as the structure of the entire book, in this manner seems to stem
from his attitude that "everything that is worthwhile is to some
extent subjective.”^
Reading Speak, Memory with the imaginative, subjective
disposition encouraged in his essay should help the reader to make
sense of two topics Nabokov treats early on in the book: his
understanding and valuation of time, and his condition of
synesthesia. To understand time for Nabokov it is worth first
looking at the book's overall trajectory. Clearly it differs from most
autobiographies, which begin with the author’s early years and
proceed chronologically; they often make a point of identifying
early foundational trends in the author’s life that might produce the
distinctive habits and skills which would later earn that person a
publishing deal. Speak, Memory does not conform to this model of
storytelling at all; it is even debatable whether this book functions
as a traditional story at all. Nabokov clearly has no desire to
describe or justify his current circumstances as they relate to his
maturation and upbringing. What he has offered is a set of
recollections bolstered with beautiful language and interspersed
with reflections on life as experienced.
Given these loose outlines for preparing his account of
himself, it makes perfect sense that Nabokov would begin to
address the issue of time in the opening pages of the book. His
view that "the beginning of reflexive consciousness in the brain of
our remotest ancestor must surely have coincided with the
dawning of the sense of time”^ seems to be the genesis for the
entire project. For, given the role of memory in the project, what is
an autobiography but an extended exercise in reflexive
consciousness? As mentioned earlier, Nabokov states in the
foreword to Speak, Memory that the series of recollections he is
presenting begins in August 1903, despite his having been born
before that time. This is attributable to the description he offers of
walking in a park with his parents where, upon conversing with his
parents and discovering their ages relative to his own, he felt that
he had undergone "a second baptism" where he was "plunged
abruptly into a radiant and mobile medium that was none other
than the pure element of time.”^ While he describes this recognition
37
�of time (and his existence relative to it) as being a moment so
pivotal in his life as to be considered a rebirth, it seems that the
penchant he would later develop for indulgence in aesthetic bliss
would largely take the form of attempting to reject and stand
outside of time, eventually leading him to his present perspective
from which he tells the reader, “I confess I do not believe in time."i°
Maintaining an existence outside of time would likely be the
pinnacle of experiencing life on a subjective basis. The progress
toward this pinnacle is embodied early on by Nabokov with his
condition of synesthesia and the behavioral inclinations it entails.
He does not merely mention his condition, but instead describes to
the reader in detail what that experience is like for him. Nabokov
could, perhaps, be paying heed to the relative obscurity of that
condition for most readers, but it primarily seems to be a clever
way of compelling the reader to begin accepting the Nabokovian
standard of writing. The reader at once is forced to accept the
author as someone whose experience is inestimably different than
their own, while being given the chance to imagine what the
synesthetic experience is like.
Nabokov's fiction often works in a similar way. The
protagonist of Lolita is afflicted with pederasty, and uses his
narrative platform to entice the reader into accepting him as a
likeable, charming man before actually having to witness the
horror of his ways. In a similar way, the "editor” of Pale Fire
portrays himself as a relevant authority whose commentary is
necessary for understanding the poem, and leverages that position
in order to relate numerous bizarre and dubious stories concerning
himself I found similarities between the narrative voice in the two
books and Nabokov's actual voice not only because of the brilliant
use of the English language in each, but also in the shared
psychological tendencies between them. The utility of subjectivity
in Nabokov's writing clearly is not limited to its power to enable
aesthetic bliss as an end in itself Subjectivity and imagination in
writing, combined with his view that "a major writer combines
these three - storyteller, teacher, enchanter,” are rather effective
means towards that end.^i The power of literature for Nabokov lies
in creating an entirely new world with which the reader is forced to
engage, not merely in crafting beautiful prose for the reader to
38
�read. The payoff in reading a book like Lolita does not rest only in
the beautiful composition of the last pages or the finding of any sort
of resolution; it is the journey on which Humbert Humbert takes us,
where we find enchantment and bewilderment within his universe,
that creates such pleasure for the reader. This is one of the first
lessons about which we are cautioned when learning how to be
good readers, according to Nabokov:
We should always remember that the work of art is
invariably the creation of a new world, so that the
first thing we should do is study that new world as
closely as possible, approaching it as something
brand new, having no obvious connection with the
worlds we already know.12
Thus far it seems that the benchmarks for good readership
of fiction have coincided with an appropriate reading of Speak,
Memory. Nabokov clearly has treated the world of this book in
ways rather similar to the worlds we witness in works of fiction As
it is related to the reader, Nabokov's personal universe has been
crafted according to his view of life as a subjective experience
rather than according to a strictly focused fidelity to the facts of his
development and the people involved in it. And, while we are
enticed to enter that world and be entertained by his nostalgic
meanderings about growing up as an aristocrat and all of the
indulgences such a lifestyle afforded him, there is something highly
problematic about applying this last maxim of "good readership" to
non-fiction, and particularly autobiography. Although Nabokov
says "the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world," in
the case of autobiography that statement seems to be false. Even if
we accept that autobiography is a personal account of one’s own
life that could serve any number of purposes (whether validating
his accomplishments or simply following the thematic designs of
his life), we have to further probe the nature of subjectivity both in
prose and in life as experienced to determine whether the
autobiography creates a veritably new world.
That it is impossible for me to fully understand anyone
else’s experience seems obvious - in this respect 1 agree with
39
�Nabokov’s assertion that "to be quite objective in these matters is
of course impossible.”^^ Our everyday lives, however, seem to
suggest that, as far as human beings are concerned, it is quite
possible to approximate an understanding of one another’s
experiences. Many of the foundations of society, including art, take
this as a given: that we all share roughly similar life experiences
and have the ability to identify with each other accordingly. This is
how Nabokov’s art can even function in the first place. Although I
can certainly appreciate Humbert Humbert’s universe being quite
different from my own, Nabokov relies upon conventions like
language, empathy, and morality to relate Humbert’s position to the
reader. While this fictional universe and countless others should
necessarily be treated as distinct from our own, Nabokov’s
universe in Speak Memory does not seem to deserve this treatment
at first glance. No matter how different his subjective experience is
from the reader’s, it has at the very least taken place (much to
Nabokov’s disappointment) in the same space and time dimensions
as the reader’s. He admits this much in the foreword, where he
describes the reactions to the book that close family and friends
had.
Many of them disputed the factual basis of certain
recollections, arguing that he had transferred details from one
memory to another (reminiscent of the aforementioned reflections
Nabokov offered in Chapter 8).
If we concede that someone other than Nabokov has the
right to make claims on the realities of the world in Speak, Memory,
then we can rightfully treat the book as taking place in a world not
entirely apart from our own. But given that we have already
accepted Nabokov’s contrary premises concerning the similarities
between autobiography and fiction, there seems to be a need for
compromise within his views on writing. We can preserve the
notion that certain books should be treated as creating universes
with no connection to our own (and that readers must treat them
as such), and let that set of literature be referred to as fiction. At
the same time, it is possible to consider treating all of the universes
created by the art of writing as occurring on a continuum, where
certain sorts of prose are intended to be congruent with our world.
Thus, rather than marking a strict distinction between fiction and
non-fiction, readers may respect the right of an author to ground
40
�himself in our world while maintaining a great degree of
subjectivity in interpreting that world. This mode seems to be
precisely the one that Nabokov seeks in Speak, Memory. While he
clearly wishes for the reader to understand this work as an account
of his life taking place in our world, it is a personal one where the
reader must embrace Nabokov's tendency to present his
experience of our world as pursuant to a subjective, highly
aesthetic worldview on par with the experience of characters we
find in fiction. This is not to say that Nabokov’s disposition is
necessarily unique, but the combination of his upbringing, literary
talent, and particularity concerning art are unusual enough to make
him seem that way.
Trying to place Nabokov’s autobiography on this literary
continuum recalls the notion that autobiographies seem to
generate their own value, which varies according to the author’s
motivation in writing an account of his own life. Speak, Memory is
probably as close to a fictional aesthetic as autobiography can get,
because Nabokov’s primary motivation is to engage the reader with
life recollections that he finds important primarily because they
contribute to his profile as a lover of beauty. While he presents
memories like the pursuit of an especially rare butterfly to show his
ability to appreciate beauty in the world, there are plenty of
complementary moments where Nabokov simply discourses on his
opinions. Rather than always relying on a real moment in time to
illustrate his views, he finds utility in simply explaining things like
his distaste for sleep: "1 simply cannot get used to the nightly
betrayal of reason, humanity, genius. No matter how great my
weariness, the wrench of parting with consciousness is
unspeakably repulsive to me.’’^^ It is statements like this one that
help to ground a story that would otherwise be practically surreal.
This latter objective—grounding his account in reality—
seems quite important to Nabokov. While it would be sufficient for
his private life to simply enjoy the pursuit of beauty and only
interface with memory when a certain memory would generate the
pleasure he seeks, that clearly is not all that he wishes to present to
the reader. For the writer is not just an enchanter and storyteller,
but a teacher as well. To that end, Nabokov’s decision to write an
account of his own life must have been in part spurred by a belief
41
�that he could teach his reader something with these recollections
that he could not do with his fiction. Because he seems to be
concerned with teaching about the human condition, it is fitting
that autobiography is distinct in certain ways from fiction. For
although we often find great comfort in lessons learned from
novels, depending exclusively on fiction to understand ourselves
might be an unhealthy sort of escapism.
While Nabokov does seem to partake of practices like
catching butterflies, writing literature and espousing a rejection of
time that might seem to be escapist, he hardly uses these as a way
of avoiding life’s unpleasantness (in a Schopenhauerian sort of
way). Nabokov’s embrace of aesthetic beauty is instead a positive
one, where he finds these sorts of pursuits to be life affirming.
Speak, Memory is the autobiography of a man who is truly content
with life, and who proves it by describing all of the pleasures he has
enjoyed despite the typical condition of man described in the
opening lines of the book: "The cradle rocks above an abyss, and
common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light
between two eternities of darkness.With this line Nabokov has
effectively primed the reader to "read with his spine.Having
framed the proceeding account of his own life in this context,
Nabokov demands that the reader appreciate the autobiography in
the same way that Nabokov appreciates aesthetic beauty: as an
experience that fortifies life’s luminescent moments against the
dark abyss surrounding them.
Endnotes
1. Nabokov. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. New York: Vintage International,
1989. 9
2. Bowers and Nabokov. Lectures on Literature. San Diego: Harcourt, 1982.
3. SM, 27
4. GRAGW, 2
S.SM, 156
6.SM, 159
7. GRAGW, 4
8.SM,21
9. SM, 21
10. SM, 139
11. GRAGW, 5
12. GRAGW, 1
13. GRAGW, 4
14. SM, 108-109
42
�15.5M, 19
16. GRAGW, 6
Primary Texts
Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography
Revisited. New York, NY: Vintage International, 1989.
Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich, and Fredson Bowers. Lectures on
Literature. San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1982.
�Searching for Geometrical "Truth" in Einstein's Relativity
Jules Mancini
Einstein begins his combined work on the special and
general theories of relativity with a consideration of Euclidean
truth. His first chapter, titled Physical Meaning of Geometrical
Propositions, points out our tendency to determine the truth of an
idea via its connection to a real object in the physical world.
According to Einstein, however, "Geometry is not concerned with
the relation of the ideas involved in it to objects of experience, but
only with the logical connection of these ideas among themselves.
He challenges the reader, who is no doubt steeped in Euclid, by
asking, "What, then, do you mean by the assertion that these
propositions are true?" A distinction is drawn between truth as a
result of the human habit of thought, relegated to some senseobject, and truth as the internal consistency of a series of
propositions. If mathematical truth is ultimately limited to the
internal consistency of some set of ideas, what bearing does
mathematics have on physical phenomena? What bearing does
"pure” mathematics have on the theory of relativity? Expressing the
truth of physical phenomena ultimately seems to rely on
mathematics. How, then, are physical phenomena placed in
relationship with geometrical ideas?
While unpacking the general theory of relativity, Einstein
convinces us to abandon the world of Euclidean geometry. We also
discard the rigid body of reference and the Cartesian coordinate
system. We take the fork in the road that leads to non-Euclidean
geometry, non-rigid reference-bodies, and Gaussian coordinates.
What is at stake here? What changes mathematically between the
special and the general theory? Minkowski's four-dimensional
quasi-Euclidean space works for the special theory of relativity and,
Einstein says, "without it the general theory of relativity would
perhaps have got no farther than its long clothes.How does
Minkowski’s quasi-Euclidean world simultaneously function as a
culmination of the special theory and as a foundation for the
general theory?
44
�Einstein first speaks of Minkowski’s four-dimensional spacetime continuum at the end of his explication of the special theory of
relativity. Prior to introducing Minkowski, Einstein speaks of the
limits of the Cartesian system of coordinates, saying, "Every
description of events in space involves the use of a rigid body to
which such events have to be referred. The resulting relationship
takes for granted that the laws of Euclidean geometry hold for
'distances.’"^ Given this language, the reader is dubious from the
outset that the Cartesian coordinates will provide a sustainable
medium for representing physical phenomena. Nevertheless,
Einstein grants the reader the privilege of experiencing the
trajectory of growth from three-dimensional Euclidean space to
four-dimensional Euclidean space, and ultimately to four
dimensional non-Euclidean space.
Minkowski’s mathematical equations allow for a four
dimensional space-time continuum, which resembles Euclidean
three-dimensional space. What is a four-dimensional Euclidean
space and what purpose does it serve? A given point in threedimensional Euclidean space lies at the intersection of three
perpendicular coordinates x, y, z. This random point lies among
indefinite, infinitely dense points and, therefore, moving from one
to the next can constitute a continuum as opposed to requiring a
jump. Minkowski’s four-dimensional world is likewise a continuum,
though one comprised of space-time coordinates x, y, z, as well as t
for time. Simply adding t moves us from three-dimensional space to
four-dimensional space-time. However, how does this new four
dimensional world retain quasi-Euclidean properties?
Replacing t with the imaginary number
ct removes the
distinction between space and time coordinates and "the time
coordinate plays exactly the same role as the three space
coordinates...these four coordinates correspond exactly to the
three space coordinates in Euclidean geometry.How does the
imaginary number accomplish this important task of blurring the
lines between space and time? Einstein says, "If we choose as timevariable the imaginary variable
ct instead of the real quantity
t, we can regard the space-time continuum - in accordance with the
special theory of relativity - as a 'Euclidean’ four-dimensional
45
�continuum.'’^ There is a marked difference between having three
space coordinates plus a time coordinate and having four spacetime coordinates. Making the time coordinate indistinguishable
from the space coordinates allows Minkowski's space-time to
behave identically to Euclidean space. Minkowski’s four
dimensional world, in which time is represented by an imaginary
number, can fit into a three-dimensional paradigm. Put
mathematically, equations A and B below are functionally
equivalent. As Einstein says, "The analogy [between the equations]
is a complete one.”^
,1
Equation A:
X,
Equation B:
X,
a
,
,2
,
,2
4- X2 -|- X3
,
,1
-l- X2
,
2
= X,
,2 .
-h X3
'2
,
2
,
-X2 +X3
4
2
,
-I-X4 =x, -1-X2
+ X-,
H-X,
It seems impossible to talk about Minkowski without
reference to the Lorentz transformation. Still, given the scope of
this paper, 1 am going to avoid delving into the construction of the
Lorentz transformation. Suffice it to say that the shift from the
generalized Lorentz transformation to Minkowski’s world looks
something like this:
Lorentz;
+
y'^ + z'^ - c^t'^ ^x^+y^+z^- cY
Minkowski:
xf + x'2 + xf -h x'^ - Xj^ -I- X2 + X^ -V X^
The Lorentz coordinates turn into the Minkowski equation. Where
the Lorentz transformation has
for time, Minkowski’s time
coordinate takes on exactly the same appearance as the space
coordinates. In fact, Einstein goes further, asserting, "...'time’ enters
into natural laws in the same form as the space coordinates.’’^
Minkowski himself said, "Henceforth space by itself, and time by
itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind
of union of the two will preserve any independent reality.’’^
Minkowski’s quasi-Euclidean world is a necessary culmination of
the special theory because time is no longer absolute but
46
�dependent on the reference body, as seen in the example of relative
simultaneity. Time is embedded in space and relative to it. The
general theory of relativity also needs this blurring of the lines
between space and time. How does Minkowski’s world prove
foundational to general relativity?
Einstein’s approach to space-time under the general theory
hinges on Gaussian coordinates. Einstein introduces the Gaussian
coordinate system, most simply characterized as a more general
version of the Cartesian one, as necessary to the general theory of
relativity. Gaussian coordinates can apply to non-Euclidean
continua, and this seems to be why the general theory needs this
new system. Einstein says, "the description of the time-space
continuum by means of Gauss coordinates completely replaces the
description with the aid of a body of reference, without suffering
from the defects of the latter mode of description; it is not tied
down to the Euclidean character of the continuum which has to be
represented.’’^ However, Gaussian coordinates only apply to nonEuclidean continua when they are small enough to behave like their
Euclidean counterparts. What is the nature of this freedom if it
relies upon shrinking the non-Euclidean domain down to the actual
point where it behaves like the Euclidean one?
Gaussian coordinates can accommodate non-Euclidean four
dimensional space-time, whereas Cartesian coordinates only apply
to quasi-Euclidean four-dimensional space-time. Once Einstein
establishes that the space-time continuum is necessarily nonEuclidean, we are left with no choice but to abandon the Cartesian
coordinates in favor of those better able to represent the variations
present in non-Euclidean spaces (such as gravitational fields and
variably heated marble slabs]. In the case of the marble slab,
measuring rods are no longer directly reliable units of measure, as
the surface varies. In the case of the gravitational field, inertial
motion and the constancy of the velocity of light are challenged by
the deflection of light around a body such as the sun. Somehow,
Gaussian coordinates come to the rescue. Einstein says, "We assign
to every point of the continuum four numbers, x,,X2,X3,X4
(coordinates], which have not the least direct physical
significance.’’^^ It does not even matter which of the four represents
time. But this blurring of space and time was introduced earlier,
47
�with Minkowski, under the special theory of relativity. What is new
here?
The ability to accommodate the non-Euclidean is significant
and seems to begin when we free ourselves from the rigid
reference body, the external "real" object alleged to behave in a
Euclidean manner. Physical phenomena in the general theory
cannot correspond to rigid reference bodies because "in
gravitational fields there are no such things as rigid bodies with
Euclidean properties."^! In fact, rigid bodies in general become a
kind of fiction. The Cartesian coordinate system corresponds to
rigid bodies of reference whereas the Gaussian one relates to nonrigid reference bodies. Ultimately, Gaussian coordinates go further
and do away with reference body altogether.
