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St. John’s College
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The St. John’s Review
THE
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 61.1-2 DOUBLE ISSUE (FALL 2019-SPRING 2020)
Non-Profit Org.
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St. John’s Review
The St. John’s Review is going online!
See the Editor’s Note for instructions to subscribers.
Volume 61, Numbers 1 and 2
Double Issue (Fall 2019-Spring 2020)
�The St. John’s Review
Volume 61.1-2 (Fall 2019-Spring 2020)
Double Issue
Editor
William Pastille
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
Robert B. Williamson
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John’s College, Annapolis: Panayiotis Kanelos, President; Joseph
Macfarland, Dean. All manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to The St. John’s Review, St. John’s College,
60 College Avenue, Annapolis, MD 21401 or to Review@sjc.edu.
© 2019 St. John’s College. All rights reserved. Reproduction in
whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
��Contents
Editor’s Note
The Future of The St. John’s Review
with Instructions for Current Subscribers...........................................v
Essays
Charlotte’s Web for Grownups..................................................1
Mera J. Flaumenhaft
More than Human: On Human Divinity in
Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics .................................................34
Jason Menzin
Constructing the World: The Kantian Origin of the Very Idea .........49
Raoni Padui
Please Note:
This is a special double issue containing both
numbers 1 and 2 of volume 61.
A separate number will not be published
in the spring of 2020.
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The St. John’s Review
Volume 59.1-2 (Fall 2017-Spring 2018)
Double Issue
Editor
William Pastille
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John’s College, Annapolis: Panayiotis Kanelos, President; Joseph
Macfarland, Dean. All manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to The St. John’s Review, St. John’s College,
60 College Avenue, Annapolis, MD 21401 or to Review@sjc.edu.
© 2017 St. John’s College. All rights reserved. Reproduction in
whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
��Contents
Essays & Lectures
We Are, Nonetheless, Cartesians:
A Prodigal Johnnie Reports Back ..........................................1
Antón Barba-Kay
Jacob Klein: European Scholar and American Teacher....................22
Eva Brann
On Negation: Other Possibilities in
Wallace Stevens’s Parts of a World .............................................35
Jason Menzin
“The Student,” by Anton Chekhov:
A Story Told and Glanced At .......................................................55
Louis Petrich
Poetry
Tetrastichs .........................................................................................79
Elliott Zuckerman
Please Note:
This is a special double issue containing both
numbers 1 and 2 of volume 59.
A separate number will not be published
in the spring of 2018.
��We Are, Nonetheless, Cartesians:
A Prodigal Johnnie Reports Back
Antón Barba-Kay
I fancy that every speculative thinker, however solid he may believe the grounds of his
thinking to be, does harbor, somewhere
deep down in him, a skeptic—a skeptic to
whom the history of philosophy looks
rather like the solemn setting up of rows of
ninepins, so that they may be neatly
knocked down! That way of looking at
things is tempting, no more; it is tempting,
and for philosophy it is in a sense the temptation—just as for man in general suicide
is that. It is a kind of suicide, too.
—Gabriel Marcel
It is said that philosophy makes no progress—that its history is a
series of footnotes to Plato, say, or that it is an ever-renewed attempt to find a beginning that cannot be known by being taken
for granted. The remark is sometimes made to rouge over our
blushes at the fact—striking to newcomers—that philosophers
have not been known to settle any fundamental questions once
and for all to everyone’s satisfaction. And yet there is at least one
point to which just about every modern thinker subscribes predictably and monotonously: I mean that Cartesian philosophy has
got it all very wrong.
Descartes was wrong that philosophy should be founded on
a closed set of first principles, wrong to think he could subtract
himself from the world, wrong to imagine himself as a pure
Antón Barba-Kay teaches philosophy at The Catholic University of
America in Washington, DC. This lecture was first delivered St, John’s
College in Annapolis on Wednesday, July 6, 2016.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 59.1-2 (2017-2018)
monadic subject, wrong to conceive of his consciousness as an
impartial spectator, wrong that we have privileged access to immediate self-knowledge, wrong about qualia making up the stuff
of perception, wrong to try to demonstrate God’s existence on
purely rational grounds, wrong about the separability of mind
from body, wrong in reducing organisms to mechanisms, and
wrong to think that mastery and possession should be our proper
disposition toward nature. There would seem to be a whole buffet
of wrongheadedness on offer here, such that any observer surveying the past three hundred years of philosophical writing at a
glance would be forced to conclude that Descartes was so wrong
about so many things that there could be nothing worth talking
about anymore—at least insofar as it isn’t clear whether there is
anyone still standing who is in need of being disabused.
The reductio ad Cartesium is as characteristic of twentiethcentury phenomenology (which acknowledges Descartes as its
awkward stepfather), as it is of Frankfurt School and post-Heideggerian thinkers who have taken special issue with Descartes’s
Enlightenment view of the unadulterated, monological cogito.
But this anti-Cartesian impulse has been even more evident in
Anglophone philosophy, taking its cues as it does from late
Wittgenstein, who directs so much of his laconic ingenuity
against what is usually identified as the Cartesian view of consciousness. There is virtually no one writing about philosophy of
language or philosophy of mind who disagrees with the substance
of Wittgenstein’s criticisms. And yet one opens up just about any
subsequent book in this vein—by Sellars, or Rorty, or Dennett,
or Ryle, or Nagel, or Searle, or McDowell—and sure enough the
doornail has been resurrected, the dead horse is propped up and
flogged with relish as if for the very first time. Attend almost any
academic conference on an epistemological theme, and you will
hear Descartes mentioned as a foil to the true view being advanced with a frequency that would make for a decent game of
bingo, if it did not partake of the regularity of law. I add to this,
finally, that I have been surprised by the animus with which most
of my students treat Descartes. They tend to find him smug, glib,
and bratty, almost always returning the favor by letting him have
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BARBA-KAY
3
it in the most peevish and conceited manner. Or rather, I would
be surprised if I did not take care to remember the hysteric
falsetto that I felt myself adopting toward him when I first read
him at St. John’s. Bacon was a magnanimous humanitarian,
Machiavelli inspired giddy admiration, Montaigne had his salty
candor, but Descartes I held responsible for every modern perversion. My question, then, is why this is so, what is it about
Descartes that gets our goat? Why can’t we get over him?
Now, there are of course many ways of being wrong. There
are authors whom we honor with perennial disagreement; we remain interested in their mistakes because we acknowledge that
being dead wrong is harder than being half right. And so,
Anaxagoras or Lucretius or Spinoza will continue to have a home
among our philosophical counterfactuals, as thinkers who have
staked out a wrong—but nonetheless basically and fundamentally
wrong—position, a fixed Charybdis with respect to which all
other positions must navigate. Philosophers are, on the whole,
trying to stake out the middle ground of justice between extreme
positions, and so those who have argued that there is no such
thing as middle ground (between the mind and the body, say)
cannot but continue to figure in such discussions. Our disagreement with Descartes has something to do with this, but I don’t
think it’s enough to account for the allergic obsession with which
we seem to return to him. I have known no one to get his or her
dander up on account of Anaxagoras.
Descartes also figures disproportionately in our imagination
because we understand him to be one of the fathers of the modern
scientific method. Any throat-clearing prefatory to discussing the
history of science and technology therefore feels compelled to
take its bearings by him—just as any book on the history of painting starts flexing its erudition with those obligatory couple of
paragraphs about the caves at Lascaux. What’s more, by routinely
taking Descartes to be such a father figure, we acknowledge how
much of his practical project has gone exactly according to plan.
No one disputes the fact that he was a gobsmackingly gifted
mathematician, for instance, or that his mechanical, anti-teleological interpretation of nature proved a necessary condition of
�4
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 59.1-2 (2017-2018)
modern industrialization. We only worry about the scientific mastery and possession of nature because it is a fait accompli and it
is no great strain to see the trade-offs. All the same, it is both as
scientists and as philosophers that we continue to try to worry his
views out of ours; and if this is so, then I want to say that it is for
parallel reasons—that despite our best efforts to refute his philosophical views, we remain, nonetheless, and in decisive respects,
Cartesians. As Wittgenstein says: it is as if a certain picture of
the world holds us captive.
But before saying what I take to be the most distinctive aspects of this picture and why we can’t seem to exorcise it from
consideration, here is my (very un-Johnnie-like) disclaimer: I will
be more concerned in what follows with relatively conventional
Cartesian views—views routinely ascribed to Descartes—than
with scrupulous attribution to his work, because part of what I
take to be most remarkable about our widespread view of Cartesianism is how impervious it is to questions about what the historical Descartes might have actually thought. It seems at least
likely, to take one example, that Descartes was not the grossest
kind of mind/body substance dualist—I have seen many diligent,
knowledgeable scholars at pains to argue so. And yet this is
treated as irrelevant outside such localized discussions: as soon
as anyone brings up dualism, you can brace yourself for the requisite, tendentious summary of Descartes’ views. This will annoy
anyone who has taken some trouble over his words, of course,
but it should also alert us to the fact that Cartesianism has a sort
of life of its own. I do not say that Cartesianism has nothing to
do with the texts of Descartes. But we should be interested in the
fact that its mistakes have not been straightforwardly rectified by
quoting chapter and verse. It is because Cartesianism does not
(exactly) exist, that, for some reason, we have had to invent it.
In what respects, then, is Cartesianism still intimately ours?
The clearest way in which Descartes continues to have a hold on
our thinking is that he is the first philosopher to insist on reasoning as an individual dislocated from a tradition of thought. He is
the first to make the claim that everything worth knowing can be
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BARBA-KAY
5
worked out methodically and self-evidently by the projected light
of one’s own analysis. Any thinker amounting to anything has of
course found him or herself somehow at odds with tradition. But
Descartes’s discussion in the Discourse of his teachers and the
academic curriculum at La Flèche is not so much an argument
with tradition, or a criticism or purification of standing opinions,
as an out of hand dismissal of the possibility that convention
could have any bearing on the task of knowing the truth. Poetic
fables, he says, are full of exaggerations, oratory is nothing but
the prettification of rigorous thought, the moral writings of the
ancient pagans are “magnificent palaces that were built on nothing but sand and mud” (5),1 and theology is pointless because
salvation is either available to all without study or beyond anything that any amount of study could hope to establish. All of this
is striking less for what Descartes says than for what he thinks
goes without saying. When he then says of philosophy that “there
is still nothing in it about which there is not some dispute, and
consequently nothing that is not doubtful;” he does not even feel
the need to defend the glorious havoc contained in that single
consequently. The same goes for the habits and customs which
he purposes to extirpate from his mind: “the mere fact of the diversity that exists among them suffices to assure one that many
do have imperfections” (8), there being “one truth with respect
to each thing” (12). That these are breathtaking non-sequiturs
should not obscure the fact that they are hugely attractive ones,
and that we risk misunderstanding both Descartes and ourselves
so long as we do not acknowledge the full strength of that attraction, and continue to look for its sources.
Surely what is most attractive about his position is its promise of original and pristine certainty, his adoption of a stance anterior to and abstracted from any particular context of experience
from which to judge truth or falsity. Let me begin by saying what
I take to be insightful about this direction of approach. The main
1. Page numbers are keyed to Discourse on Method and Meditations
on First Philosophy, translated by Donald Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998).
�6
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 59.1-2 (2017-2018)
questions of the Meditations are the programmatic questions of
modern philosophy. What can I know, and how can I be sure of
it? What difference do I make to the objects of my experience
and thought? I open my eyes and the world seems to show up effortlessly, a spectacle articulate and whole. Descartes’s experiment in doubt is meant, on the contrary, to call attention to the
sense in which what I witness is not simply self-standing, but
something that can only take place where I freely work to sustain
it. I must be party to my experience in order for it to be constituted as experience at all. Everything that lies in my thinking
must be doubtful—subject to the possibility of being doubted—
because it is a condition of its being thought that I own and affirm
it. Experiencing something thus means that I am in some sense
at work at implicating things in, and explicating them according
to, a woven whole of conscious expectation. Descartes goes so
far as to doubt the most basic truths of mathematics, not because
there is any real likelihood that they are false in themselves, but
because it is not inconceivable that I may slip up every time I add
two to three (61), which is meant to emphasize that even the most
basic arithmetical operations work out by being kept in mind. To
the extent that I can then imagine willfully abstaining from the
activity of discriminating and articulating the world as mine, to
the extent that I can hold all of my experience in abeyance, the
world collapses in on itself, an abyss opens up beneath my feet.
The malevolent genie personifies this possibility of existential
vertigo, in which doubt unfixes all things because there is nothing
not affirmed by me that could steady them. The one intact, unshakable point that cannot even be subject to doubt is therefore
that very activity of my conscious intending. I am a thing unlike
any other because in some sense I carry the very weight on which
I stand, I bear the full weight of the world—even if I can only be
sure of myself so long as I continue to catch myself in the act.
This thought experiment undeniably shows us several aspects
of what it means for us to have the world in view. It throws into
relief that objects of experience are only fully realized because I
mind them; that my attention lends a hand to constituting the tissue of ordinary experience; and that the thought of a world must
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BARBA-KAY
7
always be coupled to the thought of its nothingness. But
Descartes’s errand is more ambitious than this, since, once he has
taken it apart, he then aims to piece the world back together on
his own terms, which is to say, in no uncertain terms. The connection between what can be absolutely evident to me and what
is self-evident is crucial here. The one discipline that impresses
Descartes at school is mathematics—less for what it has
achieved, he says, than for the kind of certainty it promises; the
clarity and certainty that are supposed to govern his inquiry in
the Meditations are therefore cast with an eye to that peculiar pattern. Since mathematics has always been regarded as the learnable and knowable discipline par excellence, this could hardly be
called a bad choice. For mathematical clarity to be our wholesale
guide to knowing as such, however, Descartes must conflate what
is knowable with what is self-contained in its own deduction—
that is, with what I am always in the position to recognize as selfevident. To set all of our knowledge on such footing, we must
each of us take up a position in which everything must be knowable in advance of our experience, in which to know means to be
certain, and in which what is not certain is demoted to arbitrary
and optional. I am asked to take up an autonomous position, a
vantage beyond belief, before which the objects of my thinking
are arrayed and assessed, before being assented to. My knowledge is the absence of mind—nowhere and no one in a position
to see it all.
It is this flattering affinity between what I am always in the
position to know and mathematical clarity that underpins the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity that has made up
our epistemic bread and butter ever since. These are not
Descartes’s explicit terms, but this casual and widespread way
of approaching inquiry undeniably has roots in something like
the Cartesian identification of truth with a specific experience of
certainty. What is objective is what cannot be denied without contradiction, what would be the case if I did not know it, what is
valid for all times and places, and so what must be impersonally
assessable and deducible. It is the realm of necessity, best exemplified by our usual deferential attitude toward mathematics and
�8
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 59.1-2 (2017-2018)
the sciences; it is the knowable as such that leaves no room for
doubt. Outside this impersonal I, however, there is a subjective
remainder—ambivalently understood as a domain of arbitrary
preference and convention, but also as a domain of pure privacy
and inner freedom, a place sealed and secret, from which I cannot
be shaken and to which I may always retreat, if I should be so
minded. It is the disengaged mental retina, the fixed point from
which I invest what is not objective with my own meanings, and
at which every man is for himself and on his own.
This is an admittedly unsophisticated and flat-footed version
of a picture that I find to be widely prevalent among my students,
though I also think that one need not squint too hard to see variations on this theme as the common guiding thread of modern philosophy. Whether in the form of Spinoza’s distinction between
natura naturans and naturata, or in Hume’s between relations of
ideas and matters of fact, or in Kant’s scission of nature from freedom, or Hegel’s counterpoint between what is ‘in itself’ and what
is ‘for itself,’ or more proximately in the Nietzschean or Weberian
opposition of facts to values, it is clear that the attempt to render
philosophy into a quasi-scientific a priori body of knowledge has
had the effect of sharpening under its pressure a corresponding
view of our inner freedom as a naked power of self-possessed
willing lying beyond the appeal of ordinary, shared reasons. For
every Descartes, there has then followed a Pascal.
This is an imprecise generalization, of course, but if anything
like this dialectic between necessity and freedom underlies our
picture of the world, then it would help to explain why our thinking somehow continues to circle back to Descartes. Perhaps the
most striking feature of the Cartesian project—which is to establish the full truth to one’s own satisfaction—is that it has the effect of forcing all its opponents to adopt it. Once Descartes has
withdrawn from the premises of ordinary shared experience, the
only strategies for flushing him out are to question the soundness
of his premises, to note the ways in which his position does not
itself acknowledge its historical debts, or to point out all the ways
in which his position of radical doubt would be incoherent in
practice. These might, in fact, be the only logical responses open
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BARBA-KAY
9
to us. But they are responses that, Gorgon-like, turn us into the
kind of skeptic that we take ourselves to be trying to undermine,
because we feel we must turn to a priori thinking and presuppositionless logical analysis in order to refute him. This is what I
have found most striking in the classroom: because Descartes has
denied or removed the shared bases of ordinary experience, we
feel forced to take up a position somewhere on the unmediated
poles of subjectivity and objectivity—both of which in fact take
for granted the Cartesian picture of a fully self-constituting and
autonomous beginning to knowledge. We find ourselves having
to reason at him rather than with him, because we tacitly accept
his opening claim that there is no we who could reason in common. It is half way through Meditation III, only after Descartes
has established the existence of God, that he claims to prove that
he is not alone in the world (74), but it is a strange discovery for
him to make, since he has addressed his spiritual exercises to us
all along. Cartesian thinking is cinematic: it is a condition of our
witnessing it that we be excluded from its proceedings.
In what sense can objectivity be a Cartesian innovation,
though? It is clear that philosophy has always and everywhere
sought to describe what is permanently and universally true—as
Nietzsche put it, philosophy’s demand of itself is that it become
timeless. But it is equally clear that other analogous distinctions—between human and divine knowledge, say, or between
convention (nomos) and nature (physis)—are by no means congruent with the way in which we contrast subjectivity to objectivity. To take up the second example: physis in ancient
philosophy is something like a transpolitical domain subtending,
and prior to, any particular human arrangement. But it refers, on
the one hand, to a reality that is found variously embodied in
(rather than separated from) those arrangements, and, on the other
hand, to an ordered whole that is neither apodictically reducible
to, or immediately transparent to, discursive analysis. As Plato
shows in the Timaeus, the attempt to generate the order of the
world from the measurement of harmonious ratios results in a
leftover interval that balks the intellect’s designs to tidy it up.
Physis hides. She will not fully yield herself to logos.
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That this can no longer be our picture of the world—that our
universe is no longer cosmic, so to speak—should not prevent us
from realizing that communal friendship held a central place in
pre-modern philosophy, the very absence of which marks our
own somewhat impoverished oscillation between subjectivity
and objectivity. The Platonic Socrates is entirely at home using
the most cynical maneuvers of logical jujitsu, but he usually reserves those moves for his arguments with the sophists. In his
discussions with more generous interlocutors, he tries to establish
the kinds of philosophical affection (both for the truth and for his
fellows in speech) that distinguish him from the sophists he otherwise so much resembles. Similarly, we can hardly underestimate the importance of the first person plural in Aristotle. He
understands that the deepest truths are somehow already present
within his students’ ways of speaking and acting; starting from
shared conceptions, he works to deepen their understanding.
When he notes near the beginning of the Ethics that mathematical
exactness is not an appropriate standard for ethical investigations
because different inquiries are measured by different kinds of
precision, we register our distance from him by his deadpan indifference to justifying this assertion. And yet what kind of Cartesian argument could ever sufficiently establish such an
assumption? It is exactly at this point that we are hostage to the
demand for clarity and certainty, because the latter criteria are always in the position to undercut any such shared understanding.
It is Descartes’s innovation, then, to deny any implicit
“we”—a first person plural opening up upon the world—as a necessary or helpful middle term between my thinking and the objects of experience. His project is to dissociate friendship from
reason and to seek knowledge without community. Mathematical
precision is therefore paradigmatic of its aspirations for good reason: it seems to admit no ambiguity, seems to be independent of
historical circumstances, and seems to proceed on premises that
cannot be denied without contradiction. Agreement or disagreement do not seem to touch its truth. Mathematics is no respecter
of persons (you may depend on it). And again, mathematics is
bewitching to the extent that it promises to take the measure of
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the world prior to encountering it—hence the notion of a method
or an instrument of investigation that, once established, will be
able to generate results algorithmically and impartially. The
mathematization of nature gives us mastery over it—it affords us
vast powers of prediction and control even as it narrows the scope
of what we care to attend to. But applying such a common denominator to philosophical inquiry reduces it to only two areas
of discussion—that to which I am forced to acquiesce and that
which I am free to dispute. To the extent that I insist on being a
pure subject, I also insist on making the world purely subject to
me. If, however, there are forms of knowledge we can only know
by holding things in common—as we do in friendship or faith or
trust or loyalty or love—and if we take their pledges seriously as
more than private stimuli, then there is a whole set of goods that
are unavailable to Cartesian thinking, forms of knowledge whose
inside-out, rather than outside-in, character is checked from the
outset by the Cartesian demand for certainty. There may be
strength in numbers, but it is a strength that can lift you no higher
than yourself.
I want to indicate here—too hastily, perhaps—some of the
ways in which the Cartesian fascination for impregnable speech
has shaped modern philosophy. If it is the promise of disembodied speech to settle matters somehow in advance of knowing
them, then it cannot be surprising if there has been special hell
to pay in political and moral reasoning. The very project of the
classical contract theorists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—attempts to deduce the legitimacy or illegitimacy of a certain state of affairs by specifying the beginning point of all
possible human arrangements—obeys a Cartesian impulse to
project a point of fixed certainty into the world (although in this
domain it is Hobbes rather than Descartes who counts as the first
Cartesian). The state of nature served as a quasi-geometrical postulate from which, once accepted, certain prescriptive conclusions could be drawn. With some contemporary exceptions (like
Rawls), it is true that this approach was later abandoned under
pressure from historicist criticism. But nineteenth- and twentieth-century historicism itself obeys a neo-Kantian, and so quasi-
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scientific, impulse to read our historical formation as an a priori
schema governing all possible human experience. Historicism is
also Cartesian, therefore, in the sense of attempting to settle the
fundamental, constraining forms of human knowledge in advance
of any particular experience of them.
But if the issue of historicism has lost some of its urgency
since the end of the Cold War, I would ask you to consider what
we mean by morality. The term, understood as a system of prescriptions stipulating right conduct, is a modern one, itself a result
of the Enlightenment attempt to bring mathematical precision to
bear on our conception of the good. Aristotle’s Ethics and its medieval appropriations are not systems of morals (like Kant’s and
Mill’s), because they do not conceive their project as establishing
the goodness of certain practices and habits from a position outside of themselves. Nothing in Aristotle answers to this description. Our contemporary notion of morality, on the other hand,
aims at scientific rigor precisely to the extent that it purports to
deduce our duties from infallible rules—in other words, to specify how we ought to act regardless of our particular attachments
and responsibilities.
This apparent rigor has done very little to win the kind of
widespread consensus that might have been expected from it.
Moreover, it funnels ethical conversation into an adversarial, winner-take-all pattern. Most of my class discussions on ethical matters take the form of a predictable tug-of-war between “you’re
bad for judging others” and “I am entitled to my opinion that others are bad,” because everyone has independently realized that
the best strategy is to ask one’s opponent to define his or her
terms, and then to disparage those definitions in order to stalemate whatever may be supposed to follow from them. This strategy is not good enough to win any arguments, but it is a surefire
way not to lose any either. (The expectation of absolute moral
certainty thus goes hand-in-hand with relativism.) The underlying
Cartesian assumption is that a winning argument is one that no
one could reasonably find fault with, when in fact the predictable
outcome of such reasoning is dilemmatic casuistry about, for in-
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stance, how many innocent people to rescue from hypothetical
runaway trains. Even where we do share a general postulate—
say, that human beings are ends in themselves—it is by no means
clear that a notion of such generality could univocally help us
make an a priori judgment between competing kinds of goods.
In addition, Hume’s, Kant’s, and Mill’s moral visions continue
to rely on, in more or less obvious ways, the sensibilities of decent, Protestant, liberal citizens: that is to say, they all claim to
give contextless grounds for already existing forms of conduct.
This reliance is even clearer in Descartes’s list of practical
maxims in the Discourse—don’t mess with the law, stick to your
guns, control your desires, play to your strengths—which sound
little better than the avuncular therapy of self-control offered by
Polonius when contrasted with the rigor that Descartes otherwise
brings to bear on scientific matters. It is true that he presents his
maxims as provisional; they are designed to be cast off once he
has built his system of knowledge from the ground up. But his
subsequent silence on this point is therefore eloquent, as is his
affinity (along with that of many modern moralists) to ancient
Stoicism, which was the first philosophical school to preach withdrawal from the world and a steady diet of sour grapes as the
means of attaining happiness. Again, if to know is to be certain,
then I can be certain of my own pleasure (as Descartes might say)
or perhaps even of my duty (as Kant might say), but it is precisely
the character of this certainty that prevents my thinking from taking place somewhere in particular or inhibits my attending to
common cares and thoughts. So long as I try to reason my own
way into the world, I will not know exactly what to do with you.
I realize that I am myself running the risk of sounding reductionist and skeptical, since I might seem to be asserting that there
is no such thing as truth in moral matters except through some
sort of wishful or willful consensus. But that is precisely the
shape that Cartesian certainty forces on us, whereas I am trying
to call attention to differences between Cartesian and other forms
of disagreement. Neither antiquity nor the Middle Ages were conspicuous for their concord, respect, and unanimity—in philoso-
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phy or in any other area of life. It may be that the very opposite
is true and that quarrels are fiercest among brothers, as Aristotle
says. But it is also clear that most of the ferociously sectarian disputes about philosophical principles in Europe and the Near East
up to, and perhaps even including, the Reformation were understood as differences within and about a shared conception of the
world. And I am tempted to call this a kind of friendship—a commitment to common goods of thought. It is, in contrast, one of
the marks of our continuing dependence on Cartesianism that we
feel the need to reason from scratch, and that this need in turn
shapes the forms of speech that are available to us. Such forms
are by no means inadequate in all respects. Like a searing fire,
they dissolve and clarify, even if they cannot establish or sustain.
But so long as we understand philosophy as clinically disengaged
thought, we will continue to prize guarded and ungenerous forms
of speech that pretend to a scientific certainty they cannot achieve
(e.g., scholarship), we will continue to disagree about first principles erratically and without end, we will continue to excel only
at the philosophical genre of critique, we will continue to be
tempted toward forms of irrationality as the only exits from a stifling objectivity, and we will continue to find ourselves stuck at
Cartesian square one. Square one is no doubt a fine square. But
if a conversation is such that I can always undercut an argument
by refusing my agreement—if that is the exemplary form of critical thinking—then no conversation can exceed my current view
of how things stand. You are only right for all I know.
Accusing contemporary philosophy of solipsism will perhaps
seem strange, since the theme of intersubjectivity has been all
the rage for two centuries and counting. But I take this to be yet
another case in point—and a good example of how Cartesianism
unleashed caustic powers of analysis that we have not been able
to put back in the bottle. Descartes was the first to formulate what
has since been called the “problem of other minds” at the end of
Meditation II, in a passage where he looks out on a busy street
and questions his usual assumption that those moving figures are
people. They might, he says, be no more than automata draped
in hats and coats. Following Descartes’s lead, the “problem” of
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other minds has been understood as this: How can I justify my
inference that you have a mind no different from mine when it’s
clear that no amount of raw sense data could ever sufficiently
warrant it? It is worth noting that Descartes does not even register
this as a special problem, nor did any major philosopher in history up to and including Kant. The deduction and explanation of
intersubjectivity has, by contrast, been one of the main preoccupations of every single major post-Kantian thinker—from Fichte
through Husserl and Wittgenstein and Habermas—all of whom
have sought to establish intersubjectivity as a distinctly nonCartesian form of knowledge.
I do not say that we have learned nothing of value from these
attempts, but it may be that what we have learned has been in the
way of hungry people reasoning about bread. In other words, it
is worth asking what we think we have to prove, or why we continue to feel as if there is a problem that needs addressing, when
no one seemed to feel such a need until the mid-1790s and when
even now there is almost no one arguing the contrary. The very
term ‘intersubjectivity’—a barbarous neologism for what used
to be called philia—suggests that our solution only replicates the
problem, insofar as it represents an attempt to maintain an attitude
of impersonal detachment in my description of the most personal
of experiences—namely, what you mean to me. ‘Intersubjectivity’ has become a bit of fashionable jargon in philosophy much
like ‘interdisciplinarity’ is in education: both words elicit a buzz
of self-congratulation all around, even as they affirm the terms
that cause the very problem they are supposed to overcome. Both
of them take for granted from the outset a situation in which subjects or disciplines are atomic units in need of combinination.
And yet, if your recipe calls for oil and water, chances are you
will never end up with a solution. Intersubjectivity promises to
be an endless though limited subject of discussion for philosophy
not simply because we have discovered in ourselves over the past
two centuries unprecedented capacities for alienation and loneliness, but also because we formulate the discussion in the wrong
kind of speech for the experience it purports to get at. We expound in monologue on the great benefits of dialogue. Said an-
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other way: the problem of other minds is not a problem except
when it is formulated in terms that assume a fundamental difference between what is absolutely certain (my mind) and what is
qualitatively less certain (you out there), so that, like most other
problems of a Cartesian pedigree—like the relation of mind and
world, mind and body, reason and experience, freedom and nature, and so forth—it can neither overcome nor be satisfied by
the dualistic terms in which it is asked.
One recurring feature that vitiates from the outset Cartesian
questions such as these is the accompanying sense that the question
proscribes a personal middle term between the proposed extremes,
a term that, before Descartes, constituted the common ground I inhabit with others because we share a world. Just as Descartes prizes
mathematics because it admits of no shades of certainty, so too the
criteria of clarity and certainty mute the sense that I should accept
common practices and concerns as the best starting point for my
thought. As Descartes says in Meditation IV: “I have been so constituted as a kind of middle ground between God and nothingness,
or between the supreme being and non-being” (82): that is, there
is nothing outside me to break the fall between certainty and ignorance. The absence of this middle term then finds literal, and striking, expression in Descartes’s view of the soul.
I am not sure whether Descartes is rightly called a dualist—
certainly there are passages in the Meditations and in his correspondence with Elizabeth that suggest he was aware of the
difficulties entailed by the view that thinking things are substantially different from extended ones, and that the two may also interact. (Of course, realizing that you have a problem and wishing
that you did not have it don’t add up to not having it.) What seems
true of both the Cartesian picture and of its Kantian successor it
is that the mind/body distinction is produced under the pressure
of locating the certainty that I am intelligent and free within the
certainty that there is no object of experience that is not material.
This is no longer the same kind of question that generates the
parts of the soul in Aristotelian or Platonic psychology or in their
Christian descendants. Many of these earlier views include a third
part of the soul between reason and desire—a part that is charac-
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teristically human by virtue of being responsive both to reason
and desire, a part that is also (and not incidentally) represented
as the seat of our social spirit, the power of soul by which we can
take things personally. It is precisely this third, mediating part—
the part by which we are understood to be attached to others—
that is done away with by the Cartesian picture of the soul. The
distinction between mind and body is thus the distinction between
subjectivity and objectivity concretely instantiated within our
own selves.
A final passing note on how this missing personal middle has
affected even the most rarefied metaphysical questions: One
would think that if anything is objectively the case, it is questions
about being as such. And yet it is owing to Descartes’s polarization of subjectivity and objectivity that the notion of epistemology as a specialized, delimited discipline exists in contrast to
ontology. It was the Cartesian inspiration of early modern epistemology to focus more precisely on the conditions of possible
experience by surrendering the assumption that the world is intelligible in itself. This approach gave us what is valuable in Kant,
Nietzsche, and Heidegger, while simultaneously making inescapable the question, In what sense can things be said to be
both knowable and “outside” the mind? Ancient and medieval
metaphysics were by no means widely shared social attitudes,
and yet their stance toward their objects of inquiry was nonetheless personal, both because they understood inquiry into being
also as inquiry into the divine, and because knowledge of the
whole was understood as a kind of communion within which that
whole knew itself to be completed.
I have doubtless already said too much, or tried to. My main
point has been that our continued attraction to being repelled by
Descartes has less to do with the fact of his having formulated
some set of terms or themes or questions that we are still concerned with, and more with his having established a certain
stance toward philosophical speech that continues to reassert itself within our attempts to deny it. Quasi-scientific speech—contextless speech treating philosophical questions as problems to
be mastered once and for all from an ex ante position—is in fact
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a form of deeply skeptical speech, and so long as we understand
it as the only mode of philosophical speech, then we will continue
to fall back into the reductive, dualistic terms of the questions
framed by Descartes. It can be no accident that it has been one
of modern philosophy’s main post-Cartesian aims to mortify
skepticism once and for all. Indeed, it is only in modern philosophy that skepticism has been felt to be a real threat, rather than
a crank position held by unwashed men living in barrels. Fear of
skepticism is a sure mark that you have set out to reason on your
own: as you tighten the demands of certainty, you are gripped by
doubt. As you sharpen the light of clarity and distinctness, the
shadow of doubt lengthens and lengthens; and if you will be
guided only by your own self-evident terms, if there is no middle
term between absolute certainty and error, then any misstep
threatens to bring the world crashing down, and you will surely
encounter skepticism at every turn.
Skepticism’s lesson, however, is that the truth is more than
a matter of words, since it is not in speech that the most aggressive skeptic will meet his match. The cure for skepticism has always been the same. You provoke the skeptic to act—you ask
him to go outside for some fresh air or, if you must, beat him
with a stick—in order to show him that he is incoherent in deed
and so to ask him to rejoin a common world larger than his way
of thinking can conceive. This is sometimes felt to be a kind of
concession of defeat on philosophy’s part—as if the need for action here showed that reasons just come to an end—whereas it
should help us realize that reasons may sometimes outstrip arguments. If, that is, what is most distinctive about Cartesianism
is its posture of voluntary neutrality, its attempt to specify the
only kind of answer that would satisfy it from the outset, and if
that feature thereby marks it as skeptical, then we should also
not expect for it to yield to strictly theoretical answers. Heidegger may help us see how Cartesianism is merely one historical
episode within a larger philosophical arc, and Wittgenstein may
convince us that if only we talked long enough about Cartesianism we would be cured from the supposition that there is anything left to talk about. And yet so long as we think the limitation
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involved is logical or discursive, we do not possess the right kind
of response.
For this reason I do not take Cartesianism to be exclusively—
and perhaps not even primarily—a theoretical problem or error.
A first step in escaping its attraction is to rediscover forms of reasoning in common, to realize that friendship is essential to clear
thinking. The kinds of goods that Cartesianism cannot see—
goods requiring belief, trust, and shared conviction—are not ersatz reasons, nor do they lend themselves to proof if we do not
lend ourselves to abiding by and in them. It is true they are subject to groupthink abuses to which we are highly sensitive. But
they are goods of knowledge, knowledge of a sort that is the only
point from which to break the tenacious hold that Cartesianism
continues to have on philosophical thought at large—perhaps beginning with the thought that there is any such thing as philosophical thought at large. The goods of friendship are
distinguished, in contrast to Cartesianism, by the relinquishment
of a particular kind of certainty, in order to make room for a
greater one. We acknowledge our dependence on the given context and circumstances within which we serve to make the good
in common with others—a set of books and questions and friends
and places and tasks—in sum, on a tradition. We accept this tradition not as a bias clouding our view of a more universal knowledge, but as an anchor deepening our thought and lending truth
a voice in time. That is, we acknowledge the partiality of our position not as a reason for undermining it, but, like the acknowledgment of our mortality, as a condition of our taking root.
Unlike Cartesian knowledge, the goods of friendship are never
available from the outset. They are at once retrospective and
prospective. Friendship is a vow that I do not know everything,
and so a way of holding myself in readiness. It is the knowledge
that my words may only be generous where we own something
in common, and that the weight and resonance of their shared
truth goes beyond what could be called their correctness. Cartesianism’s denial of this dimension makes it difficult to change
the question, as I’ve noted, since all attempts to reason in terms
of certainty flatten everything else to their level. It is friendship’s
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promise, on the other hand, that we can compass the whole by
knowing it to be wider than our thinking, that it is because the
world exceeds our single grasp that we are capable of having it
in common reach.
If I have ventured these thoughts aloud here, it is because I
found one such community of learners in St. John’s, and because,
having been away some years, I realize now how few and far between are such settings for friendship. As Tocqueville noted,
Americans seem to be Cartesians from the cradle—there are always so many different competing views of the pursuit of happiness, that we tend to equate truth proper with what is outside the
scope of democratic contradiction. Because of this, Cartesianism
and American egalitarianism are apparent (though only apparent)
relatives. But the pressure of world-historical forces should not
prevent us from attending to the kinds of conversations concretely available to us. Nor should it prevent us from seeing that,
so long as we conflate the rigor of philosophy with the rigor of
mathematics, we will continue to be haunted by Descartes, the
first to speak the singular idiom of such a possibility. Perhaps it
is no longer possible to speak of public reason in the terms I’m
suggesting; but philosophy, after all, has never been comfortable
in public, and approaching it as a quasi-technical discipline has
only subordinated it further to the natural sciences.
There was once a man, the first philosopher of all, who, upon
being asked his name under duress, gave it out as Noman. At that
moment, he realized something each of us must discover for ourselves as adolescents: that reason is always in some sense slipping out of the bonds of the particular, that it cannot be fully fixed
in place, that our thinking runs out beyond our station and our
term of life. Intelligence draws lines, but in doing so it always
manages to straddle both sides of them; it can contain every multitude. It is outlandish—as Carl Page likes to say; there is no resting place it cannot quit. But Noman did not stop at that. He
recognized the anonymity of his cunning as an episode within
the larger story of the restoration of his name, which would only
be fully fleshed out as the name of a father, a son, a husband, a
king belonging to his land, a friend to a dog and to the pear trees
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he had planted in the orchard as a boy. In the same way, while
we are trying to squirm out from under the depthless vision of
the Cyclops, anonymity is our best and only protection. But so
long as that insight is not then relocated within the task of making
speech personal, of giving speech a way of dwelling in the world,
then our words cannot have place, cannot take root, and cannot
thrive. We will remain Cartesians.
�Jacob Klein: European Scholar
and American Teacher
Eva Brann
The subtitle of my talk might be “Liberal Education: Program
and/or Pedagogy?” The reason is that I think of Jacob Klein’s life
as being an embodiment of that slash, “and/or” and therefore an
occasion for asking what seems to me a question the answer to
which determines the success—I mean the lively and secure survival—of liberal education.
There is the much more often debated converse to the question: “Is there a specific pedagogy for liberal education?” This is
the question: “Is there a specific curriculum for liberal education
which goes with the kind of teaching you might call “liberal?” I
won’t dwell on the answer today, except insofar as it bears on
particular aspects of teaching. I’ll just say that I think the answer
is that almost anything can be taught liberally—to a point. In particular, the shop crafts are germane enough to the liberal arts
(which form one part of liberal education, as I’ll spell out later)
to serve as a suitable complementary curriculum. To prove it,
there’s that wonderful book by Matthew Crawford, who is both
a student of philosophy and a motorcycle mechanic: it is called
Shop Class as Soulcraft (and is the much worthier successor of
that cult classic, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance); it
shows how fixing things forms souls, just as reading books does.
Let me give my answer to the topic question up front. I’m
not a great believer in that mode of talking to my colleagues
which attempts to make a whodunit of the telling so that they get
to learn my resolution to the inquiry only when they’re mostly
long adrift in mind.
Eva Brann is a tutor and former dean at St. John’s College in Annapolis,
Maryland. This lecture was first delivered as the keynote address at the
Jacob Klein Conference on Liberal Education held at Providence College on Friday, March 11, 2016.
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I am persuaded, even with a certain passion, that Liberal Education does have its most appropriate program, its preferable
matter, and that this matter particularly calls for its own pedagogy. Concisely and thus a little too peremptorily put: You cannot
achieve liberal education in the mode of a specialized teaching
authority, a professor. That is by no means to say that professors
who know their stuff inside-out can’t sometimes teach liberally—
but it will be, I think, in an alternative style for them: Ex cathedra, “from the podium” will have to become “in the trenches,”
on a chair around the table with the other human souls.
I was one of that diminutive number of refugees for whom
that little devil Mephistopheles’ shamelessly candid admission
held: “I am a part of that power that ever seeks evil and ever accomplished good.” (It comes from Goethe’s Faust which no German-born person can live through a year without citing thrice.)
The Nazi persecution brought me to America where, with some
practical know-how and some luck, anyone who knows how to
be happy, can be happy, and to St. John’s College, where several
of my older colleagues were refugees. I came very young and
grew very old in Annapolis, so this band of my seniors, including
Victor Zuckerkandl, a well-known Viennese musician, and
Simon Kaplan, a Kant scholar, who came in middle age, are all
gone. Jacob Klein, called Jasha by us all, including by some
cheeky students (who are supposed to accord each other and their
tutors, as I will do, the honorific “Mr., Mrs., Miss” and later
“Ms.”), was among them. As far as I could tell—and I observed
avidly—they were well appreciated, even well loved by their
American hosts who, in their gracious naiveté, admired them for
their thorough learning and marveled at them for their pronounced personalities. But Jasha held a special place.
All the refugees that I’ve known or read of who were fully
adult when they emigrated led a cleft life—a European formation
and an American re-formation. Mr. Klein grew up and studied in
Slavic and central Europe and fled to the Anglophone West, from
the Nazis’ politically, but psychologically also from an antically
tyrannical father. This ogre, however, also came to the States and
made Sonoma County, where he turned grapes into raisins, unsafe for habitation. Among the many stories about him that Jasha
told me was that of his wedding gift to Jasha and Dodo. Dodo
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Tammann was the divorced wife of Edmund Husserl’s son, and
she became a powerful presence at St. John’s. The wedding gift
was a smallish bag of these raisins.
The years of Mr. Klein’s life were split almost exactly between Europe and America: from his birth in 1899 to 1938, his
arrival in America—thirty-nine years, and from 1938, his arrival
in Annapolis, to 1978, his death while still teaching—forty years.
(Winfree Smith, in A Search For The Liberal College [1983],
gives an indispensable account of Mr. Klein’s early years at St.
John’s, ending with his deanship.)
To me there is, in my mythifying mood, something providential in this half-and-half life. For in Europe Mr. Klein was a
private scholar without institutional bonds. He studied, conducted
private seminars and above all, wrote his principal book, entitled
in English, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra (1934-36). It is a work of enormous scholarship, drawing
from primary and secondary works in all the modern and classical languages—oddly not Hebrew; this visibly Jewish man governed by a Jewish fate didn’t, as far as I could tell, have a Jewish
bone in his body. Let me interject here my understanding of this
apostasy. It was not the ordinary assimilation of convenience,
still so hotly debated when I was young, but an allegiance that
trumped everything, even his love for Russian novels, namely
his deep affinity for the Greeks—not the esthetic Greeks captured
in the formula “Noble naiveté, quiet grandeur” which appeared
in the first and greatest history of antique art, that of Johann
Winckelmann (1717-1768) and which dominated that famous
German philhellenism.—I myself grew up under its aegis. What
drew Mr. Klein to the Greeks was—let me joyfully risk some political incorrectness—a very masculine view of that Greek grace
as sober soundness, as, so to speak, the apotheosis of good sense,
a virtue which the Greeks call sophrosyne—literally, soundmindedness. It was a glory that I, who had spent my post-graduate
years as a Greek archaeologist, had never suspected—that behind
all those canonical great books, there might be a very specific intellectually handsome togetherness.
Since I’ve begun to understand something of the Origin of
Algebra, I’ve thought that its doctrine was a, perhaps the, principal example of this sense of Greek soundness. The book, after
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all, traces out a loss, the loss of just this whole-heartedness. Not
that Mr. Klein was a modernity-basher. Far from it—he had studied physics and found the revolution on which he was reporting
and its modernity (plus, I should say, its extreme realization in
post-modernity) irresistibly interesting, and so his account of our
condition seemed to me far deeper and more persuasive than the
socio-political explanations I was given as a history major in
Brooklyn College. There was, furthermore, I learned in time,
nothing Heideggerian in his approach to the mode of this loss,
no call for the Destruktion (mitigatingly translated as “de-construction”) for the sake of recovering a pre-traditional ontological
origin. But, it seems to me, there might actually be large, sensibly
practical consequences from a propagation of the thesis of the
Origin of Algebra.
Obviously, I should now say as concisely as possible what
this thesis, this teaching, seems to me to be. The very subtle, very
reliable paragraph by paragraph exposition of the thesis in all its
complexity is to be found in Burt Hopkin’s Origin of the Logic
of Symbolic Mathematics (2011). I see it, more simply, in this
way: The Greeks, meaning the relevant written texts we have (but
I think the artifacts harmonize), had a direct, an immediate approach, to beings of thought, what might be called a first innocence, and if you like, even a naiveté, perhaps after all, even of
a noble sort. Their direct intellectual sight accorded those beings
a fullness, a meaning-fraught concreteness. Their way of regarding numbers is a prime example and probably the most illuminating case—negatively, because for mathematics the psychological
element is much reduced so that the intellectual mode stands out,
positively because the loss of this immediacy enabled the principal
science at the foundation of our epoch, astronomical and terrestrial
physics. Greek numbers, arithmoi, are collections of things, a
counting-up of them, in German, Anzahl. These counted-up assemblage-numbers undergo, in a long-breathed conversion traced
in the book, a reduction to mere symbols, completed by Vieta and
Descartes. In the helpful medieval language, they are transformed
from first to second intentions, meaning that a word that once
reached for a thing now reaches for the thought-belabored abstraction of the thing. This second-intentionality dominates so
much of modern discourse as to be practically a signature of
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modernity. My favorite example is this: Socrates follows a way,
in Greek a methodos, “a way gone after” (a good example: Republic 596a). We tend to have not a “method” but a “methodology,” not a jigged way, but the conception of the jigged way. We
talk, very often, in concepts rather than objects. Mr. Klein, a most
natural and, I might say, earthy person—and I might also say, like
most flesh-and-blood people full of student-delighting singularities—kookiness in plain language—had a gut-aversion to this
world of abstractions. He used to expend himself in trying to persuade Johnnies that Socrates’ forms, the eide, were not “abstractions,” literally “drawn-off,” life-deprived, thought-ghosts, but
full of attractive being.
That brings me to the second half of Mr. Klein’s life, the
American part, spent almost entirely at St. John’s College. He
did, to be sure, write two more books in this epoch. The first was
A Commentary on Plato’s Meno (1965). The Meno is to St. John’s
College something like what the Declaration of Independence is
to the United States, the condition of its possibility; it is our enabling work for freedom from academicism. The Meno shows
under what conditions learning by inquiry, as distinct from
knowledgeableness by study, is possible. Like the Algebra book
(as it is, ridiculously, known at home) the Meno book contains
some unforgettable insights—unforgettable because as soon as
you’ve read them you think you’ve always known them. This
was the kind of mental plagiarism Mr. Klein chuckled over as a
mark of his insights having been understood and adopted. My
particular pick is his discovery that the capacity of “image-recognition” (eikasia: not “imagining” or “imagination”) attached to
the lowest section of the divided line presented in the Republic
(509 ff., the commentary on the Meno mines other dialogues for
relevant illuminations) ranges through all the divisions to the
highest, because imaging is the generating principle of the world
that flourishes under the “Idea of the Good.” Thus our lowest capacity is also our most encompassing. These assimilable insights
are life-changing; I’ll refrain from personal testimonials, but you
can see that at the least the thought of an imagination-ontology
will affect your way of reflecting.
The second late book, Plato’s Trilogy, on the Theaetetus,
Sophist, and Statesman (1977), I could never take to. It is written
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in a mode that seems to belong to old age: It paraphrases the text
with the intention that the reader will extract a commentary from
the emphases and deviations. David Lachterman’s review of the
book1 helped me to see its accomplishments, one of which is that
it really functions as a sort of provocation to reflection on texts
left intact by the interpreter. (I might say here that David was, to
my knowledge, the most universally learned student who ever
came out of St. John’s; he carried on Mr. Klein’s projects in his
own competently ingenious way.)
Most of Mr. Klein’s writing was for lectures directed to our
students, and these, insofar as they were recoverable, were edited
by Robert Williamson and Elliot Zuckerman and published by
the college. They have that same quality that he saw in the Greek
authors: simultaneously with having grasped it, it grasps you: it
sits naturally in the intellect—mine, at least, and many of my colleagues’.
But these published works are not what dominated the second part of his life. In fact, he was almost comically inimical to
publication. When I came in 1957 for my appointment interview,
he placed me in a chair and, so to speak, danced around me, holding the two pot-publications I had proudly sent with my application—I was then an archaeologist—between thumb and index
finger as if they were some loathsome matter and then tossed
them back to me. (Publication wasn’t and still isn’t a criterion for
appointment or tenure at St. John’s.) Taking his aversion to publication seriously, I translated the algebra book in secret and confessed only late, because I had questions to ask. Then, however,
with splendid inconsistency, he was eager for it to come out into
the world, where it first languished, only to emerge slowly and
steadily into some fame and influence, particularly of course,
under Burt Hopkins’s energetic shepherding.
So now to the point. If the first half of his life, the European
part, was under the aegis of learning and scholarly production,
the second, American half was predominantly a teaching life, be
it as a tutor (our replacement of the title “professor,” though it’s
not used in address) or as dean of the college (1949-1958). As
1. David Lachterman, “Review of J. Klein’s Plato’s Trilogy, Nous 13
(1979): 106-12.
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for the latter function, I remember vividly that when the end-ofclass bell rang he would issue from his office to stand at the bottom of the stairs of our main building and scan the faces of
descending students for signs of life. Once he caught me coming
down, maneuvered me into his office, and chided me for having
threatened with bodily harm a student who had not been able to
inflect the Greek verb “to be.”
Here is the serious aspect of Mr. Klein as a teacher in an institution whose faculty had bound itself to an all-required, coherent plan of liberal education, with the consequent abolition of
electives for students and specialization for teachers and the replacement of the ways of learning and modes of teaching then,
and even more now, current in universities and colleges—less in
the latter since some of these ways are functions of size and consequently of—phantasized—economies of scale.
In my young and ardent years as a tutor I saw in Mr. Klein
the incarnation of a teacher in a program which was conceived
by its founders, Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan, as a contemporary re-animation of the traditional liberal education that
was first set out in the seventh book of Plato’s Republic and in
the eighth book of Aristotle’s Politics (where the word liberal,
“belonging to the free” [eleutherion] is, as far as I know, first
used to distinguish this upbringing from the vocational, utilitarian
sort). For Rome, the guiding text was Quintilian’s Teaching Program for Oratory, and in the Middle Ages, Hugh of St. Victor’s
Didascalicon and John of Salisbury’s Metalogicon (which is,
however, concerned only with the verbal arts). These works, to
be sure, often concentrate on the specific liberal arts, the skills
of learning, rather than on liberal education, which relies on texts
for reflection.
Indeed, when Mr. Klein arrived in late 1938, for the second
year of the college’s New Program, it was already fixed in its
broad organization into tutorials for the exercise of the liberal
arts and seminars for the discussion of great books. The liberal
arts were exactly the trivium, the three-way of words: grammar,
logic and rhetoric, their correctness, validity and persuasiveness,
and the quadrivium, the four-way of things: arithmetic, geometry,
astronomy and music, their countability, extendedness, regular
motions and attendant harmonies. The program of tutorials stuck
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quite closely to this scheme—reducing it to language and mathematics classes with the modern addition of laboratory. Rumor
has it that in the library of those early days, physics books were
catalogued under music, the study of bodies in ratio relations.
Learnedness was required to find the finest working examples
for exercises in these arts, taken from the most highly regarded
works of language, mathematics, and science. The early faculty
had put enticing tutorials together by the time Jasha arrived.
What he also found was a particularly felicitous modern fusion, instigated by Buchanan, of the so-called Great Books with
the Liberal Arts, which had long been regarded as ancillary, particularly to the exegesis of Scripture. Canon-establishing lists of
Great Books go back to antiquity and forward into our times, so
our founders were well-supplied (especially: Ernst Robert Curtius, Europäische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalter, 1948;
Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working
Classes, 2011). As it seems to me, Mr. Klein’s function with respect to the Program’s teaching matter was largely to add an additional element of competence and, most importantly, to
undergird the programmatic sequence with an intellectual history
that put the dawn of modernity found in the mathematical writers
of the late sixteenth and seventeenth century at the center of the
drama of a break between antiquity and modernity. It was a break
mirrored roughly in the discontinuity of our sophomore and junior years; its pathos is that of a great loss of human substance and
a huge gain of human power.
Buchanan himself was what is called a charismatic figure,
evidently (I didn’t know him) full of pedagogically energizing
outrageousness—very much the memorable master teacher dominating and drawing the college together—just what it needed in
its uncertain youngest years.
I must say here that the view I am about to offer of Mr. Klein
as presenting a model, perhaps the model, of teaching best fitting
a stable community of liberal learning is my own, perhaps to my
colleagues more of a construction than it ought to be, but very
plausible to me. It goes along with the conviction to which I’ve
confessed that a liberal education which is mindful of its tradition
and works pretty well day-to-day, with semi-frequent ascents into
sheer glory, has its own, proper teaching mode. I think that the
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delineation that follows fits not only a program of liberal education that has its own institution but also more partial, more tentative efforts. But I should report here that our founders
emphatically asserted that the program they were instituting was
not a curricular experiment. I think that attitude was crucial to
our holding together over the years: We thought—how shall I put
it?—that if this didn’t work out, then there was something wrong
with the world, not with the Program. And contrary to all pious
preaching about not being too inward-turned but more accommodating to reality, that passionate sense of being, for all our
flaws, on the right path turned out to be intensely practical. As I
recall him, Mr. Klein had a sovereign sense of being in a place
that had it right. I might add that I’ve visited a number of schools
where they did things quite differently but had the same sense of
“having got it right,” and the consequent affect between us was
immediate sympathy and potential friendship.
To begin with, then, he had the right temperament—a bit of
a gourmand (he, who despised academic grading would grade
Dodo’s uniformly delectable cuisine at every meal), a little indolent, pipe-puffing (a horrible weed called Balkan Sobranie),
amusedly tolerant toward all signs of intellectual effort in the
young and overtly repelled by adult intellectualism. In fact, he
took delight, not always fairly distributed, in the eager naiveté
and good-natured hijinks of the student generation of his first arrival; he had a special affection (which I’ve inherited) for the
scamps. (Our students of the present day, I might say, are more
experientially sophisticated and thus more psychologically
fraught—but none the wiser for it.)
I say “the right temperament,” but I mean a temperament; all
teachers in the liberal mode need a bit of a personality, both to
attract willing attention and to repel a too easy familiarity. Mr.
Klein had a lot of the appurtenances of personality, for example,
the ability to draw perfect circles on the board while facing the
class by pivoting his arm behind his back—a source of delight
to students studying Ptolemy. But these are gifts that you ape at
your peril.
Then there were other traits that were not a gift of nature but
the fruit of time. Older, more experienced teachers tend to carry
their authority with less strain and more élan, to maintain their
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repose and to intervene with aplomb, even when a learning occasion goes embarrassingly wrong—well mostly. These ways
you acquire more by keeping at it than by having a hero.
Then there were the bread-and-butter virtues of any teacher
in an institution, enforcing some discipline by mundane means—
calling on the silent, administering quizzes, requiring and attending to projects to be handed in. This dutiful fulfillment of
institutional requirements ought to be supervised by those in
charge, in our case that is the dean. Mr. Klein learned meticulous
dutifulness, as his wife told me, on the job; his pre-dean nature
was to let such things—such mere necessities—go in favor of
spontaneous life.
So far I’ve described a teacher at once too distinctively himself and too ordinarily dutiful to be a very imageable model. I’ll
now try to say how he came to be the paradigm of a teacher in a
school devoted to liberal education.
Let me begin by forfending the imputation that he followed
something called “the Socratic Method.” Neither Mr. Klein nor
we, the epigonoi as the Greek say, the successors, do any such
thing. On the one hand, it’s a contradiction in terms: Socrates
had, as I’ve said, a way, a pursuit, but not a method in the Cartesian sense of a set of jigged procedures for following an inquiry.
Mr. Klein used to say that each dialogue was its own world, and
in each conversation Socrates goes about his search in a different
way, taking into account the character of his conversational partners and of the object in question. So Socrates has his ways which
are not a method, and in that respect he is the very incarnation of
liberal teaching and our super-model. Yet, on the other hand, this
Socrates of the Platonic dialogues is, after all, Plato’s marionette,
who does as he’s told, which means he knows, or Plato knows
for him, exactly where he’s going. And that we never do know—
and we manage to rejoice in that fact.
And here finally begins my positive delineation of a pedagogy specific to liberal education and to Jasha Klein’s embodiment of it. It presupposes that liberal education, in its most
specific sense, is realized in a curriculum of texts handed to us
by the tradition, be they verbal, musical, visual. These works are
primary in the order of making or finding and prime in the ranking of quality or worth. Confronted with such works a teacher
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does well to recede into equality with the students, to inquire
along with them, and yet to be the safekeeper, the tutor of the enterprise. Mr. Klein was a master of the somewhat mysterious art
of leading from behind— by solicitous listening, by intimating
questions, even by expectant silence. He himself particularly admired a colleague, Richard Scofield, a gentleman of the old
American type, for his elegant tacitness.
This reticence had its infuriating aspects: The more a young
fellow-tutor wanted to be initiated into the deep lore we were
sure he possessed, the less forthcoming he was—sometimes, I
discovered, because he didn’t actually know, but more often because he was terminally disciple-proof; he would tolerantly respond to the admiring affection of beguiled students but would
not bind them to him by an inside teaching. It was part of that
soundness of his, which did have a Socratic look about it. His
most consequential discoveries fit, as I’ve said, into our own intellects as if there’d always been a place ready for them. Of
course, in time the insufficiencies emerged, not such as to undo
the insights, but such as to make them the center of a second sort
of attention, critical attention.
Playfulness, another Socratic element, is of the essence in
liberal learning—playfulness in making the most of the misfiring
of the inquiring intellect, playful exploitation of felicitous coincidences and other fortuities, playful extraction of sense from
nonsense, playful pinpointing of students’ personal ways—the
sort that feels to them not like offensive denigration but like gratifying spot-lighting. Playfulness, after all, goes with laughter, and
surprised laughter is the physical analogue to wonder, the beginning of philosophy. We young tutors, who had just emerged from
post-graduate studies, learned something wonderful: Learning
has a human face, and a teacher who can’t laugh, can’t be serious.
Seriousness is naturally next. Seriousness is opposed in one
respect to levity, for example a leaning some bright students
evince toward easily distractible intellectual gadgeteering. In another respect, seriousness is opposed to earnestness, dead earnestness, such as rigidly relentless industriousness. Both evade
entering into the “seriousness of the concept” (as Hegel terms it;
“Preface” 4, Phenomenology). “Seriousness” here means not be-
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laboring a thought but letting it work on you, not willfully grasping for insights but letting them come, by giving them room or—
as I like to put it—by futzing around. Time-taking patience and
messing-about belong to liberal learning, because these works
don’t open up to strategic invasions.
Serious teachers who join their students in dithering purposefully and procrastinating concentratedly must also sometimes appear in a formidable aspect. Socrates, for example, appears thus
formidable just once that I know of, though that leaves its daunting impression: When confronted with a young life going seriously wrong, here that of Callicles, he concludes with an
impassioned speech in a tone devoid of any tint of parity or playfulness: He says that he will follow his own account for a life of
virtue and bids Callicles and his crowd follow the same rationale
of conduct. “For,” he ends, “yours is worth nothing” (Gorgias,
end). On rare occasions I’ve heard that tone from Mr. Klein, a
tone utterly distinct from that of powerlessly querulous righteousness sometimes adopted by academics when great perturbations
are caused by small differences. These were moments when the
stakes were high—our students’ souls or our school’s survival,
particularly its resolute non-careerism—for this is, as I’ve said,
what the word “liberal” in “liberal education” originally betokens.
That brings me to the protection of the exchanges that are the
life of learning from dangers both within and without the classroom. Of these there are many, of which I’ll mention only one:
the corruption of conversation into debate, into argument, and
even into discussion, into all the modes of human communication
in which the passion of competition outweighs the desire for illumination. Mr. Klein practiced a pedagogy that incited in students the desire to shine but damped their impulse to outshine
each other. I think what made it work was his own sense that
some of the greatness of the works we were grappling with magnified us, but also that in the face of this grandeur our gradations,
natural or acquired, were minimized. But there was some kindly
cunning in it as well: to pretend in the face of much contrary evidence that everyone was genuinely at work and really up to it
and to keep pretending it until it—sometimes—came true.
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Perhaps I’ll mention one more vulnerability of any serious
community of young learners: the excitation of friendships
formed in the face of deep questions and difficult texts displaces
proper preparation and solid learning. For young teachers that
somewhat vacuous intensity wears out with time, but some of
our students do graduate having had more experience of the love
of learning than of learning. Characters like that hung around
Socrates, and, as I recall, Mr. Klein didn’t know what to do about
them either. However, to my mind there are worse ways to waste
one’s time.
I have not at all exhausted the pedagogical lessons that many
of my colleagues and I myself learned from Jacob Klein. Since I
can’t recall his ever mentioning to me a living model for himself,
this conclusion may be justified: What shaped the soundly ingenious scholar of intellectual history that he was in the first half of
his life, into the devoted teacher’s teacher of liberal learning that
he became in the second half, was a tiny college, St. John’s, with
an unadulterated program of liberal education, seated in the continent-wide American republic, with a continuous tradition of enabling liberty.—This half-European was as American as they
come.
I’ll finish with a little anecdote to show how Jasha was my
teacher and my model. When, after his death, Dodo was disposing of his library, she told me to take whatever I wanted. I was
simply paralyzed by the prospect of suddenly owning a lot of irreplaceable books. So I went minimal. I chose only his Greek
Plato in the Teubner and Oxford editions, multiple volumes,
falling apart with use and heavily underlined as well as annotated
in his tiny, legible script. Then, nearly two-score years ago, I
bound all the volumes up in a broad golden ribbon and never
looked inside them again until I was writing this talk. He would
have chuckled.
�On Negation: Other Possibilities in
Wallace Stevens’s Parts of a World
Jason Menzin
After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends.
—Wallace Stevens
“The Well Dressed Man with a Beard”
In three poems from Parts of a World (1942)1—“Of Modern Poetry,” “Landscape with Boat,” and “The Well Dressed Man with
a Beard”—Wallace Stevens reflects on the idea that poetry enables human life, and on the idea that the poet’s fictions can console us, compensating to some extent for the loss of older ideas
of order. This perspective is a shift in tone and sensibility from
the sharp irony, cool distance, and florid diction characteristic of
Harmonium (1923).2 Parts of a World seems to seek a solution
to the problem of Crispin in Harmonium’s “Comedian as the Letter C,” who is “washed away by magnitude,” overwhelmed by
the violence of untamed reality:
[Crispin] now beheld himself,
A skinny sailor peering in the sea-glass.
What word split up in clickering syllables
And storming under multitudinous tones
Was name for this short-shanks in all that brunt?
Crispin was washed away by magnitude.3
1. Wallace Stevens, Parts of a World (New York: Knopf, 1942).
2. Wallace Stevens, Harmonium (New York: Knopf, 1923).
3. Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Kermode
and Joan Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1997), 22.
Jason Menzin has taught philosophy at the Morrisey College of Arts
and Sciences, Boston College.
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“Of Modern Poetry” is a short, self-referential poem in the ars
poetica tradition. It enacts what it describes, pointing to itself at
its beginning and end:
The poem of the mind in the act of finding
What will suffice. It has not always had
To find: the scene was set; it repeated what
Was in the script.
Then the theatre was changed
To something else. Its past was a souvenir.
...
It must
Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may
Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman
Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.4
This “poem of the mind” is mainly the imaginative act of the poet
in the process of creating. But for Stevens, the poem of the mind
is also a more expansive metaphor for all imaginative activities,
from faith and philosophy to history, literature, and science. It
stands for all fictive acts, all human attempts to find coherence in
the chaos of the world outside themselves. “The act of finding /
What will suffice” is this imaginative project, which is rooted in
the need for order, meaning, beauty, joy, play, and pleasure.
The “Modern” in the poem’s title indicates that the imagination faces new challenges. Poetry must adapt to contemporary
needs. In the past, the mind “has not always had / To find” because “the scene was set”; it merely “repeated what / Was in the
script.” The poet could borrow freely from religious, philosophical, political, economic, moral, and artistic certainties. But the
script of a scriptwriter God not only controls reality’s radical contingency, it also constrains the imagination’s possibilities. God’s
scripted world unfolds from birth to death with logical, or at least
dramatically plausible, necessity among thoughts and feelings.
Belief in such a coherent narrative could once, perhaps, have provided a sense of stability.
4. Ibid., 218-19.
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But Stevens signals the transformation of the world with a
line break—“then the theater was changed”—suggestively enjambing “To something else.” The broken line mimics a fracture
in the world, while the enjambment underscores the urgency of
transitioning to a new order. The gap between the first and second
sections of the poem, across which the enjambment moves, mirrors the imaginative leap required if the poet is to cross from one
structure of meaning to another.
When the scene changes, the past becomes merely a “souvenir”—a stale memento—and the poet must renovate the theatre
of human meaning.5 For Stevens, the poet must step into the gap
of feeling and meaning created by the collapse of the old verities.
The imagination
. . . has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.
It has to face the men of the time and to meet
The women of the time. It has to think about war
And it has to find what will suffice.6
It cannot any longer repeat God’s script, but must meet the new
realities head-on, connect to contemporary people and places, even
“think about war.” It must leave Romanticism behind and search
out reality in plain language. “And it has to find what will suffice.”
But what is the sense of sufficiency? In essence, it is a response that matches a need. In physics, it is the equal and opposite reaction to an action. It is not, however, an answer or a final
resolution, but a reaction that reestablishes balance. It is, for a
time, enough.
“Of Modern Poetry” presents Stevens’s thinking about the
voice of the poet, written in Stevens’s own voice, without the eva5. William Butler Yeats described the same change of scene in his wellknown poem “The Second Coming,” in which “things fall apart” so
that “the centre cannot hold.” He compares this change of scene to the
fall from paradise, an apocalypse auguring a new creation. William
Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York: Scribner,
1996), 187.
6. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 218-19.
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sions of irony. The first lines of the poem are expressed in short
strokes with simple diction. The word it and its declined variations
occur fifteen times, and the whole of the piece lacks the sharp tone
in much of Harmonium. Despite the spare language, the governing
metaphor of the opening section is theatrics—plays and playing
in the theatre of the world. The image of poetry is a performance
before an audience. Play and performance run through the whole
poem, from a theatre with a set-scene, to an insatiable script-less
actor on stage, to a guitar-twanging metaphysician in the dark, to
a man skating, to a woman dancing. Play is part of a living being’s
response to the pressures of life, but it is also a self-sufficient act,
done for its own sake, a good in itself.
But if there is play, there is also work. And since “it,” the
mind of the poet, “has to find what will suffice” in a world where
“the theatre was changed,” the imagination must “construct a new
stage.”7 Stevens knows, as Nietzsche knew, that the death of God
means the loss of old givens. Several years after “Of Modern Poetry,” Stevens will echo Nietzsche, re-announcing that “the death
of one God is the death of all.”8 But Stevens also knows, with
Sartre, that human beings—and poets in particular—have the
artistic capacity to build a world out of their own experience. The
mind’s construction of a new stage is part of the poet’s construction of reality. This is Sartre’s existentialism compressed and
transmuted into the language of poetic creation.
Having constructed the new stage of poetic reality, Stevens
sets a single, long and complex sentence across the mid-point of
“Of Modern Poetry”:
It has to be on that stage,
And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and
With meditation, speak words that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., 329.
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Of which, an invisible audience listens,
Not to the play, but to itself, expressed
In an emotion as of two people, as of two
Emotions becoming one.9
The imaginative mind not only develops new forms through
which reality may be understood, it also, “like an insatiable
actor,” plays at playing a role, and speaks words to the world.
These are the two complementary halves of the poetic whole: a
created stage-world and a fictive performance. But as with the
woman singing by the sea at Key West, the relationship between
creator, creature, and spectator is not simple. And here Stevens
insists that the poet must speak carefully, “slowly and with meditation,” the words that suffice.
Stevens’s figure for sufficiency is consonance, like words
that rhyme: the echo of “ear” in “hear,” the repetition of “ear”
and “ear.” The sounds of rhyme, expectation and fulfillment, imitate the poem’s broader ability to satisfy a psychic need. It is first
the sound, not the sense, of his words that triggers a response in
the actor-poet’s invisible audience. It is the sound that prompts
the audience to turn inward, to feel an internal response, listening
“not to the play, but to itself.” This is the mystery of poetry. A
bridge of words, of sense and sound, emerging from nowhere and
crossing the gap between poet and audience. This is sufficiency,
a temporary unity of feeling, “expressed / In an emotion as of
two people, as of two / Emotions becoming one.” It is through
this unity, when it happens, that the poet changes the world.
Stevens not only fuses feelings—unifying people and emotions—but also transmutes the mind poetically. At the poem’s beginning, the mind is an actor in the world-as-theater. When “the
theater was changed,” the mind becomes an insatiable actor who
“has to be on that stage.” Then, allowing the analogy to disappear,
mind as actor becomes musical metaphysician. The fictive personae merge, echoing in poetic form the fusion of “two / Emotions
9. Ibid., 219.
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becoming one.” Actor-mind, now reconstituted as instrumentalist,
continues to make sounds:
The actor is
A metaphysician in the dark, twanging
An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives
Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly
Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend,
Beyond which it has no will to rise.10
In a poem about poetry, Stevens inserts an image of a philosopher, one who lacks a Platonic sun, lacks the light of reason—a
metaphysician making music in the dark. And the sounds that
issue from his guitar are sounds of the imagination.
But why does he “twang”? And why on one string instead of
several? Again, the sound of words first moves the audience toward emotion. “Twang” is sensibly onomatopoetic, vibrating in
the mouth as a string vibrates in the air. The single string reflects
his harmonization of distinctions; his music briefly unifies minds.
From the sounds of the wiry string a new formulation of “what
will suffice” emerges. Moments of “sudden rightnesses” flash
into existence and create a temporary equilibrium of feeling, a
womb-like sense of containment, a nearly unimaginable fullness
of satisfaction: “wholly / Containing the mind, below which it
cannot descend, / Beyond which it has no will to rise.” This is
not the permanence of a set-scene, nor the eternal verities of old
metaphysicians, but a moment of passing human integritas.
The poem closes with brief sketches of simple scenes from
human life:
It must
Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may
Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman
Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.11
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
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Gone is the metaphorical stage, the actor, and the musical metaphysician. What remain are simple figures of play and motion
and gentleness: “a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman /
Combing.” Prefiguring the tone in much of Stevens’s late poetry,
these are quiet, transient, and lonely images of sufficiency. Like
the poem itself, these are instances of what might suffice, “the
poem of the act of the mind.”
✢✢✢
Unlike his practice in much of Harmonium, Stevens employs
irony in Parts of a World not merely to mock, but also to clear
an imaginative space upon which to frame new possibilities.
“Landscape with Boat,” a poem with a painterly title about an
artist, reflects this development in Stevens’s ironic sensibility.
First published in the autumn of 1940, “Landscape with
Boat” has four main sections, each with its own distinct focus
and tone: the first, like the “Snow Man” of Harmonium, is largely
descriptive; the second is critical; the third revelatory; the fourth
calmly reflective. Moreover, the poem has two halves—the first
framing the life and art of an ascetic figure, the second exploring
the sense of other possibilities.
“Landscape with Boat” begins with a deceptively simple line:
An anti-master-man, floribund ascetic.
He brushed away the thunder, then the clouds,
Then the colossal illusion of heaven. Yet still
The sky was blue. He wanted imperceptible air.
He wanted to see. He wanted the eye to see
And not be touched by blue. He wanted to know,
A naked man who regarded himself in the glass
Of air, who looked for the world beneath the blue,
Without blue, without any turquoise hint or phase,
Any azure under-side or after-color. Nabob
Of bones, he rejected, he denied, to arrive
At the neutral center, the ominous element,
The single-colored, colorless, primitive.12
12. Ibid., 220.
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The opening—“An anti-master man, floribund ascetic”—is
a sentence fragment, an extended noun, a label, language that
might appear on a small card beneath a painting on the wall of a
museum. It signals the poem’s subject matter without incorporating the living action and motion of a verb. The syntax of this
phrase—the indefinite article, the negation, the missing verb—
hints at the meaning of the figure Stevens has introduced. The
anti-master man is defined in part by inversion. He is by being
what he is not. He is neither Nietzsche’s master man nor Hitler’s;
he is not even the anti-master man. He is merely an indefinite
“an.” But he is also a “floribund ascetic.” “Floribund,” a neologism, clearly suggests “florid,” probably also “abundant,” and
therefore forms an oxymoron with “ascetic.”13 Although “floribund” is not a word in English, floribunda, “many-flowering” in
Latin, is a species of rose popularized at the 1939 World’s Fair.
With some or all of this in mind, Stevens characterizes the antimaster man as an ironic paradox of empty-fullness, a man of selfdenial and roses.
But what is this floribund ascetic? He is an artist, a peculiar
abstractionist, who removes elements from a painted canvas: “He
brushed away the thunder, then the clouds, / Then the colossal illusion of heaven.” This painter is both poetic imaginer as well as
ambiguously broom-brush-wielding artist. Thunder is sound, not
shape. The illusion of heaven is idea, not image. Neither can literally be “brushed away.” But the ascetic artist does brush them
away, removing both the real and the imagined sky, the thunder
and clouds as well as heaven, the stale ideas of order and coherence lost to the modern world. This inverse painting, the brushing
of negation, is a necessarily imperfect, incompletable process.
The painter who removes all color from a canvas ceases to produce painting. This ultimate abstractionist would succeed in his
end only by failing as an artist. And just so, despite his brushing
13. In “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” Stevens disaggregates this
fusion, in “happy fecundity, flor-abundant force” (Collected Poetry
and Prose, 336).
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away, “Yet still / The sky was blue.” The ascetic may succeed in
removing images and ideas, but he cannot brush away the blue
of the imagination.
But who is this anti-master man, this floribund ascetic? Is
this Stevens himself? The rich connoisseur of food and art and
flowers and books, living alone in a small upstairs room at home
in Connecticut? Is he the idea of a modern artist, a poet-painter
who denies the world and life to achieve a truth beyond the real?
Is it an echo of Nietzsche’s conception of the ascetic? A mockery
and critique of the poet? A critique of critique?
What is this abstractionist trying to do? What does he want?
What does it mean to take blue away from the imagination? Like
a refigured image of the earlier “snow man” of Harmonium, the
abstractionist tends toward negation and nothingness. He must,
in other words, “have a mind of winter” and “have been cold a
long time”14 to want “imperceptible air,” to want to see with a
single, cyclopean “eye” and not be touched by the blueness of
feeling and imagination. He would see with Homer’s monster’s
eye, without the depth of emotion, without color, half-blind, in
an almost perspective-less perspective without human sense—
an urge not for the chaos of senseless nonsense but for the bare,
“naked” barrenness of non-sense. He is also, perhaps, a figure
for the twentieth-century physicist, peeling back the surface of
both the world and the mind to find a colorless absence as the ultimate object beneath. Or, more comically, he is the poet carried
away by critique and the poetic reassessment of old ideas of coherence. He is Stevens critiquing himself and his own poems
about poetry, parodying the act of tossing too many things onto
the dump heap.15
This ascetic artist, a figure of negation, is “Nabob / Of bones,”
a non-man, shorn of everything but his internal frame. “He rejected, he denied,” brushing away his painting, his world, and his
14. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 8.
15. Cf. Stevens’s poem “The Man on the Dump,” Collected Poetry
and Prose, 184-86.
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self, in an effort “to arrive / At the neutral center, the ominous element.” The danger of this kind of abstraction is acute. It turns a
man into a skeleton, pulls clouds from the sky, rejects, denies,
and destroys. It is the search for the “ominous” center, something
non-human, sub-human, and impossible: “The single colored,
colorless primitive.” The primitive, like the artist’s “eye,” is singular, so that the form of the seeker here matches the form of the
thing sought. It, like the artist figured in the poem’s opening line,
is oxymoronic, colored colorlessness, and, like the artist himself,
is a thing of negation, neither this, nor that, but “neutral.”
It was not as if the truth lay where he thought,
Like a phantom, in an uncreated night.
It was easier to think it lay there. If
It was nowhere else, it was there and because
It was nowhere else, its place had to be supposed,
Itself had to be supposed, a thing supposed
In a place supposed, a thing that he reached
In a place that he reached, by rejecting what he saw
And denying what he heard. He would arrive.
He had only not to live, to walk in the dark,
To be projected by one void into
Another.16
This unsympathetic, comic-tragic figure’s effort fails, however, because lifeless life is not life but death, which is the end
of possibilities: “It was not as if the truth lay where he thought, /
Like a phantom, in an uncreated night.” There is finally no colorless color to find, no human experience beyond human feeling
and human thought. Unreality, however, does not prevent its supposition. The abstractionist is not only ascetic, but also paradoxically floribund. He seeks a truth beyond the imagination by
means of supposing, by imagining. And within Stevens’s poetics,
this seeming inconsistency makes perfect sense, since “the absence of the imagination had / Itself to be imagined.”17
16. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 220.
17. Cf. “The Plain Sense of Things,” in Collected Poetry and Prose, 428.
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Hypothetically, if the truth beyond the imagination were
“nowhere else,” then it would be “there.” But this truth is not
only not the twice-repeated “nowhere else,” it is also not even
“there.” It is non-truth. It is only “nowhere” because it is an experience of nothing. The negated, brushed away world and the
mind of ultimate rejection and denial does not exist. Or, if this
non-truth does exist, it has no sense for the living human being.
It would be “a thing that he reached / In a place that he reached,
by rejecting what he saw / And denying what he heard.” Nevertheless, Nabob perseveres in his efforts; despite obstacles and
impossibilities, “He would arrive.” But at what ridiculous,
tragic cost: “He had only not to live, to walk in the dark.” Perhaps the floribund ascetic is not only florid and abundant, but
also florid and moribund, flowery and dead, since his is a poetics of death.
In a remarkable use of enjambment, Stevens both uncovers
the heart of the ascetic painter-poet and figures his inevitable
end, explaining that Nabob had only “To be projected by one
void into / Another.” At the exact mid-point of the poem, a position which here signals the ascetic’s central emptiness, he is projected by one void—himself—into the blankness of the
unfinished sentence at the end of the poetic line. He is thrown
into the nothingness beyond the poem, a senseless non-existence
beyond human meaning. Strongly paralleling the “nothing” of
the “Snow Man” in Harmonium, the ascetic is projected by one
void, the nothing that he is, into another void, the nothing of the
non-world that he seeks.18
Had Stevens concluded the poem at this point, it would
merely be an ironic recasting of the “snow man” into the figure
of an inhuman poet-artist—from snow man to no man. The continuation of the poem reveals an important aspect of Stevens’s
poetic development.
The third section opens with a continued reflection on the ascetic artist in much the same tone as before:
18. Cf. again “The Snow Man,” in Collected Poetry and Prose, 8.
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It was his nature to suppose,
To receive what others had supposed, without
Accepting. He received what he denied.
But as truth to be accepted, he supposed
A truth beyond all truths.19
These five lines form a bridge between the second and third sections of the poem. They recapitulate the opening half of the poem,
reminding the reader of the abstractionist’s practice of un-painting. The metaphor of brushing away images is here made plain—
the ascetic artist receives ideas and images from “others”
“without accepting” them, supposing without believing, inheriting and denying his inheritance. Nabob is a figure of critique,
whose only affirmative supposition is “a truth beyond all truths,”
a nothing-truth of emptiness, a metaphysics of non-.
Stevens uses repetition in the bridge-section to create expectation and emotional force. The empty suppositions of the ascetic,
reiterated by the repetition of “suppose” in the five lines of the
bridge passage, are finally overwhelmed by a new supposing, the
powerful revelation of other possibilities of life through creative
figuring:
He never supposed
That he might be truth, himself, or part of it,
That the things that he rejected might be part
And the irregular turquoise, part, the perceptible blue
Grown denser, part, the eye so touched, so played
Upon by clouds, the ear so magnified
By thunder, parts, and all these things together,
Parts, and more things, parts.20
With a complete shift in poetic tone, Stevens undoes the ascetic artist’s opening act of de-creation. The return of the world,
with language that feels like air and sunlight overwhelming desolation, is beyond the abstractionist’s supposing. And although
carefully couched in the subjunctive “might” and the conditional
19. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 220.
20. Ibid., 220-21.
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“if,” the feeling of these lines, especially as it contrasts with the
sense of a world brushed away in the poem’s first half, contains
romantic—nearly biblical—force. The negating ascetic, of
course, “never supposed / That he might be truth, or part of it.”
And with the pulse-like repetition of “part,” Stevens brings back
the parts of a world brushed away by the ascetic in the poem’s
opening section. Stevens brings back the “turquoise tint”—now
“irregular”; the “blue”—now no longer the “imperceptible air”
of the ascetic, but “perceptible,” “grown denser”; the “clouds”—
now playful on the eye; the “thunder”—now magnifying the ear.
The painting of the poem’s opening has been restored, renewed,
with all but the “colossal illusion of heaven” reinstated. And
even that illusion, perhaps necessarily left off the canvas in
modernity, is transmuted in a second and final, restorative supposition:
He never supposed divine
Things might not look divine, nor that if nothing
Was divine then all things were, the world itself,
And that if nothing was the truth, then all
Things were the truth, the world itself was the truth.21
Echoing “Sunday Morning,”22 where divinity lives within the self
and within scenes of earthly emotion, this second supposition
projects the possibility of a new kind of divinity. Here the ascetic
is inverted. The thing sought is not nothing, but everything: the
world itself, the parts of a whole. This everything is not under
the canvas, not beneath the blue, or beyond, but here and now
and as things actually are. As in the flight of the angel in “Notes
Toward a Supreme Fiction” and that poem’s “expressible bliss,”
here differences are collapsed, like a mystical epiphany, and truth
is seen everywhere.23
But surely this goes too far. Stevens’s skepticism and his poetics of sufficiency is not a poetics of totality. And indeed, all of
21. Ibid., 221.
22. Ibid., 53-56.
23. Ibid., 349.
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this would be too sentimental, too romantic for belief, if not for
the qualifying conditionals, the uncertainty of “might,” the indefiniteness of “suppose.” These are not assertions of certainty,
but expressions of possibilities, contrapuntal potentialities to the
ascetic artist’s negations. Yet even these evasions fit into the orchestrated whole of Stevens’s own poem. This suggests, if only
obliquely, that the two abstractions—one of negation, one of totality—are not equally plausible or equally human.
In “Landscape with Boat,” artistic repetition, not mere repetitiousness, signals the potential for actual order—both in the
poem and in the world. Even as “suppose” is repeated several
times in this section, the word “he” is repeated seven times in the
opening section, “it” eight times in the second, and “part” seven
times in the third. After the repetition of “it” in the second section,
“he” is repeated six times. Before the repetition of “part” in the
third, “he” is again repeated six times. These symmetries of repetition provide cohesion to the poem both in sense and sound.
They are like a pulse within the poem, from the ascetic “he” to
the non-truth of “it” to the revelatory “part.” The existence of
these parts of the poem themselves enact the “parts” described
within the poem. If artistically shaped patterns, structures of poetic repetition, point to the possibility of parts in the world, then
there may be a concordance between poem and cosmos. The
poem may make possible a belief in the possibility of parts, a belief in the possibility of a whole defined not by inversion but by
life itself.
Within the shape of this whole, Stevens completes the poem
with a reflective voice, moving into the warmth of sunlight, air,
and water. He ends with a “better” supposing, a life of motion
and sound and warmth:
Had he been better able to suppose:
He might sit on a sofa on a balcony
Above the Mediterranean, emerald
Becoming emeralds. He might watch the palms
Flap green ears in the heat. He might observe
A yellow wine and follow a steamer’s track
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And say, “The thing I hum appears to be
The rhythm of this celestial pantomime.”24
Here, with the appearance of the steamer’s track, is a refreshed
“Landscape with Boat”—not the landscape brushed away by the
abstractionist, but a rich place, an image of what might be, of
what “might . . . might . . . might” be, of possible poetry and possible life. Here in the south of Europe a better painter, a man alive
to the scene before him, sits at rest on a sofa on a balcony overlooking the play of light and water on the Mediterranean. Unlike
the abstractionist—a void becoming void—this artist, like the sea
before him, is perhaps an “emerald / Becoming emeralds,” the
green jewels that are the parts of reality. This greater artist observes rather than destroys, and, instead of brushing away thunder
and clouds, watches palms flap leaves like green ears that can
hear a world in the warm air. This possible poet observes the liquid pleasure of wine and the liquid of the sea. He sees in the water
a “steamer’s track,” a relic of motion, a hint of the boat of the
poem’s title, an affirmation that this moment itself, this lived moment from the balcony above the sea, is the landscape with boat.
In the midst of this renewed world, the poet reflects in spoken
words on the sense of his own poetry: “The thing I hum appears
to be the rhythm of this celestial pantomime.” In harmony with
the poetics of the poem’s second half, this better poet feels his
poetry fitting into the rhythm of the world. He feels the rhythm
of his own language to be a sound of concord, a thing that might
reflect the greater poetry of a cosmos of moving parts.
✢ ✢ ✢
In “The Well Dressed Man with a Beard,” another short poem
with a painterly title, Stevens continues to work through themes
and ideas from “Of Modern Poetry” and “Landscape with Boat.”
Unlike the latter poem, however, with its two distinct halves,
“The Well Dressed Man with a Beard” consists of a body and
tail, a single stanza of sixteen lines and a one-line coda.
24. Ibid., 221
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After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends.
No was the night. Yes is this present sun.
If the rejected things, the things denied,
Slid over the western cataract, yet one,
One only, one thing that was firm, even
No greater than a cricket’s horn, no more
Than a thought to be rehearsed all day, a speech
Of the self that must sustain itself on speech,
One thing remaining, infallible, would be
Enough. Ah! douce campagna of that thing!
Ah! douce campagna, honey in the heart,
Green in the body, out of a petty phrase,
Out of a thing believed, a thing affirmed:
The form on the pillow humming while one sleeps,
The aureole above the humming house . . .
It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.25
On initial reading, the negative conclusion of the poem’s
coda seems strangely paired with the humming affirmations that
end the main stanza. Perhaps a closer examination can help clarify the relationship between the coda and the whole.
The opening line is a compressed version of the two halves
of “Landscape with Boat,” in which the first half involves the
negations of the ascetic artist, while the second half makes affirmations that re-create the world. Similarly, this poem begins with
the recognition of a “no,” before moving to the affirmation of a
“yes”: “After the final no there comes a yes / And on that yes the
future world depends.” This sentence is obscure because “no”
and “yes” are not responses to particular questions, but instead
they express psychological polarities or even cosmic antitheses.
The “final no” is the end. It is death, rejection, perfection, and
apocalypse. This final no echoes the artistic purpose of the ascetic
painter-poet in the earlier poem. Here again, the “no” is not
merely an ironic negation, but rather an idea that clears the
ground for something else and greater—a “yes.”26
25. Ibid., 224.
26. Cf. the final line of Joyce’s Ulysses.
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Once the last “no” is spoken or thought, there is not nothing,
not silence, but the advent of a Christ-like “yes.” This “yes” is
the actuality of affirmation beyond negation. It is the basis of a
whole “future world.” “No” is the night, the absence of the world
in sleep; “yes” is the sun, the light of seeing, the world seen, the
imagination’s possibilities. “No was,” in the negation of past time
and non-existence, while “yes is” in the actuality of the evanescent present.
The long, dense conditional sentence that follows contains the
poem’s central imagery and points to the possibilities of a “yes.”
As in “Of Modern Poetry,” Stevens is again in search of what will
suffice—here the possibility of finding one thing that “would be /
Enough.” The skeleton of this sentence—“If the rejected things
slid over the western cataract, one thing remaining would be
enough”—echoes the structure of the poem’s opening line: from
no to yes. The protasis opens with negation—“the rejected things,
the things denied”—while the apodosis points to the potential for
something more, something “remaining,” that is sufficient. This
pattern, in small, suggests the whole of “Landscape with Boat,”
the possibility of moving from abstract negation to discovering
meaning to reclaiming a whole world. Stevens emphasizes the
conclusion of the apodosis through enjambment in the last line,
pointing from the potentiality of “would be” to the sufficiency of
a suggestively lonely “enough.”
Water passing over a cataract is an irreversible moment of
loss. The “western cataract” is the poem’s own “final no.” It is
the horizon of the setting sun, a spatialization of death. Like the
musty theatre from the opening of “Of Modern Poetry,” the rejected things that pass beyond are exhausted fictions, empty ideas
incapable of engendering meaning in the modern heart. But if not
every idea slides over the western cataract, if—in a remarkable
quadruple expression of singularity—“one, / One only, one thing”
should remain, then that “would be / Enough.” Even if the one
thing were physically infinitesimal, “no greater than a cricket’s
horn,” even if the one thing were intellectually insignificant, “no
more / Than a thought to be rehearsed all day,” it would be enough
because it would be something.