This change in coordinate systems essentially replaces the
rigid with the arbitrary. No system based on rigid bodies can
directly give us position or time. Therefore, we "refer the four
dimensional space-time continuum in an arbitrary manner to Gauss
coordinates."!^ There seems to be some subtle difference between
placing our unit of measure in the surface as opposed to on the
surface. Einstein, in a footnote, speaks of the problems of using
Cartesian coordinates on the marble slab, saying, "The surface is
not a Euclidean continuum with respect to the rods, and we cannot
define Cartesian coordinates in the surface."'^^ Perhaps there is a
shift away from expressing a relationship between the coordinate
system and some surface and toward expressing the relationship of
one part of a surface to another part of it. Is one of these
approaches truer? If geometry only concerns itself with the ideas
internal to it, then the second option, in which points simply
encounter points, seems to better fulfill the requirements for
geometrical truth.
Regardless, given the constraints implicit in Cartesian
coordinates, it is clear that we need a new coordinate system.
Einstein declares, "The Gauss coordinate system has to take the
place of the body of reference."!^ The coordinate
system/measuring body replaces the rigid reference body. Einstein
continues, "The following statement corresponds to the
fundamental idea of the general principle of relativity: 'All Gaussian
coordinate systems are essentially equivalent for the formulation of
48
�the general laws of nature.’"'^'^ Does this mean that geometry has, in
some sense, absolute physical meaning? Special relativity required
us to perform the Lorentz transformation on its equations because
all reference bodies were not equally valid for the formulation of
natural laws (only rigid bodies of reference were suitable].
However, under the general theory, equations simply lead to
equivalent equations. No Lorentz transformation is necessary. All
transformations are reduced to transitions in the coordinates
themselves, as all coordinates are equally valid for the general laws
of nature. There is no need to calculate a new value to account for
rotation; in fact the coordinates themselves aren’t even “real"
values. The general laws of nature must persist regardless of which
coordinates are chosen.
Still, I am struggling to see the freeing of space-time from
the rigid body of reference in the Gaussian equations themselves.
What is the radical difference between the two equations below?
ds^ =dx^~ +dx2 +dx2 -^dx^
ds^ = g, I+ Ig^^dx^dx^ + gjit&Z + Ig^^dx^dx, + g^^dx^ + Ig^^dx^dx^ + g^^dx^
The first equation is an example of a Euclidean continuum in which
Cartesian coordinates would hold. It requires that the u-curves and
v-curves are straight lines.
However, the idea of a straight line has lost all meaning.^^ Further,
"according to the general principle of relativity, the space-time
continuum cannot be regarded as a Euclidean one."i^ The second
equation reflects a curved space-time continuum in which
Euclidean geometry no longer holds. The g numbers are
magnitudes corresponding in a "perfectly definite way” to u and v
(here simply dxi and so on] (80].These g magnitudes also
"determine the behavior of the rods relative to the u-curves and v49
�curves.”!^ Perhaps splitting the g magnitudes into two categories
will help. The magnitudes
show up when we are
simply dealing with the same point twice, as it is squared in the
equation. However, ^12’^23’5^34 show up when we are dealing with
the value (still "perfectly definite"] that lies between gi and g2.
Instead of squaring a single point, we multiply adjacent points (for
example for gu we would multiply dxi and dx2]. Given that the g
values determine the behavior of the rods, calculating ^22 allows us
to know the relationship of the surface between two points, which
thereby allows us to determine distance.
Einstein offers a summary, saying, "Gauss invented a
method for the mathematical treatment of continua in general, in
which ‘size-relations’ ('distances' between neighboring points] are
defined.”i5 Prior to introducing Gaussian coordinates and nonEuclidean geometry, Einstein says that "we are not in a position to
define exactly the coordinates x,y, z relative to the disc by means of
the method used in discussing the special theory, and as long as the
coordinates and times of events have not been defined, we cannot
assign an exact meaning to the natural laws in which these occur."20
We are seeking exact definitions, which will in turn provide us with
the exact meaning of natural laws. The Gaussian solution seems to
lie in defining the coordinates and times of events arbitrarily, in
such a way that they are internally consistent and fully adaptable to
endless variations, as opposed to being relegated to an external,
rigid sense object. This shift returns us to the introductory
chapter’s exploration of geometry and physical meaning. Are
Gaussian coordinates, given their internal relationship to one
another, somehow a truer geometrical expression? Can this internal
relationship of one arbitrarily numbered point on the surface to
another one really convey any physical meaning?
According to Einstein, physical meaning always boils down
to encounters involving the space-time coincidence of two events.
Under special relativity, encounters relied on having two distinct
entities - a reference body (as a sort of base to which events are
referred] and a means of measuring the coincidence of events
(clock, rod, coordinate system, etc.]. General relativity, on the other
hand, abandons the reference body, and encounters occur between
50
�points themselves. The coordinate system functions as both
reference body and system of measurement. Einstein speaks at
length about such encounters, saying,
The only statements having regard to these points which can claim a
physical existence are in reality the statements about their
encounters. In our mathematical treatment, such an encounter is
expressed in the fact that the two lines which represent the motions
of the points in question have a particular set of coordinate values,
Xl,X2,X3,X4 in common. After mature consideration the reader will
doubtless admit that in reality such encounters constitute the only
actual evidence of a time-space nature with which we meet in
physical statements...Every physical description resolves itself into a
number of statements, each of which refers to the space-time
coincidence of two events A and B. In terms of Gaussian coordinates,
every such statement is expressed by the agreement of their four
coordinates Xl,X2,X3,X4?^
Points replace the body of reference in the Gaussian system and we
can make physical descriptions of events simply by stating their
coincidental coordinates. Gaussian coordinates accomplish a
monumental task by freeing geometrical expressions from external
sense objects, which in turn enables physical meaning to operate
on itself mathematically, with an internal logical consistency, and
without reference to any "real" object lying outside of it. The
geometrical expressions themselves become statements with
physical meaning. Ironically, it is as though freedom from the
physical is ultimately what lays the foundation for articulating
physical meaning.
Einstein, in the final chapter, speaks more generally about
geometry and physical meaning, saying, "According to the general
theory of relativity, the geometrical properties of space are not
independent, but they are determined by matter."22 Thus, if we are
to have anything logically sound to say about the universe, we must
51
�regard matter as knowable. At first glance it seems as though we
are back to the logical fallacy of the opening chapter, in which we
are tempted to refer truth to sensible objects. However, perhaps
something different is at work here. If geometrical properties are
dependent on matter, then it either seems as though there are few,
if any, absolute geometrical truths or that matter is everywhere the
same. Could one interpret this to imply that geometry is relative?23
After completing his work on the general theory of
relativity, Einstein wrote an essay titled Geometry and Experience.
In this essay Einstein says that "as far as the laws of mathematics
refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain,
they do not refer to reality...yet on the other hand it is certain that
mathematics generally, and particularly geometry, owes its
existence to the desire to learn something about the behavior of
real things.”34 p[as Einstein found a way, with Minkowski’s four
dimensional world and Gauss’ coordinate system, to retain the
certainty of geometrical propositions while also referring those
ideas to physical descriptions? Minkowski and Gauss take steps
away from experience, blurring the lines between space and time
and abandoning rigid reference bodies, respectively. The end result
seems to be a self-contained geometrical whole, which is both an
internally sound theory, and also, at its core, a set of physical
descriptions. Geometrical propositions are only concerned with the
"logical connection of these ideas among themselves,” and yet the
connection of those ideas—here as coordinates—directly describes
the physical world.
Endnotes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
Einstein. Relativity: The Special and General Theory. Nevk^York: Penguin, 2006. 8
Ibid., 54
Ibid., 12
Ibid., 54
Ibid., 84
Ibid., 112
Ibid., Ill
'Space And Time’, a translation of an address delivered at the 80th Assembly of German
Natural Scientists and Physicians, at Cologne, 21 Sep 1908.
9. Relativity, 87
10. Ibid., 86
52
�11. Ibid., 89
12. Ibid., 86
13. Ibid.,
14. Ibid., 78
15. Ibid., 75
16. Ibid., 85
17. Ibid., 80
18. ibid.
19. Ibid., 82-82
20. Ibid., 75
21. Ibid., 86
22. Ibid., 103
23. Matter determines geometrical properties and geometrical properties in turn
determine natural laws, as all Gauss coordinates are equivalent for the formulation of
natural laws. Thus it seems that geometry is relative to the matter in question and yet, if
all coordinates lead to equivalent natural laws, there must be some absolute geometrical
truths. Does geometry somehow accommodate the infinite variations in matter by limiting
the laws of nature?
24. Pesic, Peter. Beyond Geometry: Classic Papers from Riemann to Einstein. Dover
Publications, 2007.147-8.
Primary Texts
Einstein, Albert. Relativity: The Special and General Theory. Penguin
Classics, New York: 2006.
Minkowski, Hermann. 'Space And Time,' a translation of an address
delivered at the 80th Assembly of German Natural Scientists and
Physicians at Cologne, September 21,1908.
Pesic, Peter. Beyond Geometry: Classic Papers from Riemann to Einstein.
Dover Publications, 2007. Pages 147-8.
53
�Nietzsche's Philosopher: The Antagonistic Redeemer
Mary Creighton
10[175]
Hatred of Mediocrity is unworthy of a philosopher: it is almost a question mark
over his right to 'philosophy.' Precisely because he is the exception, he must take the
rule under his wing, must help everything average to keep up faith in itself
Nietzsche's recurring insights into the 'herd' and the
'mediocre' in his Writings from the Late Notebooks inform us that a
"desperate," "dangerous," and "irreversible mediocratisation" has
befallen 19* century European culture. Nietzsche postulates
"everything we in Europe today are used to admiring as 'feeling for
humanity,' as 'morality,' 'humaneness,' 'sympathy,'" etc., is "nothing
other than the diminishment of the whole human type.''^ It is a
phenomenon in which man "sinks" and gives rise to the "herd
animal." Nietzsche continually refers back to this notion of the
mediocre as a diagnosis of European man - so much so that it
becomes a highly charged term in his entire telos, if in fact he can
be said to have one. However, on page 203, a peculiar passage
arises in which he describes the archetypal figure of the
philosopher. Standing apart from the "superman" or "oversoul"^
who is described as the antithesis and redeemer to the mediocre,
Nietzsche introduces the philosopher as the "exception" to the
mediocre. Nietzsche writes in Note 10[175];
Hatred of Mediocrity is unworthy of a philosopher: it
is almost a question mark over his "right" to
philosophy. Precisely because he is the exception, he
must take the rule under his wing, must help
everything average to keep up faith in itself.^
In this passage, the characterization of the philosopher as
"exception" implies that there is a kind of intellectual position
taken in the method of his philosophy that somehow circumvents
his falling prey to mediocrity. This essay will explore what makes
54
�hatred unworthy of the philosopher, what exactly his "right” to
philosophy entails, and how he must take the rule under his wing to
help the average keep up faith in itself
Mediocratisation:
The Sleepless Sphinx
Nietzsche’s "suspicion, which keeps returning; [his] concern,
which never lies down to sleep . . . [his] sphinx, alongside which
there is more than one abyss," refers to the phenomenon of
"mediocratisation” that has proliferated among the European
nations in the 19* centuryMediocratisation is marked by a
subscription to values that weaken and soften "powerful [and]
fundamental drives.”^ These powerful and fundamental drives are
replaced by drives prescribed for the masses rather than drives
that emerge organically within an individual. Nietzsche’s favorite
examples of such weakening drives are due entirely to the
influence of European Democracy and Christian morality, most
aptly embodied in the moral values of "selflessness” and "equality.”
While the powerful and fundamental drives are the mark of one’s
will to power, impulses toward values like selflessness and equality
are self-negating and self-diminishing. To posit that all men are
equal, as democracy does, inspires men to accept their position as
no better or worse than their fellow citizens. To instill such beliefs
in the heart of man is to teach him to suppress all that is unique
about him. In doing this, man reduces himself holding the
conviction that he is only as valuable as his neighbor. Furthermore,
"selflessness,” a Christian moral virtue, encourages a similar
phenomenon whereby one denies or sacrifices themselves for the
sake of another. If everyone sacrifices their self for another, no one
has the capacity to rise to greatness and demonstrate strength of
character in any of its awe-inspiring forms. With such values,
whence does greatness burgeon?
Ultimately, Nietzsche finds any value that suppresses the
individual for the sake of the masses to be one that encourages a
"herd” instinct. Furthermore, Christian morality, "the illusion of the
species,’’^ establishes one system of right behaviors, right desires,
and right existence that applies to such masses. This attempt to
55
�establish the "right" desires for the masses is at odds with the very
heart of Nietzsche's notion of the individual. These systems
"cultivate” and "develop the herd animal in man” and "push back
those other and opposite virtues which give rise to a new, higher,
stronger” species.^ Furthermore, these values instill an "instinctive
conspiracy of the whole herd against everything that is shepherd,
beast of prey, hermit and Caesar, to preserve and elevate the weak,
the oppressed, the mediocre.”^ It is important to consider that the
shepherd, the hermit, the Caesar, etc., are not distinct from the herd
simply because they are not characterized by "feeling for
humanity,” "morality,” "humaneness,” or "sympathy,” but because
they deviate from the status quo, or the "herd.” Their distinction is
characterized by the fact that they hold a blind allegiance to the
behaviors of the general public. The latter mark the masses or the
herd; the former mark the individual(s3 who stands apart from it.
Why Hatred is Unworthy of the Philosopher:
Hatred as a moral position
Hatred, for Nietzsche, is "a mob pose”^ because it takes a
moral position against another. On page 243 of Writings from the
Late Notebooks, Nietzsche claims, "Hating is a value judgment ruled
by revenge.”!® Revenge and resentment are in direct opposition to
one’s will to power in that they transfer responsibility for one's
personal sufferings onto another. To say this in other words, one
would not hate if one could change one’s situation oneself. This
explains why such emotional responses are a "mob pose.” It is the
manner of the mob (the "quiescent herd”] to resent and hate the
ruling "superior” class. Because the ruling or superior class is more
powerful than he, the common man has systematically deemed that
which is powerful to be dangerous.!! Thus, the lower class hates
and resents the dangerous powerful class of "superior” men. With
this pattern in mind, we can understand why Nietzsche defines
such moral and emotional responses as characteristic of the
common man.
Hatred must in fact be a moral position because it implies
that the mediocre (the potentially "hated” in this case) could not be
otherwise. This is to say that there is no free will on the part of the
56
�mediocre insofar as they are unable to, on account of their own
willing, change their situation. To endorse the notion that there is
no free will is to subscribe to the Christian postulate that man’s fate
is in fact determined by a God or a divine will. To say it another
way, man’s only excuse for his incapacity to change his state [as a
mediocre being) is that God himself has willed it or determined him
irrevocably as such. With this determinist view of nature, it would
then mean that the philosopher himself was taking a Christian
moral position in the act of hating the mediocre. For the
philosopher to be a man who has himself ascended above
mediocrity, he would in fact have to subscribe to the belief that
either there is free will, or that man is without a will at all.
Nietzsche does not maintain that free will is the means by
which the mediocre must rise above their state. Rather, he
maintains that there is no will at all. Man may alter his state by his
drives, his will to power. In this sense, the philosopher could hold
the mediocre in contempt for not rising to the will to power, but
such hatred would be altogether irrelevant. It is unworthy because
the act of hatred would reduce him to a state of moral valuation in
which he becomes resigned to the powerless nature of mankind,
resigned to reside in hatred, which is a moral judgment and not a
philosophical position. "Hatred" looks down upon the masses
because they are [helplessly] mediocre, rather than because they
are allowing themselves to dwell among the herd.^^
The Philosopher's Right to Philosophy:
The Exception to the rule
Nietzsche considers that thus far, all philosophers have been
unworthy of the title because their task has been merely a will to
Truth and to moral arbitration. These men "hold fast some large
body of valuations ... of previous assignments and creations of
value [logical or moral ones).”!^ This "kind" of philosopher is
engaged in "summarizing and abbreviating" the "present and the
past" by "making all events and all evaluations up to now easy to
survey, easy to think through, to grasp, to manage.’’^^ Nietzsche
thinks that these "philosophical labourers" embody the mildest
form of philosophy, serving almost more as historians than
57
�philosophers. Nietzsche claims that the "only way [he] still allow[s]
[philosophy] to stand is as the most general form of history;"i5 such
intellectual work belongs more to the field of history than to that of
philosophy. Instead, Nietzsche reserves the name of philosophy for
a more stalwart enterprise. Nietzsche warns his readers not to
allow the term "philosopher" to be "confined to the philosopher
who writes books, or even introduces his philosophy into books."i6
This historian-philosopher explicates or translates cultural and
intellectual behaviors, but he himself does not does create or
produce them. He is not a "legislator of valuations."i7 A philosopher
who can "command and legislate" emphatically proclaims, "this is
how it shall be."^^ His words do not include rococo drapery to
disguise moral teachings. This "legislator of new values arises with
a new and unprecedented terror"i9 because he stands outside of
the previous status quo, which has adopted a purely moral
interpretation of Truth. It is this type of philosopher that stands as
an exception to the mediocre.
For Nietzsche, the philosophic tradition, the very will to
Truth (incontrovertibly, the goal that has marked the entire
enterprise] has been conflated with Virtue and Happiness. This
tradition has reigned since the time of the Ancients^o, as seen in the
work of Aristotle who equated the notion of the "good" with the
"Truth," thereby demonstrating the only path to "happiness. "21
Nietzsche sarcastically references this notion in his section of
aphoristic splendors in Beyond Good and Evil when he writes,
"Where there is the tree of knowledge, there is always Paradise."22
Similarly, Nietzsche claims that "nobody will very readily regard a
doctrine as true merely because it makes people happy or
virtuous;"23 however, these are the very conclusions Aristotle's
Ethics draws. The desire for Truth is inextricably bound, for
traditional philosophers, to the will to Morality; if it is not the
impulse to Truth itself that drives a man to be moral, then it is the
hope for life that will.
In establishing the very idea of Truth as something
apodictic, one finds that there are only means of behaving, of
existing. Ultimately, these means are defined by whatever
behaviors serve this established Truth. Our philosophic tradition
has told us that "the certain is worth more than the uncertain, that
58
�illusion is less valuable than truth.'’^^ Man wants to find certainty;
he wants a causa sui. Thus, Nietzsche claims, the role of God and the
accompanying moral code satisfy man’s longing for such certainty.
This notion is demonstrated most aptly by the Socratic teachings,
whereby man finds that Virtue is in fact knowledge.^s By equating
the idea of Truth with morality or virtue, there lies the temptation
to assert that all impulse to Truth is in fact moral. Not only has this
premise been held as impervious, but also it has been recapitulated
in the work of all philosophers. On page 17 of Beyond Good and
Evil, Nietzsche writes.
The power of moral prejudices has penetrated deeply
into the most intellectual world, the world
apparently most indifferent and unprejudiced, and
has obviously operated in an injurious, obstructive,
blinding and distorting manner.26
Such moral philosophy "always creates a world in its own image”^^
because the philosopher is "secretly influenced by his instincts"28 to
perpetuate a moral imperative. Previous philosophers who have
attempted to circumvent such prejudices seem to fall terribly short.
The "thou shall" commands of these philosophers "on no account
sound to their ears like an T want,’ but rather 'only as the command
of a God do they dare to discharge their task.”’^^ in this case, the
philosopher’s proclamations are merely echoes of externally
imposed moral valuations. This is why "this same will to blindness
rules among the founders of religion.’’^^ Take one of Nietzsche’s
favorite examples, Immanuel Kant: His attempt to discover a
groundbreaking philosophy is for Nietzsche little more than a
reiteration of the moral world order. Hidden in this moral
argonaut’s^i discussion of a Categorical Imperative, Kant reaffirms
the idea that there is one single system by which all men may
achieve moral truths— and that this is inherent in us by means of a
priori synthetic judgments. This establishes a moral code for all of
mankind, implying that all people ultimately share the same
valuations. This is the very basis of Nietzsche’s fear that all
metaphysics thus far has served as merely a handmaiden to
Theology. Similarly, we are reminded that "a virtuous man is a
59
�lower species if only because he is not a 'person' but acquires his
value from conforming to a schema of man that has been fixed once
and for all."^^ This "fixed" state of "once and for all” characterizes
the precise nature of Kant’s Categorical Imperative. This kind of
behavior amounts to little more than Christian moral cheerleading
and is for Nietzsche congruent with the mediocre person’s instinct
to follow the herd rather than stand outside of it and make
valuations for one’s self. Nietzsche calls for a braver kind of
philosopher: one who boldly stands outside this moral imperative,
outside the herd.
The philosopher’s "right” to philosophy is his ability to stand
outside of moral philosophy as it has been practiced thus far. The
right to philosophy is his because he is the exception to the rule, to
the mediocre. The philosopher of exception does not make moral
prescriptions a part of his intellectual pursuit. It is the courage and
wisdom of the philosopher to function as a supramoral figure. For
Nietzsche, this means stepping outside of moral examinations of
humanity, as well as purely intellectual illuminations of it. The
philosopher stands outside the mass, moral valuations, and
predetermined philosophical constructs. Nietzsche describes the
"heights of the soul” whereby the philosopher belongs to an
"esoteric class” that "views things from above downwards.”^^ These
"things” that the philosopher views are human behaviors, human
"insights,” and human "follies.”^^ On page 220, our exceptional
philosopher writes.
One should at last put human values nicely back in
the corner where alone they have any right to be: as
personal little values. Many species of animal have
already disappeared; if man disappeared as well,
nothing would be lacking in the world. One must be
enough of a philosopher to admire even this
nothingness (- nil admirari
For Nietzsche, if man were to disappear, and thus his moral
valuations with him, there would be "nothing lacking in the world.”
Implicitly stated in this is the fact there would be no goodness or
evil lacking in the world either. Such moral valuations are contrived
60
�and imposed upon the world by man himself. This nothingness,
this extramoral landscape, can only be admired when one has come
to understand human values as symptomatic of a contrived moral
system. Truth, if it exists at all, is marked by "the degree to which
we permit ourselves to understand the fact" that "moral distinction
is only perspectivally conditioned."^^ If the philosopher aspires to
any Truth at all, it is to remove the moral lens through which men
have traditionally viewed human behavior. Removing this lens, one
may freely admire the view: a nothingness that merely lies
lackluster under an indifferent, ever retreating horizon.
The philosopher is the exception because he shares the
qualities of a "stronger species.The "means by which a stronger
species preserves itself' is by "granting [itself] a right to
exceptional actions."^^ The exceptional action of the philosopher is
the conducting of his intellectual work outside of the moral
imperative. This is itself "an attempt at self-overcoming and
freedom": "an ascendency in respect to one’s strength of will."^^
This is the most apt description of Nietzsche’s concept of the self
overcoming of man.
The Rule Under His Wing;
The Philosopher as Antagonistic Redeemer
If approaching the universe and formulating values outside
of a moral world-order is "a great stretching of the limbs" for
philosophers [who are "warriors of knowledge’’], so much more of
a stretch must it be for the general public, whom Nietzsche regards
pejoratively as "the mediocre.’’40 For the "beast in us wants to be
lied to - morality is a necessary lie.’”^i Morality is necessary only
insofar as our plebian lusts for an ordered world depend on it.
However, what this new philosopher provides is a rousing of spirits
away from such established moral systems, replacing them with
the strength to formulate such valuations for oneself. In this sense,
the philosopher is not only the exception to mediocrity, but a model
for its abandonment. Submitting to the self-negating moral
postulates of the mediocre is a "symptom of weakness" that is
"incompatible with an ascending and affirmative life.’’'’^^ -The
philosopher’s affirmation and ascension are seen in a "replacement
61
�of morality by the will to our goal, and consequently to the means
of gaining it... [and a] replacement of the categorical imperative by
the natural imperative."^^ The idea of ascension is significant
because it implies a rising above that which is average to a superior
position.
The philosopher’s self-overcoming ascends, beckoning all
others to do the same. If it were simply the responsibility of the
philosopher to inspire the mere imitation of his behaviors, it would
then mean that his role is to help everyone average keep up faith in
themselves. However, this is not the statement that Nietzsche makes
in Note 10[175]. Rather, he "must take the rule under his wing and
help everything average keep up faith in itseW (italics mine). We
must remember that despite the fact that the philosopher is the one
that "takes the rule under his wing," he is no angelic redeemer. He
is a commander, a legislator! The philosopher commands his
underlings, "thou shall."'’^'^ In this sense, he is an antagonizes This
antagonistic redeemer, if we may call him such, does not extend a
hand to us, but "arises with a new and unprecedented terror."'^^
Such antagonistic and terror-inspiring legislation only serves to
threaten the individual. In the old model, everything powerful was
considered dangerous; power inspires terror. However, without
moral valuations and labels ("You evil thing!”) to justify such terror,
one has no choice but to react, respond, fight and command back.
There is no more "considerateness, tact and forbearance, of goodnatured pause before the rights of others ... [no more] benevolent
instinct of human values in general, which reveals itself in trust and
credit. .. [and] respect for men."^^ This inspires the emergence of
an individual whose "genesis and survival are different from those
of the average man"'*^^: "Their 'knowing' is creating, their creating is
law-giving, their will to truth is - Will to Power."^^
Confronted with this antagonism, the average man must
keep up faith in himself in order to survive. The average thing is
average no longer; rather, it becomes stronger, bolder— more
individual. It is in this process that one learns how one becomes
what one is: that is to say, by necessity.
62
�Endnotes
1. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Writings from the Late Notebooks. Cambridge Texts in the
History of Philosophy, Cambridge: 2003. pp 67.
2. Ibid., 177
3. Ibid., 203
4. Ibid., 67
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid., 113
7. Ibid., 68
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., 172
10. Ibid., 243
11. Nietzche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future.
Dover Publications Inc., New York: 1997. pp 128.
12. At first glance, this reasoning seems helpful and correct: The philosopher is "above"
hatred because he believes in the free will of individual. Furthermore, he believes that all
of the individuals that comprise what Nietzsche call the 'herd' and the ‘mediocre,’ have the
free will and the capacity to rise above their state. However, true to form, Nietzsche
challenges many of the intellectual traditions that we have thus far taken for granted.
Nietzsche claims it is false to take two antithetical concepts and thus infer an implicit
proposition from an explicit one. An example of this kind of antithetical inference is seen
in the idea that "hatred of a world that makes us suffer expresses itself in the imagining of
a different world” [141). In this example, one uses the fact of lament over suffering as a
basis for proving that a world without suffering is also possible; otherwise, one would
have no reason to lament at all. Simply put, the world could not be any other way.
However, for our pioneering polemicist, this kind of deduction would be a "blind trust in
Reason" (141). Such deductions set up the world as necessarily [and falsely) causal and
dialectical (141). On page 141, he continues to assert that such conclusions are so
instilled in man’s rational tradition; however, such tradition is not enough to "prove what
is asserts" (142). With this consideration in mind, would it then be false to make the claim
that hatred of the mediocre implicitly suggests that the mediocre could be otherwise.
13. Nietzche, Friedrich. Writings, 39
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid., 26
16. Nietzche, Friedrich. Beyond, 29
17. Nietzche, Friedrich. Writings, 39
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Nietzsche's earliest examples are those of Aristotle and Plato but these were not
necessarily the first.
21. Most explicitly discussed in Aristotle’s The Nicomachean Ethics.
22. Nietzche, Friedrich. Beyond, 52
23. Ibid.,
24. Ibid., 3
25. This marks the most significant conclusions of Plato’s Protagoras.
26. Ibid., 17
27. Ibid., 6
28. Ibid., 2
29. Nietzche, Friedrich. Writings, 39
63
�30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
Ibid.
Nietzche, Friedrich. Ecce Homo. Penguin Classics, London: 2004. pp. 71
Nietzche, Friedrich. Writings, 187
Nietzche, Friedrich. Beyond, 23
Ibid.
Nietzche, Friedrich. Writings, 220
Ibid., 200
Ibid., 229
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., 220
Ibid., 69
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Ecce Homo, 98
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Writings, 146
Ibid., 39
Ibid.
Ibid., 203
Ibid., 177
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond, 83
Primary Texts
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the
Future. Dover Publications Inc., New York: 1997.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Ecce Homo. Penguin Classics, London: 2004.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Writings from the Late Notebooks. Cambridge Texts
in the History of Philosophy, Cambridge: 2003.
64
�Prince Myshkin's Beautiful Horizon: Exploring Death and
the Infinite in Dostoevsky's The Idiot
Kevin Cowling
Dostoevsky's novel The Idiot, through the character of
Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin, presents the reader with a man
who claims access to knowledge of the infinite. More precisely, the
Prince claims at times in the novel that he has experienced and has
witnessed others experiencing moments in which they "know
everything.” These are the moments that seem to inspire so much
joy in the prince. They may also be to blame for his decision to act
candidly with everyone in society after returning from four years in
a Swiss sanatorium where he was treated for his epileptic
condition, even though participating in society is somehow painful
to him.i It is the decisions behind these actions—and the actions
themselves—that deserve further exploration, particularly because
Myshkin's character is contrasted so starkly with other characters
presented in the novel, notably Ippolit Terentyev [another sick
young man) and Parfyon Semyonovich Rogozhin. Each of these
characters, in his own way, also faces death in the novel. Ippolit
even seems to access the same type of infinite feelings that we see
Myshkin describing on many occasions.
What, however,
differentiates their experiences from Myshkin's, making them
unable to see the beauty of life as the prince does? Myshkin seems
to act in order to help others find the infinite that he himself has
known, but his actions do not lead these characters to see the
infinite in the same way. Is Myshkin's access to the infinite
fundamentally different from the experiences of those around him?
It will first be fruitful to look at some examples of how
Myshkin describes his experiences and conceptions of the infinite,
which he discusses with Lizaveta Epanchin and her three daughters
on the day he returns to Petersburg. In relating anecdotes of his
experiences abroad, the prince begins to discuss the improvements
brought about by his treatment and thus his increasing number of
walks around the Swiss village. He then talks about an experience
he had just outside the village:
65
�I kept thinking about how I was going to live; I
wanted to test my fate, I became restless especially at
certain moments.
You know, there are such
moments, especially in solitude.... Also at noon
sometimes, when I'd wander off somewhere into the
mountains, stand alone halfway up a mountain, with
pines all around, old, big, resinous; up on a cliff
there's an old, ruined medieval castle, our little
village is far down, barely visible; the sun is bright,
the sky blue, the silence terrible. Then there would
come a call to go somewhere, and it always seemed
to me that if I walked straight ahead, and kept on for
a long, long time, and went beyond that line where
sky and earth meet, the whole answer would be
there, and at once I'd see a new life, a thousand times
stranger and nosier than ours; ...And then it seemed
to me that in prison, too, you could find an immense
life.2
Here, in his mention of the horizon, Myshkin relates to the
Epanchin girls his initial impressions of the infinite. The striking
thing about this impression is that, even here, where it seems that
this infinite horizon is unreachable, Myshkin's response is a
positive and not a negative one. Even more can be gained from this
insight if it is coupled with a quotation from the previous page:
'We came to Lucerne, and 1 was taken across the lake.
I felt how good it was, but 1 also felt terribly
oppressed,’ said the prince.
‘Why?’ asked Alexandra.
‘I don’t understand why. I always feel oppressed and
uneasy when I look at such nature for the first time—
both good and uneasy.’^
In both of these instances the prince is describing times when he
was in a natural environment and how those experiences affected
him. Knowing that scenes of nature make him feel "oppressed," but
knowing also that they bring him a good feeling, allows for deep
66
�insight into Myshkin's experience of the horizon discussed above.
It is quite likely that in looking toward the horizon and feeling a
need to move toward it, into some kind of infinite space, the prince
feels an immense oppression. Pair this with his solitude and the
fact that he himself has a corrupt nature (his sickness), and it is
clear that his feelings regarding the horizon do not appear to have
been exclusively positive. If this is the case, then he made a choice
about his convictions concerning this infinity that is present before
him, yet not attainable. The closing lines of the initial quote of this
paragraph seem to show that his choice has been made. Myshkin
has chosen to think about the horizon not as a limiting factor in his
life, but as something that will open his eyes to allow him to see the
beauty of all of the things that surround him. Even an environment
as oppressive as a prison cannot overcome the immensity of the
beauty that he chooses to see in that horizon.
This is just the first of many examples wherein the prince
discusses his feelings regarding the infinite, and it would be unfair
to say that somehow this moment sums up everything Myshkin
feels on the subject. Later in his meeting with the Epanchins, the
infinite again arises, but this time through anecdotes about two
men who are facing their own death. It is in these descriptions that
Myshkin's thoughts become entangled with questions of mortality,
a theme that pervades the way characters in the novel either
experience, or at least approach the possibility of experiencing, the
infinite bliss that Myshkin contemplates above. The first story
involves a man who is sentenced to death by firing squad, but is
told only a quarter of an hour later that his sentence has been
lessened and that he will not be killed. Myshkin describes a
conversation with this man:
He knew beforehand what he was going to think
about: he kept wanting to picture to himself as
quickly and vividly as possible how it could be like
this: now he exists and lives, and in three minutes
there would be something, some person or thing—
but who? and where? He wanted to resolve it all in
those two minutes! There was a church nearby, and
the top of the cathedral with its gilded dome shone in
67
�the bright sun. He remembered gazing with terrible
fixity at that dome and the rays shining from it: it
seemed to him that those rays were his new nature
and in three minutes he would somehow merge with
them...The ignorance of and loathing for this new
thing that would be and would come presently were
terrible; yet he said that nothing was more
oppressive for him at that moment than the constant
thought: 'What if 1 were not to die! What if life were
given back to me—what infinity! And it would all be
mine! Then I'd turn each minute into a whole age. I'd
lose nothing. I'd reckon up every minute separately.
I'd let nothing be wasted!"^
There is a parallel here between the prince's experience with the
horizon and the experience of the man sentenced to death, only the
man sentenced to death seems to have added something:
knowledge of his impending death. The idea of merging with the
reflected rays of sunshine is almost identical to the idea of walking
into the horizon; that is, Myshkin's desire to merge with the infinite
and find "the whole answer" is the same feeling that the prisoner
finds when contemplating his existence merging with the reflected
rays. The problem is that Myshkin desires this mysterious infinity
when not faced with death. The prisoner, on the other hand, feels
so oppressed by the thought that he might merge with the infinite
that his desire is only for life and the infinite opportunity that it
seems to offer in opposition to the certainty of death. But are these
two views really different? Is the prisoner's desire given the
opportunity to embrace life different from Myshkin's desire to
merge with the infinite? As stated above, Myshkin knows that this
horizon and this infinite knowledge are somehow unattainable, but
through his experience he encounters ways to glimpse this infinite.
Both Myshkin and the prisoner seem to have had a glimpse of this
infinite and both have decided to take the oppression that it makes
them feel and turn it back on itself, using this oppression to import
a positive view of the world into their everyday existence.
This view seems to be further reinforced later in the
conversation. After explaining the feelings of the prisoner and the
68
�fact that the prisoner was eventually pardoned, Myshkin and the
Epanchin girls discuss the story:
'Did he live 'reckoning up' every minute?' asked
Alexandra.
'Oh, no, he told me himself—1 asked him about it—he
didn't live that way at all and lost many, many
minutes.'
'Well, so, there's experience for you, so it's impossible
to live really "keeping a reckoning." There's always
some reason why it's impossible.'
'Yes, for some reason it's impossible,' the prince
repeated. '1 thought so myself...But still it's somehow
hard to believe...'
'That is, you think you can live more intelligently
than everyone else?' asked Aglaya.
'Yes, I've sometimes thought so....And...l still do.'^
The prince states in this dialogue that although he has shared some
sort of experience with this prisoner, he feels that he can somehow
succeed where the prisoner has failed. He admits here that what
the prisoner has set out to do is impossible. One cannot try to live
each moment of life as if it were the most precious of moments.
Even the prisoner, who faced death, could not achieve that goal.
But with all of the evidence against him, the prince cannot help but
feel that his convictions about the impossibility of the goal are
wrong: he has the ability to "live more intelligently" than one
whose convictions on the subject should, it would seem, be
stronger than his.
After the story of the prisoner, the prince is once again
called to talk further about his ideas with the Epanchin girls.
Aglaya, the youngest of the Epanchin girls, seems remarkably
intrigued by his positive attitude, even in the face of the prisoner's
story. She then questions the prince about what it might be like to
witness an execution, an experience that Myshkin has discussed
previously in the novel with General Epanchin's valet. Aglaya
presses the prince to recount this moment as well, and the prince
once again begins to discuss the themes of the infinite and how one
69
�can find goodness even in the most trying of circumstances. The
discussion centers on the face of the man about to be executed. In
the prince's opinion, this face would be a wonderful subject for a
painting. He describes:
...the very moment when he had climbed the little
stairway and just stepped onto the scaffold. He
glanced in my direction; I looked at his face and
understood everything....On the contrary the head is
terribly alive and must be working hard, hard, hard,
like an engine running; I imagine various thoughts
throbbing in it, all of them incomplete, maybe even
ridiculous, quite irrelevant thoughts...and meanwhile
you know everything and remember everything;
there is this one point that can never be forgotten,
and you can't faint, and around it, around that point,
everything goes and turns. And to think that it will
be so till the last quarter of a second, when his head
is already lying on the block, and he waits
and...knows, and suddenly above him he hears the
iron screech!...Portray the scaffold so that only the
last step is seen closely and clearly; the criminal has
stepped onto it: his head, his face white as paper, the
priest offering him the cross, he greedily puts it to his
blue lips and stares, and—knows everything
For the prince, the face of the man who only has a minute to live
has the same quality found in the horizon. It holds a key to
understanding everything; only this time the prince is able to
capture this understanding in some tangible way. He does this by
attempting to live through the moments that the condemned man
has just lived through, is currently living through, and will soon live
through, until he ceases to live. When the infinite horizon was just
that, a horizon before him that was unreachable precisely because
of its constant distance, Myshkin's access to it was only possible in
the form of a recognition. Here, in the experience with the
condemned man, Myshkin seems to have bridged that distance by
associating himself with the infinite horizon, through recognizing
70
�mortality in the face of this man. This recognition of another man's
mortality has allowed the prince access to new ways of thinking
about his own mortality. He perceives himself as the one about to
be executed and experiences what the moments leading up to, and
even the moment of, the execution must be like.