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The one thing, no matter how small, that survives the
decimation of time is actual and therefore powerful. The cricket’s
horn suggests both small size and enormous sound wholly
disproportionate to the insect’s physical magnitude. This
disproportion indicates the power of the one thing preserved from
the cataract’s eclipse. “[N]o more / than a thought,” rehearsed in
the mind (as if for a play on the stage in “Of Modern Poetry”),
the one thing remaining points to a passage on repetition in
“Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”:
A thing final in itself and, therefore, good:
One of the vast repetitions final in
Themselves and, therefore, good.27
The one thing, rehearsed and repeated, final in itself, is poetic expression, the power of words to change the world. Echoing the
actor and the metaphysician in “Of Modern Poetry,” both of whom
use sound to move their audiences, the thing that suffices here is
“a speech / Of the self that must sustain itself on speech.” As much
as bread and water, the right words may sustain life.28
To complement the “better” supposing in the second half of
“Landscape with Boat,” here the idea that something might
survive oblivion provides pleasure, even to the point of eliciting
exclamations. The “douce campagna” blends with the sweetness
of “honey in the heart” and the vigorous receptivity of “green in
the body.” This is a place of peace and pleasure brought on by
words that are enough. The “douce campagna” is a dream-like
belief, “a thing affirmed,” a ghostly energy humming in the
night—like crickets—where the human being sleeps and dwells.
But what is the meaning of the coda, “It can never be satisfied, the mind, never”? Is Stevens undercutting the possibility of
encountering and experiencing the “douce campagna”? Is this an
27. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 350.
28. Cf. the final stanza of “Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction”: “How
simply the fictive hero becomes the real; / How gladly with proper
words the soldier dies, / If he must, or lives on the bread of faithful
speech.” Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 352.
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anti-romantic backlash against the apparent sentimentality of the
poem? Is this the speech that ends possibilities? As with the conditionals and evasions in the revelatory third section of “Landscape with Boat,” it is reasonable to remember that Stevens
disdains the falsifying voice of naïve idealism. But perhaps there
is also more. Perhaps the coda is itself an instance of the “final
no” from the opening line of the poem. Perhaps the one thing that
survives the “western cataract” is the poem itself or the “petty
phrase” that is the poem’s opening line. By the poetic logic of
“The Well Dressed Man with a Beard,” after the “final no” there
comes a “yes.” And if this is true, then the reader must feel the
inevitability of an as-yet-unspoken “yes” coming after the
poem’s final “never.” If the opening line is to be believed, then
the end of the poem is not the end. Despite the emphatic negations “never . . . never,” which point to the impossibility of permanent satisfaction, “yes” implies an unending process of poetic
refiguring, a never-ending poetic response to a never-ending
human need for something real.
✢✢✢
Stevens’s shifting usage of terms of negation is a critical clue to
a change in his poetic sensibility between the publications of
Harmonium and Parts of a World. In Harmonium, negation is
characterized, on the one hand, by desolation, as in the impossibly icy mind of a snow man who, “nothing himself, beholds /
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is,”29 and, on the
other hand, by the half-mockery of Mon Oncle’s opening address,
in which “[t]here is not nothing, no, no, never nothing, / Like the
clashed edges of two words that kill.”30 But in Parts of a World,
despite the apparent similarity of expression, negation begets new
and potentially endless possibilities. In “Of Modern Poetry,”
“sudden rightnesses” create an emotional space for the mind
“below which it cannot descend, / Beyond which it has no will
to rise,”31 signalling not the inability of the mind to progress, but
29. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 8.
30. Ibid., 10.
31. Ibid., 219.
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the temporary bliss of sufficiency. In “Landscape with Boat,” the
ascetic “never supposed / That he might be truth,”32 signalling
not another layer of artistic demolition, but the opening of a new
vista on life. And in “The Well Dressed Man with a Beard,” that
“it can never be satisfied, the mind, never,”33 signals not the end,
but the never-ending need for poetry. “Never” and “not” and
“no” in Parts of a World signify affirmation rather than despondency. They point away from the precipice of the “western
cataract” and toward the solid ground of meaning, feeling, and
expression offered by a supreme fiction.34
32. Ibid., 220.
33. Ibid., 224.
34. The difference in Stevens’s understanding of negation in Harmonium and Parts of a World might well be compared to the final “no” in
Rev. 6:8 (“And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat
on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given
unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with
hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth”) and the “yes”
of a future cosmos in Rev. 21:1 (“And I saw a new heaven and a new
earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there
was no more sea”).
�“The Student,” by Anton Chekhov:
A Story Told and Glanced At
Louis Petrich
We students take our pleasure in stories. We students love stories
that lift us to the light of meaning and fill us with confidence to
face life’s elements on friendly terms. We are nevertheless engaged in a precarious undertaking. The meaning and strength we
obtain may be shared and the stories proclaimed universal; or they
may be unshared—opposed to each other—their stories indeterminate and parochial. In this second case the meaning and strength
that we happen to find may appear to others as the desperate attempts of a literate organism to keep its skin warm and its way lit
in the local cold and dark. It may not be possible to tell the difference in truth between these two kinds of meaning and strength.
I would like to tell you a story now, written in 1894 by Anton
Chekhov, called “The Student.” It is a multi-layered story, but
very short—about three and a half pages—taking twelve minutes
to tell. If you are reading this lecture, please try to hear the words
of the story, here included, as if they were being told to you for
the very first time.
∽
The Student
Anton Chekhov1
The weather was fair at first and still. The blackbirds were calling and
a creature in the nearby swamps plaintively hooting as if blowing into
1. Translated by Michael Heim. Used by the kind permission of The Estate of
Michael Heim.
Louis Petrich is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, where this lecture
was first delivered on November 3, 2017. It is dedicated to Amy Kass (19402015) and her husband, Leon (b. 1939). Like many others, the author was a student in their light of reflection for some years.
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an empty bottle. A woodcock flew past, and a shot boomed out merrily
in the spring air. But when the woods grew dark, an inauspiciously cold,
piercing wind blew in from the east, and silence fell. Needles of ice
stretched over the puddles, and the woods became disagreeable, godforsaken, hostile. Winter was in the air.
Ivan Velikopolsky, a seminary student and deacon’s son, was on
his way home from a hunt, following a path through a water meadow.
His fingers were numb, and his face burned in the wind. He felt that the
sudden blast of cold had violated the order and harmony of things, that
nature herself was terrified and so the dark of evening had come on
more quickly than necessary. Desolation was everywhere, and it was
somehow particularly gloomy. The only light came from the widows’
vegetable gardens by the river; otherwise everything far and wide, all
the way to the village four versts off, was submerged in the cold evening
mist. The student remembered that when leaving the house he had seen
his mother sitting barefoot on the floor in the entryway polishing the
samovar and his father lying on the stove coughing. It was Good Friday,
so cooking was forbidden and he was terribly hungry.2 And now,
stooped with the cold, he thought how the same wind had blown in the
days of Rurik and Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great3 and there had
been the same crippling poverty and hunger, the same leaky thatched
roofs and benighted, miserable people, the same emptiness everywhere
and darkness and oppressive grief, and all these horrors had been and
were and would be and even the passing of a thousand years would
make life no better. And he had no desire to go home.
The gardens were called the widows’ gardens because they were
tended by two widows, mother and daughter. The crackling fire gave
off great heat and lit up the surrounding plowlands. The widow Vasilisa, a tall, plump old woman wearing a man’s sheepskin coat, stood
nearby, staring into it pensively; her daughter Lukerya, who was short,
pockmarked, and had a slightly stupid face, sat on the ground washing
a pot and spoons. They must have just finished supper. Men’s voices
came up from the river, local farmhands watering their horses.
“Well, winter’s back,” said the student, going up to the fire.
“Hello there.”
2. The Lenten fast that lasts for forty days calls for varying degrees of abstinence
from meat, dairy, fish, olive oil, and alcohol; on Good Friday, the somber anniversary of Christ’s crucifixion, Orthodox Christians observe the strictest fast
of the year and are meant to eat nothing at all.
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Vasilisa started but then saw who he was and put on a welcoming
smile.
“I didn’t recognize you,” she said. “God be with you and make you
rich.”
They talked. Vasilisa had been in the world: she had worked for
the gentry first as a wet nurse and later as a nanny, and she had a dainty
way of speaking and a gentle, stately smile that never left her lips; her
daughter Lukerya, a product of the village and her husband’s beatings,
merely squinted at the student in silence with the strange look of a deafmute.
“Peter the Apostle4 warmed himself at a fire just like this on one
cold night,” the student said, holding out his hands to the flames. “It
was cold then too. And oh, what a terrible night it was. An exceedingly
long and doleful night.”
He looked around at the darkness, gave his head a convulsive
shake, and said, “You’ve been to the Twelve Apostles service,5 haven’t
you?”
“I have,” Vasilisa responded.
“Remember when Peter says to Jesus during the Last Supper,6 ‘I
am ready to go with thee, both into prison, and to death’ and the Lord
says, ‘I tell thee, Peter, the cock shall not crow this day, before that
thou shalt thrice deny that thou knowest me’? When the supper was
over, Jesus, grieving unto death, prayed in the garden, and poor Peter,
weary of soul and weak, his eyes heavy, could not fight off sleep. And
sleep he did. Later that night Judas kissed Jesus and betrayed him to
3. Rurik: semi-legendary Viking hero of the Russian Primary Chronicle (1200),
who conquered in the ninth century and whose dynasty ruled the area occupied
by Kievan Rus until the sixteenth century. Ivan the Terrible: Grand Prince of
Moscow 1533-84, first ruler to be crowned Tsar, feared for his power and traditionally associated with cruelty. Peter the Great: Peter I, Tsar 1682-1725, first
to assume title of emperor; most famous for his efforts to modernize Russia by
westernizing it.
4. One of Jesus’s twelve original apostles, who plays a large role in the Gospel
events.
5. Twelve Apostles: Also called “Twelve Gospels” or the “Lord’s Passion”; the
service conducted on the evening of Holy Thursday consisting of twelve readings drawn from all four Gospels, leading up to and including the Crucifixion.
The passages Ivan cites are a combination of verses from Luke 22, John 18,
and Matthew 26.
6. The final meal Jesus shares with the twelve apostles just before he is taken
into custody and crucified.
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his torturers. He was bound and taken off to the high priest and beaten
while Peter—exhausted (he’d hardly slept, after all), plagued by anguish and trepidation, sensing something dreadful was about to happen
on earth—watched from afar . . . He loved him passionately, to distraction, and could now see them beating him . . .”
Lukerya laid down the spoons and trained her fixed gaze on the
student.
“Having arrived at the high priest’s house,” he continued, “they
began questioning Jesus, and the servants kindled a fire in the midst of
the courtyard, for it was cold and they wished to warm themselves. And
Peter stood at the fire with them, and he too warmed himself, as I am
doing now. And a certain maid saw him and said, ‘This man was also
with Jesus,’ meaning that he too should be taken for questioning. And
all the servants standing by the fire must have looked at him with suspicion and severity because he grew flustered and said, ‘I know him
not.’ And when shortly thereafter another recognized him as one of
Jesus’ disciples, saying, ‘Thou art also of them,’ he again denied it. Then
a third time someone turned to him and said, ‘Was it not thou I saw with
him in the garden today?’ and he denied it a third time, whereupon the
cock immediately crew, and Peter, gazing from afar at Jesus, recalled
the words he had said to him at supper . . . And having recalled them,
he pulled himself together, left the courtyard, and shed bitter, bitter
tears. The Gospel says: ‘And Peter went out, and wept bitterly.’ I can
picture it now: the garden, all still and dark, and a muffled, all but inaudible sobbing in the stillness . . . “
The student sighed and grew pensive. Still smiling, Vasilisa suddenly burst into sobs herself, and tears, large and abundant, rolled down
her cheeks, and she shielded her face from the fire as if ashamed of
them, and Lukerya, her eyes still fixed on the student, flushed, and the
look on her face grew heavy and tense like that of a person holding back
great pain.
The farmhands were returning from the river, and one of them, on
horseback, was close enough so that the firelight flickered over him.
The student bade the widows good-night and moved on. And again it
was dark, and his hands began to freeze. A cruel wind was blowing—
winter had indeed returned—and it did not seem possible that the day
after next would be Easter.
The student’s thoughts turned to Vasilisa: if she wept, it meant the
things that happened to Peter on that terrible night had some relevance
for her . . .
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He glanced back. The lone fire glimmered peacefully in the dark,
and there were no longer any people near it. Again he thought that if
Vasilisa wept and her daughter was flustered then clearly what he’d just
told them about events taking place nineteen centuries earlier was relevant to the present—to both women and probably to this backwater
village, to himself, and to everyone on earth. If the old woman wept, it
was not because he was a moving storyteller but because Peter was
close to her and her whole being was concerned with what was going
on in Peter’s soul.
And all at once he felt a stirring of joy in his soul and even paused
for a moment to catch his breath. The past, he thought, is tied to the
present in an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of the other.
And he felt he had just seen both ends of that chain: he had touched one
end and the other had moved.
And when ferrying across the river and later climbing the hill he
gazed at his native village and to the west of it, where a narrow strip of
cold, crimson twilight still shone, he kept thinking of how the truth and
beauty guiding human life back there in the garden and the high priest’s
courtyard carried on unceasingly to this day and had in all likelihood
and at all times been the essence of human life and everything on earth,
and a feeling of youth, health, strength—he was only twenty-two—and
an ineffably sweet anticipation of happiness, unknown and mysterious,
gradually took possession of him, and life appeared wondrous, marvelous, and filled with lofty meaning.
∽
So what should we do now? Is the story not sufficient in its
telling? The student glances back to see if meaning adheres to
what his listeners outwardly felt by that fire. Let us do that, we
movers-on: glance back with me to the outward-looking first
paragraph, and let us creatively accompany the author as we wonder about felt meanings.
The weather was fair at first and still. I wonder why authors
bother to describe the weather. Is it merely to assist our imaginations in making the story seem vividly real? Or does the weather,
as banal a subject as they come, determine our recognition of
things, profoundly, not merely superficially? We like it to remain
fair, but we know it always changes, never quite predictably, like
lines of verse that obey a form but surprise us at each step. Any
attempt to describe the weather must therefore be qualified with
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Chekhov’s: “at first.” The word “still” that follows “at first” and
earns its momentary stop is a favorite of his. It captures the punctual motion and rest that we would feel as hearers of his musically
made stories if we knew Russian. The weather, when “still,” feels
poised, self-same, and we can almost rest our hope in its authorized continuity. But this lovely stillness, because it is “at first,”
feels ready to tip over, betray its promises, despoil its fair face,
and move unplotted toward no home of rest. So begins the story
Chekhov called his most perfect. Perfection lacks nothing, contains everything that belongs to its life and form. For a story to
be perfect, should it not be the first story told, yet poised to bend,
alter, and pour itself out as someone else’s?
The blackbirds were calling and a creature in the nearby
swamps plaintively hooting as if blowing into an empty bottle.
There is, at first, a “calling” sound, and we recognize the
source—blackbirds, but Chekhov does not tell us the meaning of
their calling. Shall we tell ourselves as co-authors that they are
calling each other to fulfill the wondrous and marvelous biological yearning to make life on earth reproduce itself always and
everywhere? It is good to recognize a call out there and feel uplifted by strong purposes, rather than to face the silence of nothing or the cacophony of chaos. At the center of this story is the
call of a particular bird at a precise time. It is not uplifting to its
intended hearer, at first.
Appearing second in this sentence, without even a comma of
pause (so quickly the weather changes), is a hooting sound of
complaint from some unknown “creature,” implying a creator if
we take the word literally. (Do you take the word “creature” literally? I shall answer that for myself, at least, at the end.) The
hooting sound, issuing from nearby swamps, places of growth
and decay, reminds the storyteller of the blowing one makes into
an empty bottle, the origin of music and poetry, perhaps. It reminds me that the pains of creaturely life must be relieved, for
even the righteous who survive the floods of annihilation take to
emptying the bottle afterwards, as the Bible tells, whose story of
creation begins with an almighty poetic blowing upon the original
chaos and emptiness. Calls to life and complaints of death that
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sound together in a chord: take them as the telltale sounding of
this particular author, Chekhov. Do the birds and other creatures
display the signs of a certain kind of author? I shall answer that
as well, twice over, in proper time.
A woodcock flew past, and a shot boomed out merrily in the
spring air. Another bird is recognized in the atmosphere of
spring: a cock of the woods, now here—boom!—now gone. Supper is being provided with that merry shot. The hunter may now
go home to fulfill family desires and rest.
But when the woods grew dark, an inauspiciously cold,
piercing wind blew in from the east, and silence fell. The
weather changes, as we knew it would, and the former blowing
into bottled emptiness to make sounding motion arise from stillness, now pierces to silence the calling birds of spring. Darkness
spreads its cold wings. That supper of woodcock may be the last,
for some time.
Needles of ice stretched over the puddles, and the woods
became disagreeable, godforsaken, hostile. Winter was in the
air. The puddles of swamp, from which life, they say, arises,
adapts to air, and returns at last to mud are now become icy needles to sting and pierce the touch. Who is responsible for the infliction of sharp pain on sensory life? He whose breath once
hovered over the empty deep and spoke things into being from
nothing by naming them has forsaken the woods, and the air of
speech belongs to the winter wind. Whose name is pronounced
from out of that disagreeable, hostile air?
The name we hear at once, at the start of the next sentence
of a new paragraph, is “Ivan.” This name is common in Russian
history and literature, but there is one Ivan among them all who
is particularly relevant (note that word, please).7 Ivan Karamazov
faces the question of whether to stay close to home to protect his
dissolute father from the threat of murder. Ivan Karamazov, after
much deliberation, decides not to remain near home, and thus he
is complicit in his father’s murder. By denying practical relation
7. Chekhov often instigates comparison with his literary masters, in this
case, Dostoevsky, author of The Brothers Karamazov (1880).
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to a person existentially connected to him, he negates the existence of that person and puts his own in question. Ivan Velikopolsky faces the same question: whether to return home to a father
coughing his life away on the stove while his mother sits barefoot
on the dirty floor polishing the samovar, or to leave them there,
cold and stooping in the dust.8
While we are at it, let us consider the names of the two widows. Vasilisa is a common Russian name found in fairy tales for
a peasant or housekeeper who by elevation of marriage becomes
a princess (think Cinderella). Our Vasilisa has imitated her storied
namesakes by working among the gentry, learning to speak daintily, and smiling in a stately fashion determined to live happily
ever after. The thought of her, by name, makes the despairing student turn back to the fire at which she stared, the light of which
inspires his spiritual elevation. But by its connection to a character whose storied smiles turn to sobs, his elevation by that light
is associated in our minds with fairy tales.
Let us pause over the image of light to do a little theology,
shall we? Recall that in the beginning of John’s Gospel, the light
goes unrecognized by the world, though the world came to be
through that light, and the dark never masters it. To those who
do see the light, there is given the right to become children of
God, not born of the “fleshly desire of a human father, but offspring of God himself.”9 This is elevation to an absolute love
and happiness of the highest order. Is this elevation by means of
the light, seen and recognized, a fairy tale? It ends, true enough,
with “a narrow strip of cold, crimson twilight” still shining in
the west, not yet mastered by darkness. But after we hear that
exhilarating, final (one long sentence) paragraph, built on this
twilight image: do we see and recognize any light as master illuminator of our diminishing turning pages? Calls and complaints,
8. Ivan Karamazov, in consideration for the suffering of innocent children, frames his position to his younger brother in terms of a ticketed
earth traveler: “It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return Him the ticket.” Without a ticket to the divine harmony
of things at the end of time, there is only the present, in which all things,
according to Ivan, are permissible.
9. John 1: 4-5, 10-13.
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fullness and emptiness turn, as leaves do, into the fading colors
of the persistent past.10 But who authors them and gives meaning
to their turnings?
Our consideration of Vasilisa’s name tasks us to pull together
our dispersed attention to fairy tales, John’s Gospel of light, a
storyteller’s poeticized feelings, and the miserable facts of nature
and society. Will we be elevated or broken down by our task? We
have one more name to consider before testing the outcomes.
Lukerya is so named to direct our attention to the Gospel of
Luke, who is said to have been a physician, like Chekhov, and
more relevant to the poor and oppressed than the other three
evangelists. Luke’s telling of Peter’s denial contains unique details seized by Chekhov for their dramatic interest. The maid who
first identifies Peter does so in Luke by staring at his face and
figure, not by his Galilean dialect.11 Lukerya lays down her
spoons and stares fixedly at the student’s face, as if, like the maid,
she were finding out his relation to a victim of torture, in order
to ask him something. Does he know and love that victim actively, or does he merely preach? Is he pierced by the present
look of suffering, more than by the icy wind on his skin? Lukerya
does not once look into the face of her mother, who by living
among the gentry distanced herself from her daughter’s cries of
pain. She holds in those cries like a deaf-mute, while staring open
the storytelling soul of the student for purpose of recognition.
We, too, shall stare open his soul, our souls, all of them.
To undertake which, recall this tremendously helpful insight
into the summoning power of storied words. Luke tells how
Peter and Jesus, the one uttering his third denial while the other
is being beaten by his guards, hear the cock crow (a new day!)
and turn their faces to meet and remember the words at the Last
Supper;12 so fantastical at the time of utterance, those words now
become scripted history. And only then, as a character in a story,
10. The last paragraph, a single sentence of prolonged poetic mastery,
elevates painful facts in thought and feeling to a realm of beautifully
expressed meanings, without the possibility, in a second sentence, of
contradiction.
11. Luke 22: 56.
12. Luke 22: 60-61.
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does Peter (in the student’s telling) “pull himself together.” Previously, he was dispersed, the input of his eyes denied by his
tongue relation to the history of his ears. Lukerya, tongue-tied
and stupidly staring, still waits for the crowing sound that will
summon recognition of her pain and give her the strength to pull
herself together as a character in a bigger story than her own,
but one that she can co-author.
The word “relevant” that I asked you to note often arises in
discussions of Chekhov. He was sharply criticized in his own
time for not writing relevant stories—that is, for not taking a position and prescribing a cure for Russia’s social and political ailments. He claimed that his only duty as a writer was to present
the truth of human life, as lived by late nineteenth-century Russians, as simply as he could, not to advocate particular reforms.
He honored Tolstoy as his master in truth-speaking letters, but
he had this to say of Russia’s bearded prophet of reform: “There’s
more love for mankind shown in electricity and steam engines
than in chastity and vegetarianism.” Chekhov puts the conflict
of purpose between relevance and truth at the heart of his story.
The student reaches for truth of the highest, most encompassing
kind, after he leaves the widows in their pain with nothing more
than a “good night.” While thinking of the meaning of the tears
of Vasilisa, not of their comfort or remedy, he stares back to see
the fire glimmer “peacefully in the dark,” with no people near it.
That solitary fire inspires his felt discovery of the truth and
beauty guiding the events of history. This was Tolstoy’s concern
in 1500 pages of War and Peace. The student gets the truth of
history in three and a half pages. But that is the art of Chekhov,
a writer trained by empirical facts as a physician to the discipline
of brevity. Can truth ever be relevant unless it accommodates our
brevity of breath? Chekhov understood the answer to be obvious.
He left relevance, as understood by his critics, to the secret workings on each soul of his briefly measured, immediately felt, simple words.
Perhaps you find no conflict between relevance and truth
even under pressure of mortality. For students as such are always
young, while they seek as lovers to meet the face of truth, like
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sea kissing sky at the horizon. Let us grant this fine sentiment to
ourselves—I think Socrates would. Three questions remain. Are
the truths met by the student credible? Do they justify the suffering that their instigation augments in the widows? And is growing
wise as the cock crows worth the bitter tears of heartbreak when
love of the dear old self is found facing you with a kiss at the
horizon? Let us try out two sets of answers to these questions,
which will, in turn, settle our earlier question about nature’s author. First, in sympathy with the student, let us glance back some
more (second paragraph).
The student is on his way home from a hunt on Good Friday.
He feels that the “sudden blast of cold”—like a shot from a gun—
has “violated the order and harmony of things.” But Good Friday
is supposed to be especially mortifying, and a seminary student,
no matter how cold his hands, ought to recognize the priority of
spirit over mere elements. In the Gospels, darkness covers the
land while Jesus expires on the cross mid-day, and an earthquake
splits rocks open when he breathes his last.13 But our student,
Ivan, remembers not these disordered phenomena, only the discordant postures of his earthly parents: his mother sitting barefoot
on the floor and his father lying on the stove. How hard it must
be to hold Gospel truths in mind before the uncouth suffering of
one’s dearest relations. As he moves homeward, he has a vision
of history inspired by the weather and his parents’ conditions.
The same wind always blows in your face—that is a fact of nature—and despite all proud conquest, unification, and modernization, Russians still squander the light stupidly, polishing their
silver samovars under leaky roofs, coldly coughing, downward
grieving, always dying. There is “the same emptiness everywhere,” which is also a fact of nature, scientifically understood
not to contain meaning in its dust. “All these horrors had been
and were and would be and even the passing of a thousand years
would make life no better.” The student has acquired a Biblical
prophetic cadence, but he has no good news to deliver, “no desire
to go home” to the ones he loves and cannot help.
13. Luke 23: 44; Matthew 27: 52.
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But what is most oppressive, we jaunty Americans might especially feel, is the tedium of all that Russian moaning and groaning. This native feeling of ours has received precise critical
formulation. In addition to being called “irrelevant,” Chekhov was
accused of indulging the “banalities” of useless complaint and
fantasies of hope. This criticism is easiest to appreciate in his
plays: while one character, stage left, let us say, is tearing her life
to shreds and another, stage right, is costuming hers in silk, inevitably a household servant from out of memory limps on stage,
trying not to spill a large samovar, and announces that it is time
to clear the table and drink some tea. That peasant woman, with
her insistence on commonplace reality, is sitting expectantly in
the background of this story: the student’s mother. When her son
arrives at home, full of the loftiest revelations of meaning, she
will be ready to serve the tea center stage and talk about the
weather and the proverbial world, for that is how people really relate. Chekhov, you understand, did not go for those Tolstoyan
episodes of being thrown to the ground half dead and looking up
at the infinite sky to encounter the life-altering repository of Truth,
ever solicitous of our human happiness. He thought, rather, that
the truth about relevance (another word for which is relationship,
or in the positive sense, love), is often a banal truth: you meet the
right person for mutual love and happiness, but at the wrong stage
of development, and the discordance of years or of readiness to
recognize each other’s relevance cannot usually be rectified by
the dramatic realigning of motions and ends, as Tolstoy performs
for Natasha and Pierre or Kitty and Levin.14 Nevertheless, it is not
too late in a Chekhov story, as in life, to make the best of bad timing by constant improvisation and large stores of quiet laughter
and watery eyes. When these fail and emptiness massages the
heart, resort from dread is taken in repetitions of phrase or gesture,
which like the polished samovar of tea punctuate the weary days
and awful nights with something familiar, shining, and collective
14. The first couple are major characters in War and Peace, the second,
in Anna Karenina.
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of people who seek warmth in the drink and light of life from the
banal superfluities of plaintive or fantastically hopeful speech.
Now to continue in sympathy with our student: as he first approaches the fire, the presence of the women being irrelevant to
his desire for warmth, he says “Well, winter’s back,” and he gets
no response. He then adds, “Hello there,” to which Vasilisa starts,
as one always jumps a little when something appears out of nothing. Then, seeing who he is, she puts on a welcoming smile, for
a student is good company to a woman who has learned to talk
above her station, and she says, “I didn’t recognize you. God be
with you, and make you rich.” Otherwise, what comes into being
out of nothing may quickly return to nothing. Her proverbial
words have an ultimate relevance, which Luke and John, in their
gospels, emphasize. They report, as instances of Peter’s denial,
these words, “I am not,” which are the precise negation of Jesus’
thrice repeated answer to the cohort who come to arrest him in
the garden, “I am he,” at which they fall to the ground, from
whose dust man first came into being.15 The student, like Peter,
puts his existence as a creature to question by approaching the
fire for bodily warmth while his soul at first goes unrecognized,
as if empty of riches, that is, of love. For take note of this: Peter’s
love for Jesus, which our translator describes with three words,
“passionately, to distraction,” is in Russian two words, bez pamjati, meaning literally, “without memory,” as if it were uncaused,
always there. To deny such a love, to empty it out at the moment
of trial, is to subject something timeless to historical criteria, according to which things without cause and memory go unwritten.
The student, recognized in memory, finds his existence as a
creature fortified when the widow invokes love without memory
in the proverb: “God be with you and make you rich.” She gives
evidence of the existential potency of these words by appearing,
like Peter in the courtyard, distracted by something always there.
She is wearing a man’s heavy coat, presumably her dead husband’s, and standing clean of dirt she stares into the fire pen15. Luke 22: 58; John 18: 5-6, 17, 25.
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sively. Chekhov does not say if she is distracted by her husband,
for what doctor knows where dead people go to occupy themselves, or what living people are thinking when they look occupied? No living men are present, though at any moment the
farmhands may appear from the river and change everything. The
daughter sits on the cold ground, ugly, stupid-looking, and
washes a pot and spoons. Who can tell what she is thinking?
Maybe we should consult the historical record of people who
have felt the same cold and terror of the dark. That is the student’s
approach to the mystery of three souls, who from out of all time
and space have become opaquely present to each other in bodies
lit by a fire in a garden on a particularly “doleful” night.
Peter, as we are told by Matthew and the student, follows
Jesus into the High Priest’s courtyard to watch from afar and see
the end of it all.16 Remember the empty bottle of the second sentence, which the student feels everywhere on his way home as
the condition of life. That emptiness, harboring potentials of
sound to creators, Peter will feel inside Jesus’ tomb. The end of
it all, which he would like to watch from afar, on the outside of
events, he must experience up close, from the inside. Our student
also sees afar in the past Peter’s bitter tears, but touches inside
the present the widows’ emotions.17 These two-sided aspects of
the “end of it all”—seen and touched, past and present, outside
and inside—are thematic in much of what follows.
In all four Gospels, it is a serving maid who first questions
Peter in the High Priest’s courtyard. The student adds dramatic
body to this verbal moment: the maid’s assertion of his identity,
“This man was also with Jesus,” lingers a few beats unanswered,
causing the other servants, men included (in John’s account, the
arresting police loom conspicuously),18 to look at Peter “with suspicion and severity.” Their hard looks “fluster” him into saying,
16. Matthew 26: 58.
17. The student is a Thomas who does not come up short on our modern
demand to test the veracity of past appearances by probing their present
wounds.
18. John 18: 18.
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“I know him not.” The flustering indicates that he begins not to
recognize himself inside as the recipient of those outside looks.
Who knows what Peter might have answered if only women were
present, without men to raise fears of what men do to each other
and to women? 19 If Peter had answered the maid honestly, thence
to be hauled away by those severe men, we would recognize him
today as another self-made hero of friendship (like those in
Homer and Virgil), rather than a runner to the empty tomb who
enters it alone and learns to fill it with the sounds of life.
That is something new, born of three denials, which we students practice all the time in three forms, for three worthy purposes of our own.20
I deny that a story is all about me for the purposes of sanity
and objectivity. I deny that I am free of past teachings and newly
elevated by present ones for the purposes of continuity and commonality. And I deny that it is art that moves me to imitate proud
combative heroes for the purpose of giving greater influence to
humble truth.
In practicing these three denials, I follow Peter, who points
every good student the way. First, he denies that Jesus’s ques19. Recall that it is the boasting of Peter in a group of men, each feeling
superior to verbal challenges as they compete for honor in the presence
of their beloved Jesus, which brings forth the prediction of his three denials and the crowing of the cock. The future is caused by a present
when both are understood as parts of one plot, whose characters serve
action, not speech—so cheaply uttered much of the time.
20. It was Chekhov’s story that made me attend to the richness in the
four Gospel accounts of Peter’s denials. His words of denial are not
identical, and neither are the questions they answer. They are three distinct replies to three different inquiries. Moreover, to fully understand
their meanings, we must remain aware of all seven layers of the story:
the Hebrew scriptures; the historical events and personages; the four
Gospel accounts of those events as fulfilling the scriptures; the student’s
retelling of Peter’s denials to the widows; Vasilisa’s attention to this
same story during the Twelve Apostles service the previous night;
Chekhov’s story of the student’s telling; and finally my telling to you,
this Friday evening, November 3, 2017, Chekhov’s story.
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tioning has everything to do with him personally. This gets him
admitted by the maid to the courtyard of objective seeing and discussion, with love kept safely impersonal. Second, he denies that
he is another, “of them,” loosed from the past and a newly authored beginning, rather than a conforming Jew. This keeps him
close to the fire of the ancient teachings. And third, he denies that
he is the memorable one from the garden, moved by a heroic
image appropriated from epic stories of martial friendship to
draw his sword and lop off the enemy’s ear. This denial keeps
him free from the suspicion that he comes, not in peace and civility, but wielding a sword.21 Without the practice of these three
denials, especially the third, there is no learning as we students
practice it here.
But then the cock crows, and Peter undergoes three distinct
responses, which successively undo the three denials. First, as
told by the student, he gazes at Jesus from afar, same scene as
before, but the questioning is entirely about him now. Second,
their faces meet and he recalls in the words said at supper that
he is one of them in character, people who associate and speak
differently, elevated but answerable to authority. And third, he
pulls himself together, leaves the courtyard, and weeps bitterly
for his beautiful, heroic image, emptied out for ease of breath and
freedom from pain. This third undoing, the most important, lets
the truth about Simon, the humble fisherman prone to sinking
and weeping, become the new fairness and stillness of human nature. We students, like Peter, undergo these same three motions
when we hear the cock crow and feel undone in our previously
objective, conformist, and anti-theatrical reading of stories.
What happens next? The Student sighed and grew pensive.
That sigh forces a little pause in the flow of events, where freedom is to be found. In that free pause, Vasilisa bursts into sobs
and hides her face, while Lukerya, still fixed on the student,
21. Matthew 10:34. Peter strikes at the ear (John 18:10) so that we might
recognize the meaning of this third denial: by it he escapes having to
suffer the priesthood’s violence, born like his from pride in its own severe agency, awarded precedence over the ear’s hearing of the Word.
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grows heavy and tense, “like a person holding back great pain.”
This would seem like a good time for the student to perform a
kind outward act, or, since he is pensive, to ask the obvious question: “What is going on inside your soul?” But instead, at the approach of the male “farmhands,” the opportunity to “move on”
he quickly takes. Since we are in sympathy with him, we shall
say that he bravely risks his spirit to solitary thought in the cold
and dark.
The reflection of light off the farmhands makes the outer
world of men’s affairs touch the inner one being stared opened by
women. It is like the crowing of the cock that instigates Peter’s
going out to stir the stillness of the world with tears, detesting
what he knows about his inside in relation to outside questions
and cruelties. The student knows that he has made an old woman
cry and her daughter much upset. He goes out from them into a
world whose facts deny the coming of Easter. But he makes Easter
happen in himself. How does he perform this transformation?
He performs it in three stages of physical and mental action.
First Stage: his thoughts turn to Vasilisa; her “abundant” weeping and its shame he interprets from afar this way: “if she wept,
it meant…[Peter’s] relevance for her”; but this conclusion, without external support, is forced by his inner hunger; so he dares to
glance back for evidence, and for that glance we must praise him;
he sees the fire glimmering peacefully in the dark, absent of people; again he thinks of Vasilisa—and also of her daughter—and
again he thinks, more confidently now, that those events narrated
from long ago must “clearly” have relevance to both women and
“probably” to “everyone on earth;” and this is so not because of
the universal art of storytelling that he has mastered—he is a
modest student in that regard—but owing to the “whole being”
of the old woman taken by concern for Peter’s soul, as if he were
her present child;22 for souls feel intimate with each other across
time and space by means of repeated words and common gestures
issuing from similar bodies. Second Stage: the soul of the student
stirs with joy, as the stillness of the freezing hour flows towards
22. Mark 12: 30-33.
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ends he sees and touches; he pauses to catch his breath, as the
former sigh of his spirit’s slow death is reversed in a quickening
of life;23 history he now thinks of as an unbroken chain of events
that conducts motions from end to end, not as a circle does, always repeating the same misery, but as a satisfying linear progression from beginning to ending, like a story told by a
master—but what kind of story? Third Stage: he crosses the
river—we hear nothing of the painful ice needles now; he climbs
the hill—nothing is felt of the biting wind now; he gazes upon
the village of his birth—no glimpse of the beatings and cringing
of life; he sees the last bit of crimson sunset, and again the light
encourages him with supreme confidence to find what he has
been seeking—the truth and beauty guiding human life in gardens and courtyards past and present; “in all likelihood and at all
times” they form “the essence of human life and everything on
earth”; and finally, life appears to him “wondrous, marvelous,
and filled with lofty meaning.”
The first sentence of the first stage is the key to all the rest:
“The student’s thoughts turned to Vasilisa: if she wept, it meant
the things that happened to Peter on that terrible night had some
relevance for her . . .” This sentence ends in the Russian with the
word, otnoshenie, translated by Michael Heim as “relevance.”
(Literally, it means “relation” or “relationship.”) This word is followed by an ellipsis that makes it linger critically in our thoughts.
The new paragraph answers at once to criticism: “He glanced
back.” The concern for relevance turns the head of the student to
see the light of the fire, which he first approaches in order to
warm his hands, but at which he stays to tell a well-known story
to two differently staring widows. It is not the warmth, but the
light of the storyteller’s truth—the fire that gives inspired voice
to the face—that the student and Chekhov insist on delivering.
The widows go home deeply moved by that voice and face. The
student, as we just witnessed, moves on to three revelations: universal relevance and intimacy of souls; the pulsing chain of interconnected events; and their guidance by truth and beauty,
23. 1 Peter 3: 18.
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always and everywhere. We can take these three stages and revelations as demonstrative of how the mysterious words that begin
John’s gospel actually operate in human beings: all that comes
to be is sensitive to the Word, and the relevance of the Word to
all the living is as light, which shines in the dark, and is never
mastered by the dark.24 Of course, as a reminder, our present
glances at the story are precisely those that sympathizers with a
seminary student would be expected to take.
But there is another story to tell about our relation to this
story. Just as Matthew reminds us in his Gospel that another story
is told among the Jews about the empty tomb of Jesus—that the
body was stolen, not raised—so there are another set of answers,
in the negative, to the three questions we asked earlier.25 Are the
student’s truths credible? Are the sufferings of the widows justified? And is the love at the horizon ever other than of self?
Matthew discredits the thieving story as a Jewish conspiracy.
Chekhov lets us relate to his story unhindered by his authorial
elbows. Here follows the negative relation to Chekhov’s story,
no less probable to thought and feeling, I think, than the positive
one we just experienced.
Let us begin by repeating two impressive words from the
first stage of the student’s transformation: “whole being.”26 Now
recall the two great commandments taught by Jesus in keeping
with scripture: to love the Lord your God, who is the one and
only God, with your whole being—all your heart, all soul, all
mind, and all strength; and, like the first, to love your neighbor
as yourself.27 The student fails to obey the second command to
turn self-love outward, to make it relevant, and this failure to be
relevant undermines his adherence to the first command to identify entirely with the truth of the ever present living God—living,
therefore, in the widows, presently. Let me now give standing
to these claims.
24. John 1: 3-5.
25. Matthew 28: 11-15.
26. “Peter was close to her and her whole being was concerned with
what was going on in Peter’s soul.”
27. Mark 12: 30-31; Matthew 22:39.
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In the garden, Jesus asks his three closest friends, Peter included, to stay awake with him. That is not a lot to ask, but the
love of self, rooted in bodily needs, overmasters their willing
spirits. The student is a sleeper of a much deeper kind, a waking
dreamer who loves life in the abstract, far from miserable people,
malleable to the hungers of his thought. Consider the characters
again. Lukerya is the innocent victim of her husband’s beatings.
She fixes her gaze upon the student, holding in the great pain that
his picturing power aggravates; but he walks away suddenly,
without a word of recognition, just as her husband inexplicably
died one day, leaving her unrecoverable, with “the strange look
of a deaf-mute.” Vasilisa, bettered by conformity to high society,
denies present relation to her dirty daughter by hiding her face
in shame not of her tears, as the student conveniently thinks, but
of her whole being, whose career has entailed denial of child for
the sake of worldly gains. Ivan treats both women not as neighbors to be loved by command as a suffering of unlovely particulars, but as characters to be drawn into making his dreary return
home part of a story that he wants to end triumphantly, without
any upsetting questions. He catches his breath from their sobs
and flusters.
This alternative understanding of character accords with the
following re-interpretation of the three denials. The student first
denies that he and the widows are concerned wholly with what
is going on in their own souls, not with the goings-on in Peter’s
soul. The wholeness of their beings they do not give away to anyone. Second, the student denies that history is open-ended, plotless, free to become better, worse, or incomparably different from
the past, not auto-progressively chained to it.28 Third, the student
denies that life is guided by ego and chance much of the time,
not by truth and beauty. (You might want to roll up your
sleeves—we’re going to push hard now.) What truth makes Vasilisa smile all the time? It is the ego of a social climber. What truth
28. Ironically, his retelling of Peter’s story contains his own creative
additions, in which he ought to recognize his freedom to occupy a better
or worse state of mind.
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makes her shield her face as she sobs by the fire? The shame of
happiness found out as pretense. What truth makes her sob so
abundantly? The fact that ego and its pretensions require ongoing
sacrifice of the one you love. Lukerya is guided by what solicitude? The chance that the husband who beats her may die sooner
rather than later. What beauty is there in a face that squints to see
things in the dark, is stupidly silent for fear of another beating,
and becomes fixed in a stare, heavy and tense, when the pain calls
her back unrelieved? Ivan Karamazov would applaud her insistence on the right of suffering innocence to hold back from brokered Easter reconciliations. Here, then, is the truth, if you really
want it relevant to modernity: try to better yourself by abandoning the dear ones who would otherwise keep you stuck in their
dull care, or by hoping for the early death of a painful relation,
until fortune can be mastered to achieve those ends. And if you
glance back, consider not the human wreckage, only the golden,
solitary fire. New days call for new gods and horizons of riches.
All this ugliness the student denies, though it is plain and ordinary
to see (and points the way to necessary social reforms), because
at the age of twenty-two he cannot help standing closer to birth
than death. Still healthy, strong, able to give his head “a convulsive shake” to throw off the encompassing dark, ferry the cold
river, and climb with ample breath the hill to see the last rays of
light shine upon his place of nativity, of course he feels, in the
days of egotistical youth, that everything on earth is guided by
similar motions of self-fulfilling vitality.
The student gets his Easter going by freely misconstruing
what is terrible and ugly in the souls of the widows, and moving
on from them. Their Easter is still hostage to shame and anger in
the day of desolation. Perhaps we cannot do better than to practice, like him, the denials that get us, in despite of others, the way
home from emptiness. But should we not try to hear the cock
crow after every twilight seminar song, like a gunshot?
Apropos of that question, I have to tell you something about
Chekhov’s acoustic tastes. He liked gunshots a lot. A year after
he wrote “The Student,” he was finishing his first major successful play, The Seagull. It contains a mother—an actress who lives
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entirely for herself in art—and it ends with her son’s suicide by
gunshot. Chekhov’s subtitle: A Comedy in Four Acts. Its opening
in St. Petersburg was a fiasco, and Chekhov was dismayed by an
art that gave its form over to the freedom of actors and audience
to misconstrue by their unlovely particular contributions. But
when The Seagull was staged a few years later by Stanislavsky
and the new Moscow Art Theatre it was a triumph, and
Chekhov’s name was on the way to becoming an adjective of reality—“Chekhovian.” The Moscow players knew how to let the
cock crow in the silent beats of the comedy, and so the minor
keys in its music were heard, and its mutually incomprehensible
characters, whose talking substitutes for plot, were pulled together by an audience properly concerned with the complicated
simplicities of their own knotted relations of love. Anyway, that
is what I meant a moment ago: we have to hear the cock crow if
we want to triumph in our egotistical comedies of living and
dying.
I am almost done talking, not improperly I hope. Jesus, you
know, was executed for talking very improperly: “blasphemy,”
his crime was called, which is the opposite of empty, unplotted
talk. To blaspheme, as you students know from the Greek, is to
injure the relations among men, women, and God by speech.
Peter denies knowing the accused blasphemer because he is
rightly afraid of the power of speech to make hate happen. In
fact, his second and third denials (in two of the gospels) become
vehement; he even curses his questioners for not believing him,
though cursing is itself a kind of blasphemy.29 Here, in miniature,
we witness the degeneration of speech from having lethal power
over the devotional lives of people, to self-contradiction, incredulity, bitterness of failure, and over time to empty talk and
shallow feelings that make nothing happen and no one takes seriously. The student follows Luke and John by leaving out from
his story the anger and cursing of Peter, and he follows Matthew
and Mark by leaving in the weeping. We may suspect that he
lacks the instinct for righteous anger, while possessing the pity
29. Matthew 26: 72-74; Mark 14: 71.
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of a young heart. Chekhov, too, lacks anger, his critics would say,
while he waters the eyes too much. He does not know the blasphemer, they would say, for he is a connoisseur of empty talk
who honestly shows us the vanity of literary pretensions. That is
why he points out at the end of this most perfect of his stories
that the storyteller is only twenty-two: all his transformational
thinking and feeling are but the workings of his youthful metabolism, which throws off the impertinent assaults of winter when
it is that time in the calendar—no more significant than a change
in the weather.
But wait a minute. If Chekhov has the honesty to admit that
the weather and chemistry are the powers that either kill or resurrect the sick soul, then is his admission not justly called by us
“blasphemy”? Try the question out this way: Chekhov, a doctor
who writes about ailing people denies relation to higher sources
of meaning in the names of applied biology and meteorology.
This injures the respect owed to his literary art—to speech itself—by making storytelling a pre-scientific substitute for drugtaking and social revolution. The making of love then loses its
articulate way and people become incomprehensible bodies one
to another. That denial of relation to higher meanings, with those
consequences, should sound like blasphemy to the priesthood of
letters and its seminar students, I think.
But wait one last minute, please. Remember that Chekhov
showed signs of tuberculosis in his twenties, but denied for years
the implications. He wrote “The Student” at the age of thirtyfour, while coughing up blood. During the ten years of worsening
health that remained, he devoted much precious time to playwriting, and he married an actress, Olga Knipper, whom he made
love to mostly from afar in the form of wonderfully articulate letters. He stopped practicing medicine. I think, in the end, he was
trying to pull together in new dramatic forms the movements of
bodies much given to dispersive talk by denials of love and death.
Have we not seen how his student, Ivan, needs the expressive
bodies of the widows for him to call Biblical characters into
presence to speak, as in a theater, into the outer darkness of the
world, to test the light of words? Remember also that the outer
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plot revealed by Jesus requires only that Peter deny him three
times before the cock crows. The anger or weeping is Peter’s
free contribution, or rather, a creative act by the particular storyteller. And that act makes all the difference to the soul. Our student does not get angry, does not weep, as Lukerya and Vasilisa
do; yet all three respond freely in body and soul to the same story.
There are many ways to deny that the cold and dark are curable;
yet the student still seeks, by the last glimmers of light, the way
home to the unlikely love that gave him improbable birth. When
he arrives, a young man still, but older than he was, he will drink
tea with his parents, his mother soon also to become a widow,
and I like to imagine that he will continue his story, taking note
of the weather and its changes, which he is learning to read.
And what about the widows? I myself would learn from Lukerya’s fixed face to beware the anger born of suffering that feels
betrayed and trapped by the egotism of love, for what is more
prone to hate than misery of heart that hears itself as the only
story being told? And from Vasilisa’s career I would beware of
guilt that relieves its burden in self-pity, hidden from the fire and
faces of the injured, turned to the stately world of swelling
speeches and fairy-tale smiles. And finally, speaking as I began,
let us students remember our creators in the days of our youth,
before the songbirds fall silent and the guardians of the house
stoop to dust.30
Thank you for listening to Chekhov’s story of the student,
and my attempt to show how much, and little, there is to tell.
30. Ecclesiastes 12: 1-4.
�Tetrastichs
Elliott Zuckerman
Preludes have long since ceased
to promise Fugues. What’s here—
each time after a silence—is yet another
interruption of uncertainty.
Meanings will spread, as when a loaded brush
touches some cotton-wool too wet
to limit bleeding. Etymons
will crawl along the fibers.
I think you will particularly like
Siberia. Let us all know
about the customs and the cold.
Think of us on holidays.
Do not say that Sometimes
it is only a cigar.
The point is not
to denigrate cigars.
The plaster hand, the portrait of Busoni,
all music put aside to try again
to stop the wrist from getting stiff:
What was this a lesson in?
Elliott Zuckerman is a tutor emeritus at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. These forty tetrastichs have been selected from a collection of 120. Each quatrain is meant to be a separate poem.
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A love potion? There is no need for one.
Just dramatize a double suicide
and leave the poison out. It can be done
with lemonade.
There was a different tenor in each act.
She sang her song of rapt transfiguration
and in her tones of ecstasy made clear
that she was ready to take on three more.
In the closing pages of your lecture,
you can take your leap. They’ll say
you haven’t proved you got there step by step.
There were no steps—the lecture started there.
Let’s celebrate the woman who
was tired of trees.
No longer to be reasoned with, no longer
listening, it’s one way to be old.
Your face is next to mine,
and even lingers—
the warm surprise of graceful lankiness,
my prince factotum.
After a thousand and three in Spain alone,
what clearer signs of drawing to an end
than throwing parties for the peasantry
and asking almost anyone to dinner?
�POETRY | ZUCKERMAN
The trees themselves
sensing how much space they need
plotted their equidistance
like dancers with extended arms.
I’d like the actor who agrees
that he must get inside the role he plays
to tell me what he tries to feel when he
portrays hypocrisy.
Hers were not hymn-tunes,
square in meter and in rhyme.
Her dashes represent
unmeasured time.
I’m happy that the Shropshire Lad
has his own pad.
I used to think that he
lived here with me.
I cannot hear the pipe unless
the shepherd blows it.
How can I tell the music
from the music?
At the doorpost of the tenement
I studied densities of old enamel:
pastel maps,
an opaque residue of smell.
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After the concert, she told the other ladies
the pianist had a memorable rubato.
The ladies took it that the two of them
had spent the night together.
There is an elf
who charms me at the root of being.
Yet elfhood serves
no evolutionary purpose.
One must be
an artist
not to find
a food one likes.
Can one do in words a vast expanse
of every possible hue and shade of green
with somewhere a small patch of cadmium red?
Has it just been done?
The seven types of ambiguity
are not so clearly differentiated
as the seven
deadly sins.
The man who asks us
to excuse his pun
fears that we
may overlook his wit.
�POETRY | ZUCKERMAN
When rhetoric already lies
we cannot tell
whether what lies beneath the cant
is lying.
Imagine a garden without any toads
but the birds are real
and named by their song: two cuckoos, a quail,
and a nightingale.
It was hard to accept him as half of a pair
and the girl couldn’t hide her victorious air;
I tried not to stare at the hand on the knee
and acted a plausible copy of me.
I slice and sculpt and sand what happened till
an anecdote redecorates my past.
Such labor is the compliment
that humor pays to truth.
Someone says that wit began
with not the word but laughter alone.
It follows perhaps that early man
wept before the cause was known.
What if everything that came to mind
arrived with (so to say) a grade from God?
Little would change, for half the world would wonder
whether God was good at giving grades.
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Elders who are troubled all their lives
by doubts that they’ve gone deep enough,
may want to test the thickness now
that so much surface has worn off.
Have I condemned nostalgia? It is the source
Of aching loveliness, maligned because
we had to wait for it, and at its dawn
it gave scant notice that it might return.
Nausicaa washing at the water
was grace itself.
But follow the line of her white arm
to reach the hand of merely human gesture.
The irises were cream and indigo,
a lazy bird prepared herself for flying—
and in the middle distance: Lo
and behold! the silver gateway of implying.
At ninety she retained the girlish charm
they taught her and she took to at sixteen—
a habit long impervious to reform,
no longer fired by flesh but baked in bone.
This castle runs on wheels, with makeshift brakes.
It inches on, headed askew. It leaks,
sudden, burning. The royalty worship the days—
Good morning, Good afternoon—and clutch their keys.
�POETRY | ZUCKERMAN
I used to say that song need not be sounded.
Now pitches are distorted in the treble.
No doubt the tones I hear have been confounded
by some didactic Muse, to cause me trouble.
Americans with European souls
need not restrict their comedy to manners.
The question of what continent we’re born on
takes second place to why we’re born at all.
Faces are plaster masks, egg-white, cream, and gray.
Silenus, spent, will hobble down the hall.
Three actions are complete: the quest, the crux, the fall.
Old age is not a coda, but a satyr-play.
When once again you tell that anecdote,
acquire a gurgle as you near the end.
They’ll think that you’ve just found renewed delight
in the climactic phrase already planned.
A musical trick was employed by the muscular Icarus
when inventing the famous lament about flying too high.
His appoggiaturas brought tears to a cynical eye
while his anapests lent the lament their precipitancy.
85
�
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Pastille, Willaim
Brann, Eva T. H.
Hunt, Frank
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St. John's Review
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The St. John’s Review
Volume 58.2 (Spring 2017)
Editor
William Pastille
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Editorial Assistant
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Joseph Macfarland, Dean. All manuscripts are subject to blind review.
Address correspondence to The St. John’s Review, St. John’s College,
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© 2017 St. John’s College. All rights reserved. Reproduction in
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ISSN 0277-4720
��Contents
Essays & Lectures
Leibniz’s Monadology and the Philosophical Foundations of
Non-locality in Quantum Mechanics .....................................1
J. H. Beall
Depth Versus Complexity .................................................................25
Eva Brann
A Note on Apollonius’s Reconceptualization of Space ....................43
Philip LeCuyer
“Aristotelian Forgiveness”: The Non-Culpability
Requirement of Forgiveness ........................................................52
Corinne Painter
On Two Socratic Questions ..............................................................77
Alex Priou
Poem
Sabbatical..........................................................................................93
Louis Petrich
��Leibniz’s Monadology and the
Philosophical Foundations of
Non-locality in Quantum Mechanics
J. H. Beall
One of the most troubling aspects of our understanding of modern
physics generally, and quantum mechanics specifically, is the
concept of “non-locality.” Non-locality appears in an entire class
of experiments, including the so-called “two-slit” experiment. In
these, particles and “quanta” of light can be emitted and absorbed
individually. Yet in the way these particles or quanta traverse the
space and time between emission and absorption, they appear to
behave not as point particles, but as though they were distributed
throughout the entire spatial volume and temporal extent of the
experiment. That the phenomenon of non-locality has recently
been corroborated over macroscopic distances of the order of 10
kilometers makes these effects all the more remarkable.
In this lecture, I shall review the experiments and arguments
that have led to an acceptance of non-locality in modern physics,
and will suggest that the concept of space and time that this
understanding implies is consistent with Leibniz’s Monadology,
in which our ideas of space and time are fundamentally different
from those given to us by our intuitions.
1. Leibniz’s Monadology
Leibniz’s writings on the philosophical, mathematical, and
natural sciences represent a coherent, if somewhat surprising
whole. Nowhere is this more clearly illustrated than in the
Monadology, the Discourse of Metaphysics, and the LeibnizClark correspondence.
Leibniz begins with the view of God as a maker, a being who
makes the world the best it can possibly be.
Jim Beall is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. This
lecture was originally delivered on December 4, 2015.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Part and parcel of this view is Leibniz’s Principle of Sufficient
Reason. It goes something like this: one monad can only be
different from another because of its different character or
qualities. I’ll use a modern idea of a monad to illustrate this: an
elementary particle like an electron. I hope my choice will become
plausible a bit later when we start the discussion of quantum
mechanics.
Is one electron the same as another? If so, if there is no
difference between “this electron” and “that electron,” then they
would be the same, since by the Principle of Sufficient Reason
they cannot be distinguished. But my simply pointing to them is
an indication of the differences. “This electron” is different from
that one, because it has an explicitly different representation that
is indicated by my pointing at them. If I were to insist on a
Cartesian representation of this difference, I can make a threedimensional coordinate system with a particular origin and three
orthogonal axes, labeled x, y, and z. Numbering these axes, I can
locate “this” electron and distinguish it from “that” electron by
the use of three numbers, x1, y1, z1, and x2, y2, z2. I can then say
that I have a representation of each of these two electrons as
different, given these two sets of three numbers. I can even
represent their separation of this electron from that electron by a
three-dimensional version of the Pythagorean theorem.
Leibniz makes this explicit several places in his works. For
example, in the essay, “On Nature Itself,” he states this point in
arguing against Descartes’s reliance on geometry in physics.
Given such an identity or similarity between objects,
not even an angel could find any difference between its
states at different times, nor have any evidence for
discerning whether the enclosed sphere is at rest or
revolves, and what law of motion it follows. . . . Even if
those who have not penetrated these matters deeply
enough may not have noticed this, it ought to be accepted
as certain that such consequences are alien to the nature
and order of things, and that nowhere are there things
perfectly similar (which is among my [Leibniz’s] new
and important axioms) (Paragraph 13).
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BEALL
3
Of course, electrons have other properties as well: charge,
mass, angular momentum (they seem to spin like tops), magnetic
moment (they act like tiny bar-magnets), velocity, momentum,
and kinetic energy, among other things. Each of these qualities
or characteristics can also be represented by a series of numbers
or “coordinate expression.” I’ve always fancied that in a very
formal sense an electron or any other elementary particle (had
Leibniz known about them) could be represented as an aggregation of numbers (or coordinate expressions) related to another
monad. This other monad could also be represented in a similar
way. By the Principle of Sufficient Reason, some of these coordinate expressions are different from the coordinate expressions
of all other monads.
The other thing to mention about monads is their unity.
They are “simple.” They do not have parts. According to
Leibniz, they represent a unity of different properties, much like
a geometric point that is the nexus of many geometric lines.
Leibniz states that:
Everything is full in nature. . . . And since everything is
connected because of the plenitude of the world, and
since each body acts on every other body, more or less,
in proportion to its distance, and is itself affected by the
other through reaction, it follows that each monad is a
living mirror or a mirror endowed with internal action,
which represents the universe from its own point of view
and is as ordered as the universe itself (Principles of
Nature and Grace, Based on Reason, Paragraph 3).
Some even have the property of being “be-souled.” So look
around you. According to Leibniz, you are sitting among a
reasonably large group of monads, each of which is capable of
noticing you and regarding you as separate, individual “beings.”
There is one final thing about monads (among their many
interesting properties) that bears on our discussion of quantum
mechanics. As Leibniz says at another point in the Monadology:
The monads have no windows through which something
can enter or leave (Monadology, Paragraph 7).
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Monads have no “windows.” Yet each monad is a representation
to a greater or lesser extent of everything else in the Universe
because it is linked to all other monads by means of its relation
to God. That is, each monad is a reflection of the entire
Universe precisely because it is in some way a projection of a
part of God. The debt Leibniz owes to Plato’s Republic for this
concept (note that I did not say “image”) is nowhere directly
acknowledged by Leibniz, but it is manifest. The one quarrel
Leibniz would have with my associating him with the image of
the Cave in the Socratic dialog is simply that it is an image
rather than something that dwells in the understanding. For
Leibniz’s God is, at least to my thinking, a Mathematician, and
He, like Dedekind, holds that mathematics has no need of
geometry.
In this conception, then, there is a profound similarity
between all of our connections with one another and with the
physical, social, and moral world.
It seems clear, therefore, that Leibniz does not think that
space has an actual existence. As he states explicitly,
As for my own opinion, I have said more than once that
I hold space to be something relative, as time is, that I
hold it to be an order of coexistences, as time is an order
of successions (Letters to Clark, Leibniz’s Third Paper,
Paragraph 4).
This is radically at odds with Newton’s Principia, in which
Newton seems to deduce the existence of absolute space from
the existence of absolute (i.e., accelerated) motion. For Newton,
space is the “sensorium of God.”
Let us ponder this for a moment. For Newton, space has an
existence. We can look out into the space before us and hold it in
our minds as something, even though we can (as Kant does) in
our imaginations remove all of its contents from the space that
holds it. What is left over is space, be it a cubic centimeter in
front of us or a volume 100,000 parsecs on a side.
When Leibniz sees this emptiness, he views it as an actual
metaphysical void, something that not even God can relate to. As
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BEALL
5
such, it is an abomination. Leibniz cannot accept a thing that God
cannot act upon, and the idea of an actual void is such a thing.
Since God must be able to act on all creation, a genuine
metaphysical void cannot exist. This is one of the reasons why
the Leibniz-Clark correspondence (Clark was taking Newton’s
part) makes little headway to change the authors’ minds. The
grounds of the conversation are radically different.
It is a worthy anecdote to relate that Leibniz and Newton
never acknowledged the other’s invention of the differential and
integral calculus. And it is helpful to note that Newton’s development of the calculus relies on geometrical constructions, while
Leibniz’s relies on an evolution of Descartes’ algebra. It is true
that Leibniz uses sketches of curves and lines for his derivations,
in part because we are visual creatures, but Leibniz’s derivations
do seem to be less reliant on images of extension.
Thus, for Leibniz, extension has no actual existence. What
we interpret as extension, as space, is a representation given to
us by God. It is very likely that the same is true for time in
Leibniz’s metaphysics. This separation is like a three-dimensional
Pythagorean theorem whose terms are given to us. What we
interpret as a spatial extension is a coordinate interval that we
call space, just as temporal separation is a coordinate expression
that we call time. What separates us, what we interpret as
distance, is just a shadow on a Cave wall caused by our origin
within a common light. What separates us from the amber light
of ages past is an equivalent coordinate expression whose
regularity is provided by God.
I cannot resist at this point recalling for you the yarn in the
Odyssey when the hero is among the Phaeacians, and Homer
brings us back from the story Odysseus is telling into Alkinoos
and Arete’s palace hall with its feast and polished stone floors
and torchlight. The momentum of that telescoping does not stop
there, but places us back firmly into the present where we realize
that we are reading words two thousand years old about a story
that is a thousand years distant even from that remote past. Like
Leibniz’s God, Homer has linked us to the ages, and three
millennia are as nought.
�6
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
One other element of Leibniz’s philosophy will prove
useful later: Leibniz directly addresses the problem of a Deity
that weaves out our destinies to construct the best of all possible
worlds. This Deity knows everything we are capable of doing,
knows all of our potentialities, and further, knows all of our
past.
And since every present state of a simple substance is a
natural consequence of its preceding state, the present is
pregnant with the future (Monadology, paragraph 22).
Thus, the “demon” in Laplace’s Essay on a Theory of Probability
takes its inspration from Leibniz. Laplace says explicitly:
We ought then to regard the present state of the universe
as the effect of its anterior state and as the cause of the
one which is to follow. Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which
nature is animated and the respective situation of the
beings who compose it—an intelligence sufficiently vast
to submit these data to analysis—it would embrace in the
same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of
the universe and those of the lightest atom; for it, nothing
would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be
present to its eyes (Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on
Probabilities, Chapter II).
Leibniz seems to recognize the determinism of such a God, but
sidesteps the troublesome argument of the lack of free will by
claiming that God knows all possible predicates of our being, and
so chooses the path which we would follow anyway!
I regard the foregoing comments about Leibniz’s Monadology as a preamble to our discussion of the problem of nonlocality in quantum mechanics, especially as the concept of nonlocality has been articulated by interpretations of the work of
John Bell, an elementary particle theorist who worked at CERN
before his untimely death in the Fall of 1990. But first, I shall try
to provide some background on the landscape in which Bell
developed his justifiably famous theorem.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BEALL
7
2. An Eternal, Golden Braid: Quantum Mechanics in
Rutherford, Bohr, de Broglie, Heisenberg, and Einstein
It is surprising at first glance that of the four papers Einstein
published in 1905, the one for which he was awarded the Nobel
Prize in Physics was not the paper on special relativity, entitled
“On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” (Annalen der
Physik 17 [1905]: 891-921); nor the famous E=mc2 paper, “Does
the Inertia of a Body Depend upon its Energy Content?”
(Annalen der Physik 18 [1905]: 639-641); nor the one on Brownian motion, “On the Movement of Small Particles Suspended in
Stationary Liquids Required by the Molecular-Kinetic Theory of
Heat” (Annalen der Physik 17 [1905]: 549-560).
(As an aside, it is worthy of note that this is the one
hundreth anniversary of the publication of the 1915 paper on
General Relativity, and the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of
Maxwell’s publication of his theory of light as electromagnetic
waves.)
The actual phrasing from the Nobel Prize Committee was
“for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his
discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.” The so-called
“photoelectric effect” paper has a curious title: “Concerning an
Heuristic Point of View Toward the Emission and Transformation
of Light” (Annalen der Physik 17 [1905]: 132-148). This was the
publication that marked the beginnings of what is now called
Quantum Mechanics.
In the paper, Einstein characterizes the wave theory of light
in the following manner:
The energy of a beam of light from a point source (according to Maxwell’s theory of light or, more generally,
according to any wave theory) is continuously spread over
an ever increasing volume.
In the next paragraph, Einstein notes that
The wave theory of light, which operates with continuous
spatial functions, has worked well in the representation
of purely optical phenomena and will probably never be
replaced by any other theory.
�8
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
But in the next paragraph, he says,
It seems to me that the observations associated with
blackbody radiation, fluorescence, the production of
cathode rays by ultraviolet light, and other related
phenomena connected with the emission and transformation of light . . . are more readily understood if one
assumes that the energy of light is discontinuously
distributed in space. In accordance with the assumption
to be considered here, the energy of a light ray spreading
out from a point source is not continuously distributed
over increasing space but consists of a finite number of
energy quanta which are localized at points in space,
which move without dividing, and which can only be
produced and absorbed as complete units.
On the one hand, Einstein allows for a “wave theory” like
Maxwell’s waves in a luminiferous aether in which the light is
transmitted, reflected, and refracted. He “heuristically” considers
light to be a particle during light’s emission from and absorption
into material bodies. It is perhaps ironic that Einstein was never
able to reconcile his conception of the dual nature of light with
the equivalent, dual character of particles as both material bodies
and waves, a solution posed by de Broglie to provide an explanation of Bohr’s model for the energy levels of the hydrogen atom.
Of course, this entire “braid” began with efforts to apply
models from classical physics that explain everything from
cannonballs to asteroids to planets to the very small structures
within matter such as atoms and elementary particles via Galileo,
Thomson, Millikan, and Rutherford.
By way of a truncated outline of the argument, Bohr used the
existence of hydrogen spectral lines and the contemporary work
by Planck to explain so-called blackbody radiation. Planck made
the hypothesis that discrete oscillators in matter had only certain
fundamental modes with which they could vibrate. He asserted
that these oscillators were in equilibrium with the thermal
radiation from matter with a particular temperature, and thus
explained blackbody radiation. Bohr wondered what the “Planck
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BEALL
9
oscillators” could be, since the classical picture of an orbiting
charge holds that it should radiate continuously. He hypothesized
that his atom settled into quasi-stationary states and emitted and
absorbed radiation during transitions from one energy level to
another.
It is likely that everyone in the audience is familiar with
Bohr’s model from high school science classes and many popular
lectures and books on the subject of science. You Seniors are in
the process of completing this sequence of papers.
In fact, the Bohr model has become a commonplace picture
of the atom. But such familiarity hides the utter strangeness of
the concept. The atom is stable for a while, and then is excited or
de-excited by the absorption or emission of light at a specific
frequency. These energy levels are Bohr’s answer to why the
spectra of light from certain gases contains only certain
frequencies. If you sprinkle salt onto the logs in your fireplace,
the resultant light is a brilliant yellow. That yellow light contains
only certain frequencies, frequencies that are as much an indication of the presence of the sodium in salt as your finger prints
are of you as an individual person. We know the constitution of
stars precisely because of this line-spectrum identification of
elements, stars that can be hundreds or thousands of light years
distant.
The strangeness of the idea of the Bohr atom bothered de
Broglie, who reasoned by a kind of symmetry derived from
Einstein’s photoelectric effect paper (wherein light can have a
particulate nature, as well as a wave-like nature) that particles
could perhaps have both a discrete nature and also a wave-like
nature. In an immensely clever argument (he won the Nobel
Prize for it), de Broglie argued that one can calculate the
“wavelength” of a particle by assigning it a specific momentum,
which implies that it has an energy. That energy can be used to
calculate a characteristic wavelength, E = hν = hc/λ. It is a
stunning triumph for so simple an argument that the wavelengths
thus calculated for an electron in the Bohr orbits for hydrogen
is exactly the circumference of the quasi-stationary orbits for
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
electrons in the hydrogen atom. So the electrons are not exactly
particles when they are inside the atom. They also have wavelike qualities.
Schroedinger was a young assistant professor when de Broglie
published his astonishing idea. I have it on good authority that
Schroedinger was assigned the task of giving the journal club
lecture at his university the next week. It’s a bit like these Fridaynight lectures, but less formal and typically they are on a weekday
afternoon. The assignment was something like, “Take a look at
de Broglie’s paper and give us a synopsis of it at the journal club
next Tuesday.”
Schroedinger had a ski trip planned for that weekend (Friday
through Sunday, apparently). Being the persistent soul that he
was, he took a copy of de Broglie’s paper and a book on
solutions to differential equations in various coordinate systems
(rectilinear, cylindrical, and spherical) with him on the ski trip.
The short version of the story is that he didn’t get much skiing
done, but he came back well on the way of inventing wave
mechanics, an explanation for the energy levels of atoms as kind
of standing waves in space. His “eureka” moment came when
he said to his bewildered ski companions, “I have just fit the
energy levels of the hydrogen atom in a way you would not
believe!” The standing waves were similar to the threedimensional oscillations of sound waves in a concert hall. But
standing waves of what?
I believe Schroedinger originally thought of the standing
waves as waves of charge density. The electron has wave-like
qualities à la de Broglie, and it has charge, so it would make
sense as an extension of de Broglie’s hypothesis. But electrons
have discrete charges when they are measured by Millikan in
his famous oil-drop experiment. How come we never see
fractional charges?
Schroedinger’s description of electrons (or any elementary
particle, for that matter) was that they are aggregations of waves
that reinforce in a certain region and cancel out everywhere else.
This makes sense in explaining the energy levels of a hydrogen
atom, but causes other conceptual problems.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BEALL
11
Schroedinger’s description of a
particle as an aggregation of waves
of some sort caused Heisenberg to
analyze the behavior of such particles
when we try to measure them. If we
try to localize the particle as we do in
the act of measurement, we confine
it to a narrower region in space. That
means we add up more and more
waves. Each wave has a slightly
different speed. Schroedinger needed
these different speeds for different
wavelengths in order to get the
“wave-packet” to behave like a particle. But that means that the
momentum of the particle becomes less certain over time, since, in
order to localize the particle, we need to add more wavelengths, and
adding more wavelengths means the velocity (and therefore the
momentum) become more uncertain.
There is actually a calculable limit to the uncertainty in the
momentum times the uncertainty in the position of a particle. It is
greater than or equal to Planck’s constant. This is of course the
Heisenberg Uncertainty Relation. It says that there is a fundamental,
�12
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
and not simply an experimental, limit to our knowledge of the
location of a particle and its momentum.
A particularly helpful illustration of the Heisenberg derivation (and one that will be useful to us later in this lecture can
be had by looking at single-slit diffraction of a plane wave. The
wave can be a wave of light, an elementary particle like an
electron, or even a water wave. If it originates from a far-distant
source, the wave is essentially a series of parallel troughs and
peaks with its propagation direction perpendicular to those
troughs and peaks. When we allow it to approach a screen so that
the peaks and troughs (as seen from above) are parallel to the
screen, we can watch the interaction of the barrier with the
oncoming waves. If there is an opening in the barrier that is of
the same order as the wavelength of the waves, a fraction of the
waves can pass the barrier. When this happens, a part of the wave
front gets through the barrier, but for some fraction of the waves,
the direction of the waves is changed because of the wavefront’s
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BEALL
13
interference with itself. This interference produces a dispersion
of the wave front that gives its velocity a vertical component. It
is important to note what has happened here. We have limited the
wavefront in the vertical direction to a δx that is essentially the
width of the slit. It has produced a dispersion in the velocity of
the wave in the vertical direction, a δv.
In Schroedinger’s terms, this dispersion in the velocity of the
wave in the vertical direction (that is, in the same direction as the
opening of the slit) is an uncertainty in the velocity. If we
consider the wave as representing the motion of a particle, then
the localization of the particle within a δx produces an uncertainty
in the momentum of the particle of order δp. This illustration is
not entirely fanciful. In fact, Heisenberg uses it as one of his
derivations of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Relation. Furthermore,
the smaller the slit, that is, the smaller the uncertainty in position,
the greater the uncertainty in the momentum.
This has led to no end of problems in interpretation. One
example of this is the fact that elementary particles (be they
electrons, protons, or photons), when emitted from a source and
directed toward a screen or grid whose spacings are the same size
as the wavelengths of the elementary particles, will show a
diffraction pattern on a screen downstream from slits. For the
sake of clarity, we will consider only photons, although the
discussion could as well apply to any elementary particle,
including neutrons, protons, electrons, etc.
Let a stream of photons set forth across the chaotic gulf toward
a screen. Imagine this as like a scene from Milton’s Paradise Lost
as Satan launches himself across the chasm between hell and
paradise. These photons are transmitted and diffracted as though
they are electromagnetic waves. When they reach two slits in the
screen, the waves interfere with one another so that there is a very
specific pattern of light and dark lines on the screen downstream
from the slits called a “two-slit” pattern.
Suppose we turn down the intensity of the light. Let us make
the light exceedingly dim, so that when we look at the screen or
detector, we find only one cell on the screen illuminated or
exposed (you remember photographic film, I trust) at a time.
�14
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
What happens next is remarkable. This figure shows the
buildup over time of electrons in a two slit experiment at very low
flux levels. We see one quantum at a time arriving . As we watch,
the diffraction pattern begins to develop. We see the characteristic
two-slit pattern. But we have allowed only one quantum (in this
case, electrons) to be emitted at a time. How can we possibly get
a two-slit pattern. Such an experimental apparatus exists. The
results from it behave exactly as I have said.
Apparently, the individual light or particle quantum goes
through both slits at once. It is spread out over the entire space
of the experimental screen (or more properly, the experimental
volume) and then excites only one element of the detector. If this
seems quixotic to you, it is. It is known as “the problem of
measurement” in the vernacular of Shady Bend. The wave
function (remember all those waves adding up to produce the
wave packet) is spread out even for a single particle or quantum
of light. The moment before it hits the detector screen, it is
everywhere on the screen. At the next instant, it collapses into a
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BEALL
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single point. This is known as the “collapse of the wave
function.” The collapse is apparently instantaneous. If these are
material particles or quanta of light, they sort themselves into a
single area on the screen instantaneously.
There were many objections to this explanation, not the least
of which was that it violates causality. The wave-packet description of the two-slit experiment requires that the waves instantly
collapse to a single point, after having, a moment in time before,
occupied the whole of the experiment.
Bohr and Heisenberg made noble efforts to resolve this
apparent contradiction by supposing that the wave function
description of elementary particles was merely a calculation of
likelihood or probability. Since probability is only a likelihood,
the collapse of the wave function is merely the result of a
measurement. And like any measurement, once it occurs, the
answer is always, “Yes. That’s what happened!”
Einstein would have none of it. His famous quote, “God
does not play dice!” about the so-called Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics was an indication of his
objection to the probability interpretation of the psi-function. In
his view, there was an underlying causal relation between the
elements of the experiments and their outcomes that was not
represented by quantum mechanics (QM). Yet QM is a remarkably successful theoretical method.
In a paper in response to the probability interpretation of
QM, Einstein, Podolski and Rosen (EPR) tried to show that the
uncertainty relation developed by Heisenberg was flawed, and
that some variations of the single or two slit experiment would
give an inroad into figuring out precisely what the momentum
and position of the particle would be. One of the thought
experiments proposed to measure the momentum transferred to
the screen by the impact of the particle, This (by conservation
of momentum) would allow the particle momentum to be
measured exactly, while the position would be localized to the
region within the slit. But when one took into account the
uncertainty in the position of the screen, the Heisenberg
Uncertainty limit returned.
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A variant of one of the thought experiments used two
particles that interacted prior to the slit, and then had one transfer
its momentum to one screen while another’s position was
determined independently. Again, by conservation of momentum
the second particle’s momentum and its position were to be
determined beyond the Heisenberg limit. Each response to EPR
by Heisenberg and Bohr led EPR to further amplifications of the
experimental apparatus. While the correspondence in the
scientific literature led many to accept the Copenhagen Interpretation and the Heisenberg Uncertainty limit, Einstein was
never able to believe the probabilistic nature of Bohr and Heisenberg’s interpretation.
Yet the alternative to a probabilistic interpretation was an
instantaneous collapse of a physical wave function. This instantaneous collapse would clearly exceed the speed of light, and thus
render it difficult to accept, since the limiting speed of the transfer
of information in Special Relativity is the velocity of light. This
is one of the fundamental hypotheses of Special Relativity.
This led John Bell to a further analysis of the two slit experiment, and the theoretical development of Bell’s Theorem (or
Bell’s Inequality), which has allowed many experimental test of
locality, causality, and the predictions of quantum mechanics. It
appears to contradict Einstein’s hopes for a “hidden variable”
theory, wherein true causality would be returned to the world.
Apparently, this is not to be realized.
3. Bell’s Theorem (or Bell’s Inequality)
But how does this happen? Bell’s theorem is essentially a test of
whether or not two particles, once they interact, can be separated
enough so that their states do not influence one another.
Remarkably, it is posed in such a way that it can be implemented
as an experimental test.
Schroedinger called this phenomenon, in which the wave
function of two particles becomes joined by their interaction, an
“entanglement” of the wave functions of the particles. And you
recall that all particles have a wave function description that
guides or governs their behavior.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BEALL
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This hypothesis bears on EPR’s paper. To reiterate, if two
particles interact, then the momentum of one could be determined
by inference due to measuring the momentum of the other, since
the momentum of the pair has to be conserved. At the same time,
the position of the first particle, for which we inferred the momentum, could be accurately measured for its position as long as
the pair were sufficiently far apart. Thus, the momentum and
position of a particle could be measured at a precision which
violated the Heisenberg uncertainty limit. At this point, EPR
could claim that the Heisenberg Uncertainty relation was merely
a practical limit, and that there was some underlying, governing
relation which we simply needed to find, some sort of “hidden
variable” that really determined the evolution of the system.
J. S. Bell was sympathetic to EPR’s view. His theorem (called
variously Bell’s Theorem or Bell’s Inequality) was an attempt to
establish whether or not EPR’s hypothesis could be tested
experimentally. The experimental setup is remarkably simple, but
not trivial. Two particles would be allowed to interact, to become
“entangled,” and then would separate and go off in opposite
directions. After a time, the particles would each be measured to
determine their properties. As with the EPR paper, the hypothesis
that their states could no longer interact would produce one result,
whereas the hypothesis that their states were still entangled when
they were measured would produce another result.1
The next figure (overleaf) shows the results of one of the
experimental tests of Bell’s Theorem, in this case the orientation
of the polarization of photons measured by two separated systems.
The straight line shows the limit of a “local, realistic” hypothesis,
that is, that the results are uncorrelated. Any experimental result
below the diagonal straight line indicates a correlation (that is, an
entanglement) between distant particles and their experimental
1. For a readable proof of the theorem, see Nick Herbert’s book Quantum Reality (New York: Random House, 2011) and his account at
http://quantumtantra.com/bell2.html, as well as his articles “Cryptographic approach to hidden variables” in the American Journal of
Physics 43 1975): 315-16 and “How to be in two places at the same
time,” New Scientist 111 (1986): 41-44.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
apparatuses. Perhaps most important, the results predicted by QM
show a very close agreement with the data!
In some later experimental tests, groups have tried to
estimate the speed of the transmission of the correlations by
changing slightly the timing of the setting of the measuring
apparatuses. In a ground-breaking paper by Robert Garisto
entitled “What is the Speed of Quantum Information?” (Quantum
Physics 2002 [arXiv:quant-ph/0212078v1]) the result of a
measurement conducted at CERN is that the correlations happen
at a velocity at least 10,000 times the speed of light over a
distance of 18 kilometers. I say “at least” because the electronics
of the experi-mental setup could not measure a faster correlation.
So for all intents and purposes, this speed is a lower limit. The
correlations occur effectively instantaneously.
What are we to make of such results? Henry Pierce Stapp’s
paper, entitled “The S-Matrix Interpretation of Quantum Theory”
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(Physical Review 3 [1971]: 1303-20), provides a highly recommended discussion of Bell’s Theorem, despite the imposing title.
(By way of a friendly warning, it’s best to get a bit of orientation
first by reading Section X, “Ontological Problems,” and Appendix B, “World View.”)
To give you some idea of Stapp’s take on Bell’s Theorem, I
quote from his paper at a point just after he shows a concise proof
of that theorem.
A conclusion that can be drawn from this theorem is that
the demands of causality, locality, and individuality
cannot be simultaneously maintained in the description
of nature. Causality demands contingent predictions;
locality demands local causes of localized results;
individuality demands specification of individual results,
not merely their probabilities.
As Stapp puts it:
I can see only three ways out of the problem posed by
Bell’s theorem.
1. The first is to accept . . . the idea that human
observers are cognizant only of individual branches of
the full reality of the world: The full physical world
would contain a superposition of a myriad of interconnected physical worlds of the kind we know. An
individual observer would be personally aware of only
one response of a macroscopic measuring device, but a
full account of reality would include all the other
possible outcomes on an equal footing, though perhaps
with unequal “weights.”
2. The second way out is to accept that nature is
basically highly nonlocal, in the sense that correlations
exist that violently contradict—even at the macroscopic
level—the usual ideas of the space-time propagation of
information. The intuitive idea of the physical distinctness
of physically well-separated macroscopic objects then
becomes open to question. And the intuitive idea of space
itself is placed in jeopardy. For space is intimately
connected to the space-time relationships that are
naturally expressed in terms of it. If there are, between
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far-apart microscopic events, large instantaneous connections that do not respect spatial separation, then the
significance of space would seem to arise only from the
statistical relationships that do respect it.
3. The third way out is to deny that measurements that
“could have been performed, but were not,” would have
had definite results if they had been performed. This
way out seems, at first, to be closest to the spirit of the
Copenhagen interpretation. However, it seems to contradict the idea of indeterminism, which is also an
important element of the spirit of the Copenhagen interpretation.
Some comments are clearly in order here. The third option
Stapp articulates bears remarkable similarities to Laplace’s
Demon or Leibniz’s God as architects of the best of all possible
worlds. In that instantiation of reality, what we choose is exactly
what we will. But what we will as a predicate of our being is
completely known by the Deity and determined by it.
The first option is known as Stapp’s “many-worlds”
interpretation. That option is often mentioned in the same breath
as Schroedinger’s Cat.
In that interpretation, as Stapp says, the cat is both alive and
dead in the multiply unfolding universe of outcomes. Each point
where the quantum hits the screen represents a starting point for
a separate future.
As an interesting aside, we have some hopes of conducting
Bell’s Theorem type experiments here at St. John’s in a room in
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the basement appropriately called the Quantum Lab. But of
course, no cats will be allowed in that room.
Most people find the second option, non-locality, most
“appealing,” if that is the right phrase.
In the case of the first experimental measurements, conducted with two low-energy neutrons colliding; then recoiling
down separate arms of a vacuum line; and finally having their
angular momenta determined by a Stern-Gerlach apparatus (I will
spare you the details), there were (some thirty or forty years ago)
five measurements, four of which agreed with Bell’s inequality.
Since then, all of the experimental tests of Bell’s theorem have
confirmed it.
To emphasize how surprising this has been, I recall a
conversation I had with Professor Carol Alley at the University
of Maryland when I was a graduate student there. He is a famous
experimental physicist, one who used a laser to measure the
distance to the Moon from a site near Goddard Space Flight
Center during one of the Apollo Lunar Landing missions. As we
talked about Bell’s theorem, and it’s apparent experimental
corroboration, standing in the hallway in the Physics Building at
the University of Maryland, he was clearly quite perplexed that
there was any corroboration of the inequality. As we spoke, his
voice was getting louder and louder. Finally, I said to him,
“Professor Alley, you realize that you are shouting at me?” He
laughed and said, “Well, it’s certainly not you that I’m shouting
at, Jim. It’s the idea of this result!”
Left with the options Stapp articulated, which would you
abandon: causality, locality, or individuality. You cannot have
all three! Most people, faced with these options, give up
locality.
4. Like shadows on a Cave Wall: Leibniz’s ideas of “space”
as a kind of answer to the problem of non-locality
It is time to recall one of the things I am attempting in this lecture:
to use Leibniz’s conceptions of space and time in the Monadology as a metaphysical foundation for the idea of no-locality in
quantum mechanics.
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Let us reiterate the properties of monads. Monads are
singular. That is, they have many properties, but no parts. They
have no windows. All their impressions and reflections of the
Cosmos come through their reflection and articulation of the
Deity, which they represent in a small part.
Finally, it is likely, based on the experimental results of Bell’s
Theorem, that our intuitions of space and time are far removed
from the way the Universe actually is.
5. Concluding remarks
I conclude this lecture with two principal points and some
speculations.
First, it was many years ago that Roger Penrose in a book
called The Emporer’s New Mind, tried to explain the coherence
of mind by the physical effects of non-locality on a relatively
small scale—the electrochemical and quantum mechanical
processes in the human brain (cats, also, most likely, since
Penrose is fond of cats). This coherence would require entanglement of the prior physical states of these electrochemical wave
fronts, but this does not seem terribly surprising.
Second, entanglement does not depend simply or perhaps
even necessarily on proximity. At a fairly formal level, entanglement depends on interaction. The entanglement of cognitive
processes with the experiential world might be sufficient to
explain the commonality of experience, a term which I coin here
in this essay, especially given that the correlations persist over
manifestly macroscopic differences.
This bears, quite generally, on our ideas of culture, also. As
an example, think of how easy or difficult it can be to change
one’s entire conception of the world via a single conversation. I
thank Mr. William Braithwaite for the suggestion.
The concept of non-locality thus articulated can extend far
beyond the possibility of common experience to the possibility
of kindredness with our common weal. We might not, actually,
be separate spheres, hoping to connect, hoping to touch and
know the world. Like shadows on a cave wall, both we as
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individuals and the rest of the sensible world could actually
spring from a common light.
Finally, and this is a bit more speculative, but hardly
original, the entire evolution of the history of the Cosmos has
involved some pretty heavy entanglement. We now call it the
Big Bang.
This brings us to a further point regarding Leibniz’s Deity.
God might not have simply said, “Let there be Light.” God
might have actually been that light.
�Diver Tomb, Posidonia (Modern Paestum)
ca. 480-470, Museum, Paestum
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Depth Versus Complexity
Eva Brann
What a great honor it is to be invited to speak to the philosophers
of Athens, though I came flying into Atlanta through the blue
skies by airplane rather than sailing into the Piraeus over the
wine-dark sea by trireme!
My topic is a duality, an opposition in the way our world offers itself to the search for knowledge, which is mirrored in our
personal predisposition for a way of inquiry.
I’ve learned not to expect an audience to sit with bated breath
until I reveal my own inclination and also not to indulge myself
in post-modern indeterminacies. So I’ll say up front where, as
my students say, I’m “coming from” and, as matters more, where
I’m going with my title, “Depth Versus Complexity.” I think that
the first dimension of depth describes such bottom-seeking
knowledge as we’re capable of searching out; it may be called
philosophia, “love of wisdom.” The second dimension, on the
other hand, describes such surface-covering information as we
can attain by research; it could be named, to coin a term,
philotechnosyne, “love of skillful fact-finding.” Since it seems
to me hazardous, both aimless and dangerous, to plunge into the
depths below a surface that I’m not acquainted with, it also seems
to me that those who attempt such a plunge, which is always
made with eyes closed, should have their eyes wide open above
Eva Brann is a tutor and former dean at St. John’s College in Annapolis,
Maryland. This lecture was first delivered to the Department of Philosophy at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia on September 16,
2016.
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and be acquainted with much of the wide surface, always keeping
in mind Heraclitus’ dictum that “Eyes and ears are bad witnesses
to humans that have barbarian souls” (D-K 107). I will cite rather,
in behalf of being extensively informed, Socrates, who lived in
that first Athens as an ardent urbanite. He seems to Phaedrus, his
ostensible guide, like a stranger outside the city in the country
around Athens, and he says that he, Socrates, only learns when
within the city; but he shows that he has far more real local
knowledge than his companion.
The direct opposite of complexity would be simplicity; of
depth it is shallowness. I’m not disavowing but rather avoiding
those antitheses, for now. So I’ll describe the two ways not as directly opposite, but rather as orthogonal to each other. Therefore
let me begin in a somewhat unlikely way: with the most basic
Cartesian coordinate diagram of classical physics, in which the
horizontal x axis represents the fundamental independent variable, time, and the vertical y axis orthogonal (that is, at right angles) to it represents some other physical dimension—early on,
distance, velocity, and acceleration. That’s so even in latter day
elementary textbooks. But at a crucial moment in physics, its first
modern moment, the direction is different. The second theorem
of the Third Day of Galileo’s Two New Sciences (1638), sets out,
under the title of “Naturally Accelerated Motion,” the earliest
clearly quantified law of nature, that for free fall at the surface
of the earth,1 where acceleration is naturally uniform. Here time
is represented by an upright line, while the horizontal stands for
velocity. Moreover, time begins not at what will later be called
the origin, the intersection of the representative lines, but at a release point. Picture the diagram as rendering Galileo, nearly half
a century earlier, standing at the top of the Leaning Tower, about
to start his experiment by letting go of a ball. That experiment
was not, to be sure, an experiment at all but a demonstration of a
remarkable fact already known by Galileo, namely that balls of
different weights would, absent friction, hit the ground together.
1. The third day of creation in the Hebrew Bible is when the earth appears (Genesis 1:9).
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That’s somewhat to my point, since so-called information, gathered by experimental research is, I would guess, far less often put
to use as the source of new discoveries than as the corroboration
of pre-conceived knowledge.
What is a little off my point is the mind-boggling and modernity-determining way Galileo proves the law on the basis of a
postulate suggested by the Pisan demonstration. The postulate
says that, since weight is not involved in free fall close to the
earth’s surface, the simplest possible relation of velocity to time
is to be assumed, namely that the former varies directly with the
latter. Then the velocity-lines, set up horizontally on each moment of time, increase proportionally with the time of falling and
so assume the outline of a triangle whose base represents the velocity at the moment of impact. The interior of this triangle is a
kind of proto-integral, a summation of all the near-infinitesimal
velocity-lines, with side t for time and d/t for distance per unit
time, or velocity. These sides, when multiplied, yield twice the
area of a triangle representing the dimension t·d/t . Simply put,
the area of a triangle, a plane figure, now represents a distance,
a linear figure. I’m moved to say that this counterintuitive procedure instantiates the crucial effect of quantification: the symbolic quantity has no immediately apprehensible similarity to the
quality of the symbolized phenomenon, here distance.
I must interrupt my account here to say, very emphatically,
that Galileo clearly saw what was eventuating and did his clever
and careful best to circumvent the representation of distance by
area, so that his proof is conceptually clear but mathematically
cumbrous. More efficient and less mindful ways would soon be
found.2
As it turns out, the tsunami of information now available is
largely numerical in form and bears a ruptured relation to its qualitative subject. Incidentally, the law of free fall then simply stares
at you from the diagram: Since by the postulate the velocity ratios
2. Of course, this transmogrification had already preceded, when a
length uniformly increasing had been made to symbolize a similarly increasing rate, namely, the ratio of distance to time or velocity, d/t.
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are the same as the time ratios, we can substitute the time for the
velocity and say: In free fall on earth, in abstraction from friction
and in the absence of a force that might increase acceleration, the
distances vary as the squares of the times, d ~ t 2 Let me repeat:
I’m a little off topic with this tale, but only a little, since the story
of non-similar symbolism is deeply implicated in the tale of depth
vs. complexity.
My recall of a moment when time went diagrammatically
downward rather than outward is intended to remind you of other
ways time goes downward—and inward. If Galileo’s ball hadn’t
been stopped at ground zero it would have gone inward toward
the center of the earth.
There is another discipline in which time heads down. In archaeology, the deeper we dug (I say “we” because in my pre-Socratic days I was an archeologist), the later it was in our personal
day, the earlier it became in the world’s time: the deeper down,
the farther back. On our earth, the buried past lies progressively
deeper below the visible now that presents itself on the surface.
These material survivals went, if undisturbed, in readable stratifications, way back into prehistoric times.3
I refer to digging because it is an analogue, perhaps even the
source of metaphor for a psychic capacity called remembering.
In remembering we dive into our memory tank, often to meet a
memory floating or flashing up to forestall or even anticipate our
search. But sometimes we must recollect, dig laboriously downward through stratum after stratum of compacted memories, until
the desired one halts the search. Socrates distinguishes memory
(mneme) from recollection (anamnesis)—e.g., in Symposium
208a, and Meno 81d. Augustine, that great Platonic theologian,
devises an imaginative topology of the soul which visualizes that
3. “If undisturbed:” I recall a day of excitement at the American Excavations of the Athenian Agora (Marketplace), when a pristine Neolithic
deposit was thought to have been discovered. By evening the excavators
had reached bottom—and there lay a little button bearing the legend:
Army of the Hellenes. It came from a Greek army tunic; its presence
spoiled the temporal virginity of the find and with it much of its informational value.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
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depth-sounding destination of recollection (Confessions, Bk. X,
Chs. 11, 12, 17). Our quasi-sensory memory images densely fill
the innumerable fields and caves and caverns of our inward
quasi-spatial memory. Here we wander in remembrance. But yet
deeper within the huge inner world are placeless places for imageless presences such as true mathematical figures (meaning
those drawn with breadthless lengths on an inner quasi-plane),
precepts of the liberal arts, including logic, and the invisible
being of things discerned within, “themselves by themselves,”
the Platonic forms. These flee into the remotest recesses and must
be “excogitated,” literally “driven together and out,” that is, laboriously recollected. Then Augustine extends the depth—or
height—of the soul beyond memory and its recollective recesses.
“I will transcend” (transibo), he says, my memory and “ascending” (ascendans) through and beyond my memorial soul I will
mount up to God who is above me.
To my mind, this is a remarkable correction, or perhaps a
consummation, of Socrates’ account, who never tells, except in
post-mortem myths, how the forms and their ruling principle, the
Idea of the Good, actually come into the soul—or it to them. In
Augustine’s account, they penetrate, they enter, the innermost
depth of the soul, that is to say, the soul opens onto the heights
of Heaven. Depth and height are strangely identical. I will dwell
on this later, but here recall to you that the Latin word altus means
both “high” and “deep,” and also that Heraclitus says “The way
up and down is one and the same” (D-K 60).
Like Augustine, the enhancer of Platonic psychology,
Freud, its traducer, has an outside-in psychic topology. He himself called psychoanalysis “depth-psychology” (Encyclopedia
Britannica, 1926). His early typology in the Interpretation of
Dreams (1900) names at the upper end the perceptual system,
that is, awareness; behind or below comes the preconscious system, that is, the subconscious, where reside psychic facts not
presently in awareness but readily accessible. And deep down
there is the place of the unconscious, a hermetic hell, reachable
only by the experts in deep penetration, by the psychoanalysts.
The motto of Freud’s early book is “If I cannot bend heaven, I
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will raise hell” (Virgil, Aeneid VII 312). And that is why I call
Freud a traducer of the two ancients: For them the light increases with depth, for him the murk. As Lady Macbeth, who
might, poor woman, be a Freudian case, says: “Hell is murky”
(Macbeth, V.i.41).
I’ll return to Augustine’s Confessions, Book XI (23, 27, 28), to
me the highpoint of the inquiry into time. Here memory becomes
the place and the condition of time. Time is a “distention” of the
mind, a dilation brought about by its accumulating memories, and
the amount of this mental stretching is the measure of times. Neither
future nor past are; only the present, the here and now, exists. The
future is expectation now and the past is memory now, and time is
the presently felt extent of this expectational and memorial stretching upward into the future and downward into the past respectively.
To be sure, Augustine says nothing about up or down. But
Husserl, who takes his departure from Augustine in what is probably the greatest application of the phenomenological method to a
subject, namely his Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness (1905), does exactly that in describing his own “Diagram of
Time” (para. 10). He speaks of the new nows changing into pasts
that continuously “run off’ and plunge “downward” into the depths
marked on a vertical line which symbolizes the “retention,” that is
to say, the memory of impressions.
Before showing you where I plan for all this to be going let me
take a minute to tell you about the etymologies of the words “deep”
and “down.” I am far from imagining that recovered meanings, be
they the careful etymologies produced by learned linguists, who
trace a word to its speculative Indo-European root, or the creative
derivations devised by imaginative amateurs, which have no basis
in research, prove anything at all. The dead-serious but linguistically
dubious etymologizing of certain philosophers strikes me as an improbity, while the apt hijinks of others seem to me good fun.4 But
both linguistically sound etymologies and imaginative verbal jeux
4. An example of—how shall I put it?—unstraightforwardness is Heidegger’s translation of Greek aletheia, “truth,” as “un-concealedness,”
as from alpha-privative a (“un”) and Lethe (“forgetfulness”), from a
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
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d’esprit can be thought-provoking, the latter because they’re meant
to be, the former because they may tell us something about the development of human reflection. But all in all, etymologies are incitements, not revelations, and poetic play, not philosophy.
Here is the linguistically respectable etymology of “deep.”
The Indo-European root, dheub, gives rise to “dip,” “dive,” as
well as “deep.” Thus it is reasonable to infer that “deep” originally signified plunging into an element and bringing up some
of it. The deepest dipping and diving our earth affords us is the
ocean, the deepest of the deep the Mariana Trench; let it stand
for non-metaphorical, literal, depth and diving. The “down” adjective is similarly physical; it is derived from dune, “hill”;
“down” means “off the hill,” moving from top to bottom.
Now let me do the same for “complexity.” “Com-,” Indo-European kom, signifies “beside, near, with”; “-plexity” derives
from plek-, “to plait,” originally from “flax,” a plant yielding textile fiber. So like depth, complexity is rooted in our dealing with
material objects. I’ve read that the most complicated object
known to us is our brain. I don’t need to insist that its complexity
is non-metaphysical, literal, just because I believe that complexity hardly ever is a metaphor.
We deal with complexity by “ex-plicating,” that is, undoing
the im-plicating entanglements of complexity, or by “ex-plaining,” that is, setting complexities out plainly. The two meanings
of the word “plain,” that is, “clear” and “flat,” have the same origin: the wide “plain” is where things are plain because view is
unobstructed, and the mathematical flat surface, the “plane,” has
the same origin. Hence “explaining” is a mode of extracting
meaning that explicates its subject by projecting it onto a flat surface. Thus, for instance, the brain is contained by a roughly round
skull (because, I imagine, the sphere is that mathematical solid
verb that means “to elude notice.” The etymology has some support,
but there is no evidence that to early and classical authors aletheia
meant anything but truth and genuineness as opposed to falseness and
counterfeit. An example of fun is from Plato’s Phaedrus (252c): Pteros
means, “Winged Eros” since pteron means “feather.”
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which has the lowest ratio of surface to content), so that its involutions need to be explicated in plane surfaces: in marked cross
sections for viewing and labelled schemata for functions and
plane mappings for neural networks.
What I’ve just said can serve to deal with an annoying sort
of argumentative deflection. Someone will interject, to derail
you: “It’s more complex than that.” To which the answer is: “Well
then, if you mean it, draw me a picture.” For complexity is the
eminently diagrammable, spatializable problem; it can be set out
plainly. To be sure, complexity is the opposite of simplicity, and
what these folks often say as the final put-down is: “You’re being
simplistic, you’re over-simplifying.” To which the apparently
merely eristic, that is, merely contentious, answer is: “And you’re
being shallow, superficial,” meaning: your overview has too few
nodes and connections to begin with and doesn’t go into the matter to boot.
It will be the point of my talk to show, perhaps a little too
briefly, that it is not merely argumentative to say that complexity
is a superficial view of the world, but has real non-derogatory
meaning, and then to conclude by attempting a description and—
I’ll be upfront about it—a defense of depth. Just as I don’t want
to say that they are opposite kinds of thinking, so, far be it from
me to claim that complexity and depth are “kinds” of thinking at
all. To my mind, it is plain unthinking to claim that there are different ways of thinking. Thinking is always thinking—always
the same in being “about” something, thus always qualified by
what it is about. It is always the same but often about something
different. For, of course, there are different objects of thought,
different ways to see what you must think about.5 Thus the people
who used to be referred to as primitives, and before that as savages, felt surrounded by well- or ill-intentioned spirits and, most
rationally, concluded that these needed to be propitiated in ways
they themselves might respond too—just as we would.
5. People also employ different devices, modes, ways of thinking, such
as figures, analogies, conjectures; it is hard to see how they could do it,
except against a backdrop of plain mentation.
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Or take Socrates. Some folks say that he was interested in
defining certain objects, that is, in delimiting them in the universe of discourse, in explaining them and their interrelations
verbally. Well, so he was, but only when they were heavily affected with non-being, as in his multi-definitional pursuit of the
sophist in the dialogue of that name, the results of which I’ve
spent some amusing hours diagramming. But when he is within
view of a true being, like one of the human excellences, asking
that notorious “What is . . . ?” question, definition is not his aim,
but a delving descent to depths attained in literal “under-standing” (as we say) or in a truth-following ascent to the heights
achieved through “over-standing” or epi-steme (as the Greeks
say). It is always thinking but sometimes of words, or about objects, or from different positions. Consider that if thinking
weren’t always just that we wouldn’t even know when we have
different intentions.
Now to some gist. What is complexity? Well, first, there are
several kinds I’ve discerned and no doubt others I haven’t.
There’s Wittgenstein’s kind, very clearly set out in the Philosophical Investigations (Part I, 1945, Part II, 1949). He says at
one point: “The deep aspect eludes us easily” (I 387, 594). “Do
not try to analyze the experience in yourself” (my italics, II xi).
So we are to turn to the public use of words, for example, explanations (I 69) and the behavior it induces, called the “language
game.”6 The external view, he says, “reveals a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing” (I 66). His
figure here appears to be one-dimensional, a thread of overlapping fibers (I 67), but since these also criss-cross, the real figure
6. It seems to me that the language game, which teaches meaning by
ostension, doesn’t work except for a dull-witted apprentice: Master
teaches pupil the word “slab” (flagstone) by pointing to an exemplar
and then sends him to fetch another from a pile (I 6). If he’s dull enough,
he’ll come back with a slab, but if he’s brightly observant, he’ll come
back and say: “I didn’t see another just like this one.” The master will
be thrown back on communicating The Slab, itself by itself, since no
one, I think, can see likeness except through modelling essence—but
the last clause goes beyond my present point.
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is clearly two- or three-dimensional. This is verbal complexity,
and it is characterized by overtness, extensive relationality, and
interconnectivity: “family resemblances” (ibid.); its point is to
get on with practicalities; speech is known from its use in the
world.
Another kind of complexity can be characterized as computable: It has sharply defined digital elements related by rules
of computation, that is, problem-solving procedures, algorithms. This complexity is hard-edged: digits in clear calculational relations. The point is to get the solution to the kind of
pre-formulated question called a “problem,” whose relation to
human experience is determined by the fiat of postulation.
Yet a third kind of complexity is informational, characterizable as bits of fact, raw or inferred, singular or aggregated in
categories. Information has only relative existence; in its first
nature it is like a mud flat, which becomes discrete only when
handfuls are molded into a clump of clay. Abstract information
is therefore irrelevantly pre-formed pseudo-knowledge. Thus
information, even when verifiable, consists of relational factoids that become active facts in a context of human intention.
Information becomes relevant to final decision-making when
a desire is formulated and an intention is formed. Then the
point is usually to underwrite the desired action, or to modify,
even to cancel it, if the facts are really terminally unspinnable.
My final, but surely not last, kind of complexity is psychical and social—that is, human. I won’t attempt to delineate it.
Its elements are too various in kind and degree and their relations too difficult, be it by human intention or natural obscurity.
Ungifted experts tend to deliver very gross conceptual depictions of the human world, but very great psychologists and anthropologists (the latter need to be the former more than the
converse, I think) manage to combine an extensive overview
with penetrating insight. I am thinking of the Greeks’
Herodotus and our Tocqueville. They manage to survey the
many phenomena that surface on our earth and to clue out underlying, I would say, the underlying distinctions and commonalities.
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Here, by a natural and easy transition (as Robert Brumbaugh
used to say, when he meant quite a leap7) I shall try to speak of
depth. It might seem presumptuous, did I not think that one may
speak of it without having been there: Trying is all.
To begin with, the deep divers that I have read and even
known, display respect for and acquaintance with phenomenal
complexities.8 I say “phenomenal” because the juxtaposition of
phainomena and onta, sensed “appearances” and intellected “beings” must surely underlie the distinction between complexity
and depth. Let me here say again that complexity usually is and
means to be a literal description of its realm, while depth is a
metaphor, a figural application of a this-worldly phenomenon:
dipping and diving into a material element.9
Thereby hangs a tale, a tale I will foretell in a sentence:
There is no, repeat, no way of speaking of the soul and of the
realm whose emissary it is except by analogy (prosaically) or
by metaphor (poetically). Indeed, all philosophical speech is, I
dare to claim, figurative. Let me remind you of two prime examples. Plato’s Socrates speaks of eidos, literally “look” or “aspect.” But the word is used “meta-phorically,” which means
“carried over” into the realm of thought, in which reside the beings that have “invisible looks.” (Mythically and punningly their
place is in the underwold: Aides aeides, “Hades the Invisible,”10
Phaedo 80d, Cratylus 404b.11) Or take the Stoic invention of the
7. At Yale, I slipped in and out (more out) of his lectures, the only graduate class in philosophy I ever attended at all (1951). The required undergraduate course at Brooklyn College was a big nothing
8. “Even known”: Jacob Klein, Dean of St. John’s College when I arrived (1957).
9. Thus descriptions that mean to delve are usually simplifications. Of
whom is it truer to say “you’re simplifying” than of a novelist who is
experienced in the delineating soul and the world?
10. Aeides: an allusion to the un-murky Greek Hades (Aides), the underworld where dwell luminously invisible things.
11. In other dialogues they are located up high (Symposium 211), in the
heavens (Phaedrus 247).
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“concept,” literally a “grasping together [of particulars].” These
metaphorical ways, the poetry of philosophy, are not, to my
mind, primitive evidence of some logic-overleaping access to
the Unconcealed that hides itself from the prosaic professors,
but our one possible way to reach beyond the sensory world by
taking advantage of the deadness of the metaphors that make up
our latter-day language. It is a semi-extinction that allows us to
use our words as if they had always meant what we mean them
to mean: non-sensory beings directly denoted by pure imageless
speech. Who hears “concept” as an assembling grasp, or “logic”
as a collecting art?12
Aristotle and Wittgenstein actually agree—imagine this!—
that there is articulable thinking not in need of quasi-sensory
imagining. For Aristotle it is the highest kind that functions without imagination: intellecting, noesis, the direct apprehension of
the knowable. For Wittgenstein no understanding of a proposition
is in need of imagining (On the Soul 1129a ff.; Philosophical Investigation I 396). I can believe it of Aristotle that his mind, his
nous, had such a capacity for viewless thinking, sightless insight—do any of ours?13
So, I claim, whether or not we are practicing etymologists,
whether we are literally the “truth-tellers” about our first words
(for that is the etymology of “etymology”), their defunct spirits
tug at us to return to them.
—No way to speak of underlying being non-somatically, I
said a moment ago, and no way to go into sightless depths (divers
without goggles do keep their eyes closed) without first taking
in the surface, the place of laid-out overtness, of infinite particularity, of connecting context. Here’s another Socratic corroboration: Socrates is generally and inattentively presented as
denigrating the multifarious and shifting phenomenal surface on
which we crawl about. But recall that he, an inveterate urbanite,
who says that country places don’t teach him a thing, had more
12. Logic: from Greek logos, whose root is leg-, as in “collect.”
13. It is practically undecidable whether either Socrates or Plato ever
claimed to have come within sight of the forms.
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local knowledge and more scenic sensibility than his companion,
a suburban stroller. That’s in the Phaedrus (229b ff.). And in the
Symposium (206b ff.), Socrates, we learn, has been taught to
think that the ascent into the heights of being must start with the
surely complex, and mostly surface-captivated experience of
falling in love, which is also the first glimpse into psychic depths.
And the same is true of Aristotle and Thomas and Hegel, who all
seem to know a lot about worldly and human complexity, especially the monk.14 I’m not just dropping names here but citing
concrete examples of experiential expansiveness.
With complexity given its due, what then is depth, this mode
figuratively orthogonal to complexity, a mode more askew of than
opposite to it? But I will stall one last time: What is depth and
the way down not?
1. It cannot, by its very nature, be governed by the formalisms of logic. For it is always reached through the revealing
veil of metaphor, which assures that the blunt first law of logic
be set aside, the one that proscribes “p · ~ p.” This law of noncontradiction forbids that a proposition be at once true and not
true, though for its first formulator, Aristotle, this is not a formal
axiom but an affirmation that its intentional object, the thing
meant in declaratory speech, is always a determinate being,
which either is or is not. So with acquiescence in the law of thinking and being goes this very implication, that the spatial world is
determinately, positively, what it is. Not so the depths. The way
down is very much a via negativa on the one hand: “I don’t really
mean what my speech is saying”—and therefore, on the other, a
via in-ventionis, a way of “going into,” of discovery—of things
not quite thinkable.
2. Nor is depth-diving a way of deduction, of the logical descent from maxims to conclusion, nor of induction, the logical
ascent from facts to generalizations.
3. Nor are the depths a mere alternative universe of dis14. Thomas: His “Treatise on the Passions” in the Summa Theologiae
seems to me unsurpassable; consider also Aristotle’s researches in the
animal kingdom and Hegel on history and the arts.
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course, an idly eccentric language game, since, I am convinced,
urgent intimations from that quarter, from our internality, those
pulls that precede articulated speech, are a common, an ineluctable, human experience. This is a claim scarcely capable of
verification other than by testimonial. But I simply believe that
even people who revel in their own and their world’s brute materiality are visited by such transcendent innuendos.
4. Nor is the way into depths subject to a Cartesian method,
prescribed by teachable rules for the direction of the mind.15
*****
What then, finally, is depth and the way down?
Well, to begin with, as Heraclitus says: “The way up and
down is one and the same” (D-K 60).16 I’ll adapt it to my purpose.
Perhaps I can put it thus: The way of our search and its discoveries leads deep down into the depths of our soul, mind, or consciousness, towards what is found last but is in itself first, a
grounding principle.17 Once discovered, it becomes the ruling
principle (arche) of our account-giving as we come back up onto
earth. So the delving and climbing reach the same end, an “alpha
and omega,” the insight and its expression.
That is the way, but the mode of our search is question-asking
rather than problem-solving. In this phraseology, depth is the
15. Descartes, Discourse on Method (1637), Rules for the Direction of
the Mind (1628).
16. He might concede that my experience of the way up and back is different, because I’m facing in opposite directions, but still, the overseeing Logos will give the same account of both. For the Heraclitean Logos
is both immanent, as determining the ratios (logoi) of the elemental
transformations of nature, and transcendent, as the one who gathers,
collects (legei) Everything into One; it is the latter Logos who contracts
up and down into one.
17. My version of Aristotle, Physics 184a: “The way is from things
more knowable to us and clearer, to things clearer by nature and more
knowable.” There is another meaning of “ground,” not mine here. It is
the a priori, the conceptually prior basement upon which to construct
an epistemological edifice, an explanatory system such as Kant erects
(Critique of Pure Reason, B 860).
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venue of questions, complexity of problems. Statements of problems can actually do without question-marks, they are perplexities presented to be explicated, straightened out, conceptually or
practically. Or, if you like, a problem is a hard-edged, well-defined question with a correspondingly jigged answer drawn from
a predetermined pool.
For example, here’s a metaphysical problem: to discern the
number of causes operative in the world. The solution is constrained by such presumptions as these: Everything this-worldly
has a cause, including apparent chance (Aristotle, Physics Bk.
II iv ff.); therefore, if anything is uncaused or self-caused it is a
divinity (Physics, Bk. VIII; Metaphysics, Bk. XII); causes are
multiple, because the world is complexly constituted, and “responsible,” meaning that they come to us as responses forced
from the beings pinned down by an interrogation. And so forth.
The solution is definite, and the discussion continues only insofar as some people reject it.
Here’s a practical problem: On my way back from Athens, it’ll
be a problem how to circumvent the notoriously long security lines
of your Atlanta airport. When I get to the front, I’ll think of other
things. Solving practical problems takes this-worldly know-how;
solving philosophical problems takes other-worldly activity. In either case, when a problem is really solved it is also dissolved; it
becomes moot. People preoccupied by solved problems are told to
get a life. (There actually are some solved philosophical problems
that stay solved, mostly those involving a superseded physics.18)
Questions, on the other hand, seem to me not properly perplexities. They don’t go away, they are perennial, not because
they are demonstrably insoluble but because they are not properly
proposed for solving but rather for going into, deeper and deeper.
The mode of engagement with questions, as I delineate it
for myself, is what Socrates calls aporia—literally, waylessness.19 Therefore the way of searching out the deep is indeed a
18. Some of these do in fact remain interesting, sometimes as testimonials to the concrete impasses that make grand theories implode.
19. Or “unprovidedness.” The above meditation on modes of searching
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meth-odos, a “way-to-be-followed,” but only in the sense of
an oriented movement, not in the modern meaning of a method,
a progress guided by procedures.
Entertaining questions thus requires wisdom, a considering,
reflecting frame of a mind still resonating with past experience
but now focused by desirous expectation. Otherwise put: Questions are a mode of blessed ignorance, a thorough apprehension
of our own cognitive limitations which clears our minds of mere
opinions and, while it prevents us from reaching for personal
originality rather than objective origins, moves us inward.20
A question, then, is a receptive opening in us—who knows
in what capacity of ours. The reception is expectant of an answer—of a spontaneous intimation rather than a driven determination, of an incitement more than a settlement, of a mental
vision or a verbal hypothesis instead of a conclusive solution.
has as a background Aristotle’s Book III of the Metaphysics, which
marks the transition of philosophy from amateur question-asking to professional problem-solving, the second such transition in the West. The
first was from pre-Socratic initiation into Logos or Truth by a divinity
to the Socratic search by going into oneself.
The word “problem” is not actually used by Aristotle in Book III; in
fact he speaks of “difficulties” and aporiai, which I think he assimilates
to “problems” in our sense. Plato already uses problema in the geometry-derived sense. A problem asks for a construction, which yields a
product, as opposed to a theorem, which gives insight. Some ancients—
this is to my point—objected to the notion of a mathematical problem
since mathematics is about knowing, not making (Heath, Euclid’s Elements, I 125). By this distinction hangs a tale extending into modernity,
but beyond the scope of this talk: the development of mathematical objects from concrete items to abstracted symbols.
20. “Blessed ignorance” is my adaptation of Nicolas of Cusa’s title, Of
Learned Ignorance (De Docta Ignorantia, 1440)—“blessed” for
“learned” because, of course, it’s precisely not learned. Even though
lots of graduates might be correctly awarded an I.D., an Ignorantiae
Doctor, it would be in the wrong spirit. What Cusanus means by learned
ignorance is the fully realized desire to know that has become unobstructed when we have thoroughly learned our ignorance (Bk. I i). Directing features of this desire are the via negativa (the way of gaining
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Such responses are often fraught simplicities, not abrogations of
difficulties but rather problem-generating fecundities.21
The aim of asking questions is to penetrate spatio-temporal
experience so as to reach the atemporal inwardness, commonly
called the essence, whose surface is the appearance. Here I should
stop because I am being carried away toward an ontological speculation from what I would be glad to call a meditation on, or at
most a phenomenology of, inquiry.22
*****
a foothold in the transcendent by what it is not), conjecture (the way
of holding a well-motivated opinion firmly enough to go on with but
flexibly enough for alteration), and analogy (the way of levering up
thought by recognizing similarities in different venues and through
these likenesses discovering differences). I think that these ways are
mutually implicated, but I have neither studied Cusanus enough nor
sufficiently thought out my notions.
21. Prime examples are to be found in the sayings of Heraclitus and
Parmenides, the two pre-Socratics distinguished by being not “physical”
(Aristotle, Physics 186b), but meta-physical. Here is one example: Parmenides says: “For it is the same both to be aware (noein) and to be”
(D-K 3; D-K 8, line 34)—most often translated along these lines: “For
the same thing can be thought as can be.” Heidegger interprets ingeniously in line with his notion of unconcealment: Being’s essence involves being apprehended (Introduction to Metaphysics (1935), 106).
I think we should not subvert bold depth by refusing to read what is
written. Parmenides regards Being as One, for which his figure is a
sphere. So he countermands the multiplicity inherent in his spherical
metaphor by gnomically intimating that Being is self-aware, self-translucent, self-implicated—as unextended, partless, undifferentiable, being
everywhere and nowhere, just as is awareness when its object is itself.
22. I regard it as somewhat corroborative of the descriptive verity of
my depth metaphor for a tendency of inquiry that it plays no discernible
role for Heidegger either in Being and Time (1927), where phainomena
and onta are assimilated [31, 35] or in the Introduction to Metaphysics,
where Being is self-emergent and involves its own manifesting appearance as a defining delimitation [77]. The reason for this absence is, I
think , that Dasein (an abstraction from a human being) which is only
in caring about its being, is altogether temporal and this-worldly—so
perforce a-metaphorical and un-deep.
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Are there consequences to the preceding exposition? To my
mind, there are personal ones surely—such as the acquisition of
a template to gauge what you’re doing and to judge if a quarter
turn inside and down may be desirable. There are disciplinary
ones probably, such as querying cognitive scientists concerning
the feasibility of inward-turned mental depth emerging from the
ultimate complex structure, the brain. And there are institutional
ones possibly—such as a reconsideration by philosophy departments of their highest degree, now the Ph.D., Philosophiae Doctor. It is, after all, a comical title which claims that you are a
proficient preceptor, a doctor, of the love of wisdom, a teacher,
that is, of love—a situation nowadays full of moral and legal pitfalls. Departments might add a secondary but more sensible degree, the Ph.D.2, to be read as Philosophiae Dilector, a “delighter
and dilettante in the love of wisdom.” For I think that while the
mapping of complexity, which is an institutional way of “doing”
philosophy, can keep you promotion-worthily busy and often
contentedly absorbed, the dilettantish delvers into depths, amateurish because philosophy true to its name cannot be a profession, might also have their diploma, though such diving may
bring up nothing but deep delight:
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song
To such a deep delight ’t would win me . . .
Coleridge, “Kubla Khan”
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A Note on Apollonius’s
Reconceptualization of Space
Philip LeCuyer
Apollonius re-envisions Euclidean space. He does this indirectly
by slowly and carefully re-envisioning one of the two most important objects in Euclidean space—the circle. Apollonius reopens the question that Euclid seemed to have settled in
Definition 15: what is a circle?
Euclid’s Elements is the only mathematical work used by
Apollonius in the Conics. The Elements constitute Apollonius’s
intellectual inheritance, a fundamental aspect of which is a concept of space that is essentially negative. Euclid’s series of five
negations is conveyed through the five postulates. The first one
states: “from every point to every point to draw a straight line.”
This means there are no holes in Euclidean space. The second
postulate states: “to produce a finite straight line continuously in
a straight line.” This means there are no edges to Euclidean space.
The third postulate, “to describe a circle with any center and any
distance,” means there is no directionality in space—all radial
directions are equivalent. The fourth, “all right angles are equal,”
means there is no handedness, no distinction between left and
right.
The famous fifth postulate is longer:
If a straight line falling on two straight lines make the interior angles on the same side less than two right angles,
the two straight lines, if produced toward infinity (ep’
apeiron), meet on that side on which the two angles are
less than two right angles.
This means that Euclidean space has no curvature. No holes,
no edges, no directionality, no handedness, no curvature. It is an
essentially negative concept.
Philip LeCuyer is a tutor at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
The author thanks Grant Franks, also a tutor in Santa Fe, for fashioning
the figures.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Apollonius does not—as Lobachevski, Bolyai, Riemann, and
the topologists do many centuries later—change any of these postulates. Rather, he exposes an unarticulated postulate which pervades or underlies the five stated ones, and in so doing introduces
a positive characteristic to space.
There are two sides shown in the fifth postulate: 1) the side
on which the three lines form a triangle, and 2) the other side on
which the lines produced toward infinity diverge forever. Euclid
leaves this other side of things in knowing silence. The Elements
is about the triangle, which is a figure, and about the circle, which
Euclid also defines as a figure, a schema. What then is a figure?
Euclid defines a “figure”as “that which, beneath (hypo) any
boundary or boundaries, is contained (periechomenon)”—literally, that which has a perimeter, a horizon, around it, something
characterized by “surroundedness.” The Elements stands as the
authoritative study of two and three dimensional figures and the
notion of containment. It culminates in the construction of the
five regular solids, and, as its finale, Euclid presents for our contemplation a comparison of the respective linear edges of the five
solids when contained in the same sphere. The definition of figure
governs the Elements from start to finish.
Figures are present in Apollonius’s Conics, but they are not
what is being studied. What is being studied is a set of curves,
first encountered as conic sections, to which Euclidean figures
are attached like monitoring devices on an athlete or a patient.
And what are these curves as a class? As a class, they are not figures because they do not all enclose finite areas. The exact same
reasoning, the same proofs, apply to those that do enclose areas
(ellipses and circumferences of circles) and those that don’t (hyperbolae and the special case of the parabola). If they are not figures, what are they?
One can see a sharp difference between Euclid and Apollonius in the way that each generates what is conical. Euclid does
this by revolving a right triangle around one of its two shorter
legs while that leg, held stationary, becomes the axis of a right
cone. Euclid’s cone is a three-dimensional figure made by revolving a two-dimensional figure. Each type of right cone pro-
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duces a different kind of conic section: one that has a right angle
at its vertex, made by revolving an isosceles right triangle, will
yield a parabola when cut by a plane perpendicular to its surface;
an acute cone will yield an ellipse, and an obtuse cone will yield
an hyperbola. This is true, but it is not true enough. Apollonius
will demonstrate that every size of every shape of each type of
conic is present in every conic surface—both right cones such as
Euclid generated finite versions of, and oblique conic surfaces
such as Euclid never dreamt of.
Apollonius’s foundational definition states:
If from a point a straight line is joined to the circumference of a circle which is not in the same plane with the
point, and the line is produced in both directions, and if,
with the point remaining fixed, the straight line being rotated about the circumference of the circle returns to the
same place from which it began, then the generated surface composed of the two surfaces lying vertically opposite one another, each of which increases to infinity (eis
apeiron) as the generating line is produced to infinity (eis
apeiron), I call a conic surface, and the fixed point I call
the vertex.
A conic surface is not a figure in the Euclidean sense. It is a
boundary, but not a boundary that contains by closing back on itself. Apollonius studies the conics, the parabola, ellipses, hyperbolae, and the circumferences of circles not as boundaries
containing areas, but as lines which reveal something deeper and
more important than space as inert content. (Note that when
Apollonius includes circles in a list together with conic sections,
he always calls them “circumferences of circles.”)
Before I turn to consider the step-by-step transformation of the
key Euclidean proposition through which Apollonius re-understands what a circle is, and so what space is, I will take up briefly
the remarkable last proposition of Bk. I of the Conics. The implications of this theorem are momentous. The pair of opposite hyperbolic sections produced by cutting the upper and lower conic
surfaces with a plane (the upper and lower curves in Figure 1) produce a second set of opposed curves, also hyperbolic and conjugate
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to the first set (the dotted curves). No point on this second set of
curves is on the conic surface. They are merely in co-planar space
with the first set of curves.
How did Apollonius do this? He prepared this moment by
defining (in Definition 11) a “second” diameter, which simply
names what Apollonius had just demonstrated for the ellipse in
Proposition 15. This “second” diameter in the ellipse is conjugate
and is also the mean proportional between the first diameter and
the first diameter’s upright side. It is therefore finite. Do opposite
hyperbolic sections have a “second” diameter? They do have a
conjugate diameter which as such bisects all the external lines
between them parallel to their first diameter (Proposition 16). But
is it finite? This conjugate diameter of the original vertical hyperbolic sections does not touch them anywhere. These sections
extend up and down to vertical infinities whereas the conjugate
diamter extends sideways—neither in nor on, but outside the
conic surface. Apollonius, citing Definition 11, states in Proposition 38 that the finite “second” diameter that was demonstrated
to exist in the ellipse, a finite curve, is also present in hyperbolic
sections. Based on this undemonstrated analogy with the ellipse,
the assumed “second” diameter of the original hyperbolic sec-
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tions is pressed into service as the first diameter of these conjugate curves, which therefore exist, but which were not produced
by cutting a conic surface. Not only that: these conjugate opposite
curves could themselves produce, in reciprocation, the original
hyperbolae without reference to any conic surface.
If this constitutive analogy between hyperbolae, ellipses,
and circumferences of circles holds, it means that conic curves
have no more or less to do with conic surfaces or cones than the
number four has to do with how many legs are on a cow. How
we discovered these curves, how we first produced them, does
not amount to a sufficient account of what they are. Neither
conic surfaces nor cones are ever again considered by Apollonius after this moment of liberation in the last proposition,
Proposition 60, of Bk. I.
The crucial proposition in Euclid, which Apollonius transforms by relentless generalization, occurs at the conclusion of
Bk. II of the Elements (and again in Bk. VI, 13). There Euclid
demonstrates that the square on any ordinate in a circle—i.e., on
any line from a point on the circumference of a circle perpendicular to a diameter, is equal in area to the rectangle on the resulting two segments of that diameter (Figure 2a). His first move, so
to speak, is to substitute this property of a circle for Euclid’s definition. We see this accomplished immediately in the first propositions in Bk. I of the Conics.
In his fourth proposition in Bk. I, Apollonius demonstrates that
the section produced by a cutting plane parallel to the circle used
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to generate the conic surface is itself a circle. Here he does use as
the basis of his proof Euclid’s definition of a circle as a closed figure (schema) in which all the straight lines falling on the circumference from a point within the circumference are equal to each
other. But in the very next proposition, Proposition 5, Apollonius
does not use that definition, but rather the Euclidean property that
the square on the ordinate is equal in area to the rectangle on the
diameter segments, in order to prove that what is called a sub-contrary cut in an oblique conic surface is also a circle. Having substituted this property for Euclid’s definition, the rest of the act of
re-understanding is accomplished by generalization.
The next step is to re-label the lines which embody the property (Figure 2b). Line “a” is still the ordinate. Line “b” is now
the perpendicular (least) distance from the point on the circumference to the one tangent of the ordinate’s diameter, and line “c”
the least distance to the other tangent. This re-labeling brings all
the components of the crucial property together at any and every
point on the curve (except the points of tangency themselves).
In Figure 2c, the restriction on which tangents are allowed is
broadened to include any tangents to the circumference. If both
of the tangents do not touch the same diameter, they will intersect. The line connecting the two points of tangency is no longer
a diameter but now a chord. The distance “a” is revised as shown.
Lines “b” and “c’”are still the least distances from some point on
the circumference to the new generalized tangents. How does it
stand with the square on the revised ordinate “a” vis-a-vis the
rectangle “bc”? This is a difficult problem, and as we gather from
the letter to Eudemus, Euclid was not able to solve it. Here we
have our first glimpse of the full-bodied three-line locus problem.
I will try to indicate why it is important.
Now comes the fundamental proposition—Bk. II, 29 (See
Figure 3). The curve has been generalized into “a section of a
cone or circumference of a circle.” The proposition demonstrates
that AD is a diameter, but Apollonius can only establish this by
a reductio ad absurdum proof. This means that it is not a direct
deduction from particular prior theorems, but an inference from
the system as a whole. It is not true because some other thing is
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true. It is true because otherwise all the other truths would collapse. In this sense, this proposition reveals a principle. It is this
principle, I think, this “additional thing,” that Apollonius was referring to in his letter to Eudemus when he wrote:
The third book contains many incredible theorems of use
for the construction of solid loci and for limits of possibility of which the greatest part and the most beautiful
are new.
And when we had grasped these, we knew that the
three-line and four-line locus problem had not been constructed by Euclid, but only a chance part of it and that
not very happily. For it was not possible for this construction to be completed without the additional things found
by us.
Apollonius’s construction of the locus problem itself in
Proposition 54 of Bk. III looks like figure 4. He cites Proposition
29 of Bk. II as the basis and backbone of his proof. The upshot
of it is that the square on HX (the distance from any point on the
curve to the chord connecting the tangents) is in a constant ratio
(not necessarily equality) to the rectangle BY, ZC. These in turn
are the distances (not necessarily the least) of the same point H
(which can be any point on the curve) to those two tangents. The
angles do not have to be right angles, and they can differ from
each other. Still, whatever the ratio is, it is constant.
These curved lines investigated by Apollonius reveal a property of space that lies deeper than the bundle of Euclidean characterizations. It is the property of constancy. Any two points,
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every two points, though differently located, can have in common
a ratio not of distances simply, but of areas specified by those
distances to three co-planar lines. The areas are no longer statically contained, no longer aristocratically contained “beneath”
the imposed boundary of a figure. They change incessantly. Only
the ratio between them, which is itself not an area, is constant. It
is as if all the points on a conic curve are the same point, exhibiting the same essential relationships to three given co-planar lines,
and differing only in location. The coherence of a conic line
comes about not by an artifice of drawing, nor from without by
the act of cutting a cone, but is intrinsic to the curve itself. A conic
curve is not a figure. It is a law.
For Apollonius, space is no longer the passive recipient of
figure or form that Plato described in Timaeus 51, (“a dream from
which we cannot awaken”), and as Euclid also thought. It is no
longer merely a medium which tolerates logic. The Apollonian
property of constancy in space matches with, and is manifested
by, conic curves, just as the presence of oxygen in the air is manifested by fire, by oxygenation. Space is not outside of time, not
merely eternal; it is constant in and through time. Apollonius has
in this way re-conceived space as a medium which is hospitable
to and enabling of certain lines, conic curves, that share this property. Through Proposition 54 of Bk. III we see that these curves
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in mathematical space can crystallize into a physical path, and
we understand why.
After Apollonius, between every two points there is not only
the austere straight line of Euclid’s first postulate, but an abundance—an actual infinitude—of self-defined intelligible curves.
It will take a bit more generalization to re-join the two sides of
Euclid’s fifth postulate. The three co-planar lines of the locus
problem, the two intersecting tangents and the chord connecting
their points of tangency on the curve, are Euclid’s two non-parallel lines and the line transecting them that we encountered on
the finite side of the fifth postulate. They will be re-drawn as nontangents and a non-chord, as any three co-planar lines, thereby
allowing the part of the curve within the triangle and the part beyond it—the converging finite and the diverging infinite— to be
re-joined as one thing. The constancy of the ratio of areas still
holds over the whole curve. Descartes would undertake that task,
but the heavy lifting in this new conception of space had already
been accomplished by Apollonius.
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“Aristotelian Forgiveness”:
The Non-Culpability Requirement
of Forgiveness
Corinne Painter
Introduction
Forgiveness is a topic of much historical, contemporary, crossdisciplinary scholarly and popular work. However, the literature
on Aristotle’s account of forgiveness (sungnomē)1 is not as significant as the treatment of other ethical, political, or psychological phenomena in his work, probably because his own treatment
of forgiveness is not given as much attention as other matters in
his thought.2 Although the existing scholarship dealing with Aristotle’s thought on forgiveness is extensive,3 this essay does not
1. For simplicity’s sake, I will use the English translation of this term
throughout the essay.
2. Gregory Sadler also acknowledges this in his article “Forgiveness,
Anger, and Virtue in an Aristotelian Perspective,” American Catholic
Philosophical Association, Proceedings of the ACPA 82 (2008): 229247, on 229-230.
3. For example, a recent general volume that includes a discussion of
forgiveness in Aristotle and other ancient authors is Ancient Forgiveness: Classical, Judaic, and Christian, ed. Charles L. Griswold and
David Konstan (NY: Cambridge University Press, 2012); and another
still fairly recent monograph that examines forgiveness beginning with
ancients is Charles Griswold, Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration
(NY: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Both of these books are interested in situating their interpretations of Aristotle’s thought about
Corinne Painter is Professor of Philsophy at Washtenaw Community
College in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
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intend to present an examination, critical or otherwise, of the literature. Much of the work that investigates Aristotle’s thought on
forgiveness tries to locate it in an historical account of forgiveness
or focuses narrowly on the question of whether forgiveness is itself
a virtue or whether it is merely associated with virtue in Aristotle’s
thought. Neither of these interesting questions is my concern in
this essay. Instead, without settling the question of whether forgiveness is a virtue or is merely associated with virtue,4 I will examine Aristotle’s claims5 about forgiveness that appear in Books
III, V, and VII of Nicomachean Ethics,6 within the framework of
his discussion of unwilling, willing, and chosen, deliberate actions.
forgiveness within a broader context of other historical and contemporary accounts of forgiveness. Additionally, Gregory Adler’s essay (see
fn. 2) is an instructive essay that focuses on the relationship between
forgiveness, anger and virtue, as is Patrick Boleyn-Fitzgerald, ”What
Should Forgiveness Mean?” The Journal of Value Inquiry 36 (2002):
483-498. Like Adler, Boleyn-Fitzgerald also examines the relationship
between forgiveness and anger—especially helpful since I will not consider the topic of anger here. Obviously this short list of references is
not meant to be exhaustive. Another subset of the literature focuses on
the role that forgiveness plays in Aristotle’s virtue ethics, typically in
the context of Aristotle’s views on the emotions, where the latter appears
to be of primary concern. In this connection, see Essays on Aristotle’s
Rhetoric, ed. Amelie Oskenburg Rorty (Berkley: University of California Press, 1996) and Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, ed. Amelie Oskenburg
Rorty (Berkley: University of California Press, 1980).
4. Beyond being interesting in itself, this question is also difficult to answer, since Aristotle’s analysis of forgiveness seems to allow both interpretations. I will attempt to show that we can discover much of value
in Aristotle’s account of forgiveness without answering this question.
5. I point this out in order to emphasize that I will be focusing on Aristotle’s text rather than on interpretations of his text by other scholars,
since my aim is to offer a coherent account of Aristotle’s remarks on
forgiveness rather than a comparison of how other interpreters of Aristotle have understood him.
6. Abbreviated hereafter as NE. I use the translation by Joe Sachs, Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics: Translation, Glossary, and Introductory
Essay, (MA: Focus Publishing, 2002).
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First, I try to explain which actions Aristotle claims are forgivable, when forgiveness ought to be granted, and why. Second,
based on this explanation, I compare Aristotle’s unassumingly
rich account of forgiveness to the leading contemporary secular
view of forgiveness that is advanced by Jeffrie Murphy, whose
account I take to be representative of what may arguably be characterized as the “standard” contemporary secular account of forgiveness.7 By focusing on Aristotle’s claim that forgiveness is only
appropriate for those wrongdoers who are not morally responsible
for their actions, I show that unlike the leading account of forgiveness—and perhaps even against our intuitions—forgiveness is intimately connected both to excusing and to justifying wrongdoings,
and that resentment need not precede forgiveness. Third and finally,
I conclude with the claim that Aristotle’s account of forgiveness
is more coherent than the leading account, and I wonder whether
it is not also more compelling, given the importance Aristotle
places on compassion for wrongdoers as opposed to holding them
accountable and then foreswearing the resentment held against
them, which take center stage in the contemporary account of forgiveness.
§1. The Forgiveness of Unwilling and Willing Action
There is more than a little disagreement in the literature regarding
Aristotle’s ethics—which depends upon his conception of virtue,
its general nature, its various instantiations, and how one becomes virtuous— and about his complicated account of the emotions—which he ruminates about in many of his works. Still,
while Aristotle does not define forgiveness in the most straight7. I do not mean to suggest that there is only one contemporary account
of forgiveness, or that there is no disagreement amongst contemporary
thinkers who reflect on forgiveness. As a perusal of the contemporary
literature on forgiveness shows, however, there are fundamental elements of the contemporary secular accounts of forgiveness that are held
in common, even if some of the details are debated. In the second part
of the paper, I focus on what I take to be the key element of the leading
contemporary account of forgiveness, critically comparing it to Aristotle’s account.
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forward manner, a reasonable account may be constructed on the
basis of attending to relevant descriptive remarks about forgiveness that he offers in NE.8 For example, in Bk. III, Ch. 1 and Bk.
V, Ch. 8, where Aristotle distinguishes unwilling, willing, and chosen, deliberate actions, we find explicit remarks about forgiveness
suggesting that chosen, deliberate wrongful actions are not properly forgivable, whereas “for unwilling actions [that is, actions
whose source is external force or certain forms of ignorance
(1110a1-2)] there is forgiveness” (1109b33), and that “there is also
forgiveness” (1110a24) for some acts that could be construed (in
a qualified sense) as “willing” since their “source . . . is in oneself”
(1110a16), i.e., in the wrongdoer.
§1a. Forgiveness and Unwilling Action
Regarding unwilling actions, Aristotle says that in addition to externally forced actions,9 the ignorant actions that are candidates
for forgivability are actions about which the wrongdoer knows
that the action ought not to have been done. Aristotle identifies
these actions as actions done “on account of ignorance of the particulars . . . with which the action is concerned” (1110b351111a3), which cause the wrongdoer to suffer and about which
the wrongdoer expresses regret or repentance (1110b19;
1110b24, 1111a20-21).10 In Book V, however, Aristotle clarifies
8. To be sure, Aristotle also discusses forgiveness in other works, especially in his Rhetoric; however—although there is no room here to defend this claim in the confines of this paper—his remarks about
forgiveness in the Rhetoric and elsewhere, if attended to carefully, can
be seen as consistent with those made in NE, even though they arise
while he is attending to different guiding themes or questions.
9. Not incidentally, Aristotle notes the difficulty of determining when
actions have their cause in an external force (see Bk. III: Ch. 1).
10. Aristotle uses “suffering” (or pain) as a synonym for “remorse,”
which is an effect that the wrongful act has on the wrongdoer’s feelings,
whereas he uses “regret” as a synonym for “repentance,” which is not
an effect on the wrongdoer’s feelings but involves in the wrongdoer’s
thinking. Importantly, neither of these effects require the passage of
time; for Aristotle seems to view these “effects” as sometimes experi-
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that not all unwilling actions are forgivable (1136a5), distinguishing differing forms of ignorance as follows: “for those
things that people do in error not only while being ignorant
but as a result of ignorance are forgivable, but those that are
done not as a result of ignorance but while one is ignorant
and as a result of a passion that is unnatural and inhuman are
not forgivable” (1136a6-9, emphasis mine). Aristotle also
states that
what is done on account of ignorance is in every instance not a willing act, but it is unwilling by its
painfulness and by one’s regretting it, while someone
who does a thing on account of ignorance without
being in any way distressed by the action has not
acted willingly, since he did not even know what he
was doing, [but] he has not acted unwillingly either,
since he is not pained by it (1110b18-23).
Since there are actions that do not fit neatly into the willing
or unwilling classifications, Aristotle creates the category of
“non-willing action” (1110b24) to mark off those “unwilling”
wrongful actions about which the wrongdoer is unware of the
wrongness and thus is neither pained by nor regretful of. It might
seem difficult to discern whether the newly categorized actions
are forgivable in Aristotle’s view; however, directly after constructing this new category of action, and despite the fact that he
uses “on account of ignorance” in his remarks both about “unwilling actions” and about “non-willing actions,” he states that
“acting on account of ignorance seems different than acting while
being ignorant” (1110b26, emphasis mine), where the latter
enced while the wrongful act is being performed; and in any case, these
dispositions demonstrate the non-culpability of the wrongdoer at the
time at which forgiveness is to be granted. I do not defend this claim
here, as I am fairly certain that this is commonly agreed to by scholars
of Greek who work on Aristotle. Nevertheless, it is worth pointing out
for those who are not familiar with Aristotle’s use of these terms and,
more importantly, because I will come back to this point in part two of
the paper.
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seems to mean that the person is ignorant in a robust sense. This
distinction appears to be determined on the basis of whether the
ignorance is associated with incomplete knowing or complete ignorance. Regarding incomplete knowing, this could be associated
with failing to know the particulars that frame the conditions for
the action when such knowledge is not expected, or with the
wrongdoer being innocently unaware of the wrongful nature of
the act, which occurs when there is no reasonable expectation for
the person to have known better. While the former acts are those
actions about which wrongdoers feel regret and pain and the latter
are acts about which wrongdoers do not feel pain or regret, both
kinds of actions seem to be unwilling actions of the sort for which
the ignorant wrongdoer is not to be blamed but should be forgiven, on Aristotle’s view (Bk. III, Ch. 1).
In contrast, the ignorance that is associated with complete ignorance appears, for Aristotle, to arise out of unnatural, inhuman passions, which, in turn, tends to result in not knowing about the
wrongness of the action in question even though one ought to know.
While these, too, are actions about which the wrongdoer does not
feel pain or regret, in this case, these actions appear to be non-willing
actions for which the wrongdoer is at least possibly blameworthy,
depending on other conditions or circumstances that characterize the
action or the disposition of the wrongdoer. As an example of this
kind of action, in Book V, Aristotle writes that “people apply punishment for ignorance itself if the one who is ignorant seems to be
responsible for it, as when . . . people are drunk, for the source is in
oneself, since one has the power not to get drunk, which is the cause
of the ignorance (1113b30-34). Although there are good reasons that
are known to us now that should move us to advance a more complex account of drunkenness that addresses its possible link to alcoholism, which is as an addiction over which those who suffer from
it have little to no control, this is a problem that goes beyond what
can be considered in this paper. In any event, it is reasonable to interpret this passage as suggesting that Aristotle appears to characterize (at least a certain kind of) drunkenness as the result of a
controllable passion that is unnatural and unsuitable for humans,
given that it causes us to act ignorantly in a blameworthy sense.
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However we interpret the distinction Aristotle makes between
the different kinds of actions based on ignorance—i.e., acts that are
performed on account of ignorance and acts that are performed while
one is ignorant—Aristotle’s remarks about unwilling and non-willing action reveal a long-debated tension in his thought that arises in
many contexts and is rooted in his teleological account of nature in
general and of human nature particularly. For the present consideration, the important question involves whether Aristotle claims that
wrongdoers should be held responsible for non-willing wrongful actions that are caused by what he calls “unnatural” and “inhuman”
passions, since the answer to this question determines whether such
an act is forgivable and, thus, whether the wrongdoer should be forgiven. This challenging question will be addressed shortly.
§1b. Forgiveness and Willing Action
Like unwilling actions, only some willing actions are forgivable,
namely, “when one does what one ought not to do on account of
motives” such as insufferable conditions that “strain human nature too far, that no one could endure them” (1110a25-26), or,
“when one endures something shameful or painful in return for
things that are great and beautiful” (1110a21-22). Here, one
might be motivated to argue that this last kind of action would
be better characterized as a chosen, deliberate action, given its
apparent utilitarian nature. But the appropriateness of this characterization depends upon whether all the conditions for an action’s having been intentionally chosen and deliberated upon are
met, which (amongst other things) include (in the case of vicious
action) whether the action is chosen from out of an unshakable
and firmly vicious character, and whether it is performed merely
for the sake of immoderate or otherwise excessive self-interest
or gain (see 1105a-27-35).11 Since the action that Aristotle describes here does not meet these conditions—for it is neither
11. I assume at least basic familiarity with Aristotle’s virtue ethics and
with his attendant account of virtuous and vicious action, and so I do
not offer a consideration of his Ethics here, especially as this would
take us too far afield from the focal concern of this paper.
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viciously performed nor done for self-interest of the sort described but for things that are “great and beautiful”—it is properly characterized as a willing, though unchosen, action. The
(complicated) distinction between these two classifications of
action and whether they are forgivable is discussed in what follows.
Notwithstanding this distinction, like unwilling actions for
which wrongdoers feel pain and regret, wrongdoers who perform these sorts of willing acts also feel pain and regret; however, unlike unwilling actors who are either externally forced
to perform wrongful actions or are ignorant of some necessary
information about the circumstances that would lead to a right
action, here, the actor is not forced by external causes to act,
since the source is in the actor and “anything for which the
source is in oneself is also up to oneself either to do or not”
(1110a17). Moreover, the (in a sense) “willing” wrongdoer
knows the wrongful nature of the action, including the “particular circumstances in which the action takes place” (1111a23),
but she cannot be expected to act differently, given the conditions that accompany the wrongful action, including its possible
consequences.
Given Aristotle’s complex consideration of the distinction
between willing and unwilling acts, which motivated him to
add non-willing acts as a new category of action, it seems clear
that what distinguishes forgivable unwilling actions from forgivable willing actions is (a) the source of the action—is the
cause external force or is it in oneself, at least in a qualified
sense?—as well as (b) whether there is ignorance involved and
if so, (c) what sort (1111a22-24). Additionally, in those cases
in which there is sufficient knowledge and ability to act in a
wrongful manner that either prevents a greater evil than the
wrongful action itself (1110a5) or “for the sake of something
beautiful” (1110a6)i.e., in order to bring about genuinely noble
ends – such actions are, indeed, forgivable, which is supported
by the distressed state in which this kind of wrongdoer finds
herself, which is characterized by suffering and regret.
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§1c. Forgiveness and Chosen, Deliberate Action and the
Double-Tiered Nature of Non-Willing Action
Careful reflection on his remarks in Book III and Book V suggests that Aristotle’s account of forgiveness does not allow
wrongdoers who perform chosen, deliberate actions, which are
those that are properly associated with virtue, or, in this case,
vice, and, thus, those that are in the fullest sense blameworthy,
to be forgiven. For it is clear that he speaks only of unwilling
(not non-willing) and some willing actions as those that are appropriately forgivable; indeed, chosen, deliberated upon wrongful actions are conspicuously absent from Aristotle’s account.
Hence, wrongful actions appear to be unforgivable if they are
committed (i) deliberately and intentionally (certainly not accidentally or in ignorance), (ii) with full knowledge of the
wrongful nature of the action, (iii) where there is a realistic possibility of choosing not to act wrongfully, (iv) on the basis of a
considered choice to gain pleasure or avoid pain (of the trivial,
self-interested sort), and (v) on the basis of the stable (virtually
immutable) disposition of the wrongdoer, which are the conditions that describe genuinely vicious action, insofar as it is performed viciously and not just in accordance with vice (see
1105a-27-35).12
It is important to acknowledge that for Aristotle, truly vicious action is not performed on the basis of losing a struggle
against a natural tendency to act in accord with a particular passion, such as being too quick to anger, for example, since the
vicious person no longer struggles to keep her unsuitable13 pas12. Again, I assume basic familiarity with Aristotle’s virtue ethics; but
for further elucidation of the conditions for virtue and vice and for the
genuinely virtuous and vicious action that is associated with these dispositions, see also: 1103b23-25; 1105b1-4; 1111b5-7; 1112a16; 1113b4-6;
and 1114b21-15.
13. In what follows, I use “unnatural” and “inhuman”—Aristotle’s
terms—and “unsuitable” and “unbefitting”—my terms—interchangeably, since I think Aristotle employs these terms as a way to describe
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sions in check but gladly takes pleasure in choosing to act in
accord with these “inhuman” passions while knowing that
doing so is inappropriate; for, this is a sign that a firm and unshakable character is at work, which is a condition of genuinely
vicious, and thus, fully blameworthy action (1103b23-25;
1105b1-4).14 However, in acknowledging this, we are moved to
re-consider the difficult question about non-willing action that
was posed earlier regarding whether Aristotle claims that
wrongdoers should be held responsible for non-willing wrongful actions that are caused by “unnatural” and “inhuman” passions, especially since the answer to this question provides the
key to determining whether these actions are forgivable. For,
simply put, if a wrongdoer is responsible for her wrongful act,
then her act is not forgivable, on Aristotle’s view, and, hence,
she ought not to be forgiven.
It was already acknowledged (in section 1a) that wrongful
actions that arise out of complete ignorance that is based in a person’s so-called “unnatural” passions and are therefore not accompanied by remorse or regret are neither willing nor unwilling
actions; however, these actions also do not appear to be chosen,
deliberated upon actions, given that they are performed in complete ignorance, i.e., while one “is ignorant.” Indeed, this is why
Aristotle created the new category of “non-willing” action. But
along with this, we noted the tension this newly created category
of action creates. For it seems that wrongdoers who perform nonwilling actions should not be held responsible for their actions
since they have no appreciation for the wrongness of their actions, given their basis in an apparent natural tendency to act in
passions that steer us away from achieving a virtuous character, which
is the means by which we can achieve our proper human telos, according to Aristotle. Again, it is not my aim to elucidate or examine Aristotle’s moral theory (or, for that matter, his teleology) in this paper.
However, in what follows, I discuss what I take to be Aristotle’s understanding of the meaning of “unnatural” and “inhuman” in the context
in which he uses these terms in this passage.
14. See fn. 12 for further textual evidence of this.
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accord with “unbefitting” passions over which such wrongdoers
do not seem to have control, at least not initially (and maybe
never). All human beings have passions and tendencies with
which they simply find themselves without having willed or chosen them. In fact, the attempt to develop a morally virtuous character involves our struggle to rid ourselves of the tendency to act
in accord with these “unsuitable” passions, which move us to act
in excess or deficiency of the mean that constitutes virtuous action, whatever this may be.15
This further clarification allows us to formulate the tension
at issue here more precisely: on the one hand, we neither will nor
choose to possess the natural passions and tendencies with which
we find ourselves but which present obstacles to the development
of a virtuous character. But, on the other hand, Aristotle’s further
consideration of non-willing actions that arise out of our natural
tendency to act in accord with these passions identifies these passions as “unnatural” and “inhuman” (1136a6-9), which appears
to motivate him to characterize these as actions for which the
wrongdoer may, ultimately, be responsible and for which, therefore, forgiveness ought not to be granted. I think this apparent
tension can be resolved, first, by noting that Aristotle characterizes these passions as “inhuman” and “unnatural” because they
present obstacles that must be overcome in the process of developing a virtuous character, and second, by acknowledging (a) that
this characterization is not only not inconsistent with the recognition that it is perfectly natural to possess tendencies to act in
accord with our passions, but (b) that it is necessary for us to possess such passions and tendencies in order for genuine virtue to
be possible. For the process of becoming virtuous requires us to
possess passions that we must attempt to reign in from the extremes of deficiency and excess to which they naturally tend until
15. What constitutes virtuous action and how one develops a virtuous
character is not discussed here; rather, the conditions for vicious action
are outlined only briefly in order to make sense of why Aristotle claims
that chosen, deliberate, wrongful action is not forgivable, unlike unwilling and most willing actions, which are forgivable.
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we are no longer struggling against this challenge, as was previously acknowledged.
Recognizing this prompts us to assign a “double-tiered” character to these sorts of actions. At first—and probably for much if
not all of our lives – these kinds of actions are non-willing actions
that arise out of entirely unwilled, unchosen “natural tendencies”
to follow passions with which we simply find ourselves, and
about which Aristotle remarks that “there is more forgiveness for
following natural tendencies . . . [particularly] for those that are
of a sort that is common to all people” (1149b4-5). Furthermore,
while Aristotle distinguishes between some natural tendencies that
appear to be common, such as “spiritedness and aggressiveness”
(1149b7) and those that appear to be less common, such as “desires that are for excess or desires that are for unnecessary things”
(1149b8), this is a difficult and nuanced distinction to understand,
not to mention one that does not allow us to easily identify the
specific actions that belong in each category. Nevertheless, he
clearly states that (at least) the former are forgivable, further elaborating on this in Book VII, Chapters 7—10, within which Aristotle initially distinguishes different forms of “unrestraint,”
claiming that persons who act in an unrestrained manner that is
associated with excessive desires are “more shameful” than persons whose unrestraint is associated with natural spiritedness
(1149b25-26). However, he subsequently identifies the former —
i.e., the more shameful—as “dissipated persons” who, “without
regret,” “choose” their actions typically for the sake of “gaining
pleasure for themselves,” not only characterizing them as “incurable” (1150a20-23), but distinguishing them from unrestrained
persons, who are “capable of regret . . . and curable” (1150b3234). He furthermore claims that acting in an unrestrained manner,
while certainly not admirable, is not vicious (1151a7):
the unrestrained person is not even like someone who
has knowledge and is actively paying attention to it,
but is like someone who is asleep or drunk. And
though he acts willingly (since he acts while knowing
in some manner what he is doing and for what end),
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he is not vicious, since his “choice”16 is that of a decent person (1152a15-18).
With this claim, Aristotle intimates that such persons are not (robustly) responsible for their actions and that they should therefore
be forgiven.
Importantly, even if we acknowledge that distinguishing dissipated from unrestrained actions is difficult and cannot be done
outside the concrete context within which actions are performed,
it seems clear that in order to determine when forgiveness ought
to be granted, we must be able to discern when a wrongdoer passively follows17 her natural tendencies or desires, for example, to
act aggressively (or to pursue unnecessary ends), or whether the
wrongdoer deliberately chooses to allow her natural tendencies
to act in accord with her immoderate, unsuitable passions to govern her actions, which can be accomplished by observing the
wrongdoer.18 For Aristotle argues that only if the latter occurs,
should persons be held responsible for the actions that arise out
of them, given that this demonstrates a deliberate, committed re16. Here Aristotle uses “choice” in a looser sense than when he uses it
while discussing actions that are richly and robustly deliberated upon,
the latter of which is a condition both for truly virtuous and for truly
vicious acts; but here, as the passage makes clear, he is attaching
“choice” to willing actions that do not rise to this level.
17. Joe Sachs offers an extremely helpful discussion of the passive nature of unrestraint, advancing that “Aristotle repeatedly refuses to call
unrestraint anything but a passive experience.” See footnote 201, Ch.
7, Bk. VII, p. 122; see also footnote 183, Ch. 3, Bk. VII, p. 122, which
provide evidence for how challenging it is to interpret Aristotle properly
with respect to how he conceives of unrestraint and the actions that flow
from it. For example, as Sachs points out, while Aristotle sometimes
speaks of unrestrained action as a “hexis,” namely when making indirect summary statements that include mention of unrestraint along with
other phenomena (e.g., 1151a27; 1151b29; 1152a35), whenever he
speaks about unrestraint on its own, he calls it a “pathos” (e.g., 1145b5,
29; 1147b 8, 16; 1148b6).
18. Probably for most of us, our actions will be motivated by a mix of
these “extremes” throughout out adult lives.
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fusal to attempt to overcome natural tendencies to act in accord
with unbefitting passions; indeed, despite knowing the wrongness
of our actions, in this case we allow our unsuitable passions to
rule us to such an extent that they become part of our very character, which we are unwilling to change. If this happens, we take
pleasure in intentionally and knowingly performing wrongful actions and we certainly don’t feel pain or regret over them. Consequently, these actions are unforgivable, and, thus, forgiveness
ought not to be extended to persons who perform them.
Having said this, it is imperative to underscore that for Aristotle, it is extremely difficult to develop the kind of character just
described, from out of which truly unforgivable actions arise,
which means that most wrongful actions are ultimately forgivable
in Aristotle’s view. For careful reflection on the reasons, conditions and circumstances that frame wrongdoings typically render
them excusable or justifiable rather than inexcusable or unjustifiable actions for which wrongdoers are morally responsible, and
when this is the case, forgiveness ought to be extended, according
to Aristotle. As we will now see, this is in contrast to the leading
contemporary account of forgiveness.
§2. A Closer Look at Forgiveness: Culpability,
Resentment, Excusing, and Justification
Aristotle’s account may strike one as strange, particularly if one
is familiar with the contemporary literature on forgiveness, since
in these accounts,19 in contrast with Aristotle, for whom it is the
non-culpability of the wrongdoer that makes the wrongdoer’s act
forgivable and the wrongdoer deserving of forgiveness, it is typically claimed that the question of forgiveness does not arise unless the wrongdoer is morally culpable for her wrongdoing. For
example, Jeffrie Murphy, a contemporary philosopher and legal
scholar whose work on forgiveness is amongst the most well19. As I mentioned in the Introduction, I take the work of Jeffrie Murphy on forgiveness as representative of the “standard” contemporary,
secular account.
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known, well-regarded, and frequently cited,20 appealing to the
account of forgiveness offered centuries ago by Bishop Butler,21
defines forgiveness as “the foreswearing of resentment, the resolute overcoming of the anger and hatred that are naturally directed toward a person who has done an unjustified and
non-excused moral injury” (504). Although Murphy (and others)22 may not agree with every aspect of Butler’s account of forgiveness, which I will not recount here, this definition highlights
that in addition to being preceded by the negative attitudes and
emotions of resentment, anger and, even, hatred, forgiveness requires the moral culpability of the wrongdoer. As Murphy states,
“we may forgive only what it is initially proper to resent; and, if
a person . . . is not responsible for what he did, there is nothing
20. For example, see Jeffrie Murphy, Getting Even: Forgiveness and its
Limits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) and “Forgiveness and
Resentment,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Vol. 7, Social and Political
Philosophy, ed. Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling, Jr., and Howard
K. Wettstein (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 503516. Further references to Murphy refer to his 1982 article. But it is
worth noting that his more recent text takes an even stronger “anti-Aristotelian” position, in advancing the general thesis that forgiveness ought
to be more sparingly extended than it is and that resentment (and associated negative attitudes) ought to be more greatly valued and explicitly
cultivated as morally legitimate responses to wrongdoers.
21. Joseph Butler, “Sermon VII: Upon Resentment” and “Sermon IX:
Upon Forgiveness of Injuries,” in Fifteen Sermons (London, 1726). Not
incidentally, most contemporary scholars working on forgiveness appeal to Bishop Butler’s account of forgiveness in their analyses, and indeed, further references to Bishop Butler’s account refer to Murphy’s
analysis of it and are cited accordingly.
22. Two additional informative contemporary essays on forgiveness
include: Norvin Richards, “Forgiveness,” Ethics, 99.1 (1988): 7797 and Joanna North, “Wrongdoing and Forgiveness,” Philosophy,
62.242 (1987): 499-508, who, in agreement with Murphy, advances
that “one cannot forgive when no wrong has been done, for there is
no breach to be healed and no repentance is necessary or possible”
(502).
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to resent. . . . Resentment—and thus forgiveness—is directed toward responsible wrongdoing” (508).23
Indeed, Murphy goes to great lengths to distinguish forgiveness from several other concepts with which he claims it is often
confused (506), including the concepts of excuse and justification
(ibid.). According to Murphy, the essential role that resentment
plays in forgiveness gives rise, necessarily, to the distinction between these notions and forgiveness (ibid.), since these other dispositions are not defined by a foreswearing of resentment. In
elaborating on the distinction between forgiveness and excuse
and justification, Murphy maintains that
to excuse is to say that what was done was morally
wrong; but because of certain factors about the agent
. . . it would be unfair to hold the wrongdoer responsible or to blame him for the wrong action. [And] to
justify is to say that what was done was prima facie
wrong; but, because of other morally relevant factors,
the action was—all morally relevant factors considered—the right thing to do (ibid.).
Put plainly, neither excusing nor justifying actions of a wrongdoer are to be identified with granting forgiveness to a wrongdoer, on Murphy’s view, since it is only legitimate to raise the
question of forgiveness if the person who is wronged is justified
in resenting the wrongdoer, and resentment is only justified if the
wrongdoer is culpable for her action, which is a condition that
is not met when “wrong” actions may (or should) be excused or
justified.
In the context of forgiveness, Murphy sees the primary justification for and appropriateness of resentment as a tool that allows individuals to demonstrate proper self-respect, so that what
23. In the analysis that follows, I focus on Murphy’s consideration of
resentment, leaving aside a discussion of anger or hatred. This is both
because Murphy focuses his own analysis on resentment and because
resentment is the feature of his account that is most closely connected
to his claim that forgiveness requires the moral culpability of a wrongdoer, which is the point of disagreement that provides the primary
ground for my thesis that Aristotle’s account is more compelling.
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is at stake in the relationship between resentment and forgiveness
is a proper sense and celebration of one’s worth and the recognition of the significance of how intentional wrongdoings are a sign
of disrespect (505; 507). From this it follows that, on Murphy’s
view, the foreswearing of resentment that is a necessary element
of forgiveness is only appropriate in a moral sense24 if it is
granted under the condition that (a) forgiving the wrongdoer expresses rather than denies the autonomy and self-respect of the
person wronged, as well as (b) the moral agency—i.e., the culpability—of the wrongdoer is respected (ibid.; 508).25
24. I highlight the language of morality in order to reflect Murphy’s understanding that genuine forgiveness is to be identified with moral forgiveness, since it is granted for the “right” – i.e., for moral – reasons
(508). Additionally, although Murphy considers whether forgiveness
might be obligatory (511), ultimately, he claims that “we are not obligated to forgive… and no one has a right to be forgiven…. [though] we
can have good reasons for bestowing forgiveness” (ibid.). Dissimilarly,
Aristotle seems to articulate when and why a wrongdoer deserves – has
a right to – forgiveness, which suggests that he believes these cases may
be obligatory.
25. Murphy also lists a third condition that must be met in order for forgiveness to be appropriate, namely, that the generally accepted rules of
morality, whatever they are, must not be violated (505; 507; 508). In
addition, although I will not address this claim explicitly in this paper—
primarily because it seems both obvious to me and certainly not incompatible with Aristotle’s view of forgiveness—it deserves mention that
on Murphy’s view, genuine forgiveness should be identifiable neither
with forgetting a wrongdoing for the sake of therapeutic (e.g., emotional) reasons (507) or with letting a wrongdoer off the hook with the
hope of bringing about her repentance, the latter of which is a position
often argued for in religious contexts (512). Forgetting a wrongdoing
for therapeutic reasons would be motivated by a desire for self-preservation, whereas letting a wrongdoer off the hook in order to motivate
her repentance may be rooted in arrogance, neither of which is an explicitly moral motivation for action. Moreover, while these practices
may be personally or socially beneficial, they are not necessarily consistent with maintaining self-respect or autonomy, or, with respecting
the moral culpability of the wrongdoer; and in some cases, they may
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There are many reasons that Murphy analyzes as those typically offered as justifications that may be consistent with the conditions he lays out for appropriate (moral) forgiveness. However,
before briefly examining these, we would do well to note that
Murphy’s account of the distinction between forgiveness, excuse
and justification is perplexing. For in explaining why excusing
and justifying wrongdoings are not to be confused with forgiveness, he cites the fact that the wrongdoer is not responsible for
her wrongdoing due either (a) to the excusability of her action,
which is based on conditions about the wrongdoer (i.e., in Murphy’s terminology, the wrongdoer’s agency), or (b) to the justifiability of the action, which is based on conditions surrounding
the action in question (506). But isn’t this precisely why otherwise wrong actions are forgivable and why such “wrongdoers”
should be forgiven? As Murphy himself admits, these wrongdoers are clearly not responsible for their actions and thus they
should neither be resented nor be held accountable (ibid.). So,
why does Murphy (and many other scholars who agree with him)
refuse to claim, as Aristotle does, that these wrongdoers should
be forgiven? The reason appears to be his unwavering commitment to the idea that foreswearing resentment is a necessary element of the process of forgiveness and since there can be no
(proper) resentment in the case of wrong actions that are excusable or justifiable, forgiveness must be different than these (ibid.).
Sadly, the commitment to the existence of a necessary connection between resentment and forgiveness appears to be dogmatic, as I do not see any argument for the necessity of this
connection. For in Murphy’s analysis of the meaning and condibe incompatible with these values. Genuine, i.e., moral, forgiveness
should also be distinguished from letting a wrongdoer off the hook too
quickly (505), without engaging in proper reflection about whether the
wrongdoer deserves forgiveness, which is discussed in what follows.
It should be noted that there are other interesting aspects of Murphy’s
account of forgiveness that I do not consider in this paper, as I intimated previously, but this is only because I focus on what I take to be
the most glaring deficiency in his account, especially when compared
to Aristotle’s account.
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tions of forgiveness within which he discusses why resentment
is the precursor for forgiveness, he claims, as was acknowledged,
that the primary value defended by resentment is self-respect
(505; 507; 508). However, while it seems reasonable for a person
to resent moral injuries that are intentionally performed against
oneself, and that to fail to do so could signify (amongst other
things) a lack of self-respect, what does not seem reasonable is
(a) that wrongdoers who perform moral injuries intentionally are
the only appropriate candidates for forgiveness, as Murphy
claims, or, for that matter, (b) that such wrongdoers should be
forgiven, certainly not if they are pleased about the intentional
wrongdoing. Regarding (a), what seems to distinguish Aristotle’s
view from Murphy’s is whether it makes sense to consider an action “wrong” and the person who performs it a “wrongdoer”
when the action may legitimately be justified or excused (e.g.,
for one or more of the reasons Aristotle articulated). Given that
(in this context) the language of justification and excuse implies
that an action was performed that is taken to be wrong in some
sense—otherwise this language would not be used—we should
be compelled to acknowledge that wrongdoings may in principle
be justified or excused. It seems that Aristotle was aware of this,
given that his account of forgiveness relies on and promotes this
understanding of the way in which judging a questionable action
as justified or excused and, thus, as forgivable, ultimately presupposes its “wrongness” in some relevant sense.
Regarding (b), in order to determine whether wrongdoers
who perform their wrongful actions intentionally should be forgiven, it is helpful to consider the reasons that Murphy offers as
possible justifications for moral forgiveness and to compare them
with Aristotle’s view of when forgiveness should be extended
and when it should not. According to Murphy, the most promising justifications for forgiveness include: (i) the wrongdoer’s repentance or change of heart, (ii) the wrongdoer’s sincere apology,
(iii) the wrongdoer’s good or well-meaning intentions, and (iv)
the wrongdoer’s suffering being sufficient to demonstrate a relevant transformation of the wrongdoer (508). While Murphy goes
on to discuss each of these justifications separately (508 – 511),
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it is sufficient to note that they share in common that the wrongdoer may be separated from her wrongdoing (508; 509),26 since
only in these cases is forgiveness potentially appropriate, given
that this separation not only (1) allows respect for the worth and
autonomy of the one wronged as well as for the initial moral culpability of the wrongdoer (ibid.), but also, paradoxically, (2) recognizes the non-culpability of the wrongdoer at the time at which
forgiveness is granted (509).
Importantly, although, unlike Murphy, Aristotle does not
propose a necessary relationship between resentment, foreswearing resentment, and forgiveness, nor does he (explicitly) emphasize the importance of upholding self-respect and autonomy, and
although he outright rejects the notion that forgiveness requires
the culpability of the wrongdoer, arguing the opposite, Aristotle
nonetheless supposes the separability of the wrongdoer from her
wrongdoing, just as Murphy does. We need only recall the examples of unwilling and willing actions that Aristotle claims are
forgivable to see this, which were outlined in section one. In
fact, some version of each of the reasons listed, which Murphy
defends as potentially compatible with what he characterizes as
moral forgiveness, can be interpreted as present in Aristotle’s
account of forgiveness, given that they all imply the non-culpability of the wrongdoer at the time at which Murphy claims forgiveness is appropriate. Indeed, when Murphy’s reasons for
forgiveness are examined carefully, it appears that wrongdoings
are forgivable for him, too, only when wrongdoers are no longer
responsible for their actions, which suggests that although the
acts retain their “wrongness,” they are nevertheless either excusable or justified: they are still “wrong,” but because of conditions that are true about the actor or about the circumstances
framing the action, it would be unfair—i.e., wrong (pardon the
26. In this connection, taking cues from St. Augustine, Murphy writes:
“to the extent that the agent is separated from his evil act, forgiveness
of him is possible without a tacit approval of his evil act” (ibid. 508,
emphasis his) viz. the well-known religious proclamation to “hate the
sin but not the sinner.”
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pun)—to hold the wrongdoer responsible, as Murphy himself
admits (506; 511).
The main difference between Murphy and Aristotle on this
point was introduced in an endnote within which not only the
synonymous meaning of “suffering,” “pain,” and “remorse” as
well as the synonymous meaning of “regret” and “repentance”
was noted, but it was also noted that although these dispositions
refer to a “gap” in the wrongdoer’s feelings or thinking, this does
not necessarily imply a passage of time, as these dispositions
could be experienced simultaneously. For Aristotle, there is no
requirement that there be a point in time at which the wrongdoer
is inseparable from her action and thus should be resented but
then at some later time she is separable from her act because, for
example, she has repented, apologized or otherwise demonstrated
her regret and sorrow. Instead, Aristotle claims that if a wrongdoer is to be forgiven it is because either (i) her “wrong” act is
performed unwittingly (e.g., because she had incomplete knowledge), (ii) she regrets and is suffering from it, either while she
performs it or later, which, for him, means that her character is
not the (vicious) character of an intentional wrongdoer, which is
immutable,27 (iii) she means well insofar as she attempts to prevent a worse outcome than her action (e.g., she was well-intentioned), and/or (iv) she cannot reasonably be expected to act
otherwise, all of which make the wrongdoer non-culpable, and
hence the act justified or excused.
It seems to me that despite his appeal to the wrongdoer’s disposition at different points in time, Murphy ultimately agrees with
Aristotle, especially since he claims that the strongest case for forgiving a wrongdoer occurs when she has genuinely repented, apol27. Recall that for Aristotle, the transformation of a genuinely vicious
character is not possible, as was briefly discussed in section 1c of the
paper. To be sure, whether genuinely vicious (or virtuous) characters
are mutable is a feature of Aristotle’s virtue ethics that can (and continues to) be debated; however, with respect to the question of forgiveness,
as I will argue in the conclusion, his account is coherent and compelling
in a way that Murphy’s is not.
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ogized, or otherwise demonstrated remorse (509-511). For this
likely means that the wrongdoer is no longer culpable and thus
should no longer be resented, given that she has become a different person (511). Of course, Murphy would say that these kinds
of actions are only candidates for forgivability if their wrongdoers are initially culpable for their actions but later become no
longer culpable; for otherwise they were either never culpable
to begin with, since this is a requirement of forgiveness for Murphy, or they did not undergo a process that changes them from
an initially culpable wrongdoer to a person who is no longer that
same culpable wrongdoer. But beyond insisting on (a) the necessity that forgiveness requires the initial culpability of the wrongdoer and (b) foreswearing the resentment that appropriately
directs itself toward the culpable wrongdoer, Murphy does nothing to convince us of the connection between these. For, recall
(again) his attempt to distinguish forgiveness from excuse and
justification: when excuse is appropriate, something about the
wrongdoer’s ability to act makes it unfair to hold her responsible
for her action, thereby making her action excusable; and when
justification is appropriate, something about the conditions or circumstances framing the action also makes it unfair to hold the
wrongdoer responsible for her action, thereby, making her action
justified (506). As I think this (and related) passages in Murphy’s
analysis show, despite Murphy’s attempt to distinguish forgiveness, excuse, and justification, ultimately, even for him, proper
(moral) forgiveness cannot be granted to culpable, resentable
wrongdoers but should only be extended to wrongdoers whose
actions, at the time at which they are forgiven, are excusable or
justifiable, just as is the case for Aristotle.
§3. Concluding Remarks: On the Compelling Nature of
“Aristotelian Forgiveness”
On Aristotle’s account, resentment is not a necessary element of
forgiveness, not initially or in the form of needing to overcome
it, because from the outset, the kinds of wrongful actions that are
forgivable are not attached to wrongdoers who should be resented;
rather, their actions are excusable or justified, as was argued. I
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submit that Murphy (and others who agree with him)28 should give
up his reliance both on the moral culpability of the wrongdoer and
on the accompanying resentment and its eventual foreswearing as
essential ingredients of forgiveness for at least three related reasons. First, as I argued, even Murphy admits that at the time at
which forgiveness is appropriate, the wrongdoer is not culpable
because something about her or the conditions under which her
acts was or is performed—e.g., she repented or apologized or
meant well—result in the wrongdoing being justified or excused
without eliminating its “wrongness.” Again, Murphy himself admits this (506), betraying the incoherence of his position.
Second, holding onto resentment until the wrongdoer undergoes some sort of magically transformative process, which, with
Aristotle, we have good reason to believe is not possible if the
wrongdoer is someone who genuinely takes pleasure in intentionally acting wrongly, may be unreasonable to expect from a
person who is wronged, regardless of whether doing so upholds
autonomy or self-respect, which is by no means a foregone conclusion. This is especially true, given that there are many ways
that self-respect and autonomy can be maintained that do not require harboring dangerous, negative emotions that may easily
transform themselves into attitudes or actions, such as hatred and
vengeance, which (at least arguably) often fail to respect anyone,
and certainly speak against a sense of humility, not to mention
an appreciation for a shared sense of humanity (which is a point
to which I return in what directly follows). Furthermore, overcoming resentment requires some emotional gymnastics that it
is not clear could or should be cultivated, particularly given the
shaky foundation Murphy offers for why wrongdoers should be
resented, which Murphy does not support with much more than
his insistence that Bishop Butler is correct on this point. Again,
why should it be the case that forgiveness must involve the
foreswearing of resentment, since either it is unclear that the
wrongdoer should be resented in the first place, or, taking Aris28. Recall that Murphy’s account represents the mainstream, leading
contemporary secular account of forgiveness.
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totle’s lead, it is unclear that she should ever be forgiven? Put
plainly, why not understand forgiveness, as Aristotle did, namely,
as an attitude one takes with respect to a wrongdoer who deserves
it for one or more of the reasons outlined, none of which require
the one wronged to resent the wrongdoer, and all of which
demonstrate the non-culpability of the wrongdoer?
Third, given that there is no reason to believe that the absence
of resentment or its foreswearing in Aristotle’s account of forgiveness results in the one wronged failing to respect herself or
to exercise her autonomy, as I already hinted, Murphy would do
well to discard his insistence that forgiveness requires resentment
at all. Instead, he should offer an account of forgiveness that calls
for us to take on the perspective of the wrongdoer, as this is compassionate and respectful of the worth of all persons who deserve
it. I cannot help but wonder whether Aristotle’s account instructs
us to treat wrongdoers in an (appropriately) compassionate way,29
which allows us not only to exercise self-respect but also to respect the other and her circumstances more easily than Murphy’s
account permits. For the latter not only advances an arguably fictive distinction between forgiving and excusing and justifying
that fails to withstand philosophical scrutiny, but also fails to attend robustly to the reality that all persons are potential wrongdoers in the ways that both Aristotle and Murphy articulate. For
although Murphy acknowledges what he refers to as “moral humility” (513), he concludes from this only that we “should be
open to the possibility of forgiveness” (ibid.). In contrast, Aristotle suggests that relating to wrongdoers through compassion is
the goal, since this demonstrates human decency, which he intimately connects with compassion and thoughtfulness, which, in
turn, he claims should govern our relations with (most) others
(1143a20-22).
Thus despite what may remain unclear in Aristotle’s account
of forgiveness, “Aristotelian forgiveness” is (1) internally coher29. I take it that compassion—generally speaking, not within Aristotle’s
theoretical framework—can be inappropriate; however, I do not defend
this here, as to do so would take us too far afield from the paper’s focus.
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ent, (2) properly appreciative of the many reasons a wrongdoer
should not be held responsible for her act and should be forgiven,
which (3) is consistent with respect both for those who are
wronged and for those who perform wrongdoings, (4) calls for
compassion towards others and an appreciation for our shared
humanity, and finally, (5) does not fall prey to the emotional
quagmire that may threaten our attempts to forgive when we
ought and to refrain from forgiving when we ought not. Consequently, Aristotle’s account of forgiveness ought to be preferred
over the leading contemporary account.
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On Two Socratic Questions
Alex Priou
What pointless images come up on account of a
single word. Take the word something, for example. For me this is a dense cloud of steam that has
the color of smoke. When I hear the word nothing,
I also see a cloud, but one that is thinner, completely transparent. And when I try to seize a particle of this nothing, I get the most minute particles
of nothing.1
The most famous Socratic question—ti esti touto?—is often preceded by a far less famous, but more fundamental question—esti
touto ti? Thus we read, for example, in Plato’s Hippias Major:
Socrates: So, then, are not also all the beautiful things
beautiful by the beautiful?
Hippias: Yes, by the beautiful.
Soc.: By this thing that is something (tini)?
Hipp.: That is something, for what (ti) [else] is it going
[to be]?
Soc.: Say, then . . . what is this thing (ti esti touto), the
beautiful? (287c8-d3)2
Or, in the Symposium, where Socrates asks Agathon, “Is love love
of nothing or of something?” (199e6-7) Aristotle implicitly affirms the priority of this question to its more famous counterpart by only claiming that there is a science of being after
having confronted the “most difficult and necessary aporia of
all to look into,” namely, whether or not “there is something
1. Luria 1968, 132.
2. All citations are to Plato and his Euthyphro, unless otherwise noted.
All translations are my own.
Alex Priou is Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Kutztown
University in Kutztown, Pennsylvania. This paper was first delivered at
the Annual Meeting of the Association of Core Texts and Courses on
April 16, 2015 in Atlanta, Georgia.
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(esti ti) aside from the particulars,” “something one and the
same (hen ti kai tauton)” that would make such knowledge
possible (cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics 999a24-9, 1003a21-2).
Though this question is posed in many dialogues with respect to myriad topics,3 in every instance it receives but one
answer: it is something, namely something that is. The dialogue devoted to why this question always meets with an affirmative answer would appear to be the Parmenides, for
there Parmenides throws into question whether the eidē are,
only to establish that, if we have opinions that there is some
unity in being, such unity must be. 4 Nevertheless, the dramatic setting of the Parmenides is the quarrelling of the PreSocratic schools, and the popular dismissal of philosophy
that their quarrelling engendered. For a dialogue that establishes that the object of inquiry is simply because we have
3. Some examples (by no means exhaustive): Charmides 161d1-5 and
168b2-4, Parmenides 132b7-c2, Phaedo 64c2-3, and Theaetetus 160a9b4 and 163e4-7. Of course, Socrates often doesn’t ask this preliminary
question, perhaps with some reason for his silence in mind, the most
obvious and necessary example being Minos 313a1.
4. This claim condenses the respective thrusts of the first and second
parts of the Parmenides. Let the following suffice to establish the above
claim. The second part’s inquiry into the one that is preserves the intelligibility of unity without addressing the skepticism raised at the peak
of the first part, i.e., the view that there is no access to the one that is or
that the one simply is not (cf. 133a ff.). Parmenides addresses that skepticism in the final five deductions, which function as a reductio ad absurdum. This reductio culminates in a denial of unity not just in
being—for being could nevertheless still always appear to be, without
being—but in appearance and opinion, as well. This conclusion proves
untenable, since as a matter of fact unity is opined to be—indeed, at
many points during that very conversation. Thus the dialogue pushes
us to the conclusion that is enough that unity is opined to be for it simply
to be, i.e. for the claim that one is to be true, at least so far as human
beings may recognize. It’s on this point that the Parmenides and Euthyphro converge.
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opinions about it, we must, as I hope to show, turn to the Euthyphro. 5
From the very beginning of the dialogue, Socrates’s whole
way of life is in question. For an indictment has brought him to
the stoa of the king, thus compelling him to leave his usual haunts
in the Lyceum, where we find him in dialogues as early in his career as in the Charmides and as late as in the Euthydemus and
Lysis.6 To some extent, then, we share in Euthyphro’s surprise at
finding Socrates in such a place. Euthyphro expresses his surprise
by asking Socrates, “Has something new (ti neōteron) come to
be?” (2a1) Euthyphro’s phrasing, quite unintentionally prescient,
shows that more than Socrates’s way of life is in question. For
when Euthyphro later asks Socrates what Meletus claims
Socrates does (ti poiounta), Socrates will respond that Meletus
claims that he makes new gods (kainous poiounta tous theous)
(2a8-b4). Socrates appears to have made a new ti, a new something or what, and so to have radically revised how we think
about nouns.7 Not (just) Socrates, but his question is on trial (cf.