Obviously, this is one of the most important moments in the
prince's life. In the first five chapters of the novel he has already
discussed it twice with five total strangers, and on both occasions
with great veracity. It is not only significant that the prince
recognizes the importance of this moment himself but also that he
believes the moments before death have had a similar effect on the
condemned man. It seems that Myshkin's ability to access the
infinite in the face of the condemned man is contingent on the fact
that the prince believes that the man is able to access this infinite
knowledge in these final moments himself. The apparent qualifier
for this access by the condemned man is his assurance that his
death will soon occur, that he is facing his mortality in a fixed,
temporal way. What is even more intriguing about the prince's
thoughts here is that he feels that this image, if captured correctly
in a painting, would have the same effect that it had on him when
he witnessed the events. In essence, he is asserting that in facing
one's own mortality, one can gain access to this infinite horizon.
What one does with the knowledge of this infinite horizon is still
unclear, though it seems that some insight has been gained into
what the prince thinks he can do with the knowledge he believes he
has received from these experiences.
Of course, it would be fitting to place the discussion of
Myshkin's feelings surrounding the infinite horizon and death
within the context of the scene in which he faces his own mortality.
Before moving to that moment, however, it is worth taking a look at
a conversation between the prince and Rogozhin, the man who will
eventually wield the knife against Myshkin and allow the prince to
face death in a way that he never has before. Rogozhin, though the
first character introduced in the novel, quickly takes a backseat to
the exploits of the prince. The two seem to get along well enough
in the beginning, but by the end of Part One they have locked
themselves into a love triangle, both desiring the affections of the
beautiful Nastasya Filippovna. After she spurns the prince's initial
71
�marriage proposal, she runs off with Rogozhin, later returning to
Myshkin only to leave him once again, and the action picks up with
Myshkin paying Rogozhin a visit in Petersburg six months later.
During this visit the two discuss a painting that hangs in Rogozhin's
home; a copy of Hans Holbein's Christ's Body in the Tomb. The
painting is a very undignified depiction of Jesus' corpse. Upon
pointing out the painting, Rogozhin asks the prince if he believes in
God, which takes the prince by surprise. Dostoevsky then writes:
‘But I like looking at that painting,’ Rogozhin
muttered after a silence, as if again forgetting his
question.
‘At that painting!’ the prince suddenly cried out,
under the impression of an unexpected thought. ‘At
that painting! A man could even lose his faith from
that painting!’
‘Lose it he does,’ Rogozhin suddenly agreed
unexpectedly. They had already reached the front
door.
‘What?’ the prince suddenly stopped. ‘How can you!
1 was almost joking, and you're so serious! And why
did you ask me whether I believe in God?’^
Earlier, Myshkin was describing a painting of a man before his
death and how that painting could bring the notion of the infinite to
others by using their empathy to explore what it would mean to
face their own death. Here, Rogozhin and Myshkin are looking at a
painting of the dead Christ, but not just any painting of the dead
Christ. This painting shows Jesus as a corpse, and there is little, if
any, divinity noticeable in the representation. Interestingly, it is the
prince who points towards this when he notes that one may "lose
his faith” because of the painting. He quickly discounts this thought
as something of a joke after Rogozhin's surprising response, but
nevertheless the question remains: if the prince is striving to see
the beauty in all things, then why make such a remark?
For the prince there seems to be a difference between the
actuality of death and the moments of life that exist before death,
and these should not be confused. To clarify: It is not the death of
72
�the condemned man that was so significant for Myshkin, but the
moments leading up to death, and the feelings of infinity
experienced within these moments. Of course, these moments only
exist due to the knowledge of death's impending actuality: Access
to the infinite exists for Myshkin when he sees the beheading
because he sees a man that knows his death will come in a finite
period of time. For Myshkin then, and presumably Rogozhin at
some point as well, seeing the image of Jesus [who is considered
both fully human and fully divine) as a corpse provokes a much
different way of thinking about death. Life does not exist in this
painting whatsoever, even in the face of the Christ, the bringer of
eternal life. If Rogozhin stares at this painting often, as he seems
wont to do, how can he bring his thoughts about mortality back
into life in the same way that Myshkin has? It seems that the
answer comes in the form of these few lines spoken between the
two gentlemen in the passage related above. Rogozhin sees in this
painting death's finality, and it has caused him to lose faith in life.
Thus, he has no desire to seek out beauty in the way that Myshkin
has thought to seek out beauty in life. Instead of life, Rogozhin has
based his existence on death, which will become clearer when some
of his further actions are explored.
After the two men part, Myshkin continues to walk around
the city with an uneasy feeling. Throughout the entire day he has
been seeing eyes watching him wherever he has gone but it is only
at Rogozhin's house that he recognizes them as Rogozhin's eyes.
On some level, the prince attempts to downplay this paranoia by
attributing it to a flaring up of his illness, but he soon realizes, to his
chagrin, that both the eyes and his increasing feeling of illness are
quite real. Here Dostoevsky gives the reader some insight into
Myshkin's thoughts concerning his illness. On his walk, the prince
thinks back on the experience of the moments just before his
epileptic fits. The novel reads:
The sense of life, of self-awareness, increased nearly
tenfold in these moments, which flashed by like
lightning. His mind, his heart were lit up with an
extraordinary light; all his agitation, all his doubts, all
his worries were as if placated at once, resolved in a
73
�sort of sublime tranquility, filled with serene,
harmonious joy, and hope, filled with reason and
ultimate cause....Reflecting on that moment
afterwards, in a healthy state, he had often said to
himself that all those flashes and glimpses of a higher
self-sense and self-awareness, and therefore of the
"highest being,” were nothing but an illness, a
violation of the normal state and if so, then this was
not the highest being at all but, on the contrary,
should be counted as the very lowest. And yet he
finally arrived at an extremely paradoxical
conclusion: 'So what if it is an illness?’ he finally
decided....lf in that second, that is, in the very last
conscious moment before the fit, he had happened to
succeed in saying clearly and consciously to himself:
‘Yes, for this moment one could give one's whole
life!’—then surely this moment in itself was worth a
whole life....’At that moment,’ as he had once said to
Rogozhin in Moscow, when they got together there,
'at that moment I was somehow able to understand
the extraordinary phrase that time shall be no more.’^
The above excerpt has implications for almost everything that has
been previously discussed. First, it seems that Myshkin relates this
moment before the fits to his gazing out at the infinite horizon and
his experience of looking the condemned man in the face. The
difference is that the experience being related here does not
require some sort of outside, sensory experience, but rather is an
introverted, psychological experience that is followed by a
complete disconnection with sensory experience. Again he is faced
with a choice: He can either look at this situation as one that is
completely oppressive, dismissing his feelings as stemming from
an illness and therefore illegitimate and not to be venerated, or he
can accept that his illness can provide him with moments of
extreme beauty. He concludes that the latter is the way that he
would rather look at the situation.
With scattered thoughts, the prince roams the city when he
is overtaken by a "new, sudden idea.’’^ Though not fully explained
74
�outright, this new idea involves visiting the house where he
believes Nastasya might be residing, something which he has told
Rogozhin he does not plan to do. Because of this, Myshkin is
incredibly conflicted. Not only is he feeling paranoid and ill, but for
the first and maybe the only time in the novel, we see the prince in
a morally suspect position. He not only thinks negatively about
other people in these moments, but he also recognizes these
moments of weakness in himself and chastises himself for it. At
one point Dostoevsky writes, "It was from the fit that all this
darkness came, from the fit that the 'idea' came as well!"io Clearly,
this is one of the prince's darkest hours. He is close to forgoing all
of his previously held beliefs. Then, in one moment, he seems to
have found his way back to seeing the beauty. Myshkin thinks,
"Compassion is the chief and perhaps the only law of being for all
mankind. Oh, how unpardonably and dishonorably guilty he was
before Rogozhin!"ii When he sees Rogozhin following him and
recognizes him, however, his faith is shaken once again. At this
moment, "He saw only an unhappy man whose inner state was
dark but quite comprehensible.This comprehensibility is no
comfort to Myshkin. On the contrary, it is so concerning for
Myshkin that it allows him to lose track of the beauty inside
Rogozhin. If there is no beauty in Rogozhin, then what reason is
there to say that there can be beauty anywhere? Myshkin's
worldview seems to be contingent upon the fact that beauty can be
found in all things without exception. In the text, Myshkin
confronts this question directly.
Conviction—of what? (Oh, how tormented the prince
was by the monstrosity, the "humiliation” of this
conviction, of "this base foreboding," and how he
blamed himself!) ‘Say then, if you dare, of what?’ he
said ceaselessly to himself, in reproach and defiance.
'Formulate, dare to express your whole thought,
clearly, precisely, without hesitation! Oh, I am
dishonorable!’ he repeated with indignation and with
a red face. ‘With what eyes am I to look at this man
now all my life! Oh, what a day! Oh, God, what a
nightmare!’!^
75
�When combined with Myshkin's realization that his “sudden idea"
stems from the fact that he knows that Rogozhin is following him
and that he is violating his promise not to seek out Nastasya^^ this
"conviction” arising in him now concerning Rogozhin seems to
center around the violence of which he believes Rogozhin is
capable. The prince, hoping against all hope that his mind could
ignore this violence somehow, is ashamed that it cannot. He paints
himself as an unfit judge when he looks upon Rogozhin in a
negative light. For the prince, it is only appropriate to treat others
with compassion. This treatment is not limited to a physical
treatment, but also to the way one conceives of another. Seeing
Rogozhin as capable of violence, or even as inevitably drawn to
violence, as the prince does here, is not a compassionate
conception. It is the opposite, and the prince, feeling that he has
lost faith in his own convictions, is overwhelmed by despair and
humiliation.
Myshkin returns to his hotel, contemplating his shameful
new outlook on Rogozhin, when he thinks he sees the man once
again. On the stairs, Rogozhin suddenly emerges from a niche and
raises a knife to kill Myshkin. This is the moment that should be
captured in the painting Myshkin describes for Alexandra at the
Epanchin household. The conviction that was discussed in the
previous paragraph and the "sudden idea" seem to have led the two
characters to this moment. Myshkin has known that his death is
waiting here in this stairwell. Just before entering the stairwell
Dostoevsky writes, "His heart stood still. 'Now everything will be
resolved!' he said to himself with great conviction."^^ This is
Myshkin's chance to truly live out the experience of the condemned
man. The knife is raised and Myshkin, seeing Rogozhin's distorted
face, calls out to him, "Parfyon, 1 don't believe it!...,”i^ before he
sinks into a fit, preventing Rogozhin from going through with the
murder. Dostoevsky writes, "Then suddenly it was as if something
opened up before him: an extraordinary inner light illuminated his
soul."i7 With his earlier conviction that the moments before his fits
were "worth one's whole life," it seems that this circumstance helps
bring Myshkin back to his original convictions by exposing him to
the infinite, both through facing his own death and through his
76
�epileptic seizure. He was truly facing his own death at the hands of
Rogozhin, but his illness prevented his death precisely at the
moment when he was questioning the most basic premise of his
convictions: that beauty can be found in all things in life, even the
ugliest.
This scene can be explored from the perspective of
Rogozhin as well because he, too, faces death when he raises the
knife to kill Myshkin. In a sense, he is experiencing the face of the
condemned man like Myshkin had back in Lyon at the execution.
But there is something much different here: notably, the conviction
already present in Rogozhin when confronted with this face.
Rogozhin has spent his time looking at the Holbein painting and in
this image of death he simply cannot find the kind of beauty in the
life that surrounds him as Myshkin is able to in his confrontations
with death. While Myshkin's experience allows for some kind of
empathic human feeling, the painting, and, perhaps even more
strikingly, the competition that exists between the two men, have
not allowed Rogozhin the same access to this experience. In fact,
the competition for Nastasya allows Rogozhin to remove his
experience from the prince's, building up the hatred that leads him
to violence. It seems the painting has contributed to this conviction
because of what it symbolizes for Rogozhin: a loss of faith. If death
is the true finality, so true that even Christ cannot overcome it, then
this should be the solution to the problem with Myshkin as well.
No conception of human experience or of the beauty of all things
can overcome the finality and the inevitability of death. Like
Myshkin, Rogozhin embodies this conviction and outwardly
expresses it, sharing his beliefs in the form of violence. Ironically,
while trying to kill the prince to assert his faith in death, Rogozhin
further entrenches the prince in his own positive outlook on the
beauty of life precisely because of the existence of death. Instead of
providing a solution to his problem, violence has only exacerbated
it, leaving the door open for more violence.
The rivalry between Rogozhin and Myshkin has created
clear distinctions between the outlooks of the two characters, but
these are not the only two approaches to the subjects found in the
novel. One other highly developed approach comes from the
character named Ippolit, a young man with tuberculosis who is
77
�able to work his way into the lives of the characters through some
rather dubious circumstances. In Part Three he has his most telling
scene when he arrives at the prince's dacha to read what amounts
to a lengthy suicide note entitled "My Necessary Explanation." In
the note, Ippolit states that a doctor has informed him that he has
two weeks left to live and that this knowledge has left him with
little purpose in life. If he can no longer finish anything he begins,
then why begin anything new at all? In a sense, Ippolit is very
much like the condemned man about whom Myshkin talks with the
Epanchins, but in this instance, the condemned man is able to
relate to Myshkin what he is actually feeling about his approaching
death.
The explanation is full of contradictory thoughts,
highlighted in the story of a doctor to whom Ippolit returns a
wallet. Before this story Ippolit writes, "people are created to
torment each other,"!^ but during this story he ends up helping the
doctor by visiting an old school acquaintance. In this visit he says:
'In sowing your seed, in sowing your "charity,” your
good deed in whatever form it takes, you give away
part of your person and receive into yourself part of
another's; you mutually commune in each other; a
little more attention, and you will be rewarded with
knowledge, with the most unexpected discoveries.
You will be bound, finally, to look at your work as a
science; it will take in the whole of your life and
maybe fill the whole of it. On the other hand, all your
thoughts, all the seeds you have sown, which you
may already have forgotten, will take on flesh and
grow; what was received from you will be passed on
to someone else. And how do you know what share
you will have in the future outcome of human
destiny? And if the knowledge and the whole life of
this work finally raises you so high that you are able
to plant a tremendous seed, to bequeath a
tremendous thought to mankind, then...’ And so on, I
talked a lot then.^^
78
�While not exactly the same as Myshkin's outlook regarding the
beauty of the world around him, there does seem to be some
connection between the two viewpoints, namely that each regards
worldviews as shareable through actions. In this instance Ippolit is
discussing charity, which is similar, though not identical, to the
compassion with which Myshkin seems so concerned. Ippolit does
admit that actions of charity can have an effect on others, but the
real insight he seems to bring to the equation is that there is no true
knowledge of what effect this might have. In essence, this appears
to be Ippolit's major concern, though it will take more explanation
to fully bring this idea to light.
The previous quote shows that at one point Ippolit had
some positive feelings regarding life and how one may be able to
act towards others. But later that same night, Ippolit thinks for the
first time that he would be better off killing himself than living. For
the moment it seems that Ippolit, when facing the infinite, has
chosen the path of Rogozhin rather than the path of Myshkin. This
hypothesis is further reinforced by the fact that Ippolit seeks out
Rogozhin and the two discuss his suicide, which Ippolit dubs his
"ultimate conviction” in the note. He writes:
There was a contrast between us, which could not fail
to tell in both of us, especially me: I was a man whose
days were already numbered, while he was living the
fullest immediate life, in the present moment, with no
care for "ultimate” conclusions, numbers, or anything
at all that was not concerned with what...with
what...well, say, with what he's gone crazy over;...I
gave him no hint of my "ultimate conviction,” but for
some reason it seemed to me that he guessed it as he
listened to me....I hinted to him, as I was leaving, that
in spite of all the differences between us and all the
contrasts—les extremites se touchent..., so that he
himself might not be so far from my "ultimate
conviction” as it seemed.^o
Ippolit states there is a contrast between the two, and ultimately I
agree with that statement, but in this moment it seems that their
79
�contrast lies only in the kind of solution they are seeking in death.
Rogozhin is able to guess that Ippolit has made up his mind to kill
himself simply because violence, and ultimately death, are
Rogozhin's own answer to all things, in the same way that beauty is
the answer to all things for Myshkin. Neither of these is the case
for Ippolit, though in this moment he has chosen death for himself
The difference lies in Ippolit's concern for "ultimate" conclusions, a
concern that he does not see in Rogozhin. In essence, Ippolit is
searching for a type of knowledge, but not the type of knowledge
that Myshkin or Rogozhin may offer. Ippolit seems much more
concerned with an earthly knowledge. He wants his convictions to
be confirmed, not because he feels a certain way, but because they
are somehow inherently true. This is why he says that Rogozhin is
not concerned with "numbers.” Ippolit wants to understand in the
sense of a mathematical, objective understanding, as contrasted
with Myshkin and Rogozhin's beliefs, both of which are heavily
based on the two characters’ subjective interpretations of
experience. The desire for this type of understanding is why
Ippolit may never be able to share the same convictions as either of
these men, and why he is so easily able to disregard the above
quote concerning charity. One can never really know the outcomes
of one's actions toward another, so a conviction like Myshkin's
[that compassion is the true law of mankind) is completely
unpredictable and, as such, cannot be counted on as an absolute
conviction. If this is indeed true, then such a conviction can never
be a comfort to a mind like Ippolit's.
Interestingly, Ippolit seems to understand Rogozhin's
convictions during their discussion. The statement, "with what he's
gone crazy over," can be read as Rogozhin's obsession with
violence and death. This reading is supported by the French
phrase which translates, "extremes meet," implying that although
Ippolit understands that the two men seek different things, they
have ultimately both chosen death. Later, Ippolit even says, "His
house struck me; it resembles a graveyard, but he seems to like it,
which, however, is understandable: such a full, immediate life as he
lives is too full in itself to need any setting.”2i He sees that
Rogozhin's existence is so engaged with death that even
surrounding himself with death would not be a concern to a man
80
�such as this. It is important to note Ippolit's understanding of
Rogozhin's convictions because he will later describe the Holbein
painting and how it could lead a man to believe that there is no
beauty in the world. He even goes so far as to suggest that if Christ
had seen the picture himself, he may have decided not give himself
over to be crucified.22
This understanding of Rogozhin merges with Ippolit's
experience of the infinite, discussed toward the end of Chapter VI
of Part Three. In this segment, he writes about a night of delirium
in which he has an experience similar to the one Myshkin does
when looking at the horizon. This is immediately followed by an
apparition of Rogozhin. He writes:
Can something that has no image come as an image?