Apology 22e6-3b4). Euthyphro, however, understands Meletus
to mean by these “new gods” Socrates’s daimonion, and thus
takes Socrates to be his fellow religious innovator, to be something of an ally.8 But they are in many ways quite different.
Whereas Euthyphro expresses the utmost pride in his wisdom,
5. “The theoretical or methodological assumption (that to ask about
piety is to ask about an idea or form), if it is to be something more than
an assumption, requires a non-methodological—a conversational or dialectical—justification” (Bruell 1999, 127).
6. Cf. Bruell 1999, 118.
7. Cf. Davis 2011, 217.
8. Religious innovators, of course, could hardly ever be allies.—Geach
1966, 369 follows Euthyphro’s interpretation of the accusation. Burger
2015, 25-7 and Strauss 1996, 15 suggest that these gods may be
Socrates’s eidē. Meletus’s use of the plural in every version of the accusation we have suffices to dismiss Geach’s proposal (cf. Apology
24b8-c1; Xenophon, Memorabilia, I.1.1; Diogenes Laertius, Lives of
the Eminent Philosophers, II.40). Cf. Bruell 1999, 118-20.
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Socrates expresses shock when he first hears about Euthyphro’s
unorthodoxy and closes by cautioning him against deviating from
orthodoxy.9 To be sure, Socrates seems unique in his (however
ironic) respect, if not reverence, for Euthyphro, even going so far
as to say he is a desirer of Euthyphro’s wisdom, though others
laugh at him (14d4, 3b9-c2). Nevertheless, the situation is not
one of two religious innovators, but of two men with some inclination toward unorthodoxy. The one succumbs; the other resists.
If Socrates is not so unorthodox as he initially appears, then to
what extent is his allegedly new “what,” his ti, in reality new?
To what extent is Socratic philosophy latent in orthodoxy itself?10
9. Euthyphro twice affirms his wisdom with an oath by Zeus (cf. 4a12b3, 5b8-c3). The first oath comes after Socrates expresses shock with
an oath of his own at Euthyphro’s innovation (4a11-12). A little later,
Euthyphro momentarily slides into the third person while speaking of
his precise knowledge. That is, he speaks of himself as spoken of by
others. Socrates exploits Euthyphro’s vanity in his response by imagining a conversation, in which he speaks of him as wise before another
(cf. 5a3-b7, esp. 5a9-b1). Socrates is successful, for upon hearing this
imagined conversation Euthyphro swears his second oath. Socrates’s
closing caution against innovation occurs at 15c11-e2.
10. In this way, the question of the Euthyphro is much broader than
much of the literature assumes. For what is at stake is not just “the relation between religion and ethical knowledge” (Hall 1968, 1 [emphasis
added]), with the dialogue presenting “a powerful argument against any
attempt to base moral judgments on religious foundations” (Mann 1998,
123), but the relation between religion and knowledge as such. (For a
helpful list of secondary literature on this question, see Mann 1998, 123
n. 1.) The principal difficulty with this view is that the argument in question has a much broader range than the ethical or moral. No form of
dikaion or its cognates occurs in the argument in question (cf. 9d111e1). The argument thus abstracts completely from what the basis of
the gods’ love is. Indeed, the whole purpose of the argument is to raise
the question of whether there even is such a basis. Thus the fundamental
dilemma of this crucial passage, and so of the dialogue as a whole, is
not between a knowledge-based and religion-based ethics, but between
passive obedience to divine whim or wisdom and the active search for
wisdom by human beings, between reason and revelation.
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It is necessary to begin from the position of orthodoxy, as
represented by the reaction Euthyphro’s father has to the murder
of one of his servants. Euthyphro relates that his “father, binding
together his”—i.e., the murderer’s—“feet and hands, sent to
here”—i.e., Athens—“to hear from an interpreter (exēgētēs) what
(hoti) it’s necessary to do (poiein)” (4c6-d1). In certain circumstances, the position of orthodoxy makes clear precisely what we
are to do. Suspected criminals are to be bound. But in those circumstances where we don’t know clearly and precisely what we
are to do, the position of orthodoxy compensates for this lack by
having us defer to an interpreter. Such interpreters answer our
questions about what is to be done—in this case, say, regarding
what punishment is fitting for a hired servant who has killed a
household slave. Within the position of orthodoxy, then, there is
some reason for questioning—of what sort, though, we are as yet
unclear. Despite his apparent orthodoxy, Euthyphro’s father
clearly believes the fitting punishment to be death, for, when the
hired servant dies in his bonds, he is untroubled.11 Indeed, everyone except Euthyphro seems to agree with his father—the rest of
his family, the Athenians generally, and even Socrates. And
though this gives Euthyphro’s decision to proceed against his father a foolish air, it at least minimally redeems his efforts at religious innovation, since everyone, as it turns out, has arrived at
what orthodoxy demands on their own.12 That is, everyone plays
the interpreter. The ubiquity of interpretation comes to the surface
11. Edwards 2000, 218, following Allen 1970, 21, points out that Euthyphro’s father assumes he has “a right of summary justice which dispensed him from any duties to the man accused of murder,” a right that,
Edwards adds, Euthyphro implicitly denies. Both Euthyphro and his father appear more ambivalent than Edwards’s characterization allows.
After all, his father does send for an exegete, and Euthyphro does wait
some time before bringing the accusation to court.
12. Though Euthyphro questions the justice of the punishment his father
inadvertently visited upon the hired servant, not even Euthyphro questions that such a punishment is what the interpreter would have advised.
Indeed, Euthyphro is speciously silent on what the messenger said the
interpreter proscribed.
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when Socrates, in an attempt to explain his line of questioning
about what piety is, mentions his confusion about the words of a
poet. In attempting to clarify his confusion, Socrates begins to
speak of parts (though not of wholes)—that is, to use the ontological language more familiar from the Parmenides.13 Accordingly, if Socrates’s apparently unorthodox question lies latent in
the position of orthodoxy, it is in the role of interpreters (whether
ourselves or officials) and the phenomena that make them necessary to the position of orthodoxy.14
It is clear that Euthyphro considers himself a sort of interpreter, inasmuch as he bases his religious innovations on the traditional stories told about the gods. Socrates is surprised to learn
that Euthyphro has such an orthodox view. He goes so far as to
have Euthyphro swear before Zeus that he truly holds these things
to have come to be thus (6b3-4: su hōs alēthōs hēgēi). Socrates’s
second invocation of a god suggests that he is perhaps as surprised here at Euthyphro’s extreme orthodoxy as he was earlier,
when he learned of the extent of his unorthodoxy. Indeed, so surprised is Socrates that he interrupts a particularly simple argument, familiar from the Meno and Theaetetus—about what
constitutes an adequate answer to the ti esti touto question—to
affirm Euthyphro’s orthodoxy. Socrates’s interest in Euthyphro
thus stems from the fact that his religious innovations have one
13. Once Euthyphro says Socrates speaks correctly in claiming that the
pious is a morion of the just (12d4), Socrates (with Euthyphro following
suit) only refers to it as a meros (cf. 12c6, d2, 5, 6, 8, e1, 7, 9). In so
doing, Socrates throws into question (immediately after Euthyphro has
deemed it beyond question) the agreement that the pious is a proper
part, in the sense of having a natural joint, rather than just a piece or
fragment of justice.
14. In other words, the basic issue of the dialogue is this: “How can
[Socrates] make his ignorance prevail . . . over [Euthyphro’s] knowledge?” (Bruell 1999, 125) In order to so prevail, we must understand
why Socrates’s ignorance “permitted or compelled him to draw positive
(or negative) conclusions about the most important matters” (Bruell
1999, 124).
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foot in orthodoxy and one foot out. His case shows how the orthodox requirement for interpreters allows for such unorthodoxy
as we see in Euthyphro, an unorthodoxy that Euthyphro, Meletus,
and many others identify—whether rightly or wrongly—with
Socrates’s peculiar mode of questioning. Additionally, by asking
Euthyphro to say what the pious is, Socrates draws on Euthyphro’s desire to play the interpreter (exēgētēs), thus exploiting
Euthyphro’s offer to explain (diēgeomai) many things concerning
the divine (6c5-d2). Euthyphro’s offer comes on the heels of
Socrates’s surprise that Euthyphro believes or holds (hēgeomai)
such an extremely orthodox view (6b2-c4). Socrates uses hēgeomai for believing or holding some view in place of Euthyphro’s
earlier use of nomizō (5e6). In this context, Euthyphro offers to
show how what “human beings themselves happen to believe
(nomizontes)” gives “a proof that the law (nomou) is such” as
Euthyphro interprets it (5e2-6a3). Socrates’s substitution of hēgeomai for nomizō thus aims to arrive at certain phenomena present within law, the phenomena of believing, interpreting, and
explaining. By posing his idiosyncratic question in this context,
Socrates tests the extent to which the ti of the ti esti touto lies latent
in such phenomena, and thus in the view of orthodoxy itself.15
Socrates touches on the relationship between the ti of ti esti
touto and the phenomena within law most pointedly during an
argument famous for articulating the so-called “Euthyphro
problem.”16 In this argument, Socrates attempts to show Euthyphro that the love of all the gods is not a sufficient criterion for
determining what particular acts are pious—that is, that the godloved is an inadequate definition of the pious. Toward this end,
Socrates distinguishes between active and passive participles,
between the loving and the loved (10a10-11). The passive participle, i.e., the verb reified as a substantivized verbal adjec15. After Euthyphro’s proof, no forms of nomos and nomizō occur, an
especially surprising fact in a dialogue concerned with the rules or opinions that guide correct action with respect to the gods.
16. See note 10.
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tive,17 is then argued to be the consequence of the finite, passive
verb form, rather than the other way around. That is, Socrates
intends to show that something is a loved thing because it is
loved, but not that something is loved because it is a loved thing
(10c10-12). When brought to bear on the claim that the pious is
the god-loved, the priority of the finite verb to the substantivized
form shows that the gods’ activity of loving is but an affect or
experience of the pious, and not what it is. Socrates thus argues
that the ti of ti esti touto is, independent of how anyone—god
or man—is disposed to it intentionally. What something is is not
dependent on our inclinations, then, but our inclinations on what
it is. Yet Socrates’s argument is flawed principally because there
are some who love something simply because it is a thing loved,
i.e., a thing loved by another or others. Certainly some such phenomenon is what makes the Athenians laugh at Euthyphro or
grow angry with Socrates, what makes the Athenians inclined
to view such acts of interpretation as unorthodoxy. The position
of orthodoxy thus seems to exclude the ti of Socrates’s ti esti
touto. For from the perspective of orthodoxy, the fact that something has been said provides sufficient justification that it has
been said well (7a11-b1).18 No appeal to being is necessary, just
to opinion.
Nevertheless, orthodoxy’s manner of justification is not so
exclusive as it first appears. In his presentation of the aforementioned “Euthyphro problem,” Socrates expresses this manner of
justification in rather confusing language. His language poses a
significant problem for understanding his argument, not simply
because the logic is unclear or the use of “because” (hoti) is
17. Because rendering the passive verb forms in Greek into English requires using the verb “to be” with the participial form, the distinction is
somewhat elusive, as many notice (see, for example, Geach 1966, 378).
The distinction turns, I maintain, on the reification of an experience or
affect as a quality—and an essential one, at that—of what they seek to
define. Thus I have chosen to render philoumenon as “a loved thing.”
18. Reading eirētai gar at b1 with all the manuscripts and against their
seclusion by Burnet and others.
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equivocal,19 but rather because it is difficult to know which sense
Socrates intends hoti to have in this or that clause. More than
once, Socrates uses hoti to mean both “because” and “that,” i.e.
to indicate a fact and a justification, in a single sentence. Further, in his summary of his argument, Socrates clarifies that Euthyphro has failed to say what (hoti) the pious is, using hoti in
the sense of ousia, i.e., in the sense familiar from ti esti touto
(11a6-8). Socrates thus uses hoti in its three primary senses—
what we could call its justificatory, factual, and essential
senses—and in a way that appears unnecessarily confusing.
Thus in an argument meant to delineate a causal relationship
between particulars and universals, Socrates uses a word that
mixes all three into one. As we read, then, we must determine
in each instance which sense Socrates means hoti to have. In
the process, however, we cannot help but note that, as separate
as these senses may be syntactically, they are also quite inextricably linked. In accordance with proper usage, Socrates uses
hoti in the justificatory sense interchangeably with dioti. But
dioti is itself a contracted form of another phrase Socrates uses,
dia touto hoti, which employs hoti in its factual sense. If hoti
in the justificatory sense is equivalent to dia touto hoti, then
hoti in the justificatory sense contains within it hoti in the factual sense.20 Reasons rely on facts. But this still excludes hoti
in the essential sense, the sense interchangeable with the ti of
Socrates’s question, ti esti touto. Is the factual sense of hoti
completely separable from its essential sense? How could essential hoti be excluded, but factual and justificatory hoti main19. On the difficulty of understanding the sense of “because,” see Geach
1966, 379; Hall 1968, 6-9; and Cohen 1971, 6-8.
20. In reality, the justificatory language is far more complex: hoti is used
at 10a2, 3, c2 (twice), 3 (twice), 10 (twice), e5; dioti at 10b1, 4, 5, 7, 8,
9 (twice), 10, 11, d6, 9, e3; dia at 10b2, 3, 7, 8, 9, 10, d4, 5; dia touto
hoti at 10d4, 6-7, e2-3, 6-7; and the substantivized infinitive as an instrumental dative at 10e5-6. Of the forty-three occurrences of dioti in
Plato, twelve are in the Euthyphro alone, i.e., just over a quarter of the
occurrences in just fifteen Stephanus pages—really, on one page alone.
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tained? Doesn’t the lexical intimacy of these three senses suggest
a necessary connection between them? And if so, what is it?
This question amounts to whether the particular acts piety
dictates we perform are wholly particular, or rather must be
viewed in light of some general understanding of what piety is.21
Euthyphro seems reluctant to venture beyond these particulars.
When knowledge of piety first comes up, Euthyphro seems interested in teaching Socrates the pious and impious things, and
not the pious as such (4e4-5a2). Likewise, when Socrates first
asks Euthyphro about the pious as such, Euthyphro understands
the neuter singular to hosion to indicate a single pious thing, and
not the idea common to all particular, pious things (5c8-e2). And
much later, when Euthyphro begins to pull away from Socrates,
he is clear that what he would have to teach Socrates is not some
one thing, but a number of things (14a11-b1). Nevertheless, even
in his first definition, Euthyphro does come up with a somewhat
general rule that applies not just to his case, but to many others.
Likewise, when Socrates gives voice to the objection he and the
Athenians raise against Euthyphro’s innovation, his formulation
is rightly general (cf. 4b4-6). Indeed, the disagreement between
Euthyphro and the Athenians regards which general rule (or example become rule, e.g., Zeus’s “prosecution” of his father) applies to the particular case of Euthyphro’s father, his hired
servant, and the household slave.22 Justificatory hoti thus entails
21. It is an old question as to whether the Euthyphro “is meant to imply a
full-blown theory of Forms” (Geach 1966, 371). For a thorough discussion,
see Allen 1970.
22. At one point, Socrates shows Euthyphro that those disputing in courts
don’t dispute whether one should pay the penalty for injustice, but whether an
injustice was committed (8b7-d3). Shortly after this, Socrates expresses the
general rule guiding Euthyphro’s prosecution of his father in as particular a
form as he can, indeed to quite comic effect (cf. 9a1-8). Euthyphro’s initial
(and nearly absurd) inability to put himself in the shoes of the accused amounts
to an inability to see the ambiguity of how this or that law applies to a particular
deed, i.e., it amounts to the mistake of restricting the general entirely to the
particular. As Euthyphro’s quick retreat shows, this mistake is untenable, even
to those most devoted to the precision of the laws. Cf. Benardete 2001, 201.
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not just factual hoti, but essential hoti, as well. For which particular act is pious depends on the general rules that collectively
constitute what piety is. Consequently, it is not the case, as earlier
surmised, that, from the perspective of orthodoxy, the fact that
something has been said provides sufficient justification that it
has been said well (7a11-b1). As Socrates observes, other things
are said that don’t quite jibe with what has been said, thus necessitating further interpretation or conversation from us (7b2-5).
Indeed, without the question of which rule to apply to this or that
particular situation, there would be no need for interpreters.23 At
least in the present circumstances, then, the altogether orthodox
question of which rule or law applies to these or those circumstances provides sufficient grounds for Socrates to ask his apparently unorthodox question, ti esti touto?
But are these grounds sufficient in all circumstances?
Socrates suggests so when he compares his question about the
relationship between piety and justice to an account of fear (deos)
and reverence or shame (aidōs) in a pair of epic verses (12a6b1). When introducing these verses, Socrates speaks of the poet
as making two things, one of these being the verses, the other
being something he wishes to compare to what he and Euthyphro
were just discussing (12a7-8: epoiēsen, poiēsas.) But what the
poet made that is comparable to what they were just discussing
lies on an entirely abstract level. Thus, the poets don’t just make
verses; they make ideas, or rather determine their relationship.24
Socrates thus compares his inquiry into the ti of ti esti touto to
his interpretation of the poet’s verses (cf. Republic 515d2-7). But
23. “Euthyphro,” and, I would add, everyone else, “is unwilling . . . to
leave matters at the merely factual relation of a pious deed to the approval the gods confer on it by loving it, to let the piety of the deed be
determined by that love alone” (Bruell 1999, 129).
24. Burger 2015, 83-5 points out that grammatically the object of poiēsas
is Zeus himself, an allusion back to Meletus’s charge that suggests that
not Socrates, but the city’s poets are the makers of (new) gods. On the
complex way in which the poet’s genetic account relies on an eidetic account, see Bruell 1999, 131-2 and Burger 2015, 83 ff. (esp. n. 44).
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in his interpretation, Socrates criticizes the poet on the basis of
his and Euthyphro’s experience of deos and aidōs (cf. 12b2-c9).
Though Euthyphro happily goes along with Socrates, Meletus
would be unlikely—to put it mildly—to take Socrates’s criticism
of a fellow poet so lightly (cf. Apology 23e5). Nevertheless, Meletus’s claim that Socrates is “a maker (poiētēn) of gods,” namely
“one who makes (poiounta) new gods while not believing (nomizonta) in the archaic or original ones” (3b1-3), seems at best a halftruth.25 In a certain respect, Meletus appears to be right. As Socrates
argues, action requires discerning (diakrinō) what is good or bad,
noble or shameful, and just or unjust, so as to reach a sufficient
judgment (krisis) about what to do (7c3-d7). But in his mode of
questioning, Socrates exposes the insufficiency of all judgments by
exposing his interlocutors’ inability to answer (apokrinō). Meletus
is therefore correct that Socrates doesn’t believe (hēgeomai, nomizō)
in the archaic or original gods, since his investigation of the phenomena within law (nomos) exposes that answers are not forthcoming. Meletus is wrong, however, to conclude from this that Socrates
seeks to replace the archaic or original gods with new ones. For at
the core of Socratic refutation is the same issue that plagued Euthyphro and his father, that makes interpreters necessary and court
cases unavoidable: the ambivalence or multivalence of particular
deeds as to which vomos they fall under, and thus whether the deed
is pious or impious, or, should the particular deed already be agreed
to be pious, which nomos makes it so or is implicit in it and thus
renders like deeds pious.26 These altogether pious questions invoke the factual, justificatory, and essential uses of hoti that pro25. It is only “at best” a half-truth because, as Burger 2015, 35 notes,
Socrates is the (perhaps inadvertent) cause of both the dangerous liberation from generally accepted opinion and the subsequent return to that
opinion.
26. Socrates gives two competing formulations of the subject of his question. The first—tou hosiou te peri kai tou anosiou (4e2-3)—suggests a clear
and precise separation of the pious from the impious, while the second—
peri . . . tōn hosiōn te kai anosiōn (e5-6)—suggests that the same things
can be both pious and impious. On the connection between this issue and
polytheism, see Bruell 1999, 130-1 and Burger 2015, 59-61.
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vide the necessary and sufficient conditions for Socratic philosophy.
What is at bottom unorthodox about Socrates, then, is not the
introduction of new gods per se, but the willingness to confess
ignorance about which laws apply to which particulars, and the
attempt to articulate the recalcitrance of the opinions contained
in law to clear and easy application to particulars. For in his
mythical self-presentation, Socrates says that Daedalus is both
his and Euthyphro’s progenitor—that is, that the circular character of Socratic refutation is not exclusively Socrates’s, but human
(11b9-c6). Man is somehow fundamentally Socratic, and it is
Socrates’s exposure of this fact that arouses the Athenians’s ire
(cf. 3c9-d2). They simply kill the messenger. Under this interpretation, what Socrates does may be an unorthodox failure of
piety, but it is the humble failure to rise to piety, rather than an
attempt to go above and beyond it. What is missing from this interpretation, however, and unfortunately takes us beyond the Euthyphro, is Socrates’s anticipation in the Sophist that a stranger
from Elea may be a theos elenktikos (216a1-b6). This substantial
revision of Homeric theology appears to guide Socrates’s reaction
to the god’s assertion of his wisdom, which assertion Socrates attempts to refute as though that were unproblematically pious
(Apology 21b9-c2). In this revision, Socrates implicitly claims
that not just human beings are beholden to the above ambivalence
or multivalence of particulars with respect to generals, but gods
as well. Let it suffice to conclude that this deeper implication of
what Socrates uncovers in the Euthyphro amounts, paradoxically,
to an accusation against orthodoxy of impiety: not Socrates, but
the city has made new gods in place of the theoi archaioi.27 For
27. Compare the alternative of Strauss 1996, 16-17. The present understanding of Socratic piety falls outside of the debate that McPherran 1985, 283-4 frames as between the constructivists, who take there
to be a view of piety latent in what follows the “aporetic interlude”
of 11b-e, and the anticonstructivists, who deny the same. For that debate presupposes considerable agreement, namely that what is referred to as “Socratic piety” relies on a definition of what the pious
as such is, whose reconstruction they respectively claim to be possi-
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not just man is Socratic, but his god as well.28
ble and not. If there is anything like “Socratic piety,” it cannot be based
on a static definition, but rather only on the awareness that no sufficient
definition is forthcoming.
28. The deeper implication of Socrates’s substitution of hēgeomai for
nomizō lies in the former’s secondary, original sense of “to lead,”
which suggests that believing is the active attempt to guide oneself
(and others), and not the passive acceptance of laws (on Plato’s use of
voice—middle, active and passive—see Davis 2011, 205-21). That is,
the laws present themselves as the answer to some desire for guidance.
But that desire, in posing the question the laws purport to answer,
proves not just prior to (and thus of higher status than) the laws, but
more general than the laws, which are always these particular laws.
The primary or principal phenomenon within law would thus be man’s
longing for such wisdom as would allow him to live well. On this phenomenon as that of soul, see Burger 2015, 73-5 (with 69 n. 36), as well
as Davis 2011, 217-18 and passim.
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the History of Philosophy 23: 283-309.
Mann, William. 1998. “Piety: Lending Euthyphro a Hand,” Philosophy
and Phenomenological Research 58: 123-42.
Strauss, Leo. 1996. “An Untitled Lecture on Plato’s Euthyphron” (David
Bolotin, Christopher Bruell, and Thomas Pangle eds.), Interpretation 24:
3-23.
��POEM | PETRICH
93
Sabbatical
Louis Petrich
I would have thought the broad summer airs,
By amplitude of want, more friendly shared.
Life—no surprise—opportune in corners,
Echoes up the cry of fire and ashes:
Teach us to care and not to care,
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks.
Island mine, sit me still, hair to skin light,
Sun beaten by the whip of wind and salt spray,
Stomach fitted upon rocks and coral,
Mostly hidden, unseparated below,
Sharp and aspiring above,
Good to take counsel over cares hard gone,
These straight and crooked cravings of my sea soul
To pour each drop of time that remains
Into practice of present looking toward,
Looking after what I found fine in you—
Deep-eyed causes,
Welling up close to speak
Through summer lips—
Oh, stay a little, and kiss the strewed rocks
Forsaken of stars, but here my remaking.
How fine the faces of sea and sky at the horizon meet!
Their line of appointment never bent
To give up place and tell long secret looks.
Unmeasured goings, no reckoning of returns!
An hour’s breath is allowed this body
To go beneath and feel no heaviness:
Louis Petrich is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis. He wrote
this poem while on sabbatical in Bonaire, Dutch Caribbean.
�94
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Quiet there, beauty there,
Vast riches, strange attachments,
Currents you would never guess,
Cold-eyed passers-by at ease
In the whirligig of Becoming.
Counting down to the last,
I follow with borrowed sufficiency
The beaded gleams of light
Up to the birth meeting,
And pour handfuls of new looks upon the awful leavings of Love.
Contend less much, eternal counselors—
A made man collects by the shore.
���
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The St. John's Review
Volume 50, number 3 (2008)
Editor
C. Nathan Dugan
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Bramt
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Thomas Browning
The St. John's Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John's College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson,
President; Michael Dink, Dean. For those not on the distribution list, subscriptions are $10 for one year. Unsolicited
essays, reviews, and reasoned letters are welcome. All
manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to the Review, St. John's College, P.O. Box 2800,
Annapolis, MD 21404-2800. Back issues are available, at $5
per issue, from the St. John's College Bookstore.
©2008 St. John's College. All rights reserved; reproduction
in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing and Printing
The St. Jolm's Public Relations Office and the St. fohn's College Pri11t Shop
�2
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�3
Contents
Is There Great Jazz? ...................................................... 5
Andre Barbera
Preformationism In Biology: From Homunculi To
Genetic Programs ........................................................ 33
jorge H. Aigla, M.D
The Persians and the Parthenon: Yoke and Weave
Part Two: The Parthenon............................................. 53
Mera ]. Flaumenhaft
�4
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�5
-.:f Is There Great Jazz?
fj:-- Andre Barbera
Ten years ago I began a lecture with an excerpt from "Split
Kick." [Musical example 1] 1 That lecture was ostensibly
devoted to one evening's recorded performance by Art
Blakey's quintet in 1954. My barely hidden agenda was to
ask, 'is there great jazz?', to answer 'yes', and to consider the
implications for St. John's College. Now I ask the question
explicitly, although my confidence in an affirmative answer
has waned. Addressing the practical problems associated with
an affirmative answer is not the main thrust of my remarks.
Rather, I want to consider whether jazz really is worthy of
our attention.
What is 'great' and what is 'jazz'? I shall not attempt to
define greatness. As we consider jazz and its possible merit,
however, we may uncover some of the aspects of greatness
that we attribute to the works already on St. John's program,
or at least think about some of our prejudices on behalf of
those works.
Let us get straight about what kind of music jazz issomething we all know already. Jazz is primarily instrumental
music, emphasizing brass and reed instruments, based on
dance, popular song forms, and the blues, and is of distinctly
African-American character in its origin, development, and
soul. Jazz entails swing, the blue tonality, and improvisation.
Jazz musicians employ idiosyncratic timbres or tone colors. In
jazz, instruments are treated like voices and voices like instruments. Ultimately, one might find in jazz expressions of
Andre Barbera is a tutor at the Annapolis campus of St. John's College.
This lecture was delivered at AnnapOlis on September 8, 2006. }.,.{usical
examples arc listed in Appendix 1 and can be heard online by visiting the
St. John's Review webpage (www.stjohnscollege.edu/news/pubs/review.shtml)
and clicking the link "Jazz Examples to Accompany 'Is there Great Jazz?' by
Andre Barbera".
�6
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
individuality, autonomy, freedom. Many examples of jazz
lack some of these characteristics and perhaps a few lack
them all, but this rough definition should suffice. Of these
various characteristics, some are more important than others,
for example the African-American natnre of the musical
idiom. Jazz is race music, by which I do not mean that one
need be overtly cognizant of race to appreciate it, nor that
jazz musicians need to be African Americans. Nonetheless,
the nature of jazz, its soul, is African-American. Other
important characteristics of jazz include swing, the blues, and
expression of the individual. I shall speak about swing now,
and comment on the others later.
Swing is good, out of place in much music, but
undeniably a good musical characteristic. Swing is difficult to
define. It requires that the music neither speed up nor slow
down, thus betraying its origin in dance. Fifty years ago, in a
famous albeit imperfect treatment of the phenomenon, Andre
Hodeir noted: "In jazz, the feeling of relaxation does not
follow a feeling of tension but is present at the same
moment." And, "Swing is possible ... only when the beat,
though it seems perfectly regular, gives the impression of
moving inexorably ahead .... " 2
A well-known example of swing can occur in consecutive
eighth notes that are played such that the note on the beat
lasts longer than the note off the beat. [Musical example 2;
Appendix 2, Swing Eighths] How much longer one note lasts
than another varies and presents a notational challenge that is
usually and wisely ignored. One does not learn about swing
from written examples, and besides, this depiction is very
narrow, pertaining only to consecutive notes of equal
notational value. We shall consider a more subtle and
complex example of swing later.
Now that we have skirted the question of greatness and
provided a loose description of jazz, we might reasonably
wonder: why even ask if there is any great jazz? Empirically,
one can discern the influence of African-American music all
�BARBERA
7
over the globe, from the blues revival in 1960s England to the
second-hand influence of the Beatles throughout the Western
world, India, and the Far East, from the popular music of subSaharan Africa to the internet-transported pop music of
today. There are a handful of exceptions: the Nazis banned
this kind of music, and it is prohibited in some strict Muslim
societies. But by and large, blues, jazz, and African-American
music in general can be heard all over the world, in its
original forms as well as in myriad adaptations and dilutions.
Of the various sub-types of African-American music, jazz
is clearly the most sophisticated, the highest, by which I mean
the most developed and complex. Thus I maintain with little
or no reservation that jazz is the great music of the \Xlestern
world over the past one hundred years; but here I am using
'great' to mean hegemonic. Pervasive influence is insufficient
for us to canonize the music as great in our terms, as worthy
of our study, but it is sufficient reason for us to consider it.
Our aim here is to begin to evaluate the musical merit of jazz.
What are the qualities of jazz that might make it great in
the sense of The Republic or Euclid's Elements of Geometry
or The Brothers Karamazov? Here the long list of what is
ordinary about jazz intrudes, the reasons why jazz for all of
its charms is not great, but in fact rather common. I shall
address five aspects: setting, structi1re, boredom, recording,
and individuality.
Setting
We can go right back to our opening example to start
working on our list. The object of scrutiny is a performance,
a live recording. (Let us just agree to use the common if
somewhat nonsensical terminology of "live recording" to
distinguish recordings made in front of an audience from
recordings made in a studio.) The piece, "Split Kick" by
Horace Silver, is not written down in the traditional sense.
The performance is an isolated event occurring on a Sunday
night in February 1954, in a nightclub. People drink in nightclubs and talk and eat while the musicians are playing. Jazz
�8
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
has made it into the concert hall, but most often its setting is
one of entertainment and amusement. The use of 'noble' in
such a context seems overdressed and proud.
Blakey's quintet had been playing at Birdland for the
entire week, two sets a night. But these musicians were not a
working group, having been pulled together for the specific
purpose of that week's performances leading up to a live
recording. 3
Let us not ignore the spoken introduction. William
Clayton "Pee Wee" Marquette was the short-statured m.c.
who worked also as doorman at Birdland. He lived upstairs,
took his meals there, and "touch[ed] the guys in the band for
money. "4 Pee Wee reasoned that his promotion of the
musicians entitled him to a commission. Pee Wee also carried
with him an adjustable butane cigarette lighter set at the
maximum: apparently the sight of a two-foot flame shooting
up in the dark, basement nightclub provided a thrill to
patrons. 5 Does great music need a pitchman with a flamethrower?
At nightclubs, jazz musicians usually give two performances per night, and sometimes three on weekends. The
Village Vanguard, an old-style, cash-only jazz club in New
York, books groups Tuesday through Sunday, with performances at 9 and 11 on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and
Sunday; 9, 11, and 1 on Friday and Saturday. That's not art;
that's work!
Therefore, the setting for jazz is common.
Structure
"Split Kick" is a contrafact that relies on the standard, 32measure structure and harmony of a popular song, that is, on
a small, narrow, and fragile framework. 6 A structure like this
is central to almost all improvisation-this is in part why free
jazz blew itself up and did so fairly quickly. What did Mozart
do with this structure? There are his variations on themes,
usually for keyboard, which doubtless are close to transcriptions of improvisations. They show Mozart not at his best-
�BARBERA
9
one might even say 'worst' except that worst and Mozart's
music don't really go together. The variations are boring and
lack intensity, just one elaboration after another. The
structure of theme and variations imposes in most cases
limitations of harmony, meter, and phrase. There are a few
instances of jazz that break out of this mold, generally
ambitious and pretentious endeavors. If jazz were to be great,
it seems to me it must work within and simultaneously
transcend by some means the limitation of theme-andvariation structure.
Boredom
Structural limitations lead to the indisputable fact that vast
stretches of jazz performances are boring/ One might make
the same remark about other works of art, literature,
philosophy, and so forth. I shall not mention those works on
the program that I find most tedious, with the exception of
Tristan tmd Isolde. The conclusion of that opera is glorious by
any measure and stands perfectly well as good music, severed
from what comes before it. But part of its true glory rests in
relief, or release, the sense that the bad trip of the past four
hours is about to end.
We do not read all ancient geometers, do not study all
Viennese classical composers, do not read all enlightenment
philosophers. There is a fair amount of material attributed to
Euclid that we never look at, and for that matter we read only
about half of The Elements of Geometry. We have time to do
only so much, and besides, much of what we skip is boring.
With jazz, in a misguided sense of fairness-everyone gets
a turn-we have drum solos and bass solos, most of the
former and virtually all of the latter being boring to listen to.
This is not to question in the least the nearly indispensable
roles played by drums and bass in making good jazz. But all
sorts of solos by melodic or chording instruments are also
boring. My friend Stevie Curtin, a guitarist, says that there is
a lot of killing time in jazz. Such a notion is related to the
labor of the entertainer, and is of a lower order artistically
�10
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
than the boredom that is composed into works with an
intention of ultimate release or exhilaration.
Recording Industry
Since the 1920s, jazz has been disseminated not only to its
audience but also to its future practitioners largely by means
of recordings. To cite just one sequence: Lester Young listened
to the recordings of Frankie Trumbauer, Charlie Parker to
those of Lester Young, Lou Donaldson. and just about
everyone else to those of Charlie Parker. The recording
industry is a business, and most decisions regarding what gets
recorded and who hears it are made with an eye toward
turning a profit. All art and literature might be constrained to
some degree by the practicalities of life, but the short-term
demands of the free market hardly allow for the unfettered
and ennobling expression of the human spirit.
Worse still, the idiom of jazz, which depends upon
spontaneous invention, is disseminated in recordings that are
hardly products of spontaneity. Records are made by
acoustical engineers and then marketed. No doubt the live
recording is an attempt to mitigate this apparently contradictory relationship. Michael MacDonald, an audio
technician, producer of jazz records, and graduate of St.
John's College, mentioned to me that his goal as producer of
a "Live at ... " recording "was to place the listener in the
second row of tables, in from the stage." 8 To some extent, I
believe such recordings are effective. Think of our opening
example: it is as if we really are at Birdland; we can visualize
Pee Wee Marquette on the stage; we can see the musicians
taking their places; we imagine that the music is produced
spontaneously before us.
Alas, in this case there is some deception. From the Blue
Note documents sent to me by Michael Cuscuna, I conclude
that "Split Kick" was recorded in the middle of the third set
of five sets of recordings made that evening. Marquette says,
"We're bringing back to tl1e bandstand at this time, ladies and
�BARBERA
II
gentlemen, the great Art Blakey and his wonderful group .... "
Were they really coming back to the bandstand, or were they
just sitting there, waiting for the audio technicians to record
an introduction ?9
The Individual
In a list of the hallmarks of jazz, Gunther Schuller has placed
primary emphasis on the development by the performer of a
unique tone or tone color. 10 Schuller argues that the more
resistant the instrument, trumpet versus alto saxophone for
example, the more important it is to develop such a tone.
This idea characterizes jazz no differently than one might
describe pop singing-it all comes down to some captivating
tone color. In thinking especially about Miles Davis, a master
of various tones, I thought that Schuller might be right.
[Musical Example 3]
How to characterize Davis's tone? Variety: brassy notes,
bent notes, dirty notes, decaying notes, breathy notes. One
trumpet sound, in fact, seems to be pitchless, or composed of
many pitches, all breath. Writers have used various terms to
describe the color of Davis's tone. To me it seems first and
foremost to be fragile but inherently contradictory, both
harsh and delicate at the same time. An intended accolade
given to some popular and jazz musicians and singers is that
they could have played classical music, or they could have
sung opera. I am thinking of Sarah Vaughan in this regard. It
is safe to say, with that tone Miles never could have played
classical music.
In review, jazz is common, not great, because:
1. It is performed primarily in nightclubs;
2. It relies on the structure of theme and
variations;
3. In many instances it is boring, exuding a
workman-like or laborious quality;
4. It is controlled by the recording industry;
5. It is obsessed with tone color.
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
12
From these remarks, one might think that I was called in to
help put down an insurrection of jazz rebels seeking to
contaminate the St. John's program with their music. To
generalize, the issue that I am placing before you is one of
entertainment versus ennoblement, that is to say, refreshing
versus new and improved. Thus far, I have been making the
case for jazz as entertainment, and as I attempt to show some
ennobling qualities of jazz, you will see that we never leave
entertainment and its limitations far behind.
*
*
*
There are many great jazz musicians about whom I have to
say only that they deserve lectures of their own. In addition,
strong, fruitful influences, like Latin music, important issues
regarding the composition of the jazz audience, and widely
celebrated and influential recordings do not figure in my
remarks. Thus my remarks are not broadly representative of
jazz, although I hope that they touch on its character. Most of
early jazz and all recent developments are also absent, which
betrays my prejudices and age.
Rather than great jazz musicians, let us ask if there is
simply a great jazz recording, or more narrowly, a great jazz
solo. We turn first of all to the great man of jazz, Louis
Armstrong, who almost single-handedly transformed his
work into one that revolves around the exceptional
individual.
Here is an excerpt from "Hotter Than That" recorded by
Armstrong and his Hot Five in 1927. The excerpt includes a
polyphonic, eight-measure introduction, then three choruses
of 32 measures each, followed by a call-and-response passage
between voice and guitar. I direct your attention especially to
the first and third choruses where we hear Armstrong first as
cornetist and then as vocalist. Despite the relatively primitive
recording conditions, it is abundantly clear to me why this
jazz was called 'hot'. I also call your attention, although it is
hardly necessary, to the latter half of the third chorus where
�BARBERA
13
Armstrong sings in 3/4 meter against the prevailing 4/4 meter.
[Musical example 4]
What I find truly remarkable about this vocal passage is
how Armstrong extricates himself from the 3/4-meter
pattern. He does not do so abruptly, but rather before
returning to 4/4 he follows the ten measures of 3/4 with a
measure of 12/8, whose off beats do not jibe with either the
4/4 or the 3/4 pattern. Jazz writers comment on the interchange between Armstrong and guitarist Lonnie Johnson that
follows this passage, although I sense a letdown at this point
after the brilliance of Armstrong's cornet playing and his
stunning scat singing.
"Hotter Than That" is a very important piece in the
history of jazz, but I feel the need to make some excuses for
it-primitive recording, no drums, a time-killing piano vamp.
Let us consider a somewhat more modern piece. A quick
search on the internet produced the following testimonials: 11
1. Terell Stafford, who has been hailed as "one of
the great players of our time, a fabulous trumpet
player" by piano legend McCoy Tyner, cites as one
of his most profound musical influences Clifford
Brown's rendition of "Cherokee."
2. On bandleader Bob January's website My
Favorite Things, under "My favorite recordings,"
there is a short list that contains Clifford Brown's
"Cherokee."
3. Trumpeter Woody Shaw, in an interview for
Down Beat [Aug. 1978], said: "I'll never forget
[Brown's "Cherokee"]. It just haunted me. Such a
beautiful dark tone. Clifford more or less shaped
my conception of what I wanted to sound like."
4. On a site that seemed to be connected to
Springfield Public School District 186, Springfield,
Illinois, in a section entitled "Entertainment:
Rediscovering classic jazz," Justin Shields cites
"one of the greatest jazz recordings in history, the
�14
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
classic 'Cherokee' [by Clifford Brown]."
5. And on a blog entitled Corn Chips and Pie:
Chunky nuggets, Millicent posted the following
[May 3, 2006]. "Let me tell you something: if I
played the trumpet (well, I did once, in the sixth
grade), I would transcribe every single note of
Clifford Brown's solo ... of 'Cherokee,' and I would
work on it every day of my life. Finally, at age 97,
I would master it, and every single resident of my
nursing home on Mars would shit himself in
wonder and awe. Then I would die."
Perhaps we should take a listen. We hear the introduction,
the tune or head, and then two choruses of improvisation by
Clifford Brown. A word about the introduction: it is a
pejorative cliche about the music of native Americans, but it
functions well in setting up the rapid, soaring, pentatonic
melody. [Musical example 5]
Clifford Brown's solo is truly exhilarating, especially the
last quarter of his first chorus with its breathless overflowing
of notes. The remaining solos on this performance by other
musicians are good, but certainly not in a league with
Brown's. So one experiences a let-down of sorts in the latter
half of the piece. Indeed, the same thing happens in Brown's
solo itself: the second chorus, as fine as it is, cannot match the
first. The bar has been set too high, too soon, having the
effect of a denouement that lasts too long.
Now I would like to turn to a jazz solo that I think is
great, on Frank Wess's "Segue In C,'' performed by Count
Basie and his orchestra at Birdland in 1961. The arrangement
of the piece is masterful, but I want to home in on the first
solo after Basie's introduction, Budd Johnson playing tenor
saxophone. Johnson was a highly regarded and widely
traveled musician, but it is safe to say that his is not a
household name, not even in some jazz circles. We shall hear
the last introductory chorus by Basie, followed by Johnson's
solo.
�BARBERA
15
Johnson's solo lacks the dazzling virtuosity that is heard
on "Cherokee." Rather it comprises six beautifully designed,
integrated blues choruses. Here we have a successful attempt
to overcome the inherent limitation of the theme-andvariation structure. Johnson has fashioned each chorus as a
melodic and emotional succession to the previous one, and
with a musical sense for the shape of the entire set of six. The
first is restrained, sweet-toned, and bubbles over with swing,
in part owing to the entrancing rhythm section. Indeed, much
of the music produced by Basie's orchestra can be taken as
exemplars of swing. The second chorus expands the register,
emphasizing tone 5, and ends with repeated tone 6 as a
springboard to a further expansion of the register to tone 8
in the third chorus. In the third and fourth choruses, the wind
instruments from the orchestra accompany the soloist with
riffs. The fourth chorus is marked at the beginning by a
quotation of "I Dream Of Jeannie With The Light Brown
Hair," which I note solely to orient the listener. The fifth
chorus is the emotional high point of the solo, containing
loud, long, high blue thirds leading into the first and fifth
measures. The sixth chorus, the denouement, is as subtle and
effective as the first. It begins with repeated C's, tone 1, and
ends with an almost self-effacing descent down to low tone 3.
[Musical example 6]
I have also attempted to notate the first three-plus
measures of the sixth chorus to emphasize an aspect of swing.
[Appendix 2, Triplets] Excluding subtleties of intonation, and
even assuming that the rhythmic designation of the individual
notes is approximately correct, where does one place the last
note, B-flat, of the example? In other words, is it the third
part of a triply divided half measure that falls late (indicated
by the arrow pointing right), or is it an anticipation of the
downbeat of the next measure (indicated by the arrow
pointing left)? Probably neither. [Musical example 7]
What we hear is the soloist fall behind the beat. Triplets
can produce the effect of speeding up or slowing down
depending upon the durational value to which the ear hears
�16
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
them as an alternative. In this case, the triplets in and of
themselves produce a drag on the beat, and Budd Johnson is
playing the triplets progressively slower. The passage is made
even more effective by the early appearance of the B-flat. This
is the note that transforms the tonic harmony of C major into
a secondary dominant chord pointing to the subdominant
harmony of measure 5 in the chorus. The secondary
dominant has occurred throughout the piece in measure four,
but in this case the phrase is truncated, at least theoretically,
by the omission of a second occurrence of the note C.
Therefore, the transformational B-flat arrives just a little bit
early even though the triplets are gradually slowing down.
The ear and the heart make sense of this.
Why don't we stop here and canonize "Segue In C"? I
have already mentioned that the piece is well orchestrated
and unfolds beautifully. There are a couple of written-out
ensemble passages to come as well as a trombone solo. The
latter is the problem. The trombone solo is not bad, and the
audience at Birdland that night seemed to like it, but in fact it
is no match for Johnson's solo, and at times seems downright
crude. It effectively diminishes the work.
With the examples by Louis Armstrong, Clifford Brown,
and Budd Johnson, we have encountered the problems or
dangers of seeking greatness: (1) in a recording; (2) in an
improvisation; (3) in a whole that consists of a series of
contributions by different individuals. I shall return to this
example by Budd Johnson at the end, but let us move on.
What is the work? In most cases we have books, writings
assembled and organized at some time and place into what
are now books with titles like the Elements of Geometry or
the Critique of Pure Reason. In some cases our works are the
realized performances of musical scores, for example Bach's
St. Matthew Passion. In other cases, somewhat more
problematic for us at St. John's, but not really for our
conception of the work, the object resides in a museum,
Leonardo's Mona Lisa or Picasso's Guernica, for example.
�17
BARBERA
With jazz, the nature of improvisation turns the work into
an action. Certainly there are instances of improvisations
becoming fixed compositions.' 2 Nevertheless, the very
essence of jazz seems to entail spontaneous music making,
real-time poiesis. Charlie Parker's legendary status in the
world of jazz rests in part on his unmatched ability to
produce unique improvisations repeatedly, even on multiple,
consecutive takes of the same tune in the recording studio.
Ted Gioia addresses this problem in The Imperfect Art:
Reflections 011 jazz and Modem Culture. He proposes to
develop an "aesthetics of imperfection." Gioia writes, " ... the
virtues we search for in other art forms-premeditated
design, balance between form and content, an overall
symmetry-are largely absent in jazz." And later, "our
interest in jazz, it would seem, is less a matter of our interest
in the perfection of the music, and more a result of our
interest in the expressiveness of the musician ... [whose
performances) are judged ... not by comparison with some
Platonic ideal of perfection but by comparison with what
other musicians can do under similar conditions. Our interest
lies primarily in the artist and only secondarily in the art." 13
On first reading, such a suggestion seems to imply a kind
of hagiography of individuals, in short, a study of great men
and their deeds. The achievements of Alexander the Great are
indeed great, and conceivably we might sit around and
discuss how he did it. In that discussion, the contributions of
some participants would be more valuable than others, but
likely so because of experience or at least outside reading. I
presume that an appreciation of jazz does not entail an
interest in this man or that, in Louis Armstrong or Charlie
Parker, but rather in the artist. We might be amazed at the
man who can play the fastest, or the highest, or the loudest
on a given instrument, but certainly this amazement differs
from our enchantment with Clifford Brown's solo on
"Cherokee."
As listeners to jazz, we marvel not at the highest or
loudest or strangest note, but at that consecution of notes
- -----------
---~
--------------
--
�18
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
aptly fitted to the tune, at a specific time and place, on a
specific instrument or instruments. If in so doing we are
studying great men, we are doing so only while they are
actually performing the deeds that make them great.
This brings us to a reconsideration of individuality, which
previously I had listed among those characteristics that make
jazz common. There the subject was tone color, that quality
of sound that might be uniquely identified with a performer.
A unique sound is of some interest owing to the originality
and skill needed to produce it, but it is hardly a principle of
great music. It is, at best, an ingredient.
There may be in jazz, however, a sense of the individual
far more significant than unique tone color. Part of Louis
Armstrong's great achievement during the 1920s was to make
jazz a soloist's music in place of the quasi-egalitarian ethos of
collective improvisation. His effect on jazz was analogous to
what Babe Ruth did for baseball, making it a slugger's game.
Since Armstrong, nearly all jazz has been concerto music,
music that requires an ensemble, but only to throw into relief
and to support the music of the individual.
The jazz soloist, the individual, goes about his work in
connection with the blues. The connection is in fact threefold. First, there is the structure, usually tripartite, built on
strong harmonic pillars. Second, there is the blue tonality
with its characteristic tone 3, its subtonic, and its embellishment of tone 5. Third, there is the sentiment, the lament
that conveys the soul of jazz. It is this third meaning of the
blues that is of paramount importance in defining the role of
the jazz soloist.
Lament underpins much jazz, but not in such a way that
hearing jazz (or blues) is a sad experience for the listener.
Quite the opposite. The listener, through the music, has his
cares-not necessarily woes-articulated in a way that
surpasses his own ability to express them. Blues guitarist
Brownie McGhee went so far as to reverse the relationship
ordinarily expressed by "having the blues." He said, "The
�BARBERA
19
blues was in the cradle with me rockin'. I never had the blues.
The blues had me. My cradle would rock without anybody
rockin' it. " 14 For the listener, something like catharsis takes
place, but not in the sense that the listener pities or fears a
representation of truly pitiable beings or frightful conditions.
The listener's condition or lament, rather, is transformed in
the musical expression and, if not lifted from her shoulders,
is at least lifted up before the community and to God. The
jazz soloist is a priest.
As is the case with most works of art, the expression is
individual, particular. The sentiment is not ''Abandonment
and infidelity are evil" but rather "My baby done left me."
Blues musician Bill Broonzy said, "It's a natural thing that no
two human beings had blues the same way." 15 Expressions by
and of the individual are hardly unique to music or to the
United States, but in this country there has existed over the
past two centuries a remarkably and perhaps uniquely fertile
ground for the sprouting up and growth of a musical idiom
that so expresses the soul. The setting is, of course, a special
case of the melting pot, a fertile ground that includes the
contradiction of enslavement of Africans sanctioned by a
government that in spirit may be the best attempt so far to
secure individual liberty in the context of society and its
responsibilities. The contradiction is enslavement coupled
with insult and irony.
One need not know about the enslavement of Africans in
the United States in order to appreciate jazz, but the existence
of jazz is, in my opinion, unthinkable without the
enslavement. This notion might cause mathematical minds
with a taste for justice to worry about or question the
goodness of the world: the price for a great artistic development being cruelty and dehumanizing social structure.
Such a thought-if there were not any cruelty, there would
not be any jazz-puts emphasis in the wrong place. The
world is a wonder, aspects of which may be considered in
terms of equations. (For those of you familiar with The
�20
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Brothers Karamazov, one might think of the difference
between Ivan and Zosima.)
A brief review: after considering an argument for jazz as
common, jazz as entertainment, we have been considering the
possibility of something greater. We have heard excerpts from
legendary solos by Louis Armstrong and Clifford Brown, and
a solo by Budd Johnson that overcomes the limitation of
theme and variations and in so doing achieves integrity. From
these examples we were required to consider what is the jazz
work, and this in tnrn led us to think about the jazz soloist as
an individual who, in the context of the blues, makes a
connection with the individual listener.
I have proposed an image of the priest for the jazz soloist,
but I want to emphasize the limited, thoroughly Western
notion that I have in mind. I do not see the soloist as a kind
of African tribal leader, or even as a Levite. In other words,
although the soloist serves as an intermediary, taking upon his
shoulders the burden of articulation, and thus in a way
performs a sacrifice, he does not do it primarily for the good
of the community. That good may be a by-product of his
action. Rather, he does it for you, or for me. He acts for the
individual. His entire musical being is that of the individual,
the autonomous one, cast in relief against the communal
background.
Before concluding with remarks on how the connection is
made, I would like to consider one more musical example, a
candidate for a great work, albeit a miniature. In fact, we
shall hear three versions. The piece is not much more than a
riff, composed by Charlie Parker and set in the 12-measure
blues sequence. Entitled "Now's The Time," it has a
moderate tempo in between the slow lament and the fast
instrumental blues. I call it a dance blues. 16
Parker recorded "Now's the Time" more than once, and
although his solos are almost always interesting, I know of
nothing special about those recordings to recommend them
as great. Here is the beginning of one from 1953-Parker's
solo on this recording is very good-so that we can hear the
�BARBERA
21
basic plan. In lieu of trying to write out the head or theme
based on a single performance by Parker, I have provided the
version published in The Real Book, with a copyright of
1945,17 [Musical example 8; Appendix 2, "Now's The Time"]
Now let us listen to the beginning of a recording by tenor
saxophonist Sonny Rollins from February, 1964. We shall
hear the head, just one blues chorus in this case rather that
two in Parker's, and then four choruses of improvisation.
[Musical example 9]
In my opinion, there are many factors that contribute to
the greatness of this performance: the busy drums; the highly
propulsive bass-clear evidence that you do not need to allot
a solo to the bassist as long as you let him really blow during
the performance; the tone of the sax-narrow or with
minimal vibrato at times, but chock full of pitch variation;
omitted notes, for example measure six of the head; thematic
choruses, the first built around ghost tones in approach to the
tonic, the second and third emphasizing tone 6 in both the
upper and lower registers, the fourth emphasizing tone 2. A
comprehensive analysis would tie together these tones of
emphasis, which function like the recitation tones of improvised psalmody." But here my analytical goal is much smaller
and narrower.
I call your attention to one very brief passage in measure
8 of the second chorus, although I shall gloss over the details.
I have transposed Rollins's solo to F for purposes of
comparison. 19 [Musical example 10; Appendix 2, Rollins,
2:5-8]
Rollins has centered initially on D, tone 6, for this middle
phrase of the blues, measures 5-8, but then there is a startling
flourish, the beginning of which is presented in the last
measure of the example. Assuming that D-flat and C-sharp
are the same notes, you can see that the sixteenth-note run is
a whole-tone scale. The whole-tone passage ruptures the
music; it breaks the groove. But this rupture makes musical
sense. Three or four of the tones comprising the scale are part
of the tonality, a blues in F. The B-natural and the C-sharp
�22
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
however are definitely outside, and these are the notes that
startle us, that give us the tension that accompanies relaxation. I believe that the inspiration for this rupture, and what
makes it work so well, can be found in the accompaniment to
the head.
We hear Ron Carter, the bassist, play a chromatic ascent
in the head in measures 5-8, in a rhythm only approximated
in the written musical example. [Appendix 2, Rollins, head 58] The B-flat and arguably the B-natural and C are also part
of the theme, but what about the C-sharp? The latter note
does not appear in the two recorded versions by Parker that
I am familiar with nor in the written version. [Musical
example 11]
From whom did the chromatic ascent come? Horace
Silver, perhaps? During A Night at Bird/and in 1954, Blakey's
group played "Now's The Time," and the chromatic ascent is
clearly presented by the pianist, Silver. Note that while the Bflat, B-natural, C-natural and their harmonization are played
by the entire ensemble, only Silver plays the C-sharp.
[Musical example 12; Appendix 2, Blakey and Silver, head 58]
Rollins must have heard this recording, and perhaps the
chromatic ascent had been making the rounds for some time
in the performance of "Now's The Time." Ten years separate
the two recordings. 20 When the chromatic ascent is carried to
an extreme of four notes, then we arrive at C-sharp, which
along with B-natural provides the missing tones for a
complete whole-tone scale. It is precisely in this connection
that Rollins is able to push or break the tonality, albeit for a
moment, and to do so with inherent musical logic.
I am not suggesting that Rollins came to his performance
in a fashion as pedantic as my presentation, although in jazz
circles he is famous for his introspection. A close look,
however, at an admittedly very short passage provides an
insight into and possible understanding of the musical
thinking of a jazz genius. Rollins apparently liked the result,
�BARBERA
23
because he plays a very similar passage in measure 7 of the
third chorus. [Musical example 13]
Let us now move from small to large, from consideration
of chromatic passing tones to the general question posed by
the title of the lecture. Have we found a great work of jazz?
Undoubtedly, provided that we stay within the realm of jazz.
The rest of the performance is also very good, with solos by
Herbie Hancock and again by Rollins, with further references
to the whole-tone phrase. But is the work really great? I see
two related reasons for saying "No." First, it is a recording,
and second, the recording took place in a recording studio.
There is no way around the first problem, one that is shared
by virtually all music that we study and to some degree by just
about every work on the St. John's program insofar as the
books are translations made from texts established by editors.
I feel that the problem is more serious with jazz, with that
musical idiom in which, as I have claimed, we are entertained
and perhaps ennobled by the individual in the very act of
individuation.
Attempting to solve the second problem, the studio
recording, is a temptation that I find irresistible. The solution
is a temptation because we know that in most cases the "live
recording" is also somewhat of a fabrication, a piecing
together by recording engineers of recorded excerpts. This is
the case with A Night at Bird/and. The reason why the
temptation is irresistible is because the engineers often do a
good job.
By a good job, I mean that the recording approximates
the real thing, and I make this claim from experience. I know,
I have experienced the real thing, an ennobling performance
by a jaz.z musician. At one point I considered apologizing for
what amounts to a dressed-up version of "jazz in my life."
Further reflection on the subject inclines me to think that the
personal aspect of the subject is in fact central. Jazz is about
individuals, it is music by the individual and for the
individual. It is not only concerto music, but concerto music
best heard in its actual, spontaneous development, and best
�24
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
heard up close, that is, as chamber music, in a setting where
the listener relates intimately and personally to the
performer. Our chambers are nightclubs.
The Blakey performance at Birdland is about as good a
recorded live performance as any that I know of. It is a
recording and thus artificial, or doubly artificial, but it
captures a sense of spontaneity and improvisation. The music
and the musicians are of high caliber. And they were cookin'
that night. Nevertheless, there may be no individual piece,
not even an individual solo that we could call great, not on a
par with the performances that we heard by Louis Armstrong,
Clifford Brown, Budd Johnson, and Sonny Rollins.
Where does this leave us? Even if we were to decide that
there are great performances of jazz that could be revisited
repeatedly, those performances would be relatively brief: five,
ten, fifteen minutes. There are a few examples in jazz of
extended compositions and performances, but by and large,
the great performances of jazz are miniatures. Such being the
case hardly excludes jazz from our consideration. We might
approach a performance like Sonny Rollins's "Now's The
Time" in a way similar to our approach to a motet by Josquin
des Prez or a sonnet by Shakespeare. Were we to try for
something larger, longer, my inclination would be toward the
Live at ... genre rather than the extended work-A Love
Supreme-or the thematic collection of recordings, for
example Out of Time. The problem with my preference, A
Night at Bird/and, is that we know it is an artifice, a collection
of miniatures pieced together to give the impression of a
whole. Its advantage, on the other hand, is the success of the
ruse, the conveyance of a sense of spontaneity spread out
over an evening's work, and this is crucial. For a great work
of jazz must convey the sense of the artist at work, that work
being a priestly lament that strives for, that longs for, that
articulates ... and here words fail me. I cannot say what jazz
articulates. Jazz, I believe, really is about something, albeit
ineffable. Furthermore, jazz has meaning, not just musical
meaning, but meaning as jazz. It exudes the spirit of America,
�BARBERA
25
especially North America. Freedom of the individual is
perhaps the characteristic most commonly associated with
jazz, and although this seems to be generally true, the peculiar
qualities of lament, sacrifice, and beauty are missing in this
characterization.
Let us narrow our scope by returning to the example of
Budd Johnson's solo in "Segue in C." The structure of theme
and variations is a limitation that hinders musical development, but at the same time it provides the channel through
which improvisation, individuation can take place. 21 Unlike
with literature and the non-temporal arts, with jazz the clock
is ticking. Unlike with the music of Mozart, with jazz the
clock is ticking now. Jazz is urgent, and so we feel it when
Budd Johnson falls behind the beat. We feel it not because we
fear that Johnson is going to lose the beat, but rather because
we can feel his control, his autonomy. [Musical example 14;
Appendix 2, Triplets] The blues and song form provide the
foundations of phrase and harmony that allow for such free
elaboration, that allow for elaborations about the
autonomous individual.
Time flows. Music forms time. Improvised music forms
time in time, perhaps self-referentially. Jazz, if it is great,
forms time in time in history: this individual, this place and
time, your lament, but made beautiful, transcendent.
I do not know if there is great recorded jazz. The portion
of this account that has sought such a work, that has
attempted to determine its characteristics, and that has
argued diffidently in behalf of a few cases, is shamelessly
based on personal testimony. In the final analysis, no amount
of explanation on my part will make jazz or any individual
performance great for you, just as I am powerless to persuade
you, ultimately, that the Mozart-da Ponte operas are great.
Knowledgeable and sensitive human beings point to these
works and tell us they are great. Personally I am certain in one
case, Mozart, and favorably inclined but uncertain in the
other.
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
26
Appendix 1: Recorded Music Examples
Musical examples can be heard online by visiting the St. John's Review
webpage (www.stjohnscollege.edu/news/pubs/review.shtml) and clicking
the link "Jazz Examples to Accompany 'Is there Great Jazz?' by Andre
Barbera".
1. Split Kick
2. Now's The Time
Art Blakey Quintet, A Night at Bird/and, val. 1
Clifford Brown (tp), Lou Donaldson (as),
Horace Silver (p), Curly Russell (h), Art
Blakey (d), February 21, 1954, Birdland, New
York City
0:00- 0:58 (Marquette's introduction) and
0:00- 1:05 (Blakey, "Split Kick")
Sonny Rollins Quartet, The Essential Sonny
Rollins: The RCA Years
Sonny Rollins (ts), Herbie Hancock (p), Ron
Carter (b), Roy McCurdy (d), February 14,
1964, New York City
0:00-0:09
3. I Thought About You
Miles [)avis Quintet, The Complete Concert:
1964
Miles Davis (tp), George Coleman (ts),
Herbie Hancock (p), Ron Carter (h), Tony
Williams (p), February 12, 1964,
Philharmonic Hall, Lincoln Center, New York
City
0:00-1:13
4. Hotter Than That
Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five, The Hot
Fiues and Hot Sevens, vol. 3
Louis Armstrong (cor, voc), Kid Ory (tb),
Johnny Dodds (d), Lil Armstong (p), Johnny
St. Cyr (bj), Lonnie Johnson (gt), December
13, 1927, Chicago
0:00-2:16
5. Cherokee
Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet, Clifford
Brown's Fittest Hour
Clifford Brown (tp), Harold Land (ts), Richie
Powell (p), George Morrow (h), Max Roach
(d), February 25, 1955, New York City
0:00-2:48
�BARBERA
6. Segue In C (Alternate)
7. Segue in C (Alternate)
27
Count Basie Orchestra, Basie at Bird/and
Thad Jones, Sonny Cohn, Lennie Johnson,
Snooky Young (tp), Quentin Jackson, Henry
Coker, Benny Powell (tb), Marshall Royal (cl,
as), Frank \Vess (as, ts, fl, arr), Frank Foster,
Budd Johnson (ts), Count Basie (p), Freddie
Green (gt), Eddie Jones (b), Sonny Payne (d),
June 27, 1961, Bird land, New York City
1:04-3:28
Count Basie Orchestra
3:02-3:12
8. Now's The Time
Charlie Parker Quartet, The Essential Charlie
Parker
Charlie Parker (as), AI Haig (p), Percy Heath
(b), Max Roach (d), July 28, 1953, Fulton
Recording Studio, New York City
0:00-0:37
9. Now's The Time
Sonny Rollins Quartet
0:00 -1:40
10. Now's The Time
Sonny Rollins Quartet
0:36-0:52
11. Now's The Time
Sonny Rollins Quartet
0:00-0:15
12. Now's The Time
Art Blakey Quintet, A Night at Bird/and, vol. 2
0:00- 1:39
13. Now's The Time
Sonny Rollins Quartet
0:36-1:10
14. Segue inC (Alternate) Count Basic Orchestra
3:02-3:12
Play List
To locate the music examples on www.rhapsody.com, search by album
title, then by song title.
Album Title
Song Title
Basie At Birdland
Segue In C (Alternate Take)
Clifford Brown's Finest Hour
Cherokee
The Complete Concert: 1964
I Thought About You
The Essential Charlie Parker
Now's The Time
The Essential Sonny Rollins: The RCA Years Now's The Time
�28
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
The Hot Fives And Hot Sevens, Vol. 3
Hotter Than That
A Night At Birdland, Vol. 1
Announcement
Marquette
A Night At Birdland, Vol. 1
Split Kick
A Night At Birdland, Vol. 2
Now's The Time
Appendix 2
Swing Eighths
Triplets
Now's The Time
by Pee Wee
�BARBERA
29
Rollins, 2:5-8
Rollins, head 5-8
Blakey and Silver, head 5-8
Notes
1
Here is Pee \Y/ee Marquette's introduction:
"Ladies and Gentlemen, as you know, we have something special down
here at Birdland this evening, a recording for Blue Note Records. \Vhcn
you applaud for the different passages, your hands goes right over the
records there, so when they play 'em over and over, throughout the
country, you may be some place, and uh say: 'Well, that's my hands on
one of those records that I dug down at Birdland.'
We're bringing back to the bandstand at this time, ladies and gentlemen,
the great Art Blakey and his wonderful group, featuring the new trumpet
sensation, Clifford Brown; Horace Silver on piano; Lou Donaldson on
alto, Curly Russell is on bass.
And let's get together and bring Art Blakey to the bandstand with a great
big round of applause.
How 'bout a big hand, there, for Art Blakey.
Thank y' all."
�30
2
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence (1956; rev. ed., New York: Grove Press,
1979), 195 and 198.
3
I presume that the recording was made over the course of the last night
of the engagement because this specific collection of five musicians was
not a working group. Horace Silver recalls the recording lasting for two
nights over the weekend rather than one (HS 12/20/96). [This format
indicates the date of conversations between the author and Lou
Donaldson (LD) and Horace Silver (HS).] Other sources indicate one
night's recording. In 1975, Michael Cuscuna discovered four takes previously ignored or unknown. These were issued on a separate record as
Volume 3 (BNJ 61002). In addition there are according to Cuscuna four
"rejected takes, some not even complete on tape-never to come out."
(Personal correspondence, 1996) The current two-volume set of CDs
contains all preserved material except for the rejected takes (Blue Note
CDP 7 46519 2, DIDX 1130 and CDP 7 46520 2, DIDX 1131).
4
(HS 12/20/96). Lou Donaldson remembers Marquette serving the
function of 'policeman', who had his hands full keeping the often-rowdy
audience in check (LD 12/18/96).
5
Bill Crow, From Bird/and to Broadway (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1992), 88.
6
The harmonic sequence underlying the piece is 'borrowed' from
another song, "There Will Never Be Another You" by Harry \Varren and
Mack Gordon. It is quite common among jazz musicians to compose a
piece by adding a new theme or melody to the harmonies of a popular
song, and this procedure in itself would not seem to disqualify a work
from greatness.
7
Ted Gioia, The Imperfect Art: Reflections 011 Jazz and Modem Culture
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 108-109. Gioia quotes Andy
Warhol: "I like to be bored." The author adds: "That much-if not
most-jazz is boring seems scarcely undeniable; given its extreme
dependence on improvisation, jazz is more likely than other arts to
ramble, to repeat, to bore."
8
Personal correspondence, June 26, 2005.
9
The same holds for "\Vee-Dot" on A Night at Bird/and. Marquette says,
"How 'bout a big hand, for Art Blakey, Art Blakey and his wonderful allstar[s]." But the recording documents show that this version of "\VeeDot" was recorded in the middle of a set.
10
"What Makes Jazz Jazz?" Musings: The Musical \Vorlds of Gunther
Schuller: A Collection of His Writings (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1986), 27. This is a talk given by Schuller at Carnegie Hall on
Dec. 3, 1983. " ... jazz is, unlike many other musical traditions both
�BARBERA
31
European and ethnic/non·Western, a music based on the free unfettered
expression of the individual. This last is perhaps the most radical and
most important aspect of jazz, and that which differentiates it so dramatically from most other forms of music-making on the face of the
globe ... so typically American and democratic .. .I would like particularly
to dwell on one dear way in which jazz distinguishes itself from almost
all other musical expressions ... and that is the way jazz musicians play
their instruments, with particular regard to the aspect of sonority, timbre,
and tone color.,
1l The internet addresses for (1)- (3) and (5) are given here; (4) is no
longer available.
www.terellstafford.com/main.html
www.bobjanuary.com/favorite.httn
www. woodyshaw.com/downbeat 1_cberg. pdf#search =%22Woody%20Sha
w%20DownBeat%22
http://cornchipsandpie.blogspot.com/2006/05/chunky-nuggets.html
12 Portions of the Rite of Spring apparently came from Stravinsky playing
around on the piano. Conversely, jazz musicians repeat solos, a famous
example being Coleman Hawkins's "Body and Soul," the thinking being
that if you have come up with a good solo, why mess with it. Lou
Donaldson admitted to engaging in an activity nearly the opposite to
learning one's solos (LD 7/8/96). In response to my question regarding
whether he practiced his instrument any longer, he said "No." Rather, he
has worked out a way of practicing on stage, at gigs. He plays songs in a
variety of keys and tempos, which amounts to practice.
13
Gioia, The Imperfect Art, 55 and 101.
14
Interview by Studs Terkel of Big Bill Broonzy (vocal), Sonny Terry
(harmonica), and Brownie McGhee (guitar), "Keys to the Highway," May
7, 1957, Chicago, WFMT.
15
Ibid.
16
Indeed another composer, Andy Gibson, combined the riff with a
simple melody to make "The Hucklebuck/' a popular dance and
recording of the late 1940s.
17
The Real Book, vol. 2, 2nd ed. (Milwaukee: Hal Leonard Corporation,
no date), 293. The written example includes only the melody and not the
indicated harmonization.
18 Tone 6 substitutes for tone 5, a slight extension of normal movement.
Tone 2 does not substitute for tone 1 but rather points to it. Tone 2
specifies the end while at the same time leaving open the possibility of
additional choruses, a possibility that is realized by the piano choruses
and two subsequent choruses on saxophone.
�32
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
19 The head appears on the upper staff and Rollins's solo on the lower
staff.
20 Rollins had been working on "Now's the Time." Three weeks earlier,
Jan. 24, 1964, he recorded the piece with the same musicians. That
recording lasts sixteen minutes, four times longer than the one under
consideration. In some ways, it sounds like practice for the real thing. My
version of the Jan. 24 recording seems to be pitched in the key of B! And
even if it is in B-flat, the range for Rollins is a fifth above the range for
the Feb. 14 recording. Note also that Hancock only camps in the Jan. 24
recording, and does very little of that, in the course of the sixteen
minutes, perhaps another indication that this is an experiment in the key
of B major.
21
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann
(New York: Random House, 1966), 213. Necessity and "freedom of the
will" become one in artists.
�33
Preformationism In Biology:
From Homunculi To Genetic
Programs
1-
Jorge H. Aigla, M.D.
I. Introduction
Organic beings come to be. The way in which they do so has
been subject to much speculation and debate. In this paper I
shall review some of the ideas put forth regarding generation,
and argue that ways of thinking and seeing in the study of
development have had weighty influence on other areas of
biology.
II. Development
I should begin with what is perhaps the most notorious image
in all of biology: that of a human sperm containing a
miniature organism (Figure 1). I use the word "image"
advisedly, as this is not a drawing of what is seen, nor a
schematic diagram of an object, simplified in order to aid
understanding. Nicolas Hartsoeker produced it in his 1694
Essay de Dioptrique. 1
We would do well to study it attentively: it has detail,
definition, there is no blurriness, and it depicts a familiar
form. It wishes to suggest that a preformed microscopic
human individual is already present, complete, in the male
Jorge H. Aigla, M.D., has been a Tutor at St. John's College in Santa Fe since
1985. This essay is a modified version of a Friday Night Lecture originally
delivered in Santa Fe on December 6, 2002. The lecture was dedicated to
two friends and retiring coileagues: Hans Von Briesen, Director of
Laboratories, and to the late Ralph Swentzell, Tutor. I again dedicate this
essay to them. The author acknowledges his indebtedness to Professor
Richard Lewontin of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard
University for his close reading of the essay followed by his helpful and
insightful comments and suggestions.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
sex cell. This type of what would come
to be known as "preformationism" is
really a 111<Jrphological pre-existence of
a miniaturized adult homunculus. It
rests folded, patiently, apparently
peacefully, and it is already developed.
Once presumably created, this future
being is simply "awaiting the hour of
its birth." 2 All that needs to happen is
growth of its parts by accretion. This
living being will be engendered, but
was not, strictly speaking, reproduced.
The image's beauty and suggestiveness (and cuteness) are nonetheless
plagued by its unreality: Hartsoeker
never saw it, could never have seen it
(given the state of microscopical
science at his time with absence of
corrected objectives for aberration and
astigmatism, without oil immersion for
increased resolution, and lacking
staining techniques for enhanced
contrast and visibility), and lastly, no
one shall ever be able to see it. It
simply does not exist. Hartsoeker
himself explicitly says only that
perhaps one would see this, if there FIGURE 1
were better instruments. 3
In order to expect to see this, or to be able to claim to
have "seen" this cased figurine, several observations and
mental conceptions have to come together. We shall take a
brief detour in our attempt to understand their confluence.
There are two, and only two, options for understanding
development: either the future being and its parts exist in
smaller form from the very beginning, or the adult parts come
�AIGLA
35
to be as products of development from structures that do not
originally resemble them in the least.
For the former "preformationist" possibility, a miniature
form of the future organism is already present, and development is merely unfolding (what was termed in early days
"evolution"), with growth of pre-existing morphological
entities.
Marcelo Malpighi (who had discovered with the aid of
the microscope the capillaries in the lung just four years after
William Harvey's death-1661) was the earliest proponent of
this view, and gave us several drawings in 1673,4 where the
baby chick is all there, from the start. One may be tempted to
disregard this view as nonsensical, but consider: how is one
to explain an apparent gelatinous blob of unformed matter in
the egg, giving rise to and becoming a chick (or a
salamander)? The puzzle of development was solved (in a
way) with the preformationist hypothesis, and it was
explained in purely mechanical terms: unfolding and
enlargement of pre-existing components. The alternative, so
it seemed to Malpighi and his followers, would have to
postulate a mysterious directiveness to the process of development, a vital and, to them, non-material force.
Two thousand years earlier Aristotle clearly understood
the two possibilities, and perspicuously argued against preformationism: "How will the foetus become greater by addition
of something else if that which is added remain unchanged?
But if that which is added can change, then why not say that
the semen from the very first is of such a kind that blood and
flesh can be made out of it, instead of saying that it itself is
blood and flesh?" 5 And wondering how parts of the embryo
get made, he asserts:
Either all the parts, as heart, lung, liver, eye, and
all the rest, come into being together, or in
succession, as is said in the verse ascribed to
Orpheus, for there he says that an animal comes
into being in the same way as the knitting of a net.
That the former (parts coming into being simulta-
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
neously) is not the fact is plain even to the senses,
for some parts are clearly visible already existing
in the embryo, while others are not. 6
This argument of his is one of temporal succession in what
one observes. He concludes: "If the whole animal or plant is
formed from seed or semen, it is impossible that any part of
it should exist ready made in the semen or seed .... " 7 In
addition, his logical division of bodies into matter with form
inseparable from it, makes possible the whole doctrine of
epigenesis: the possibility of pattern emergent as a process,
like plaiting a net or painting a picture. Aristotle does not
address the further impossible consequence of the preformationists: not only is the organism pre-existent, but in this
already formed being, all of its descendants have to be present
-the so-called theory of encasement or fitting.
Trying to make clear the way in which matter and form
jointly come to be in the embryo, Aristotle wrote that "the
female contributes the material for the semen to work upon"'
and that the semen communicates to the material body of that
embryo the power of movement and form.' In this formulation Aristotle is simply being consistent with his notion that
"the mover or agent will always be the vehicle of the form," 10
and also with his conception that "that which produces the
form is always something that possesses it." 11 So the male
provides "the form," what seems to be at once formal,
efficient, and final cause, and the female contributes the
material cause.
Malpighi and Hartsoeker seem to be have clung to these
latter statements of Aristotle, but appear to have disregarded
the same author's foregoing arguments against preformationism. For Aristotle the semen provides the form for the
embryo, not the formed embryo.
Another factor that must have helped Hartsoeker believe
one should eventually be able to see what he delineated is the
observation by Anton van Leeuwenhoek of spermatozoa in
semen in 1680 {which he likened to "animalcules") through
�37
AIGLA
his microscope (Figure 2), which apparently was able to
magnify specimens 270 timesY It should not be forgotten
that a cell theory (of which I shall speak presently) did not yet
exist for Hartsoeker-it would take 150 years for spermatozoa to be identified as cells by Kolliker in 1841.
In any preparation of human semen, seen with the very
best available optics, the folded foetus cannot be seen; it can
only be imagined. In critical microscopy work, it is difficult
for the eye to see what the mind does not know, and the eyes
may well be blinded by what the mind knows. Further, the
eyes, at times, may see what the mind desires. Hartsoeker's
homunculus is a beautiful example of what I would call
wishful proleptic observation being fitted to preconceived
theoretical commitments. Malebrauche has described this
mode of operation: "The mind should not stop at what the
eye sees, for the vision of the mind is far more penetrating
than the vision of the eye." 13 I beg to differ, and would
venture to say, by contrast, that seeiug with the eye of reasou
may not be the best way of looking. Seeing is a complicated
8
FIGURE 2
1
�38
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
matter. Observation is colored by expectation and theory
(preconception). It may not be possible to encounter scientific
"facts" as data, objectively discovered. The wish to see
something may often well determine what is "discovered."
One could hardly blame Hartsoeker for providing us with his
famous image, notwithstanding the fact that he was not
adhering to the dictum our students are repeatedly urged to
follow: "Make sure you do not merely find what you are
looking for!"
Preformationism does not have to deal with the formidable problem of development as such, and Hartsoeker sided
with the "spermist" sub-school in wishing to find the
miniature organism in the male seed (the other school being
the "ovist").
Another microscopist, Wolff, in 17 64, described
"globules" in animal tissues, and when he aimed his good
instrument (by the day's standards) at the developing chick
egg, he saw no minuscule baby chick; and in cross section, he
discerned layers of spherical structures that eventually gave
rise (or differentiated) to an embryonic organism. He
opposed the preformationists, and his "epigenesis!" school
taught that development started from an entirely homogeneous and unformed mass, acted on by an extraneous forcea "vis essentialis" (a force related to being alive). The camps
had been set, and preformationism with its purely mechanistic tendencies, seemed to have been forever discredited, in
favor of an epigenetic process of differentiation, that in its
inception embraced a form of vitalism, and left us with the
gargantuan problem of true development.
III. Cell Theory
That the development of the cell theory itself was influenced
by other theories in biology is not widely recognized. Of
course atomistic speculations from the physical sciences
played a role; but there is more.
�AlGLA
39
c
In 1665 Robert Hooke had observed pores and box-like
structures in cork, which he christened "cells," but he said
nothing of their possible biological meaning.
Schleiden, studying plant tissues, attempted to explain
what he saw in strictly physico-chemical terms. A good
biologist, he knew of Wolff's publications and eliminated
preformationism altogether from anatomy and embryology.
He applied what must have seemed to him "epigenetic"
considerations to cell formation and development, and in
1838 summarized his work 14 (see Figure 3 15 ). He could illafford to think that cells came from cells (which sounded too
much like preformationism), so cells had themselves to
develop. He made the cell nucleus (discovered by Robert
Brown five years earlier) the center of cell formation, calling
it the "cytoblast." The nucleus itself (or the nucleolus, as his
writings are unclear on this point) separated out of the
formative fluid (the "cytoblastema") by a sort of precipitation
in a "mother liquor," and only then, about it condensed the
rest of the cell (the cytoplasm) and its membrane. He emphasized that plants consist exclusively and entirely of cells and
their products, and an early version of the cell theory was
born.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Notice that for Schleiden cells are mostly structural
elements and without physiological import, nor is there a
continuity of cells or of life in a precise sense. Also, we must
remark, this epigenetic cellular thinking fits well with spontaneous generation.
Schwann, a colleague of Schleiden, accepted this theory
of cell formation, and he deserves credit for extending it to
animals in 1839. 16 He also added some thoughts about
function and metabolism to this intermediate cell theory.
Schwann described the formation of blood corpuscles in
excruciating detail, ascribing also to the precipitated or
crystallized nucleus the power of cell formation de novo.
Let us pause and regard the engraving of Figure 3. After
much consideration I have come to the conclusion that cells
just do not look like this, and I say so after carefully studying
many different plant tissues, and having studied for over
three decades animal tissues nuder the microscope. The only
thing that resembles to any degree this illustration are figures
of the special form of cell death called apoptosis. Apoptosis is
programmed cell death, was characterized by the pathologist
Kerr in 1972, 17 and is now one of the most widely studied
genetic molecular phenomena. Cells that die due to a genetically programmed mechanism in apoptosis show nuclear
shrinkage, condensation, fragmentation, and in contrast to
other forms of cell death (necrosis), exhibit no inflammatory
response. Could Schleiden and Schwann have seen apoptosis
and interpreted it with the eye of their cellular epigenetic
framework? That is, did they take dying cells for cells
forming? It is impossible to tell, as this type of cell death
apparently plays a minor role, if at all, in plant tissues. Or
could perhaps their preparations have had bad fixation and
poor staining, and they be describing artifacts? This is
unlikely. What is possible for me to tell in reference to
Schwann's writings on blood cell formation, is that he was
imposing a chronological order on what he saw statically,
thinking the nucleus of red cells came before their membrane
and cytoplasm, whereas the order of development is precisely
�AIGLA
41
the opposite: the nucleus of red cells becoming smaller and
eventually being extruded, Schwann inferred, with the aid of
the imagination, a dynamic sequence of events in fixed
tissues, and he erred. He wished what he saw to depict and
imply what he wanted.
It is intriguing that the conceptual frame of epigenesis,
and the disproval of preformationism by Wolff in embryology, carried over into cell theory, retarding it and giving it
an originally erroneous mechanism for cell genesis.
This mistake was brilliantly dispelled by the pathologist
Virchow. In 1860, twelve years after Schleiden and Schwann,
he defined the cell as "the ultimate morphological and
functional element in which there is any manifestation of
life. " 18 For Virchow all cells (including abnormal ones like
those found in cancer growths) do come from pre-existing
cells, and he rightly saw Schleiden and Schwann's theory of
free cell formation as nothing but an avatar of de novo
spontaneous generation; and this, before Pasteur's work of
1860 and 1864, disproving once and for all the discontinuity
of life. At last the cell theory developed into its mature form,
and a unity underlying the diversity of living organisms was
established. The word "Biology" (coined by Lamarck and
Treviranus) now, finally, became meaningful.
The capping of the cell theory comes with Walter
Flemming, 19 who in 1879 described cell division or mitosis:
not only did cells come from cells, as Virchow showed, but
now all nuclei come from pre-existing nuclei.
rv: Modern Embryology
Once the sperm and the egg were also recognized to be cells,
investigators turned their eyes to the process of fertilization.
Hertwig20 in 1876 and 1885 determined that this event is due
to the joining of the male and female nuclei. Heredity must
then be due to the transmission of a material substance, and
the male contributes to the new organism some matter as well
as the female (contrary to Aristotle's teachings), and it is the
nucleus that is embodying this matter.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Van Beneden21 in 1883 saw that the colored stubby bodies
discovered by Flemming in cell division (and now named
chromosomes) played a role in fertilization. Studying the
round worm Ascaris megalocepha/us bivalens, which has four
chromosomes in each adult cell, he observed that two
chromosomes came from the father's sperm and two from the
mother's egg, before the new zygote formed and divided.
Although he does not say so explicitly, the hereditary
substance now seemed to be confined to these nuclear bodies.
The chromosomes then, are equally contributed by the
parents, and are constant in number for the species.
With the recognition that all cells arise from cell division
in adults as well as during embryonic development starting
with the zygote, the next question tackled was: How do cells
become different and give rise to a complex organism?
Let us turn to the experimental embryological work of
Roux, Driesch, and Spemann and Mangold. Roux 22 destroyed
one of the two blastomeres at the two-cell stage in the frog,
and got a half-embryo. Notice his experiment constitutes a
defect study. He concluded that the potency of a cell equals
its fate, and that each cell is self-differentiating, the whole
organism being simply the sum of independently developed
parts. In a sense, he advocated a preformation of limited,
fated, and pre-assigned potentialities, and established embryology as an experimental science of proximate causations and
mechanisms.
Roux's experimental results ran into difficulties with the
work of Driesch. 23 When this investigator separated (not
destroyed) one of the blastomeres of the sea urchin at the
same two-cell stage, he got a half-sized full embryo. Notice
his experiments are isolation studies. These results induced
Driesch to embrace an extreme vitalism, postulating a
nonmechanical entelechy (Factor E). 24 For what machine, if
cut in half, could still function normally? The potency of an
early cell is not preformed, and turns out to be much greater
than its fate. The resulting half-sized embryo strongly
suggests that cells at very early stages of development are
�AIGLA
43
pluripotent. Eventually Driesch's thinking, without a mysterious non-material "entelechy," became known as holistic
organicism: the organism is more than a mere summation of
individual parts added together.
The climax of this part of the story comes with Spemann
and Mangold25 who in 1924 showed that a portion of tissue
from a newt embryo could induce the formation and
production of other tissues, even of an incomplete new newt,
in a recipient. Developmental possibilities, then, are not
totally preformed, and many events in morphogenesis must
be the result of cell-to-cell interactions.
It must be emphasized that in Roux's experiments the
killed cell remained attached to the viable one, and the developing embryo did not "sense" this cell was dead. If the killed
cell had been separated, as in the work of Dreisch, the
embryo would then have compensated (regulated) its development into a (smaller) whole embryo. Driesch's work
reveals that a developing organism is a whole, and that its
plan for differentiation at any time and stage of its embryology lies in the totality of its being. This does not mean that
any and every alteration in a part of an organism will
interfere with the normal development of the rest of the
complete organism-this would be a claim of an extreme
form of wholism. The developmental process is a regulative
one, where the embryo has the ability to grow normally even
when some portions are removed or rearranged. The embryo
is a "harmonious equipotential system"26 because all the
potentially independent parts function together to form an
organism. Driesch's concept of "regulation" implies that cells
must interact with each other in complex ways, and the work
of Spemann and Mangold demonstrates that one tissue can
direct the development of another neighboring tissue. The
small grafted region in their experiments was called "The
Organizer" since it controls the organization of the complete
embryonic body. The organizer is a piece of tissue; tissues are
made up of cells; cells contain nuclei with chromosomes
within.
�44
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
V. Chromosomes
Mendel's work was published in 1865, and only
unearthed in 1900, after much embryological and cytological
work had been performed. Shortly after the re-discovery, in
1902 Boveri 27 united the sciences of embryology and
cytology. In his experiments he demonstrated that normal
development depends not on the number of chromosomes
per se, but in the normal combination of a complete set of
these structures. He managed to fertilize a sea urchin egg with
two sperms, so three sets of chromosomes became apportioned to four cells after the second zygotic division. The
chromosomes were distributed asymmetrically, by chance, to
the daughter cells. When these cells were gently separated
and allowed to develop, only those with at least one whole set
of chromosomes gave rise to a normal individual.
Furthermore, the abnormal embryos were abnormal in
different ways. His conclusion was seminal: chromosomes are
functional individuals, that is, each chromosome must possess
(and give rise to) different qualities.
The same year brought the work of the American Walter
Sutton, 28 who painstakingly documented the continuity and,
�AIGLA
45
more importantly, the distinct individuality and physiological
singularity of chromosomes in the Giant grasshopper. Figure
4 shows his most elegant camera Iucida drawings (not
diagrams or photographs) of chromosome groups. They are
unprecedented and unequaled, even when compared to
modern ones, in resolution and accuracy. Chromosomes are
then continuous in a given species from one generation to
another, from one cell to its descendants, and are also
morphological individuals one from another. They are the
preformed material substrate for heredity and development
in living organisms.
In truth, the chromosomal theory of inheritance, meaning
that chromosomes are the bearers of hereditary factors or
traits, had been established by Boveri and Sutton. But some
biologists wanted stronger, unequivocal evidence or proof.
Thomas Hunt Morgan, a senior colleague of Sutton at
Columbia University, was originally trained as an embryologist, and of course, detested any suggestion of preformationism. He was "an experimentalist at heart" (his own
words) and very much disliked inferences in biology. 29 From
the start he opposed the chromosomal theory of heredity,
since to ascribe to chromosomes the ability to confer
character traits must have carried the vice of preformationism
for him. We must add that the controversy over what had
exclusive responsibility for hereditary development, either
the nucleus itself or the cytoplasm instead, was not yet totally
settled. Furthermore, Morgan's opposition stood despite the
fact that sex determination seemed by then to be caused,
quite clearly, by chromosomes.
When he turned to genetics, studying the fruit fly
Drosophila, Morgan was unconvinced that a strict association
between specific characters and specific chromosomes
existed. He read in the work of Boveri and of Sutton only a
parallel behavior, during cell division and fertilization, of
chromosomes and Mendelian traits. His apprehensions may
strike us as peculiar but are not altogether awkward: it is
indeed strange to suggest that the shape or color of an organ
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
in a living being was preformed in some as yet mysterious
way, in these stubby colored structures known as chromosomes. Although we do not have now, as with Hartsoeker,
any preexistence of a complete homunculus, our eye meets
preformed materials that are passed on and could determine
form and function.
Morgan's paper of 1910 30 is extraordinary in many ways.
In no other does one see the struggle an author is undergoing
in arriving at an inevitable conclusion that contradicts his
previous beliefs. He prevents himself throughout from even
using the word "chromosome"; he establishes that the traits
for sex and white eye color are "combined," but avoids
calling them physically linked. He refutes his own distrust
and establishes the chromosomal theory of inheritance by
demonstrating that one specific character corresponds to the
behavior of one specific "factor" (later shown to be a
chromosome, visible under the microscope).
Fortunately in this case, and unlike in the history of cell
theory, the suspicion against preformationism did not retard
progress in genetics. Morgan himself was soon converted,
becoming one of the staunch advocates for ascribing to
chromosomes their genetic role through his further work and
that of his students, particularly Sturtevant and Bridges (who
provided direct proof of the chromosomal theory of inheritance in a most difficult paper).
VI. The Genetic Program
Chromosomes were found to be constituted largely of
deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). DNA was shown to be the
material responsible for conferring visible (phenotypic)
traits. 31 The molecular structure of DNA was determined in
1953,32 and soon after the language of the genetic code. DNA
is the preformed element in natural living beings, and it
controls development-to a degree. In other words, development could be said to be preformational as regards genes
and their hereditary influences, but rigorously epigenetic in
actual constructional activities from undifferentiated begin-
�AIGLA
47
nings. And this leads us to the concept of the so-called
"genetic program," and to new problems and questions.
There are really two problems that both genetics and
embryology must address in order to get an adult organism
from a fertilized egg: cells becoming different (differentiation) and cells producing shapes (morphogenesis). Both
processes appear to be directed, and with the rise of information theory and the knowledge of the molecular biology of
instructions and mechanisms for protein coding by the DNA
base triplets, the notion of a genetic program is quite
reasonable. What exactly do biologists mean by a genetic
program? Where is it coded? And if it is coded in DNA, how
so?
First, the program is one of combinations of three
molecules (bases) determining an amino acid, and about three
hundred of these amino acids specifying an average protein.
If the genetic program has a language, the alphabet is made
up of single bases. It must be noted that a protein is not even
completely specified by its amino acid sequence, originally
coded by the DNA. The intracellular environment plays a
role in the final folded stable state of proteins, and every
protein has alternate stable states. The future shape of a string
of amino acids is "open," and the actual final configuration
only "closes" through environmental conditions."
Secondly, the genetic program must be an open one.
Evidence for this was provided one hundred years ago by
Harrison, 34 who observed independent differentiation in
nerve fiber outgrowth from single cells. Frog protoplasmic
fibers extended from nerve cell bodies into any region where
frog lymph was present in a Petri dish (in vitro)-a result not
consistent with a rigidly preordained genetic program. That
the program is modifiable and plastic is obvious from the
experimental results of Spemann and Mangold, and from
recent work with stem cells. Also, the phenomena of regeneration of limbs in some animals, of memory and of learning,
imply that the program is not rigid, yet has some specificity. 35
It is worth emphasizing that both-cell differentiation and
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
morphogenesis-are the result not only of a genetic program,
but also of what some have appropriately designated as a
"somatic program," consisting of the whole embryo at any
particular time and stage. 36 Neighboring cells and their
respective positions cause and induce changes in cell shape,
adhesion, motility, migration and function, and in the shape
of organs and of the organism as a whole. The program is not
a "recipe" for the final product; environmental information
and random developmental noise enter into a notcompletely-determined process."
Lastly, it is essential that the program turned out to be not
a descriptive program, as was thought previously (specifying
what the cell or the whole organism will look like), but
instead a program of instructions describing how to make an
organism. 38 Consider a structure in origami. A set of data
completely specifying its final configuration would be
extremely difficult to collect, and would not at all explain
how to achieve the end form. It is much easier to formulate
instructions on how to fold a piece of paper; simple instructions about folding have complex spatial consequences. In the
same way during development, gene action sets in motion
sequences of events that can bring about profound changes in
the embryo. If the program were the full description of the
organism, modern molecular biologists could rail again, this
time with an ultramicroscopic intonation, against preformationism. This generative program of instructions is carried
out on an epigenetic basis, and the road from DNA to
proteins to phenotype is extremely complicated and
tortuous." It is also the case that the environment can
influence, to a great degree, the variable expression of the
genetic program. 40 The embryo not so much develops as
emerges from the fertilized egg; it reveals itself, and one may
be tempted to say that it is almost evoked.
For some modern molecular biologists like Changeaux (a
famous collaborator with Jacob and Monod), any talk of a
developmental program is pointless, 41 and he wishes to
dispense with the term altogether, placing exclusive emphasis
�AIGLA
49
on epigenetic processes. He arrives at this (to me) extreme
view from his work on the development of neural connections in the nervous system (a sophisticated extension of
Harrison's work), where much plasticity occurs. This
malleability is only to be expected, so why is Changeaux so
much against the concept of a program? I am afraid that a
specter is haunting him: the specter of preformationism.
Rightly understood, a genetic program need not totally
determine and predict exactly what the precise shape of a
given nerve cell or of a nervous system with its billions of
synaptic connections, or of a whole vertebrate, will be. No
animal or plant is fully shaped and entirely determined by its
DNA. In this sense, living beings are not absolutely
predictable and may never be "computable. "42 Speaking of a
genetic program does make sense, especially if one considers
that this program is an historically evolved one, 43 and does
not provide an unalterable architectural blueprint, but only a
set of instructions for·the construction of a living being, and
at the same time, the means to carry it out.
Prominent developmental and molecular biologists have
recently wondered whether we "understand" development at
all. 44 The implications for a philosophy of biology are deep;
what seems to be at stake is our understanding of the concept
of "understanding" itself. It has become nearly impossible to
discern or even expect any broad general principles in embryology,45 and there may be not mnch more to explain than
what is observed. 46 We have an alphabet (nucleotide bases)
and words for development (triplets coding for amino acids
that make up proteins). What appears to be wanting, and has
so far remained elusive, is a "grammar of development." 47 My
guess is that this will not be forthcoming merely from the
completed human genome project that ascribes to portions of
DNA in different chromosomes the coding for the various
proteins that help constitute a living organism.
The foregoing discussion should result in a change in
conceptualization in the posing of the problem of differentiation and development. The old "classical" question was:
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
"How does an apparently homogenous, small ball of yolkladen cytoplasm with a nucleus, turn into a large, complicated, highly organized adult with fully functioning organs?"
Now we had better ask: "How does the encoded structure,
compressed into the specialized maternal organ-the eggbecome transformed into the realized structure of an adult
organism?"48
VII. Epilogue
I have attempted to investigate the role of an idea, preformationism, in several areas of biology: developmental
anatomy, cell theory, the chromosomal theory of inheritance,
and the concept of a genetic program. Beholding an egg
should remind us that it embodies, for Aristotle, a world of
explanation. It should be apparent that for us, one of the
greatest mysteries lies hidden within, and what is more,
comes out of it.
Notes
1
Nicolas Hartsoekcr, Essay de Dioptrique (Paris, 1694), 230.
2
F. Jacob, The Logic of Life (Princeton, Nj: Princeton University Press,
1993), 20.
3
Hartsoeker, Essay de Dioptrique, 229.
4
L. \'V'olpert et alia, Principles of Development (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1998), 3.
5
Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals, Bk. I, Ch. 8, 723a15-20, A.
Platt, trans., in The Complete \Vorks of Aristotle, ed. J. Barnes (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).
6
Ibid., Bk. II, Ch. 1, 734a16-22.
7
Ibid., 734a33-35.
8
Ibid., 729a29-32.
9
Ibid., 729b5-8.
10
Aristotle, Physics, Bk. Ill, Ch. 2, 202a9. R.P. Hardie and R.K. Gayc,
trans., in The Complete \Vorks of Aristotle, ed.
Princeton University Press, 1984).
11
Ibid., Bk. VIJJ, Ch. 5, 257b10.
J. Barnes
(Princeton, NJ:
�51
AIGLA
12 E. Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1982), 138.
13
Nicholas Malcbranche, De fa recherche de Ia
1700), 48.
verite, Vol. I, (Paris,
14
M.J. Schleidcn, Contributions to Phytogenesis, H. Smith, trans.
(London: for the Sydenham Society, 1847 [orig. 1838]).
15
R. Virchow, Cellular Pathology (London: John Churchill, 1860), 10
(Figure 4).
16 T. Schwarm, Microscopical Researches into the Structure and Growth of
Animals and Plants, H. Smith, trans. (London: for the Sydenham Society,
1847 [orig. 1839]).
17
]. F. R. Kerr ct alia, "Apoptosis: A Basic Biological Phenomenon with
long-ranging Implications in Tissue Kinetics," British Journal of Cancer,
26 (1972): 239.
18
Virchow, Cellular Pathology, 3.
19
In B.P. Voeller, The Chromosome Theory of Iuheritance (New York:
Appleton Century Crofts, 1968), 43-47.
20
In Voeller, The Chromosome Theory of Inheritance, 4-8; 26-33.
21
Ibid., 54-59.
22
In B.H. \Villier and J.M. Oppenheimer, Foundations of Experimental
Embryology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1964), 2-28.
23
In \Villier and Oppenheimer, Foundations of Experimental
Embryology, 38-50.
24
Hans Dreisch, The Science and Philosophy of the Organism, vol. I
(London: Adam and C. Black, 1907).
25
In \Vrllier and Oppenheimer, Foundations of Experimental
Embryology, 144-184.
26
Hans Dreisch, The Science and Philosophy of the Organism.
27
In \'\i'iliier and Oppenheimer, Foundations of Experimental
Embryology, 74-90.
28
W. Sutton, "On the Morphology of the Chromosome Group in
Brachystola Magna," Biological Bulletin IV, no. 1 (1902): 24-39.
29
S.F. Gilbert, "In Friendly Disagreement: Wilson, Morgan and the
Embryological Origins of the Gene Theory," American Zoologist 27
(1987): 797-806; S.F. Gilbert, "The Embryological Origins of the Gene
Theory," Journal of the History of Biology II, no. 2 (1978): 307-351.
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
52
30
T.H. Morgan, "Sex Limited Inheritance in Drosophilia, '' Science
XXXII, no. 812 (1910): 120-122.
31
O.T. Avery, CJv1 Macleod, and M. McCarty, journal of Experimental
Medicine 79 (1944): 137-158.
31
J.D. \Vatson and F.H.C. Crick, "Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids,"
Nature 171 (1953): 737-738.
33
D. Whitford, "Protein folding in vivo and in vitro," in Proteins:
Structure and Function (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2005).
34
R.G. Harrison, "Observations on the Living Developing Nerve Fiber,"
Anatomical Record 1 (1907): 116-118.
35
E. Mayr, "Cause and Effect in Biology," Science 134 (1961): 15011506.
36
E. :Niayr, This is Biology (Cambridge, lvlA: Harvard University Press,
1997), 21, 171.
37
R. Lewontin, The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment
(Cambridge, .MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
38
\X'olpert, Principles of Development, 21.
39
Science 295 (1 March 2002): 1661-1682, see complete issue.
40
Lewontin, The Triple Helix.
41
J.P. Changeaux, Neuronal Man (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1997), 195.
41 L. \Vol pert, "Development: Is the egg computable or could we generate
an angel or a dinosaur?" in M.P. Murphy and L.A.J. O'Neill, What is
Life? The Next Fifty Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1995), 57-66.
43
.Mayr, "Cause and Effect in Biology"; Mayr, This is Biology.
44
L.Wolpert, "Do We Understand Development?" Science 266 (1994):
571-572.
45
Ibid.
46
R. Lewin, "Why is Development so Illogical?" Science 224 (1984):
1327-1329.
47
Ibid.
48
E. Mayr, "Comments on Theories and Hypotheses in Biology," Boston
Studies in Philosophy of Science 5 (1968): 450-456.
�53
The Persians and the Parthenon:
Yoke and Weave
Part Two: The Parthenon
1
Mera J. Flaumenhaft
"Who are you and what is your family? .. .How old were you
when the Medes came?"
Xenophanes
1. The Building and the Polis
There are no words on the Parthenon (Figure 1). So in one
sense it is true that, unlike Aeschylus's Persians, the building
offered Athens a "visual, non verbal" education. 37 But, like
every other feature of this logos-loving city, this silent marvel
in marble invites all who see it to articulate in words the
story-or multiple stories-it too tells about Athens and
Persia.
The first is the story of the building itself, the story of its
building. Like Aeschylus's play, it has its origin in the Persian
wars. But its site far predates these events, reminding us of
ancient times when Athens was a fortified community
centered around a palace monarchy. From its earliest days,
Athens, like Persia, shaped and rearranged the natural
features of the environment to serve the demands of its
communal life. In the early Bronze Age (1300-1200 B.C.), the
Mera Flaumenhaft is a tutor at the Annapolis campus of St. John1s College.
This essay is in two parts. Part One of this essay appeared in the previous
issue of The St. Jolm's Review, volume 50, number 2. Notes are continuous.
The photos included in the text are courtesy of Ann M. Nicgorski,
Willamette University, 1998. Dr. Nicgorski's excellent collection of images of
all the parts of the Parthenon discussed in this essay is available and easy to
use at www.willamette.edu/cla/Ytrvicws/parthenon/. For websites and books
with a fuller selection of photos, see the Bibliography before the Endnotes.
�54
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
FIGURE l (Courtesy of A. Nicgors.ki)
Acropolis, "high city," was artificially terraced and shored up
by a wall of cut rocks. So old and huge was this rampart that
it was called the "Cyclopean" wall; it was said to be the work
of a barely-civilized pre-human people, or of the legendary
Giants under the direction of Athena, who had defeated them
in an early war between the Gods and the Giants. 38
Eventually, the Acropolis above it became the site of a
fortified citadel from which the Athenian royal family ruled
the surrounding population.
Legend also told how Poseidon and Athena long ago vied
for primacy in this land. The sea was Poseidon's claim to
power; he caused a pool of salt water to appear on the rock.
Athena brought forth an olive tree as evidence of her power.
The judges ruled that the olive was the more valuable gift and
the goddess became the patroness of the city whose name she
shared. The incident was memorialized in the pool and the
olive that remained in the Erechtheion, one of the earliest
temples on the Acropolis. There is a story that, in 480 B.C.,
on the day after the Persians burned the Acropolis, the men
whom Xerxes sent to sacrifice in the shrine fonnd that "the
�FLAUMENHAFT
55
olive had put forth from its stump a shoot of about a cubit's
length" (Hdt., 8.55). By the early sixth century, the hill was
no longer dominated by a royal palace, but had become a
major sanctuary, accessible to all by a wide ceremonial ramp
that led visitors to a temple with an altar to a small olivewood
statue of Athena Polias, that is, "of the city." This carved
figure, xoanon, wrapped in her pep/as (robe), remained a
focus of civic religious life for centuries.
The statue had such close relations with Athens that, like
the supposedly autochthonous human population, it was
associated with no other earthly place. Its origins were
unknown; it was said to have fallen on this spot from the
sky, 39 the home of Athena's father, Zeus, on whose unlimited
empire Xerxes wished to model his own. Unlike the shadowy
legend of the statue's beginnings, the story of the birth of the
goddess herself was well known. So, indeed, are those of the
other Greek gods. Anthropomorphic in looks and character,
these gods are immortal, but not eternal; each came into
being, and each is associated with partial aspects of nature or
human experience. The story of a god's genesis often points
to the characteristic nature of that god. The full divinity of
each is most fully expressed when all are considered together.
But, unlike Persian multiplication, pantheon does not mean
mere aggregate or multiplied strength. Rather, it means a
defined plurality in which the elements are related, but differ
from, and are even in tension with, each other, and so
compose a viable and complete whole. Once again, as we saw
in Part One of this essay, the metaphor of well-woven fabric
comes to mind.
It was predicted that Athena's mother, Metis, whose
name means "cunning," "craft," or "counsel," would give
birth to a child excelling in these same qualities, one who
might rule the world. So Zeus, the child's father, swallowed
the pregnant Metis. When the time came, Hephaestus, also
crafty and cunning, split Zeus's head with an axe and
delivered the baby. And so Athena appeared in the world:
full-grown, fully armed, with an extraordinary intelligence,
�56
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
the very personification of immediacy, wily craft, and
resourcefulness. Not born from a mother, never to be one
herself, the maiden, parthenos, became the patron goddess of
a city of extraordinary masculine activity, one that excelled
not only in physical strength, as evidenced in war, but also in
the political arts of public speech and commerce and the
technological arts of agriculture, horse chariots, and ships.
But this child of her father was patron to women as well. Her
craft was manifest in the spinning and weaving of wool, as
well as of words. The image of her owl appeared on loom
weights that remained indoors, at home, with the women, as
well as on the currency exchanged in the open-air Agora
below the Acropolis, where men congregated to conduct the
commercial affairs of the city. Pallas Athena stood behind the
pep/as-weaving women and the spear-carrying warriors
whose lives together made a complete human city. The civic
fabric of Athens was woven from her arts, equally at work in
men and women ..
The annual Persian feast to celebrate the Great King's
birthday was called "tuktu," that is, "perfection" (teleion,
Hdt., 9.11 0). Athens' greatest festival celebrated not the birth
of a divinized despot who claimed that he was different from
all other men, but that of a civic deity who really was. The
meaning of her pep/as, in contrast to Xerxes' in Aeschylus's
play, reveals much about the two regimes. 40 There were two
related summer festivals devoted to Athena, one involving
part of the city and one all of it, both focused on the
olivewood image and what she wore. In May, the women
celebrated the Plynteria, the "washing rites." Gently
undressing and veiling the olivewood Polias, they carried her
pep/as to a spring, or perhaps as far as the sea, to launder it.
In the meantime, in the Kallynteria, the "adorning rites," the
crude and featureless image was prepared to receive the clean
garment. She was bathed and oiled and decorated with
jewelry. Robed again, she was replaced near her altar in the
old temple to await the most important festival of the year,
which took place in the following month, and bore her name.
�FLAUMENHAFT
57
From as early as the seventh century B.C., the June
Panathenaia, the festival of "all Athenians," culminated in a
citywide procession in which Athena's people presented her
with her annual birthday gift, a new peplos. By the next
century the festival included musical and rhapsodic performances, athletic and equestrian contests, and the awarding of
tripods, figurines, and large vessels of olive oil to those who
excelled in honor of the goddess who brought the olive.
The weaving of the peplos for the olivewood statue was
begun, appropriately, nine months before the goddess's
birthday celebration during a festival of crafts, when the
loom's warp-the upright cords-was set up by nine women
"workers," ergastinai, from designated aristocratic Athenian
families and several seven to nine year old girls dedicated to
the service of Athena. These children lived on the Acropolis
for the nine months and helped weave the pep/os. This bright
purple and yellow, woolen "story-doth" was decorated with
a tapestry-like depiction of Athena's exploits in the victory of
the Gods over the Giants. As we shall see, the Parthenon, like
other Athenian works, repeatedly associates this mythical
victory with Athens' historical victory over Persia. In the early
celebrations of the Panathenaia, the peplos was a rectangle of
about five by six feet and would have fit the human-sized
wooden image. Later, it may have been as big as a ship's sail
and, like real sails, would have been made by sewing several
loom weavings together. 41 The larger peplos was probably
made by professional male weavers for the Greater
Panathenaia every fourth year 42 and may have been exhibited
in the old temple of Athena Polias after the festival. Before
that, however, the pep/os was transported, perhaps on a
wheeled ship-cart, from the northwest city gate near the
Kerameikos district along a processional route to the Agora,
to the base of the Acropolis, and then carried up to the top
for presentation to the goddess. The ship "float" may have
been made from a Persian trireme captured at Salamis. Like
the wooden benches in the theater, and the roof and internal
decorations of the Odeion, which were made of Persian masts
�58
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
and spars,43 it would have been an explicit reminder of the
Persian defeat. Again, the analogy of the Spanish Armada
makes vivid the attempt to keep an averted disaster literally
before one's eyes. In the hall of Gray's Inn in London, a
carved wooden screen thought to have come from a flagship
in the Spanish Armada has served a similar function for
centuries. It was rescued by firemen when the building was
badly damaged during the London Blitz and survives today to
remind the small island nation of its unlikely survival of both
Spanish and Nazi attempts to invade and conquer it. 44
How can we understand the festival fabrication rituals on
which this ancient city and its citizens spent so much time and
effort and money? Both the weaving and the civic procession
are prime examples of the ways in which the democratic polis
produced and maintained itself as a civic community.
Representatives from all parts of the population-old and
young, men and women, citizens and resident aliens, slaves,
and workers in many different crafts-participated in the
preparations that were overseen by a large number of administrative officials. The weaving at the center of the
Panathenaia was thus the occasion for weaving together not
only the pep/os, but also the different elements of the
Athenian city. The prescribed rituals and legal instructions
concerning the workers, places, times, materials, patterns,
colors, and the delivery of the woolen cloth occupied the
attention of much of the population. One can observe the farreaching effects of such "material" rituals in the building of
the ark and tabernacle by the wandering Israelites; it kept
them busy and made them obedient, law-abiding, and
devoted to what they had worked so hard on. The same
effects are aimed at in the annual festival that removes and
replaces the K'aaba cover in Mecca, and in Christian processions of a beautifully dressed image of a patron saint, like the
annual fiesta for La Conquistadora in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
In their outlook and technology, Athenians looked to the
new, the future, and change. At the same time these rituals
held them to the old, the past, and the recurring. Festival
�FLAUMENHAFT
59
preparations and participation compelled these self-sufficient
and resourceful citizens to recognize their dependence on
what was beyond their control. Free and self-governing, the
Athenians on such occasions devoted their powers and
resources to obedience to laws and the service of old traditions and gods. If, in celebrating Athena, they were simultaneously celebrating their own achievements and character,
the rituals in honor of the goddess seem designed to remind
them also of their limitations. By the middle of the fifth
century, the birth of Athena Parthenos, her victories over
Poseidon and the Giants, her procession, and her peplos
would all be pictured on the most outstanding building on the
Acropolis. For that fabrication and its effects on the city we
must return to the events memorialized in Aeschylus's
tragedy.
At the battle of Marathon in 490 B.C. a small Athenian
army and their allies defeated a massive Persian force that had
traveled vast distances by land and sea, transforming even the
shape of the lands they traversed, to conquer resisting cities
in Greece. 6,400 subjects of the great king died at Marathon.
The Athenians lost 192 citizen hoplites. In the aftermath of
this unlikely victory, Athens began to build a new temple on
the south side of the Acropolis in honor of her patron
goddess. This required extending the south platform of the
Acropolis, which dropped too steeply to accommodate the
planned temple. Although much work had been done, the
Marathon Hekatompedon ("hundred-footer" temple) was
still unfinished when the Persians returned under Xerxes in
480. This time they reached Athens itself and burned the
entire city, including the unfinished temple. Before the
Persians arrived, almost the entire population of Athens had
been evacuated to Troezen and to the nearby islands of
Aegina and Salamis, to which they probably brought the
olivewood image of their goddess. 45 As Aeschylus reminds his
Athenian audience, the religious and political life of the polis
lay not in its streets and buildings, but in the characteristic
activities and attitudes of its citizens. The boule (council)
�60
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
continued to meet at Salamis, even as those it governed saw
smoke rising from the burning buildings and their contents,
including the peploi of former years, 46 on the Acropolis. A
year after Xerxes' defeat at Salamis, the force that had
remained in Greece with the Persian general Mardonins was
decisively smashed by the Athenians and their allies at the
battle of Plataea.
Here the story of the Parthenon almost ended, for after
the victory the Greek allies took an oath:
I will not set life before freedom ... having
conquered the barbarians in the war .. .I will not
rebuild any of the temples that have been burnt
and destroyed by the barbarian, but I will let them
be left as a memorial to those who come after of
the sacrilege of the barbarian. 47
This way of remembering through preserving ruins is seen in
the preserved parts of the cathedral the Nazis destroyed at
Coventry and was urged in recent deliberations about what,
if anything, should replace New York skyscrapers destroyed
by twenty-first century barbarians. The rubble in Athens was
left to lie or was used haphazardly in the hasty fortification
and reconstruction of the city. But in the repaired north wall
of the Acropolis some of the column drums from the
unfinished temple to Athena were deliberately placed so that
they could be seen from the restored Agora, the marketplace,
below. These pillars remain on view today.
Thucydides tells the story of the recovery of the victorious, but destroyed, city of Athens (1.89-108). Domestic and
civic buildings were rebuilt, and the port at Piraeus was laid
out and fortified. Despite Lacedaemonian objections, long
walls were built to the sea, and the Athenian naval force was
expanded. Most of the Aegean and coastal cities became allies
of Athens in the Delian League to keep the seas open and to
discourage future Persian invasions. Before long, the allies
preferred, and were encouraged, to give money to Athens and
let it build the ships necessary to protect them all. These cities
�FLAUMENHAFT
61
soon found themselves members of an alliance that was
rapidly coming to be dominated by its strongest city. In 454
B.C. the League's treasury was moved from Delos to Athens.
When peace was concluded with Persia in 449 B.C., the
Athenians summoned all the Greeks to a general assembly to
discuss future safety and to reconsider the Plataean oath not
to rebuild sacred places. One consideration was to be that the
Greek allies had failed to sacrifice to the gods who had saved
them from the Persians. Pressured by the Lacedamonians,
who declined to attend, and resenting the growing power of
Athens, no other League members showed up, and Athens
decided unilaterally to continue policing the seas and
collecting tribute.
At this point Pericles proposed rebuilding and enlarging
Athena's temple on the Acropolis. His oligarchic enemies in
the assembly objected to spending the money of the Delian
League for an Athenian project, charging that they would be
"gilding and bedizening our city .. .like a wanton woman
[who] adds to her wardrobe precious stones and costly statues
and temples worth their millions" (Plut. Pericles, Xll}. 48
Pericles countered that the allies were "owed no account of
their moneys" as long as Athens effectively "carried on the
war for them and kept off the Barbarians" (Plut. Pericles,
XII). Plutarch describes the enthusiasm with which the
populace then embraced this vast public works project. It
would call many arts into play and involve long
periods of time, in order that the stay-at-homes,
no whit less than the sailors and sentinels and
soldiers, might have a pretext for getting a
beneficial share of the public wealth ... So then the
works arose, no less towering in their grandeur
than inimitable in the grace of their outlines, since
the workmen eagerly strove to surpass themselves
in the beauty of their handicraft. And yet the most
wonderful thing about them was the speed with
which they arose. (Plut. Pericles, XII-XIII)
�62
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Here Plutarch emphasizes the competitive spirit and the
speed that, like the swift victory at Salamis, characterized all
things Athenian. When the oligarchs continued to complain
about the great expense of the Parthenon, Pericles offered to
fund the undertaking himself, as years before, he had funded
the production of the Persians, and as, more recently, other
wealthy individuals had underwritten other buildings and
beautification projects in the ciry. In this way, he said, Athens
would be saved the cost and "I will make the inscription of
dedication in my own name" (Pint. Pericles, XIV). At this
dramatic gesture, the wary assembly quickly voted in favor of
public funding and sparing no cost. For the next few decades,
a great deal of the assembly's time was spent deliberating on
the features and expenses of the new temple. Even as it took
shape, it was supervised and discussed by the democratic
population for which it was being built. These discussions are
recorded in civic records and in the narrative accounts of the
extraordinary writers Athens also produced. Thus the aristocratic Pericles maneuvered his oligarchic enemies into
supporting polis-sponsored projects that would increase the
power of his radically democratic supporters. The Parthenon
was the centerpiece of the building program. The man whom
Plutarch calls "that political athlete" (Pint., Pericles, III) was
among the most interesting competitors ever to exhibit
himself upon the Athenian stage. The Panathenaic trophies
and the names of the athletes who won them are lost in the
anonymity of time, like those of the Persians who died at
Salamis. The name of the young aristocrat who made his
"brilliant debut"49 as the choregos of Aeschylus's Persians, was
not inscribed on the temple, but it was known forever after as
Pericles' Parthenon. 5•
Before looking at the Parthenon, let us glance briefly at
some Persian buildings where, as in Athens and Sparta,
physical constructions reflect the political structure and
principles of the regime. As Aeschylus describes it, the everexpanding Persian Empire is centered on the royal palace and
nearby tomb of the divinized monarch, the only godlike
�FLAUMENHAFT
63
figure who appears on stage. Although the play is set in Susa,
it is clear that the king's palaces, like everything else in
Persia-except the monarch himself-are multiple; in
addition to Susa, Ekbatana and Persepolis are mentioned
repeatedly as the king's headquarters. But, unlike the civic
and political activities of Athens, which took place in one
bounded, permanent location, the Persian court was also
always on the move. 51 Super-civilized in some respects, it
retained nomadic aspects more characteristic of lessdeveloped peoples. The King sat upon a movable throne. The
portable royal tent, as elaborate as the palaces, was an object
of wonder to the Athenians, who may have copied its shape
in the roof of the new Odeion. 52 Herodotus says that
Ekbatana, the palace fortress built by Deioces, the first king
of the Medes, was built for himself and his bodyguards on a
hill and was reinforced artificially with seven strong walls; the
rest of the people lived outside the stronghold. Deioces
arranged that all business "should be contracted through
messengers and that the king should be seen by none" (Hdt.,
1.99). The structure of the hierarchical Persian regime
insured that each level-subjects, local officials, and regional
satraps-had dealings only with the ones immediately above
and below it. At Persepolis, the huge compound was not far
above the plain below and may have been surrounded by a
mud wall. This too was a closed site, open only at the king's
pleasure. An ancient commentator remarks that, "at Susa or
Ekbatana, the king was invisible to all," but everything was
arranged so that he "might see everything and hear everything. " 53 His viceroys, "the Great King's eyes/' 54 as
Aeschylus's Persians refers to them, were ever vigilant.
Even in the public audience hall, the Apadana, at
Persepolis, vision seems to have been obstructed by the many
columns and the distant ruler in the large, dark chamber
would not have been easily observed by his subjects. 55
Directions came from an unseen center from which attention
was also turned by the king's desire for unlimited expansion.
A long inscription describes "the palace which I [Darius] built
�64
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
at Susa" 56 of timber, gold, stone, ebony, and brick transported
from the far reaches of the empire. Unlike the Athenian
political records with their public accounts of the expenses
and inventories of Periclean buildings, there is no Persian
record of the architects, organization, or political context of
Persian building. In Persia, as in Egypt, the King's massive
construction projects, like his military campaigns, were facilitated by the unlimited, enslaved manpower at his command.
The eastern monarchy did not discuss its "public" buildings
any more than it discussed its foreign and military policy. It is
not surprising that Persia produced no narrative history or
drama and that among the extant ruins of its great buildings
there is no evidence of either assembly places or theaters.
Herodotus's observations about the buildings and
monuments of "barbarian" nations other than Persia are also
instructive about what was different about Athens' greatest
monument. Not surprisingly, the nomadic and under-civilized
Scythians had no temples or cities; residing in movable tents,
their only significant permanent places were their fathers'
gravesites (Hdt., 4.127). These itinerant non-builders were
also not producers of cloth. They made no linen or woolen
fabrics, both of which require a stationary economy, but
dressed themselves mostly in animal skins. Early Persians,
before the eras of the great buildings, also wore leather.
Croesus and the Lydian conquest softened tl1em into the
lovers of luxurious fabrics, robes, and slippers with which,
along with enormous palaces, the Greeks associated them. In
Lydia, the greatest building was a royal tomb constructed by
craftsmen and by prostitutes who worked on it to earn their
dowries (Hdt., 1.93). The walled city of Babylon had two
walled compounds within it, one for the royal palace, the
other for a stack of multiple towers, ziggurats. The latter
contained a huge temple for Zeus with a great gold statue of
the god and altars for sacrifice to him. Herodotus says Xerxes
took the statue and killed the priest who had forbidden him
to do so (Hdt., 1.181-2).
�FLAUMENHAFT
65
The most impressive buildings of the Egyptians were not
temples for gods, but massive memorials to the godlike kings
who built them. Thus, Moeris built a propylaia (gateway) to
the temple of Hephaestus as a memorial to himself (Hdt.,
2.101), and Cheops built pyramids, intending to preserve his
memory as a divinized ruler. Cheops used slave labor,
ordering all Egyptians to work only "for himself" (Hdt.,
2.124). Amasis, the last of the Egyptian kings described by
Herodotus, considered himself a "great lover of the Greeks"
(Hdt., 2.178). But Herodotus emphasizes how different
Egypt was: the sheer size of his propylaia and temple to
Athena at Sa'is, the "supernatural" (hyperphueas) size of its
stones, how long it took for two thousand men to transport
its building materials from great distances, and the many
colossal statues and hybrid man-headed sphinxes around the
temple. Herodotus was "amazed" at the huge shrine, made
from a single stone, outside the temple. It was said that one
of the workmen had been killed while trying, unsuccessfully,
to lever it into place (2.175). The story strikes an odd note,
given the thousands of anonymous slaves who lost their lives
to Egyptian projects. In Memphis, the statue of Hephaestus
measured seventy-five feet; it was so large that it had to lie flat
on its back in front of its admirably large temple (Hdt.,
2.176). Again and again, Herodotus associates the size and
character of the buildings of non-Greek peoples with their
political and religious character.
Now behold the Acropolis again, this time with the
completed Parthenon and surrounding buildings in place
upon it. From the top, all of Athens, including its boundaries,
would have been visible. The ancient city itself was walled,
and contiguous lands were contained between mountains and
the sea. Herodotus observes that the longest wall of the Great
King's private domain in Ekbatana was "about the length of
the wall that surrounds the city of Athens" (Hdt., 1.98,
emphasis added). Unlike the eastern empire that recognized
no natural boundary, Athens was open on the inside and
bounded-though accessible to outsiders-on the outside,
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
both physically and politically. Political life was not contained
in a closed palace, garden paradise, or tomb, where all
communication with the royal family was mediated by
officials or bodyguards. The sacred precinct upon the
Acropolis was articulated from its surroundings by its
elevation and by the grand gateway, the Propylaia, through
which it was entered. But, like the Agora, which was no more
than a ten or fifteen minute walk from any place in the city, 57
the Acropolis was accessible to all Athenians, to resident
aliens, metics who "dwelled among" (met-oikeo) them, and
to foreigners (xenoi) who visited from elsewhere. In festival
processions and athletic competitions, in battle, assembly, and
the theater, Athenians were on view to each other and direct
speech was the preferred medium of exchange. Unlike the
staircase to the Apadana, the stairs to the Propylaia invited
those who climbed them to enter and to look.
The new temple could be seen from everywhere in
Athens: from the lower hill on the Pnyx where the assembly
met, from the theater on the south slope of the Acropolis, and
even from the sea. Most other buildings in Athens were made
of dark wood and baked brown mudbricks. Rebuilt quickly
after the Persians went away, they were not made to be
looked at or to be visible from afar. Even the public buildings
in the Agora, including marble stoas, temples, and fountains,
would have had, at least from their location, a lower status
than the temple on the Acropolis. Various architectural
"refinements" that will not concern us here make the
Parthenon appear to be "springy" or to float skywards,
increasing its high status in the physical city. Because it is
located on the highest spot on the hill and near the edge of
the southern side where less traffic was possible, most views
of it from elsewhere on the Acropolis would not have
included other large structures. 58 Unlike the Agora, which
was planted with shade trees, the rocky hill above it did not
support trees or other vegetation-except Athena's olive.
There were, however, numerous smaller buildings,
monuments, and billboards, so that the ancient visitor's view
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67
would have been far more cluttered than what we see today.
As we have seen, some of this "clutter" functioned as a
"public archive in bronze and stone," 59 providing information, to those who could read, about the building projects
themselves.
The temple to Athena was not used for child sacrifices,
prostitution, or royal burials. Visitors to the Parthenon came
to deliver the birthday peplos to the goddess-and to look.
What they saw was themselves, both in the flesh and represented in local marble. The temple was not used for
worship of the goddess. Rather, like Aeschylus's play, it was a
"monument" or "reminder" of the city's collective defeat of
a different way of life, a house for a goddess who exemplified
what they regarded as a superior life for human beings. As we
shall see, the pictures of the Parthenon clearly distinguish
men and gods, humans and beasts, as well as male and female
human beings. Deified kings, as well as sphinxes, Centaurs,
and Amazons, are all rejected as hybrid; each in its own way
undermines human nature. Unlike the unlimited, enslaved,
yoked manpower that worked and died on Persian palaces
and Pharaohs' pyramids, the Parthenon work force, although
it certainly included slaves, consisted of citizens, resident
aliens, and foreigners as well, all paid for their labor. In
addition to the myths depicted on the temple, there are myths
about it. An old story tells how a mule that was resting from
its task of dragging heavy marble up to the building site came
back, of his own free will, to encourage his yokefellows in
their work. 60 Athenian civic propaganda, spread easily among
a small population whose politics consisted of constant talk,
insisted that even beasts of burden were enthusiastic participants in this project. Self-yoking in a noble cause is the theme
of the story that Athenian Solon tells Croesus about the
blessed brothers, Cleobis and Biton, who put themselves
"under the yoke" of a carriage to pull their mother to
worship at the temple of Hera (Hdt., 1.31). Another story
contrasts with that of the Egyptian laborer crushed in the
temple of Athena at Sa'is, where the goddess is present only in
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
the huge, inert statue (Hdt., 2.175). In Athens, in contrast,
Plutarch reports that, when the most zealous workman at the
construction site of the Propylaia entrance to the Acropolis
fell off the building, mortally injuring himself, Pericles was so
dispirited that the Goddess appeared to him in a dream and
told him how to heal the man (Piut. Pericles, XIII). The
popular myths repeatedly assert that Athena watched over
and took an active interest in the building of her city.
The dimensions of the new Parthenon were larger than
those of its predecessor so that it could accommodate the
statue that Phidias planned for it. But, like the city that
withstood the mixed and disproportionate Persian force, the
Parthenon is a monument to unity and proportion. In what
follows I shall not discuss the architecture itself, but concentrate on selected parts of the temple, in which "narrative"
depictions shape the viewers' collective memory of their
victory over the Persians. On the stage Aeschylus depicts
Persians who, although different from Athenians, are recognizable human beings like themselves. On the Parthenon, the
actors on the "stages" of the pediments and metopes on the
outer temple resemble the humans who view them, but are
super or sub-human in size or form. The inner walls of the
temple are the "stage" on which Athenians view themselves
engaged in the paradigmatic Athenian festival, the celebration
of Athena's birthday. As in Aeschylus's tragedy, the civic
clothing and dynamic "weaving" of Athenian democratic
politics is meant to look superior to the luxurious fabrics and
strong yoke of the Persian Empire. The most important ritual
fabric in Athens was woven to clothe the wooden image of
the goddess who watched over this city. Just as Aeschylus's
play represents the power and failure of Persia in the Queen's
robes and Xerxes' peplos, so the Parthenon's pediments,
metopes, and frieze, and the celebrated statue of the goddess
herself, make Athena's pep/as a politically significant artifact.
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69
2. Pediments: Before and Above the Polis
Although the Parthenon stands at the center of polis life, the
citizens who come to see it are made to look again, to re-view
their city in the light of what is outside it, both spatially and
temporally. Thus, the pediments, the triangular gables facing
outward east and west on the short sides of the temple, depict
the outermost context of the city, the cosmos in which the
bounded polis takes shape and flourishes. Unlike the
divinized Darius and Xerxes, who aspired to a realm as
extensive as Zeus's sky, the Parthenon assumes a realm that
transcends the limited human world. In two dramatic scenes
depicting well-known stories, the pediments exhibit divine
beings who have their primary location outside the city, above
the mortals whose affairs they are both spectators of and
participants in. These representations of the gods depict the
continual adjustment and balancing of different and complementary human qualities. They show how Athens became
Athena's city through the careful interweaving of all the other
gods-including those who seem antithetical to her waysinto a heterogeneous but viable whole. Although it depicts
opposition and strife among the gods, the "polytheism" of
the Parthenon is informed by a principle of a coherent,
unified cosmos. The "dramas" staged on the pediments do
not conclude in the mere defeat of one of the contesting
sides; the gods don't die. The victor wins by assimilating the
vanquished and adjusting the order of the world. We know
about the pediments from a few remarks of the traveler
Pausanias who saw them in the second century A.D., from
Jacques Carrey, who made drawings of them in 1674 before
they were largely destroyed in a gunpowder explosion in
1687, and from the damaged yet remarkable figures in
Athens, Paris, and the British Museum in London. Classicists
and archaeologists have put together a variety of plausible
scenarios for the two pediments. The non-expert can follow
their lead and think through, in a general way, what the intent
and effect of these scenes might have been.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
The pediments are populated with three-dimensional
sculptured figures. These are positioned at different angles,
some facing forward, others seen in profile. Some appear to
be moving towards the front triangular plane of the scene,
and some actually do penetrate it. The originals had attachments, some of which mnst also have projected outside the
plane. The triangular frame and the rounded character of the
sculptures remind one of theatrical tableaux; viewed more
closely, the sculptures might even have appeared to be
"rounder" than would distant actors who might appear flat in
a very large theater. The pediment figures are unusual in that
their backs, unseen after the sculptures were mounted, are
finished; like actors on a stage, they appear as "real"
personages, not just building ornaments. The "backdrop"
wall was originally painted bright red or blue, and the
colorful patterns painted on the sculpted clothing of the
figures would have stood out against it as costumed actors did
onstage. Tragic actors, like those in the Persians, are intelligible to the spectators, the "audience," primarily through
their heard speech. How do the silent pediment actors
"speak" to Athenians about the Persian wars of recent
memory and about the community that survived them?
The west pediment faces the spectator as he approaches
the Parthenon from the great (unfinished) entrance gate, the
Propylaia. His first view of the highest part of the "back" of
the temple (as it appears in descriptions and drawings) would
be a tableau of the contest between Athena and Poseidon,
who take center stage. The scene is set on the Acropolis.
Pausanias says their strife was for the "land," suggesting a
very early, almost proto-Athenian time. They are symmetrically flanked by horse-drawn chariots and gods. In the
narrowed corners are reclining river gods (and perhaps the
autochthonous king Kekrops), snakes, a sea monster, and
other figures associated with early legends of king Erechtheus
and his family: "The figures in the angles represent the royal
population of Athens before it was Athens. " 61 The contest
between Poseidon and Athena pits the natural abundance of
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71
surging fluidity against the artful prosperity of rooted solidity.
Fruit and oil, wooden boats and oars, will characterize
Athena's city, where speech and artful skill, techne, will shape
the sheer power and fertility of Poseidon. Thus, the victory of
Athena in this pre-political agon results not in the elimination
of the immortal god of the sea, bnt in his assimilation. On the
north side of the Acropolis both the olive tree and the salt
spring remained as reminders of the outcome. Travelers by
sea leaving or arriving at Athena's city would always see the
great temple of Poseidon on the cliff at Sounion. Equilibrium
rather than mere defeat is suggested by the position of the
contenders, both of whom remain upright in a "great
'Pheidian V'," 62 and by the way Poseidon's leg overlaps
Athena's, placing him in the foremost position. The pediment
suggests that balance in Athena's city involves harnessing
Poseidon for the city's benefit. But harnessing does not mean
simply yoking. Every visitor to the Parthenon remembered
that the Persians were defeated at sea, and that Athens'
greatness, in contrast to that of landlocked Persia, was the
result of her close and comfortable relation with Poseidon.
Unlike Xerxes and the Persians, Themistocles and the
Athenians knew that one doesn't "beat" or shackle the sea,
but collaborates with it by sailing and swimming. In the 4 70s,
after the maritime victory at Salamis, Athens may have
developed a Poseidon cult around the salt spring and the sign
of the trident,63 which, like the olive tree depicted in the
center of the pediment, remained visible on the Acropolis.
The west pediment memorializes the victory over Persia by
asserting that Athens succeeds under the supervision of gods
who transcend the city in time and place, but that, in Athens,
there is a time and place for all the gods.
The "front" east pediment also pictures a cosmic event,
"in the manner of classical drama ... played out in the course
of a single day." 64 The scene is Olympus. In the center, the
viewer would have seen a tableau that included Zeus, perhaps
seated on his throne, Athena, newly emerged from his head,
and Hephaestus holding the axe that liberated-and
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
delivered-her. With a mother named Metis, "craft" or
"wisdom," and gestation in the head of Zens, she comes into
the world as a manifestation of rational, self-reliant thought.
Just as the symmetry of Athena and Poseidon on the west
pediment conveys their simultaneous existence in Athens,
here the symmetry of Athena and Hephaestus around Zens
indicates that these two must be thought of together. "In
Athens, the birth of Athena makes a new god of Hephaestus,
for they share between them the patronage of all things made
by the hands. " 65 He is her midwife, but also the "working
partner to the newborn goddess of work. "66 Like the central
figures on the west pediment, the central group here is
flanked by an array of divinities, some individuals, and some
in groups carved from common blocks of marble. Tied
together, they suggest again that Athenian mortals look up to
a pantheon of complementary divinities. The east pediment's
location, Olympus, is a loftier mountain than the Acropolis of
the west pediment. It is far removed from the city around the
Acropolis, but the "explosion of power"" from the head of
Zeus affects not only the gods who have homes on Olympus.
"The event taking place between" Helios, the sun, in the
south angle and Selene, the moon, in the north "is ... an event
of cosmic significance. It is dawn. There is a new order on
Olympus. The coming of Athena has changed the world." 68
As we have seen, Athens commemorated Athena's birth
with a new dress, whose weaving and presentation provided
the city with an elaborate protocol for holding itself together.
The fast-moving, quick-thinking city of rationality and
progress here tied itself to tradition and repetition, to time.
The east pediment, like the festival and the Parthenon itself,
made the Athenians look backward as well as forward and
recognize their mortal limits. Thus, although the gods who
live forever have an endless future, time as it is depicted on
the east pediment is cyclical, not linear. Just as Athena's
victory on the west pediment does not simply banish
Poseidon, here on the east "Light does not banish darkness
from the world, for neither can exist without the other." 69
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73
Dawn, like Athena's birthday, always comes round again. But
although the gods do not die, even they tire and retire when
the sun goes down. Nothing captures this quite so well as the
immortal but weary horse of Selene's chariot, about to sink
under the night horizon in the northern angle of the
pediment. The horse breaks the plane and thus the distancing
frame of the pediment, and seems to reach into our world.
Viewers have always loved him, for although his days are not
numbered like ours, he expresses weariness as we too know
it.
Like the Persians, the Parthenon suggests "weaving" as an
image for the holding together of a human community. One
of the most astonishing things about the pediments is the
sculptured clothing, a trademark of Pheidias's style
throughout the Parthenon. Unlike the stiff Persian costumes
and royal gear that obscure nature with conventional wealth
in Aeschylus's dramatic depiction, the fabrics pictured here
reveal the bodies they cover. Iris's clinging, blowing dress,
Hestia's light, crinkly crepe under heavier woolen folds, and
Amphytrite's belted peplos amaze the viewer with the art of
the sculptor, who imitates soft fabrics in stone, but also with
the art that weaves real soft fabrics of cloth, the art of Athena
herself. Through the draperies, and probably through the
"embroidered" patterns that were painted upon them, the
groups of sculptures could unify "motifs involving a complex
dramatic action and including many interlocking
figures ... Pheidias invented a plastic means by which a scene
composed of many parts could be transformed into a single
powerful image." 70 Their flowing garments and the variety of
angled positions make the three goddesses on the east
pediment (perhaps Hestia, Dione, and Aphrodite) seem to
"weave" in and out among each other (Figure 2). We shall see
something similar in the low relief frieze inside the
Parthenon. Like the Athenian pantheon and Pheidias's sculptured tableaux of these gods, the weaver's art combines many
elements into a coherent whole. The politics of the city that
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
FIGURE 2 (Courtesy of A. Nicgorski)
fabricated the Parthenon sculptures and Athena's woven
peplos did something similar: it fabricated its way of life by
weaving together free speech in the political deliberation of
free individuals. Entirely different are the lined up, repetitious figures on the Persepolis Apadana staircase. Unlike the
lovely, varied, and flexible materials of the Parthenon, their
stiff, identical robes do not convey the famed beauty of
Persian weaving. In contrast to the dramatic tableaux vivants
of the Olympians on the pediments and the Athenians and
gods on the frieze (to be discussed below), even in Persia's
most accomplished works of art, the Persians remain
arbitrarily and stiffly yoked together, just as they are said to
be in Aeschylus's play.
3. Metopes: Outside the Polis
The outer sides of the temple display what's outside: earthly
alternatives that threaten to invade and destroy Athena's
polis. Wrapping around the outermost upper wall of the
Parthenon, below the pediments, is a horizontal band of
ninety-two squares, thirty-two on the long sides and fourteen
on the short. These metopes, seen "between the holes" or
"between the eyes," are separated from each other by slabs of
three vertical bars called "triglyphs," which frame each scene.
Originally painted in bright, contrasting colors, the figures on
the metopes were far more distinct than they appear today.
Each square presents a framed static scene, a snapshot, to the
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75
spectator who can view one whole side at the same time, or
each picture in the band, as he circles the temple. The
metopes are carved in high relief and most do not appear in
the round as the theatrical pediment statues do. Here, too,
the effect is sometimes compared to the changing scenes in a
drama, but now the scenes remain in place while the
spectator moves. Another difference is that in the theater the
scenes follow one another in time, suggesting causal relations
between them, while the metopes are freestanding or paired
images that do not depict a sequential narrative in time. The
central scene of Aeschylus's play is central in time; the center
of a band of metopes is central in space, although, as we shall
see, on the south side, it may represent a different time, but
one related in theme, to those around it. Like the play, the
metopes can be seen as four sets or "acts," each depicting a
particular conflict between Greeks (or their champions) and a
particular enemy: on the east, gods and Giants; on the north,
Greeks and Trojans, on the west, Greeks and Amazons, and
on the south, Lapiths and Centaurs. These subjects appear
repeatedly in the Parthenon and in other fifth-century
buildings. The threats depicted are all analogues to the
Persian invasion depicted by Aeschylus. The play uses words
to depict the unseen Greek alternative to the Persians seen on
stage. But the metopes depict the Greeks as well as their
would-be destroyers. Each set can also be "read," like
Herodotus's inquiries, as the struggle between the civilized
Greek city and a particular deficient alternative to the life it
regards as human.
All four sets depict battles with mythological enemies. On
three sides, mortal victors defeat mortal enemies. But on the
east wall, the final destination of visitors to the Parthenon, the
viewer would have faced the early cosmic conflict in which
the Giants, sons of Gaia, the Earth, arose to challenge the
hegemony of the heavenly Olympian gods. As we have seen,
the great "Cyclopean" foundations of the Acropolis were
reminders of Athena's victory and harnessing of Giant power
in the service of her city. In some versions of the legend the
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Giants are defeated and imprisoned in the locations of
volcanoes. The primitive Giants are the first depiction on the
metopes of an attempt of massive force to overcome divine or
human civilization. Their eruptions are associated more with
the powers of nature than with intentional evil. They cannot
be simply destroyed, but are containable and even usable.
Little remains of the eastern metopes, but their theme
appeared repeatedly on the Parthenon, most notably on the
great statue's shield and on the peplos itself." Thus, every
element of the east side of the Parthenon refers the ultimate
prosperity of Athenian civilization to the divine. Beneath the
birth of Athena on the east pediment and behind the Giant
metopes, the viewer would see the culminating panels of the
interior frieze, picturing the Olympian gods towards whom
the procession of Athenians moves. And through the east
doorway, beneath the pediment, frieze, and metopes, in the
innermost part of the temple, he would view the statue of the
Goddess herself. Nowhere on the Parthenon does any
historical human being become an immortal, as did the
mythical Heracles, who probably was depicted helping
Athena overcome the Giants. And unlike the giant representations of Darius and Xerxes in Persia, there are no enlarged
portraits of identifiable individual human beings.
Themistocles, not named but clearly referred to in
Aeschylus's play, is not identifiable on the Parthenon, and
Pericles, as we have seen, is present only in the spirit of the
project. 71 Nowhere is it suggested that human rule might
extend indefinitely, like that of Zeus or the Great King's
dreams. In the stories depicted on the Parthenon and in the
contained inward focus of the building itself, Athens differentiates itself from its recent Persian enemy. As we shall see,
the story of the Parthenon itself and of the politics of its
construction under Pericles suggests an Athens that will need
to expand its own aims, even as it remembers its defeat of
unlimited expansion. As the articulated and delimited city
moved towards its own version of empire, its relationship
with the goddess and gods of the eastern "front" of the
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77
Parthenon would shift radically from that celebrated in its
memorial monument in the decades immediately following
the Persian War.
For the conflict between mortal human beings, the
designers of the Parthenon's north metopes (the ones facing
the Athenian Agora) selected the war with the Trojans, a
people who are the same as their Greek enemies in their
nature, physis, but whose conventions, nomoi, like those of
the Persians, represent a different way of life. Although the
Trojan War was a Greek invasion, it was viewed as a response
to a previous "invasion" on the part of the Trojans since
Paris's violation was thought to undermine all civilized
custom. Thus, some of the surviving slabs show Menelaus,
Helen, and Paris. The historical and mythological Trojans
were an eastern patriarchal monarchy that, in some respects,
resembled Persia. Homer depicts the "Trojans" as a mixed,
polyglot, loosely combined force from many different places.
In contrast, the Greeks, although from many cities, are ethnically coherent; they speak the same language, function as a
political community, and coordinate their military efforts. 73
Like Aeschylus's Persians and Herodotus's Inquiries, the
Parthenon's north metopes depict an alternative human
culture in order to think about the customs most appropriate
to human nature.
The anthropology of the remaining metopes, the
Amazons of the west and Centaurs of the south sides, depicts
mythical beings that resemble, but are not quite, human
beings. Unlike the Trojans and Persians, they represent a
difference in kind-in nature-rather than in custom. The
first are entirely human, but entirely female, rejecting life
with males of their own kind. The second are entirely male,
but are hybrids of human and beast. Athenian civic
mythology had long depicted Amazons and Centaurs as
enemy invaders and threats to Athens and to Theseus, its
founding king. The metopes, like the tragic dramas, assume
familiarity with these stories, but they do not dramatize
incidents involving particular heroes. Little remains of the
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Amazon metopes, but a brief consideration of what they
represent will help to understand the unified thought of the
Parthenon and to set the stage for the better preserved
Centaurs.
The Amazons are liberated women. In contrast to the
typical Athenian confinement of women and their children
within the home, these untamed, unmarried horsewomen
hunt, fight, and even mate in the open air, rejecting the
confinements of the polis, of buildings generally, of conventional female clothing, and even of their own bodies. Their
name seems to refer to their custom of removing the right
breast; the breast-less (a-mastos) woman could more easily
pull a bow or throw a javelin, typically Persian weapons, as
opposed to Athenian hoplite spears. The voluntary mastectomies are reminiscent of Persian castrations described by
Herodotus; the exclusion of males and the isolation of the
Amazons also require denaturing and mutilation. Some depictions of Amazons show two breasts, exposed in a way
unthinkable for ordinary Athenian women. In others, they
appear in pants, short belted jackets, and pointed caps, and
have pale skin as opposed to the outdoors tans of Athenian
men.74 Athenian artists often pictured Amazons in Persian
dress and hats in order to mock the latter as effeminate.
Athenian mythology credited the defeat of the Amazon
invasion of Athens to Theseus, and located his victory on the
hill of the quintessentially masculine war god Ares, the rocky
platform just below the Acropolis. In the Oresteia Aeschylus
depicts the establishment of the Athenian court on the
Areopagus and makes clear that its supersession of the female
Furies is a critical step in the development of civic justice in
the Athenian polis. The defeat of the Amazons by the male
founder of Athens invites two questions.
The first concerns the truth of the common claim that
Athens simply assumed male superiority and that women
were regarded as inferior human beings. There is no doubt
that Athens was a male hoplite culture; men fought its wars,
spoke in its assembly, met in its markets, socialized in its
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79
gymnasia and symposia, wrote for and performed in its
theater, and designed and built its temples. Women, in
contrast, spent their time at home, indoors, among other
women and female and young male children. They had no
property rights, did not take part in public deliberation, and
were certainly less articulate and less visible than their fathers
and brothers, husbands and sons. The myths about au
Amazonian alternative to such a life are not surprising. But it
is misleading to claim that Athens aims to exclude women as
it does the half-humans and barbarians on the outside of the
temple. There is a difference between differentiation and
exclusion. Athens and its myths distinguish appropriate
realms for male and female human beings, but they do not
attempt to eradicate the female. Amazons are excluded
because they attempt to exclude the male from human life.
Their defeat by Theseus resulted not in the elimination of
women, but in their integration into a human life that
includes both sexes. In the carefully revised civic legends that
replaced the hyper-masculine, godlike Heracles with Theseus,
the unequivocally human founder marries the Amazon queen.
She and her comrades live on in what, from the perspective
of egalitarian modernity, looks like a subordinate position.
But Athenian drama and religion make clear that women are
necessary, not just as producers of children, the only role for
which the Amazons reluctantly acknowledged their need for
men, but for civilized life as the Athenians saw it.
Once again, women's work offers an appropriate
metaphor. The communal fabric is woven from warp and
weft: each requires the other; they have different jobs to do.
One is upright, stiff, a visible support; the other is horizontal,
more pliant, weaves in and out, sometimes behind the scenes,
sometimes visible. Modern technology has gone a long way
to liberate the sexes from their strictly differentiated natures;
how far is yet to be seen. But in fifth-century Athens, where
Persians had to be repelled by hand-to-hand combat, and
where birth control, frozen foods, and mass-produced textiles
were not available, division of labor follows from natural
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
differences bet\veen the sexes. Differentiation may require
hierarchy. But we shonld also note that refusing to medize
included rejecting polygamy, as well as effeminate dress and
luxury. This snggests that polis life inclnded a developed
sense of the individnal worth of women as well as of men,
however constricted the lives of the former now appear. As
we have seen, the Panathenaic festival included, and even
featured, women. Only they could perform certain civic
fnnctions, including the most intimate ministering to the
patron goddess. The peplos had to be made, not by slaves, but
by female "citizens with known ancestry" who performed
this rite, "not for themselves, bnt for the city. It is the ritnal
that distinguishes the women of Athens from the women of
other states ... it is a ritual in which women and men both play
important roles." 75 However dominant the males of Pericles'
city were, its women were present and visible. The Amazons,
we must conclude, are on the outside, partly because they are
women who relocate themselves from inside to outside, but
also because they are women who attempt to remove
themselves from the full hnman condition, that is, from a
civic life that interweaves, however hierarchically, men and
women.
A second question about these warrior women is that of
their relation to Athens' patron, the warrior goddess, Pallas
Athena. Is she to be considered the paradigmatic Amazon? A
complicated answer is suggested by the different, but
overlapping, aspects of her presence on the Acropolis. In the
early days, worship of Athena Polias seems to have taken
place in the old Erechtheion temple where the olivewood
statue resided, and where Athenians brought multitudes of
little statuettes as offerings to her, seeking, perhaps,
protection, like that sought by later generations when the
Parthenon was sanctified as "Our Lady of Athens." During
her great annual festival, the women bathed her, applied
cosmetics, and dressed her in traditional female garb and
jewelry. She was human-sized or smaller and was associated
with female fertility, agriculture, and domestic prosperity in
�FLAUMENHAFT
81
peacetime. She may have been seated and she carried no
shield or weapons. There is nothing of the Amazon about her.
Another Athena, called the Promachos, "foremost
fighter," was a large bronze statue made by Pheidias perhaps
as a thank-offering for the Greek victory at Marathon. This
one stood outdoors on the western side of the Acropolis. Her
armed figure, the Centauromachy pictured on her shield, and
the Persian spoils displayed around her base, 76 suggest the
more masculine task of defending Athens. Although she is
more a symbol of public military strength than an object of
worship and private protector like the Polias, here she seems
relaxed, a secure victor over Persian invaders rather than an
aggressor in her own right. Her shining spear and helmet
were visible to ships sailing towards the city as they passed
Cape Sunium. 77 This Athena is no more suggestive of the
Amazons than the Polias is. In action, Athena as battle god
differed from her brother, the bowman Apollo. Walter Otto
long ago suggested "immediacy" as the feminine element of
her fighting spirit. 78 Unlike the "far-shooting" god, and unlike
Amazons and Persians, both of whom fought with bows and
arrows, Athena shows up near at hand among those she
champions, both women and men, as she does at Homer's
Troy and Aeschylus's Salamis.
The temple Pericles built in the decades after Salamis
housed the third Athena on the Acropolis, Pheidias's most
famous statue of Athena, the Parthenos, "maiden"; unlike the
Amazons, she is comfortable with a roof over her head. We
shall consider the colossal image when we arrive at the
innermost chamber of the Parthenon. For now, let us merely
raise the question: is she the divine image of the ordinarily
reclusive, fierce but shy, race of women warriors of Athenian
legend? Or is she something new, an Athenian god on the
march, ready to leave her home and city, the Promachos of
the post-Parthenon empire that Pericles sees as the natural
successor of the Persian one that failed in Athens?
The south metopes, which depict women merely as the
occasion for masculine conflict, have survived in good
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
enough condition to convey some idea of what they once had
to say. The thirty-two tableaux depict a well-known legend,
the battle between the Lapiths and their half-brothers, the
Centaurs, who, like Theseus's friend, the Lapith king
Pirithous, were fathered by Ixion. 79 Demanding a share in the
kingdom, they made war on the more civilized branch of the
family until an uneasy truce was established. In a foolish
gesture of reconciliation, Pirithous invited the estranged
relatives to his wedding, but the unruly Centaurs got drunk,
wrecked the party, and attempted to carry off Pirithous's
bride and the other Lapith women. Although the panels do
not present a continuous linear narrative of this event or its
outcome in the defeat of the Centaurs, they are arranged in
pairs, triplets, and groups by their composition and subjects.
All but one contain only two opposed figures, and that one,
east 21 (moving to the right, facing the south side of the
temple), concludes a central set of nine panels in which the
Centauromachy is not the subject. We reserve this mysterious
center for the end of our discussion.
As we have seen in Aeschylus's play and on the
Parthenon, Athenians associated their Persian enemies with
the fully human Amazons. Like Persian Xerxes, Trojan Paris,
and Amazon women, the male Centaurs disrupt marriage and
hospitality as the foundations of the human city. 80 But, for
several reasons, they seem even more alien. However
lopsided the Amazon attempt to avoid the limitations of
ordinary mature female lives, they are recognizably human in
form, belong to a coherent community, and make arrangements for its continuity. The Centaur seems more a member
of a herd than of a community. His hybrid body combines a
mature human nature with a mature beastly one. The result,
as pictured in the metopes, undermines rather than enhances
human wholeness. The Amazon isolates herself from the male
half of humanity; the Centaur combines male halves of two
different kinds. Aeschylus's play and the Persian Queen's
dream raise the question of whether different nations of
human beings can be viably yoked together to form a
�FLAUMENHAFT
83
coherent human regime. The Parthenon Centaurs depict a
"yoking" of two different kinds that is incapable of coherent
human life. Egyptian and Assyrian art often represent hybrids
of different animals and of animals and humans in the service
of humans. Persian monsters of this kind are found in eaglefaced lions and human-headed bulls in Pasargadae and
Persepolis. But on the Parthenon such a combination is the
enemy and would-be destroyer of civilized human life.
In contrast to the bodies of the Lapiths, who are beautiful
even in their painful twisting, the bodies of the Centaurs lack
unity and proportion. Combining the upright and horizontal
forms of its progenitors, the Centaur lacks the full powers of
either orientation. Like snapshots or scenes in a dramatic
pageant, the metopes freeze moments of violent action,
exhibiting the peculiarity of Centaur posture: they cannot
stand or kneel like men; they can rear like horses. Although
all Centaurs are man above and horse below, there are early
depictions (not on the Parthenon) with human forelegs. From
the front, these might look more human, but from the side,
they appear even less unified, since their nether parts are also
dual. Both combinations viewed from the side or rear present
not one whole, natural being, but a beast with two backs.
The most human parts of the Parthenon Centaurs are the
faces. Although some are grotesque and mask-like, while
others are said to be "sensitive" or "grandfatherly," several
features emphasize their un-emerged humanity, or their
reversion to bestiality. Their heads are set low on their
shoulders and are less visibly articulated from their bodies by
necks than those of the humans (south 26, 29, 31). Unlike the
dean-shaven faces of the young Lapiths, the Centaurs are
bearded; they look older and shaggy and the beards further
obscure the articulation of their heads. 81 In south 31 the
bearded head of the Centaur is hard to grasp, but the Centaur
has the Lapith by the throat (Figure 3). Rationality seems
pulled down or sunken into their violent, marauding Centaur
bodies. A recent interpreter claims that the more "human"
faces among the mask-like, ferocious ones are evidence that
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
the sculptors did not
view these problematic
beings as uniformly alien
and hostile, or offer an
"easy apology for human
superiority," and asks
"whether they [centaurs]
should be construed as
other at all." 82 It seems
more correct to say that
the occasionally human
expressions underline
the grotesqueness of FIGURE 3 (Courtesy of A. Nicgorski)
their bestial behavior,
just as Xerxes' pain at his disastrous failure intensifies the
audience's understanding of what is wrong with his grotesque
project. Persian violations are the result of human nature
aspiring to the super-human; Centaur violations are the result
of human nature sunk into the subhuman. In both cases,
hybris characterizes the hybrid.
The sunken heads are emphasized even more by the
prominent rear ends of the Centaurs. Their upright human
torsos are short and the heavy bulk of their horizontal horse
bodies pulls them groundward. Even when rearing or
bucking, they are not taller than their human opponents.
Many originally had carved hairy tails that protruded out of
the frames of the deeply carved reliefs. Some interpreters
associate the tails with the supposed phallic character of the
Centaurs, deriving their name from the Greek word for
"goad" or "prick" (kentros), and relating it to obscene phallic
jokes that play on their name and sexually aggressive
character. 83 But interestingly, many of the Centaurs do not
have prominent or even visible genitals, as do most of the
Lapiths, who are often pictured in full frontal nudity. \Vhen
the Centaur organs of generation are visible, they are in
equine location. The early Centaurs with human front legs
raise the odd possibility of two different sets of genitals. One
�FLAUMENHAFT
85
would expect that these organs would be of great interest,
given the virile potency of the horse component, as well as
the hybrid nature of the combination. The relative lack of
attention to the genitalia of the Parthenon Centaurs reminds
the viewer that there are no accounts, as there are for
Amazons, of communities of Centaurs. After the first mating
of Ixion, references to females or to reproduction are rare.
The human torsos of the Parthenon Centaurs have navels
indicating their generation. But whatever their own
genealogy is, it seems that Centaurs, like mules and other
hybrids, are themselves sterile dead ends. Amazons do not
marry, but they generate and raise children; Centaurs do
neither: they rape.
Finally, the Parthenon Centaurs seem remarkably
unsexual in their attack on the Lapith women. The
impression the metopes give is more of disrupted communal
festivity, marauding violence, and theft than of lust; more
unfamiliarity with the celebratory social use of wine by a
civilized community, than a coordinated attempt to provide
themselves with women. This is not the rape of Sabines taken
for marriage to perpetuate a community. The two slabs that
do depict Centaurs with women (south 25, 29) show only the
attempted abduction and call attention to the awkwardness of
any actual coupling. Viewed as a whole, these metopes
suggest that the sculptors are more interested in depicting the
opposition of male bodies than the violation of female ones.
Like the pediment sculptures, the metopes are extraordinary in their representation of drapery, the fabric that
indicates the presence of differentiated but coordinated activities of men and women in a well-fabricated human
community. The nude bodies of the Lapiths are repeatedly
displayed against the fabric of woven capes made by the
mothers and wives they are fighting to protect. Kenneth
Clark's distinction between nudity and nakedness 84 reminds
us that the visible bodies of the Lapiths are not merely
exposed as those of animals would be. Rather, they suggest
the freedom and equality of citizen soldiers on view to each
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
other. Like the Athenian youths who performed a nude
armed dance at the Pauathenaia, they exhibit their readiness
to protect their threatened community. 85 In contrast to the
"nude" Lapiths, the half-animal bodies of the Centaurs, with
their lifelike muscles, hairs, and veins, would look strikingly
"naked." They are unfettered by the yokes, reins, and bridles
with which, elsewhere on the temple, human masters have
"clothed" their animals. On the frieze, these signs of human
domination were made more visible through the use of paint
or real reins or bridles attached to the stone with bronze
rivets. Two of the best-executed and best-preserved metopes
demonstrate some of the themes sketched above. Both focus
our attention on woven cloth as a sign of civilized humanity.
The composition of south 27, the sixth slab from the eastern
corner, positions the Lapith and Centanr combatants so that
their bodies pull away from rather than turn upon each other
as Poseidon and Athena do in the West Pediment (Figure 4).
The Centaur appears to be trying to remove a spear from his
back, and the Lapith is about to strike him again. All the
features described above-the upright posture of the man,
supported by his two sturdy legs, the exposed human genitals,
the unusually low horizontality of the beast, the sunken
Centaur head-are present here as in other panels. But the
remarkable pulling
apart of the two
bodies allows the
sculptor to concentrate attention on
the full folds of the
long cape worn by
the youth; the eye
falls especially on
the curved vertical
folds between the
figures. The cloth,
as well as the fact
that the nude man
FIGURE 4 (Courtesy of A. Nicgorski)
�FLAUMENHAFT
87
is carved in much
higher relief than the
Centaur behind him,
separates and makes
him stand forth from
his surroundings as the
naked beasts never do.
In his almost threedimensional
roundness, this man
resembles pediment
gods or human stage
actors. The open cape
FIGURE 5 (Courte-sy of A. Nicgorski)
reveals his articulated
human body and its dominating and generative powers, but
attests also to human shame and the recognition that, for the
human, cover and exposure are appropriate in different
circumstances. Finally, the sculptor's craft has represented in
its own medium the product of the weaver's craft: soft,
folded, perishable cloth is captured in hard, rigid, permanent
marble. In their drunken rampage, the Centaurs have
scattered weapons and jugs about the wedding feast turned
war. Techne, in the form of weapons, wine, and weavings, is
the trademark of the human; mere force characterizes the
non-human.
South 28 (Figure 5) functions as a partner to 27. Stunned
or dead, a Lapith youth lies flat on the ground, legs useless,
arms pinned under him, genitals flaccid, head tipped back.
Under him is his crumpled cloak, likely to be his burial
shroud when the battle is over. A bucking Centaur, naked
chest erect and arm stretched out like the Lapith's in 27,
towers above the youth. His carved tail, miraculously intact
over the centuries, stands out in triumph, and he grasps a
bowl from the wedding feast, perhaps the domestic "weapon"
with which he felled the Lapith. Unlike some depictions of
Centaurs, the ones on the Parthenon are not shaggy. 86 For the
most part, they are naked and unprotected. Therefore, the
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
most striking feature of this panel is the extraordinary wild
panther skin that hangs upside down from the Centaur's
outstretched arm. Part shield, part cloak, it is the complete
antithesis of the fabricated cloth that signals the human, even
more so since parts of it hang in folds reminiscent of the cloth
in other metopes. Here a wild hybrid carries the barely transformed skin of a wild beast, another violently killed victim
who never self-consciously faced his killer as human
combatants do. The open-fanged jaws and outstretched claws
of the dead panther hang directly over the face of the dead
Lapith, emphasizing the confrontation of the wild and the
civilized. Finally, the combination of man and beast in the
triumphant Centaur appears even more monstrous by the
additional limbs and tail provided by the draped panther skin.
Moving one more slab to the right, the spectator would
have faced, in south 29, another frozen moment. An elderly
Centaur with short, flabby torso and bald, bearded head low
on his chest abducts a struggling young Lapith woman. Her
vulnerability and violation are indicated by her torn peplos
and exposed naked shoulder and breast. Greek art often
displays the kalokagathos-the "noble and good" mannude, as he would have displayed himself in the gymnasium.
Respectable women, the wives, mothers, and daughters
whose lives were more secluded than those of the men,
usually appear clothed, only partly visible to observers. The
Lapith girl's crinkly dress reveals her spread legs, although, as
we have suggested, the Centaur seems more intent on robbery
than on sexual assault. All his strength is concentrated in his
left arm and the hand that restrains her powerless hand and
holds up her body as he attempts to gallop away. On this
Centaur's back, balancing the crinkly dress pressed against his
chest, is one of those capes that appear on some of the other
metope Centaurs. The garment does not fall naturally on the
Centaur's back; rather, this beast with two backs is cloaked
only on its human shoulders. Unlike the capes that "frame"
the vertical bodies of the nude humans, this one grotesquely
emphasizes the monster's hybrid nature; the naked horseflesh
�FLAUMENHAFT
89
of its nether part interrupts its downward flow. The
"piecrust" edging on the cape will be seen as the characteristic decoration of the cloaks of the young Athenian
horsemen of the frieze. Once recognized as a mark of the
civilized city and its citizens, it appears even more anomalous
on the horse-men that threaten civilized life.
The greatest mystery about the south metopes concerns
the apparent intrusion of seemingly unrelated material in
south 13 through 21. Unfortunately, these scenes are known
only through the Carrey drawings, which reveal that the
center panels of the Centauromachy contain no Centaurs.
Jeffrey Hurwit reviews suggestions that these panels are
dramatically (or cinematographically) coherent as a "mythological 'flashback"' in the manner of "similar debriefings in
the choral odes of tragedies," and that they may have
presented the background story of Ixion and his descendents,
or of "early Athenian kings and heroes."87 He suggests that
the central panels are not intrusive at all, but relevant to the
central purpose of the Parthenon: the celebration of Athena
and her city is itself a paradigmatic civic activity. Thus, these
carvings may depict Athena and her cult statues. South 19-21
may "have represented the spinning of cloth, the removal of
a robe or pep/as in a roll from a loom" and the "disrobing of
a stiff, old-fashioned cult-statue (the Athena Polias) in anticipation of the presentation of a new dress: the central events
of the Plynteria and Panathenaia come to mind. " 88 As we shall
see, these events are represented also at the final destination
of the Athenian procession on the east end of the frieze. If, as
I have suggested, the Parthenon repeatedly uses woven fabric
and the women who weave it as images of the interwoven
elements of a coherent enduring community, female woolworkers and dressers at the center of the male
Centauromachy make sense. From both ends and at the
center of the south side of the Parthenon, the violent
Centaurs undermine the foundations of human society:
hospitality, marriage, weaving, and civic religion.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
4. Frieze: Within the Polis
At the outermost and highest position of the temple's short
east and west ends, the pediments and their sculptures in-theround point to what is beyond and above the city. The
external band of "framed" metopes carved in high relief
below them on all four sides of the temple depict the
struggles of the civilized polis to maintain itself against terrestrial threats in the shape of fully and partially human aliens.
Within the columns on the inner structure a three-foot-high
ribbon of pictures carved in low relief also wraps around the
temple. The frieze is continuous, broken visually only at the
four corners of the building. But since it is viewed from
outside and below, through the columns, it is also seen as a
series of separate scenes like the metopes and like the articulated episodes of Aeschylus's play. Like the Persians, which
differs from most tragedies by depicting a contemporary
historical rather than a distant mythical event, the frieze
differs from other Greek friezes in depicting a contemporary
subject; it is a "documentary"" in real place and time: "For
the first time in Greek history, it shows mortal human
beings." 90 On the inside of the temple we view the city from
the inside, at home, at peace: a terrestrial, civilized
community attached to and defined by a particular locale.
In the play Athens views Persians and examines itself
indirectly by looking at them. On the Parthenon frieze Athens
looks directly at itself. The Parthenon frieze shows victorious
Athenians rather than defeated Persians. The Persians are now
remembered, not by preserving ruins and abstaining from
civic rituals, but by restoring these rituals at-and even onthe temple. The setting is, once again, the Acropolis. The
festival procession that had to be abandoned "when the
Persians came" now makes its way through all the important
public places in the city, serving once more, but with special
meaning, "as a symbolic reappropriation of the city's space by
the community." 91 Mourning memory has given way to
festive memory. The frieze replaces the flight of the people
and Athena from the city to Salamis with the procession of
�FLAUMENHAFT
91
the reestablished populace to the new home of the goddess at
the center of the city.
Like Pericles' funeral oration, the city on the frieze does
not emphasize individuality; unlike those of the Centaurs and
even the horses, the Athenian faces on the frieze are indistinguishable from each other. 92 Also, unlike the metopes with
their opposed pairs, the frieze contains all the elements of a
coherent population organized into groups. In characteristic
clothing, young and old, male and female, magistrates and
citizens, warriors and weavers, and even resident aliens who
call this city home, make their way to the east front of the
temple. The frieze resembles a story·cloth, wrapped around
an enclosed form. Like the city and the building itself, it
emphasizes the boundedness of the city. The observer circumnavigates the sides, looking inward towards the center. 93 As
we have seen, the final pomp€, "procession," of Aeschylus's
tragedy depicts the disintegration of the Persian regime and
the shamed ruler's retreat in his tattered pep/as into the
private confines of his palace, out of the view of those he has
ruined. In contrast, the Panathenaia pomp€ on the frieze
depicts an integrated regime in the act of delivering a new
pep/as to the goddess and openly displaying the "ruler"-the
demos, "people," itself-to the public view.
In the Persians, the dramatic action moves forward; the
scenes change, while the spectator remains stationary. On the
Parthenon, the procession is frozen into stationary stone. But
as the spectators move forward towards the front of the
temple, the frieze procession itself seems to advance. 94 The
spectators in the theater are simultaneously in their own time
and that of the play. Likewise the viewers at the temple are in
both the time of their own procession and the time of the
procession on the frieze. Like the play and the east pediment,
the frieze respects the unity of time, and its action too has a
beginning (at the southwest corner), middle (on the north
and south sides), and end (on the east where the two sides
meet). Unlike the framed metopes, which depict separate
episodes, the Ionic frieze is a "seamless whole" that can
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
present a narrative in "a continuous spatial and temporal
flow." 95 "Everything here is ongoing; everything is process.""
Various participants turn in different directions, adjust their
clothing, and wait, like actors, for their cues. Marshals
motion them forward, cavalry and chariot horses wait
patiently or rear restlessly, trained acrobats jump on and off
chariots, and a sacrificial ox digs in its heels.
A selective discussion will once more highlight the way
the frieze "remembers" the Persians and defines Athens in the
same "vocabulary"-this time pictorial-of yokes, woven
fabric, and speech. Again, comparisons with Persian visual art
prove instructive. The designers of the Parthenon and many
other Athenians were familiar with the great buildings of the
eastern empire, and it is likely that some of those who carved
its marbles had earlier worked on Persian buildings. Was the
Parthenon frieze "an ideological reply to the creation of their
old enemy," 97 or, after Athens had avoided the Persian yoke,
was "Persian imperial propaganda ... appropriated and
adapted by nco-imperialist Athens for the purposes of
promoting her own self-image"? 98 On the peripheral
pediments, metopes, and frieze of the great democratic
temple, the differences from Persian buildings are more
striking than the suggested "appropriations." But, as we shall
see, in the innermost chamber of the temple, the viewer is
sharply aware that Athens, too, "required an empire, but an
empire different from any that had ever existed." 99
Let us look again at the relief on the Apadana (throne
room) staircase at Persepolis. It depicts foreigners in
procession, bearing gifts to the Persian king. Their clothing is
repetitive, stiff, and stylized; no animated human body is
revealed or enhanced by the heavy robes of the Persians or
the simple tunics of their subjects. The foreign groups are
distinguished from each other in dress, gifts, and the animals
that accompany them but, like Xerxes' army of soldiers, they
are all alike in the most important respect, their enslavement.
They march stiffly, in single file, all in the same position, at
the same distance from each other. 100 The individuals are
�FLAUMENHAFT
93
isolated even as they form a unit. The loss or addition of a
few figures would have little effect for, like Xerxes' armies,
they are not woven together into a coherent whole. Their
sameness suggests that the army of craftsmen who made them
were also "under the yoke." The figures are clearly carved,
with beards, hands, and feet making pleasing decorative
patterns like those in interior tiling or wallpaper. But they
lack animation and will of their own, neither gesturing to nor
speaking with one another. Individual figures or groups are
regularly tepeated so there is no narrative in time, no illusion
of motion. The effect is mesmerizing and intimidating, and
reduces the viewer to "gaze in something like awe-from
prostration level." 101 Another Persepolis relief shows Persian
subjects carrying the king on his throne. They too are all the
same; he is unique, above, and much larger than they. They
serve as the patterned architectural support on which his
weight presses.1 02
The difference in size is also seen in a rock relief at
Bisutun on which captured rebel kings approach Darius.l 03
The location of this impressive carving is itself interesting. It
sits high on a cliff overlooking a mountain, inaccessible, like
the Persepolis Apadana, to the sight of Persians as if it were
meant for the realm to which the King aspired-the whole
world. Unlike the Parthenon in the middle of Athens, this
monument in the middle of nowhere-or everywhere-bears
an inscription, the same words that begin all public utterances
of the King: "Proclaims Darius the king ... " The picture of the
diminished and yoked human beings before him conveys the
same political principle as the words: absolute despotism. On
the Persepolis staircase the camels, mules, and horses are
reined and bitted. On the Bisutun monument the hands of the
captured kings are tied behind their backs. Forced to face
their conquering master, they cannot look at or speak with
each other. The metaphor of Aeschylus's choruses and the
Queen's dream is depicted on the cliff at Bisitun: the captive
kings are literally yoked together by the cord around their
necks.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
In contrast to the Persian unity of repetition, the long and
varied Parthenon frieze conveys the dynamic unity of the city
it celebrates. Among the Greek cities, the Athenians alone
celebrated their unification in a public festival. 104 Civic
mythology told how, long before the building of the
Parthenon, Theseus united a number of independent communities to "live together," szmoikeo, in a single city. No longer
held together by a single monarch, the democratic citizens on
the frieze walk in pairs or groups that articulate them into
sub-classes of the city. Unlike the mass pictures on Persian
palaces and rock reliefs, the Athenian participants are neither
unconnected individuals nor yoked teams, but autonomous
and willing parts of an organized whole. The frieze conveys
their freedom-the same freedom Pericles describes in the
funeral oration-in several ways. The people are local
citizens, not foreign subject peoples of other nations. They
are self-organized. Marshals resembling their fellow citizens
in size and dress are stationed at various points to keep an eye
on the parts of the procession and to direct them to move at
the right times. There is no all-seeing agent of an unseen
monarch supervising the action. Other city magistrates at the
east end take part in the central ceremony of the festival, the
folding of the goddess's festal robe.
The figures on the frieze differ in size, but not as in the
Persian murals. In order to fit the frieze horses into the
confines of the three-foot band, the sculptors made them the
size of ponies, and the bulls being led to the sacrifice are no
taller than their human masters. There is no colossal Great
King or Pharaoh towering above his subjects. In the selfgoverning democratic city, only the gods are larger than the
citizens; seated, they are the same height as the standing
humans who deliver offerings to the only beings they
recognize as above them. The rest of the frieze figures are
distinguished into ranks of horses, lines of chariots, pedestrians, bearers of various implements and, on the east side,
the only mortal women depicted on the temple. Unlike the
figures in Persian frieze processions, the Athenian participants
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take different positions, and look in different directions.
Unlike yoked non-Persian processors, here even nonAthenian metics, who carry trays and parasols, willingly
weave their way in the procession to the front of the temple.
Only animals are reined or yoked together. The beautiful
horses on the frieze are separated from their human handlers
who coordinate animal strength with human needs in finely
wrought chariots. Unlike the diminished Persian subjects,
these zeugei pompikoi,' 05 "yoked processionals," seem to have
their nature enhanced by their participation in the civic
festival. They might remind us of the story of that mule who
returned of his own will, unyoked, to further the work on the
temple. Elsewhere on the frieze, graceful young riders recall
that Athena was also the "horse-taming goddess." Hers is the
power that enables men to train and work with horses, rather
than merely to subjugate them by force. The bulls and sheep,
as objects of sacrifice, are more mere instruments of their
human masters. But, like that of the weary pediment horse
described above, the depiction of the resisting "heifer lowing
at the skies" 106 reveals an extraordinary sensitivity to the
psychic dimension even of mastered animals. Persian bulls
and horses seem stiff and unanimated in comparison.
The frieze unfurls in a horizontal band, but there are no
prostrate subjects, dying La piths or half-horizontal Centaurs.
The posture of free citizens is upright. As if to underline the
free character of the event, the frieze includes among the
chariots, acrobatic contestants, apobatai, about whom little is
known, but who seem to have shown their agility by jumping
on and off moving chariots in competitions. It is sometimes
suggested that they represent the freedom and flexibility of
the Athenian hoplite warriors who, to the perplexity of historians, are not represented on the frieze. Most importantly like
Herodotus, Thucydides, and Aeschylus, who all point to free
speech as the key distinction between Persians and Athenians,
the Parthenon frieze depicts Athens' citizens communicating
with each other. Marshals beckon, horsemen and pairs of
girls chat, magistrates converse in groups, and the chief
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archon instructs the child who helps him fold the pep/as. In
their freedom to speak-to describe, deliberate, and
disagree-the human members of this city resemble their
gods, who, on the frieze, are also depicted in conversation.
The procession begins at the southwest corner of the
temple. The first figure on the west side-the one farthest
from the front-is a nude young man who is arranging his
large cloth mantle as the procession is about to begin. Most
of the figures are clothed. The Parthenon frieze, like the
metopes and like the peplos ceremony of the Panathenaic
festival itself, repeatedly draws our attention to the ways in
which human beings cover their bodies.l 07 Along three sides,
the moving spectator sees at intervals marchers who are
adjusting their clothing, belts, or footwear as they progress
forward. The clothing of the figures on all sides of the temple
articulates them into groups, identifiable by cloaks, tunics,
hats, and footwear. The fabrics also indicate motion, speed,
and the direction of the procession and contribute to our
sense of real live activity on the frieze. The frieze also depicts
many objects-chariots, bridles, pots, trays, and stoolsfabricated by this technologically sophisticated people.
Interestingly, it shows no buildings, agreeing perhaps with
those who evacuated to Salamis, that the Athenian polis could
survive even if its buildings were destroyed, as long as its
political and ritual activities were maintained.
The long north and south sides of the frieze exhibit the
male warriors of Athens, unarmed, at peace. Modern viewers
have puzzled over the depiction of archaic chariot warriors
rather than fifth century hoplites. Some explain it as
supporting Pericles' expansion of the Athenian cavalry.
Others claim that the 192 figures (if you count right) on the
frieze were meant to represent the 192 hoplite soldiers who
fell at Marathon as they participated in the last Panathenaia
before the battle. 108 The depiction of young men guiding
spirited yet orderly horses suggests the character of the city
Pericles describes in the Funeral Oration. It is a stark contrast
to the dream that the Persian Queen describes in Aeschylus's
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play. As we saw in Part One, the submissive and the spirited
women pull against each other when Xerxes yokes them to
pull his chariot. The chariot horses on the frieze have more
in common with the horses that pull the chariots of the gods
in the corners of the west pediment. These horses and
humans who, unlike centaur horse-men, are fully distinguished from each other, are nevertheless a masterpiece of
intertwining elements. Here the technical art of perspectival
carving in extremely shallow bas-relief produces a stone
picture that looks almost like a flat woven mat. Once again,
the interweaving of the figures suggests the way in which this
city is bound together. A computer video in the British
Museum turns the chariot horses to show how they would
look if they faced the viewer. As the figures turn, the frieze
resembles a weaving that, stretched in different directions,
reveals but does not unravel the separate strands of which it
is fabricated. The horses and humans in the frieze procession
"hold together" as individuals do in the Athenian polis, but
not in Persia.
As the procession weaves its way forward, slowing as it
approaches its destination, the culminating scene takes center
stage and is "framed" by the
two central columns of the
eastern front. The frame is
structural and therefore
more prominent than the
changing "frames" the
viewer makes for himself as
he progresses towards the
pep/as scene (Figure 6); this
makes this scene "static
and eternalized." 1' ' Many
viewers feel that the
procession also becomes
"hushed" or "silenf' at this
point, as all senses focus on
the most important human
FIGURE 6 (Courtesy of A. Nicgorski)
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
fabrication on the frieze. It is literally a woven fabric. Below
the pediment depicting the birth of Athena are pictured the
city's chief ceremonial magistrate, the archon basileus ("king
archon"), his young assistant, and the goddess's birthday
pep/as. That they are folding, and not just holding, the pep/as
points to the integrity and continuity of the city, for they are
preparing to put it away, according to the custom of the past,
for the dressing of the image in the future.uo The confidence
about continuity and the future is also suggested by the
participation of children in the ritual. It is a stark contrast to
the dead-end feel of the Persians, where Aeschylus's young
and childless king withdraws in pathetic pompe in his tattered
pep/as. The ritually woven story-doth, which may have been
painted on the marble in bright yellow and purple, depicted
the victory of gods over Giants, the subject of the east
metopes. Its making and its part in Athena's festival symbolize
the way in which Athens itself is "woven" together. Evelyn
Harrison observes that, like the one on Keats's Grecian Urn,
"this is a picture of a folk." 111 By "brede/ of marble men and
maidens," Keats means both "breed" and "braid." Like the
urn pictures, the chiseled Parthenon "folk" resembles a
"braided" tapestry. Horizontal lines are still visible "to serve
as a sort of warp for the design." 112 Like the gods who
overcame the Giants, these citizens were able to overcome the
Persians because they were politically "well-woven." This is
what Athenians meant when they said they were "worthy of
the pep/os." 113
The web of state, or fabric of society, is the product of the
interweaving of warp and weft: male and female, public and
private, and, as the Eleatic Stranger explains in the
Statesman, of courage and moderation. In his description of
the ruling art, the true statesman, like the master weaver,
supervises and interweaves all the subordinate activities of the
city. After preparing a multiplicity of single strands of wool,
he combines them in a tightly woven, but freely flexible,
unity. Unlike autocratic tyrannies like Persia, where difference
is regarded as rebellion, and ropes, bridges, and fetters bind
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unrelated parts into a rigid, unnatural "whole," the Greek
city thrives on the "tension" between its different elements.l 14
It holds together from within, like a well-woven fabric or, as
we have seen, like the pantheon of the gods. The designers of
the Parthenon suggest that a "smooth web," which is smooth
not despite, but because of its tension, can be achieved in a
law-abiding democracy as well as in the virtuous monarchy
described by the Stranger. Here, too, statesmanship has interwoven raw materials, tools, vessels, servants, laborers,
merchants, ship owners, clerks, heralds, soothsayers, and
priests into a working whole. Plutarch's description of
Athens, coordinated and collaboratively at work on Pericles'
building projects comes to mind. But the statesmanship is that
of citizen magistrates, not monarch.