But it was as if it seemed to me at that moment that I
could see that infinite power, that blank, dark, and
dumb being, in some strange impossible form. I
remember it seemed as if someone holding a candle
led me by the hand and showed me some huge and
repulsive tarantula and started assuring me that this
was the dark, blank, all-powerful being, and laughed
at my indignation.^^
Though this seems to be some kind of experience of the infinite
horizon like Myshkin's, the two differ. This difference stems from
Ippolit's "ultimate conviction.” Because Ippolit is attempting to put
his faith in violence, the infinite horizon present in front of him
comes in the form of a violent beast (the tarantula). Ippolit then
moves from this state of delirium into a further state when he sees
the apparition of Rogozhin enter his room and stare at him for a
long time during the night. He later reveals that the door to his
room was locked the whole night, and the door to the house as
well, so it would have been impossible for Rogozhin to actually
have entered his room, reinforcing the reading that the vision of
Rogozhin is an evolved version of this tarantula figure.24 Rogozhin
has become the embodiment of the convictions that Ippolit has
81
�recently attempted to embrace: death as the solution to the
problem of the infinite. In this scene, however, Ippolit is possessed
by fear and revulsion when confronted with Rogozhin. Ippolit's
vision of fear and revulsion in the face of Rogozhin is a sign that he
has not fully embraced Rogozhin's convictions, preventing him
from carrying out his suicide. By imagining Rogozhin sneaking into
his room at night, Ippolit is picturing Rogozhin as coming to face
death—Ippolit as a condemned man—without fear, something
that Ippolit himself is unable to do. He says after this experience
that it is here that he becomes truly resolved, not out of logic, but
out of revulsion.25 It seems that this is precisely why he could
never have brought himself to suicide. He desires an explanation of
the infinite horizon that involves logic, but his complete rejection of
logic in order to embrace violence and death is in contradiction to
the character of an individual who would write a document called
"My Necessary Explanation."
Following this story, the beliefs expressed in Ippolit's note
begin to encounter those of the prince. He writes toward the end of
the note;
What do 1 need your nature for, your Pavlovsk park,
your sunrises and sunsets, your blue sky, and your
all-contented faces, when this whole banquet, which
has no end, began by counting me alone as
superfluous? What do 1 care about all this beauty,
when every minute, every second, 1 must and am
forced to know that even this tiny fly that is now
buzzing near me in a ray of sunlight, even it
participates in this banquet and chorus, knows its
place, loves it, and is happy, while 1 alone am a
castaway, and only in my pusillanimity did not want
to understand it till now!^^
He cannot see that the beauty before him is there, precisely for the
reason he believes it should not exist. The prince understands that
his mortality is what has made coming back from the experience of
the infinite horizon so glorious. He can see beauty in each thing
because he recognizes in that moment that his ability to experience
82
�beauty depends on his being alive. Someday he will not be there to
see the beauty of the world, or it will not be there for him to
experience. Ippolit, in this quotation, says the exact opposite. How
can he see the beauty, knowing that he cannot always experience
it? How can the fleeting moment in time possess something
glorious when he cannot understand the significance of its fullness?
He is so caught up in the idea that he must understand, truly
understand the things that occur around him that he does not allow
himself to give in to those things, as do the fly and the prince.
There seem to be at least three differing views presented in
regard to the infinite horizon and death. Prince Myshkin, upon
experiencing this horizon a number of times, allows this experience
to bring him to a fuller understanding of the beauty of life around
him. Because the infinite horizon is so closely related to death, it is
mortality that allows Myshkin to brighten his life in this way. By
attempting to live his life as if he were facing death at each
moment, he has learned to appreciate the amazing beauty of each
of the individual moments of life, and can see the beauty locked
within their confines. He can even see beauty in those moments
that seem devoid of all beauty. This view is contrasted with the
convictions of both Rogozhin and Ippolit. Rogozhin embraces
death, mostly due to his loss of faith. Furthermore, his competition
with Myshkin for the affections of Nastasya drives him to extreme
violence, reinforcing these deadly convictions. Ippolit seeks a
solution through violence as well, but embarrassingly [or perhaps
even on purpose) fails to properly load his gun before trying to kill
himself. He then lives out the next few weeks of his life without
becoming like Rogozhin or Myshkin, but instead living as a gossip
of sorts around the other characters of the novel. As this figure, he
acts as the one who knows more than those around him, which fits
with his attempt to understand his place within the world.
To revisit two of the original questions: Why do Myshkin’s
actions not lead these characters to see the infinite in the way that
he does, and is his access to the infinite fundamentally different
from the experiences of those around him? The answer to the first
seems to be that Myshkin’s actions are actions of empathy towards
others. Though they may be considered beautiful by some, not all
people see his actions as he sees them, and therefore he cannot rely
83
�on his convictions to bring out the same emotions in others. Thus,
Myshkin's pity for Nastasya does not provide Rogozhin with the
opportunity to see the beauty in her that Myshkin's pity is
attempting to reveal, simply because Myshkin's convictions
regarding the beauty of this pity cannot be interpreted in the same
way by Rogozhin. In a similar way, though Myshkin sees beauty in
the trees of Pavlovsk, this same beauty cannot be accessed by
Ippolit. To the second question, the answer seems to be yes. But,
this is only because in exploring this subject it has become clear
that each character experiences the infinite horizon in a unique,
personal way. To say that one’s experience of it could be shared
wholly with another is likely to lessen that experience, even when
talking about characters in a novel. On some level, the characters
may understand one another and one another’s motivations, but
their experiences are their own. Myshkin especially seems to have
an extraordinary set of experiences precisely because of his illness
and his lack of experience in society. Ultimately, is this what it
takes to have the convictions that Myshkin has? Can one live within
a society without a sickness and still believe that there is beauty in
all things?
Endnotes
1 Dostoevsky. The Idiot. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, trans. New York:
Vintage Classics, 2003. 75
2. Ibid., 58-9
3. Ibid., 58
4. Ibid., 60-1, emphasis in original.
5. Ibid., 61-2
6. Ibid., 64-6, emphasis in original.
7. Ibid., 218
8. Ibid., 226, emphasis in original.
9 Ibid., 227
10. Ibid., 229
11. Ibid., 230
12. ibid., 232
13. Ibid., 233
14. Ibid., 231
15. Ibid., 234
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., 395
19. Ibid., 405
84
�20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
Ibid., 406-7
Ibid., 407
Ibid., 408-9
Ibid.,
Ibid., 411
Ibid.
Ibid., 413
Primary Text
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Idiot. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa
Volokohonsky. New York: Vintage Classics, 2003.
85
�A Proposed Atlas to the On-ramps and Off-ramps of the
Road to Serfdom
Jesse Wilhite
As F. A. Hayek guides us spiraling down The Road to Serfdom
in his cautionary tract, he confronts us with a number of choices,
branches which, if taken one way, will continue on the path that
Western civilization has mapped out for us, but another will lead
toward dark places. Hayek does not spend a great deal of time
examining any deep philosophical foundations that may underlie
these options. He merely shows us the choices, analyzes the paths
taken by others, and speculates about where we seem to be going.
He seems to assume that a reasonable person, when presented with
the options side by side, will choose to return to the recentlyabandoned road of traditional Western civilization and liberalism
rather than to continue on a road that leads to modern serfdom, the
worst of totalitarianism in both its Communist and Fascist forms.
One of the great questions fundamental to this decision pertains to
morals and values. What are the moral underpinnings of the
traditional liberal system? What are the values one must hold to
choose the abandoned road? Are they compelling, or even possible?
How might they be maintained or, if they have been lost, how might
they be reacquired?
To a great extent, Hayek takes certain values for granted. He
assumes that we understand good and evil and agree that they
exist, and that there is a kind of wickedness in the realities brought
about by the Nazi regime with which England was at war during
the writing of The Road To Serfdom. From the beginning, he frames
the drift from the abandoned road to the road to serfdom not in
terms of a departure from values per se, but rather in terms of the
pursuit of good intentions that reaped bad but unintended
consequences. His fundamental argument is not that we have the
wrong values, ideals, and morals, but that in pursuing the right
ones in the wrong way we have abandoned them, changed them,
and we risk losing them altogether.
For Hayek, basic ideas and social order, the foundations of
civilization, have evolved over time. Based historically in Classical
86
�thought and Christianity, and germinating in the flowering of the
Renaissance, Western civilization is rooted in "respect for the
individual man qua man."i This is the fundamental idea, the moral
base Hayek assumes we share, which, along with material
prosperity, he warns that we are in danger of losing altogether.
This fundamental idea, this fountain flowing with morals and
values, is important as a fixed point from which to view the world.
In criticizing the disappearance of these virtues under socialism,
Hayek asks, "What are the fixed poles now which are regarded as
sacrosanct, which no reformer dare touch, since they are treated as
immutable boundaries which must be respected in any plan for the
future?"^ For virtue or morality to mean anything, there must be
fixed points of reference, boundaries that may not be moved.
Individual self-determination seems to be the foundation of the
abandoned road, the sine qua non of liberalism.
This individualism is not only held as an a priori axiom. "The
fundamental fact on which the whole philosophy of individualism is
based” flows from the fact that only limited knowledge is available
to any one person about the values and needs of the multitude of
other individuals; that is, only partial scales of value are possibly
knowable.3 Therefore:
From this the individualist concludes that the
individuals should be allowed, within defined limits,
to follow their own values and preferences rather
than somebody else's; that within these spheres the
individual's system of ends should be supreme and
not subject to any dictation by others. It is this
recognition of the individual as the ultimate judge of
his ends, the belief that as far as possible his own
views ought to govern his actions, that forms the
essence of the individualist position.^
The impossibility of knowing or imagining a complete scale of
values and needs means that a complete ethical code is unavailable
to any central planner, which seems therefore to necessitate an
individualist position simply in order to have a properly
functioning economic system.
87
�Another necessity for morality or values, another fixed pole,
is a respect for truth as such. Referring to relativism, Hayek says,
"The moral consequences of totalitarian propaganda which we
must now consider are, however, of an even more profound kind.
They are destructive of all morals because they undermine one of
the foundations of all morals: the sense of and respect for the
truth."5 It may seem too obvious to need stating, but as we will
learn later, respect for truth as truth is a fundamental principle
Hayek assumes to be necessary to morality.
In The Road To Serfdom we find two litanies of liberal
virtues. These virtues include "independence, self-reliance, and the
willingness to bear risks, the readiness to back one’s own
conviction against a majority, and the willingness to voluntary
cooperation with one’s neighbors,” and "independence and selfreliance, individual initiative and local responsibility, the successful
reliance on voluntary activity, noninterference with one’s neighbor
and tolerance of the different and queer, respect for custom and
tradition, and a healthy suspicion of power and authority.’’^ The
common character essential to all is a sort of self-sufficiency, not
simply for its own sake but also as a supporting element in a liberal
extended order. Virtue lies not only in defending oneself from
coercion and in respecting the foundations of tradition, but also in
openness to what is different. There are three intersections of
values and morality that bear addressing in concert with one
another. The values of freedom and equality intersect, as do the
questions of morality as end or as means, and of morality as an
individual or a collective phenomenon.
As we have seen, individualism is taken to be a fundamental
principle, and inherent in it is the principle that each should be free
to pursue his own ends. Thus freedom or liberty is a basic tenet of
liberalism. This is freedom of action within a consistent, prior
framework: the rule of law. It is freedom to pursue one’s self
interest, one’s own values and needs. Hayek points out the danger
of the extension of this concept of guaranteed freedom to include
freedom from want and material need.^ Essentially, this
redefinition or extension, the expectation that government should
free the individual from material need, is dangerous for several
reasons. In abdicating economic responsibility to the government.
88
�the individual also abdicates power or control over all that is
attached to economic needs and economic activity; in Hayek's
terms, over virtually everything. The individual moves from
independence to dependence. Freedom, when thus extended, ends
in servitude.
The liberal good of equality is subject to a similar negative
extension. Under individualism or liberalism, each deserves to be
treated equally as man qua man. Equal protection exists for all,
without privilege for any, according to predetermined rules, known
as the rule of law. This is equality before the law, equality of
conditions. One of the on-ramps of the road to serfdom involves the
extension of this concept of equality to include material equality, or
equality of ends, an extension which necessarily cancels out
equality before the law. Given different capacities, different people
must be treated differently in order to achieve equality of ends.
Here again a well-intentioned expansion of the range of a liberal
good changes the direction of the ultimate path.
One fundamental problem consists in determining where
the good lies—in the ends or the means, in the individual sphere or
the sphere of collective planning. In other words, do we aim at
justice or some standard of good as an end, and use whatever
means necessary to accomplish it, or does justice or the good lie in
the means, a framework we use to allow a multiplicity of ends? Is
justice a matter of ends or of means? For Hayek, a complete ethical
code, one that would encompass the needs and values of each
individual, is impossible even to imagine, so morality must be
understood in the realm of the individual and justice must lie in a
consistent framework of the rule of law rather than in some sort of
requirement of particular ends, such as material equality.^ It seems
simply impossible to have complete or even sufficient knowledge of
needs, values and means to allow for planning in such a way that
we will accomplish just ends without generating terrible,
unintended consequences. Morality exists only on an individual
level, because the individual is the ultimate agent of action, the only
one who both knows his values and the only one who can connect
those values to the moment of action. Any attempt to shift morals
to a higher or prior sphere cancels them out and they cease to exist
as such. Beyond this, there is a difference between the moral sense
89
�that urges us to attempt to plan for just ends and those coercive
ethics that would be required to execute them on a mass scale. "The
interaction between morals and institutions may well have the
effect that the ethics produced by collectivism will be altogether
different from the moral ideals that lead to the demand for
collectivism.”^ Ultimately, justice must be understood primarily in
terms of means and a consistent rule of law as a framework for
individuals to pursue their self-determined ends. To attempt to
accomplish specific collective ends is neither possible nor safe.
We arrive at a significant question. If these ideals of
liberalism and traditional morality are necessary to civilization and
a liberal free market, and if we are in danger of abandoning them
for a road to serfdom, how may we preserve them? Alternately, if
these ideals already have been to some degree abandoned, how
might we recognize and reestablish them? Hayek gives us a few
clues, and we may discover a few of our own. They can be imagined
as on-ramps and off-ramps of the road to serfdom.
One of the first on-ramps we come to is simple impatience.
Hayek identifies this as having been one of the primary and early
motivations for abandoning the free market extended order
responsible for the growth of civilization. As the market order was
systematized and advanced in the nineteenth century on an
unprecedented scale, "the crude rules in which the principles of
economic policy” consisted still required development and there
was "just irritation with those who used liberal phraseology in
defense of antisocial privileges and the boundless ambition
seemingly justified by the material improvements already
achieved.”!*^ Instead of patiently developing the economic system,
carefully fostering the rule of law, and essentially building upon the
foundation of the advances in the free market, the temptation was
to start over by fiat on a different foundation. "Because of the
success already achieved, man became increasingly unwilling to
tolerate the evils still with him which now appeared both
unbearable and unnecessary.’’^^ Development unfolds over time,
and it would seem that the maintenance of traditional morality and
the free market requires a sort of patience on the part of all
involved, allowing natural market processes to bring prosperity in
due course, taking time to foster the rule of law, and experimenting
90
�with and adjusting the framework as necessary as it evolves over
time.
Another important on-ramp to serfdom is the atrophy of
moral sense. Traditional morals are communal information,
transmitted and inculcated in ways that we do not perhaps fully
understand. But they also seem to be fostered and maintained
individually through practice. One must exercise them in order to
avoid the vicious cycle of the blunting of our moral sensibilities:
What our generation is in danger of forgetting is not
only that morals are of necessity a phenomenon of
individual conduct but also that they can exist only in
the sphere in which the individual is free to decide
for himself and is called upon voluntarily to sacrifice
personal advantage to the observation of a moral
rule. Outside the sphere of individual responsibility
there is neither goodness nor badness, neither
opportunity for moral merit nor the chance of
proving one’s conviction by sacrificing one's desires
to what one thinks is right.^^
This once again speaks to the point that morals are inherently
individual and disappear at the level of central decision-making.
But it also implies that it is vital that the individual be called upon
to sacrifice voluntarily. Where there is no opportunity to exercise
this moral capacity it seems to disappear, either because the
conditions no longer exist or perhaps because of a drying up of the
individual moral capacity. Mere participation in political
democracy is not sufficient.
The periodical election of representatives, to which
the moral choice of the individual tends to be more
and more reduced is not an occasion on which his
moral values are tested or where he has constantly to
reassert and prove the order of his values and to
testily to the sincerity of his profession by the
sacrifice of those of his values he rates lower to those
he puts higher.13
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�There seems to be a habitual aspect to individual participation in
moral choices and moral traditions: Either we use them or we lose
them.
A third on-ramp to the road to serfdom shows up in a
somewhat odd place, in the social order itself. "It should never be
forgotten that the one decisive factor in the rise of totalitarianism
on the Continent, which is yet absent in England and America, is the
existence of a large recently dispossessed middle class.’’^'^ The main
reason this leads to serfdom is that large disaffected social classes
tend to become enemies of the current regime. Those who were
once materially and socially mobile, such as the middle class, tend
to fight to regain the advantages they have lost. Another reason
that a dispossessed middle class is especially problematic,
however, is that this class will tend to expand in a liberal free
market system, drawing the other classes into it. The middle class
is the center of gravity of the liberal system, the class most directly
involved in the economic life of a society, that which has the most
vested in a free market system, and that which most reinforces free
market values. Preserving the trading class, or at least not
intentionally leveling it, would seem to be important to maintaining
the extended order.
The corruption of language is another factor in the path to
serfdom. We have seen how the extension of the concepts of
freedom and equality has paved the path toward collectivism. The
redefinition of the word liberal from its nineteenth century
meaning to its current one is another example. In the realm of
propaganda, language is manipulated and words are redefined in
order to move people into new ideas using redefined familiar
terms.New concepts parasitize the host language such that its
traditional moral content is lost in favor of new ideas aimed at
transforming the people’s imagination, mores, and ultimately their
direction.
The greatest means to preserving the traditional liberal
ideals and thus avoiding many of these on-ramps to serfdom lies in
education, both formal and informal. Hayek does not spend much
time addressing this issue here, but he leaves a tantalizing
indication of this concept tucked away in his discussion of a
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�potential new international order. "Nowhere has democracy
worked well without a great measure of local self-government,
providing a school of political training for the people at large as
much as for their future leaders."!^ There is a sense in which
participation in local government, which directly concerns the
citizens’ immediate interests (and often takes place in small
countries such as Switzerland) is a kind of informal education, a
continuous internship in the necessities and limitations of political
and economic liberty. It can be a breeding ground for ideas, a
greenhouse for liberal traditions, and a school for habituating the
young to freedom and to the society in freedom that seems to be
superior to the society in socialism. Hayek echoes Tocqueville here,
as he does throughout much of The Road To Serfdom. Local political
life and participation in good things accomplished through free and
voluntary associations can provide a vital inoculation against the
bug of collectivism.