The eastern side of the frieze depicts women, not as
objects in the hands of Centaurs, but as active members of a
flourishing society, the producers of the city's swaddling
cloths, everyday garments, and ceremonial fabrics for the
living, as well as shrouds for the dead. Again, we should
emphasize that the weaving pictured here is not private but
civic work. The loom for weaving, like the plough for
planting and the press for making olive oil, is a domestic
peacetime contrivance of the armed goddess who, at other
times, champions the warriors who defend her city. Near the
end of the procession, Athena appears without her helmet
and weapons with the aegis in her lap. Here we see the
worker goddess, Athena Ergane, the patroness of
shipbuilders, woodworkers, and weavers like the ergastinai
who wove the peplos, seated, appropriately, with the metalworking smith, Hephaestus, who split Zeus's skull with his
ax, enabling Athena to be "born."
Like the gods on the pediments, the gods seated together
at the head of the frieze procession are multiple strands that
together make up a unified whole. They too are a "folk." Like
the rest of the frieze figures, they present a silent story to be
articulated by the viewer. Each divinity is identifiable by
distinctive looks or by conventional tags, some in the form of
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
objects that were once attached to or painted on the marble
reliefs: Apollo's headband (drill holes remain), Poseidon's
trident (now missing from his left hand), Hermes' hat, Ares'
club, Athena's aegis, Hera's veil, and Zeus's throne (the
others are on simpler, backless, stools). Each god has a special
position with respect to the others, either by genealogy and
history or by what each personifies. But not even a god is
autonomous or self-sufficient. None can even be himself until
woven into the pantheon in the context of the others. In
some places, the perspective of the low relief carving makes
their limbs look entwined or interwoven. They lean against
each other (Hermes-Dionysus, Poseidon-Apollo, ErosAphrodite), and refiect each other in their arm gestures
(Dionysus, Hera, Apollo) and veils (Hera-Aphrodite). Jenifer
Neils suggests that those in the right hand group, which
includes Poseidon, are associated with ports, the sea, and
naval battle. They are balanced by those of the left hand
group, which includes Demeter; these are associated with the
countryside, agriculture, and land battle. All together, she
claims, the gods remind the viewer of the completeness of the
recent Athenian victory over the Persians. 115
Their overlapping draped garments also unify them in an
integrated group. Like the garments everywhere on the
Parthenon, where there is little nudity,'" these are
remarkable. Except for the child Eros, the gods, like the frieze
Athenians, are all clothed in rippling, crinkly, folding, fiexible
material that conforms to the lifelike bodies beneath it.
Athena's peplos is carefully pinned at the shoulder and tucked
under her legs; Artemis wears a head cloth and modestly
adjusts her gown to cover her shoulder, and her skirted robe
falls about her differently positioned legs in a different way
from Athena's. The Athenian people, "worthy of the pep/os,"
worship gods whose clothing is tailored for anthropomorphic
bodies.
How are the frieze Olympians related to the frieze
Athenians? Some claim that the gods turn away and show
little interest in the procession in honor of the goddess. 117 But
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Neils revives a view that they are sitting in a semicircle and
thus are attending to the central pep/as scene "before"
them. us Viewers of the frieze who think of the "row" of gods
this way visually deepen the low-relief carving and bring out
its "texture." Like the flattened ranks of horses, the gods and
humans appear as they might in a woven tapestry. So the gods
are both interested and not interested in the mortals who
honor them. As at Troy, they can turn away to pursue their
amours, quarrels, and conversations. But, as Homer shows,
the most serious and interesting activities of the gods who live
on Olympus are the ones that are interwoven with those of
mortals on earth. Athena is as interesting as a strand in
Homer's stories of Achilles and Odysseus and in Aeschylus's
accounts of the founding of the Athenian court and defeat of
the Persians as she is in her own story. The Parthenon gives us
the gods both on their own and woven into our mortal
stories.
The frieze offers the Athenians a picture of themselves
that is also worthy of the gods' attention. The human festival
is, after all, the reason they have gathered together in Athens.
The only other place where they assemble in this fashion is at
home on Olympus. Now they have accepted seats of honor
and look relaxed, keeping their distance from the mortals yet
prepared to stay and grace the holiday with their presence.
There is time to be passed before the animals are sacrificed
and the meat is distributed in the Keramikos at some distance
from the temple. The Gods, who dine on nectar and
ambrosia, do not appear eager for the festival feast. Mortal
fighting, yoking, and weaving require mortal eating. But the
gods who live forever have leisure just to look and to talk.
Some of them view the approaching procession. Aphrodite
points out something to young Eros, who perhaps has seen
fewer of these events than the others have. And others, Zeus
and Hera, Athena and Hephaestus, and Poseidon and Apollo,
turn to each other and converse, just like the rwo groups of
five magistrates fianking them. If the pep/as has already been
displayed and is now being folded away, the culminating
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scene of the frieze illustrates the purpose of the temple as a
memorial of the Persian attempt to destroy Athens. The
Persians have come and gone. In Athens, the gods who live
forever participate in the Athenian Panathenaia; Athena's
pep/as-and the people "worthy of the peplos"-endure.
5. Statue: Parthenos, Polis, Empire
As they arrived at the front side of the Parthenon the
spectators would first see the eastern pediment depicting the
birth of Athena. Beneath it the eastern metopes showed the
goddess's battle with the Giants. From between the central
columns her birthday pep/as on the frieze would be visible.
But the extraordinary visual displays we have discussed so far
were all only wrappings, the decorative coverings of the
house of the goddess herself. Ancient visitors to the temple do
not even mention the frieze, but all marvel at the statue. Deep
within, in her own private chamber, Athena Parthenos stood
alone, visible and awesome in
looks and size, to the "folk"
that came to her birthday
party. Unlike the Great King in
his Persepolis throne room,
this divinity was made to be
seen. But Pheidias's masterpiece can no longer be seen.
Pausanias's descriptions, some
ancient souvenir statuettes, a
small Roman copy, the
Varvakeion Athena (Figure 7)
and other statues of the type,
are all that's left to shape our
understanding of the famous
statue and what it could have
meant when the Parthenon
was the highpoint of the
Athenian polis. The full-size,
concrete reproduction in the
FIGURE 7 (Courtesy of A. Nicgors.ki)
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unlikely setting of Nashville, Tennessee has attracted much
popular and scholarly attention, but it is hard to believe that
the Parthenos could have looked like that.
The size of the little korai statues presented with
petitionary prayers of individual Athenians to the familiar
wooden image of Athena Polias 119 suggests the personal
attachment and affection that those who brought them felt
for their domestic goddess. The bronze Athena Promachos is
larger than the human warriors she would lead in warding off
a threat to their city; outdoors and approachable, she stands
"foremost" but at ease among them. We have seen how the
Parthenon, unlike the colossal buildings of other places, is
large, but somehow commensurate with human size aud the
capacity to take it in. This is true, despite the fact that
Pheidias deliberately made it larger than the earlier
"Parthenon" on its site so that it could contain the statue he
intended to put in it. Similarly, the large size of Athena on the
east frieze is subtly suggested by her seated position, but does
not overwhelm either the mortals depicted near her or the
mortal viewers of the frieze. But the standing 120 Parthenos
statue, although of human shape, was colossal, almost forty
feet tall, far beyond human scale. She was the power behind
the most powerful city in the world. Full-breasted and
clothed in an Athenian pep/as, she would not have resembled
the human-sized Amazons at the edges of the city. She held iu
her extended right hand a much smaller statue of Nike, the
goddess of victory, that was almost six feet tall. Athena
Parthenos stood ready and armed, with the Gorgon aegis not
resting on her lap as in the frieze, but as visible armor over
her pep/as. Her helmet, crowned with sphinx and griffins,
had its earfiaps up to indicate peacetime, but it was on her
head, and she held her spear. Her shield was engraved with
the familiar subjects of fighting Amazons and Giants, and her
sandals depicted, once again, the Centauromachy. Here, as
elsewhere in the building, Athena's defense of Athens in
contemporary times is associated with her defeat of these
earlier threats. But now the victor over the Giants is herself a
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giant. The folds of her giant pep/as recall the stiff, fiuted
columns of her giant temple more than they resemble the soft
and folding fabrics we have been observing elsewhere in the
Parthenon.
Like the Zeus at Olympia, the Parthenos was marveled at
for its size and for the materials it was made of: the bright
white ivory of her face and arms, the gemstones of her eyes,
and the gold of her clothing and equipment. Unlike the
olivewood Polias that fell from the sky, perhaps as a gift from
Zeus, the Parthenos was admired as the fabrication of an
extraordinary Athenian artist. Just as the later, world-famous
statue at Olympia was Pheidias's Zeus, this masterpiece was
Pheidias's Athena, the product of human imagination and
technical prowess at their peak. In contrast to the smaller,
worn, wooden slab, this Athena was huge, hard, and very
heavy. The plates of gold that formed her dress weighed
almost a ton.
The atmosphere inside the temple was mysterious and
unsettling, illuminated by window light reflected from a pool
at the statue's base. The shimmering water and light must
have suggested a sort of animation in the immense and
immovable stone figure. The beauty of the Parthenos was
reportedly breathtaking. She must have been deinos, simultaneously "terrifying" and "terrific," "awful" and "a\vesotne."
Unlike the (probably) seated wooden doll that received
female ministrations and petitions, and unlike the seated and
sociable Athena of the east frieze, Pheidias's goddess was
upright and alone. Unlike the statuesque Persian Queen, who
is humanized by what she says, the Parthenos was silent. She
did not communicate with the mortals who came to see her.
Gifts were not presented to her or animals sacrificed at her
altar, and no priestess interpreted messages from her. Since
the huge, flat, ivory face was fastened to the surface and
removable-like the theater mask of Xerxes' mother-it must
have been less realistic and human than some of the more
expressive marble faces elsewhere on the temple. The size of
the immense, white hands, one holding a man-sized statue
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and the other balancing an enormous spear and shield, must
have appeared proportionally larger than the neck and face,
because they were closer to the viewer. Could one still see in
this colossus the goddess of handiwork, Athena Ergane, the
"worker," with hands on a woodcarving, pot, or loom? Or
would her hands suggest those of great Achilles, whose great
man-slaying hands ruthlessly killed Priam's son?
As we have seen, the Persians and Egyptians made such
statues, sometimes so large that they had to lie prone on the
ground. They were usually the images of Kings and Pharaohs,
who represented themselves as all-powerful, even divine, in
their homelands and as entitled to the universal empires they
aspired to outside. Does the colossal Athena still celebrate, as
the outer parts of the temple do, the bounded, self-governing
city and its victory over the despotic juggernaut that sought
to yoke it and deprive it of speech? Or is she, deep within the
temple, the embryo of the imperial Athens destined to emerge
in the fifty years following the Persian Wars? Paradoxically, in
preserving what it viewed as its fully free way of life, Athena's
city, democratic within, was becoming despotic without. The
rule (arche) that began in self-defense against an everexpanding despot soon became the ever-expanding means for
maintaining the extraordinary expense of its extraordinary
achievements. But necessity-for defense or for maintenance-was just the prologue to full-scale empire (arche) in
the Athenian mode.
The necessary means soon became an end in itself as
empire became the full expression of Athenian glory.
Thucydides' account of the war between Athens and its
erstwhile ally Sparta alludes frequently to Athens' erstwhile
imperial enemy Persia. The Persians had always exhibited the
King's valuable possessions as a means of displaying his
power. After the Persian wars, Athens, contrary to its earlier
customs, began to exhibit the valuable trophies left by the
fleeing Persian army. In 454 B.C., the year the Delian treasury
was moved to Athens, each of her colonies and "allies"
marched in the Panathenaic procession with an offering of a
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
cow and a full suit of armor. Some of these "allies" must
uneasily have remembered the Great King's demands for
earth and water several decades before. The Parthenon frieze
does not picture tribute-bearing allies, armed Athenians, or
alien slaves. But as Athens grew rich and powerful she began
to display herself, not only as the producer of dramas, games,
festivals, and art, but as a city worthy of power, as well as the
pep/as. The empire itself soon became part of the display.
Pericles' three speeches in Thucydides make clear that the
internal glory of Athens required external support, often at
the expense of those who did not participate in the
democratic life that Pericles describes. In contrast to the
Persian yoke, weaving has been the appropriate metaphor for
Athenian democratic politics. But Athens' appropriation of
the resources of the unraveling Delian League was destined to
conclude with the unraveling of Athens itself. Pericles does
not use the word "yoke" in his tough arguments for Athenian
rule over the former allies; nor do the Athenians who later
present Melos with their ultimatum. But the Melians know
they must choose between subjugation and death. Just as
Athens had become the only independent city in the Delian
League, its nominal democracy had become the rule of one
citizen (Thuc., 2.65). And Athena, comfortably interwoven
with her fellow gods on the Parthenon frieze, had reappeared
like Darius, in the depths of her temple, huge and
shimmering, overpowering and alone.
As an expensive war with Sparta became increasingly
likely, Pericles assured the Athenians that they had at their
disposal tribute from the allies, public and private dedications, sacred vessels, Persian spoils, and temple treasures.
Several decades before, Aeschylus had vividly contrasted the
private gold of the Great King with the communally owned
silver of the city that defeated him. Xerxes' stage-mother
asserts that he is accountable to no one. Now Pericles
reminded the Athenians that the pep/as of Pheidias's statue
was not a soft woolen fabric like that of Athena Polias, but
one of solid gold. But it, too, could be removed. For, when
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Pheidias began his masterpiece, Pericles had advised him to
make the pep los detachable (Plut. Pericles., XXXI). 121 Pericles
now reminded the assembly that the goddess was there not
only to be looked at, but also to finance their "safety," and
that no ally need be consulted. As long as they replaced the
loan, they could make use of "the gold plates with which the
goddess herself was overlaid" (Thuc., 2.13). By this time, the
storeroom of the Parthenon was the depository of the Delian
League treasury that had been moved to Athens. Within the
lifetime of the men who had survived Salamis, the building
that began as a memorial of free Athens' defeat of imperial
Persia metamorphosed into a monument to imperial Athens.
In truth, the building was less a "temple" in which to worship
a goddess than the city's icon of its own power and a secure
storehouse for its usable resources; it had become "the central
bank of Athens." 122
Reversing Themistocles' pre-Salamis strategy of evacuating the population from Athens and depending on a
"wooden wall" of ships, Pericles' first speech advised outdwelling Athenians to "bring in their property from the
fields" and "come into the city" (Thnc., 1.143; 2.113) behind
the walls Themistocles had hurriedly built in anticipation of
war with Sparta. Donald Kagan points out that Pericles recognized this strategy as an attempt to overcome "problems
presented by natnre" by turning mainland Athens into a more
defensible "island" (Time., 1.143).123 One is reminded, not
only of Salamis, but also of the "unnatural" projects of
Persian and other barbarian overreachers to "yoke" the
Hellespont, turn peninsulas into islands, and reroute rivers by
digging channels. Thucydides says it was hard for a rural
Athenian to leave behind his town (polis) and the ancient
form of government (po/iteia) of his father (Time., 2.14).
When these suburban Athenians had come into the city-here
he says astu (Thuc., 2.17), the physical surroundings-they
had nowhere to go, so they camped in deserted places, and in
sanctuaries and shrines. The Acropolis and Parthenon were
off-limits. But many crowded into land at the foot of the
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Acropolis-land that an oracle had warned against inhabiting-and in areas between the Long Walls, and in the
Piraeus (Thuc., 2.17).
Just before Pericles' second speech, the funeral oration,
Thucydides says that the Athenian army that invaded Megaris
with Pericles as its general was "the largest army of Athenians
that had ever been assembled in one body" (Thuc., 2.31). His
enumeration of the different parts of this force reminds one
of Aeschylus's descriptions of the Great King's army in the
earlier war. His Persian Queen would have been satisfied with
this numerical account of Athenian strength. The funeral
oration is the more subtle account of the source of Athenian
strength, the one the Queen could not appreciate. The free
city that defeated the Persians is to be celebrated and loved
for the character of its life: its political institutions, laws,
physical beauty, wisdom, and the character of its citizens.
Athens is open to all the world; no one is prevented "from
learning or seeing" (mathematos e theamatos, Time., 2.39);
the city is an exhibit, a school, from which all Hellas can learn
(Thuc., 2.41). But as Pericles continues, it becomes clear that
Athens is not a large enough stage on which to exhibit its own
excellence, and that he is thinking of a wider audience than
even Hellas. The delimited city that once remembered the
Persians is now offered the prospect of being honored and
remembered forever by the whole civilized world. Its citizens
can win glory by fixing their gaze, not only on the city but on
the "power [dzmamin] of the city" (Thuc., 2.43). Athens'
power must be displayed in the great theater of war and only
colonies or defeated enemies will serve as "everlasting
memorials" (mnemeia ... aidia, Thuc., 2.41) of her greatness.
Immediately after Pericles' celebration of Athens in the
funeral oration (2.34-46), Thucydides describes the plague,
making it clear that it was exacerbated by the crowding of the
country people into the city (again called astu): now even
temples were filled with corpses and "No fear of gods or law
of men restrained" (Thuc., 1.53). It is unlikely that Athena's
temple on the Acropolis remained unviolated. Plutarch says
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that Pericles' enemies blamed him for the plague, attributing
it not only to the crowding, but also to the idleness of the
multitudes of men who were "pent up like cattle with no
employ or service" (Plut., Pericles. XXXIV). We might
remember his earlier enthusiastic description of the opportunities for employment and prosperity that Pericles' building
projects had provided.
Pericles' third and last speech is a sober acknowledgement
of the Athenians' sufferings and an exhortation not to allow
these private ills to jeopardize the "common safety" (Thnc.,
2.61). But "freedom" no longer means defying the Great
King's demands for "earth and water" and halting the
expansion of the Persian Empire. Athens and Sparta, as
different as they were, could willingly "yoke" themselves
together to avoid subjugation by Persia. Here Pericles speaks
again of the relationship between Athens' expanding
"empire," her drive to supersede her own limits, and the
necessary subjugation of her erstwhile ally:
... of two divisions of the world which lie open to
man's use, the land and the sea, you hold the
absolute mastery over the whole of one ... to
whatever fuller extent you may choose; and there
is no one, either the Great King or any
nation ... who will block your path as you sail the
seas ... Nor must you think that you are fighting for
the simple issue of slavery or freedom; on the
contrary, loss of empire is also involved and
danger from the hatred incurred in your sway.
From this empire, however, it is too late for you
even to withdraw ... for by this time the empire you
hold is a tyranny, which may seem unjust to have
taken, but which certainly it is dangerous to let go.
(Time., 2.62-63)
Pericles reminds his discontented fellow citizens that their
fathers acquired, preserved, and bequeathed the empire to
them, giving Athens a "great name" (Thuc., 2.64),
�110
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
presumably one far greater than the "Athens" that Darius
wanted to be reminded of, and than the Persian names which
had frightened all Greeks until Athens defeated Xerxes.
Pericles' last words are again about how, even as all things
decay, the memory (mneme) of the glorious Athenian enterprise will endure; the "splendour of the moment and the
after-glory are left in everlasting remembrance" (aeimnestos,
Time., 2.64).
The ivory skin and golden pep/as of Pheidias's Athena
seem to have remained on the statue through the end of the
Peloponnesian War. But she must have provided a kind of
political and psychological support for the empire that was
incubating as Pericles beautified and glorified the city.
Thucydides recounts how internally democratic Athens
became as brutal and denatured to its external subordinatesand eventually to itself-as the internally despotic tyranny of
Persia had been in its expansion. But the silent Parthenon tells
a much more tragic story than the one Aeschylus dramatized
for his fellow citizens. For Athens at her peak exemplified a
human way of life more noble and more natural than overextended Persian despotism, despite the latter's impressive
multiplication of territory, people, buildings, and gold. The
story of Athens is tragic, rather than merely sad or repellent,
for the same reason the story of Oedipus is tragic: the terrible
collapse comes about not, as in Persia, because of grotesque
suppressions and distortions of the human soul, but precisely
as a result of the full exercise of human capacities: selfgovernment, mastery of the sea, poetry, mathematics,
philosophy, art, and architecture, and the free human speech
that makes it all possible. It is difficult simply to say that we'd
prefer for Oedipus or Athens to have been more "moderate."
Pericles urged restraint, even as he cultivated an Athenian
love for Athens that was bound to end up as an eros for Sicily
(Time., 6.24). His ward, Alcibiades, the man most in love
with the Sicilian expedition, was disastrously recalled to
Athens in a ship called the "Salaminia." In the first half of the
century, Phrynichus and Aeschylus made it possible in the
�FLAUMENHAFT
111
theater for the surviving Athenians to weep for Miletus and
even for the Mede. As Athens completed the building
intended to remember its own razing and restoration, the city
hurtled forward to the events described in Thucydides'
terrible account. The colossal Athena within that building was
the terrible image of power that Pericles said would insure the
survival of Athens' name. The shining, bright monument to
Marathon and Salamis could not deter the dark, bloody
massacres at Mytilene, Melos, and Mycalessus. In some
terrible way, it contributed to them.
6. Pandora
We come at last to our last Athenian pep/os. The pedestal of
the statue of Athena depicted another carved gathering of the
gods at another birthday celebration of yet another
parthenos, the maiden Pandora. Hesiod gives two accounts of
the world's first human woman; in both, she and the gods are
the source of all of mankind's troubles. 124 After Prometheus
defied Zeus by giving fire to human beings, Zeus ordered
Hephaestus and Athena to produce a counter-gift, a
"beautiful evil" (kalon kako11), in response to Prometheus's
empowering gift. Hephaestus mixed earth and water and
fashioned a lovely maiden, Pandora, "all-gifts." Athena taught
her to do needlework and to weave the "skillfully embroidered" (po/udaidaloll) web. She dressed and veiled her, and
the other goddesses adorned her with finery. A surviving cup
shows Athena in her own shawl and aegis, pinning the peplos
on the new-made girl. 125 Everyone knows the end of the
story: Pandora opened the jar of "all gifts," releasing them
upon previously free and unburdened man, forcing him to
"bow his neck to the yoke of hard necessity." 126 Along with
the blessings of fire, agriculture, and weaving, man now
possessed the curses of disease, war, and slavery. The source
of human ills, of course, is human nature itself, and Athens
understood itself as the paradigmatically human city. The
tragic account of Athens' glory that we read in Thucydides'
long discursive book can also be "read" in the emerging
�112
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
empire's most impressive building. Like Pandora, the
"beautiful evil" made by Hephaestus, and like the terrible
events depicted in the tragedy that Aeschylus and Pericles
made beautiful for the theater, the monument that Pheidias
and Pericles made beautiful on the Acropolis is a kalon kakon:
the story of the Parthenon and the stories that it tells show
Athens in full flower, and also show the seeds of her selfdestruction.
This story began with an account of Aeschylus's Persians,
a humane view of the tragedy of an empire that attempted to
subjugate free Greek cities under the yoke and mantle of
worldwide tyranny. As different as they were, the defensive
alliance that voluntarily yoked Athens and Sparta together
succeeded in preserving them-and their differences.
Decades later, having torn each other and themselves apart in
the war that Thucydides attributes to Athens' own pursuit of
empire, Alcibiades, who had spent the war bouncing from
Athens to Sparta, to Thrace, to Persia, suggested that the two
former allies might achieve true glory if they once again
yoked themselves together to oppose Persia. This time the
alliance would not be defensive, but aggressive, with the aim
of establishing a Pan-Hellenic empire. The project could
never work since, as we observed above, the yoking of nnlike
partners, even under Darius or Xerxes, is bound to be
temporary. Athens and Sparta were too different to ally for
joint conquest, in contrast to defense, and Alcibiades was
nurtured in Pericles' Athens, not in the palace at Persepolis.
His last wild scheme collapsed completely as the Spartans
entered Athens, unopposed, seventy-six years after the battle
of Salamis. There is no play describing that event.
�FLAUMENHAFT
113
Bibliography
All the images discussed are available online at many websites. Any
reliable search engine will locate a large selection. They can also be found
in the following, easily available, books:
Athens:
Bruno, Vincent J. The Parthenon. New York: \'7.\V. Norton, 1974.
Connolly, Peter and Hazel Dodge. The Ancient City: Life in Classical
Athens and Rome. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Hurwit, Jeffrey .M. The Athenian Acropolis: History, Mythology, and
Archaeology from the Neolithic Era to the Present. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1999.
Jenkins, Ian. The Parthenon Frieze. Oakville: British Museum Press, 1994.
Neils, Jenifer. The Parthenon Frieze. New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2001.
~~-~-·
YVorshipping Athena: Panatheuaia and Parthenon. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1996.
Neils, Jenifer, ed. Goddess and Polis. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1992.
\Voodford, Susan. The Parthenon. New York: Cambridge University Press,
1981.
Persia:
Allen, Lindsay. The Persian Empire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2005.
WiesehOfer, Josef. Ancient Persia. London: LB. Tauris & Co., 2001.
Notes
37
Donald Kagan, Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy (New
York, 1991), p. 161-62.
38
Jeffrey M. Hurwit, The Athenian Acropolis: History, Mythology, and
Archaeology from the Neolithic Era to the Present (Cambridge, 1999), p.
74.
39
40
Pausanias, I.xxvi, declines to comment on the truth of this story.
Peploi were given to Athena in the rituals of other Greek cities; Athens
seems to have been the only place where the "garment was actually
placed upon the statue." E. J. W. Barber "The Peplos of Athena," in
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
114
Jenifer Neils, ed., Goddess and Polis (Hanover, New Hampshire, 1992),
p. 106. Perhaps the earliest description of such a presentation is described
in Book Six of the Iliad, when the desperate women of Troy under siege
make such an offering in hope of her aid. \Vhen she prepares to go to the
aid of the Greeks, she takes off her "soft peplos, that she herself had
made and her hands had fashioned" (VIII.385-86) and dons the tunic of
Zeus and her armor.
41
Barber, in Neils (1992), p.llO.
42
The festival and evidence for its changes over time are described in
detail by Hurwit (1999) and H.\V. Parke, Festivals of the Athenians
(Ithaca, New York, 1977), pp. 29-50. See also Jenifer Neils, "The
Panathenaia: An Introduction," in Neils (1992), pp. 13-27. H. A. Shapiro,
"Democracy and Imperialism: the Panathenaia in the Age of Perikles," in
Jenifer Neils, ed., \Vorshipping Athena: Panathenaia and Parthenon
(Madison, Wisconsin, 1996), 215-25.
43
Kagan, p. 168.
44 Jan
Collie, Hidden London (London, 2002).
· 45
Brunilde Sismondo Ridgeway, "Images of Athena on the Akropolis,, in
Neils (1992), 122-42, p. 122; Peter Connolly and Hazel Dodge, The
Ancient City: Life in Classical Athens and Rome (New York, 2000), p. 12.
46
Hurwit, p.136.
47
Russell Meigs, "The Political Implications of the Parthenon,, in The
Parthenon, ed. Vincent J. Bruno (New York, 1975), p. 103, citing the
orator Lycurgus, Against Leocrates 81.
48 Plutarch's
Lives, Pericles, XII, Vol. III, trans. Bernadotte Perrin
(Cambridge, Mass., 1967), p. 37. Subsequent references will be given in
the text.
49
Kagan, p. 37
50 Meigs,
51
p. 111.
Allen, pp. 93-4.
52 Pausanias,
I.xx.
53
Joseph Wieseh6fer, Ancient Persia (New York, 2001), p. 34.
54
Persians, 979, and Hall, n. 979, p. 172.
55
Donald N. Wilber, Persepolis: The Archaeology of Parsa, Seat of Persian
Kings (New York, 1969), p. 57.
56
Wieseh6fcr, p. 26.
�FLAUMENHAFT
115
57
Christian Meier, Athens: A Portrait of the City in Its Golden Age, trans.
Robert and Rita Kimber (New York, 1998), p. 381.
58
The setting of the full-scale reproduction of the temple in a flat, treefilled park in Nashville, Tennessee makes the building itself feel very
different. The ancient view \vas probably more restricted than it is now;
the view from the west side was best. Ian Jenkins, The Parthenon Frieze
(London, 1994), p. 18.
59
Hurwit, p. 54.
60 Susan Woodford, The Parthenon (Cambridge, 1981), p. 20. Montaigne
says that "The Athenians ordained that the mules which had served in
building the temple called Hccatompedon [the earlier Parthenon] should
be set free, and that they should be allowed to graze anywhere without
hindrance." "Of Cruelty," in The Complete Essays ofMontaigne, trans.
Donald M. Frame (Stanford, 1975), p. 103.
61
Hurwit, p. 176.
62
Hurwit, p. 176.
63
Hurwit, p. 32.
Vincent J. Bruno, "The Parthenon and the Theory of Classical Form,"
in The Parthenon (New York, 1974), p. 91.
64
65
Evelyn B. Harrison (1974), "The Sculptures of the Parthenon," in
Bruno, 225-311, p. 248.
66
Harrison (1974), p. 249.
67
Harrison (1974), p. 233.
68
Hurwit, p. 179.
69
Harrison, p. 278.
70
Bruno, p. 94.
71
This may suggest that the primary aim of the building was to celebrate
this victory, rather than Athena's birthday. See Hurwit, p. 30.
72
An enemy of Pheidias claimed that the sculptor had made likenesses of
himself and Pericles in the Amazon metopes. Pheidias died while in prison
on these charges. Plutarch affirms the resemblance to Pericles (Pint.,
Pericles, XXXI).
73
Mera ]. Flaumenhaft, "Priam the Patriarch, His City, and His Sons,"
Interpretation, 32.1 (Winter, 2004): 3·31.
74 Page duBois, Centaurs and Amazons: W!omen and the Pre~History of the
Great Chain of Being. Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1991), p. 54, citing Bernard
Ash mole, Architect and Sculptor itt Classical Greece (London, 1972),
�116
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
pp.165ff. Sec also Larissa Bonfante, "Nudity as a Costume in Classical
Art," American Journal of Archaeology, Volume 93, No.4, (October,
1989), p. 555.
75
Mary R. Lefkowitz, "Women in the Panathcnaic and Other Festivals,"
in Neils, ed., \Vorsbipping Athena, 1996, 78-91, p. 81.
76
Hurwit, p. 24.
77
Pausanias, I.xxviii.
78
\'\falter F. Otto, The Homeric Gods: The Spiritual Significance of Greek
Religion (Boston, 1954), p. 53.
79 The
myths about their ancestry are confused: they are the products of
the mating of Ixion and a marc, or of Ixion's offspring and a mare, or of
Zeus in the shape of a horse and Ixion's wife.
80
duBois, pp. 27-8.
81
In the frieze behind the mctopes, only older men, officials, and some of
the gods are bearded, but all have articulated necks.
82
Robin Osborne, "Framing the Centaur: "Reading 5th Century
Architectural Sculpture," in Art and Text in Ancient Greek Culture, Simon
Goldhill and Robin Osborne, eds. (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 71, 75-76.
Osborne ends by suggesting that "treating others as beasts" may "itself
constitute a lapse in propriety," p. 83.
83
duBois, p. 31.
84
Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (New York, 1956).
85
Bonfante, p. 554.
86
duBois, p. 30.
87
Hurwit, p. 173 and Note 62.
88
Hurwit, pp. 173-74.
89
Neils (2001), p. 196.
9
°Kagan, p. 160.
91
Louise Bruit Zaidman and Pauline Schmitt Pantel, Religion in the
Ancient Greek City (Cambridge, 1992), p. 106.
92
Peter von Blanckenhagen, Unpublished lecture, St. John's College,
Annapolis, date unknown.
93
The British lvluseum's Duveen Gallery reverses the direction of the
viewing, enclosing the viewer rather than the pictures.
94 The
CD that accompanies jenifer Neils's The Parthenon Frieze
(Cambridge, 2001) attempts to approximate the experience of walking
�FLAUMENHAFT
117
alongside the frieze by moving the frieze before the stationary viewer.
The corners of the temple are indicated by four red lines.
95Ncils (2001), pp. 33,37-8.
96
Evelyn B. Harrison, ''The Web of History: A Conservative Reading of
the Parthenon Frieze," in Neils (1996), 198-214, p. 211.
97 Woodford, p. 33.
98 Jenkins,
99
p. 26. Jenkins rejects the latter view.
Kagan, p. 111.
100 Woodford,
101
p. 36.
Green, p. 5.
102 \Vieseh6fer,
Plate V.
103 WiesehOfcr,
Plate I.
104
Robert Parker, Athenian Religiou: A History (Oxford, 1996), p. 14.
105
Neils (1992), p. 93.
10 6 John
Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn," 1820.
10 7 This
theme has been fully explored by Jennifer Neils in \'(!orshipping
Athena (1996), Goddess and Polis (1992), and The Parthenon Frieze
(2001). On Greek weaving, the pep/as, and cloth fabrication in general,
see also Barber, in Neils (1992) and Barber (1994).
lOS
Harrison (1996) is critical of John Boardman's speculation, 199-200.
109 Neils (2001 ), p. 70.
110
Harrison (1996), p. 203; Neils (2001), p. 68.
111
Harrison (1996), p. 210.
11 2 Neils
(2001), p. 80.
113
Harrison (1996), p. 200.
ll 4
Plato, Statesman, 303b-311c.
11 5
Neils (2001), pp. 188 ff.
11 6
Neils (2001), p. 186.
117 Phillip
Fehl has argued that the rocks in the frieze locate the gods, also
emotionally distanced from the humans, on distant Olympus. "Gods and
Men in the Parthenon Frieze" (1961), quoted in Bruno (1996), 311-21.
118
Neils (2002), pp. 61-6.
119
Hurwit, p. 18.
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
118
120 Pausanias,
I.xxiv.
121
His foresight later saved the sculptor from an accusation that he had
stolen some of the gold. \Vcighing proved he had not.
122
Hurwit, p. 164.
1D
Kagan, p. 113.
124
Hesiod, Theogony, 571-616 and Works and Days, 60-105.
125
Jenkins, p. 41.
126 Jenkins,
p. 40.
�
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Dugan, C. Nathan
Brann, Eva T. H.
Hunt, Frank
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Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert. B.
Zuckerman, Elliott
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Barbera, André
Aigla M.D., Jorge H.
Flaumenhaft, Mera
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November 02, 2001. Brann, Eva T. H. <a title="Ways of naysaying" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/269">Ways of naysaying</a> (audio)
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Flaumenhaft, Harvey, 1938-
Schulman, Adam
Seeger, Tony
Weiner, Neil
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The St. John’s Review
Volume 51, number 2 (2009)
Editor
Pamela Kraus
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Barbara McClay
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson,
President; Michael Dink, Dean. All manuscripts are subject to
blind review. Address correspondence to the Review,
St. John’s College, P
.O. Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 214042800. Back issues are available, at $5 per issue, from the
St. John’s College Bookstore.
©2009 St. John’s College. All rights reserved; reproduction
in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing and Printing
The St. John’s Public Relations Office and the St. John’s College Print Shop
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
3
Contents
Essay
The Secret Art of Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis
Principia Mathematica, Part Two...................................5
Judith Seeger
“The Things of Friends Are Common”........................37
Christopher B. Nelson
Review
“My Subject Is Passion”...............................................45
Eva Brann’s Feeling Our Feelings: What Philosophers
Think and People Know
Ronald Mawby
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
5
The Secret Art of Isaac
Newton’s Philosophiae
Naturalis Principia Mathematica
Part Two
Judith Seeger
4. The Second Hidden Text: The Great Work of Nature
Tis true without lying, certain & most true.
That wch is below is like that wch is above & that
wch is above is like yt wch is below to do ye miracles
of one only thing
And as all things have been & arose from one by
ye mediation of one: so all things have their birth
from this one thing by adaptation.
The Sun is its father, the moon its mother, the
wind hath carried it in its belly, the earth is its
nourse. The father of all perfection in ye whole
world is here. Its force or power is entire if it be
converted into earth.
Separate thou ye earth from ye fire, ye subtile from
the gross sweetly wth great indoustry. It ascends
from ye earth to ye heaven & again it descends to
ye earth & receives ye force of things superior &
inferior.
By this means you shall have ye glory of ye whole
world & thereby all obscurity shall fly from you.
Judith Seeger is a tutor at St. John’s College, Annapolis. This essay is
published in two parts. Part one appeared in The St. John’s Review, volume
51, number 1. All bibliographical references appeared at the end of part 1.
Endnotes are numbered continuously through both parts
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Its force is above all force. ffor it vanquishes every
subtile thing & penetrates every solid thing.
So was ye world created . . . . (“Tabula
Smaragdina,” translated by Isaac Newton)37
The General Scholium with which the second and third
editions of the Principia end is so powerful that it may
obscure the discussion of comets that precedes it. That
discussion, however, is of crucial importance. The main text
of all three editions of the Principia culminates with
Newton’s demonstration that the formerly fear-inspiring
comets, rather than being supernatural signs of God’s wrath,
are natural bodies that obey the same laws as the planets. This
accomplishment is one of the triumphs of the book. But
Newton did not stop there. The wide-ranging disquisition on
comets at the end of Book 3—consisting primarily of celestial
observations, mathematical calculations, and inferences
drawn from Newton’s optical studies—includes, as well,
assertions about the active role comets play in the universe, in
passages that stand out in the context of mathematical calculations and demonstrations.
Consider, for example, the remarks that follow
Proposition 41 of Book 3 in all three editions. At this point,
Newton has already established that the bodies of comets are
“solid, compact, fixed, and durable, like the bodies of
planets” (918), and that their tails are composed of extremely
thin vapor which the head or nucleus of the comet emits
under the influence of the fierce heat of the sun. Then,
surprisingly (for what does this have to do with the mathematical determination of celestial motion ruled by universal
gravitation?), he states that this extremely thin vapor is
essential to the replenishment both of water on earth and of
a more subtle spirit required for life. The passage continues:
For vapor in those very free spaces becomes
continually rarefied and dilated. For this reason it
happens that every tail at its upper extremity is
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broader than near the head of the comet.
Moreover, it seems reasonable that by this
rarefaction the vapor—continually dilated—is
finally diffused and scattered throughout the whole
heavens, and then is by degrees attracted toward
the planets by its gravity and mixed with their
atmospheres. For just as the seas are absolutely
necessary for the constitution of this earth, so that
vapors may be abundantly enough aroused from
them by the heat of the sun, which vapors either—
being gathered into clouds—fall in rains and
irrigate and nourish the whole earth for the propagation of vegetables, or—being condensed in the
cold peaks of mountains (as some philosophize
with good reason)—run down into springs and
rivers; so for the conservation of the seas and
fluids on the planets, comets seem to be required,
so that from the condensation of their exhalations
and vapors, there can be a continual supply and
renewal of whatever liquid is consumed by
vegetation and putrefaction and converted into dry
earth. For all vegetables grow entirely from fluids
and afterward, in great part, change into dry earth
by putrefaction, and slime is continually deposited
from putrefied liquids. Hence the bulk of dry earth
is increased from day to day, and fluids—if they
did not have an outside source of increase—would
have to decrease continually and finally to fail.
Further, I suspect that that spirit which is the
smallest but most subtle and most excellent part of
our air, and which is required for the life of all
things, comes chiefly from comets. (926)
This is an allegory of circulation as the alchemists understood
it, in which the spirit provided by the tails of comets is
analogous to the philosophers’ mercury—whose many names
included dew of heaven, oriental water, celestial water, our
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
balm, our honey, May dew, silver rain—the spiritual agent,
whose properties were activated, according to Basil
Valentine, by expulsion from its habitat in the form of airy
vapors, and whose descent was perceived as heavenly
condensation falling to nourish the earth, which would perish
without it (Nicholl, 92-3).38 Newton is not here speaking of
circulatory motion within a single immovable plane, which he
has shown in Proposition 1 of Book 1 to be the motion of
bodies driven in orbits under the influence of centripetal
force. He is describing, rather, a continual churning within
the universe, the manifestation of nature as a circulatory
worker, to borrow his characterization of it in 1675.39 This is
an image of earth as retort, inasmuch as comets supply both
the fluids and the subtle spirit required for the development
of life itself.
The final book of the first edition of the Principia ends
abruptly with Proposition 42. But the second edition
continues. In addition to incorporating more observations
and calculations of the paths of comets, Newton in the 1713
edition extends the image of renewal nourished by comets to
the fixed stars themselves, writing, “So also fixed stars, which
are exhausted bit by bit in the exhalation of light and vapors,
can be renewed by comets falling into them and then, kindled
by their new nourishment, can be taken for new stars. Of this
sort are those fixed stars that appear all of a sudden, and that
at first shine with maximum brilliance and subsequently
disappear little by little” (937). This phenomenon, he
comments, had been noted by such reliable observers as
Cornelius Gemma, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler’s pupils.
In his last recorded conversation with John Conduitt,
Newton, at the age of 83, expanded upon the circulatory
image implicit in this understanding of those celestial events;
for, as the preceding citations from the Principia show, he
regarded the appearance of what we call supernovae as
evidence that the universe itself undergoes vast cycles of
destruction and regeneration. Conduitt wrote of this conversation that:
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it was his conjecture (he would affirm nothing)
that there was a <sort of> revolution in the
heavenly bodies that the vapours & light gathered
<emitted> by the sun <which had their sediment
as water & other matter had> gathered
themselves by degrees into a body <& attracted
more matter from the planets> & at last made a
secondary planett (viz. one of those that go round
another planet) & then by gathering <to them>
& attracting more matter became a primary
planet, & then by increasing still became a comet
wch after certain revolutions & by coming nearer
& nearer the sun, had all its volatile parts
condensed & became a matter fit to recruit <&
replenish> the sun (wch must waste by the constant
heat & light it emitted), as a fagot put into
<would> this fire if put into it (wee were sitting
by the <a wood> fire) & and that that would
probably be the effect of the comet in 1680 sooner
or later . . . (Iliffe, 1: 165).
Newton added that when this collision occurred, after
perhaps five or six more revolutions, it would “so much
increase the heat of the sun that <this earth would be burnt
&> no animals in this earth could live” (Iliffe, 1: 165).
Indeed, he seemed to Conduitt “to be very clearly of opinion”
that such a collision, and subsequent “repeopling” by the
Creator had happened at least once already, observing, first,
“that the inhabitants of this earth were of a short date,” partly
because “all arts as letters long ships printing – needle &c
were discovered within the memory of History, wch could not
have happened if the world had been eternal,” and, further,
that as far as the earth itself was concerned, “there were
visible marks of men [Westfall (1984: 862) has “ruin” here;
the word must be difficult to make out.] upon it whch could
not be effected by a flood only” (Iliffe, 1: 166). Such collisions were, Newton speculated, the cause of the suddenly
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
brilliant stars he had noted in the Principia—but without
mentioning there, as he did in his conversation with
Conduitt, that he took those stars to be “suns enlightnening
other planets as our sun does ours” (Iliffe, 1: 165). When
Conduitt asked him “why he would not own as freely what
he thought of the sun as well as what he thought of the fixed
stars—he said that concerned us more, & laughing added he
had said enough for people to know his meaning” (Iliffe, 1:
166).40
Newton could laugh, even in the face of past and future
death and devastation, for he trusted that a benevolent and
all-powerful God—both perfect mechanic and perfect
alchemist—determines everything that happens in the
universe, including the generation and apocalyptic
destruction of all living things (as, of course, Newton had also
read in the Bible, though he seems not to have mentioned
that particular bit of testimony in the conversation Conduitt
recorded). The second text concealed in the Principia, by
giving us an alchemical account of the generation of life,
expresses Newton’s confidence in God as perfect master of
the Great Work. This text is fully contained in the following
sentence, added to the second edition of the Principia, in a
translation based on that of Cohen and Whitman (938), but
retaining the ampersands of the Latin text. The issue is not
the use of the ampersand itself, which appears stranger here
in English than it does in the Principia, as it is used
throughout that work. What is striking is that both a comma
and an ampersand separate every term from the one that
follows it. This is not Newton’s common practice when
listing members of a series:
And the vapors that arise from the sun & the fixed
stars & the tails of comets can fall by their gravity
into the atmospheres of the planets & there be
condensed & converted into water & humid
spirits, & then—by a slow heat—be transformed
gradually into salts, & sulphurs, & tinctures, &
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slime, & mud, & clay, & sand, & stones, &
corals, & other earthy substances.
In the second edition this sentence is followed by two more
sentences. In the third edition those two sentences have been
omitted, so that the sentence cited above is the last one in the
body of the work immediately preceding the General
Scholium.
By the time he wrote these words, Newton had
abandoned his attempts to achieve experimental evidence for
the existence of the forces he had sought through his
alchemical work, but his references to comets show that he
had not abandoned his faith in the truth behind that quest,
for the language and imagery of this sentence come from
mystical alchemy. The sentence can be read as an allegory of
the three fundamental processes by which, according to the
alchemists, nature perfects her work: sublimation (the vapors
arise from the sun, the fixed stars, and the tails of comets);
distillation (by gravity they are condensed and turned into
water and humid spirits); and concoction (they change form
under the application of a slow heat). This process as a whole
Newton knew as vegetation, which in one of his earliest texts
on this subject (called “Of Nature’s obvious laws & processes
in vegetation,” written between 1670 and 1675) he explicitly
distinguished from what he called the “gross mechanicall
transposition of parts” (3r). In the 1670s Newton had no
inkling either of universal gravitation—writing, for example,
that clouds could rise high enough to “loos their gravity”
(5r)—or of a possible connection between comets and life on
earth. Although he writes in the manuscript that, “this Earth
resembles a great animall or rather inanimate vegetable,
draws in aethereall breath for its dayly refreshment & vitall
ferment & transpires again with gross exhalations” (3v), he
does not claim to know the renewable source of the ethereal
breath. After writing the Principia, however, he was able, in
allegorical language, if not in the language of experimental
science or mathematics, to complete the system of life-giving
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
circulation.41 The products of vegetation, listed in order as
rising from the depths of the planet toward its surface in the
presence of the fertilizing philosophical mercury falling from
the heavens are emphasized in the Latin text by the repetition
of the ampersand. The first three—fundamental salts,
oleaginous and fiery sulphurs, and transforming tinctures—
are alchemical ingredients of increasing power, associated
with spirit and necessary for the origin and development of
life. The next four describe the evolution of matter under the
gradual drying effect of slow heating: slime (the residue of
putrefaction), mire, clay, and sand. With the eighth member
of the series, stones (a category that includes precious stones),
we begin to see the organization associated with the mineral
kingdom, considered a union of spirit and matter. The ninth
member of the series is coral, which also appears in the generative series in “Of Nature’s obvious laws.” Unmodified this
would be red coral, a precious natural analogue (according,
for example, to Michael Maier, nine of whose works were
part of Newton’s library) of the crimson philosophers’ stone
(169). With coral we pass from the mineral to the vegetable
kingdom, for coral was thought in Newton’s day to be a
marine plant, which grew under water and hardened to stone
when brought into the air. The last member of the
sequence—seventh in the group comprising the evolution of
matter, third in the group comprising the evolution of life in
terms of the three “kingdoms,” and tenth in the entire
process comprising the gradual union of spirit and matter—
brings us to the animal kingdom, telling us that “all terrestrial
substances,” a category that includes our own bodies, have
come into being through the natural transmutation of
celestial vapors by gravity and the planet’s slow heat. Newton
begins this sentence speaking generically about planets. He
ends it speaking specifically about that which “concerns us
more”: our earth and ourselves.
The final sentence of the body of the Principia, then,
reaches back to the very beginnings of Newton’s concern
with cosmology. He has returned at the end to the old
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questions on a new level of understanding made possible by
his discoveries in the Principia, though not yet sufficiently
developed to be expressed openly in the mathematical
language of experimental philosophy. In the second and, even
more pointedly, in the third edition of the Principia (both
prepared with more leisure than the first edition), it seems,
Newton wanted to end his book with a powerful vision
encompassing all of nature; a vision which, like that of the
veiled text at the beginning of Book 1, would be at once as
clear as crystal to those who knew how to read it and as clear
as mud to those who did not. The dissertation on comets is
the last dual teaching. Through careful observations and
sophisticated mathematical calculations Newton has transformed our understanding of the nature of comets and the
laws behind their motion. But he has also composed hauntingly beautiful images of generation in our universe and on
our earth, for in the final allegory comets link the earth and
everything in it to the heavens. Newton chose not to express
this grand life-giving circulation openly in the Principia. But
he did include it. The processes revealed in these allegories
declare the Great Work of nature under the guidance of God.
In this vision perpetual circulation leads to life itself, and
universal gravitation is its motor.
5. “The fountain I draw it from”
Nature may truly be described as being one, true,
simple, and perfect in her own essence, and as
being animated by an invisible spirit. If therefore
you would know her, you, too, should be true,
single-hearted, patient, constant, pious, forbearing
and, in short, a new and regenerate man. (The
Sophic Hydrolith)42
I am not so bold as to assert that I have interpreted the
concealed texts correctly in every detail and I certainly do not
claim that I have discussed every appearance of symbolism in
the book. Nevertheless, I hope I have shown that a coherent
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
vision may be seen by reading the beginning of Book 1 of the
Principia in terms of numerological, esoteric geometrical,
theological, and alchemical symbolism, and by reading the
end of Book 3 in terms of alchemical allegory. I am not
arguing that the Principia properly understood is a sort of
Paradise Regained couched in mathematical metaphors, and I
have not forgotten for a moment that I am dealing with the
foundational text of modern terrestrial and celestial
mechanics; that what I have been calling the exoteric text has
existed ostensibly on its own for over 300 years; and that the
esoteric texts, in the absence of the exoteric text, would be no
more than mystical fancies, and perhaps not particularly
interesting ones at that. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake
to dismiss or avoid the esoteric texts, because they open the
way to a new and richer level of understanding of the work
as a whole, as well as of its author.
In fact, the existence of concealed texts in the Principia is
a solution, rather than a problem. Newtonian scholarship has
been a prolonged and uneasy exercise in rethinking his work.
Isaac Newton devoted the passion of his soul and the activity
of his intellect to discovering the intelligibility and the unity
of the world in all its manifestations. Yet even before we knew
of his vast manuscript collection of theological and
alchemical writings, whose subjects and style are so very
different from those usually attributed to the author of the
Principia, Newton was considered a complex and contradictory character. Now, the impacts of successive revelations—among them the ardency of his alchemical pursuits,
the intensity of his theological studies, and his conviction that
much of his work was restoring ancient learning—seem to
some to have shattered the possibility of ever seeing him as a
single, cohesive individual.
The Principia has been the crux of the problem.
Mathematicians and physicists have, quite reasonably,
focused on its mathematical and physical aspects. Meanwhile,
Newton’s biographers and the students of his theological and
alchemical pursuits have, for the most part, surrendered the
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Principia to those capable of following its formidable mathematics. I hope that, by looking closely at the Principia in a
way that (to my knowledge) has not been attempted before, I
have demonstrated that the mathematical, philosophical,
theological, and alchemical aspects of Newton’s work are
intertwined. But, even granting the existence of the concealed
texts, important questions remain: Why would Newton have
incorporated these teachings into the Principia? Why would
he have hidden them rather than revealing them openly? And
to whom are they addressed?
The first hidden text is particularly perplexing. Even as
mounting evidence persuaded me that it must be there, I had
no ready answer to the question why someone absorbed in
the relatively hasty composition of such a difficult and timeconsuming work would (or even could) have taken the time
and trouble to construct it. And yet perhaps it is not so
surprising. The language of symbol and allegory would have
been second nature to a man so thoroughly steeped in the
interpretation of alchemical and theological texts.
Incorporation of allegory and symbolism into his own text
would not have required inordinate effort. More importantly,
while for readers of the Principia, the hidden texts might
seem to be subsidiary to the open text—if they are seen at
all—for its author the relationship would have been the
reverse. The esoteric texts are not appendages to the exoteric
text; they are, instead, its foundation. There were certain
things Newton was not disposed to doubt and he held certain
convictions he would not deign to explain. In 1676, for
example, in a letter to John Collins, after asserting what he
realized was astonishing power and generality for his method
of fluxions, Newton wrote, “This may seem a bold assertion
because it’s hard to say a figure may or may not be squared or
compared with another, but it’s plain to me by ye fountain I
draw it from, though I will not undertake to prove it to
others” (Correspondence, 2: 180). The symbolic texts allow
Newton to incorporate into his masterwork the certainty
which was the source of his amazingly fruitful vision of the
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
world, without having also to prove its existence to others.
They proclaim the glory of God suffusing both the universe
and the souls of men: the ground of Newton’s assurance that
the pursuit of knowledge through experimental and mathematical means is the proper vocation of humankind.
So did Newton include the hidden texts as a prayer of
thanksgiving to God, or perhaps as a personal meditation,
without intending them to be visible to others? I do think that
expression of his deepest beliefs at the heart of his greatest
work must have been a balm to the lonely soul of its author.
Newton had an attentive niece, devoted disciples, sympathetic colleagues, and even friends; but he had no peers. His
manuscripts with their repeatedly suppressed declarations
and speculations tell the story of an individual tormented by
the conflict between the aching desire to share his convictions
and the conviction that he could not do so. The “classical”
scholia, parts of which I have quoted above, serve as a particularly poignant example of this struggle, which he finally
settled by not including them in the Principia. The hidden
texts, thus, help resolve what must have been nearly
unbearable tension. Newton would have known that,
whatever their fate as far as the rest of the world was
concerned, they were there as his testimony of faith.
Nonetheless, it seems impossible that he concealed texts
in the Principia simply for his solitary satisfaction. There are
abundant indications within the work that signal the existence
of the first hidden text, while the remarks cited concerning
comets are in plain sight of anyone who reaches the end of
Book 3. Moreover, Newton himself, in the General Scholium,
calls our attention to the relation between God and natural
philosophy in a way that, when read only in the light of the
surface text of the Principia, is more puzzling than enlightening. The extended discourse on God, located at the center
of the General Scholium, is, frankly, shocking. It bursts
through the surface of the text with the force of a pent-up
spring, a surging torrent of words, far too powerful and far
too passionate to be neatly contained within the book the
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Principia seems at first to be. And then this ardent outpouring
vanishes without a trace, subsiding as suddenly as it began,
beneath the sentence: “This concludes the discussion of God,
and to treat of God from phenomena is certainly a part of
natural philosophy” (943).44 No one who reads this passage
can doubt that its author was a man of exceptional piety, but
if he was so very pious (and if he really believed that to treat
of God from phenomena is part of natural philosophy), how
could he have slighted God in his greatest work? It is true that
the Principia is a book of experimental philosophy (though
there are necessarily few actual experiments in it), and that
there is no experiment that will simply prove the existence of
God. But, except for a few scattered remarks, God appears to
be so utterly absent from the work that—despite the
testimony of Richard Bentley’s lectures, titled A Confutation
of Atheism from the Origin and Frame of the World, delivered
in 1692 and published in 1693—Newton has been
condemned for writing an atheistic book (or, alternatively,
commended for writing a secular one).45 Of course, I have
been arguing that God is not at all missing from the Principia.
On the contrary, anyone willing to admit that this work (like
white light, the stone of the philosophers, man, and the
universe) may be simultaneously one and many, and able to
follow the clues Newton has provided, can see that it is, in
fact, filled with God’s presence and that we are meant to see
that presence.
But if we are meant to see that presence, then why hide
the teachings? There are several partial answers to this
question. One reason may have been Newton’s personality,
which has been described by such various terms as prudent,
paranoid, modest, arrogant, cautious, suspicious,
domineering, fearful, and vindictive. A more important factor
in his decision to hide the teachings could have been his
particular situation in the context of the political and
religious turmoil that was occurring in England during his
lifetime. Most importantly, the nature of the teachings
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themselves would have determined the form of their presentation.
As for his personality, extreme reticence, whatever its
source, was apparently part of Newton’s character. Public
revelation of any of his work seems often to have required a
struggle with himself as well as with others; most of what he
wrote, by far, he did not publish. But a simple appeal to
character does not really resolve the issue, for in the works he
did publish Newton was not always quite so reluctant to
reveal his beliefs as he was in the Principia. In the Opticks, for
example, published during his lifetime in six editions (three
in English, in 1704, 1717/18, and 1721; two in Latin, in
1706 and 1719; and a French translation in 1720), he wrote
increasingly openly of his hopes and speculations regarding
natural philosophy, though he still disguised them (however
transparently) as queries. He first published the Opticks,
however, after the death of his nemesis Robert Hooke in
1703 and his own ascent to a position of fame and power as
author of the Principia and president of the Royal Society,
and at a time when he was becoming more conscious of the
need to leave his work for posterity. Openness had also
characterized his early “New Theory about Light and
Colours.” But the tone of ingenuous excitement in which on
January 18, 1672 Newton (who was not yet 30 years old)
described his discovery of the nature of light to Henry
Oldenburg as “in my Judgment the oddest if not the most
considerable wch hath beene made in the operations of
Nature” (Correspondence, 1: 82-3) is one he never again
employed publicly. Instead, burned by the hostility that work
aroused, he designed his Principia to ensure that the
expression of his deepest passions and convictions would be
visible only to like-minded readers.
Newton’s penchant for secrecy, however, was not simply
(and perhaps not even primarily) a matter of character. He
had compelling external reasons to conceal his theological,
philosophical, and alchemical beliefs. With respect to
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theology, in the General Scholium to the Principia Newton
finally affirms the strict monotheism and the vision of God as
Παντοκρατϖρ that underlie his work, though with characteristic discretion he eschews the scorching anti-Trinitarian
diatribes he allowed himself in his unpublished manuscripts.
But by the time the second edition of the Principia was being
prepared—and the General Scholium was Newton’s final
addition to that edition—its author was Sir Isaac, secure in his
renown; and the Principia was so highly regarded that it had
practically become a sacred text itself. Had the unknown
Cambridge professor expressed his dangerously unorthodox
beliefs in 1687, he would have risked his career if not his life
(for religious heterodoxy was a capital offense in England at
the time). Moreover, the peril of confessing such beliefs did
not abate during Newton’s lifetime. He was a member of the
Convention Parliament of 1689, which declared equally
illegal the Roman Catholicism he loathed and the Arianism he
held.46 Newton could reasonably conclude that open
acknowledgment of his religious convictions would have put
his entire philosophical program at risk. At the very least it
would have provided for a lifetime of distraction, as he would
have been forced to engage in endless discussion and defense
of his beliefs. He had better things to do.
Newton had good reasons, as well, not to proclaim his
unorthodox philosophical convictions in the Principia,
closely tied as they were to his heterodox theology. He
believed that the existence of gravity had been made manifest
through its effects as revealed in the Principia, and that such
revelation, as he wrote in the General Scholium, was—
indeed, had to be—enough for now. Throughout his long life
he repeatedly tried to claim the right to say that he did not
know the cause of gravity, insisting (as had Galileo) that
knowledge of causes was not necessary for the pursuit of
natural philosophy. In fact, Newton was convinced that
requiring that causes be known, or hypothesized, before
effects could be studied stifled philosophical progress.47 In the
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General Scholium, after his often quoted assertion that he
does not feign hypotheses, Newton continues: “For whatever
is not deduced from the phenomena must be called a
hypothesis, and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or
physical, or based on occult qualities, or mechanical, have no
place in experimental philosophy” (943). This statement—in
addition to neatly equating, in terms of their uselessness, the
metaphysical with the physical and the mechanical qualities
that the Cartesians held with the occult qualities which to
them were anathema—stakes out Newton’s philosophical
position on this issue. He publicly refuses to attempt to
explain gravity, and, with the authority of the Principia
behind him, he goes on to declare that a search for its cause
is, at best, beside the point.
But his protestations were not accepted by the mechanical
philosophers. Surely the heat with which they attacked him
was due in part to their understandable suspicion that he
thought he knew the cause of gravity, and that it was not
mechanical; for it was quite clear that impulse was unable to
account for universal gravitation. Explanation of gravitation,
therefore, seemed inevitably to require acceptance of a
doctrine of attraction, of action at a distance, of a force that
was, to use their heavily-laden word, “occult.”48 Newton
would readily have admitted that the workings of gravity
were occult—in the simple sense that we do not know exactly
how God does it. But he could never have satisfied the strict
mechanical philosophers on this point, no matter what he
said, for conservation of the universe as Newton understood
it required active force;49 and any admission of a nonmechanical cause into the universe was unacceptable to those
who held that the physical world could only be intelligible in
terms of matter and motion alone. If Newton harbored
personal beliefs about God’s active role in the universe, he
also realized that it would have been foolish for him to
express openly in the Principia convictions for which he
could not supply experimental evidence. Wisely, he designed
the surface text of the book to preclude speculation about
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causes. The deeper teachings—composed in a language not
susceptible to argument—were reserved for those who could
appreciate them.
As concerns Newton’s alchemical quest, as well, there
were abundant reasons not to reveal it openly in the
Principia. Again, one was the character of the open text as its
author constructed it, for if he had no demonstrable evidence
of the cause of gravity he had no demonstrable evidence even
of the existence of the forces he sought so avidly through
alchemy. Newton seems to have read alchemical texts with
the same intent with which he read all texts: seeing their
deliberately deceptive exposition and dense symbolic enigmas
as expressions of a single truth uniting nature and revelation,
obscured by a veil that could be penetrated by interpretation,
which in this case was aided by the experimentation at which
he was so adept. Whatever the philosophers’ stone may have
meant for other alchemists, for Newton I believe achievement
of the stone would have been the culmination of his life’s
work: it would have meant the acquisition through experimental means of that truth which he sought so very intensely.
As early as the first edition of the Principia, Newton struggled
with the desire to reveal his alchemical pursuits, writing in
the Preface, after describing the procedure he would follow
in the book:
If only we could derive the other phenomena of
nature from mechanical principles by the same
kind of reasoning! For many things lead me to
have a suspicion that all phenomena may depend
on certain forces by which the particles of bodies,
by causes not yet known, either are impelled
toward one another and cohere in regular figures,
or are repelled from one another and recede. Since
these forces are unknown, philosophers have
hitherto made trial of nature in vain. But I hope
that the principles set down here will shed some
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light on either this mode of philosophizing or
some truer one. (382-3)
As usual, however, he resolved that the open text of the
Principia was not the proper place for conjectures, no matter
how fervently he may have held them. This brief statement of
his strong suspicion and hopes and a few speculations in the
last paragraph of the General Scholium, which he cut short
for lack of experimental evidence, are as close as he comes to
openly stating his chemical aspirations in that work.50
Failure to obtain experimental evidence for chemical
forces might have been sufficient motive for Newton to
withhold open acknowledgment of those aspirations, but
there were other cogent reasons for discretion, as well.
Newton surely considered himself among the philosophical
alchemists, for, unlike the puffers or smoke-sellers, whose
base activity the philosophical alchemists universally decried,
he was surely not interested in acquiring personal power or
amassing wealth through chicanery. Nevertheless, he knew
that alchemists were widely considered to be rogues and
conjurors and as such were both ridiculed and feared.
Therefore, in personal terms, there was much to be lost and
nothing to be gained by publicly espousing alchemy. In
practical terms, serious alchemists considered the power they
hoped to achieve too dangerous to be proclaimed openly to
an imperfect world, a constraint that we know Newton
respected.51 And finally, the philosophical alchemists were
engaged in a spiritual quest for purification and perfection,
which they also called healing, not only of metals but also of
their own souls. True philosophical alchemy required a
relationship between the practitioner and his God wherein
the success of the work depended at least as much upon the
state of the alchemist’s soul as upon his facility in deciphering
texts or his dexterity in following procedures. The one thing
serious alchemical writings make perfectly clear is that only
the pious and pure of heart will be able to discern the proper
proportions of materials, the correct degrees of heat for each
part of the procedure, and the precise timing necessary to
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perfect the work.52 Achievement of the philosophers’ stone
would have been a gift of God awarded to one who merited
it. Open acknowledgment of engagement in this intense and
intimate quest would have been not only foolhardy but also
impious.
There are, then, abundant negative reasons for Newton
to have hidden his theological, philosophical, and alchemical
beliefs; but there is also a powerful positive argument for
including those beliefs in the form of concealed texts.
Newton seems to have considered, repeatedly, the possibility
that the world was ready for him to reveal, in his own name,
the convictions he held. And every time he considered that
possibility, he rejected it. He, therefore, took his place as a
member of a distinguished secret fraternity long engaged in
the task of seeking the truth and revealing it in a dual
manner: each work simultaneously expounding one text for
the many, and another, through symbols and figures, for the
few.53 He believed that the alchemists, the ancient sages, and
the inspired writers of the Holy Scriptures—recognizing the
peril to themselves and quite possibly to others of openly
displaying their true convictions in unsettled times like those
in which he was living—had conveyed their mystical
teachings in metaphors, fables, allegories, images, parables,
and prophecies, as well as numerological and esoteric
geometrical symbolism. All of their texts, like the book of
nature itself, required interpretation. Newton understood the
worth of his Book of Principles. Why should it differ in this
respect from the world-changing works that preceded it? In
his remarkable passage about God in the General Scholium,
Newton comes close to expressing in words the vision of the
concealed texts. But the full force of mystical belief cannot be
conveyed in everyday language, corrupted by the Fall and
confined by what Newton called its “unavoidable
narrowness” (McGuire, 199). Newton had numerous reasons
not to express his mystical teachings openly, but he also had
a powerful reason to express them in the way he did:
Symbolism is their proper language.
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An unavoidable, and perhaps uncomfortable, consequence of this reading is the recognition that not all of the
teachings in the Principia were meant for everyone (though
the shock of this realization should be attenuated by recalling
that the book is a restricted text at every level). But if the
teachings were not meant for everyone, to whom were they
addressed? Clearly, Newton wanted others to continue the
work he had begun. He published and repeatedly revised
both the Principia and the Opticks in the interest of
promoting the development of natural philosophy, which, he
told Conduitt toward the end of his life, he felt the comfort
of having left less mischievous than he found it. But, aside
from those two books, he seems to have cared so little (or
perhaps, in some cases, feared so much) what his contemporaries would think of his work that he preferred not to
publish it during his lifetime, particularly if publication meant
that he would be hounded and pestered by critics.54 On the
other hand, he cared very deeply that his work be preserved
and, furthermore, that others know that it was his. Both his
reluctance to publish and his wounded outrage—when his
originality, at least with respect to his fellow moderns, was
assailed (as by Hooke); or his work, to his mind, was
hindered (as by Flamsteed); or his priority and even his
probity were challenged (as by Leibniz)—may be partially
understood if we realize that Newton considered the intellectual community to which he belonged to be temporal.55 In
the concealed texts Newton was addressing primarily those
he would consider his true intellectual heirs. Those philosophers, carrying on the task of improving natural philosophy
and presumably familiar with its venerable dual tradition,
would be able to see and recognize the true foundation of the
work in which they were engaged.
For Newton knew that the work was not complete.
Although he recognized that his remarkable achievements
had reached new heights of natural philosophy, he was also
well aware that his deepest questions had gone unanswered.
There is evidence that when he finished the first edition of the
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Principia, he still hoped he would find those answers. In the
early 1690s he immersed himself in a monumental study of
the entire alchemical tradition. He may, as well, have
attempted to initiate his young disciple, Nicholas Fatio de
Duillier, into his alchemical pursuits. But it came to nothing.56
In 1693 Newton suffered a breakdown, a mysterious episode
which led to rumors on the Continent that he had become
permanently deranged or had even died. The onset of this
crisis has been attributed—not fully persuasively—to various
causes; but equally remarkable (and also unexplained) is its
abrupt end. This end was characterized by the full resumption
of his sanity—if not of the intense intellectual power that had
previously marked his life—only a few months after he wrote
the rambling letters to Samuel Pepys and John Locke that
were the source of their fears for his state of mind.57 His
failure to unlock the chemical secrets of the universe, despite
his fevered attempts to do so, must have been devastating.
But Newton finally accepted that he would not be the one to
answer those questions. In 1696, at the age of 53, he
abandoned his experimental search into the unity of nature
and took a position as master of the mint.
Nevertheless, he did not repudiate his earlier failed
attempts. On the contrary, he left ample evidence of his
ongoing conviction that such unity did exist. This evidence
includes his elaboration of the second concealed text in the
second and third editions of the Principia, as well as his
decision to leave both that work and the Opticks open,
inviting further study and suggesting possible directions for
it. Newton also scattered clues to his beliefs outside of the
works published in his name. He impressed some of his
unpublished views upon the young men whose careers he
fostered, and they in turn disseminated them. His disciple
David Gregory, for example, in “The Author’s Preface” to his
Astronomiæ physicæ & geometricæ elementa (1702) included
a history of astronomy, according to which the laws his great
mentor Isaac Newton supposedly was the first to discover had
been in fact only rediscovered, as they had been known to the
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ancients. In the twentieth century the manuscript of this
passage was found among Newton’s papers, written in
Newton’s hand. Newton himself had composed it.
In addition, though he is said to have burned numerous
papers in the days before his death, Newton left millions of
words concerning the interpretation of history and scripture,
as well as his interpretation of alchemical texts and detailed
notes on his experiments.58 As he seems to have left no
written account of his reasons for wanting his unpublished
manuscripts to survive him, it is impossible to be certain of
his motives. One might surmise, for example, that Newton
left us his alchemical notes as proof of failure, as evidence
that not even he could unlock the chemical secrets of the
universe by following that path, and therefore as an
indication of precisely how not to proceed. But what, then,
do we make of the historical and scriptural interpretations
that accompany that record? Are we to regard them as
repudiated, too? In the absence of a note stating his intent—
whose discovery among the manuscripts would be a real
coup—it seems likely that he retained hope that another,
knowing of his efforts now that he was “out of the way,”
could pick up his task of unifying scripture, history, and
natural philosophy where he had abandoned it. Newton
could not have known that the executors of his estate would
label his alchemical writings not fit to print. Nor could he
have known that his more radical theological manuscripts
would also be deemed unprintable, despite the desire his
niece expressed in her will that they be published. Newton, in
short, could not have known the extent to which his
published work—particularly his Principia—like the
philosopher’s stone he had sought for so long, had begun to
transform both the world and himself within it. One of the
effects of this transformation may have been to shield the
secrecy of its author’s convictions after his death more
thoroughly than he intended. But he seems not to have cared.
Dying intestate, he left the matter in the hands of God, who,
he trusted, would allow it to be revealed at the proper time.
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For Newton believed the time would come when an
improved world would be ready to accept his teachings. In
the spirit of the ancient philosophers he most admired, his
philosophical aspirations extended beyond the realm of
natural philosophy; he trusted that its perfection would lead
to that of moral philosophy, so sadly imperfect in the
turbulent world he saw around him. The last edition of the
Opticks ends with the following passage, looking toward
progress in natural philosophy, which Newton believed
would lead not to a new morality but to a return to pure
ancient morality:
In this third Book [for the Opticks, too, is divided
into three books] I have only begun the Analysis of
what remains to be discover’d about Light and its
Effects upon the Frame of Nature, hinting several
things about it, and leaving the Hints to be
examin’d and improv’d by the farther Experiments
and Observations of such as are inquisitive. And if
natural Philosophy in all its Parts, by pursuing this
Method, shall at length be perfected, the Bounds
of Moral Philosophy will also be enlarged. For so
far as we can know by natural Philosophy what is
the first Cause, what Power he has over us, and
what Benefits we receive from him, so far our
Duty towards him, as well as that towards one
another, will appear to us by the Light of Nature.
And no doubt, if the Worship of false Gods had
not blinded the Heathen, their moral Philosophy
would have gone farther than to the four Cardinal
Virtues; and instead of teaching the
Transmigration of Souls, and to worship the Sun
and Moon, and dead Heroes, they would have
taught us to worship our true Author and
Benefactor, as their Ancestors did under the
Government of Noah and his Sons before they
corrupted themselves. (405-6)
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But the outcome of Newton’s “method” has been quite
other than the unification of natural and moral philosophy he
intended. We can never know how things would have been
different had his concealed convictions been brought to light
before the twentieth century. In the event, his Principia was
driven like a wedge between reason and faith. Designed to
declare the power of the deity in the world and, thereby, to
revive and foster both natural and moral philosophy,
Newton’s masterwork has instead been seen as a monument
to the separation between science and religion, as antithetical
to the unity of the very traditions of which it was in fact the
culmination.
6. Conclusion: The Old Made New
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.59
So what then is this Principia? To construct his grand vision,
encompassing the whole of creation, Newton, of course,
drew on his exceptional mathematical ability. But the
Principia is more than the mathematical and physical
treatise—however great—that it appears to be. It is a little
world, an artful elaboration of secular and sacred traditions
of human knowledge, born both of Renaissance
Hermeticism, which was so influential in the development of
experimental science in the seventeenth century, and of
Newton’s faith in a beneficent creator who ruled the universe
and who (in the fullness of time) would allow his human
creatures to discover and reveal its lawfulness. Behind everything that Newton did was a firm faith in God’s providence.
All of his work conveys his conviction that we live in a world
whose history is the working out of God’s great story from
the creation to the apocalypse. We humans do not have the
power, he thought, nor should we have the desire, to alter
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that already-written story; but God has hidden clues to it in
both nature and scripture, which some of us may be granted
the power to see and understand. The texts concealed in the
Principia—in their vision of God’s glory filling, fertilizing,
and illuminating the entire universe and the soul of his
disciple—are Newton’s grateful acknowledgement of the
source of his understanding and also his message to the
future; they are the manifestation of his peculiar genius and
his true secret art.
I do not intend here to discuss the validity of Newton’s
vision of the world. My goal in this study has been merely to
urge a thoroughgoing reconsideration of his Principia, a book
that resolutely resists easy classification. Seen as a whole, the
work both supersedes, and incorporates, the secular and
sacred traditions of learning that preceded it. It is a
magnificent product of transformation and circulation, a
manifestation at every level of the old made new (and, for
that matter, of the new made old). Together with the unparalleled mathematical achievements of the open text, the
mystical journey near the beginning of Book 1 teaches us that
our minds are capable of ascending to the heavens and
beyond, while the cosmic allegory at the end of Book 3 shows
us that our bodies are composed of the material and spiritual
stuff of the universe. The open text is grounded upon the
visions expressed in the hidden texts, and the hidden texts
depend for their power upon the open text while extending
its domain.
The Principia, in sum, speaks to both our intellect and our
imagination, addressing our deep human desire to be intellectually, spiritually, and materially at one with our universe.
Newton’s greatest book is far stranger and far richer than we
have ever suspected. A mathematical and physical work of
prodigious power, the Principia is also an expression of the
highest art and a declaration of the deepest love of which this
remarkable man was capable.
*
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I would like to thank Curtis Wilson, Tom Simpson, and Dana
Densmore for reading and commenting on an early draft of
this paper. I would also like to thank Rob Iliffe and Peter Pesic
for doing the same for a nearly final draft, and the editors and
editorial assistants of the Review for seeing it through to
publication. I am especially grateful to Eva Brann for her
unstinting support from beginning to end. I have attempted
to address the questions and suggestions of these generous
readers. None of them bears any responsibility for anything
written here.
Notes
37
Isaac Newton’s translation of the Tabula Smaragdina, the “Emerald
Tablet” attributed to Hermes Trismegistus (quoted in Dobbs 1991, 274).
The passage continues with some alchemical instructions.
38
Simpson, too, in the final section of his article, addresses what he calls
the astronomical alchemy that comets undergo in their close approach to
the sun, which he calls the “furnace of the heavens,” a crucible that
reaches a temperature unattainable on earth, thus leading to “the
emission of that ‘spirit’ which was always the ultimate objective of the
alchemic search and is fundamentally needed in order to complete
Newton’s account of the true System of the World” (164).
39
Newton wrote in his Hypothesis explaining the properties of light: “For
nature is a perpetuall circulatory worker, generating fluids out of solids,
and solids out of fluids, fixed things out of volatile, & volatile out of
fixed, subtile out of gross, & gross out of subtile, Some things to ascend
& make the upper terrestriall juices, Rivers and the Atmosphere; & by
consequence others to descend for a Requitall to the former”
(Correspondence, 1: 366). These sentences were written while Newton
still accepted the vortex hypothesis of planetary motion, well before he
had any idea of universal gravitation. As he developed the Principia, he
abandoned the hypothesis of vortices and, indeed, in the Principia he
takes every opportunity to combat that hypothesis. I believe, however,
that the sentiment of the passage survives as a metaphor of the circular
chemical processes, moved by gravity, that make life possible.
40Actually
he had acknowledged it, writing: “The comet that appeared in
1680 was distant from the sun in its perihelion by less than a sixth of the
sun’s diameter; and because its velocity was greatest in that region and
also because the atmosphere of the sun has some density, the comet must
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have encountered some resistance and must have been somewhat slowed
down and must have approached closer to the sun; and by approaching
closer to the sun in every revolution, it will at length fall into the body of
the sun. But also, in its aphelion, when it moves most slowly, the comet
can sometimes be slowed down by the attraction of other comets and as a
result fall into the sun” (937). He does not, however, dwell on the implications of the predicted collision for life on earth, but moves directly on
to his remarks about supernovae to which Conduitt called his attention in
their conversation.
41
This image appears in the Opticks, as well. In Query 30, one of those
added to the Latin and later English editions of that work, Newton muses
about the convertibility of light and gross bodies into one another,
writing, “The changing of Bodies into Light, and Light into Bodies, is
very conformable to the Course of Nature, which seems delighted with
Transmutations” (374), and, later, “All Birds, Beasts and Fishes, Insects,
Trees and other Vegetables, with their several Parts, grow out of Water
and watry Tinctures and Salts, and by Putrefaction return again into
watry Substances. And Water standing a few Days in the open Air, yields
a Tincture, which (like that of Malt), by standing longer yields a Sediment
and a Spirit, but before Putrefaction is fit Nourishment for Animals and
Vegetables. And among such various and strange Transmutations, why
may not Nature change Bodies into Light, and Light into Bodies?” (375).
Like the alchemical allegory at the end of the discussion of comets in the
Principia, these passages were written after their author had abandoned
alchemical experimentation.
42
Quoted in Waite, 1: 75.
43
There are exceptions: notably Alexandre Koyré, I. Bernard Cohen, and
Richard Westfall. But Westfall, who has produced the most comprehensive account of Newton’s life and work, admits with frustration that
during two decades of study Newton became ever more of a mystery to
him. In a modern version of the opinion of the Marquis de l’Hôpital—
who wondered if Newton ate, drank, and slept like other men or was
truly the god he seemed—Westfall concludes that there is no measure for
Newton, that he is wholly other. I do not agree; but I do believe that
until we acknowledge the texts hidden in the Principia we will never
understand its author.
44
Et hæc de deo, de quo utique ex phænomenis disserere, ad philosophiam
naturalem pertinet (764). This quote is from the third edition of the
Principia. In the second edition Newton states that to discourse of God is
the business of experimental philosophy, a statement which makes even
more perplexing the apparent absence of God from this particular book.
Newton seems to have thought better of that claim, for he changed it in
the final edition. Larry Stewart contends that the General Scholium “was
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written, and certainly perceived to have been written, with an eye to the
difficulties and the defence of the anti-Trinitarianism of his disciple
Samuel Clarke” (145-6). It is not clear to me why Isaac Newton would
have used his masterwork as a tool to defend Samuel Clarke, though it is
possible, as Stewart claims, that the General Scholium was (at least to
some degree) a salvo fired against societal assault on experimentalism. If
Stewart is right we find ourselves presented with yet another case in
which Newton manages to say what he means in a veiled manner.
45
The scholium following the Definitions does mention “Scriptures,”
(414) which is Cohen and Whitman’s translation of the Latin “sacris
literis” (52). And the first edition of the Principia contains (in Corollary 5
to Proposition 8 of Book 3) the following sentence: “Collocavit igitur
Deus Planetas in diversis distantiis a Sole, ut quilibet pro gradu densitatis
calore Solis majore vel minore fruatur” (583). Corollary 5 was excised
from the later editions, and some of its content was included in Corollary
4. But Newton replaced “God placed . . .” with “the planets were to be
placed. . .” (Cohen 1969, 529-30). This, by the way, is further evidence
that Newton’s use of the passive voice in the Principia is deliberate and
significant. Cohen argues, I think rightly, that these passing references are
indications that Newton was thinking of God all along, as he constructed
every edition of the Principia.
46
During Newton’s lifetime, refusal to accept the doctrine of the Trinity
could lead to prison; in 1696 a man was hanged for denying that article
of faith. Moreover, open expression of unorthodox beliefs was costly to
some of Newton’s disciples. Edmond Halley’s supposed atheism, for
example, cost him the Savilian professorship of astronomy at Oxford
University, which was awarded to David Gregory, another protégé of
Newton, who apparently was scarcely more religious than Halley, though
he was more discreet about his heterodoxy; and William Whiston lost his
position as successor to Newton in the Lucasian professorship of mathematics at Cambridge University for espousing religious views similar to
those Newton held. Newton, of course, considered the Trinitarians to be
the real heretics, and at crucial times in his life he refused to compromise
his beliefs. He was willing to sacrifice his appointment to Cambridge
University rather than take the requisite holy orders; he fought hard and
successfully against appointment by King James II of a Benedictine monk
to the university (though in this case the grounds were Roman
Catholicism rather than Trinitarianism as such); and on his deathbed he
refused the sacrament of the church. Nonetheless, he attended church
services occasionally; and he supported the Anglican Church. I doubt that
his intent in doing so was merely to disguise his true convictions in order
to protect his reputation. Newton would have regarded the Church of
England as a valuable bulwark against the political and religious
encroachments of the Roman Catholic Church, which he called the
SEEGER
33
Whore of Babylon, and which he identified in his Observations on the
Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John, published posthumously in 1733, as the little horn of the fourth beast prophesied in the
Book of Daniel.
The widespread social upheavals of the time may also have influenced
Newton’s decision to be circumspect about his theological beliefs. David
Kubrin, in his article “Newton’s Inside Out!” speculates that the reason
he censored himself and repressed his insights, ideas, visions, and grand
plan of the cosmos, “was largely social, and stemmed from the fact that
Newton realized the dangerous social, political, economic, and religious
implications that would be associated with him should he dare reveal his
true thoughts” (97). Though Kubrin focuses on the social aspects of
Newton’s ideas, his claim is reminiscent of Law’s assertion that Newton
did not reveal his supposed indebtedness to Boehme because he did not
want to be associated with enthusiasm.
47
Descartes, for example, criticizing Galileo’s method in his Discorsi, had
written to Mersenne, “Nothing that he says here can be determined
without knowing what gravity is” (October 11, 1638, quoted in de
Gandt, 118). If Newton had waited to know what gravity was before
writing the Principia, the book never would have been written.
48
Newton considered action at a distance, in a universe containing only
matter, ridiculous, for he did not believe that brute matter could act in
any way at all. In Rule 3 of Book 3 of the Principia, added in the second
edition (Koyré, 268), he explicitly repudiates the notion that gravity is
inherent in matter. In his third letter to Richard Bentley, he expressed this
conviction even more strongly, writing: “That gravity should be innate
inherent & essential to matter so yt one body may act upon another at a
distance through a vacuum without the mediation of any thing else by &
through wch their action or force may be conveyed from one to another
is to me so great an absurdity that I beleive no man who has in philosophical matters any competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it”
(Correspondence, 3: 254).
49
As he wrote to Bentley, “Gravity must be caused by an agent acting
constantly according to certain laws, but whether this agent be material
or immaterial is a question I have left to ye consideration of my readers”
(Correspondence, 3: 254).
50
Further evidence for Newton’s struggle with himself over this issue, as
well as his awareness of the effects revelation of his beliefs would have
had on others’ perceptions of both himself and his work may be seen in a
draft of a Proposition 18 (crossed out and relabeled Hypothesis 2), which
he wrote after finishing the first edition of the Principia. This hypothesis,
which was to have been part of a general conclusion to the Opticks,
reads: “As all the great motions in the world depend upon a certain kind
of force (which in this earth we call gravity) whereby great bodies attract
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
one another at great distances: so all the little motions in the world
depend upon certain kinds of forces whereby minute bodies attract or
dispell one another at little distances.” He refers to his demonstration of
universal gravitation in the Principia, and continues: “And if Nature be
most simple & fully consonant to her self she observes the same method
in regulating the motions of smaller bodies which she doth in regulating
those of the greater. This principle of nature being very remote from the
conceptions of Philosophers I forbore to describe it in that Book least I
should be accounted an extravagant freak & so prejudice my Readers
against all those things which were the main designe of the Book: but &
yet I hinted at it both in the Preface & in the Book it self where I speak
of the inflection of light & of the elastick power of the Air but the design
of the book being secured by the approbation of Mathematicians, I had
not scrupled to propose this Principle in plane words. The truth of this
Hypothesis I assert not, because I cannot prove it, but I think it very
probable because a great part of the phenomena of nature do very easily
flow from it which seem otherways inexplicable: . . .” (quoted in Cohen
1982, 63) He goes on to list some of the phenomena he has in mind.
Newton repressed but did not destroy this remarkable statement.
51
We know that Newton admitted the possibility that this fear was well
founded because of a letter he sent on April 26, 1676 to Henry
Oldenburg, Secretary of the Royal Society, regarding a question raised by
a “B. R.” (Robert Boyle) in the Philosophical Transactions whether he
should publish the recipe for a mercury that heated gold when mixed
with it. Newton stated that he doubted that this particular mercury could
be useful “either to medicine or vegetation.” Then he continued:
But yet because the way by which mercury [Newton here
places an alchemical symbol instead of the word] may be so
impregnated, has been thought fit to be concealed by others
that have known it, & therefore may possibly be an inlet to
something more noble, not to be communicated wthout
immense dammage to ye world if there should be any verity
in ye Hermetick writers, therefore I question not but that ye
great wisdom of ye noble Authour will sway him to high
silence till he shall be resolved of what consequence ye thing
may be either by his own experience, or ye judgmt of some
other that throughly understands what he speakes about, that
is of a true Hermetic Philosopher, whose judgmt (if there be
any such) would be more to be regarded in this point then
that of all ye world beside to ye contrary, there being other
things beside ye transmutation of metals (if these great
pretenders bragg not) wch none but they understand. Sr
because ye Author seems desirous of ye sense of others in this
SEEGER
35
point, I have been so free as to shoot my bolt; but pray keep
this letter private to your self. (Correspondence, 2: 2)
Newton and Boyle engaged for years in a correspondence about
alchemical research, which itself was typically guarded in the manner of
alchemical writers who rarely revealed everything even to sympathetic
correspondents. Few of these letters survive, but in a letter of August 2,
1692 to his friend John Locke, who shared Newton’s interest in
theological and alchemical pursuits, Newton observes, and respects,
Boyle’s “reservedness” about revealing a certain recipe, a restraint he
speculated might have proceeded from his own (though he does seem
somewhat miffed that Boyle is being quite so reserved with respect to
him). (Correspondence, 3: 218)
52 Newton himself, in his old age, implied as much in a conversation with
John Conduitt, stating that, “They who search after the philosophers’
stone by their own rules [are] obliged to a strict and religious life”
(quoted in Dobbs 1975, 15; also see Iliffe, 1: 178).
53
In one of the “classical” scholia, which Newton decided not to include
in the Principia, after writing of the analogy the ancients made between
the harmony of musical strings and the weights of the planets, he
continues: “But the Philosophers loved so to mitigate their mystical
discourses that in the presence of the vulgar they foolishly propounded
vulgar matters for the sake of ridicule, and hid the truth beneath
discourses of this kind” (McGuire and Rattansi, 117). I am not claiming
that Newton considered the surface text of the Principia to be a vulgar
matter foolishly propounded for the sake of ridicule. My claim is merely
that in emulation of the ancient philosophers he composed the work as a
layered text.
54
As early as 1676, reacting in part to the criticism that followed his
1672 publication on light, Newton wrote to John Collins, who had urged
him to publish his method of fluxions:
You seem to desire yt I would publish my method & I look
upon your advice as an act of singular friendship, being I
beleive censured by divers for my scattered letters in ye
Transactions about such things as nobody els would have let
come out wthout a substantial discours. I could wish I could
retract what has been done, but by that, I have learnt what’s
to my convenience, wch is to let what I write ly by till I am
out of ye way. (Correspondence, 2: 179)
55
Special circumstances, among them Newton’s own character and that
of his adversaries, influenced the particular course of each conflict, but it
seems plausible that, as far as Newton was concerned, they all had the
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
same ground. The perception that the importance of his work was
historical could also go some way toward explaining the numerous
portraits of himself he commissioned. Further, it sheds light on his
willingness in his later life to let others carry on the controversies his
work aroused, rather than entering them himself until they touched his
reputation too closely, at which point he would join the fray, but usually
anonymously. This tactic was not unique to Newton, but it may have
been unusually powerful in his case, as in later life he was able to speak
with the voice of the Royal Society. He allowed Roger Cotes to write an
explanatory introduction to the second edition of the Principia, but he
refused to read it, so as not to be asked to clarify or defend it. He did not
want his peace to be disturbed by the obligation of justifying his work to
anyone.
56
During the same years that he was making, and failing at, his final
alchemical attempts he may have contemplated excision of the first
hidden text from the Principia. Whether we think he did depends upon
how we read David Gregory’s notes and Newton’s own manuscripts of
proposed alterations to the book. In any event, if he considered dismantling that text, he did not do it.
57
The letter to Pepys was dated September 13, 1693 (Correspondence, 3:
279), and the letter to Locke three days later (Correspondence, 3: 280).
On September 28 Pepys’ nephew John Millington visited Newton in
Cambridge and was able to report to his uncle that, though “under some
small degree of melancholy,” he seemed quite sane as well as “very much
ashamed” at the rudeness of the letter, which Newton himself characterized as “very odd” (Correspondence, 3: 281-2). In a letter of October
3, Newton apologized to Locke, explaining that “by sleeping too often by
my fire I got an ill habit of sleeping & a distemper wch this summer has
been epidemical put me further out of order, so that when I wrote to you
I had not slept an hour a night for a fortnight & for 5 nights together not
a wink” (Correspondence, 3: 284).
58
Rattansi estimates that Newton wrote 1,300,000 words on theological
and biblical subjects (167), and Westfall estimates that notes and compositions on alchemy in Newton’s hand exceed 1,000,000 words (1980, 163).
59
Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act I, Scene 2.
37
“The Things of Friends are
Common”
Christopher B. Nelson
I came to a startling realization over the summer as I was
preparing to greet our newest class: that I had returned to this
college to take the position I now hold in the year in which
most of our incoming freshmen were born. The years have
passed quickly, it seems to me now, and my appreciation for
the community of learning I joined back then has grown as
my friendships within the community have deepened. I think
I became a wee bit sentimental as I ruminated upon my first
year as a student at St. John’s more than forty years ago. My
Greek has gone rusty, but as with most all of memory, the
things learned first are remembered best, and I have kept with
me over the years two Greek sentences I recall reading in my
first days at the college: χαλεπὰ τὰ καλά and κοινὰ τὰ τῶν
φίλων.
The first can be roughly translated as “Beautiful things are
difficult” or “Noble things are difficult.” The second can be
translated as “The things of friends are common” or “What
friends have, they have in common.” Back in the days of my
youth the College used a different Greek grammar book, so
this last week I took a peek at the Mollin and Williamson
Introduction to Ancient Greek, with which our students now
begin to learn Greek. And there they were, the same two
sentences, buried in an early lesson on the attributive and
predicate position of the definite article, and I rediscovered
something I once must have known about the two sentences,
something I had carried with me all these years: they are both
nominal sentences with the article τά in the predicate
position, making it possible to write intelligible, whole
Christopher B. Nelson is President at the Annapolis campus of St. John’s
College.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
sentences without the use of a verb. I was pretty sure I had
not committed these sentences to memory because of the
substantive-making power of the article τά. It’s more likely
that I remembered them because they were both quite short,
and perhaps because they appeared to carry a mystery and a
whiff of truth in them that I might untangle for myself if only
I worked on them long enough. I felt justified in this interpretation when I read in this new text that “nominal
sentences are best suited to the impersonal and timeless
character of maxims or folk-sayings” (31).
I wanted to understand better the little maxim κοινὰ τὰ
τῶν ϕίλων, “The things of friends are common.” The
sentence seemed to capture a beautiful thought, and I had the
notion that if I made the effort to understand this maxim
better, I also might come to see why “beautiful things are
difficult.” Two birds, one arrow—so to speak.
So, I begin my reflection by asking whether this little
maxim means that friends share what they have, or that they
ought to share what they have. Today, I give you half of the
lunch I packed for us both, and tomorrow you will share
yours with me. But the sandwiches we eat are hardly common
to us both; quite the opposite, they are rationed out
separately to each of us, albeit equally. We may each have an
equal share in a good thing, but not a common good. We each
consume what the other does not and cannot consume. So it
is with all sorts of goods, earthly goods, goods that are
external to us; what I give to you in the spirit of sharing with
a friend is something I will no longer have after giving it. I
will have less of it after sharing it than I did before I shared
it, however good and generous my act of friendship has been,
and however much I imagine I may have gained in the
improvement of my character by sharing.
But what, then, are the things that could be common to
friends? What kinds of things can truly be held in common
without having to be meted out among friends? I suppose
things of the soul are of this nature, things that belong to the
heart, the spirit, the mind, things that belong to our inner
NELSON
39
lives. We both may love a single object or person without our
having to share that love as we might share the expense of a
gift to the beloved one. My love doesn’t grow less because
you love too. And, of course, if we should actually love one
another, that love is surely greater and stronger for it being
reciprocated and reinforced over and over. So it is with things
of the intellect. When I learn something you have shared with
me, it does not pass from you to me like milk from a pitcher;
you have lost nothing, and yet I have gained something that
is now common to us both. The sum of what is common to
us has just grown; it has not been redistributed. And should
we together go about learning something new, we will each
be richer for what we come to have in common.
In pursuing such learning together we enter a whole new
community. For example, when we learn Euclid 1.47—the
Pythagorean theorem—each of us has it wholly but neither of
us possesses it. We now have something that belongs to us,
but not merely privately; we have gained something that is
common to us both, and in learning it we enter the
community of all who have learned it. This perhaps is why we
say “things in common” belong to “friends”: the soul is not a
wholly private place, but is able to enter this sort of
community with others.
But there is an added dimension that I think has
something to do with the reason we seek these common
things. We are moved to love something because it is
beautiful, or to love some person because he or she is
beautiful to us. We seek to know something because we
believe that knowing is better than not knowing, that this
knowledge will be good for us, perhaps even that it can be
turned to good in the world about us. These things we have
in common are beautiful and good things, and we wish
beautiful and good things for our friends. If the common
goods are those that increase our community by pursuing
them together, then the greatest acts of friendship must be the
searching together for such a common good.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
St. John’s College exists for this purpose: to provide a
place and countless opportunities for our students to pursue
together the common goods of the intellect. We call ourselves
a community of learning, aware that the word “community”
in English, as in Greek, has the same root as the word
“common.” We make many an effort to put into practice the
conviction that we learn best when we learn with others, who
like us, wish to increase the common good. Such a
community offers some pretty fine opportunities for
friendship.
We also have a common curriculum that has us all reading
books that are worthy of our attention, even of our love—
books written by men and women who were themselves
model fellow learners. The books and authors may even
become our friends, as can the characters in some of these
books. If incoming students have not already met the Socrates
of Plato’s dialogues, they soon do, and they spend a lot of
time with him in the freshman year. For some of them it is the
beginning of a lifelong friendship with a character with
whom—if open to the possibility—one can converse over and
over again. The words on the page may remain the same, but
the reader brings a new conversationalist to the text every
time he or she returns to the dialogue. At least, so it is with
me. I call Socrates a friend of mine because I know that he
seeks only my own good. He has taught me humility,
inasmuch as I possess it all.
I have many such friends in the Program. Some of them
are books. Homer’s Iliad has been my companion since the
seventh grade, and I never tire of returning to it. The Aeneid
has become a more recent friend who has helped me to
understand and better bear the responsibilities of fatherhood
and the trials of leadership. The Books of Genesis and Job
have helped me understand what it means to be human and
how great is the distance between the human and the divine;
I read them to remind me how little I really understand about
the relation between the two, which in turn serves as a spur
to seeking to understand better. Euclid’s Elements may be the
NELSON
41
finest example on the St. John’s Program of the practice of
the liberal arts, and it is beautiful for its logical, progressive
movement from the elemental to the truly grand. Plato’s
Republic is the finest book about education ever written; it
inspires much of what I do as I practice my vocation at the
College, reminding me that a community of learning is
reshaping and refounding itself any time a few of its members
come together to engage in learning for its own sake—and
that this is what we ought always to be encouraging at this
college, even by device when necessary.
Other friends of mine are authors: Sophocles, who can
evoke a human sympathy to inspire pity in each of his
dramas; George Washington, whose restraint in the use of
power is evident in his finest writings and in the mark he left
on the founding of this country; Abraham Lincoln, whom I
consider this country’s finest poet, whose very words
reshaped what it meant to be an American; Jane Austen,
whose every sentence can be called perfect (and so she is a
beautiful author to me); and Martin Luther King, who taught
me that non-violent protest is more than a successful tactical
measure to achieve a political end, but a proper and loving
response to the hateful misconduct of fellow human souls.
Then there remain the characters whom I embrace as
friends: besides Socrates, there is Hector, Breaker of Horses,
“O My Warrior”; and Penelope, who weaves the path that
allows Odysseus to return home, and is far worthier of his
love than he of hers. There is Don Quixote, the indomitable
spirit, and Middlemarch’s Dorothea Brooke, whose simple
acts of goodness change the whole world about her. I rather
like Milton’s Eve, mother of us all, who still shines pretty
brightly in the face of his spectacular Satan. I was a teenager
when I met Shakespeare’s Prince Hal, and I grew to
adulthood with him, probably following a little too closely
his path to responsibility. There’s the innocent Billy Budd,
unprepared to face the force of evil in man, and his Captain
Vere, the good man who suffers to do his duty.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
The Program also offers some reflections on friendship:
every winter, Aristotle provides freshmen with a framework
for considering different kinds of friendships and the goods
they afford. Perhaps they will find his list incomplete, or
perhaps their own experiences will be embraced by his explication. And then there are examples of friendships, pairs of
friends in many of the books, who will also provide lessons in
friendship, for better or worse: Patroclus and Achilles, David
and Jonathan, Hal and Falstaff, Huck and Jim, Emma and
Knightley, to name a few.
We journey through the Program with the assistance of
many friends, some of whom live among us here and now,
while some others live on in the books we read during this
four-year odyssey. They help us as we struggle with the big
questions that in turn can help to free each of us to live a life
that truly belongs to us. It is these friends, standing close by,
who help us to find our answers to the questions: Who am I?
What is my place in the world? How ought I to live my life?
One of my more beautiful living friends, a colleague here at
the College, has put it this way: “Our friends are doubly our
benefactors: They take us out of ourselves and they help us to
return, to face together with them our common human
condition” (Eva Brann, Open Secrets/Inward Projects, 55).
Another of my friends, a St. John’s classmate and medical
doctor, gave last year’s graduating class in Santa Fe this
reminder, that we can learn from our friendships with the
books how we might be better friends to one another: “So
often we make shallow and inaccurate presumptions about
people, like the cliché of telling a book by its cover, which
robs you of the deeper experience that defines us as humans
in our relationship to each other. For me every patient is a
great book with a story to tell and much to teach me, and I
am sometimes ashamed when my presumptions are exposed
and I then see the remarkable person within, between the
covers of the book of their own story.” This doctor has
devoted himself to saving the lives of patients suffering from
cancer, and he has this to say about how he is guided by the
NELSON
43
spirit of community and friendship within the soul of every
human being: “In my own work, it is sometimes said, we are
guided…by the idea that to save a person’s life, it is
considered as if one has saved the world. To me that has
always meant the life saved is much more than a single life
restored, as that person is someone’s spouse, someone’s
brother or sister, someone’s parent, or child, a member of the
community, of a church, synagogue or mosque, or a friend,
and as all are affected by loss, all are restored by their return.”
(Stephen J. Forman, 2009 Commencement Address, Santa
Fe). This statement is a powerful testament to the wonder of
friendship at work in the world.
In this last story, I have moved us away from the inner
world of reflection and learning to the outer world of putting
what one has learned to work in a life devoted to helping
others. The second must always follow the first. By this, I
mean that we owe it to ourselves and to others to take
advantage of the opportunities this community offers to learn
with our fellow classmates and tutors how we might acquire
a little self-understanding through the common endeavor we
practice here, before going out and putting it to work in the
world. And in the process, perhaps we will make a few friends
who will stay with us for the rest of our lives, enriching them
because “what friends have they have in common.”
This little nominal sentence, κοινὰ τὰ τῶν ϕίλων,
happens to be the penultimate sentence in one of Plato’s
dialogues, Phaedrus, which is the only book read twice for
seminar, at the end of both freshman and senior years.
Phaedrus and Socrates have engaged in the highest form of
friendship as they have conversed together to try to understand how a man or woman might achieve harmony and
balance in the soul by directing that soul to a love for the
beautiful. Socrates concludes the inquiry with a prayer to the
gods:
Friend Pan and however many other gods are here,
grant me to become beautiful in respect to the
things within. And as to whatever things I have
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44
outside, grant that they be friendly to the things
inside me. May I believe the wise man to be rich.
May I have as big a mass of gold as no one other
than the moderate man of sound mind could bear
or bring along.
Do we still need something else, Phaedrus? For I
think I’ve prayed in a measured fashion?
To which Phaedrus responds:
And pray also for these things for me. For friends’
things are in common. (279B – C, trans. Nichols).
45
“My Subject is Passion”: A
Review of Eva Brann’s Feeling
our Feelings
Ronald Mawby
Feeling our Feelings: What Philosophers Think and People
Know is Eva Brann’s latest large and wonderful reflective
inquiry into what it means to be human. Previously she has
written on imagination (The World of the Imagination, 1991),
time (What, Then, Is Time? 1999), and negation (The Ways of
Naysaying, 2001) as “three closely entwined capabilities of
our inwardness” (2001, xi). Now she takes up our affective
life: “that subtly reactive receptivity we call feeling, the
psychic stir seeking expression we call emotion, and the not
always unwelcome suffering we call passion” (2001, xi) as
well as those pervasive unfocused feelings-without-objects
called moods, each “as seen through the writings of those
who seem to me to have thought most deeply and largely
about it” (2008, 441).
Her inquiry aims at thinking about our feelings. The
second part of her subtitle—what people know—insists that
we have in our own experience the data that thinking about
feelings must address. Anyone who has been angry, for
instance, in one sense knows what the feeling of anger is. Yet
merely having felt the feeling does not enable one to grasp its
nature, sources, psychic situation, and human significance. To
grasp the full meaning of the feelings we need thinking, and
Ms. Brann believes that those who have thought best about
them are the philosophers. Hence she proposes “by way of
picked philosophers” to hit the “high points that will best
help me to make sense of myself—and of the world, natural
Eva T. H. Brann. Feeling Our Feelings: What Philosophers Think and People
Know. Paul Dry Books, 2008. Ronald Mawby teaches in the Honors Program
at Kentucky State University.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
and human-made, then and now, passing and perennial, the
world that impinges on me by instilling or eliciting feelings in
me” (xxi).
This book is singular. I would say it is sui generis were it
not of a kind with her previous trilogy of the human center
(1991, 1999, 2001). The reader naturally wants to classify
the book under the identifiable rubric of some collective
scholarly enterprise, but it resists. Ms. Brann explicitly warns
us of ten scholarly categories into which her book fails to fit.
In fact, although the book is full of learning, it is intended not
“as a work of scholarship for scholars but rather as an effort
at inquiry for amateurs” (xxv). Her inquiry into our affective
being aims at “getting a clear view of the contrasting possibilities and developing a warm—though correctable—
adherence to one of them for carrying on my life” (122), and
she hopes that reading philosophy “might be useful at the
least for gaining some sense of the way particular human
experiences are entailed by larger frameworks and, perhaps,
for finding a coherent set of livable opinions for ourselves”
(401). Her standards are dual: “verisimilitude by the criteria
of knowing and verifiability by the test of life” (442).
Ms. Brann, I would say, seeks significant truth, that is, a
view that can stand the scrutiny and serve the purposes of
both thought and life. She believes that large philosophical
accounts offer her the best chance of advance toward
significant truth. She knows her approach is not obviously
sound:
My approach is, I think, not very hard to defend
as a working method for marshaling views but not
so easy to justify as a way to establish truth. For
these grand wholes of philosophy are obviously
even less easy to reconcile than the narrow partialities of scholarship, while to cannibalize such
frameworks for handy parts to cobble together
would break up the very integrity that gives their
passion theories stature. Therefore the justification
MAWBY
47
for my—somewhat unfashionable—interest in
grounds can hardly be, it seems to me, in culling a
theory from this tradition, but rather in showing
how and why the inquiry into human affect might
be thought to involve all the world there is. (398)
An option that Ms. Brann has declined would look toward
“psychological theories—those points of view that base their
observations concerning the passions on natural theories of
the soul (or the converse) and often only implicitly on
metaphysics (or its denial)” (xx). She justifies her neglect of
psychological science by saying that discredited psychological
theories disappear at once or fade away after becoming either
literary tropes or folk-psychological terms, whereas philosophical systems show a sort of eternal recurrence. Her
unpersuaded scientific opposition would interpret Ms.
Brann’s observation as showing that in science false coin is
eventually withdrawn from circulation, whereas in
philosophy bad pennies continually turn up. The scientist
would add that even for discerning the phenomena scientific
experiment has an advantage over philosophical reflection
because experimental manipulation can separate factors that
are ordinarily confounded, so the experiment may reveal
things that ordinary observation may not. On the other hand
the scientific literature tends to be dry: vital issues can be
desiccated through operational definition, and the reader
must travel many a dusty mile through descriptions of experimental setups and statistical analysis of results to find the
small god of factual truth who lives in those details. The issue
finally is whether such factual truths lead to a livable oasis of
significant truth, or whether philosophical reflection can lead
there, or whether “significant truth” names a mirage. I am a
lapsed psychologist whose life witnesses my sympathy with
Ms. Brann’s approach, but I add that psychological studies
too can be thought-provoking.
Having sketched Ms. Brann’s aim I turn to the book itself,
a handsome, well-produced volume of over 500 pages. I urge
�48
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
potential readers not to be put off by the perhaps daunting
prospect of so much philosophical exposition. As she says,
“my subject is passion” throughout, but one topic does not
imply one continuous argument. Ms. Brann presents the
philosophers independently, on their own terms, and saves
her own conclusions for the end, so one need not read from
beginning to end to profit from the book. The ten chapters
between preface and conclusion could be read separately as
free-standing expository essays, serving as orientation for
those who go on to the original texts, as recapitulation for
those who have previously read them, or as cribs for those
wishing to be spared the trouble. And the work is a delight to
read. Her expositions are clear, her comments insightful and
judicious. Basing my judgment on the texts I know, her
accounts, even when brief, are nuanced and correct. She
knows the conceptual geography so well that she is never lost.
As a guide Ms. Brann is attentive to the needs of the reader
and her lively lucid graciousness makes her a fun companion.
The prose moves quickly without hurry, combines delicacy
with penetration, shows a keen wit and generous spirit, and
exemplifies Eliot’s dictum on diction: ”the common word
exact without vulgarity, the formal word precise but not
pedantic.” The honesty of her thinking and the accuracy of
her writing produce a dominant impression of sun-lit clarity.
*
In the remainder of this review I wish to imitate Ms.
Brann’s model by separating my exposition of the book’s
contents from my personal response. I do not think Ms.
Brann expects everyone who reads her book to adopt her
conclusions; neither do I expect everyone to adopt mine.
When, after considering various factors and divergent
viewpoints, we tentatively conclude on a way to put it all
together, our conclusion is neither independent of nor strictly
entailed by the dialectical considerations that inform it.
Truthful reporting should be disinterested, all the more so
where the topic has personal significance. Therefore I first
MAWBY
49
present the contents with minimal commentary, and then
discuss my response.
Ms. Brann begins considering “passion itself ” through
the depiction of erotic love in Greek lyric poetry. The
passionate lover receives the uneasy privilege of being subjugated by an external power: “Eros whacked me.” Here the
source of the passion is outside, and the soul contributes only
the power to be so affected. One persistent issue in thinking
about feelings is the ratio between exogenous and
endogenous factors: how much is the feeling shaped by its
object, and how much is the object merely a trigger that
evokes a soul-formed feeling?
Plato begins the philosophy of feeling with his inquiries
into eros (brought inside the soul), spirit, desire, and
pleasure. We get the Platonic images of the soul from the
Symposium, Phaedrus, and Republic, and the account of
pleasure in the Philebus. Ms. Brann follows the latter thread
to Aristotle on pleasure as a bloom on activity, to Freud on
pleasure as the reduction of psychic excitation, and to
modern research on desire.
Aristotle gets a chapter of his own as the founder of
methodological emotion studies. Aristotle writes about the
passions in his ethical and rhetorical works because of the
centrality in the soul of appetite. Passions, like virtues, are
seen as means between extremes. A focus of Ms. Brann here
is the analysis of shame, which in the “cycles of popularity”
among passions has recently been on the rise.
The Stoics come next, with special attention to Cicero. As
“moderns among the ancients” they have a representational
theory of mind and insist on the primacy of the theory of
knowledge. Yet unlike many moderns who view a drench of
the passions as a welcome relief from arid rationality, the
Stoics view passions as mistakes, irrational excessive impulses
that upset the soul, and philosophy as the cure.
We then make a long jump to Thomas Aquinas, who
places us as rational animals in the midst of creation and
situates passions between the intellectual and vegetative
�50
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
powers in the center of the soul. Thomas presents a “comprehensive and differentiated synthesis” (186) of the tradition.
Ms. Brann in a high tribute says that Thomas offers “the most
extensive and acute phenomenology of the passions known to
me” (446).
Descartes, the cunning innovator, next gives us “an initiating and deck-clearing simplification” (186). Descartes
considers a human being not as a rational animal but as a
minded machine, and says the passions arise in the body and
are felt in the mind. Ms. Brann traces Descartes’s taxonomy
of the feelings and ends her discussion of his Passions of the
Soul with this summary judgment: “a seminal treatise that
combines confident assertion with ready retraction, brisk
definitiveness with unabashed equivocation, proud
innovation with tacit recourse to the tradition, hopeful
emphasis on experimental science with a speculative physiology, and a determined reliance on the metaphysics of
distinct substances with an insistence on a human union that
the theory itself forestalls. But if the theoretical exposition is
surely obscure just by reason of its attempted lucidity, the
practical advice might be sage just because it is wisely
ambivalent” (227).
Spinoza refashions Cartesian notions into a system that
aims to overcome traditional oppositions such as body/mind,
impulse/freedom, desire/virtue, passion/action, emotion/
reason, and feeling/thinking. Spinoza’s onto-theology implies
that the impetus at the base of our being is emotional and that
affect is our body’s vitality. Intellectual understanding transmutes experience from passive to active and entails an
increase of joy. This chapter I found fascinating, as I have not
studied Spinoza, and his metaphysics is often taken as a
grounding precursor to contemporary mind-brain identity
theories. I don’t know whether his “God-intoxicated”
metaphysics finally works—Ms. Brann thinks not—but
thinking about it is invigorating.
The Spinoza chapter contains an interlude on Adam
Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, with its “wonderfully
MAWBY
51
wise worldliness” that “operates with three moral-psychological terms, “sympathy,” “propriety,” and “the impartial
spectator” (236).
Whereas Smith assumes common sense, David Hume, the
topic of Ms. Brann’s next chapter, is reductively skeptical in
the Treatise of Human Nature. As she observes, “in matters
philosophical, when you deliberately deny depth you seem to
have to embrace compensatory complexity” (292). Thus
Hume’s view of the passions as reflective impressions
becomes “baroquely elaborate” (292), yet “the analysis of
pride in particular seems, complications aside, true to life”
(309).
In the chapter entitled “Mood as News from Nothing:
Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and the Age of Anxiety,” Ms. Brann
begins with Romanticism. She comments on Rousseau, Kant,
Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Pascal before proceeding to
two thinkers who take up an “uncircumventable sense of
nothingness borne by a persistent mood about nothing in
particular” (342). Kierkegaard views anxiety as “the
intimation of the possibility of being free—to sin” (342) and
thus invests this mood with a deep theological-existential
import. Heidegger says anxiety reveals “The Nothing” that is
beyond beings and thus attunes us to the aboriginal. Ms.
Brann, who dislikes Heidegger’s character for its lack of
probity, nonetheless avers “Heidegger has told us an unforgettable truth in “What is Metaphysics?”: Moods are human
affects that tell not only how we are but what our world is”
(356).
Unlike these existential-ontological theories, Freud’s
account of anxiety uses “developmental, mechanistic, quantitative, that is, basically naturalistic terms” (368). Ms. Brann
contrasts ancient passion with modern moodiness, and notes
that moderns tend to see good moods as superficial and bad
moods as revealing, so anxiety, depression, ressentiment,
disgust, boredom, and their kin prevail in 20th century
thinkers and writers.
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
52
We come at last to the dispersal of theorizing in our times.
Ms. Brann presents the very different philosophical accounts
of Sartre and Ryle, the empirically-based conceptualization of
Silvan Tomkins, and the currently dominate English-language
school of cognitivism. Cognitivism includes a cluster of
theories that generally view emotions as judgment-like evaluations that can motivate behavior. Modern theoreticians
emphasize the utility of emotions for the organism, a role I
think is made the more urgent since, unlike older theories in
which responsive and responsible reason can discern and
judge ends, many current theories admit only a shrunken,
neutered, calculative rationality.
In the final chapter Ms. Brann begins with a disquisition
on philosophical accounts as responses to the open receptivity of questions and as frameworks that set definite
problems by pre-determining constraints on solutions. She
then articulates the leading questions of the philosophical
accounts she has examined in the preceding chapters. She
concludes with her tentative answers to the questions that
motivated her project: Is feeling a legitimate object of
thinking? What is human affect? How are thought and feeling
related? Are emotions judgments? Are we fundamentally
affective or rational beings? Are the passions revelatory?
What distinguishes aesthetic feeling? Are the emotions good?
This fragmentary statement of content fails to convey the
book’s richness. It is full of insights, with many sagacious and
thought-provoking incidental remarks. It is striking how
often Ms. Brann can summarily depict philosophical accounts
of the soul with diagrams—images of the topography of our
inwardness.
*
Now then, what response did the book elicit from me?
Ms. Brann says that to make sense of ourselves we should
read the philosophers, and that made me wonder, for in my
experience the benefit of reading philosophy for finding
livable opinions depends on which philosophers I read, our
MAWBY
53
shared basis in what I call common sense, and the dependence
of their insights on their systems. Let me explain with
examples.
Plato and Aristotle—the former through images and
arguments, the latter through analytic articulations—
organize, refine, and supplement common sense, so when I
read them I feel that we share a common world. They see
what I see, and a lot more, so I benefit. As a ‘seventh-letter’
Platonist I don’t look to the dialogues for a systematic
philosophy that can settle every question it raises, and I don’t
find one. Aristotle used to annoy me when I felt he truncated
a discussion saying “enough about that”; I would rebel,
wanting—I now see—a systematic completion that is askew
to his enterprise; he is usually not imposing a theory but
trying to articulate what is there, and when he has said all he
has seen, he stops. I profit enormously from reading these
authors, though, of course, for both, if we push every
question to the end we come upon mysteries.
In contrast, philosophers such as Descartes and Hume
seem to be constructing systems intended as alternatives to
common sense. They say, in effect, that what is really there is
less or other than common sense imagines, so when reading
them I feel I am in their systems rather than in the world, and
if their systems are incoherent, as I believe they are, then I am
nowhere, and the insights I do gain from them are in spite of,
rather than because of, their systemic notions. Take
Descartes. Ms. Brann agrees that we can see clearly and
distinctly that Cartesian matter and Cartesian mind cannot
interact, yet according to Descartes, they do. And Hume’s
systemic notions don’t illuminate my experience but render it
inconceivable; his conclusions seem to me an unacknowledged reductio on his premises. These authors, rather than
ending in mystery, begin there.
So I wonder, What is the value of an incoherent system
for illuminating the passions? How can we make sense of
ourselves using notions that don’t make sense? Ms. Brann
writes, referring to Spinoza’s Ethics,
�54
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
What is the good of attending to a text so beset
with perplexities? Well, to begin with, I cannot
think of a work that is not so beset when pressed.
At any rate, don’t we study philosophical writings
largely to learn what price is to be paid for certain
valuable acquisitions, and don’t we think out
things on our own largely to find out what
problems follow from what solutions and what
questionable antecedents we can tolerate for the
sake of their livable consequences? (278)
Our choice, then, is not between some perplexity and no
perplexity, but between various configurations of perplexity.
To avoid perplexity is to abandon thinking, or at least to give
up that serious amateur personal thoughtfulness that since
Socrates has been called philosophy.
Philosophy as amateur (i.e., loving, hence feeling)
thoughtfulness is related to Ms. Brann’s distinction between
problem-solving and question-answering, which I would
describe as follows. Problem-solving aims at reduction of
uncertainty; when a problem is solved, our sense of the world
becomes more determinate. A solved problem moves out of
our center of attention; as the solution becomes a determinate thread woven into the fabric of belief or projected as
a settled line of action, attention is freed for new tasks. The
question-answering thought of reflective inquiry aims at
heightened awareness. A question is the soul’s attentive
receptivity focused and formulated. When an answer is
glimpsed, our experience brightens. The question does not go
away when an answer is disclosed; rather the answering
world is formed and focused in our soul more intensely.
Philosophies in Ms. Brann’s scheme sit between questions
and problems, and face both ways. Philosophies can set the
terms for formulating problems. In this employment
philosophy is often antecedent to science, a communal enterprise devoted to the piecemeal discovery of truth.
Philosophies can also assemble and organize questions. In this
MAWBY
55
employment philosophy contributes to living well, and is not
a collective scholarly enterprise. It is an individual way of
being more consciously alive. Friends can help each other
here—in the end Ms. Brann’s book is just such a friend—but
we are finally alone in our sense of what is true about what is
significant.
I have a final response that concerns one of Ms. Brann’s
conclusions. Among the “unformed urgencies” that she
brought, or brought her, to this study is this question, the
question of her project: “Are we fundamentally affective or
rational beings?” (461). Spinoza affirms the former, Aristotle
the latter, and Ms. Brann sides with Spinoza but quite
properly plays on an ambiguity in “fundamental” to have it
both ways: “while we are at bottom affective, we are at our
height thought-ful” (362). She concludes that our inwardness
is affectivity variously aroused (453). Thus my being, not the
impersonal intellectual “I” that Kant says accompanies every
representation, but me, my very own inner ultimate self, my
subject, is passion.
But the question, Are we thinking or feeling beings? is
inadequately posed, since it excludes other alternatives.
Maybe what is primary for us is neither feeling nor thinking,
but doing and making. Maybe as human animals we act and
produce to remain in being and thinking and feeling arise out
of our living agency. Deeds worth doing and artifacts worth
making surely have been praised in our tradition. That Ms.
Brann writes books is at least consistent with the primacy of
works and deeds. For she agrees with Thomas that baths are
restorative, and she has tenure. Why not soak in a luxurious
bath, feelings one’s feelings, thinking thoughts, and when one
has a “eureka” insight rest content with a self-satisfied smile?
Why leap out and write a book? Might it not be because the
“production of a perfect artifact” (443) is another fundamental way of being human? Now she could reply, rightly,
that clarity of thought requires verbal expression, so writing
is a means to thinking. And certain feelings, such as pride,
require genuine achievements about which to be proud. Thus
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
56
good works and deeds may be instrumental to the best
thought and feeling. Granted. But the best works and deeds
also require, as instruments, good thought and feeling. Which
is primary, which derivative, is not clear to me, so I cannot
approve of excluding a possible answer through the posing of
the question.
While this is a weighty issue when considering what it
means to be human, in terms of this book it is a minor
quibble. Ms. Brann undertook this project to better understand herself as a feeling being, and offers the book as an aid
for any reader also “hoping to come near to an answer to the
question: What does it mean to feel?” (234) The final test for
each reader, then, is whether after having read it one better
understands one’s affective being. For myself the answer is,
Yes, I do. My vision is larger and my discernment is keener. I
am still not sure in what sense the inquiry into human affect
reaches all the world there is, but it surely reaches the depths
of the soul and, as Aristotle observed, the soul is in a way all
things. This book energized my thinking mind and enlivened
my feeling soul, and engaging with it has been a pleasure. Ms.
Brann is again to be congratulated for a marvelous
achievement.
*
Brann, Eva T. H. (1991). The World of the Imagination: Sum and
Substance. Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Brann, Eva. (1999). What, Then, Is Time? Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield Publishers.
Brann, Eva. (2001). The Ways of Naysaying: No, Not, Nothing, and
Nonbeing. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Brann, Eva. (2008). Feeling our Feelings: What Philosophers Think and
People Know. Philadelphia, PA: Paul Dry Books.
�
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<em>The St. John's Review</em><span> is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's College. All manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to </span><em>The St. John's Review</em><span>, St. John's College, 60 College Avenue, Annapolis, MD 21401 or via e-mail at </span><a class="obfuscated_link" href="mailto:review@sjc.edu"><span class="obfuscated_link_text">review@sjc.edu</span></a><span>.</span><br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> exemplifies, encourages, and enhances the disciplined reflection that is nurtured by the St. John's Program. It does so both through the character most in common among its contributors — their familiarity with the Program and their respect for it — and through the style and content of their contributions. As it represents the St. John's Program, The St. John's Review espouses no philosophical, religious, or political doctrine beyond a dedication to liberal learning, and its readers may expect to find diversity of thought represented in its pages.<br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> was first published in 1974. It merged with <em>The College </em>beginning with the July 1980 issue. From that date forward, the numbering of <em>The St. John's Review</em> continues that of <em>The College</em>. <br /><br />Click on <a title="The St. John's Review" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=13"><strong>Items in the The St. John's Review Collection</strong></a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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Kraus, Pamela
Brann, Eva T. H.
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Zuckerman, Elliott
McClay, Barbara
Hunt, Frank
Sachs, Joe
Seeger, Judith
Nelson, Christopher B.
Mawby, Ronald
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62bc4ac7920e933939974378c9be4b16
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<em>The St. John's Review</em><span> is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's College. All manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to </span><em>The St. John's Review</em><span>, St. John's College, 60 College Avenue, Annapolis, MD 21401 or via e-mail at </span><a class="obfuscated_link" href="mailto:review@sjc.edu"><span class="obfuscated_link_text">review@sjc.edu</span></a><span>.</span><br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> exemplifies, encourages, and enhances the disciplined reflection that is nurtured by the St. John's Program. It does so both through the character most in common among its contributors — their familiarity with the Program and their respect for it — and through the style and content of their contributions. As it represents the St. John's Program, The St. John's Review espouses no philosophical, religious, or political doctrine beyond a dedication to liberal learning, and its readers may expect to find diversity of thought represented in its pages.<br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> was first published in 1974. It merged with <em>The College </em>beginning with the July 1980 issue. From that date forward, the numbering of <em>The St. John's Review</em> continues that of <em>The College</em>. <br /><br />Click on <a title="The St. John's Review" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=13"><strong>Items in the The St. John's Review Collection</strong></a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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Van Doren, John
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Hunt, Frank
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Hopkins, Burt C.
Seeger, Judith
Yee, Cordell D. K., 1955-
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<em>The St. John's Review</em><span> is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's College. All manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to </span><em>The St. John's Review</em><span>, St. John's College, 60 College Avenue, Annapolis, MD 21401 or via e-mail at </span><a class="obfuscated_link" href="mailto:review@sjc.edu"><span class="obfuscated_link_text">review@sjc.edu</span></a><span>.</span><br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> exemplifies, encourages, and enhances the disciplined reflection that is nurtured by the St. John's Program. It does so both through the character most in common among its contributors — their familiarity with the Program and their respect for it — and through the style and content of their contributions. As it represents the St. John's Program, The St. John's Review espouses no philosophical, religious, or political doctrine beyond a dedication to liberal learning, and its readers may expect to find diversity of thought represented in its pages.<br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> was first published in 1974. It merged with <em>The College </em>beginning with the July 1980 issue. From that date forward, the numbering of <em>The St. John's Review</em> continues that of <em>The College</em>. <br /><br />Click on <a title="The St. John's Review" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=13"><strong>Items in the The St. John's Review Collection</strong></a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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Kraus, Pamela
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Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
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Browning, Thomas
Hunt, Frank
Sachs, Joe
McGrath, Hugh
Flaumenhaft, Mera J.
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The St. John's Review
Volume XL, number one (2007)
Editor
Pamela Kraus
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Peter Ara Guekguezian
The St. John's Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John's College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson,
President; Michael Dink, Dean. For those not on the distribution list, subscriptions are $10 for one year. Unsolicited
essays, reviews, and reasoned letters are welcome. All
manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to the Review, St. John's College, P.O. Box 2800,
Annapolis, MD 21404-2800. Back issues are available, at $5
per issue, from the St. John's College Bookstore.
©2007 St. John's College. All rights reserved; reproduction
in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing and Printing
The St. John's Public Relations Office and the St. John's College Print Shop
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
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Contents
Essays and Lectures
Aurum Antiquum: Reflections in and on
Virgil's Aeneid .............................................................. 5
John C. Kohl, Jr.
Reviews
The Finest Fruits of Reason
Michael Comenetz's Calculus: The Elements ............ .43
M. W. Sinnett
Occasional Pieces
The Sting of the Torpedo Fish .................................... 53
Christopher B. Nelson
For the Graduate Students in Classics at Yale ............. 61
Eva T. H. Brann
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
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Aurum Antiquum:
·
Refle~tions In and On Virgil's
Aenetd
·
John C. Kohl Jr.
Part 1: Heroic Tension in Aeneid 5 and 6
Palinurus
Virgil's Aeneid leaves the attentive reader with many puzzles.
One such puzzle pertains to the de~th of Palinurus in books 5
and 6. On the voyage to Italy that closes book 5 (S.838-71)
Aeneas' helmsman Palinurus is enticed at night by the god
Somnus: since the seas are calm with a following wind and no
threat is on the horizon, steering itself is not needed; one can
take a break from the helm altogether. Palinurus vigorously
opposes this suggestion and clings to the tiller all the more
tightly, so much so that when Somnus overwhelms the sailor
with drugs, he falls into the sea, dragging the tiller and part
of the stern with him. Aeneas laments his missing helmsman:
"Palinurus, having trusted too much in the calm sky and sea,
you shall lie naked on unknown sands." However, when the
two meet next in Hades (6.337-83) Aeneas betrays nothing of
his former judgment, asking Palinurus, "Which of ,the gods
tore you from us and plunged you into the open sea?"
Palinurus, unaware of what we had been told, replies that it
was not by a god but by chance !forte), that he had slipped
John Kohl is an alumnus of St. John's College (1961), a retired biologist
(Ph.D., 1967) and an amateur classicist. He has taught Greek, mathematics,
and 'physical and biological sciences in liberal arts programs at Shimer
College, The College of St. Thomas More (fexas), and Thomas More
College (New Hampshire) and has held research positions in mammalian
mutation research, in chemical defense, and most recently in cancer
immunotherapy at Baylor Medical Center in Dallas, Texas, where he
currently resides.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
and, grabbing the tiller for stability, dragged it and part of the
stern into the sea. Nor was he washed up a corpse on the
beach, but made it alive to the rock cliffs of the shore where
barbarous natives killed him and threw him into the breakers,
and now his body awaits burial.
This discrepancy is usually attributed to Virgil's having
composed books 5 and 6 at different times and having not yet
worked out fully the differences in the death of Palinurus; 1
however, I think that here in the underW-orld rhe poet is deliberately posing counter-lessons in how to read the fate of the
sailor. Charles Segal explains the two contrary aspects:
The apparent discrepancy is only a difference in
the point of view and in the mode of narration. In
5 the story is told in the third person by the
omniscient narrator with the full panoply of epic
conventions. In 6 the victim tells the tale as he
experienced it. Like any victim of a sudden catastrophe, he does not know exactly what happened.
Indeed, his vagueness about the 'great force' that
tore off the rudder (6.349) is only a subtle
reflection of the skill with which Virgil has kept
apart and yet reconciled the divine and human
levels. 2
According to Segal, in book 5 we have the comprehensive,
divine view of Palinurus' death, and in book 6 a personal,
human view of the same action. The act itself, Palinurus'
disappearance into the sea together with part of the ship, is
shrouded in mystery, and becomes ambiguous, enigmatic.
Yet, there is a Homeric precedent for this death, a
Homeric counterpart, that of the young and hapless shipmate
of Odysseus, Elpenor (x.552-60; xi.51-80), who got drunk in
Circe's house, forgot he was at the top of the stairs, fell down,
and broke his neck. 3 So the same sort of accident befalls on
the one hand Aeneas' trusted, prudent, and skilled helmsman
�KOHL
7
and on the other hand Odysseus' young, inexperienced, and
indiscreet shipmate.
Games And Underworlds
The points of comparison that Virgil raises in the Palinurus
episode constitute a subtle invitation to look at the other
principal episodes in the fifth and sixth books of the Aeneid
in light of one another and to consider the Virgilian episodes
in relation to their respective Homeric counterparts.
An overview of the episodes in the upper world of Aeneid
book 5 and lower world of 6 suggests that such a comparison
is warranted and, therefore, possibly illuminating. Aeneas
announces five contests for the Sicilian games (5.45-71): a
ship race, a foot race, a boxing match, an archery contest, and
a javelin throw. In addition, however, a riding display by the
boys (the lusus Troae), not given in Aeneas' initial agenda,
takes place after the fourth (archery) contest, and the last of
the announced contests, the javelin throw, is never held. The
Sicilian landing and activities are a prelude to Aeneas' visit to
Hades in the sixth book where there are, similarly, five major
encounters of Aeneas in the underworld: first, with his lost
and unburied helmsman Palinurus; second, with Dido; third,
with his half brother and former comrade Deiphobus; fourth,
with the punished souls in Phlegethon as described by the
Sibyl; and, finally, with his father Anchises and posterity in
the Blissful Groves. This indicates paired associations seriatim
of the respective episodes in each book.
Substantial portions of both of these books also have their
respective Homeric counterparts. In the fifth book the funeral
games instituted by Aeneas in honor of his father, Anchises,
clearly invite comparison with those instituted by Achilles in
Iliad XXIII in honor of his beloved Patroclus. 4 Only four of
the eight events in Iliad XXIII correspond with those in
Aeneid 5: a chariot race, a foot race, a boxing match, and an
archery contest. Virgil has recast the first and longest event in
the Iliad (XXIII.262-650), the chariot race with five
challengers, as a ship race between four boats selected from
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
8
the fleet as a whole, which is the most lengthy athletic contest
in the Aeneid (5.114-285). 5
Similarly, the five encounters in the Aeneid have parallels
with the respective five encounters in Odysseus' visit to
Hades in Odyssey xi: first, with his unburied shipmate
Elpenor; second, with his mother Anticleia; third, with his
comrade. Agamemnon; fourth, with. the punished in Hades
including a brief conversation with Heracles; and, finally,
with the prophet Tiresias, which in the Homeric order
.actually comes between the first conversation with Elpenor
and that with Anticleia, but which has a parallel in Aeneas'
visit with Anchises.
A comparison of Aeneid 5 and 6 with the two Homeric
parallels thus yields a rich complex of associations. In order
to explore these associations· systematically, the five events in
Virgil's games will be discussed in order. Each contest is first
examined in light of its Homeric counterpart in the Iliad,
then compared with the respective encounter in Virgil's
underworld; and lastly the underworld encounter is cast
against its counterpart in the Odyssey. The general scheme is
diagrammed below.
3
4
Chariot race Foot race
Boxing
Archery
Aeneid 5
Ship.race
Foot race
B,oxing
Archery
Troy Game
Aeneid 6
Palinurus
Dido
Deiphobus
Tartarus
Elysium
Antideia
Agamemnon Herades
Sequence
1
Iliad 23
Odyssey 11 Elpenor
2
5
Ship Race
The drama in both the Homeric and Virgilian accounts of the
race depends upon the· layout of the race course, which in
each consists of an outward-bound leg, a turning point, and
an inward-bound leg to the finish line. In the Iliad it is on the
inbound stretch that Apollo and Athena contest with one
another to decide the race between Eumelus, the front runner
�KOHL
9
and Apollo's favorite, and Diomedes, Tydeus' son and
Athena's champion, who is in hot pursuit. Thanks to Apollo,
Diomedes loses his whip, but Athena restores it, breathes new
strength into Diomedes' horses, and in her anger goes after
Eumelus' car and breaks the pole of his chariot, causing a
wreck. Antilochus now rashly challenges Menelaus for
second place by forcing the older hero to draw his team off
the course in a narrow passage near the finish line in order to
avoid a collision. For this act, the young man's second place
finish is later challenged by Menelaus at the awards ceremony
and he is rebuked: young warriors, no matter how valiant,
must learn to remember their place in the face of their
betters.
Virgil elegantly reworks the elements of Homer's race to
draw significantly different lessons. The narrow place in the
racecourse is resituated at the; turning point itself, where two
of the four ships fail of their own choosing. Gyas' ship, the
leader on the outbound course, enters the turn, but the ship's
pilot, Menoetes, fearing rocky shoals there, steers too wide
and loses the lead. For his timidity, Menoetes is pitched into
the sea by Gyas, and the ship loses its pilot and the race in the
bargain. Next, Sergestus, challenging Mnestheus for the lead,
rashly takes the inside course, where his ship founders on the
rocks. Mnestheus' ship, taking the middle course, flies
through the gap like a startled, frightened dove, leaving the
embarrassed Sergestus to free his ship and later slink back to
port like a wounded snake. Now the race is between the
survivors of the turn, Mnestheus and Cloanthus. As in the
chariot race, the gods decide the victor, but only after
Cloanthus vows sacrifice and libations to the host of divinities
of the sea and harbor did Portunus " ... with his own great
hand [drive] him on his way: swifter than wind or winged
arrow the ship speeds landward and found shelter in the deep
harbor" (5.241-43).
Aeneas' conversation with Palinurus in Hades constitutes
a counter-lesson to the boat race. As we have seen, Palinurus
claims here that no divine agency was involved in his fall
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
from the helm, that it was solely by chance, although we also
see that Palinurus struggled against his sleeplessness on the
fateful night. If we view this again in light of the Homeric
counterpart Elpenor, we learn that such accidents happen to
the skilled and responsible as well as to the young and inexperienced, even though Palinurus prudently tried to resist his
misfortune, while Elpenor seemed totally unaware of his.
Foot Race
There is a similar reworking of Homeric precedents in the
second contest on Sicily, the foot race. Three contestants are
racing for the finish line in Homer's story, Oileus' son, Ajax,
Laertes' son, Odysseus, and Nestor's son, Antilochus, who by
now has learned to respect his betters and is in last place.
Odysseus calls on his patron Athena, who not only assists her
favorite with added strength but also causes the challenger,
Ajax, to slip in the path on the dung from the sacrificial bulls,
much to the amusement of all onlookers. Ajax's complaints
and Antilochus' deference do win the former second prize at
the awards ceremony.
The field in Virgil's race is much wider than in Homer's;
in fact, we do not know exactly how many racers there are,
but seven-Nisus, Euryalus, Diores, Salius, Patron, and two
Sicilians, Helymus and Panopes-are named. The pair, Nisus
and Euryalus, the former the lover of the latter, is first and
third, respectively, as they come into the home stretch; only
Salius in second place separates them. Here Virgil presents an
episode altogether analogous to and reminiscent of Homer's
but with a shift in its comedic emphasis. Unlucky (infelix)
Nisus slips in the slippery blood (not dung) which, poured
forth by chance (forte) from the slaughtered calves, had
soaked the ground and green grass in the path of the runners.
Nisus, seeing Salius now as the leader, trips him up, allowing
his beloved Euryalus to win the race. No divinity has intervened here, and the end of the race, rather than relying
entirely on the befouled and risible aspect of Nisus to achieve
�KOHL
l1
a humorous pathos, dissolves in a comedic wrangling over
prizes. Salius vehemently claims first place and fraud.
Meanwhile, the comely Euryalus, his eyes filled with tears
over possible loss of victory, is winning favor with the crowd,
and Dibres, who would finish fourth and out of the money if
Salius wins, is protesting on behalf of Euryalus. When Aeneas
compromises by ruling in Euryalus' favor but giving Salius a
prize anyway, out of pity "for the fall of an innocent friend,"
Nisus now (successfully) puts in for a prize on his own behalf.
The prize awarded Nisus, a shield captured by Aeneas
from a Greek, foreshadows an incident later involving the
pair in much darker circumstances. In the first real action of
the Italian war, described in book 9, the pair is clispatched at
their own suggestion from the besieged Trojan camp to get
relief from Aeneas. As they pass through the sleeping, wineladen Italians at night, the pair takes advantage of the
situation to work havoc on the enemy forces like the
celebrated night expedition of Odysseus and Diomedes in
Iliad X. Unlike the Argive night expedition against the
Trojans, which proves wholly successful, that of the two
young Trojans against the Italians has a different outcome,
primarily because of the pair's avidity here for booty, as it was
for prizes earlier. Nisus, whom we know as a good runner,
could have escaped through the enemy lines to Aeneas, but
his loyalty to his companion, the captured Euryalus, a loyalty
which led to a comic scene earlier in Virgil's narrative, now
in the darkness of war proves fatal to both.
The counter-lesson to the foot race is furnished by the
second of Aeneas' principal encounters in Hades, Dido, who
answers Aeneas' earlier silence at Carthage (4.331-96) with
her own: in the face of such intense passion, words falter
because they are from her point of view unnecessary. Aeneas,
conversely, feels he owes her an explanation, but the explanation he finally gives her in Hades-that he left her unwillingly (invitus)-is weak and of no avail: hers was a love
unrequited. If the death of Nisus was the culmination of love
fulfilled, then in this counter-lesson Dido's death was the
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
12
culmination of a love unfulfilled. What we seem to have at
the center of such passions in either case is death, which
renders the value we place upon passionate love ambiguous.
The intensity of the passionate relationships here is
heightened further by the parallel in the second major
episode in Horner's Hades (xi.155-224), Odysseus' meeting
with his mother Anticlea, who wasted away and perished in
grief over the absence of her son. In the Odyssey it is the
ebbing of passion, not its waxing, that proves fatal.
Boxing Match
The boxing contest in the Iliad (XXIII.653-99) is a relatively
short and direct affair. After Achilles has called the contest
and set forth the prizes, Epeius, "son of Panopeus and a man
valiant and big and with the looks of a prizefighter" (XXIII
664-65), stands up to take on any and all challengers. Only
one in the silent crowd rises to challenge him, Euryalus,
whose father Talaus, had been a good boxer. Epeius makes
good his appearance and repute and very quickly and
magnanimously dispatches the challenger, Euryalus. Virgil
reverses this pattern of events in the boxing contest on Sicily:
it is the reluctant challenger, Entellus, who eventually
vanquishes the favorite, Dares. But the match does not start
out that way: the older Entellus flails wildly at the more
nimble Dares, loses his balance, and takes a fall on his own.
This marks the turning point in the fight. In Homeric turning
points we would ordinarily have the arrival of a hero or a
god, who would advise and rally the oppressed warrior,
lighten and breathe strength into his limbs, and then retire as
the tide of affairs reverses. But no god directly enters into
Virgil's account here (5.450-57), nor are we privileged to
learn what Entellus thinks and says to himself:
Eagerly the Teucrians and Sicilian men stand up; a
shout mounts to heaven, and Acestes first runs
forward and in pity lifts his aged friend from the
ground. But neither downcast nor dismayed by the
�KOHL
13
fall, the hero returns keener to the fray and rouses
strength from his wrath. Shame, too, and
conscious valor kindle his strength. Heatedly he
drives Dares headlong over the entire arena with
redoubled punches, right and left.
Entellus, loser of the first round of the fight, will be declared
victor in the second round when the contest is halted to
prevent the very death of Dares himself.
The course of events here reminds us of a broader theme:
the Trojans, losers at Ilium in the first round, will be the
eventual winners overall in Italy. Such a reversal has its broad
appeal. There is a widespread impulse to cheer on the
underdog and a perennially engaging fascination with
turnings in the tides of affairs of men, whether they be in real
battles or in athletic competitions. The roots of this impulse
and this fascination lie in the hope and in the curiosity that
things are not what they seem and that appearances may be
deceiving. Here in the games anger, shame, and honor have
erupted to transform old Entellus, the one appearing physically weaker, into a furious fighter of overpowering strength.
Pulling the vanquished Dares from the fight, Aeneas says to
the overmatched warrior: "Unhappy man, how could such
frenzy seize your mind? Don't you see the other's strength
and the changed will of the god? Yield to heaven" (5.465-67).
To Aeneas this sudden transformation of Entellus can only be
attributed to the subvention of a god and to a change in the
favor of a god. Has a god chided Entellus and brought him to
a new sense of himself?
The counter-lesson to the boxing contest is found in the
third of Aeneas' major encounters in Hades, that with
Deiphobus, who recounts how his wife Helen betrayed him
on the fateful night when Troy fell. She seemed to be a
faithful wife and, trusting in her, Deiphobus sleeps, while
Helen, actually an enemy accomplice, disarms the house and
allows the enemy entry. Thus surprised and with his guard
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
down, Deiphobus is killed and mutilated. Entellus also seems
to be what he is not, a weak old man and not much of a
match for the younger and nimble Dares. But there are
numerous instances both in team and individual sports where
the favored contestant, deceived by the poor reputation and
weak appearance of the opponent, becomes overconfident,
prepares poorly for the contest, and does not prosecute it
with vigor, trusting that the outcome has or will soon be
settled favorably. As a consequence the favorite is surprisingly
defeated in an upset. From Dares' perspective, is not this an
alternative explanation for the result in the boxing contest
suggested by the juxtaposition here?
The Homeric parallel is found in the third major
encounter of Odysseus in Hades, that with Agamemnon, who
tells his visitor of his betrayal and murder at his homecoming
by his deceitful wife Clytemnestra and her companion
Aegisthus. This is an unseemly and shocking deed, so much so
that the victim is totally unprepared either tactically or in
spirit to defend himself and falls, "slaughtered like a bull in a
manger," Agamemnon says.
Archery Contest
The archery contest, the last of the contests described in the
memorial games to Anchises, parallels in most of its details
the archery contest in the Iliad, penultimate in the sequence
of events ordained by Achilles. The goal in both is to hit a
dove, tethered to the top of a mast. Twice as many men (four:
Hippocoon, Mnestheus, Eurytion, and Acestes) compete in
the Aeneid as in the Iliad (Tencer and Meriones), and Virgil's
account of sixty lines (5.485-544) correspondingly goes
beyond Homer's twenty-five line episode (XXIII.859-83) in
its emotional depth.
·The first of Virgil's contestants, Hippocoon, misses and
the dove flutters her wings in terror as she perceives the force
of the arrow in the quivering mast. Then Mnestheus succeeds
with his shot, like the first of Homer's contestants, Tencer, in
severing the cord holding the dove to the mast: " ... off to the
�KOHL
15
south winds and black clouds she sped in flight" (5.512 f.).
Then the dove, "now happy in the open sky and clapping her
wings beneath a black cloud," is transfixed by an arrow from
the third of Virgil's competitors, Eurytion (as by Homer's
second, Meriones): "Down she fell, dead, left her life amid
the stars of heaven, and, falling, brought down the arrow that
pierced her." Virgil's subjective sympathy for the victim here
far surpasses that of Homer, who simply describes the dove at
one point as "timorous" (XXIII.874) and her flight. as
"circling" (XXIII.875). Consequently the pathos is not
captured and concentrated by the successive reversals of fear,
freedom, exultation, and sudden end as in the Aeneid, nor is
the transfixed bird, the epitome of death, brought to earth for
all to examine but, rather, dove and arrow fall separately.
The counter-lesson to the dove killed in flight is furnished
by the fourth of Aeneas' major encounters in Hades, the visit
to Tartarus. In contrast to the senseless loss we feel at
witnessing the sudden death of a happy innocent-the dove
in flight-here we witness those who have committed crimes,
the guilty, and who are now being punished. The whole of
Tartarus is encircled thrice with walls, then with flames, and
entered by a gate of adamant, which is guarded by Hydra and
surmounted by an iron watchtower where sleepless Tisiphone
stands watch. There is no escape. The Sibyl, who says she was
instructed by Hecate, tells Aeneas of the inmates, their crimes
and punishments: the Titans, the twin sons of Aloeus,
Salmoneus, Tityos, Ixion, and Pirithous-all challengers of
Jupiter's reign-and those guilty of fratricide, of fraud, of
adultery, of betrayal of their kin, and of treason. The
admonition is given by Phlegyas, most miserable of all:
"Learn to be just and not to slight the gods" (6.620). This
sums up the lesson, though the Sibyl adds that it is impossible
for her to recount all the forms of crime and their punishments.
The Tartarean visit has its Odyssean parallel in the last
episode in Hades in Odyssey xi where Odysseus sees Minos
giving judgment; Orion with his club; Tityus being pecked in
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
his liver by vultures because he had raped Zeus' consort,
Leto; Tantalus being tempted; Sisyphus rolling his rock
repeatedly up the mountain; and Heracles, who stole the dog
Cerebus from Hades. Odysseus wanted to stay to see "men
still earlier," such as Theseus and Pirithous, but he is afraid of
being immobilized in Hades by Persephone and her Gorgon's
head, so he leaves. Of those whom he does see, only Tityus'
and Heracles' transgressions are specifically mentioned. In
general, Odysseus is more attracted to these and the others by
their notoriety rather than by their infamy, and the punitive
dimension in the Homeric adventure is not strongly brought
out, unlike that in the Virgilian parallel.
Returning to the archery competition on Sicily (5.519f.),
we are left with the fourth competitor, Acestes, who is yet to
shoot. The prize has already been taken, yet Acestes still
draws back his bow and launches his arrow into the empty
sky.
On this a sudden portent meets their eyes,
destined to prove of lofty presage; this in after
time the mighty issue showed, and in late days
terrifying seers proclaimed the omen. For flying
amid the airy clouds, the shaft caught fire, marked
its path with flames, then vanished away into thin
air; just as often shooting stars, unloosed from
heaven, speed across the sky, their tresses
streaming in their wake.
Unlike the three earlier contests, there is no direct point of
contact between this sign and anything in the comparable
Homeric event. Acestes is the fourth and supernumerary
competitor in the archery program, and his action goes
beyond anything that is conceived in analogy with Iliad
XXIII. The flaming arrow thns assumes a significance in the
drama of the Aeneid that lies beyond the action in the
Homeric epics and retutils us to Virgil's poem itself to find its
proper reference. The description quoted above (5 .522-28)
doubtless recalls the earlier shooting star shown by Jupiter to
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KOHL
Anchises (2.692-700), who like Acestes stood before a prize,
Troy, which had been lost.
The Lusus Troiae
And so, as the dust of the contest clears, we have what is
known as the Lusus Troiae, in which sons parade across the
field on horseback under the proud and attentive gaze of their
fathers: "The Dardanians greet the bashful boys with cheers
and rejoice as they gaze, seeing in their features their sires of
old" (5.575-76). The scene gives precise expression here to
the term "religion," binding the sons to the fathers, and
through them, to the forefathers in an unbroken line of
temporal succession. The first part of their equestrian
maneuvers (5.575-87) appears to consist of mock charges and
combat. The second part (5.597ff.) emerges as a sort of
intricate dressage:
Just as once on lofty Crete the Labyrinth produced
a track woven with blind alleys and possessed a
perplexing trick in its thousand paths, where for
one following the signs insoluble and irremediable
wandering awaits, so scarcely otherwise do the
sons of Tencer entangle their tracks and weave
their flight and battle games, like dolphins
swimming through the watery seas who divide the
Carpathian and Libyan waters and play amid the
waves.
6
The counter-lesson to the celebration of Trojan youth on
Sicily is the parade of future Roman greats on the Fields of
Elysium, which Anchises shows Aeneas at the conclusion of
his visit to Hades. In Virgil's depiction, it is as if Aeneas is
situated at the stationary hub of a rotating wheel on whose
periphery various Roman figures are affixed; he looks up at
the section moving in the upper world to see youths moving
from past into future, then looks down at the section in the
lower world to see heroes moving from future into past,
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
about to be recycled to the upper world. Anchises explains to
Aeneas the doctrine of palingenesis, i.e., purgation in the
underworld and rebirth above, as they watch the succession
of Romans. How does this transgenerational rejuvenation
take place? The capacity to describe it is beyond us, since it
involves a reversal in the usual temporal order. Aeneas sees
only the barest, iconic presentation of his Roman successors
processioning by in a direction opposite to his and not their
growth, development, or interrelationships.
Tiresias, the blind Theban prophet and counterpart to
Anchises in this scheme, warns Odysseus that Poseidon is
angry over what Odysseus did to the Cyclops Polyphemus
and will make his return voyage difficult. If Odysseus really
desires a peaceful death at an old age, then after getting home
he must journey far inland to a place where oars are no longer
recognized as nautical implements and perform a funeral over
a sailor's cenotaph. Tiresias also gives Odysseus a second
warning: if he and his shipmates harm the Cattle of the Sun
on the island of Thrinicia (which the ancients later identified
as Sicily), then only Odysseus will come home, in a foreign
ship, and after much time, so that he will have to contend
with insolent suitors for the hand of Penelope. In all this
Odysseus hears much but sees very little from Tiresias, and
what he does hear is given as conditional instructions-if you
do this, then that will follow. Aeneas hears from Anchises,
and also sees much, but what he does hear and see is given
unconditionally.
Heroic Tension
The parallels between the events in Aeneid books 5 and 6 and
those in Iliad XIII and Odyssey xi, respectively, do not simply
focus our attention on certain elements of the action but also
contrast the lessons of the Virgilian events with those of their
Homeric counterparts, that is to say, the new with the old.
Thus in the first event, the chariot/boat race, we have
moderate resolve and the positive assistance by the gods
�KOHL
19
(Virgil) vs. interference and disruption by the gods and
respect for betters (Homer); in the second, the foot race,
pious love and loyalty (Virgil) vs. humiliation by divinities
(Homer); in the third, the boxing match, spirited determination and resolve in the face of disgrace (Virgil) vs. magnanimous strength (Homer); .and in the last event, archery,
persistence in the sacrifice for the larger goal (Virgil) vs. the
celebration of skill (Homer). In Hades Palinurus' struggles
(Virgil) contrast with Elpenor's ineptitude (Homer), Dido's
passion (Virgil) with Anticlea's loss of passion (Homer),
Helen's treachery not only to her family but also to Troy
(Virgil) with Clytemnestra's murder of her husband for her
lover (Homer), guilt and punishment in Phlegethon (Virgil)
with crime and notoriety in Tartarus (Homer).
Collectively, the Virgilian readings center upon civic
virtues rather than individual virtues in the Homeric counterparts. This is not surprising. Virgil's special concern, as
pointed out by Maurice Bowra/ "is the destiny not of a man
but of a nation, not of Aeneas but of Rome," whereas
"Homer concentrates on individuals and their destinies. The
dooms of Achilles and Hector dominate his design; their
characters determine the action." Curtius captures this
contrast as one between sapientia (King Latinus) and
fortitudo (Turnus); Putnam detects in Aeneas an irreconcilable difference between freedom and force, and Desrosiers
that of the patient, enduring, nearly comedic type of
Odyssean hero and the decisive, active hero whose pride
prefigures a tragic doom in the manner of Achilles. 8 Thus a
tension emerges between the spirit of the Augustan Age of
Peace and its ethical ideals and the spirit at ancient Troy with
its celebration of human excellence and valor.
. . The parade on the fields of Elysium is perhaps the most
conspicuous of the lessons in book 6 that pose interpretations
contrary to those of the corresponding events in book 5 but
it is not the only such lesson. In fact all the lessons do. Thus
we have, in the first place, an accidental occurrence (Palinurus
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
in the underworld) placed in opposition to occurrence due to
divine intervention (Palinurus on board ship, and the ending
of the ship race). In the second, passion that is altruistically
directed (Nisus and Euryalus in the foot race) is in opposition
to passion reflexively directed to one's own fulfillment (Dido
in the underworld). In the third, victory by wrathful spirit
(Entellus in the boxing match) opposes victory achieved by
exploiting disinterest and dispiritedness in the opponent by
surprise (Deophobus in the underworld). In the fourth, death
or injury as innocent victim (dove in the archery contest)
stands opposed to death as guilty transgressor (the prisoners
in Tartarus). In the fifth and final pair, events arising through
individual striving and skill (boys in the Lusus Troiae) are
opposed to those predestined as part of an atemporal cycle or
plan (the parade in Elysium). In general, these alternatives
reflect an elemental, Lucretian interpretation of motives in
which an agent is acting autonomously for himself or herself
alone, placed in opposition to a traditional, providential
interpretation of motives where figures past, present, or
future, and remote from the agent lay claim to that agent's
actions and intentions.
Once again we are brought back to the tension between
the two heroic types: the man of fortitude, confidence, skill,
and strength, mindful of his own prowess in light of his
forebears, and the man of prudence, negotiation, patience,
and persistence, mindful of and guided by thoughts of his
posterity. Aeneas, a refugee warrior from the plains of Ilium
is well acquainted with the first type of hero. Through his
Odyssean journey to Italy, home of his Dardanian ancestors,
and his prophetic experiences there, most especially in
Hades, he has now become acquainted with the second
heroic type. If such interpretations as we have given to the
events here indicate Virgil's concern with Aeneas and his
mission, we expect, therefore, that the second or "Iliadic"
half of the poem will be dominated by a man who represents
the fusion of these complementary types as the complete
hero. Such a man will display courage, martial skill, and
�KOHL
21
prowess, while acting as leader and statesman in adjudicating
and resolving disputes. In judging these disputes, he will be
aware of the contradictory motives and lessons pertaining to
each action, which will enable him to reach a just decision in
each case.
As Aeneas emerges from the underworld, soon to face this
civil strife and deal with its resolution, which he does entirely
successfully, we might expect him to be a much more
complex figure than before, laced with contradictory motives
and the task of resolving them. This would add an interiority,
a dimension of depth to his soul. But of the psyche of the
Trojan leader we learn nothing directly. There are no
monologues reported, nor internal dialogues, nor even the
occasional battlefield self-exhortation, any of which might
have revealed this psychic space. The terms "wooden" and
"frigid" have sometimes been applied to this frustrating
aspect. Yet Virgil's silence here may be a tacit invitation to the
reader to reflect upon the character and formation of the
beneficent leader as well as a quiet comment on how little
Aeneas is directly in control of his own destiny and that of his
people, being instead like a cipher in a cosmic account, told
by powers largely beyond his knowledge.
Part 2: Regarding Virgil's Golden Age
Aura Discolor
How much, then, of his mission does Aeneas in fact understand? If his project itself-to lead his Trojan refugees out of
the dying city and found a new Troy somewhere else-is
straightforward, the symbol attached to that project, the
golden bough, is problematic. The symbol has had many
interpretations, but is distinguished above all by being the
fusion of opposites: the natural shape and properties of
regeneration and growth contrasted with the artificial ones
formed of refined metal and having a sheen and a crackling
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
sound in the wind. To found the new Troy, then, is to plant a
contrivance that must yet regenerate and grow naturally.
In a well-known study, "Discolor Aura: Reflections on the
Golden Bough," Robert Brooks reflects on his subject in this
way:
The poet has expressed life and death, both as
opposites, in the wisdom of the Sibyl, and as union
in the will of Aeneas. The human actors have
reached the impasse of inner experience and
outward observation, two irreconcilable aspects of
reality. The golden bough is the necessary and
external sign demanded to resolve the antinomy,
and bears a fundamental relation to it?
Later in the same study Brooks returns to the opposition:
The essence of the golden bough is the contrast
between its lifeless nature and its organic
environment. But we cannot stop here. Obviously
the image of gold must express other relevant
associations; otherwise lead or iron or stone would
have done equally well.
Brooks attaches considerable importance to the bough's
appearance at the moment of its discovery (6.204): discolor
unde auri per ramos aura refulsit. ("With diverse hue shone
out amid the branches the gleam of gold.") 10 The word aura,
a play on aurum, normally has no visual sense but rather
denotes an. atmospheric emanation, while the gleam is
discolor, variegated and not a pure color. Discolor aura, then,
is a strange way to describe the brilliance of gold and suggests
a secret, enigmatic, even sinister quality of the golden bough.
In Hesiod we read that Cronos held sway over a golden
age of men, but the old god was deposed by his son Zeus and
sent to Tartarus, and a new, inferior silver age of men was
initiated, followed by further declensions of men down to our
present iron age. But in Ennius' later account the destiny of
Cronos (Saturn) does not quite work out that way: he finds
�KOHL
23
refuge (cf. lateo) in Italy, in Hesperia, land of the ancient
Latin folk. In the Aeneid King Latinus later greets the Trojan
delegation, telling them (7.202-04) that the Latins are of the
race of Saturn, and Evander will later explain (8.314-27):
Native Fauns and Nymphs used to inhabit these
groves and a race of men born of tree trunks and
the hardy oak, for whom there was neither custom
nor culture, nor did they know how to yoke oxen,
lay up wealth, nor spend their gains, but branches
and harsh hunted fare for sustenance nourished
them. First from heavenly Olympus carne Saturn
fleeing the arms of Jove and an exile from his lost
kingdom. He united an unruly race dispersed
among the high mountains, gave them laws, and
chose to call it Latium, since he lay safe in this
country. Under this king were the ages which they
say were golden. So calmly he used to rule the
people in peace, then little by little there followed
a worse age of duller hue (deterior. . .ac decolor
aetas).
So into this worse age ·of duller hue now steps a new man,
Aeneas, who forges a (re)union between his Trojans and the
Latins. Is the diverse hue of the golden bough, the token and
emblem by which he gains access to Hades and thence to his
mission in Latium, reflected later in the age of duller hue in
which that mission is carried forth in the second half of the
Aeneid? Conversely, is the decadent, discordant, discolored
age, which Aeneas seeks to resolve in Italy, heralded by the
variegated aura of his golden bough? That is, does the
decadence in the post-golden ages have its roots in the golden
age from which it declines?
Decolor Aetas
Virgil intends that his hero Aeneas prefigure his own patron
Octavian, whom Anchises describes to Aeneas, as we have
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
seen, as the promised one, the son of a god, who will
reestablish the Golden Age in Saturn's Latin land, and spread
a Roman Empire. He also appears on Aeneas' brazen and
golden shield (8.675-81), a double flame corning forth from
his face and the Julian star upon his head as he commands the
fleet at the triumphal battle of Actiurn.
To indicate what is at stake in this Augustan picture, a
brief sketch of the mythological background of this golden
figure is important. As in much else in Virgil's epic, it is
instructive to begin by way of comparison with Horner and in
particular with the principal figure of the Iliad, Achilles.
Laura Slatkin11 has called attention to the legend in Pindar's
Eighth Isthmian Ode that Thernis had counseled the gods that
the nymph Thetis marry a mortal rather than the divine Zeus
or Poseidon, since the son of such divine union would
challenge father Zeus and overthrow the entire Olympian
order. Thus Thetis marries mortal Peleus instead, and the son
is the half-god Achilles. But at Troy Achilles now becomes a
similar threat to his commander in chief Agamemnon, an
inferior man, to whom, nevertheless, he must pay honor by
yielding the captive Briseus. It is at this point (Iliad !.503-10)
that Thetis puts to Zeus the request that her son Achilles be
properly honored. The subsequent action does not relate
primarily to the hegemony of either Zeus or Agamemnon but
rather to how Zeus works out the end of Achilles in the Iliad
and whether the hero's short-lived life and glorious end
constitute a just, fitting response to Thetis' request. Achilles
amidst the carnage of the ensuing war, the death of his
beloved Patroclos, and the retributive killing and desecration
of Hector exacts tribute from Argive and Trojan alike. In the
extraordinary last scene of the poem Achilles has in effect12
already achieved his goal as ruler and is enthroned as king of
Hades, where he will later lament to visiting Odysseus that he
would rather be a slave among mortals than hold his present
regal station. We are left to wonder whether such excellence
among men can only be so rewarded.
�KOHL
25
The compass of the Aeneid's action, in contrast to the
Iliad's, is not from the heights to the depths of heroic fortune
but the past, present, and future of successful statecraft. In
comparison with the Iliadic myth, the central problems raised
by the Aeneid do not relate to the justice due a central heroic
figure such as Achilles but to the very existence of a city in the
face of a civil war, a city in which just dispensation might be
given. In this sense, the problems upon which Virgil's epic
turn might be said to be antecedent to those of its Homeric
prototype. A practical reading of the Iliad in this light
suggests at a minimum that preservation of the city is favored
when the best men are not situated in subordinate positions.
Such inverted circumstances often lead to internecine strife
among leaders, which, in turn is often fatal to the city as a
whole.
The problem of civil war is faced directly in the story of
Atreus and Thyestes. In one common version of the myth,
there is a dispute between the two brothers, Atreus (father of
Agamemnon) and Thyestes, over the kingship of Mycenae. A
ram with a golden fleece, a symbol of election, is born into
Atreus' flock. With the aid of Atreus' wife, whom Thyestes
has seduced, the golden ram is stolen, and Thyestes assumes
the kingship. Hermes then persuades Atreus to desist until the
course of the sun is reversed, which Zeus then accomplishes.
Again, let us first take note that the questions upon which this
myth centers do not focus on the two fraternal antagonists
and their doom but upon the very survival of the political
order of Mycenae, which will be torn asunder if and when the
two brothers collide in civil war over the kingship. Only some
outside, extraordinary intervention is able to avert this
destruction, in this case Zeus' action.
The Statesman
The mythic context of the Aeneid, as disclosed in an
important contribution by Jacob Klein, 13 turns on the myth of
Atreus and Thyestes and, in particular, on the re-embodiment
and extension of that myth in the story of the reversed
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
26
cosmos in Plato's dialogue The Statesman. Virgil probably
read and discussed this dialogue with Octavian. A reading of
Virgil's ancient biographies, notably those sections attributed
to Suetonius in Aelius Donatus and that of M. Valerius
Probus, indicates that Virgil was in the circle of patronage of
Octavian long before the principate. Virgil's lifelong interest
in philosophy seems at first to have centered upon the
Epicureans and later shifted to the Platonists. 14
If we turn our attention to The Statesman itself, however,
it becomes evident that the Atreus{fhyestes myth is not quite
the entire story the Stranger wants to discuss with young
Socrates. The two had spent their previous discussion, in
effect, trying to find out what a ruler was, and by a laborious,
dialectical process had arrived at a provisional definition of a
ruler as a guide over human beings, a "shepherd of the
people" as is usually applied to Agamemnon at Troy. But men
can seize power by various means, usually violent. What
distinguishes legitimate from illegitimate rulers? If I say,
"Obey my orders!" to you and a group of your fellows, what
compels you to do so? or not to do so? It is this question that
leads them to the Atreus/Thyestes myth in the first place and
to the witness of Zeus especially. What is the pathos by which
the restoration of the throne to Atreus is enforced? Thus the
Stranger in Plato's Statesman is led to tell of the god's action
directly (268E-274E), where the god reverses the course of
the world from the ever more chaotic age of Zeus to restore
the earlier, Edenic age of Saturn or "golden age."
The Ever-Recurring Return
The Stranger explains:
During a certain time the god himself joins in
guiding and rolling around all in its motion, while
at another time, when the periods have at length
reached the proper measure of time, he lets it go,
and of its own accord it turns back in the opposite
direction, since it's a living being and endowed
�KOHL
27
with intelligence from him who put it together in
the beginning. (268C-D)
One is fancifully reminded of a spring-driven toy or top that
one winds up at the beginning, then lets go of until the toy or
top runs down, becomes wobbly, and tips over, at which
point one winds it up again. And the stranger adds that bodily
things like the cosmos can't go on forever in one direction
like the divine, but this winding up and running down is the
next best thing to it. (269A-270A) Translated into political
terms, we see a society originally face-to-face with the
divinity that organizes and inspires it. Then the divinity
retreats into the background. As the generations of men
proceed one after another, the original divine memory
becomes ever dimmer, the inspiration weaker, the inhabitants
more forgetful of their origins, the organization more
corrupt, and the society more dissolute. We see Plato's
concern for this weakening reflected in many other dialogues:
the myths of recollection in the Meno and Republic, the
replacement of defaced images by fresh images in the
Symposium, magnetic chains of iron rings hanging from a
lodestone in the Ion, et cetera. In the face of dissolution, a
renewal by a divinity is then required.
But what then is suffered by the cosmos during this liferestoring winding-up? young Socrates asks. This leads to
further elaboration of the Stranger's myth. (270Bff.) There is,
in fact, great destruction of humans at this time, the Stranger
declares, and only a small part of the human race, having had
many strange experiences here, has survived to tell the tale.
The renewal, we infer, is a violent one, a period of protracted
and most destructive civil war, and the reversal is. indeed a
cosmic reversal. Time itself is reversed; everything is put back
to its original condition; memory itself is now put out of
question. Things are not begotten in succession but spring up
out of the earth on their own accord. There are no special
bonds of kinship and no special claims thereby on wealth and
power. Creatures do not eat one another and do not have to
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
labor for their food; strife and competition are thus eliminated. Men may even have the power of conversing with
other animals. Such is the Edenic life of men during the reign
of Cronos when the god himself is their shepherd and unlike
that of the present age of Zeus, who remains aloof.
So, once the universe is turned back and the earthquake,
shock, and destruction resulting from the end of the old age
subside, the new epoch takes over; however, the material
element in the cosmos persisting from previous times
gradually takes over and prevails. The cosmos therefore
becomes more and more fierce. Men require special assistance from the gods (Prometheus, Hephaestus, Demeter,
Dionysus) and finally a more extreme intervention is
warranted to reverse the whole order again. But here (274E2)
a difficulty arises: the two interlocutors are in search of the
statesman and his art. If Cronos as shepherd of the people is
the paradigmatic statesman, then Cronos has no statecraft, no
art, because Cronos in the golden age has nothing to do,
neither to feed or lead men nor to care for them at all. The
good statesman is a statesman paradoxically by not having to
exercise any statecraft. This puzzle, which we may perhaps
characterize as that of the philosopher-king, will send the
conversation of the two off again in search of the statesman
and his rule. Here we will leave them and turn back to look
at the story in a wider context.
The Statesman myth has been reexamined more recently
by Pierre Vidal-Naquet, who begins his discussion with a
passage from the peripatetic Dicaearchus, a student of
Aristotle, a passage that in turn was cited by Porphyry in his
treatise de Abstinentia. 15 According to Dicaearchus, the
Golden Age, which in his account actually existed and was
not an idle fiction, was home to men who were vegetarians
and had food in abundance, though not in superabundance,
lives devoid of property, social conflict, and wars and a style
of living simple and frugal, symbolized by the acorn. These
Golden-Age people lived under the direct patronage of
Cronos, who is according to Vidal-Naquet "an extremely
�KOHL
29
ambiguous divine personage." Vidal-Naquet asks, What does
Dicaearchus' text acquire from the past and what does it
conceal? Vidal-Naquet finds an answer to his question in
Theophrastus' tract On Piety where this era is portrayed as a
period of vegetable consumption and animal sacrifice, which
apparently has succeeded vegetable sacrifice and has actually
appeared as a substitute for human sacrifice: thus,
vegetable-human-animal. These fourth-century speculations of Dicaearchus and of Theophrastus and later of
Porphyry are built on a theory of actual progression or
evolution from one earlier stage to the next. In this
progression Cronos emerges as a terrible, cannibalistic god
and the golden age as an age of enormous ambiguity from a
political standpoint.
Virgil's account of Saturnus in the Georgics and especially
in the Aeneid draws in many of its aspects upon Ennius' translation of Euhemerus' account of Saturn.' 6 But Euhemerus'
Saturn used to dine on mortal flesh (until Jupiter put an end
to it) and he was not beneficent god; Saturn in Virgil, on the
other hand, is a vegetarian and a benefactor.
Do wild men become tame in the age of Cronos, or do
tame men become wild (cannibalistic) in this epoch? Since we
are moving from one kind of man, one kind of animal, to
another, we cannot say. But two contrary attempts, two
contrary movements, have been made, according to VidalNaquet, to bridge the gap. In the "upward" movement, we
import the civic order into the virtues of the golden age, a
tendency expressed by the Orphics and Pythagoreans; in the
"downward" the entrance into the Golden Age is tantamount
to making contact with bestiality, expressed in various
Dionysiac practices. In some cases, notably in Euripides'
Bacchae both movements are present. The ambiguity even
seems to reach The Statesman in a somewhat lighter, more
playful fashion. The Stranger asks the young Socrates
whether men were more blessed in the reign of Cronos or
now in the reign of Zeus? They decide that it depends on
whether men in the first age engaged in philosophical conver-
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
30
sation with the animals or merely ate, drank, and gossiped
with them. (272B1-D1)
In the Aeneid itself this ambiguity surfaces in the figures
of the Cyclopes. When we first encounter them in book 3 of
the Aeneid, they are the sheep-grazing, cannibalistic savages
with whom we are familiar from Horner's Odyssey. But in the
Aeneid's sixth book we learn of and in the eighth book we see
the Cyclopes of Aetna, skilled metal workers in Vulcan's shop
who set to work on Aeneas's shield. In contrast, Horner's
Hephaistos in Iliad XVII works on Achilles' shield alone, and
the robot-like, wheeled tripods he has made cannot be
compared to Vulcan's Cyclopean assistants, who have names
("Thunderer," "Lightning," "Fireworker") and who respond
to Vulcan's exhortations. Clearly some sort of Cyclopean
transformation has taken place, of which, however, we
receive no further information. On the deeper ambiguities in
Virgil there will be more to say later; now we move on to
other aspects of the Golden Age in Plato.
History
Colin Starnes17 brings our attention to the eighth book of
Plato's Republic where, having concluded along with the
other interlocutors their description of the best state, the true
aristocracy, Socrates and Glaucon embark on a description of
the other, inferior ones. These Socrates subsumes under four
types: tirnocracy, (whose principle is honor); oligarchy
(wealth); democracy (liberty); and-worst of all-tyranny
(power). They then talk about the ways in which one type
may collapse into the next, inferior one. Socrates prefaces this
discussion with the following observations:
Hard as it is for a state so framed to be shaken,
yet, since all that comes into being must decay,
even a fabric like this will not endure forever, but
will suffer dissolution. In this manner: not only for
plants that grow in the earth, but also for all
creatures that move thereon, there are seasons of
�KOHL
31
fruitfulness and unfruitfulness for soul and body
alike, which come whenever a certain cycle is
completed, in a period short or long according to
the length of life for each species,IS
Seen in the light of Socrates' discussion of the political
forms in the Republic, the myth of the golden age in the
Statesman has sufficed to bring to light a new conception of
social history. As Klein points out, the myth does not rest on
the old, "organic" conception as seen in the Republic,
according to which the social order goes through successive
cycles of growth, maturity, senescence, and death like the life
cycle of an annual plant, but rather on a revolutionary
conception, where at the beginning of each cycle there is a
revolution, a reversal, a renovative overthrow of the
previous, senescent, decrepit age, and the restoration of the
new age, which then gradually declines. In turning the course
of events back to a golden past, the statesman turns back and
binds the political order back to its ancestral foundations.
This gives a deeply religious character to Roman politics and,
conversely, as Hannah Arendt has explained, a deeply
political character to Roman religion:
In contrast to Greece, where piety depended upon
the immediate revealed presence of the gods, here
religion literally meant re-ligare: to be tied back,
obligated, to the enormous, almost superhuman
aud hence always legendary effort to lay the
foundations, to build the cornerstone, to found for
eternity. To be religious meant to be tied to the
past, and Livy, the great recorder of past events,
could therefore say, Mihi vetustas res scribendi
nescio quo pacta antiquus fit animus et quaedam
religio tenet ('While I write down these ancient
events, I do not know through what connection
my mind grows old and some religio holds
[me ]'). 19
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Negatively, as in the case of transgression, it is the
loosing, the releasing from these bonds of religio either by the
restitution of damages or by the paying of a like penalty that
constitutes just absolution. 20 Positively, the religious sense of
the Romans, which was cultivated at funerals by the presence
of ancestral death masks and the giving of orations honoring
ancestors as well as the recently departed, has been observed
to contribute significantly to the formation of future generations of Roman citizens.
For who would not be inspired by the sight of
images of men renowned for their excellence, all
together and as if alive and breathing? What
spectacle could be more glorious than this?
Besides, he who makes the oration over the man
about to be buried, when he has finished speaking
of him, recounts the successes and exploits of the
rest whose images are present, beginning from the
most ancient. By this means, by this constant
renewal of the good report of brave men, the
celebrity of those who performed noble deeds is
rendered immortal, while at the same time the
fame of those who did good service to their
country becomes known to the people and a
heritage for future generations. But the most
important result is that young men are thus
inspired to endure every suffering for the public
welfare in the hope of winning the glory that
attends on brave men. 21
In Virgil's epic this conception, eminently both religious
and political, centers upon that revolutionary figure, pious
Aeneas, from whom the poem takes its title. The variegated
hue of the golden bough by which he gains access to Hades is
an external sign of the union of life and death, of freedom
and force, fused in the character of Aeneas. But this union,
which characterizes the hero and pervades his age, only
extends so far. In subsequent generations of men this union
�KOHL
33
progressively falls apart; the ages become inferior. Thus to
extend the metaphor: the brilliance of the variegated hue
now diminishes as the elements successively separate to form
ever-duller colors. 22 Further, turning the cosmos back to its
pristine condition is accompanied by much destruction and
civil strife, as Plato's Stranger reminds us. The gold of the
golden age thus achieved is a gold alloyed with sadness and
loss. This, I suggest, is another meaning of the bough's
discolor aura.
There are other dark aspects of the golden age as well. In
the eighth book of the Aeneid, as we have already seen,
Evander describes to Aeneas Latium's past (8.314-36); from
this description it is fairly clear that Saturn, overthrown by
his son Jupiter, came as a refugee amongst the aboriginal,
primitive peoples of Italy, to whom he was a political and
cultural hero, ruling in peace. This Saturnian age then gave
way to debased societies as warfare and acquisitiveness
supplanted the Saturnian element, a decline aided and
abetted by waves of invaders. The Latins under Latinus are
remnants of this aboriginal Saturnian element, as is made
clear by various other allusions in the poem as well. 23 Now
come Evander and Aeneas, exiles from foreign lands and both
descendants of Jupiter. Aeneas is persistently and vehemently
opposed throughout the poem by Saturnian Juno. Her wrath
against Aeneas and the Trojans is announced at the very
beginning of the epic (1.4) and is sustained nearly until the
end (12.842). In two soliloquies (1.37-49; 7.293-322) and in
three conversations (Helenus to Aeneas: 3.435-40; Juno to
Allecto: 7.331-40; Juno to Jupiter: 10.63-95) Juno makes
clear the reasons for her antipathy: her beauty has been
slighted in favor of others (the Judgment of Paris); her
husband cheats (Dardanus, the Trojan founder comes from
the dalliance of Jupiter with Electra), and her own children
are not pretty to look at Uuventa has been spurned by Jupiter
in favor of Ganymede, and Mars and Vulcan generally are not
attractive figures either). In contrast, Aeneas' mother is
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Venus, the winner of the Judgment of Paris, and both Aeneas
and his Trojan companions are described as handsome,
beautiful people. Witness the taunts of Numanus at Ascanius
and the encamped Trojans at 9.598-620 and the protest of
Iarbas to Jupiter at 4.215-18: the Trojans are effeminate,
foppish people, incapable of fighting. The very sight of these
beautiful Trojan dandies, we imagine, makes Juno angry-a
properly Saturnian sentiment. Finally and more broadly,
there is the prediction that a Trojan remnant will someday
establish itself and overthrow Carthage, Juno's favorite city.
Mythological orthodoxy within the foregoing context thus
indicates that restoration of the golden age in Italy would
entail bringing Saturn or at least his representatives out of
hiding and reestablishing them. But the divine allegiances are
all wrong for this. Juno, the chief opponent of Aeneas, and
her associates-Turnus, Latinus, the Latins, Jutnrna and
allies-are of Saturnian stamp and resist the new order in
Italy, while Aeneas, Evander, and the Trojans and their allies
are the J avian protagonists of that new order. The institution
of the new order represents, therefore, the complete
subversion of the Saturnian elements and not their reinstitution. But Aeneas' institution, as we have seen, is quite
precisely advertised as setting up the return of the golden age,
which Virgil's own patron Octavian, descendant of Aeneas'
Jovian line, will reestablish in Saturn's Latin land, and from
which will extend a golden empire (6.789-800; 8.675-81).
How, then, can the usurpers of golden Saturn properly found
a golden age?
There are two ways to look at this new foundation, and
here the recent critics are sharply divided into two camps.
Advocates of the Empire, the "Augustans," point to the final
reconciliation of Juno and Jupiter in which the latter will
declare her to be not only Saturn's other child but also his
sister (12.830) and are well aware of the century of civil strife
and confusion that marks the late Republic; they will look at
the amalgamation of the Saturnian and the Jovian as a
complete solution to the dynastic and political problems of
�KOHL
35
the, past. The Saturnian gold will be alloyed with the Jovian
iron to produce a metal of stronger characteristics, if duller
hue. But the scene of this reconciliation is somewhat
ambiguous. Jupiter sees Juno seated on a cloud above the
battle, watching the final battle between Aeneas and Turnus,
and they exchange decisive words in the following dialogue,
beginning with Jupiter: "The end is reached. You have had
the power to chase the Trojans over land or wave, to kindle
monstrous war, to mar a home and to blend bridals with woe.
I forbid you to try any more." To which Juno with submissive
expression responds:
Because indeed, great Jupiter, this as your will was
known to me, I left unwillingly Turnus and the
earth: you would not have seen me alone on an
airy seat to suffer fair and foul, but girt in flames I
would have stood beneath with the very ranks and
dragged the Teucrians into hostile strife. Juturna I
confess I persuaded to help her miserable brother
and I approved that she dare greater things for his
life, but not spears nor stretch the bow. This I
swear by the implacable fountain head of Styx,
sole dread ordained for gods above. And now I
truly yield and I give up the fight in loathing.
(12.803-06)
Juno had in fact earlier told Jutnrna this: "If you dare
anything more favorable for your twin, do it; it is fitting.