It bears mentioning that there is at least one principle that is
important in any attempt either to reintroduce the rule of law and
liberal principles where they have been abandoned, or to introduce
them where they have not yet existed. This is the voluntary
submission of the powerful to the rule of law. As long as the
powerful seek to aggregate or maintain privilege and position for
themselves, the rule of law is impossible. The birth of such a
system, therefore, must mirror its moral condition, the recognition
that one's greater interest requires a voluntary relinquishment of
potential privilege or advantage for the greater good of freedom
and general economic opportunity. "The great opportunity we shall
have at the end of this war is that the great victorious powers, by
themselves first submitting to a system of rules which they have
the power to enforce, may at the same time acquire the moral right
to impose the same rules upon others.This essential principle is
the foundation on which individualism, liberalism, and traditional
western morality are built. The fact that Hayek felt the need to
write The Road To Serfdom when he did and the response its
publication garnered show the vulnerability of a truly free market
liberal position. The fact that intellectual opinion was rapidly
shifting toward socialism, mere decades after the flowering of
liberalism in the nineteenth century, indicates that a truly free
93
�market might not be as fundamental as Hayek would have us
believe.
If the extended order of the free market survived thousands
of years of the tooth-and-nail competition of ideas since the first
glimmers of civilization, then it seems likely that it will continue to
survive much longer. If it has really distilled the elements that
make extended order possible, then traditional morality should
continue as the most viable evolutionary strand. If socialism is
truly built on faulty foundations, then it will eventually crumble.
And yet, if this free market system is so natural and fundamental,
why does it seem so vulnerable?
An examination of the previously discussed on-ramps may
provide a clearer view. Several, if not all of them, are deeply
imbedded human characteristics. To be impatient is to be human. It
is not characteristic of the mass of men to abide injustice due to the
expectation of some future good. Facility in deferring gratification
is not common to man. If it is necessary that we be patient to tend
the garden of budding liberalism, few of us will likely be liberals.
Moreover, exercise of and habituation to the moral virtues,
whether imagined in an Aristotelian sense or in the sense Hayek
uses them, is no simple task. In one sense we simply receive the
traditional morals as given, but if exercising them is also necessary
to their perpetuation, what is to guard us from simply coasting into
socialism? The gutting of language seems to be a natural process
that simply happens over time. Language changes, deteriorates.
This constant linguistic evolution has only become greater with the
technological and social advances that have come from the
flowering of the free market. When language is changing so quickly,
how can we imagine that old terms might not be manipulated to
bear new and contrary ideas? With the great centrifugal force of
national government drawing all political power to itself from the
farthest local hinterlands, how long will there be places where the
people may still learn democracy, independence, voluntary
cooperation and how to use their freedom in the local sphere close
to home? Finally, how long can we trust the strong to defer to the
rule of law out of the understanding that it is in their best interest?
It seems doubtful whether there is room for much optimism. If
Hayek is correct, then whatever the means of the transmission of
94
�civilization are, whatever those things are that inculcate his virtues
of independence, voluntary cooperation, non-interference, healthy
suspicion of coercive power, individualism, and the rest, must be
fostered if we are not to end up in the ash heap of history.
Tocqueville saw a similar problem. "Do you not see that
religions are weakening and that the divine notion of rights is
disappearing? Do you not find that mores are being altered, and
that with them the moral notion of rights is being effaced?”!^ His
solution, however, makes a great deal of sense. "If in the midst of
universal disturbance you do not come to bind the idea of rights to
the personal interest that offers itself as the only immobile point in
the human heart, what will then remain to you to govern the world,
except fear?’’i^ Somehow, when the transmission of traditional
values is failing, these ideals must be bound to self-interest as the
universal driving component of human beings. One of the great
difficulties of this task, in relation to the conflict between liberalism
and socialism, is that the latter seems to be driven by sentiments
and motivations that bind a kind of self-interest with a communal
sense in a way that is often intellectual, but often visceral and
deeply human.
Endnotes
1. Hayek, F. A. The Road To Serfdom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. 68
2. Ibid., 218
3. Ibid., 102
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., 172
6. Ibid., 217-219
7. Ibid., 77
8. Ibid., 101
9. Ibid., 158-159
10. Ibid., 71-72
11. Ibid., 72
12. Ibid., 216
13. Ibid., 218
14. Ibid., 215
15. Ibid., 172
16. Ibid., 234
17. Ibid., 235
18. de Tocqueville, Alexis. Democracy In America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2002. 228
19. Ibid.
95
�Primary Texts
Hayek, F. A. The Road To Serfdom. Chicago; University of Chicago
Press, 2007.
de Tocqueville, Alexis. Democracy In America. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2002.
�The Faith of the Poet
Anthony Eagan
I.
Midway along his journey through the afterlife toward the
morning of his second night in Purgatory, having recently heard
Virgil’s lecture on distorted love as the source of all sin, Dante falls
asleep and dreams of a siren. He and his guide are approaching the
fifth terrace, where the avaricious and prodigal expiate their
monetary love. Though every progressive level in The Divine
Comedy can be said to show a turning point in the pilgrim’s
education as a poet, this turning point, coming as momentum shifts
from the heaviness of hell to the lightness of heaven, holds special
significance. The pilgrim has seen and learned from the suffering of
hell-bound souls who sin and refuse repentance. Now, observing
sinners who have cast off their pride in hope of seeing God, he
draws closer to earthly paradise at the heights of Purgatory; soon
he will ascend to true Paradise to be among souls who lived and
saw correctly.
In the dream, a cross-eyed and crippled hag appears. She is
deathly pale, with crooked feet, stammering speech, and arms that
have been amputated at the wrist. She is the embodiment of human
frailty and decay. By the power of his gaze, however, Dante
transforms the hag into a tantalizing woman, straightening her
figure, repairing her eyesight, empowering her with eloquence, and
enlivening her with charm. Her voice becomes so alluring that as
she sings, Dante cannot look away. Despite her revelation that she
is the "Siren who causes / sailors to lose their way,’’ Dante is
transfixed and fails to heed the warning. She tells him that a night
with her can provide such satisfaction and delight that no man
would willingly leave her side. But when she mentions having
turned Ulysses from his homeward course, the dream also changes
course. A Beatrice-like figure appears, "alert and saintly," to
liberate Dante from the siren’s influence.^
By their contrast, the magnificence of this new lady once
again diminishes the aura and eloquence of the siren. The saintly
lady calls out to Virgil, who materializes, assesses the situation, and
97
�rips the siren's clothes from her body, revealing her sex and
releasing a stench so powerful that it wakes Dante. The sudden
reek evokes hell, where "such a stench rose up / as usually comes
from festering limbs,"^ and whose nine circles are filled with rot,
feces, blood, urine, semen, muck, murk, fog, and putrefaction. Had
the saintly woman failed to intervene and summon Virgil, had Virgil
failed to tear the garments, the truth behind the hag’s artificial
beauty would have remained concealed from Dante, and he would
have been ensnared once again by the avarice and covetousness of
earthly pursuits.
To the dutiful reader (the only type of reader the poet
wants, as will be shown], this dream reiterates what has been
described in so many previous episodes and what Dante will
continually emphasize throughout Paradiso; any temporal things a
human may possess or seek to possess, from clerical robes to
political clout, from gold and riches to reputation and physical love,
are subject to time's decaying power, and will escape his grasp in
one way or another. Ambition for these objects sows envy, pride,
and greed, and human behavior is perverted by such blind pursuit.
Sins of pursuit aside, however, even the achievement of an earthly
desire by virtuous means will prove fleeting and unsatisfactory—a
sort of Pyrrhic victory for the soul—igniting new and stronger
desires, and degradation through avarice, since satiation increases
craving.
It was lust for Paolo, and the experience of momentary bliss,
that fated Francesca to the second circle of Inferno, where she
flutters about in a "hellish hurricane,"^ as erratic as her prior life’s
whims. Similarly, an excessive love of money fated the clergy found
in the fourth circle to roll stones endlessly, having lost all identity,
for "the undiscerning life that made them filthy now renders them
unrecognizable."^ The epicureans, and "all those who say the soul
dies with the body,"^ lie in open sepulchers, fated by their
shortsightedness to permanent entombment, fittingly alive in soul
but dead in body.
As to a siren, mortals are drawn irresistibly to the world's
multiple enticements. They forget that inherent in all nature’s
substances is the seed of corruption. Only that which exists outside
of matter and the senses is worth pursuing, because only that
98
�which is outside of matter and the senses has the power to
accurately direct human vision and behavior. Beatrice herself, the
reigning authority on virtue, suggests this very point soon after her
arrival in the poem, in Canto XXX of Purgatorio. In fact, all of
Dante’s mistakes up to this point, both on earth and during his
journey, emerged from a failure to look higher. Beatrice has come
to replace Virgil as Dante's guide, and like a stern mother she
immediately scolds Dante for his emotional weakness and lack of
proper vision. In a symbolic gesture, Dante, upon recognizing
Beatrice despite her veil, turns backward in search of Virgil, hoping
to alleviate his joyful fear, and, seeing his former guide has
disappeared, begins weeping.
"Dante!” Beatrice says, "do not yet weep; do not weep yet,"
and continues her chastisement fifteen lines later, asking, "How
were you able to ascend the mountain? Did you not know that here
all men are happy?”^ This whole time, a throng of singing angels
has been gathered about Dante and Beatrice. Now, in their song,
coming to the pilgrim’s defense, the angels ask Beatrice, "Lady, why
do you hit him so hard?" She answers,
"Not simply by the working of Nature’s great wheels.
Aiming every single seed to some end
Determined by stars shining at its birth.
But through the enormity of God in His grace
Some will attain to altitudes so high
That we no longer attract them with our eyes—
And one such was this man’s new life on earth.
So all good inclinations, all predictions.
Should wonderfully be proved by the life he lives...
For a time, the sight of my face was enough to sustain him:
By showing him my youthful eyes I led him
With me, moving toward a goal of goodness.
But as soon as I approached the holy threshold
Of my second age, and changed from that life to this.
He turned away from me, giving himself to others.
Beauty and virtue grew to new heights in me.
But I meant much less to him, no longer pleasing.
And he turned his steps to a path that held no truth.
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�Following fraudulent idols that promise goodness,
But never pay their accounts when payment is due...”^
Beatrice, on earth, guided Dante’s love. She was so stunning
and pure that when Dante looked upon her he envisioned the
workings and mystery of God. He saw that beneath the surface of
beauty exists a power that cannot be understood, that is greater
than the sum of all earth’s beautiful and not-so-beautiful entities,
for it creates these entities and allows for their movement towards
His good. Nothing proved the importance of the ineffable more than
the face of Beatrice; nothing was more sublime and awe-inspiring;
nothing instilled faith so well in the onlooker. Her death, then,
should have given Dante further insight into the ineffable and
elevated his poetic soul. If this most pure of human creatures is
subject to suffering and death, then all things less beautiful must be
transient, less worthy. Nothing lasts here on earth. My vision and
poetry must seek the place where, truly, Beatrice now resides. Such
should have been Dante’s thoughts.
We see now why, halfway along his journey through life,
Dante was in a "wood so dark.’’^ According to Beatrice’s speech, all
life comes to darkness if we blind ourselves to God’s mystery. We
also see now why Dante’s siren dream, halfway along his journey
through the afterlife, is so deeply important. Within Dante’s mind
or soul— wherever dreams are born— he has already learned the
error of pursuing earthly temptation; that seed of knowledge
reveals itself to him while he sleeps to dream in the ring of the
avaricious. The dream is an exact parallel of what the poet
describes in the opening of Inferno. His obscured, earthbound
vision misleads him, projects a false value onto that which is
subject to decay, and enshrouds him in error. As when Beatrice
summoned Virgil on Holy Thursday, she here again intervenes,
calling on Virgil to reveal truths to Dante and alert him to "the
stench of paganism.’’^ The pilgrim’s dream, we see, allegorizes the
poet’s larger allegory. Dante, initially enticed by human objects and
concerns, is rescued by Beatrice and Virgil, and comes to see the
error of distorted love and misdirected vision.
But why is Ulysses mentioned in the dream? Does the siren
drop his name merely as an allusion to her power? Or does the poet
100
�I
[
want to evoke Inferno yet again, specifically Ulysses’ explanation
there of how he descended into hell?
In Canto 26, Dante and Virgil ventured to the eighth ditch of
the eighth circle of sin, where the thieves and false counselors blaze
in anonymity, "each sinner wrapped in the sin which burned him
on earth/’i'’ From a perch, Dante surveyed the depths and observed
two souls inhabiting a single but divided flame. He questioned the
identity of the two thieves, and learning that the greater sinner of
these was Ulysses, his curiosity swelled, and he implored Virgil to
initiate a conversation. "Master, 1 beg you, and beg / Again a
thousand times...for you can see the desperate desire / That pulls
me, bending my body in that direction."!^ Virgil agreed, sensing the
force of Dante’s passion to speak with the famous man of twists and
turns. After all, Dante and Ulysses shared many traits, at least at
this stage in the pilgrim’s progress. Both were exiles, both eloquent;
both journeyed in search of knowledge, both were proud and in
their pride went astray— off their charted course— and both had
fought, in some sense, for their homes. Ulysses’ answer, in the form
of a speech, which is arguably the most moving poetry up to this
point in The Comedy, begins:
‘When 1 left Circe,
Who’d stolen more than a year of my time, close
By Gaeta (although that was long before Aeneas
Had come and given it its name), it wasn’t
For my young son’s sweetness, or any concern
About my aged father, or the debt of love
1 owed Penelope, which would have pleased her.
For nothing could conquer in me the craving to know
This world we live in, learning its nature, and how
To deal with human vice or worth.’i^
101
Looking back to this through the lens of Dante’s siren dream,
the issues become more apparent than when the reader first
encountered the passage. Not only did Circe ensnare Ulysses, but
�"evidence of things not seen.”^^ pje left her side, his familial duties,
and the home he fought for, in search of human knowledge. In a
sense, this moment shows a reversal of the character we knew so
well—for ten years after Troy he struggled to return to Penelope.
But in another sense, the speech comes as no surprise; experience
of the world leads a man to yearn for more of the same.
'Now hear: I’d set myself on the open sea
With only a single boat, and nothing but men
Who had not turned and run away from me...
'0 brothers,’ I said, 'you who came through a hundred
Thousand dangers, at last reaching the West:
We still have time yet to use
Our human senses, and how could such brave men
Refuse this final, daring experience.
Tracking the sun where no other man has been?’
...The moon had waned, then waxed again, five times.
Five months of full and perfect lunar cycles
Since we’d launched ourselves out on the ocean.
When suddenly a mountain appeared in the distance.
Dark and seeming, to my eyes, surely the highest
That I had ever seen. My men and I
Rejoiced, but immediately our happiness
Was turned to grief, for out of the new lands came
A whirlwind, striking hard at the bow of our ship
It whirled us around three times, we and the water.
And on the fourth it lifted the stern up high
And drove the prow straight down, to the great delight
Of Someone Else, and over our heads the sea closed.
In his pride, Ulysses could not see the signs of Someone
Else—at least, not until his ship was swallowed. On this ship sailed
"nothing but men," thus no God, no faith, no hope of higher truths.
The moon, the first of Heaven’s spheres, waxed and waned before
him for five months; yet he questioned nothing of what instigates
the lunar cycles, or what made the stars shine and the ocean
glimmer. He directed his ship onwards, through the Strait of
Gibraltar and southbound, towards the Mount of Purgatory, a place
102
�forbidden to those without faith. Never in his story did Ulysses
reveal a sense of awe, only selfishness, ambition, and joy at
reaching sights unseen by any other man.
At first glance the journey seems commendable, if
somewhat selfish, to the reader and it remains unclear just why this
quest for knowledge results in Ulysses’ descent into hell. Dante’s
dream, almost thirty cantos later, clarifies the mistake Ulysses
made. Knowledge without faith will cause the sea of experience to
swallow you whole.
II.
0 you who are within your little bark.
Eager to listen, following behind
My ship that, singing, crosses to deep sees.
Turn back to see your shores again: do not
Attempt to sail the seas 1 sail; you may.
By losing sight of me, be left astray.
The waves 1 take were never sailed before.^^
Here Dante addresses the reader as the pilgrim arrives in
the first sphere of Heaven, the Sphere of the Moon. The passage
unifies two ideas that become vital to Paradiso: That the poetry will
become more difficult, will contain subject matter paradoxical and
beyond human understanding, thus reflecting higher beauty, and
that endeavors lacking faith, suspension of reason, and recalibrated
vision will end in shipwreck. So readers beware, have trust in my
talents, pay attention, and recall all that I have previously written.
What is Dante’s endeavor? Where is he taking us? What is
his poetic mission? Is The Divine Comedy, above all, an epic poem
about epic poetry or is it the story of the making of the poet?
The epic poet has several goals, not simply in The Divine
Comedy but also in the great works that precede and follow it. The
first goal is to describe the range of human experience, and in so
doing to pay homage to the poets who first made the attempt. The
second is to raise poetry to a level higher than the words of those
poets to whom homage is paid— in order to come even closer to
truth through beauty. The third is to provide a moral framework
for readers, using episodes and incidents as allegories through
103
�which the hero experiences what it is to be mortal and learns how
to conduct his life as a result. The Iliad is often likened to a Greek
bible in which Homer exalts the values of courage, honor, and
dignity in the face of mortality; so Virgil’s Aeneid exalts pietas, or
duty to one’s society, above personal interest and comfort, and
finally the Bible— which, while not an epic poem, is a work replete
with sublime poetry epic in scope and narrative— exalts the
Christian values of faith, hope, charity, and love. The fourth and
final goal of the epic poet is— through the accomplishment of the
three prior objectives— to become immortal through artistry.
Throughout The Divine Comedy, Dante is constantly aware of
these goals, and by turns expresses anxiety, doubt, pride, concern,
and despair in regard poetry. Especially in Paradiso, where in
nearly every canto he references his lines, his task, or his readers,
we see that, as he draws towards the center of the immortal world,
his hopes for the poem take a more central role as the subject
matter. In one of these countless moments of self-reference and
thoughts of immortality, he writes:
0 Godly Pegasea, you who give
To genius glory and long life, as it.
Through you, gives these to kingdoms and to cities.
Give me your light that 1 may emphasize
These signs as 1 inscribed them in my mind:
Your power—may it appear in these brief linesl^^
Perfect poetry, then, has the dual action of benefiting both
the author and society; if one is uplifted, so is the other. Perhaps the
best way to approach the questions of how the poet achieves
perfect poetry, how he accomplishes these four aforementioned
goals, and how the allegorical afterworld through which Dante the
pilgrim travels references these goals and exemplifies their
accomplishment is to bear in mind our notion that the dream of the
siren manifests the major turning point in the pilgrim’s growth. We
must also remember the mistake Ulysses made on that final
journey which resulted in the worst of all descents.
In exile, having lost everything he held dear in the earthly
realm—first Beatrice, next his political reputation, and finally his
104
�home—Dante, as author of The Comedy, is excessively aware that
"he may grieve / indeed and endlessly— the man who leaves /
behind [divine] love and turns instead to seek / things that do not
endure eternally.”i^ If a man invests all the muscle of his soul
towards what can die or be torn away at any moment, be it his
name and standing, his wealth or his beloved, then the man loses
with its loss. In other words, if a poet invests all the power of his
talent in what is transitory, his poetry dies with passing time.
Worse yet, if a poet does not use his talent to better his name and
his community, he squanders the gifts God bestowed upon him.
This is not to say that a poet should not focus on flowers, politics,
sex, and sin: this very poem is filled with innuendo and gorgeous
images of grime, and ends with the obscure description of a rose.
Rather, if the poet writes of these things, he must see behind their
corruptible physical nature to what they reveal about the spiritual
world, the world we cannot understand or describe no matter the
level of our faith.
We know that a flower lives, as well as how it lives, but even
science cannot explain the process behind that process. To seek an
explanation that justifies the awe we should have for something as
simple as a flower and simultaneously be aware that this
explanation, however adroitly worded, will fall short of capturing
its essence, is to participate in the faith of poetry. If you water roses
and provide sunlight, growth will occur; these are the facts of a
rose. Also, it will have thorns. The poet must make these facts both
reach into and stand for the unseen. The observable must reach
behind the veil and yank out a portion of the essence that resides
there, thrusting this portion of essence into the face of the reader.
'"Look at the sun that shines upon your brow; / look at the
grasses, flowers, and the shrubs / born here, spontaneously, of the
earth.”’i8 These words, spoken by Virgil as he points the pilgrim
toward earthly paradise, glorify the grass and the flowers. These
words thrust forward a chunk of their spiritual essence, and
entreat the listener to see beyond the pretty veil of stalks and
stems, petals and pistils, into the ineffable origin of all. Although
Virgil is a pagan, his mind, as poet, is always in touch with the
essence of things, as were the minds of Homer, Statius, and Ovid,
even if their vision of truth did not match Dante’s.
105
�Of course, Dante the poet learns from Virgil the poet. The
Divine Comedy seems to show Dante asking, over and over. If
Virgil's poetry is beautiful because it hints at the essence behind our
world, how beautiful would my poetry be if given my talent, I spoke
of this essence alone? If I changed the tradition by following its
natural arc? If I traveled through hell, down through the earth, up
the Mount of Purgatory, and ascended into the Empyrean, describing
everything that is impossible to know? Would describing everything
beyond human life— the essence of essence— elevate my words, and
thrust the unseen into the gaze of my reader?
The metaphor of this garden passage thus pertains to the
entire allegory. Dante the pilgrim, in the earthly paradise, will heed
Virgil the guide, grow from his words, and soon move beyond the
spiritual capabilities of the pagan; Dante the poet will follow Virgil
the poet, grow from his example, and soon move beyond the
aesthetic capabilities of the laureate. Dante’s poetic mission is not
only to talk of the essence of hatred and strife, parricide and
politics, lust, gluttony, wrath, shame, trickery, cunning, rape,
heresy, betrayal, hypocrisy, cannibalism, schism, and all that results
from improperly directed vision, but also to create images of that
which cannot be known by mortals, based no longer on the
influence of Virgil and Ovid but on the influence of the Bible and its
metaphor of the Incarnation. Dante wishes to direct the vision of
his society of readers beyond the fleeting concerns that have
destroyed both the author’s known world and the peace of
Florence.
This is why his poetry becomes more beautiful and
challenging the higher the pilgrim ascends; as the subject matter
becomes more ineffable, Dante, paradoxically, comes closer to the
truth behind human nature.
From the opening canto of Inferno, we read of nothing but
essences. The darkened wood is the essence of Dante’s emotions in
the year 1300. The she-wolf, never sated, is the essence of human
hunger. Fire is the essence of passions that leave their possessor in
metaphysical ashes. Climbing is the essence of improvement.
Francesca, St. Bernard, Plato, Cato, Cavalcante dei Cavalcanti,
Filippo Argenti, Farinata, all the popes, and so many other shades
upon whom we stumble are not human characters hiding, as do the
106
�living, behind the inscrutability of behavior, but rather they are
momentary, honest distillations of entire lives of earthly pursuit
and the secret motivations that bent their actions towards frail
objects. The contemplative contemplate, the wrathful rage, the
slothful long for sleep, the gluttonous hunger; each similarly
pursues his nature according to its kind. The shades Dante
describes, jointly exhibiting the entire range of human emotion,
capture the essence behind the emotion and reveal the spectrum of
mortal impetuses.
Thus, if Dante were to ignore God, seeking knowledge in the
manner of Ulysses on that final voyage, creating beauty out of
corrupt material as with the siren dream, his epic poem would fail.
“Passing beyond the human cannot be worded," he insists in canto
II of Paradiso, and yet we have before us nearly 15,000 lines—
150,000 words—describing nothing but what is ostensibly beyond
the human. Really, then, since all of what Dante expresses is beyond
human sense, every line reaches beyond the infinite flowers of
experience, and thrusts its ineffable spirit at the reader.
III.
Is God, therefore, merely Dante's favorite metaphor for the
ineffable? If a poet writes of a man waking to find he has been
transformed into a cockroach, and we read this transformation as a
metaphor of the artist’s alienation, or if in a story the portrait of a
boulevardier ages in lieu of his body, and we see the portrait as a
metaphor of conscience and the power of art, then why do readers
constantly pigeonhole this tale of a poet’s journey through the
afterlife as a religious tale, and fail to consider the ascension as an
allegory for art’s immortal purpose and immortal achievement? We
do see countless moments of sacrilege. To name only one, the poet
worships false idols; even in Paradise, as he prepares to describe all
that he has seen, he invokes Apollo to be his new muse.
0 good Apollo, for this final task
Make me the vessel of your excellence.
What you, to merit your loved laurel, ask.^^
107
�In Canto IV of Paradiso, Beatrice explains a point of
confusion to the pilgrim. He has just met his first heavenly soul,
Piccarda, once a nun, who against her will was pulled away from
the convent and forced into relations with a man. She is more
distant from God than other souls in heaven, she says, because she
did not fight unto death to preserve her virginity for God, as was
her original will. In response, Dante wonders why souls in heaven
are arranged hierarchically. Certainly Piccarda is not so pure as the
Virgin Mary, but is Heaven not a place of equality under God’s
eternal benevolence? Why has God banished Piccarda and her
companions to the Moon?
Beatrice, reading Dante’s mind, clarifies that
The spirits you saw did not appear
Because their existence is here, but simply to show
Your eyes what the least exalted of angels look like.
We need to speak in this way, to your organs of sense.
Since such perception, and no other, prepares
Itself to be understood, in the end, by your mind.
And it is for this reason that scripture lowers
Itself to levels your mind can deal with, assigning
Hands and feet to God, to teach you more...2o
So the heavens are not structured as the pilgrim observes.
What he observes is but a demonstration of Paradise as it can be
understood by his limited human comprehension. Likewise,
scripture does not properly explain God, but provides stories,
allegories, images, tales and paradoxes that aim to demonstrate the
essence of the inexpressible. As a result, its readers have a
framework to live by, concrete examples, and a higher realm
towards which they might direct their vision and love.
Dante the poet knows that therein exists the power of the
Bible, the most successful and widely read of any work of literature.
Its purpose is to teach, to improve society, to warn against blind
endeavors, false glories, and sin. First, however, in order to reach
this goal, it must be dramatically entertaining and sublime in
language, wise and sad, containing all sorts of human fates and a
108
�range of characters from peasants, to kings, to the Unknowable
Himself.
The framework of Christianity is probably the best and most
comprehensive metaphor we have to explain the world beyond
human comprehension. It attempts to allegorize why we sin. It aims
to elucidate the dangers of selfish pursuits, or a life subject to whim
and therefore loss. It shows us how to avoid a living hell. It remains
the best guideline for reaching above the temporal and material
world so that, by its example, we may become immortal through
virtue, good deeds, and properly guided accomplishments.
Perhaps we should not take Dante's complex explication of
divinity as a sign that he has total faith in Christ as the embodiment
of God, that he lived on earth, performing miracles, raising the
dead, and opening once again the Gates of Heaven, but rather as an
acknowledgement that no higher moral foundation for behavior
exists than so-called divine poetry. Perhaps we feel in The Divine
Comedy the comfort of words that explain the processes behind the
processes, the essence behind the flowers, even if the explanation is
wrong.
What Dante details of the Empyrean is foreign, and goes
beyond scripture. Certainly, Mary is present, and some saints, and
even "our effigy." But otherwise it is pure light and circles, radiance,
blind vision, perfect movement, mental feeling, emotional
knowledge and seeming confusion, and, as he describes the Image,
he reiterates that nothing can be described. It is achingly beautiful.
The faith of the poet is faith in the power of his own work to
reach into universal experience. Without such faith, the poet could
not have the patience to devote years of his life to describing things.
Yet the faith of the poet is in Someone Else, no matter what form He
takes—be He Bearded, Rose-shaped, or a Gust of Wind. Did Dante
truly feel that Christ died so that we might become immortal? Or
did Apollo bequeath this gift of eloquence? Did he truly love
Beatrice, or is she, too, a device? All we can know for certain is that
in talking about what is impossible to know or express, the poet
becomes immortal. And by directing his vision away from the
observable and corrupt world, by projecting his desire towards the
spiritual world as he had once projected vision and desire towards
the hand-less hag, he taught the Something. The pilgrim gets lost
109
�among the stars, he creates, and the poet emerges, ready to
describe the experience.
Where Nature comes upon discrepant fortune.
Like any seed outside its proper region.
Nature will always yield results awry.
But if the world below would set its mind
On the foundation Nature lays as base
To follow, it would have its people worthy.21
Endnotes
1. Dante. The Divine Comedy. Allen Mendelbaum, trans. New York: Everyman's Library,
1995. Purg. XIX. 1-34
2. /n/XIV. 51
3. Inf. V. 31
4. /n/VII. 53-54
S.InfX. 15
6. Purg. XXX. 74-75
7. Ibid,. 111-132
8. Inf I. 2
9. Para. XX. 125
10. Inf XXVI. 48
11. Ibid., 68-69
12. Ibid., 90-99
13. Para. XXIV. 64
14. InfXXVl 100-143
15. Para. 11.1-7
16. Para. XVIII. 82-87
17. Para. XV. 9-12.
18. Purg. XXVII. 133-135
19. Pora. 1.13-15
20. Para. IV. 37-45
21. Para. VIII. 138-144
Primary Text
Mandelbaum, Allen, Trans. The Divine Comedy. New York: Everyman’s
Library. 1995.
110
�The Two Prakrtis
Jeff Ondocsin
At first glance, Ramanuja's commentary on the Bhagavad
Gita is a dense, layered text which can seem hardly penetrable. But
there is something in Ramanuja's discussion of the two prakrtis
that might aid in establishing a solid foundation of what Ramanuja
is trying to do in this text. More than just outlining the different
yogas that the Gita represents as the different paths to God,
(karmayoga, jnanayoga and the ultimate form of worship,
bhaktiyoga, the culmination of the philosophy of the Gita),
Ramanuja is ultimately advancing an argument about the Atman of
God and its relation to the individual atman, if in a seemingly
roundabout way. However, I believe that by examining the issue of
these two prakrtis a little closer, we can perhaps establish a
satisfying answer to the question asked in seminar about both the
spiritual and non-spiritual things that simultaneously constitute
God's body and depend on him as their atman.
In the section titled "The True Knowledge of the Proper
Form of the Supreme Person Who is the Object of Bhakti,"^
Ramanuja discusses the two prakrtis of God. Prakrti is a term that
occurs across a wide variety of Indian philosophical thought, but
the basic definition of the word is "nature." However, in this case,
nature does not entirely do justice to what the term prakrti
conveys. Prakrti could be construed as the basic stuff of the
universe, but more than this, prakrti can be interpreted to be the
force that drives all action in the world. Indeed, Ramanuja says of
the lower prakrti that it "is the prakrti of this world consisting of
endless various objects, means and occasions of material
experience and divided into eight categories, viz. the five
primordial elements and their qualities, senses and mind, Mahat
and finally Ahamkara.''^ This statement denotes the various things
that exist in the world, as well as the faculties that observe the
occurrence and existence of these things as it relates to the life of
the individual. However, the lower prakrti is not made up of the
individual atmans themselves, but "solely consists of the objects
experienced by the spiritual beings."^
Ill
�Early on in the text, Ramanuja says that Krsna reveals the
"doctrine of the atman" to Arjuna so as to overcome his perplexity
and inability to carry out his ksatriya dharma. This inability to take
action, Ramanuja says, proves that "Arjuna has no insight into the
distinct natures of body and atman.He goes on to say that the
body "is subjected to development and naturally involves birth and
death...the atman is different from the body and immortal: that it is
not subject to birth and death.Thus does Ramanuja declare that
the atman is the non-dying observer of the lower prakrti, distinct
from the physical self, as well as the faculties that allow the
detection and use of the things of the lower prakrti.
According to Ramanuja the second, higher prakrti is made
up of the spiritual beings that experience the lower prakrti, and
indeed are the support for the lower prakrti. Ramanuja describes
the higher prakrti as "God’s chief prakrti,"^ for it is the observer, or
experiencer, of the lower prakrti. Also, this is seemingly the only
time in the text when Ramanuja uses the term jiva, a word that is
defined as "a spiritual being”. It is unclear from this section
whether or not the term jiva is intended to supersede the term
atman, but another part of the text may help us resolve this issue.
In the “Discussion of Body and Atman" section, Ramanuja says, "the
entity atman, which is a spiritual being, pervades the non-spiritual
entity which is different from the atman.”^ This statement asserts
that an individual atman of the higher prakrti is a spiritual being, or
jiva, that pervades the lower prakrti, the type of prakrti which
consists of non-spiritual entities. Thus, it would seem that the
individual Atmans exist in the higher prakrti, and are separate from
the lower prakrti which they pervade.
Ramanuja goes on to say that God "is the cause of his two
prakrtis,"^ and that the prakrtis themselves are then the cause of all
things that occur in the nominal world. Further, "all beings
composed of cit and acit, from Brahma to tuft of grass, whether
existing in a superior or an inferior condition, originate from these
two prakrtis of God, and so they are of God."^ At the beginning of
the essay, however, Ramanuja declares that God makes three
statements in the Gita about the Atmans and their relationship to
God. "1. that there is difference between God and the individual
atmans; 2. that there is difference between the individual atmans
112
�themselves; 3. that this difference is absolutely reaL’’^^^ What this
seems to mean is that, in light of the assertion that all things
originate from the two prakrtis and are thus of God, the world of
the two prakrtis is absolutely real, but is different from God himself.
Simultaneously, both prakrtis are of God themselves and are
supported by Him in the same way that the lower prakrti is
supported and pervaded by the atmans of the higher prakrti. So,
while the world of the prakrtis is absolutely real and different from
God, it still emerges from God only and is in that way dependent
upon him, although the prakrtis are different and other than God.
Thus the statement, "all spiritual and non-spiritual things, whether
effects or causes, constitute God’s body and depend on God who is
their atman."ii
The path to reach this kind of knowledge is difficult for the
practitioner, as it is easy to be led off track by the prakrtis.
However, one who practices only karmayoga and is not negligent
follows the path towards this knowledge of the nature of God and is
considered successful when he is "no longer able to interest himself
in the objects of prakrti differing from the atman or in
corresponding acts, because naturally he does not experience
anything but the atman; for then all delusions have gone." 12 The
paths of the yogas are manifold, but their pinnacles are the same. A
yogin is said to have reached the highest stage of development
when he knows that "the atmans of all creatures are equal when
their proper form is separated from prakrti, for all of them have
one and the same form, knowledge; inequality is of the prakrti.’’^^
Additionally, the yogin "will view God in all atmans and all atmans
in God.”i'^ So, while God is absolutely different from the individual
atmans, at this highest stage of yoga this idea is seemingly reversed,
as the yogin recognizes that God pervades the individual atmans as
surely as the individual atmans pervade the lower prakrti.
However, while both prakrtis are pervaded by God, God does not
depend on the prakrtis as the individual atmans are dependent on
their bodies for sustenance and the like. Indeed, Ramanuja says
that "to God his body serves no purpose at all; it serves to nothing
but his sport."is The individual atmans, then, are seemingly
required to utilize the prakrtis in order to attain knowledge of the
nature of atman and God.
113
�While the first half of the text deals with the necessity of
realizing that God is absolutely distinct from the two prakrtis, the
second half purports to help those who have that realization attain
God himself. Ramanuja discusses the four types of people who
resort to God, and elevates highest those called jnanin, those who
know “the atman as an entity different from prakrti but wish to
attain God himself, because they know that God alone is the highest
aim to reach.”i6 In the section titled "On the Excellence of the
Supreme Person, On the Different Kinds of Jnanins and On the
Proper Form of Bhakti,"i^ Ramanuja reiterates his notion that the
spiritual and non-spiritual parts of the universe are all equally
pervaded by God, and that God does so "in order to reign and
maintain them, although they themselves [the spiritual and non
spiritual beings] are unable to see him. In this way all beings
depend on God because they constitute his body.''^^ He further
explains the distinction between God and his two prakrtis by
stating that God is "not conjoined with them by nature, [but]
supports them by his own miraculous power.''^^ God is thus the
originator of the prakrtis, but not the cause of the acts of the
prakrtis; he only furnished the conditions under which the gunas,
the operational forces of prakrti, create inequalities between
beings, not the inequalities themselves. This central teaching, of
the distinction between God and the prakrtis, despite the fact that
the prakrtis originate from God and are pervaded by him, is at the
crux of the text, but the attainment of God himself through the
practice of bhakti rounds out the text as the last act of the one who
is truly devoted to God.
At the last, Ramanuja says that "it is only through bhakti that
God may be either known by the Shastras, or experienced directly,
or approached as he really is."20 The last stage of the jnanin is
bhakti, devoting oneself wholeheartedly to God, while remaining
firm in the knowledge of the distinction of God and prakrtis. Even
low castes and women can come to experience God through bhakti,
for "when one has found one’s sole support on God and in virtue of
boundless and unsurpassed love enabled one’s mind to experience
Him, one shall attain Him.’’2i However, the ability for bhakti to be
undertaken by those who do not have the advantage of being able
to actively pursue knowledge of the nature of God makes one
114
�question whether knowledge is a necessary part of salvation any
longer. If the individual can come to experience God through
whole-hearted devotion to Him, then what need is there of any
knowledge at all?
Endnotes
1. Van Buitenen, JAB. Trans. Ramanuja on the Bhagavadgita. New Delhi: Dass, 1969. 99
2. Ibid., 100
3.Ibid.
4. Ibid., 49
5. Ibid., 49-50
6. Ibid., 100
7. Ibid., 55
8. Ibid., 101
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., 50
11. Ibid., 101
12. Ibid., 92
13. Ibid., 95
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid., 101-102
16. Ibid., 104
17. Ibid.,
18. Ibid., 114
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., 132
21. Ibid., 121
Primary Text
Van Buitenen, J.A.B. Trans. Ramanuja on the Bhagavadgita. New Delhi:
Dass, 1969.
115
�Chaucer's Grisild: Constreyned by Maistrie
Leah Weed
As the beloved fifth husband of the wife of Bath once had
been, the clerk of the Canterbury pilgrimage is an Oxford scholar.
Like the much-wedded wife, this clerk is well-read and has traveled
abroad. The clerk speaks little, but what he does say is “short and
quik, and ful of hy sentence.''^ He is enamored of erudition: "For
hym was levere have at his beddes heed/ Twenty bookes, clad in
blak or reed,/ Of Aristotle and his philosophie,/ Than robes riche,
or fithele, or gay sautrie.''^ He is a serious young man who values
learning over wealth. The clerk does not pursue riches; indeed, he
is unashamed to live at the expense of others. His tale is admittedly
taken from another, yet his embellishments of it indicate his quick
wit. The clerk's narrative closely follows Petrarch’s, but where
Petrarch’s "Griselda" recommends patience in marriage only to
wives, the clerk’s additions are in keeping with Chaucer’s recurring
theme in The Canterbury Tales of extending this recommendation
to husbands.
The clerk’s tale seems a clear response to the wife of Bath’s
prologue and tale. The wife declares herself an expert on the "wo
that is in mariage’’^ and decries the prevalent misogynist literature
which denounces women as incapable of fidelity and in need of
mastery. She complains that "no womman of no clerk is preysed.
The clerk, whan he is oold, and may noght do/ Of Venus werkes
worth his old sho,/ Thanne sit he doun, and writ in his dotage/
That wommen kan not kepe hir manage!’’Chaucer’s clerk, telling a
tale of extreme "wo” in marriage - one which, however, like the
wife’s marriage to her fifth husband, ends happily - acquits himself
of the charge the wife of Bath brings against clerks. He retells
another clerk’s tale [that of an elderly clerk, in fact) which
illustrates a woman’s fidelity in the most trying of circumstances.
The wife of Bath quotes Dante to illustrate that children are
not necessarily like parents, and that "gentillesse cometh fro God
alone.”^ The tale of Grisild which the clerk relates likewise notes
that daughters are not necessarily like fathers, and that heredity
and education are not the sources of nobility and wisdom. The
116
�clerk concludes his tale and dedicates his envoy’s “song" to "the
wyves love of Bathe."^ He acknowledges that scholars rarely praise
women and that, while Job gets lots of press, "Ther kan no man in
humblesse hym acquite/ As womman kan, ne kan been half so
trewe/ As wommen been.”^ The clerk's envoy’s warning to
husbands not to test their wives’ patience and his advice to wives
to vocally and fiercely defend their interests would seem to directly
oppose the moral Petrarch has intended his tale to convey. The
clerk has taken a scholar’s tale of wifely patience and tweaked it to
challenge jealous husbands’ insistence on mastery and deceit, an
emendation likely to be approved of by the wife of Bath.
Though Chaucer may well have been familiar with the
original version of Griselda’s story in Boccaccio’s Decameron, the
version of the story cited by the clerk, which he has clearly
memorized and closely translates, is Petrarch’s. That Chaucer was
aware of the existence of Boccaccio’s tale and the motivations of
Petrarch in translating and expanding it, appears certain. The
clerk’s explanation of Petrarch’s reason for telling the tale mirrors
his letter to Boccaccio explaining his motivation in translating the
story. Petrarch explains in this letter, as the clerk does in his tale,
that Griselda’s example of patience should help all persons submit
themselves to the will of God. Both Petrarch in his letter to
Boccaccio and the clerk in his tale go on to cite the Apostle James’
claim that God tempts no man, then to say, somewhat
contradictorily, that God "still may prove us, and often permits us
to be beset with many and grievous trials.The clerk notes that
God "preeveth folk al day ... And suffreth us ... With sharp scourges
of adversitee.”^ The clerk, like Petrarch, explains that God does not
test us to enhance His knowledge of our characters or intentions, as
He already knows each human’s frailties.Both Petrarch and the
clerk indicate that the intention is not that wives should imitate
Griselda. However, while Petrarch explains that her patience
"seems to me almost beyond imitation," he implies that, if it were
achievable, such sufferance would be desirable.^! Chaucer’s clerk,
on the other hand, says that, if wives were to emulate Grisild, it
would be "importable.’’i2 The clerk tells a tale of extreme wifely
obeisance, but in his interjected commentary, he discourages such
subjection.
117
�In The Decameron, Boccaccio’s storyteller, Dioneo, prefaces
his Griselda tale by describing the actions of the marquis as
"senseless brutality,” remarking that "it was a great pity that the
fellow should have drawn any profit from his conduct/’^^ Petrarch,
in his retelling, does not comparably condemn Walter, though he
characterizes the marquis’ inclination to test Griselda’s fidelity as "a
desire more strange than laudable.Chaucer’s clerk, however,
does forcefully condemn Walter. He interjects into Petrarch’s text
exclamations of outrage at the marquis’ treatment of Grisild and
small details that highlight the humanity of Grisild and her father,
thereby increasing readers’ sympathy for them. This is in keeping
with The Canterbury Tales' recurrent concern with the abuses and
dishonesty of those in positions of power.
Before describing Walter’s initial test of Grisild, the taking of
her first child, the clerk insists in an aside to his listeners that "as
for me, I seye that yvele it sit/ To assaye a wyf whan than it is no
need,/ And putten hire in angv^ssh and in drede.’’^^ In Petrarch’s
version the young daughter has been weaned when she is taken,
but in Chaucer’s she has just nursed a short time, heightening the
sense of the mother’s anguish and dread. Chaucer also inserts the
specifics of Grisild’s blessing of her daughter, whom Grisild believes
she will not see again, thus highlighting the mother’s grief. When
Walter has "caught yet another lest/ To tempte his wyf’ by taking
from her their second child, a son, the clerk exclaims, "0 needles
was she tempted in assay!/ But wedded men ye knowe no mesure,/
Whan that they finde a pacient creature.”!^ As the marquis wonders
at Grisild’s patience at the loss of her children, knowing her to have
been a devoted mother, the clerk inserts into Plutarch’s tale a
question prompted by outrage: "now of wommen wolde 1 axen
fayn/ If thise assayes myghte nat suffise?/ What koude a sturdy
housbonde moore devyse/ To preeve hir wyfhod and hir
stedefastnesse,/ And he continuynge evere in sturdinesse?’’!^ When
Walter is about to ask Grisild to return to her father’s home and
make way for his new wife, the clerk denounces this "wikke
usage’’!^ of her. The clerk also adds to the tale a wistful memory of
their wedding day. Grisild recalls and reminds Walter "how gentil
and how kinde/ Ye semed by youre speche and youre visage/ The
day that maked was oure mariage!”2o She goes on to note that "Love
118
�is noght oold as whan that it is newe."2i The clerk supplements
Petrarch’s tale with Grisild's father’s cursing of "the day and tyme
that Nature/ Shoop hym to been a lyves creature/’^^ so distraught is
he that, as he had feared, the marquis has had his way with his
daughter and disposed of her. The clerk also invents a moving
detail: When she returns barefoot and bare-headed, in just her
smock, to her father’s home, Grisild’s old clothes no longer fit her.23
The young maiden of the wedding day is no more.
While Petrarch’s admiration of Griselda’s wifely forbearance
is tempered in the clerk’s telling of her tale by outrage at the way in
which she has been mistreated, the message that nobility is not
conferred by birth is retained. Boccaccio’s Dioneo, in the original
version of The Decameron, notes that "celestial spirits may
sometimes descend even into the houses of the poor, whilst there
are those in royal palaces who would be better employed as
swineherds than as rulers of men.’’^^ Petrarch, followed by
Chaucer’s clerk, repeatedly drives home the message "that under
low degree/ [is] ofte vertu hid.’’^^ The clerk even suggests a parallel
between Grisild and Jesus when he reflects that "God somtyme
senden kan/ His grace into a litel oxes stalle.’’^^ The most admirable
characters are not necessarily the high-born. The narrator in his
prologue speaks most reverently of the poor village parson and his
plowman brother. The wife of Bath asserts, "gentillesse [...]
descended out of old richesse [...] is nat worth an hen.’’^^ It is of
Christ "we clayme [...] oure gentillesse,/ Nat of oure elders for hire
old richesse.The person who behaves most virtuously is the
most noble.
Similarly, education does not ensure wisdom. Grisild,
though uneducated, is a wise and effective leader in her husband’s
absence. The narrator asks in the prologue, when describing the
manciple - a much less admirable character than Grisild - "Now is
nat that of God a ful fair grace/ That swich a lewed mannes wit shal
pace/ The wisdom of an heep of lerned men?’’^^ As the wife of Bath
asserts, "genterye/ Is nat annexed to possession,’’^^ and ones
"gentillesse cometh fro God alone.’’^^ Chaucer champions noble
deeds and wisdom and argues that the capacity for them is not
inherited. He is clearly concerned with the inherent contradiction
119
�between a social order that associates noble birth and wealth with
value and a Christianity that embraces poverty.
The unjust treatment of women, experienced by Griselda, is
noted by many of the storytellers in The Canterbury Tales. In "The
Man of Law’s Tale," Constance - like Griselda - patiently endures
unimaginable suffering (hers, however, primarily at the hands of
evil stepmothers rather than at the hands of her husbands), and
still maintains her faith. Though she is an emperor's daughter, her
high birth does not afford her independence. Like Emily in "The
Knight's Tale," Constance does not have the power to choose her
life’s course and notes that "Wommen are born to thralldom and
penance,/ And to been under mannes governance."^^ jn "The
Physician’s Tale," the virtuous maid, Virginia, notes the injustice of
the biblical sacrifice of Jepte’s daughter: as "God it woot, no thing
was hir trespass."^^ Virginia is then sacrificed, for the sake of her
father’s honor, in comparable fashion. Daughters are disposed of as
fathers see fit. And men, whether they place women on pedestals
or revile them, have absurd perceptions of them. Sir Thopas,
though he is love-lorn and obsessed with unreal chivalric romance,
imagines that "in this world no womman is/ Worthy to be" his
mate, so goes off to seek an elf-queen.^'^ The merchant has
Proserpyne, in conversation with Pluto, belittle Solomon and other
misogynist male authors: "I sette right noght, of al the vileynye/
That ye of wommen write, a boterflye!’’35 The merchant refers to
the widespread literary argument, so hateful to the wife of Bath,
that no wives are true, but also references the record of forbearing
wives and martyrs for feminine chastity. Neither body of literature
provides a woman much encouragement.
The clerk, in the person of the envoy, warns husbands not to
test their wives and advises women to assert themselves, as is
echoed throughout The Canterbury Tales.
Indeed, freedom,
generosity, equality (in libido, if not in age), and mutual respect are
presented as the basis for a successful marriage. In "The Franklin’s
Tale," a knight pledges to his beloved that "nevere in al his lyf he,
day ne nyght,/ Ne sholde upon hym take no maistrie/ Agayn hir
wyl, ne kithe hire jalousie,/ But hire obeye, and folwe hir wyl in
al.”36 As a result of his giving her "so large a reyne,"^'^ she chooses to
be his "humble trewe wyf.’’^^ The franklin views marriage as a
120
�partnership, a friendship, and says that "friends everich other moot
obeye,/ If wol longe holden comaignye./ Love wol nat been
constreyned by maistrie./ Whan maistrie comth, the God of Love
anon/ Beteth his wynges, and farewell, he is gon!"39 The franklin
says that both women and men desire liberty, and that the one
most patient in love has the advantage. Both the young squire and
the manciple note that a caged bird, however well cared for and fed,
wants to escape and eat worms.'^o Attraction to the new, Chaucer
suggests, is natural for man and for woman. The parson, who does
not believe those who claim "that they ne be nat tempted in hir
body,”'^i advises that "a man sholde here h5mi with his wif [...] in
suffraunce and reverence."42 in "The Knight's Tale" - based on
Boccaccio’s "II Teseida” - an independent-minded woman winds up
happy with a husband who respects her, loves her, and "hire
serveth so gentilly."^^ The marriages of Emily and Palamon and of
Dorigen and Arveragus illustrate that generosity and mutual
respect are key to a successful union.
Repeated throughout the Tales is the warning that jealous
attempts to master a wife by force are counterproductive. The
Shipman, in his tale, notes - as did the wife of Bath - that wives
want husbands to be obedient and "fressh abedde.”'^'^ In "The
Miller’s Tale” a jealous elderly husband who keeps his wife "narwe
in cage”‘^5 jg cuckolded. The young wife Alisoun successfully makes
fools of the men who desire her, and is the only character to
emerge from the events of the tale unscathed. In "The Reeves Tale”
we are told that "jalous folk ben perilous everemo;/ Algate they
wolde hire wyves wenden so.”^^ But the miller, a jealous husband
and protective father, however perilous he may be, is cuckolded
and defied by his daughter. In the "Wife of Bath’s Tale” a rapist
learns that what women desire most is sovereignty over their
husbands and lovers;^^
is reformed and rewarded when he puts
himself in his wife’s "wise governance.In the merchant’s story of
a January-May marriage, January imagines that a young wife will be
more easily manipulated than an older, wiser woman would be;
"certeynly,” he claims, "a yong thing may men gye,/ Right as men
may warm wex with handes plye.”^^ Though he calls May his "lady
free,”5o January’s "jalousie it [is] so ourageous,/ That neither in
halle, n’yn noon oother hous,/ Ne in noon oother place.
121
�neverthemo,/ He nolde suffer hire for to ryde or go/’^i January’s
attempts at mastery do not prevent May’s infidelity. In "The
Manciple’s Tale’’ Phebus, the flower of knighthood and chivalry, is a
jealous husband who murders his wife when he learns of her
infidelity, but then is filled with remorse. Throughout The
Canterbury Tales, attempts to secure fidelity by force and a short
leash are doomed to failure.
Petrarch, in his letter to Boccaccio, points to the "precept of
Horace in his Art of Poetry, that the careful translator should not
attempt to render word for word.’’ Petrarch tells Boccaccio, "I have
told your tale in my own language, in some places changing or even
adding a few words.’’^2
his retelling, Petrarch adds some words
and subtracts others. He removes Boccaccio’s comment that
avoidance of marriage is an indication of wisdom. He also removes
his accusation that the marquis’ treatment of his wife is
irresponsible. Chaucer in turn gives the tale his spin, in his own
language, challenging the wisdom of Walter’s cruel and deceptive
trial as well as that of the unstinting devotion of Grisild. Chaucer’s
clerk asserts that prudent wives should not allow humility to
silence them nor give scholars the opportunity to write of them a
story like the one told of Griselda.^^ They should not suffer in
silence, but stand up for themselves.
Endnotes
1. Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. London: Everyman Library, Orion Publishing
Group, 2004.10:306
2. Ibid., 9:293-296
3. Ibid., 158:3
4. Ibid., 116-117:706-710
5. Ibid., 188:1162
6. Ibid., 255:1170
7. Ibid., 248:932-938
8. Petrarch, Francis. "The Story of Griselda: to Boccaccio." Trans. Peter Sadlon. 10 Sep.
2007. Web. 15 Feb. 2012
<http://petrarch.petersadlon.com/read_letters.html?s=pet06.html>.
9. Chaucer 254:1155-1157
10. Chaucer 254:1159-1160; Petrarch "The Story...”
11. Petrarch, "The Story..."
12. Chaucer 254:1144
13. Boccaccio, Giovanni. The Decameron. Trans. G. H. McWilliam. Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 1972. 813
122
�14. Petrarch, Francis. "Petrarch: The Tale of Griselda." Trans. Peter Sadlon. 10 Sep. 2007.
Web. 15 Feb. 2012 <http://petrarch.petersadlon.com/griselda.html>.
15. Chaucer 234:460-462
16. Ibid., 237:560
17. Ibid., 239:619-623
18. Ibid., 241:696-700
19. Ibid., 244:785
20. Ibid., 246:852-854
21. Ibid., 246:857
22. Ibid., 247:902-903
23. Ibid., 247:915-917
24. Boccaccio, Decameron. 824
25. Chaucer 233:425-426
26. Ibid., 227:206-207
27. Ibid., 187:1109-1112
28. Ibid., 187:1117-1118
29. Ibid., 18:573-575
30. Ibid., 188:1146-1147
31. Ibid., 188: 1162
32. Ibid., 131:286-287
33. Ibid., 341:242
34. Ibid., 385:791-795
35. Ibid., 285:2303-2304
36. Ibid., 311:746-749
37. Ibid., 311:755
38. Ibid., 311:758
39. Ibid., 311:763-766
40. Ibid., 305-305:610-617; Chaucer 524:163-174
41. Ibid., 550:816-817
42. Ibid., 594:2616-2618
43. Ibid., 82:3104
44. Ibid., 365:177
45. Ibid., 86:3225
46. Ibid., 107:3961-3962
47. Ibid., 185:1138-1139
48. Ibid., 190:1231
49. Ibid., 263:1429-1430
50. Ibid., 281:2138
51. Ibid., 280:2087-2090
52. Petrarch "The Story..."
53. Chaucer 255-256:1189-1197
Primary Texts
Boccacio, Giovanni. The Decameron. Trans. G. H. McWilliam.
Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972. Print.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. London: Everyman Library,
Orion Publishing Group, 2004. Print.
123
�Petrarch, Francis. "Petrarch: The Tale of Griselda.” Trans. Peter Sadlon. 10
Sep. 2007. Web. 15 Feb. 2012
<http://petrarch.petersadlon.com/griselda.html>.
Petrarch, Francis. "The Story of Griselda: to Boccaccio.” Trans. Peter
Sadlon. 10 Sep. 2007. Web. 15 Feb. 2012
<http://petrarch.petersadlon.com/read_letters.html?s=pet06.htm
1>.
�19111846R00073
Made in the USA
Charleston, SC
07 May 2013
��
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Early Writings: An Academic Journal
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Early writings : an academic journal, 2013
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The annual academic journal published by the Graduate Institute in Santa Fe.
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Carr, Casey (Editor)
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SF_Early_Writings_2013
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Connolly, Brian (Editor)
Ondocsin, Jeff (Editor)
Wilhite, Jesse (Editor)
Zehnder, Matthew (Editor)
Smith, Alycia (Cover Design)
Wood, Joan Marie
Bernstein, Elliot
Leavy, William
Olsen, April
Wycliff, Grant
Mancini, Jules
Creighton, Mary
Cowling, Kevin
Eagan, Anthony
Weed, Leah
Academic journal
Early Writings
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