Perhaps better things may follow for the unhappy."
(12.152-3) While not openly encouraging Juturna to do
battle on behalf of her brother, these words do not discourage
it either. Consequently, Juno's later vehement denial before
Jupiter, who has reproached her for the fact that Juturna now
faces Venus on the battlefield, may indicate that Juno's
withdrawal has less to do with a fundamental change of heart
and more to do with the implicit external threats of her
brother. Under this view, the new golden age is not the
voluntary melding of the Saturnian and the Jovian but the
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
involuntary usurpation of Saturnian by the Jovian. The new
age is really the age of iron; instituted by political force and
by poetic craft, it has been gilded in Saturnian guise to
produce a shaded gold. The Saturnian partisans of the old
Republic will say that by sleight of hand the Jovian has been
substituted under the appearance of the Saturnian, and they
were clear about the Augustan parallels. As put by Ronald
Syme, one of the exponents of this point of view,
In the Revolution the power of the old governing
class was broken, its composition transformed.
Italy and the non-political orders in society
triumphed over Rome and the Roman aristocracy.
Yet the old framework and categories subsist: a
monarchy rules through an oligarchy. 24
This line of reasoning has been carried forward by Inez
Scott Ryberg, who writes:
But if one side of Virgil's picture of Latinus is
Saturnian, the other side is Roman. He appears
wearing the trabea, the traditional garb of the
Roman king; he presides over Roman customs, the
opening of the Gates of War and the making of
treaties; he resists the breaking of the alliance with
the Trojans and will take no part in the
unrighteous war. 25
This ambivalent picture of Latinus carries over to an
ambivalent position of Augustus: "That the new Golden Age
of Augustus will embody the qualities of the reign of Saturn
is an important part, but only part, of the concept." Thus, she
suggests, the phrase said of Augustus, aurea condet saecula
(he will establish the golden age) has the overtones condere
lustrum (to establish the purifying sacrifice) and condere
urbem (to establish the city). This overtone or "echo,"
according to Ryberg, "hints, with 'flattering ambiguity,' that
the founder of the new Golden Age will be like Jupiter, the
son greater than his father who brought to a close the reign
�KOHL
37
of Saturn." But here, I think, we find a deviation from the
scheme we have been exploring: rather than successive
restorations of the golden age, we have successive challengers
to it, each challenger aspiring to overthrow and outdo his
predecessor, a scheme not devoted to achieving political
stability but, if anything, to undermining it.
Virgil in his poem does not resolve the status of the
golden age. Like his mentor, Plato, he shows us much, tells us
little, and moments of resolution seem rare. In the case of the
bough, it is a symbol, and it has a certain power, namely of
guaranteeing Aeneas passage through the underworld, but
not much more. There is, in Brooks' critique, no
"transcendent quality, passing beyond the contrasts of nature
to an ultimate harmony. . .it is unnatural, embodying the
contrasts of nature, rather than the supernatural,
transcending them." The bough is received and exercised in
ritual silence. "The rite is effective," Brooks comments,
and the hero receives his power, but not the
knowledge of what that power should mean...
The amor which impels him to pass living into
death receives no answer. This deeper antithesis of
success in action/frustration in knowledge is the
central and fundamental significance of the golden
bough. Certainly it is this which effects that
curious distortion of the language at the moment
of the bough's discovery. Discolor aura: not the
light of revelation, but the dubious and shifting
colors of the magic forest.
In similar manner, the more we turn back to pursue and
to restore the golden age, the more this age seems to recede
into the past. It becomes a dim, indistinct, and shifting glow,
the object of a quest that is ever-to-be-completed. Saturn
remains hidden, and with him hides that direct apprehension,
that illuminating knowledge of man's true estate. That to
which we keep turning back is instead a counterfeit Saturn, a
Jupiter disguised as Saturn, or perhaps a sort of negotiated
�38
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
cobbling together, an amalgamation of elements of the two.
Thus, the same antithesis of success in action/frustration in
knowledge, which Brooks uncovered as the central and
fundamental significance of the golden bough, discloses itself
here also. As a result, we have the constituting of a new
political order without the express declaration of its constitution; we have a new beginning, a novum principium, but
without the enunciated new principles. To indicate this intermediate, indeterminate quality 'which seems to pervade
Virgil's poem, Brooks says, "the Aeneid is a work in limbo,"
and he concludes his study with an allusion to Dante's well
known exposition of that place in the fourth canto of the
Inferno, where Dante's Virgil tells us that because he is
unbaptized he is lost, and without hope he lives in longing.
But unlike Dante, I would suggest that "limbo" in its original
meaning is not a place of darkness but a place at the edge of
things. Those who fell under the sway of the old order, the
pagan "ancients," were drawn and moved by the figures of
Aeneas, of Anchises, Ascanius and others, no matter how
dimly descried. In a distant, indistinct way virtues were made
visible, although unlike for Dante and the People of the Book,
they could own little true explanation.
Notes
1. SeeR. D. Williams, P. Vergili Marionis Aeneidos Liber Quintus (Oxford,
1960), xxv-xxviii.
2. Charles Segal, "Aeternum per Saecula Nomen, the Golden Bough and
the Tragedy of History: Part 1," Arion 4 (1965): 617-57.
3. Citations are based on the Oxford editions of Munro and Allen (third,
1920), Allen (second, 1917), Mynors (corrected, 1972), and Burnet
(1901) for the .Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, and Statesman, respectively.
4. "In fact, all of Virgil's poem is modeled on what you might call a
mirrored reflection of Homer's," we are told by Macrobius in his
Saturnalia, "you have only to compare the two passages." Macrobius: The
Saturnalia, Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Percival
Vaughan Davies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969). The
passage quoted is from book 5, chapter 2, section 13. Macrobius goes on
�KOHL
39
to identify over one hundred half-line to two-line parallels between Virgil
and Homer. Georg Nicolaus Knauer in his more recent work, Die Aeneis
und Homer: Studien zur poetischen Technik Vergils mit Listen der
Homerzitate in der Aeneis, 2nd ed. (Goettingen: Vandenhoeck and
Ruprecht, 1979), expands the list to over five hundred such parallels.
5. AB if to emphasize the nautical and equestrian parallels, Virgil borrows
part of his description of the start of the boat race from a passage in
which spirited horses are described in the third book of the Georgics
(5.144-45 = G 3.104-05).
6. The labyrinthine associations of the Trojan riding display are elicited
by John L. Heller, "Labyrinth or Troy Town?" The Classical Journal 42
(1946): 123-39.
7. C. M. Bowra, From Virgil to Milton (London: Macmillan and
Company, 1945), p. 35.
8. E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 173; M. C. J. Putnam,
The Poetry of the Aeneid: Four Studies in Imaginative Unity and Design
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965.), xiii - xiv and pp. 191 194; R. V. Desrosiers, "Two Greek Concepts of the Hero and their Echo
in Virgil's Aeneid," unpublished lecture, Berlin, N.H., 1989.
9. American Journal of Philology 74 (1953): 260-80.
10. The sections pertaining to the Cronos discussion in Hesiod are found
in Works and Days, 109-201 and Theogony, 736-885, and those in
Ennius in Euhemerus, 8-65 and Annals, 25-29.
11. The Power of Thetis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
Zeus' obligation to honor her son is fulfilled through the unfolding of the
events on the plain of Troy. I have traced Zeus' latent direction of the
principal actions here in "Design in the Iliad Based on the Long Repeated
Passages," Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy 22 (1994/5):
191-214.
12. See Eva Brann, Homeric Moments, Clues to Delight in Reading the
Odyssey and the Iliad (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2002), Chapter 13,
''Achilles as Hades and Achilles in Hades." This interpretation makes it all
the more striking that Priam, guided by the psychopomp Hermes, has
come to Achilles to ransom the body of his son from the underworld so
that it might be properly honored by and among the living. And so they
held funeral for Hector tamer of horses.
13. Jacob Klein, "The Myth of Virgil's Aeneid," Interpretation: A journal
of Political Philosophy 2 (1970): 10-20. [Also in Jacob Klein, Lectures
and Essays, ed. by Robert B. Williamson and Elliott Zuckerman
(Annapolis: St. John's College Press, 1985): 269-84.] Klein speculates
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
that the frequent Homeric references throughout the Aeneid, which the
poet has deliberately transposed or otherwise modified elements in the
Homeric originals, reflect the reversals in the Statesman myth. Further,
Macrobius' discussion of such occurrences in Virgil at the very center of
his Saturnalia, a dialogue that is reported as taking place at the winter
solstice when the sinking sun is now reversing its course, also suggests
such a revolutionary view. And Aeneas' Dardanian homecoming to
Latium where the whole Homeric cycle begins (in an extended sense)
now situates Virgil as the poet ancestral to Homer, thereby rendering
some plausibility to Virgil's enigmatic boast that it was easier to steal
Neptune's trident or Hercules' club than a verse from Homer.
14. As recorded by Henry Nettleship,Ancient Lives ofVergil, with an
Essay on the Poems of Vergil in Connection with his Life and Times
(Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1879). Later writings also support Virgil's
reputation as a Platonist: "Emperor Severus Alexander. . .Vergilium autem
Platonem poetarum vocabat eiusque imaginem cum Ciceronis simulacra in
secunda larario habuit, ubi et Achillis et magnorum virorum." "Emperor
Severus Alexander... used to call Virgil the Plato of poets and he kept his
portrait, together with a likeness of Cicero, in his second sanctuary of the
Lares, where he also had portraits of Achilles and the great heroes." See
The Scriptores Historiae Augustae, with an English translation by David
Magie, Ph.D. (Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, Loeb
Classical Library, 1953), Vol. 2, 21.4.
Klein (loc. cit.) calls our attention to part of an interpolation by an
unknown hand in a 15th century manuscript of Donatus' biography of
Virgil: audivit a Silane praecepta Epicuri cuiits doctrinae socium habuit
Varum. et quamvis diversorum philosophorum opiniones libris suis
inseruisse[t] de animo maxime videatur. ipse fuit Achademicus. nam
Platonis sententias omnibus aliis praetulit. "From Silo Virgil learned of
the teachings of Epicurus. Varus was his companion in this doctrine. And
although he seems to have inserted the opinions of opposing philosophers
in his books with great intent, he himself was of the Academy. For he
preferred the views of Plato before all others." See Jacobus Brummer, ed.
Vitae Vergilianae (Leipzig: Teubner, 1912), apparatus plenus, pp. 32-3.
15. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, "Plato's Myth of the Statesman, the Ambiguities
of the Golden Age and of History" pp. 285·301 (Chapter 14) in The
Black Hunter: Forms of Thought and forms of Society in the Greek World,
trans Andrew Szegedy-Maszak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1986)
16. Patricia Johnston, "Vergil's Conception of Saturnus," California
Studies in Classical Antiquity 10: 57-70 (1977).
17. "The Eternity of Rome: Virgil's Doctrine and its Relation to Plato" in
Philosophy and Freedom: The Legacy of James Doull, ed. David G. Peddle
�KOHL
41
and Neil G. Robertson (Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 2003),
pp.·· 181-200. For Starnes the primary elements corrupting and thus
ultimately destroying the city "have to do with the random, irrational
aspect of nature that is in principle impenetrable to human knowledge
because we can only have sure and certain knowledge of what is both
fixed and universal-that is, the Forms or Ideas." (p. 190)
18. The Republic of Plato, translated by Francis MacDonald Cornford
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1945), p. 269 [546A]. Socrates goes
on in this passage to associate political instability with the instability of
human generations. Certain marriage numbers govern the procreation of
perfect children, thus assuring the perfect continuity of generations and
perfect order in the city, but it is difficult to determine such numbers and
inferior children are born out of season, leading to disharmony.
19. From "What Is Authority?" in Between Past and Future: Eight
Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 121.
The citation is from Livy's Annals, book 43, chapter 13.
20. See Richard Broxton Onians, The Origins of European Thought:
About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), Chapter XII, esp. pp.
439-42.
21. Polybius, The Histories with an English Translation by W. R. Paton
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library, 1923)
Book 6.53.10-54.4.
22. "Moreover, the more minute the particles into which anything is
pulled apart, the more readily it is perceived that the color gradually
fades away and is extinguished: as happens when purple wool is torn up
into small parts; the purple and scarlet colour, brightest of all, is wholly
scattered apart when the wool has been pulled apart threadwise; so that
you may learn from this that the particles breathe away all their colour
before they are dispersed apart into the seeds of things." Lucretius, De
Rerum Natura 2. 826-33, W. H. D. Rouse translation in the Loeb
Classical Library (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 3rd ed. rev.,
1937).
23. The allusions to the Saturnian character of Latinus, Turnus, and
Juturna, on the one hand, and the Jovian associations and descent of
Aeneas and Evander, on the other, have been recently discussed by
Richard F. Thomas, "Between Jupiter and Saturn: Ideology, Rhetoric and
Culture Wars in the Aeneid," The Classical ]oumal100 (2): 121-47 (Dec.
2004-Jan. 2005).
24. The Roman Revolution (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1939), introductory chapter.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
25. Inez Scott Ryberg, "Virgil's Golden Age," Transactions and
Proceedings of the American Philological Association, 89:112-31 (1958).
For a recent survey of the ambivalent and contradictory ways the golden
age presents itself in Virgil's poetry and their various critical interpretations, see Christine Perkell, "The Golden Age and its Contradictions in
the Poetry of Virgil," Vergilius 48 (2002): 3-39.
�43
The Finest Fruits of Reason
Review of Michael Comenetz's
Calculus: The Elements
M. W. Sinnett
The Principle of Sound Learning is that the noise of vulgar fame
should never trouble the cloistered calm of academic existence.
Hence, learning is called sound when no one has ever heard of it;
and 'sound scholar' is a term of praise applied to one another by
learned men who have no reputation outside the University, and a
rather queer one inside it. If you should write a book (you had
better not), be sure that it is unreadable; otherwise you will be
called 'brilliant' and forfeit all respect.
-F. M. Cornford
Microcosmographia Academica:
Being a Guide for the Young Academic Politician
Of the making of textbooks about the calculus there is no
end, and, as Steerforth says to young "Daisy" Copperfield,
"there never was a more miserable business." It's not that
they prove to be "unreadable"; much worse, they're not
meant to be read in the first place. Reading, after all, is an
intensely personal enterprise replete with risks and responsibilities, and offering consequences uneven and unpredictable
at best. Textbooks, on the other hand, are intended to be
successful, and therefore proceed without reference to or
dependence upon such quaint contingencies as the judgment
and perseverance of individual students. (That they accordingly do nothing to foster the judgment and perseverance of
individual students is perhaps a trifle inconvenient from the
standpoint of anyone with the interests of education at heart,
Michael Comenetz, Calculus: The Elements. World Scientific Publishing Co.,
2002. M. W. Sinnett is a tutor at the Annapolis campus of St. John's College.
�44
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
but there's no doubt of its being good for business: The intellectual and spiritual vices reinforced by most textbooks
strengthen the market for more of the same, a nice example
of what systems analysts call a "negative feedback loop.")
"Success" is defined in terms the modern world owes to
B. F. Skinner: the subjects are to be conditioned into the
reliable performance of certain operations, the origins and
meaning of which remain soothingly obscure. The colorcoding of components of its presentation, for example,
practically allows a modern text to read itself to the students,
and since even this may fail to produce the desired results,
many textbooks now include a computer disc in order to
offer "interactive guidance," as well as, in a warm and
supportive voice, the text's personal encouragement: "I am
your friend. Trust me. Math is fun." A week's worth of class,
meanwhile, demonstrates that the blue, purple, magenta, and
brown bits (constituting roughly 900AJ) of the text can be
safely ignored; the important parts are the section summaries
(in red, for easy reference) and the worked examples (in
green, the color of life). These, in turn, are keyed to vast
arrays of repetitive and uninteresting exercises which
sufficiently disclose, in and of themselves, the venerable
pedagogical principle governing the whole: monkey see,
monkey do.
It was not always so. In the age when men were formed
of gold, there were texts in the land that were also booksgood books withal, perhaps even great books. Hardy,
Whittaker, Courant, Spivak, Apostol. These were the names
of high places, points of entry and the means of apprenticeship to the professions of science. The latter, the two
volumes of Calculus by Tom M. Apostol of CalTech (known
to us as "the gospel according to the Apostol Tom"), was the
constant companion for four solid semesters of any of us in
the University's departments of science or engineering. It was
a book we not only read and re-read, but also poured over,
despaired of, rejoiced in, feared, hated, loved, savored,
�SINNETT
45
emulated. It was a book of which we hoped to be found
worthy. These modern texts seem rather the work of a pygmy
race.
Nor, in most respects, does the work under review,
Calculus: The Elements by Michael Comenetz, bear
comparison with these great treatises; in its scope, intended
audience, and purpose, it is poles apart. And yet, in one
essential way, it both invites and survives such comparison,
for Comenetz's text is also a book, a very good book, a book
that demands and rewards careful reading and reflection.
The beginning of Calculus is with the "problem of
calculus," and comprises brief discussions of five types of
inquiry about physical and mathematical objects for which
neither classical Greek geometry nor medieval Islamic algebra
provide adequate resources. By way of proposing "lines of
thought" that lead naturally to "the problem," Comenetz asks
us to consider (1) the density and mass of a wire; (2) the
growth rate and total volume of some quantity in threedimensional space; (3) the velocity, acceleration, and distance
traversed by a "particle" in space; (4) the accumulation of
quantities such as velocity and momentum through the
operation of a force over time; and, (5) certain quantities
associated with curves, such as the areas bounded by a curve
or the inclination of a curve. In each case, a problem entirely
amenable to classical or medieval treatment under conditions
of appropriate uniformity becomes wholly intractable under
the circumstances of variability often prevailing in the world
around us. If the density of the wire, for example, is
uniform-that is, if the ratio of mass to length is independent
of the size or location of the segment of wire consideredthen the ordinary algebraic operations of multiplication and
division are sufficient to express the relations between these
quantities: density is the quotient of mass by length, and
hence, mass is the product of density with length. If, on the
other hand, the density of the wire varies with length, as one
expects in practice, then the "generalizations of notions of
quotient and product" that appear in Chapter Two are called
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
for. As the reader proceeds through the situations described
in (2) through (5) "the same problem presents itself again and
again to the eye that knows how to look;" namely, the
problem of understanding the mutual determination of
quantities whose relation is non-uniform. That such relations
prevail between quantities routinely experienced in the
physical world suggests an essential feature of the calculus
that Comenetz is determined we shall see. This mathematics
arises not through turning away from the world, but through
active engagement with it.
This connection with (what Eric Voegelin would call) the
"engendering experience" of the subject is sustained
throughout. Questions from the first chapter are employed in
the second in order to motivate the introduction of the
integral and derivative. Problem (1), in particular, pertaining
to the mass of a non-uniform wire, plays the central role in
introducing the "integral" as a generalized sum of differential
quantities reflecting the variations in the wire's density along
its length. The notion of integral is then more briefly applied
to the components of problems (2) through (5), which
pertain to the accumulation of quantities over space or time.
The process is then repeated in terms of the components of
these same problems that pertain to the generalized quotients
expressing the infinitesimally local character of the
phenomena in question. Beginning again with the wire, the
"function" m = m(x), which gives the mass of the wire at
each point x along the wire's length, is used to define the
density of mass at x as the "limit" of average densities over a
sequence of decreasing intervals containing x. This notion of
"derivative" is then applied to the corresponding components
of problems (2) through (5); that is, to the determination of
the strictly local characteristics of the quantities being
considered. Thus, just as Comenetz in Art. 2.4 applied the
definite integral in calculating the area bound underneath the
graph of a function, so in Art. 2.9 he turns to the computation of the graph's slope at an arbitrary point. The careful
arrangement of the problems, with geometric properties of
�SINNETT
47
graphs corning last, permits smooth transitions between the
two halves of Chapter Two and between Chapters Two and
Three. The use of the definite integral to discuss the area
bound by a curve over a fixed interval (Art. 2.4) leads
naturally to the "indefinite integral" (Art. 2.5) interpreted as
a function giving the area bounded by the curve over a
variable subinterval. The question that then naturally arises
(even if not explicitly forrnulated)-how fast this variable
area is changing-leads to the discussion of the derivative (in
Art. 2.6 and following). Lurking in the background, of
course, is the Fundamental Theorem, which Cornenetz
reserves for the following chapter. The immediate transition
to Chapter Three is also effected by means of problem (5) on
the geometry of curves, where (especially in §2.9.9 on
"Differentiability") he presents examples that raise rather
difficult questions as to the existence and general properties
of derivatives and integrals.
We therefore turn from the physical problems that
motivate the concepts of "integral and derivative" in Chapter
Two to a largely mathematical account of the processes of
"differentiation and integration" in Chapters Three and Four.
Here the emphasis is upon an orderly mathematical account,
which proceeds from an heuristic discussion of limits and
continuity, through an abstract (though not rigorous)
definition of the derivative, to the delineation of differentiation formulae for standard categories of functions and the
general algebraic properties of differentiation. The explicit
statement of the Fundamental Theorem then leads to
discussion of indefinite integrals, the formulae for definite
integrals corresponding to known derivatives, and to the
further applications of differentiation in determining mathematical properties of functions and of their graphs. This
approach is continued in Chapter Four, where "local"
properties disclosed by derivatives are applied to "global"
properties best characterized by the generalized summation
of definite integrals. Thus the chain rule for the differentiation of suitable compositions of functions leads to
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
techniques of integration such as "substitution," "parts," and
"partial fractions." We discover in general that the applicability of integrals is as various as our ability to build differentials of relevant quantities. The two chapters of pure mathematics then lead to two more of applied mathematicsspecifically, to the study of equations containing differentials
(a.k.a. "differential equations"), and again the same inverse
relationship between "differentiation and integration" is
found: the equations that express physical processes as
relations between derivatives can be solved (at least in these
elementary circumstances) by means of integration.
Perhaps the most beautiful thing in Calculus is
Comenetz's seventh chapter on "plane curves." Nowhere else
do we see so clearly the historical background that modern
analysis has transformed. The tools constructed in preceding
chapters are the means to a simplified and very clear
discussion of the "arc length" and "curvature" of smooth,
non-intersecting curves in the Cartesian plane. Precise references to the Lemmas of Part 1 of the Principia permit
Comenetz not only to connect his account with that of
Newton, but also to show what is at stake in both. Instead of
a characterization that applies to a figure as a whole, as in the
geometry of Euclid or Apollonius, the modern approach,
which begins with Newton and applies to a much wider class
of curves, characterizes curves in terms of their "local
geometry" (Art. 7.3); that is, it characterizes them in terms of
their behavior in neighborhoods of individual points. The
qualities that are truly "intrinsic" to such curves, such as "arc
length" and "curvature," are therefore most naturally defined
analytically. This chapter includes a number of examples in
which the analytical definition of curvature is beautifully
illustrated in terms of the geometrical figure known as the
"osculating circle"; but in the end it is curvature as a function
of arc length, k = f(s), that determines the curve independently of all geometric considerations. And this use of arc
length as an independent variable expressing position "along"
a curve allows a smooth transition to the final topic of the
�SINNETT
49
chapter, a lovely yet brief treatment of the generalization of
the Riemann integral known as the "line" or "contour
integral."
The elegance and cohesiveness of this chapter is but the
clearest example of a general feature of Comenetz's Calculus;
namely, that it is a carefully thought-out and entirely selfcontained whole. The five problems briefly discussed in
Chapter One return time and again, and develop in tandem
with the mathematical language they help to motivate.
Because they demonstrate the depths that open up through
the appropriate analytical concepts and techniques, the
problems not only receive extensive discussion in their own
right, but also necessitate the application of the virtually all
the mathematics that Comenetz presents. Even the
concluding chapter on Taylor series, which might at first seem
to have been tacked on, provides the author a chance to
survey the journey on which he has led the reader. Thus,
there are no loose ends. Indeed, as the book concludes, we
are invited to "contemplate," not the five platonic solids as at
the close of Euclid's Elements, but "the elegant formula" for
the power series computation of n/4, and to recognize in it
"the depth that yields the finest fruits of reason."
Its elegance notwithstanding, there is also something
disquieting about the wholeness of this book; in particular,
there is something artificial-not to say unnatural-about
Comenetz's invitation to contemplation, which is as if to
suggest that we have arrived someplace special. No such
invitation is forthcoming from Euclid at the close of Book 13,
since none is needed, except in the case of perverse moderns
such as myself whose cosmic piety on that august occasion
was all too rapidly swept away in a torrent of rather obvious,
and rather blasphemous, questions. (What do "Platonic
solids" look like in n-dimensions? or in a locally compact
topological vector space? or in a Banach space? Are there
Platonic solids in a Banach space? Hilbert space, sure, but
Banach space? What happens if ... ?) For those who come
freshly to Euclid-which in a just world would include every
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
literate person-the urge to contemplation arises ineluctably
from the movement of the text itself; one contemplates
because it's the natural thing for anyone who (thinks he)
dwells in a cosmos to do. Modern mathematics, by way of
contrast, promulgated by inhabitants of the universe, is
fragmentary by nature. Consummations are therefore
illusory, and wholes are inseparable from the idiosyncrasies of
authors, as witness the fact, which Comenetz knows perfectly
well, that from any point in Calculus one can ascend vertically into the theoretical ionosphere and never be heard from
again. This, in turn, is simply further evidence of the
perspective that guides Comenetz's careful arrangement of
his material in the first place; since this mathematics is exegetically related to the order of the physical world, to entertain
seriously some final wholeness about it would be to indulge
oneself in the fantasy of (what Paul Feyerabend calls) "the
conquest of abundance." Our true place in the order of things
is more aptly described by Newton's famous metaphor
(suggested by the cover of Calculus) that we moderns, at best,
are as small boys playing on a beach and diverting ourselves
in finding now a shinier pebble or a more curious shell, while
"the great ocean of truth" lies undiscovered before us.
Comenetz has indeed presented his readers a cornucopia of
"the finest fruits of reason," but ten more volumes of such
would still imply that the greatest harvest is yet to come,
indeed, that the greatest harvest will always be yet to come.
These considerations also lend urgency to the question
for whom Calculus: The Elements is intended. It certainly has
the features of a textbook, including sets of "questions" with
"answers [in the back]," a "topical summary" keyed to the
appropriate articles and sections of the text, and a "reader's
guide" that, among other things, offers alternative routes
through the material. It is somewhat difficult to imagine,
however, the nature of the course (or courses) in a conventional college or university to which it would be appropriate.
It is clearly not intended, on the one hand, for the training of
mathematicians. The book is indeed full of delightful
�SINNETT
51
surprises for the mathematically-minded reader (integrals and
derivatives clearly presented prior to, and with nothing more
than a "cautionary" remark about, limits; a definition of
continuity that clearly derives from general topology; and
numerous intimations of a beautiful generalization of calculus
known as differential geometry), but it contributes little to
the learning that the beginner would require in order to
notice them. Only a few of the central theorems of the subject
are formulated as such, and even these cannot be rigorously
proven given the relegation of such things as a precise
("epsilon-delta") definition of limit to brief discussions in fine
print. On the other hand, it seems too demanding for the
"calculus for poets" course and has the wrong practical orientation for the "calculus for business administration" course.
Nor is it appropriate to a class of science or engineering
students, in which context it would be judged both deficient
and superfluous at the same time, deficient in certain
necessary technical matters and superfluous in offering a
good deal of instruction in physics that would be more
exhaustively taught elsewhere. Precisely as a coherent and
self-contained whole, Comenetz's Calculus is a terminal
introduction to a non-terminal subject. One can easily
imagine it enticing its reader to further study, but it is difficult
to see how such study could be undertaken without the
reader, at least in part, starting over someplace else.
This is not to deny, however, the worth of reading
Calculus. To the contrary, members of any of the categories
mentioned will profit from the perspective, not to mention
the idiosyncrasies, presented here. But perhaps it is not
categories of readers that Comenetz has in mind. Perhaps it is
only when we stop thinking about categories of readers (as
authors of mere textbooks never do )-perhaps it is only when
we consider who, and not what, the readers are-that we
discover the "actually existing individual" (Kierkegaard) for
whom this book is a godsend. What, in the end, does it
achieve? What does it do? And the answer is that it doesn't
do anything. It's a book not a machine; it's meant to be read,
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
and wondered at, and reflected on, and struggled with. It can
be said to make the case for mathematical physics as among
"the finest fruits of reason," but even this only for those who
have eyes with which to see, and energy with which to
persevere, and courage with which to inquire. It is hard to
imagine the person willing to undergo the risks of genuine
reading who would not profit from, and delight in, what
Comenetz offers.
A painful duty, thus, confronts me: Calculus: The
Elements is, in my opinion, definitely not unreadable.
Comenetz, therefore, as I need hardly add, cannot be judged
a sound scholar. Alas!
�53
~
The Sting of the Torpedo Fish
fj:-- Christopher B. Nelson
Can you tell me, Socrates, whether virtue can be taught? Or if
not teachable, is it acquired by practice, or if neither, whether
men possess it by nature or in some other way?
So begins Plato's dialogue, Meno, opening as abruptly upon
the reader as my remarks have upon you this afternoon. You
freshmen will spend a good part of this year with Plato, his
frustrating protagonist, Socrates, and this very dialogue,
Meno, in both English translation and the original Greek. I
think I am on relatively safe ground in saying that the reason
we spend so much time on the Meno is that this dialogue
belongs peculiarly to this college; it is deeply rooted here. I
hope to expose a few of those roots this afternoon, but let me
first return to the beginning.
Tell me, Socrates, if you can, whether human
excellence can be taught? If not, whether we can
acquire it by practice? Or if neither of these,
whether we are born with it or it comes to us in
some other way?
Meno's question is interesting, for it appears to go to the
heart of some very big questions that all of us share: what
does it mean to be human? and how can we be better human
beings? Parents would love to know how to raise children
who are improvements on themselves; all parents want what
is best for their children. Teachers would be happy and
honored above all others if they could teach their students
virtue. As for students, why else are you here but that you
Christopher B. Nelson is President at the Annapolis Campus of St. John's
College. This is the Convocation Address to the Class of 2010, delivered at
Annapolis on August 23, 2006.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
believe that some answer might be given to Meno's question:
What is the right path to virtue? How might I acquire hnman
excellence?
But Meno's question has its flaws. For one, it comes ont
of the blue and without context. We are supposed to know,
somehow, what Meno is talking about. We are assumed to
have a common vocabulary and even a common nuderstanding of basic concepts.
Speaking of vocabulary, some of you will have noted that
I translated the Greek in two different ways when I repeated
Meno's question in English, an exercise you freshmen will
undertake as you try first to discover what is being said and
what it means before asking whether it is true. Such attempts
at translation will be first steps to getting at the root of
Meno's question.
Socrates appreciates what is at stake in Meno's question.
He thns goes straight to the heart of it with a response that
would confound any student hoping to receive the almighty
truth from a teacher. Socrates in effect says: how can I say
how virtue is acquired when I don't even know what it is?
And worse, Socrates then says that he has never met any other
person who knows what virtue is. He entreats Meno to help
him understand what Meno thinks it to be. Meno makes the
attempt, responding confidently with what he has heard from
other teachers, repeating their opinions as his own. Yet, under
Socrates' questioning, Meno finds himself disowning the
opinion he began with. After two false starts, Meno begins to
get uncomfortable with Socrates' examination. When
Socrates begs him to start over yet a third time, Meno tries to
divert the conversation from the question of virtue to the
problem with Socrates:
Socrates, I certainly used to hear, even before
meeting you, that you never do anything else than
exist in a state of perplexity yourself and put
others in a state of perplexity. And now you seem
to me to be bewitching me and drugging me and
�NELSON
55
simply subduing me with incantations, so that I
come to be full of perplexity. And you seem to me,
if it is even appropriate to make something of a
joke, to be altogether, both in looks and in other
respects, like the flat torpedo-fish of the sea. For,
indeed, it always makes anyone who approaches
and touches it grow numb, and you seem to me
now to have done that very sort of thing to me,
making me numb. For truly, both in soul and in
mouth, I am numb and have nothing with which I
can answer you. And yet thousands of times I have
made a great many speeches about virtue, and
before many people, and done very well, in my
own opinion anyway; yet now I'm altogether
unable to say what it is.
It is beginning to look as if Meno has no interest in the
answer to the question and is more concerned with his image
or reputation than with the truth. On the other hand,
Socrates is not satisfied; he still wants to proceed with the
search for an answer. He is also willing to conduct the search
with Meno, a man who seems to have no thoughts of his
own. Socrates, in wishing to proceed, has done two things: he
has told Meno that he will serve as Meno's teacher if Meno
will let him, that is to say, that he will join Meno in the
search; and he has told the reader that he is willing to do so
because he might actually learn something from Meno. He is
truly open to the possibility that the teacher may learn from
the student-any student, even Meno. So, Meno, what is
virtue?
Meno now tries a sting of his own, challenging Socrates
with a classic learner's paradox: either we know something or
we don't. If we know it, we don't need to search for it. But if
we don't already know what we are looking for, how will we
ever recognize it when we see it? Socrates will not be deterred
by Meno's attempt to bring the conversation to an abrupt
halt. Instead, he takes Meno's problem seriously and answers
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56
in two ways. First, he repeats a myth he has heard that
suggests that learning is a kind of recollection, which requires
an exercise of responsibility for learning by the one doing the
learning. Learning does not occur when someone else, a
teacher for example, tries to put knowledge into a student.
Instead, it is an act of recovery, in some way, of something
already known to us.
When Meno demonstrates that he doesn't get it, Socrates
resolves upon a way to show Meno what he means, asking
Meno to observe carefully as he examines one of Meno's
slave boys about a problem in geometry which is new to him,
a problem that can be demonstrated by a drawing in the
earth-a problem, not incidentally, that you will be working
on in your mathematics tutorial with Euclid. The slave boy
reaches a point where he expresses with confidence an answer
that is false, an answer that he comes to understand as wrong
a few moments later under Socrates' questioning. The slave
boy tries again with the same result. Socrates asks him to start
over, just as he did with Meno a little earlier. He asks the boy
to produce another answer, and the slave boy says: "Indeed,
Socrates, I do not know."
Socrates turns to Meno, and by extension to us, and says:
Do you see, Meno, what advances he has made in
his power of recollection? He did not know at
first, and he does not know now, what is the
[answer]: but then he thought that he knew, and
answered confidently as if he knew, and had no
difficulty; now he has difficulty, and neither knows
nor fancies that he knows.
Meno: True.
Socrates: Is he not better off knowing his
ignorance?
Meno: I think that he is.
�NELSON
57
Socrates: If we have made him doubt, and given
him the "torpedo's shock," have we done him any
harm?
Meno: I think not.
Socrates: We have certainly, it would seem, assisted
him in some degree to the discovery of the truth;
and now he will wish to remedy his ignorance, but
then he would have been ready to tell all the
world again and again [the answer he gave at
first?].
Meno: True.
Socrates persuades Meno that the slave boy simply would not
have been ready to inquire and learn the truth without first
being reduced to perplexity. The torpedo's shock not only did
not hurt, it positively helped; it was the condition for the
learning that did occur (and the slave boy did go on, with
Socrates' help, to find the solution to the geometry problem).
Socrates has shown us, the readers (and Meno, if he were
listening), that understanding our own ignorance is necessary
for learning to take place, especially understanding our
ignorance of the everyday, common things we thought we
knew well. When we can look at the familiar and suddenly
realize that we really do not understand it, when we can look
at what we always thought we knew, and ask "what is this
thing?" then we are ready to learn and well along the path to
better understanding. In that state we are truly torpid, just as
the slave boy was, and we bring a sense of wonder to our
search. This wonder comes not from something we understand, but rather from our desire to understand, what we
sometimes call a love of learning, born not in understanding
but in ignorance.
Socrates has done something else in his demonstration.
He has also shown us the power of discovering what
something is not, and helped us see that knowing what
something is not is much more than knowing nothing; it is a
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
kind of "knowing ignorance," an "intelligent perplexity" that
comes from trying out and discarding false notions. He has
also helped us see not only that we do not know what virtue
is, but also that we do not even know what learning is.
We now look at Meno and see that he is a slave: a slave
to his pride, a slave to the opinions of others, unwilling to
examine what he clearly does not understand. Meno's
problem is not that he is ignorant, but that he has no desire
to be free from the shackles of that ignorance.
We look at the slave boy and see that he is free; free from
the false notions he has been carrying around with him, free
from barriers to learning. This freedom, strangely, comes not
from the certainty of knowledge but from the recognition of
his ignorance.
Let me return to the place where I began, when I said that
this dialogue of Plato's is deeply rooted at the College. We
want you to acquire the freedom of Meno's slave boy, the
freedom that allows you to acknowledge the one certainty in
life: "Indeed, Socrates, I do not know." Recognition of that
certainty is the path to learning things that will belong to you,
not just repeating things that belong to others. We also want
you to have practice with the tools you will need to acquire
this freedom, tools that will help you to listen and to read
attentively and deeply, to express yourselves intelligibly and
precisely, and to measure and reckon the world in which you
live accurately and comprehensively; tools that will help give
shape to your understanding who you are and where you live,
and what your responsibility is toward others and the world
you inhabit together, the world of the body and the world of
the spirit.
We live with a deep paradox at the College, one that you
will confront right at the outset. We have made very deliberate choices about what should and should not be included
in this all-required curriculum (and there are many, many
excellent works that are not on the program list simply
because there is no room for them in just four years). Yet we
tell you that, for all the conviction we may have that these
�NELSON
59
choices constitute the best undergraduate curriculum we can
devise, this conviction is not grounded in the answers these
books purport to give but in the questions they raise. When
we say that this college is committed to radical inquiry, we
mean inquiry into the very traditions and books that have
shaped the world into we are born. This is why we are not
ashamed to admit that, although we are called an institution
of higher learning, we really do not know what learning is.
We share the conviction, nonetheless, that it is worth the
search to find out. When we welcome you to St. John's
College, we are welcoming you to join us in a search that we
imagine will sustain all of us for all of our lives, a search for
origins and foundations that will be firm enough to support
the good life we each wish to live. We call on you to join us
as fellow lovers of learning, not as would-be scholars.
One of the things you will discover as you read the
several Platonic dialogues on the program is that they
demand your engagement. They ask for you to reflect on how
you might respond to Socrates. So, let me venture into the
conversation of the Meno with a small, tentative reflection on
the question Socrates puts to Meno: "What is virtue?" My
thoughts, at least for now, are these: the way to virtue may
require that we come to know our great weakness, our own
ignorance. This ignorance is common to all who are less than
divine; it is something we share with one another in our
humanity. If there is a connection between knowledge and
right conduct, it is likely to be found in our ignorance and in
the humility it inspires, in seeing that every single one of us
has a long, long way to go toward understanding, in the
endless search for truth. I suspect that human virtue lies
somehow coterminous with this strange path toward
knowledge, which is a path through ignorance and therefore
available to us all. As we are not likely to attain great heights
of knowledge, it is more likely that we can share with each
other the great peaks of desire. It may be that the love of
learning, more than the attainment of understanding, is what
binds us together most tightly. It may also be this love of
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
learning which impels us to great acts of virtue, like the virtue
we will be asking you to exhibit every day in class: helping
your classmates to experience the loving sting of the torpedo
fish, helping them see that you too have a lot of baggage to
unload, and coming to see that learning is best pursued in a
community of lovers of learning, each seeking what is best for
the others.
And now I see that I have found my way to a typical
difficulty experienced by all Socratic interlocutors. I have
tried to say something about the nature of virtue, in terms of
loving and learning, when I'm not sure I know what these are.
So, let me leave you with this question: Tell me, freshmen,
what is this love of learning that has brought you to our door,
and where does it come from? For I do not know, although I
am happy in the thought that we have this much to share with
each other for four full glorious years.
Welcome to St. John's College! May you experience the
sting of the torpedo fish early and often. May the sting never
hurt, but help you along the path toward understanding and
freedom.
�61
For the Graduate Students in
Classics at Yale
1
Eva Brann
I'll begin by thanking you for coming to listen to me on a
busy weekday. As far as I know, a sense of guilt was not a
recognized affect in the pagan world where about forty-nine
percent of my moral allegiance lies, otherwise I would
apologize to you-apologize for being about to suggest to
you a way of life, a way that may not jibe with your purposes
and plans as graduate students who have chosen your place in
the academic organization of studies at a large university, as I
did over half a century ago. The least I can do, however, is to
give you my bona fides, although, as I will tell you in a
moment, I did not exactly keep the faith.
About fifty years ago I haunted Phelps Hall, as you do
now. The tutelary deities of those days were called Bellinger,
Bennett, Dawson, Immerwahr, Silk. I recall them with the
tenacious affection that the young conceive for their teachers.
Not that we were all that well taught: we learned not what
we needed to know but what our professors wanted to teach.
It is my impression, gained from our students' reports and
appointment interviews, that you graduate students are far
more rationally and rigorously prepared than we were.
Perhaps that, too, has its downside. In any case, our teachers
were giants, but our education was haphazardly splintered.
Nonetheless we scrambled ourselves into some semblance
of learning, but above all we achieved what we really wanted:
to get to Greece, or Rome, or wherever our hearts lay.
Eva Brann is a tutor and former dean on the Annapolis campus of St. John's
College. The occasion for this talk was the award of the Yale Graduate
Alumni Association's Wilbur Cross Medal as well as the celebration of the
sixtieth year of Yale's Directed Studies, a Great Books Program. It was
delivered on October 12, 2006.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
I went to Athens, full of philhellenic fervor. It was an
uneasy first year at the American School of Classical Studies.
I learned that the Hellas of my dreams-partly, I guess, a
legacy of my German childhood, but more, I like to think, tbe
manifestation of some aboriginal memory-was most reliably
accessible in the secure irrealities of my imagination, as I was
before long to learn that the Greeks were most inexpugnably
alive in the volumes of my then incipient library. Yet tbe
place, Greece itself, was pervading my reading and imagining
with its sensory lucidities: the pungent aroma of the thyme at
landfall on Ceos after a wild, nauseated crossing from
Sunion, the backlit blown poppies growing on Hymettus, but
above all the then still pristinely diaphanous atmosphere of
Attica, which gave sensory truth to Aristotle's saying that
light is the activity of a transparent medium (De Anima 418
b9).
Unfortunately this numinal landscape was overrun by
latter day squatters, the modern Greeks. I must have been
infected with tbis attitude from my elders, but I certainly
colluded in it. It was only eventually that I began to wonder
with some empathy what it must feel like to be the rightful
yet very remote heirs to all that broken and buried glory. We
archaeologists were, in any case, called to be intent on ruins
above ground which were meant to be salvaged from the
daily business of a modern-and then very poor-city, and
from the detritus-a treasure trove to us-from which we
scraped the earth away, careful trowelful by trowelful. Not
that I did that myself; I wasn't any good at it, capable of
sweeping away millennia at a trowel-stroke, while inspecting
at puzzled length what a discerning eye would have immediately identified as discombobulated fill. Also, I was intimidated by the Greek workmen who had been competently at
this job for generations.
But I saw what we were doing, and I studied what we
brought to light. For one thing, there was a melancholy to it.
A colleague of those years, Seth Benardete, once said to me
that Roman buildings were enhanced by ruination, while
�BRANN
63
Greek temples were diminished. It seemed true, but why? I
now think it is because Roman edifices anticipate romanticism, as it were, for they have in them something that lends
itself to the deconstruction into that suggestive incompleteness which is indeed one characteristic of the romantic.
A cracked Roman column will gather around itself a pastoral
veduta; a Greek column drum will focus the eye on its
collapsed perfection. For romantic is what the Greeks are not,
at least at their canonical best: plan and detail participate in
each other reciprocally; ruination cannot enhance them. A
shorn or broken temple or treasure house is a kind of animadversion on passage. One might say, fancifully, that temples
disapprove of time.
I am going somewhere with these divagations. (You will,
by the way, forgive all the vocabulary. There is an expansive
pleasure in being among people who, by reason of their
profession, are able to decode, even if they don't know, all the
excellent words our Grecolatinate Auglosaxon English holds
in store for us.) What I'm wandering toward are all the intellectual aporiai, the perplexities, that bedeviled that essentially
glorious first year-the intellectual ones, I mean; I'll spare
you the personal ones brought on by youth and Attic nights.
These perplexities were far more engaging than the mere, idly
sweet melancholy of being too late in history.
First I should say that I fell heart and soul into the activity
that engendered these perplexities. I was endlessly lucky and
still feel full of gratitude for falling in with an organization
like the American Excavation of the Athenian Agora-if there
are many like it. To put it succinctly: these were fanatics; they
worshiped at the (anum of scrupulousness: of digging
technique, of cataloguing protocol, of generous collegiality.
In the fifties not all the foreign schools were up and running,
and visiting unhoused scholars would marvel at the institutional hospitality they received. The Agora was a model for
canonicality: everything that was done was done exemplarily,
from spelling to photography, from restoration to exhibition.
There was a kind of communal concentration on the work,
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
any JOmmg of two sherds, each discovery of a pottery
workshop or (glory of glories) of a pot painter, every
convincing serialization of artifacts was noted with interest.
I got into this meticulous enterprise in a way I can't
account for to this day. I was invited to come down from
Soudias Street on the slopes of Lycabettos to the Agora below
the Acropolis. Homer Thompson, the director, took me
through the show rooms where the unpublished potsherds
were laid out and asked me what I'd like to work on. I
pointed at some attractive looking stuff; never was there a
luckier index finger. It landed on the Late Geometric and
Protoattic pottery, the period when the black praying-mantislike figures of the Dipylon funeral amphorae were morphing
into rounded polychrome human representations, and the
funerary somberness was replaced by sometimes intentionally
comical exuberance.
I might inject here that that very inclusive respect for all
times and populations of the Athenian market place which is
now doctrine in the humanities was practiced earlier in the
American excavation, perhaps there first and most paradigmatically. But there was-or seemed to me-to be something
behind it, something tacit but palpable, which lent both
backbone and pathos to the studious objectivity of the
research: everyone knew that there was a center, quite
literally evident in the study vitrines of our museum and
workrooms, the Stoa of Attalus. There was a culmination, a
standard, a reference point: the Athenian mid-fifth century,
the Classical Period. No one would have dreamed of saying
so, but it was known, the way in a decently egalitarian
community everyone knows to whom the aristeia would go if
there were to be a competition, but no one has the bad taste
to say so.
I left archaeology. One way to explain it is that there were
just too many issues no one had the bad taste to broach. I
might as well mention the tacitly proscribed word: it was
philosophy. My leaving was, in a very mild way, felt to be a
�BRANN
65
defection by those who had helped me and meant me to have
a career in archaeology. I still feel a twinge.
We were all deeply engaged in our work. I remember a
night when those funereal stick-figures off a Geometric pot
marched across my brain in a dream. But what was that
work?
We were erecting what had fallen and turning up what
had been buried, often in actual graves. Were we mounting a
renaissance for real life or a reburial in display cases? What,
to leap to the largest context, was the human intention
behind all those latter day "-logies" and "-graphies"-archaeology, topography, chronology, epigraphy? What did we
mean by reaching back into time, resurrecting the dead
through their artifacts and making what was earliest appear
latest? I recall sitting in my apotheke, my work and storage
room, with all those eighth- and seventh-century pots, when
Homer Thompson, who was not only a brilliant but an
attentive director, stuck his head in and asked, "What's new?"
What could be new? I was cluing out laboriously what the
most ignorant potter's ten-year old paidion would have
known as a matter of course. A friend and I once figured out
that it took fourteen times as long to study one of those little
oil lamps the excavation produced by the thousands as it did
to make one.
What were we doing? Were we not systematically and
well-intentionedly, yet literally, abusing what we had seized
on in research? Take drinking cups: kotylai, skyphoi,
kantharoi-I could type and serialize them, yet I'd never
drunk from one of them; it would have been against
protocol. Take ancient texts: we mined them for topography,
chronology, prosopography, but we didn't read them, not as
words meant to tell human truths.
I learned the lingo, the serviceable dialect of the trade, the
necessary initiation into the mysteries of the guild, one dialect
in the very language you are now learning to speak with
aplomb. I used it appropriately, but did I know what I was
saying?
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Archaeology is, if anything, grass-roots history. Who can
doubt that there is Herodotean history? Historia is inquiry; of
course one may inquire, as he does, into great and wonderful
human deeds to keep them from falling into oblivion. It
makes immediate sense. But historical research as an
academic discipline, and particularly archaeology, is
concerned also with pots and pans and babies' potty chairs.
(The Agora has several.) A sophisticated intellectual structure
is needed to warrant the study of what one might call
"deedlets," ergidia (to coin a term) rather than a deed, an
ergon, a significant action. For we should wonder under what
hypothesis the essentially surd realia of the long dead begin
to speak: how does an artifact, especially an undistinguished
one, express its maker's world? And how should we care:
engagedly to learn of our advances and our losses, or objectively, just for the heck of it, just because what is buried
beneath asks to be exhumed, just as a mountain is climbed
because it is there?
I spoke, as we all did, of development: pot-shapes
developed, evolved. How, by what detours through the
potter's vision-governed hands, did inorganic pieces re-enact
the evolutionary lines of organic species? We spoke of
chronology and were intent on establishing datings, but what
was time that it could be accounted for through excavational
strata, the spatial laminations of time, as it were? The
measurement of time by motion is problematic enough, but
its visible capture in vertical stasis-nothing is more
anathema to an excavation than a disturbed stratification-is
terminally puzzling.
We all talked of proportion: the masked standard was
classical harmony. The degenerate members, say of a series of
amphorae, were long and lank, while earlier examples were
refreshingly, finely young, and tautly chubby, like those
archaically smiling korai. But of the theory of proportion,
probably the greatest topic of Greek mathematics, we never
spoke, and to the question "what must the world be like for
the parts of a whole to be in a proportion, to have the same
�BRANN
67
ratio to each other?"-of that we seemed never to think.
Some of you probably know the remarkable answer to that
very question: how is it possible that a first element of a shape
is to a second as a third such element is to a fourth. Only in
a Euclidean world is such proportionality possible; there are
other realms in which two shapes may be the same but no two
can be similar, so that one canonical proportion cannot
govern differently sized items.
One cold winter's week I went down to Corinth to look
at the Protocorinthean pottery collection in the American
excavations. I had the excavation house to myself; at night
there was a fire in the common room and a hot meal. There
I perpetrated a horrible deed, all unknowing-as Greek
hamartiai are ever committed. I got hungry at midnight and
ate up the Corinthian starter yogurt in the icebox, the one
that made the far-famed, the finest, creamiest yogurt in the
archaeological world. There also I found a bookcase of the
olive-green Loeb series and determined in youthful hubris to
master in the cozy evenings all thirty-six Platonic dialogues,
both those certainly genuine and also those probably
spurious. I carne back with an anathema on me for the yogurt
and treasure in my heart from the Plato.
I have been at my college, St. John's, for the past halfcentury, thinking back now and then on my early years as a
graduate student of classics and archaeology. I think I am
intended to wax wise on the basis of age, and I'll take the
challenge. You must know that where I come from we have
no professors, authorities, or specialists, and our students are
meant to look on us as just better-prepared fellow learners.
That is not hyperbole but actual practice. As a result none of
us tutors, as we call ourselves, wilt readily under scepticism.
So if you find the following three lessons I've drawn from my
two lives doubtful or even repugnant, I can't ask for anything
more familiar than to hear you say so.
One. Some of you, very few I would guess, are scholars to
the bone. The pursuit of a delimited problem through
thickets of opinion and mountains of evidence gives you a
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
soberly orgiastic pleasure. You don't need advice, you'll do
what you love and gain the recognition you deserve. But
others among you, quite a few I would again guess, know in
your heart of hearts that your enthusiasm for scholarly
research is a little forced, more drawn by duty than by joy;
that the minuscule adjustments to previous opinions that you
tweak into an issue and the slight variations you contrive
upon old contextures give you only a meager satisfaction.
When you acknowledge this condition in yourself, finish your
degree, by all means. But, on the supposition that you do
want a life of learning, forget about the university and go
teach at a good small college. By good I don't mean prestigious. Lovely things go on in fairly obscure places, where
unsophisticated but willing young students often bring their
teachers back to basics, to elementary questions of the sort
that scholarly research races too far ahead of. As Thomas
More advises a promising but very corruptible young man in
one of my favorite plays, "A Man for All Seasons": "Be a
teacher."
Try not to think, in fact never think, of the writing you do
as "my work." Those of you who are researchers at heart
must believe-though there is something problematic about
it-that they are part of a common progressive work, the
advancement of learning. As I say, it's problematic whether
there is any actual progress in the humanities, or whether as
the cutting edge digs into the future, the past silts up and
sinks into sedimented oblivion. Yet whoever is nonetheless
committed to scholarship must surely believe that they can
own no real estate on the orbis intellectualis where all is
common ground tilled for the increase of knowledge. So
much the sadder is it to hear teachers speak of "my work." Is
teaching not their work?
To put it another way: The scholarly world is more and
more a virtual world, spatially expansive but often topically
constricted. For my part, I think the humanly full life is
concretely local and intellectually wide, to be lived in a faceto-face community whose members can talk to each other
�BRANN
69
about anything, where nothing of human interest is interdicted; where you don't have to mount a colloquium to have
a colloquy, where there are no taboos except indifference and
incivility; where discourse does not divide into either shop
talk or chat but observes the truly interesting human mean;
and above all, where no one owns a specialty so that others
have to venture opinions with the disclaimer, "Of course,
that's not my subject." Once I knew more about Protoattic
pottery than anyone then alive in the world, an Englishman
or two excepted. It is an experience everyone should have
sometime. And then they should stop and live in that
acknowledged semi-ignorance which is both proper to human
inquiry and the ideal state of teachers, who, before producing
another article, should set themselves to learn what their
students ought to know.
Let me make sure here that I'm rightly understood: These
instructions aren't meant as categorical imperatives, unconditional commandments. They are rather what Kant calls
"hypothetical imperatives," of the "if-then" type. The
protasis of each is: "If you want to live happily" -as Aristotle
thinks of happiness: the soul activated in accordance with
human excellence. The apodosis is: "then try doing it this
way."
Two. Socrates is said to have told the Athenians in his last
public appearance that "the unexamined life is not worth
living for a human being;" "ho ... anexi!tastos bios ou biotas
anthropoi" (Apology 38A). I think he is being more absolute
than "worth living" conveys. I would translate: "the
uninspected life is not a lived life." Socrates is uttering both a
claim and an injunction. The injunction is to ask yourself
what you're doing, and the claim is that if you don't, you
aren't all there, not quite alive. To me what Socrates says
seems utterly true, and on that hypothesis I'll proceed. What
are we mostly doing, we who are at home in the world of
learning? That's plain: mostly we use words. To be human
means to have logos-and indeed we do hardly anything but
employ /ogoi-rational speech in general and special words in
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
particular. It is, then, part of our peculiar business to know
what we are saying.
So don't use words you don't understand or don't mean
to come to understand at least partly. Graduate school is
rightly more training than education, more preparation for a
profession than learning for the sake of being all there.
Hence, the possession of a professional vocabulary, often
well-invented and always serviceable for expressing yourself
within the guild-and, I can't help adding, for marking
greenhorns and amateurs-is not only an accomplishment
but also a professional deformation. So talk human whenever
possible and know something, at least a little, of the explicit
or implicit theory behind the language of the humanities.
You might construe what I've just said as an invitation to
theorize, to engage in theory. Not so, just the opposite. It is
an incitement to philosophy, which is just the name for the
questions Socrates thinks will make you come to, be all there,
all aware. Moreover, here's a claim some of you will resist
and some of you will recognize as the articulation of your
own suspicions: Theory is the enemy-were I given to
hyperbole I would say, the deadly enemy-of philosophy,
more accurately, of Socratic philosophizing. I mean, say, legal
critical theory, literary theory, every kind of social theory; I've
just come off a bout of reading "desire theory," and I know
whereof I speak. I could talk for hours about this
displacement of thought, perhaps with some of you for a
while afterwards. But for now I'll put it in capsule form; I
understand philosophy to be everyone's business, certainly a
classicist's. It is the desire to look as straight, deep, and
directly into yourself and out into the world as you can. (It
has, of course, only a tenuous, occasional connection to the
academic subject by that name.) That effort I am speaking of,
introspective and contemplative, looking within and gazing at
the heavens, used indeed to be called theory. Theoria has had
a long and fascinating passage of diminution into "theory."
Theory is a rational screen, a mental jig under which things
are re-formed into pre-assigned shapes. It is a form of ration-
�BRANN
71
alization but not always of thinking. It is logos, however, not
plus receptive love but plus willful manipulation. A theory is
fun to devise but the devil to inherit, because duty demands
that we grasp it and wisdom asks that we resist it. Here's
another way to put it: when you spot trendiness or recognize
ideology-the marks will be a jigged and unnatural terminology-become a porcupine, all quills up.
Three. My third hypothetical imperative does verge on
the categorical. There is a sort of human minginess that
appears characteristically in academic settings-not that
academics typically practice it, but that it lurks as an endemic
danger of mutual infection. I have heard it said that its
meanness is large in inverse proportion to the minuteness of
the issues. Many of you will soon be members of departments
and will be absorbed in departmental politics. The issues are
not in fact so very small, since they concern the way the life
of learning is lived, and it is right, or seems right to me, to be
passionately involved. But passion is not pathos; beware of
false moral drama. Be as little ignoble and ungenerous as you
can.
I could fill Twelve Tables with negative advice but I'll
close with one piece particularly pertinent to this talk. In
published research plagiarism is a serious offense. In reflective
conversation it is a lovely compliment. If as teachers and
colleagues you find ideas you thought were yours by priority
turning up in your colleague's conversation, smirk with inner
satisfaction and then offer a serious critique of your own
thoughts, lest your borrowers fall into the original sin of the
intellect: holding opinions that have been purloined but not
appropriated.
I've kept you too long, but that's what happens when an
elder of the tribe is urged to talk. Yet, before I stop, one afterthought: If you could all band together to found a movement
for the abolition of the "original contribution" requirement
of the doctoral dissertation you would do the world of
learning a great service. For in the humanities the drive for
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
originality and the search for insight are too often at crosspurposes.
�
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The St. John’s Review
Volume XLIX, number three (2007)
Editor
Pamela Kraus
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Elizabeth Curry
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson,
President; Michael Dink, Dean. For those not on the distribution list, subscriptions are $10 for one year. Unsolicited
essays, reviews, and reasoned letters are welcome. All
manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to the Review, St. John’s College, P
.O. Box 2800,
Annapolis, MD 21404-2800. Back issues are available, at $5
per issue, from the St. John’s College Bookstore.
©2007 St. John’s College. All rights reserved; reproduction
in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing and Printing
The St. John’s Public Relations Office and the St. John’s College Print Shop
�2
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
3
Contents
Essays and Lectures
Vedic Tradition and the Origin of Philosophy
in Ancient India ........................................................... 5
James Carey
The Forgotten Faculty: The Place of Phronêsis
or Practical Sense in Liberal Education
(Plutarch and Aristotle)............................................... 67
David Levine
Reviews
Friedrich Nietzsche. Prefaces to Unwritten Works;
On the Future of Our Educational Institutions..........101
Jonathan Badger
Jan Blits. Spirit, Soul, and City:
Shakespeare’s Coriolanus.......................................... 117
John E. Alvis
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
5
Vedic Tradition and the Origin
of Philosophy in Ancient India
James Carey
1
“Philosophy” is a term that turns up with variable frequency
in presentations and discussions of the religious and speculative traditions of ancient India. There are those who
maintain that philosophy is an Indian no less than a Western
phenomenon. In support of this claim they point out that in
ancient India there was a vast amount of speculation about
the whole of things, how it is constituted and what its origins
are, and that this inquiry came to expression in a variety of
highly developed systems of speculative thought. There are
others, however, who maintain that philosophy is a uniquely
Western phenomenon. Philosophy, they claim, is not just
speculation about ultimate causes. It is, rather, a whole way
of life, one that is governed by the conviction that knowledge
is to be pursued for its own sake, as an end subservient to
none other, however so loftily conceived. This ideal emerged
first in ancient Greece, and later on only under the influence
of Greek thought.
In the disagreement between these two groups, the latter
appear at first glance to be on stronger ground. There was
indeed plenty of speculation about ultimate principles in
ancient India. There was arguably a wider range of such
speculation there than anywhere else in the ancient world,
Greece included. But speculation about ultimate principles is
Mr. Carey is a tutor at St. John’s College, Santa Fe, currently on leave and
serving as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the United States
Air Force Academy. A shorter version of this paper was presented as a lecture
at St. John’s College, Annapolis, in March, 1993. The present version is
dedicated to the memory of Ralph Swentzell, Tutor, as an expression of
gratitude for his tireless efforts on behalf of the Eastern Classics program at
St. John’s College, Santa Fe.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
as old as man and often does not rise above the level of superstition.
Moreover, philosophy is not simply the love of wisdom,
or the longing to see the whole, to see it clearly for what it is
and without illusions. Philosophy is this longing, to be sure,
but accompanied by a sense of obligation, or some kind of
urge, to give a rational account of what it takes to be true,
without appeal to external authority. In the West, philosophy
has traditionally been regarded as one member of a pair of
alternatives, the other being religion. The guiding lights of
philosophy are reason and ordinary, verifiable human
experience. Philosophy does not take its bearings, as religion
does, by alleged disclosures from above that are supposed to
transcend reason and ordinary experience altogether. That
neither philosophy nor religion can be simply reduced to the
other is not controversial. What is controversial is the claim
that philosophy and religion are so opposed to one another
that one and the same person cannot be both a philosopher
and a believer. We are, of course, familiar with the arguments
of such thinkers as Thomas Aquinas and Kant to the effect
that reason cannot penetrate on its own to the first principles
or the deepest stratum of being, that reason can recognize this
limitation and can thereby infer its need to be supplemented
by some kind of faith, be it only a religion within the limits
of reason alone. But, against these arguments there are
others, rather more widely accepted by philosophers, though
until recent times less forcefully advanced, to the effect that
religious belief contains, either in its explicit doctrines or in
its implicit presuppositions, certain contradictions the
affirming of which is incompatible with a fully rational life.
In arguing for the emergence of philosophy in ancient
India I shall make use of the narrow conception of
philosophy as an enterprise of rationally autonomous
enquiry, not simply distinct from but opposed to and in
varying degrees antagonistic to religious belief. I shall argue
for the emergence in ancient India of an atheism that under-
CAREY
7
stood itself to be grounded in a rational consideration of the
whole, and of man’s place within the whole. I shall not raise
the question of whether this conception of philosophy is
ultimately defensible but shall assume it as a working
hypothesis, so to speak. Accordingly, I shall be working with
a conception of philosophy that some might criticize as excessively narrow. I might criticize it that way myself. The justification for my procedure, however, is that I wish to show that
philosophy, even according to this narrow, perhaps excessively narrow conception, did in fact emerge in ancient India.
If this can be shown, then it can be shown a fortiori that
philosophy less narrowly conceived also emerged there. It is
not possible, however, to argue convincingly for a tradition of
autonomous rationality without exhibiting something of the
variety of forms it assumed, in particular, the main points of
controversy and the rival claims and arguments of the
contending parties. I shall be giving no more than a rough
sketch, however, and I shall omit much that is relevant to my
topic. I hope, nonetheless, not only to show that philosophy,
however so rigorously defined, really did exist in ancient
India, but to shed new light on the conditions of its
emergence and the trajectory it assumed, and perhaps to
communicate something of its flavor as well.
Philosophy and religion both are ways of regarding
ultimate causes, but philosophy is the younger of the two. In
defining its way in opposition to that of religion, philosophy
presupposes religion, not, of course, as something true, but as
a mistake that it has managed to get beyond. Moreover,
philosophy presupposes leisure, and human beings find
leisure only within the life of political communities. Political
communities are particular. They are particularized by
nomoi, that is, by laws and other conventions, among the
most important of which are religious nomoi. It stands to
reason, then, that the peculiar character of the reigning
religion would contribute something to the form that philosophical questioning of it assumes and to the prominence of
certain themes taken up for specifically philosophical consid-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
eration. For this reason, we need a preliminary overview of
early Indian religion. It must be admitted at the outset that we
are handicapped somewhat. The attitude of the ancient
Indians to history seems to have been one of ethereal indifference. We possess little in the way of chronicles, and most
dates given for significant events are crude approximations at
best, often having several centuries as a margin of error.
2
Sometime during the second millennium B.C., a people
speaking an Indo-European language and calling themselves
¯
“A ryans”1 migrated from the northwest into the Indian
subcontinent. A few centuries later their sacred hymns,
prayers, and incantations began to be gathered into three
collections called Vedas. A fourth Veda was later assembled.
These hymns were not written down at first but were passed
on orally from generation to generation by a priestly caste, to
whose prodigious memory the preservation of the hymns was
entrusted. Of the four Vedas, only the fourth, the Rg Veda,
contains much that is of genuinely speculative interest. It
consists of over a thousand hymns largely celebrating in the
most disparate fashion a florid polytheism, somewhat akin to
Greek religion and having almost nothing in common with
the religion of the Bible. But the Rg Veda also contains
material of a different sort, such as the so-called creation
hymn, the beginning and conclusion of which are as follows:
There was neither not-being (asat) nor being (sat)
then. There was neither a space nor a heaven
beyond. What stirred? Where? In whose
protection?....That one [neuter - tat ekam] was
breathing, windless, by its own determination [or
spontaneity - svadha ]....Who may proclaim when
¯
this creation was produced? The gods [came]
hither with the creation of this [world]. Who then
knows whence it has arisen? Whether it established itself or did not establish itself, the one who
CAREY
9
surveys it in the highest heaven alone knows. Or
else he does not know.2
Such questions about ultimate principles, real and not just
rhetorical, are frequently raised in the hymns of the Rg Veda.
Occasionally, questions are raised regarding even the
existence of the particular god celebrated in the hymn, and
are left unanswered or answered with what appears to be
strained conviction or, perhaps, irony.
Striving for strength, bring forth a laud to Indra, a
true one (satyam), if he truly exists (yadi satyam
asti). One and another say, “There is no Indra.”
“Who has beheld (dadarsa) him?” Whom then
shall we honor?3
And from another hymn,
He about whom they ask, “Where is he?” or say of
him, the terrible one, “He does not exist,” he who
diminishes the flourishing wealth of the enemy as
gambling does—believe in him (srad asmai
dhatta)! He, my people, is Indra!4
In spite of the prevailing polytheism of the Rg Veda,
celebrated alternately in confidence and in perplexity, there
are occasional suggestions of a tentative monotheism and,
more remarkably, even of monism simpliciter.5
Monism, or the view that all is one and that the apparent
plurality of things veils a more fundamental unity, is the
prevailing perspective in the principal Upanisads, which
emerged in the centuries after the Vedas were compiled. In
these works certain other common features can be discerned
that are characteristic of early or proto-Hinduism.6 Among
these are belief in transmigration of the soul, karmic encumbrance, the concept of dharma or law, the caste system,7 and
liberation as the end goal of all perfect self-knowledge. It is
worth sketching each of these features briefly, since one or
another of them, separately or in combination, comes to the
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
fore not only in the teaching of those speculative thinkers
who present themselves as theorizing within the orthodox
Vedic tradition, but even in the thinking of some of those
who reject this tradition. There were wide differences of
opinion among sophisticated thinkers regarding the most
fundamental principles of Vedic tradition. In what follows, I
shall emphasize those interpretations that, though far from
being universally accepted by believers, were most
provocative of a properly philosophical response and appropriation. I shall focus on, without restricting myself to,
themes that are central to the principal Upanisads. The divine
is presented there in a way that has little in common with the
polytheism of the Vedas.
The word “brahman,” which is neuter in gender, names
the fundamental reality that lies behind the manifold and
multiform world of appearances. Brahman, the hidden
reality, is not many but one. The world as it appears, in all its
manifoldness, is maya. This word is frequently translated as
¯ ¯
“illusion,” but one should not assume that maya is altogether
¯ ¯
unreal. It is rather the surface play of the fundamental reality.
The world of appearances is illusion only to the extent that it
is mistaken for the fundamental reality.
But what intimation, we might ask, is there of an underlying unity? The answer is that there is one thing that is
experienced as single and self-identical throughout space and
time, throughout the multiplicity of spatial and temporal
phenomena, and throughout even the manifold topics that
thought takes up for consideration. This one thing is the self,
the ¯tman. The self cannot be identified with the external
a
objects and internal concerns with which it is almost always
preoccupied. The self in its purity is, we are told in one of the
earliest Upanisads, “not this, not that” (or “not this, not this”neti neti).8 But to the very extent that the self is distinguishable from all appearances, inner appearances—including
the individual thoughts that come and go—as well as outer, it
seems to be indistinguishable from all other selves. The
thought dawns that there is perhaps only one self, and that
CAREY
11
the path to brahman, the fundamental unity underlying the
manifold appearances of the world, is through selfknowledge. This knowledge is achieved in part by study and
reflection, and in part by mastery of desires, which may,
though need not, entail acts of physical discipline and austerities (tapas). It turns out, though, that the path to brahman is
not exactly through knowledge of the self, for in the
Upanisads the self is actually identified with the fundamental
reality: ¯tman is brahman.9 Or, as it is also said, “That art
a
thou.”10 This core of indivisible individuality at the center of
our being is paradoxically what each of us really is, what is
common to us all, and finally the underlying unity supporting
everything else that in any way exists. It is not only one but
simple and self-identical.
Brahman should not be confused with Brahma, which is
¯
the name, masculine in gender, of one of the three primary
deities in the Hindu pantheon. Brahma is the creator, Visnu
¯
the preserver, and Siva the destroyer.11 In the history of
Hinduism, cultic devotion to Brahma was superseded early
¯
on by devotion to Visnu and Siva, indicating a greater
interest, even at the popular level, in the present and future
manifestations of reality than in its originating source, a
greater interest in what the world is and the limits of its transformations than in who made it or where it came from, a
greater interest in constitution than in cause, one might say.
Of the three gods, Siva is the most puzzling to the Westerner.
He is described as the great ascetic and is typically depicted
as meditating or dancing, wearing a necklace of skulls, and
possessing three eyes, one of which is closed. When Siva
opens his third eye, which is in the middle of his forehead,
the world of appearances, it was said, will be consumed by
fire. Siva is the destroyer of illusion.
Returning to the less picturesque monism of the
Upanisads, it is all-important to realize that brahman, or the
fundamental reality, is not a person. Least of all is brahman a
transcendent deity who has created a world distinct from
himself, which he governs through law, awarding happiness
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
in rough proportion to morality, if not in this world at least
in a world to come. Hinduism is, of course, not indifferent to
the question of morality. Indeed, the vexing problem of how
desire for the fruit of action can contaminate the moral purity
of the action, and thereby render the fruit unattainable, is
discerned as early as the Upanisads and is a recurrent theme
in Hinduism, and in Buddhism as well. But in conspicuous
contrast to the way this problem is conceived in the West, a
moral theology is not invoked to manage it.12 Instead, the
problem of the connection of the just deserts of action with
the actions that merit them is addressed through the related
doctrines of transmigration and karmic causality. If the self is
indivisible then it is indissoluble. It cannot be naturally
destroyed, and so it survives the death of the body. But the
indestructibility of the self does not keep it from being
encumbered with the moral effects of the acts it has
committed. This encumbrance is called karma. Although a
man may not experience in this life the effects of the karma
within which he has encrusted his indestructible self, at death
this karma binds the self to reincarnation. Moreover, karma
causes the self to gravitate, so to speak, to a new incarnation
and re-incarceration specifically appropriate to its moral
history. By committing bad actions a man becomes bad and
accumulates bad karma. At the death of his body he finds
himself entering a new body and life worse than that from
which he has just departed. How much worse that life is
depends on how bad he was, and reincarnation as something
subhuman is a distinct possibility. The indestructible self of a
man who has lived a good life is reincarnated into a better
life. As we shall see, though, reincarnation is not the only
destination for the self.
If one is reincarnated as a human being, the karma
accumulated from the preceding life determines what caste
one will be reincarnated into. The justification for castes in
the sacred tradition is traced to a well known though mysterious passage in the Rg Veda describing the sacrifice and
dismemberment of a primordial gigantic man called the
CAREY
13
purusa, a word that in later works came to mean spirit, mind,
intelligence, or consciousness.
When they divided the purusa, into how many
parts did they apportion him? What do they call
his mouth, his two arms and thighs and feet? His
mouth became the brahmin; his arms were made
¯
into the Warrior, his thighs the People, and from
his feet the Servants were born.13
This fourfold division has over the course of time become
transformed into a great plurality of castes governed by all
sorts of injunctions and prohibitions. The original fourfold
division was not nearly so complex, nor, one is tempted to
add, was it so perverse as what holds sway in India today. In
the Arthasastra, a treatise on politics, written by Kautilya
¯
toward the end of the fourth century B.C., the specific duties
of the original four castes are described as follows.
The special duties (dharmas) of the brahmin are:
¯
¯
studying, teaching, performing sacrifices for self,
officiating at other peoples’ sacrifices, making gifts,
and receiving gifts. Those of the ksatriya (the
warrior or king) are: studying, performing
sacrifices for self, making gifts, living by [the
profession of] arms, and protecting beings. Those
of the vaisya (the farmer or merchant) are:
studying, performing sacrifices for self, making
gifts, agriculture, cattle rearing and trade. Those of
the sudra (or servant) are: service of the twiceborn [i.e., the members of the aforementioned
three castes], engaging in an economic calling [viz.,
agriculture, cattle rearing, and trade] and the
profession of the artisan and the actor.14
In addition to the duties of the special castes there are the
duties proper to the four stages of life for the members of the
three highest, twice-born castes, brahmin, ksatriya, and
¯
vaisya.15 These are the stages of student, householder, forest
�14
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
recluse, and wandering ascetic, the duties of which are also
specified by Kautilya. Additionally, there are duties common
to all: “abstaining from harm, truthfulness, uprightness,
freedom from malice, compassion, and forbearance.”16 The
entire system of duties of the various castes and stations of
life make up part of what is called dharma. This word could
be translated as “law” as well as “duty,” depending on the
context. No more than lex does dharma mean nomos or
convention, that is to say, mere convention. It means rather
the proper order of human life sanctioned, if not explicitly by
the Veda, then at least by way of extrapolation and development of Vedic lore and tradition.17 It is supported by and
expressive of karmic causality. Moreover, and of apparently
greater importance to Kautilya, dharma, including the
distinctions of caste, is the shield against barbarism and chaos.
It is, of course, difficult for those of us living in the modern
West to regard the caste system, even the less extreme form
of it that held sway in ancient India, as anything other than
arbitrary and unjust. It has been argued, however, that an
egalitarian social order that does not degenerate rapidly into
anarchy, followed most likely by tyranny, presupposes an
economics of plenty. Instead of an economics of plenty, an
economics of scarcity reigned in ancient India, as it did
throughout the ancient world in general. It should not be
forgotten in this connection that even democratic Athens
made use of slaves. An economics of plenty, such as we have
today, allows for a more just social order to be sure, even the
possibility of equal opportunity for all. The price paid for this
social order is the technological mastery of nature as a consequence of which machines can do the work—at least a lot of
it—that slaves used to do. And, needless to say, the mastery
of nature generates problems of its own, problems that were
unknown in the ancient world.18 In any case, the dharma
promulgated by the Veda not only allowed for but mandated
study for three of the four castes while providing sufficient
leisure for them to engage in it. And leisure, to repeat, is a
CAREY
15
necessary if not a sufficient condition for the emergence of
philosophy.
The whole system of dharma was upheld by the king,
who was, significantly, not a member of the brahmin caste but
¯
of the ksatriya or warrior caste. Kautilya writes that the king
should employ the scepter or rod, that is to say, punishment,
for the good of the people.
For the rod (or scepter - danda), employed with
due consideration, endows the subjects with
dharma, material well-being (artha), and objects of
desire (or pleasures - kamas). Employed badly,
¯ ¯
whether in passion or anger, or in contempt, it
enrages even forest recluses and wandering
ascetics, how much more then the householders? If
not employed at all, it gives rise to the law of the
fishes. For the stronger man swallows the weak in
the absence of the wielder of the rod. Protected by
him, the weak man prevails.19
The education of the king in the science of politics,
(dandaka), more literally the science of wielding the rod
¯
(dandani ti), is treated at length in the Arthasastra. It aims at
¯
the formation of the sage-king, or raja rsi.20 Among the
¯
¯
subjects studied by the king is ¯nvi ksiki or reasoning, to
a ¯
which we shall return shortly.
The end goal of all action is liberation (moksa).21
Liberation is, at the simplest level, release from the cycle of
birth and rebirth, i.e., release of the self from karmic
causality. Since the self is a pure unity it cannot be dissolved
into its components. It is indestructible, and it does not need
to be incarnate to exist. The liberation of the self from the
cycle of birth and rebirth, then, is the union of ¯tman with
a
brahman. This liberation is most often presented as a state
that can be achieved only after an indeterminate number of
reincarnations through which bad karma is gradually shed.
However, if at the end of even an exemplary life, a life in full
accord with dharma, there remains any residue of bad karma,
�16
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
there is no liberation at death. Bad karma can be shed only
within a life, and not in the transition (most consistently
regarded as instantaneous) from the previous life to the
following. But if, within an exceptionally good life, bad
karma is entirely eliminated, then there is no longer a barrier
to union with brahman within that very life. There is no need
to die in order to experience liberation. Seen in this light,
liberation is essentially release from the ignorance that
prevents one from recognizing the identity of ¯tman and
a
brahman. Although this ignorance can be regarded as due to
bad karma, the attempt to apprehend this identity, and hence
to achieve the highest possible state of existence, presupposes
right action not as an end in itself but only as a means, as the
taming of the passions that interfere with clarity of apprehension. Action in accordance with dharma, or, as we might
say, morality, is for the sake of a non-moral end, namely the
end of seeing the concealed, though immanent and impersonal oneness of all things, without the distraction of the
desires that it is the wholly subservient and instrumental
function of morality to moderate. It should go without saying
that seeing the oneness of all things, and in particular the
oneness of ¯tman and brahman, cannot be understood as a
a
union of love, for there is not the otherness that love presupposes. There is ultimately no seeing face to face, because there
is ultimately only one face.22
3
So far we have not encountered anything that can be called
philosophy, at least not as we have hypothetically conceived
it. But it is clear that the relatively “demythologized” religion
of the Upanisads does not present the same kind of contrast
with philosophy that one finds in Judaism, Christianity, and
Islam. In the latter religions the believer affirms allegiance to
a personal creator and moral governor of the universe who
transcends and is “wholly other” than his creation, and yet
who loves it and commands love in return. In the religion of
the Upanisads, the fundamental reality, even on the highly
CAREY
17
questionable assumption that it can be called “God,” is
impersonal. It is not the creator of the universe ex nihilo but
is its inner core. Brahman is not strictly transcendent to, but,
rather, immanent within, the world, and is so far from being
“wholly other” as to be wholly the same. Unlike the God of
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, brahman is not jealous.
Hinduism has historically exhibited an exceptional
willingness to concede that other religions also have insights
into the reality that is concealed behind appearances.23 It has
thus been able to assimilate other religions into itself with
some success, although, not surprisingly, it has failed to do
this with Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Judaism and
Christianity have not historically been major forces in India,
disregarding, of course, the missionary efforts of the latter in
the last few centuries. The case is different with Islam, which
began to make substantial inroads into India during the tenth
century A.D. The bitterness of the conflict, often bloody,
between Hinduism and Islam is due in large measure to their
radically different conceptions not simply of the divine but of
what religion itself is.
In this connection it is worth considering the sources of
the Hindu analogue to what is known in West as revelation.
The Vedic hymns are, in effect, the foundational sacred scriptures. Actually, “scriptures” is not quite the right word since,
it is estimated, they were not written down until about
500 B.C., at the earliest. As we noted, they were memorized
and recited by brahmins, who were entrusted with preserving
¯
them and keeping them a living force in rituals and teaching.
The language of the Veda is an early form of Sanskrit. To
preserve the original hymns from alteration in the course of
recitation over millennia, the rules for euphony in different
phonetic contexts and for morphological change were
specified by Panini in his classic grammar, generally conceded
¯
by linguists who are familiar with it to be by far the greatest
work of its kind in any language. It is not certain when Panini
¯
composed his grammar, or even whether it was originally
written rather than composed orally and preserved in this
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
form until written characters came to be employed. In any
case, Panini’s grammar virtually precluded further phonetic
¯
development of the language. Consequently, the sound of the
Veda when recited today is arguably the same, perhaps down
to the smallest nuances, as when it was recited in Panini’s
¯
time, if not earlier.
It is all-important to recognize in this connection that the
oral tradition of ancient India was entirely different from the
oral traditions that Westerners have recently begun to show
an interest in. Those who recited the Vedic hymns and
appended works such as the Upanisads were mere vehicles for
the most exact transmission of these works possible. The
transmitter was anything but an integral component of what
was being transmitted, unlike the narrator in many other oral
traditions—the storyteller did understand himself to be part
of the story. Consequently, the Indian tradition can be
considered, for all practical purposes, literary, well in advance
of the appearance of the written language itself. As in the case
of letters proper, the best minds could address the best minds
across centuries with a minimum of interference from intermediary transmitters.
The word Veda itself means “knowledge.” It is cognate
with the Greek word eidos. The knowledge that the Veda
contains was acquired by the sages (rsis) of old. They did not
acquire it as gift from a god. They acquired it, rather, through
their superior powers of apprehension. This knowledge was
passed on orally in the very form in which it was acquired.
For that reason successive generations have access to it and it
can be authoritative for them. This knowledge is acquired,
moreover, not through seeing but through hearing, just as it
was acquired by the sages.24 The sages heard what one hears
when the Veda is recited today, though back then there seems
to have been, mirabile dictu, no one doing the reciting. What
the sages heard was the eternal though hidden articulation of
the truth, or, as we might be tempted to say, thinking of
Heraclitus, the logos.
CAREY
19
I shall continue to use the term “revelation” to designate
Vedic lore, though the term is inaccurate to the extent that it
implies the self-disclosure of God, not to sages, i.e., to the
wise, but to the elect. Hindus have difficulty understanding
the Biblical concept of revelation, and many object to the
term being applied to the sources of their sacred tradition.25
When the Muslims first began their conquest of northern
India, about a thousand years ago, they were shocked to
discover that the Hindus did not even pretend to have
prophets.26 Still, “revelation” is the only word we have for the
Vedic analogue of Biblical and Qur’anic revelation, and I shall
¯
continue to use it, not without misgivings, in speaking of
what bears only a trace of resemblance to revelation as
conceived in the West.
Now, a distinction is drawn within early Hinduism
between two levels of revelation. The primary revelation is
called sruti, or that which was heard by the sages. It consists
of the four Vedas and appended material, the Upanisads in
particular. The secondary revelation is called smrti or that
which is remembered. It consists of later works, some
devotional, some legal, and some speculative. An instance of
¯¯
the latter is the Bhagavad Gi ta, which is sometimes accorded
almost as much authority as sruti proper. This work is an
excerpt from the Mahabharata, a gigantic Indian epic eight
¯ ¯
times as long as the Iliad and Odyssey combined. Because of
the variety of material contained in the sruti, considerable
controversy emerged among the learned as to the precise
character of Vedic authority.
So far I have sketched only the most central features of
early Hinduism, emphasizing the sophisticated religious
speculation of the Upanisads and ignoring entirely the
polytheism of the popular religion.27 The highly sophisticated
religious speculation of the Upanisads does not count as
philosophy, as least not according to the conception of
philosophy I have adopted on hypothesis. Nonetheless it is
not difficult to see how philosophy could emerge in this intel-
�20
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
lectual milieu. It was a period of leisure, mandated study, and,
not least, freedom of speculation, including freedom to
rethink and reinterpret the meaning of the Veda, which
manifestly contains passages of religious skepticism and even
satire.28
4
Sometime around the sixth century B.C. three systems of
speculative thought broke with the Vedic tradition. These
were Buddhism, Jainism, and Lokayata. All three denied the
¯
authority of the Vedas and, in particular, the caste system it
supported. The first two are classified as religions. The third
is something else.
In Buddhism, as in Hinduism, one must distinguish
between the popular belief and the philosophical appropriation. Whereas the Upanisads teach the substantial oneness of
all things, Buddhism teaches the insubstantial voidness (or
emptiness - sunyata) of all things. In the writings of the
¯
¯
Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna, who is thought to have
¯ ¯
lived and taught around the end of the first century A.D., the
implications of this teaching are pressed home with dialectical force. To take a single example, against the doctrine of
the voidness of all things, the Hindu opponent objects that if
all things are void (sunya), then the very thesis that all things
¯
are void is itself void, and is thereby refuted. To this
objection, Nagarjuna responds essentially as follows. It is
¯ ¯
indeed true that if all things are void, then the thesis that all
things are void is itself void. But this consequence, so far from
being a refutation of the thesis, is in fact an exemplification of
it and contributes to its confirmation.29 The Protagorean
relativist, familiar to us from Plato’s Theaetetus, cannot avail
himself of so neat a defense. For the thesis that all theses are
relative precludes itself from being absolutely true. The thesis
that all theses are void, however, does not preclude itself
from being absolutely true, if, that is, the Buddhists are right
in holding that voidness (sunyata) is at the heart of everything
¯
¯
that in any way is, including absolute truth itself. It would be
CAREY
21
a serious mistake to think that the Buddhist doctrine of
voidness is mystical or even intuitive. Buddhism, at least as it
developed in India, regards inference, i.e., logical reasoning,
as a valid means of cognition. The teaching on voidness is
supported with reasons. As the Hindu thinkers discovered in
their formal disputations with the Buddhists, the latter came
to the occasion well armed.
Needless to say, the Buddhist doctrine of voidness leaves
no room for an eternal and substantial being, either
immanent or transcendent. Indeed, it leaves no room for
a being, strictly so called, at all. Every so-called being is
but a phase of becoming, a segment of the indefinitely
flowing causal sequence called “dependent arising”
¯
(prati tyasamutpada). According to Buddhism, the recog¯
nition of the absolute insubstantiality and dependent arising
of all things is enlightenment. Enlightenment is liberation
from attachment to what is insubstantial and transitory. It is
liberation from deluded belief in permanence, from deluded
belief in any eternal presence. There have always been, within
Buddhism, a significant number of thinkers who have taught
that the Buddha’s enlightenment was achieved through sense
perception and inference exclusively, that is, through powers
lying completely within the nature of man.
Jainism shares much in common with Hinduism while,
like Buddhism, rejecting the authority of the Veda. There is a
¯
line of sages (ti rthankaras) who have disclosed the truth
about reality. Reality is ultimately dual. Everything is either
soul or matter, and neither of these can be reduced to the
other. It is expressly taught that there is no need to recognize
any higher being than man. Jainism includes doctrines of
karma, reincarnation, and liberation similar to those of
Hinduism, and the same is true of Buddhism. But, given
Buddhism’s doctrine of the insubstantiality of all things, and
its denial of the substantial self in particular, it has the complicated task, which it does not evade, of addressing how it is
that the exceptionless state of dependent arising can allow for
encumbrance with karma, reincarnation, enlightenment, and
�22
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
final liberation. The solution to this problem depends on the
cogency of the Buddhist claim that continuity does not
presuppose identity, at least not substantial identity. Both
classical Buddhism and Jainism were regarded as, strictly
speaking, atheistic, and neither seems to have made much of
an effort to deny the charge.30
In Lokayata (also called “Carvaka”), the third school of
¯
¯ ¯
speculative thought that denied the authority of the Veda, we
find unabashed atheism, materialism, and hedonism. We
know of this school for the most part only from excerpts of
texts no longer extant but quoted, sometimes at length, by
orthodox thinkers who not surprisingly dissociate themselves
from what they are quoting. The following excerpt represents
something of the teaching and spirit of Lokayata.31
¯
An opponent [of Lokayata] will say, if you do not
¯
allow for something unseen [or invisible - adrsta]
the various phenomena of the world become
destitute of any cause. But we [members of the
Lokayata school] cannot accept this objection as
¯
valid, since these phenomena can all be produced
spontaneously from their own nature [or own
being – svabhava].Thus it has been said [and here
¯
an earlier Lokayata text is quoted] – “The fire is
¯
hot, the water cold, refreshing cool the breeze of
morn; from whom came this variety? [Answer:]
From their own nature [svabhava] was it born.”
¯
The word translated here as “own nature” has two components, sva- which means “one’s own” or “intrinsic,” and
bhava, which is the Sanskrit word for being, derived from the
¯
verbal radical bhu.32 The text continues.
¯
And all this has been said by Brhaspati [the
legendary founder of Lokayata.] “There is no
¯
heaven, no final liberation, nor any soul in another
world. Nor do the actions of the four castes,
orders [that is, stages of life], etc., produce any
CAREY
23
real effect. The fire sacrifice [agnihotra], the three
Vedas, the ascetic’s three staves, and smearing
oneself with ashes were made by nature [or,
perhaps less misleadingly, made by the elements dhatu-nirmita] as the livelihood of those destitute
of knowledge and manliness. [Presumably the
brahmins are meant here.] If a beast slain in the
¯
Jyotistoma rite [a Vedic sacrifice] will itself go to
heaven, then why doesn’t the sacrificer offer his
own father? ... It is only as a means of livelihood
that brahmins have established here all these
¯
ceremonies for the dead—there is no other fruit
[than what is found in this world] anywhere.”
In an ancient drama, Prabodha-Candrodaya, which reflects
the views of this school, a materialist offers a simple response
to the question of why believers wear themselves out with
fasting and other forms of mortification: “These fools are
deceived by the [sacred texts] and are fed with the allurements of hope.”33
The name of this school, Lokayata, is derived from loka,
¯
the Sanskrit word for world. Sankara, a philosopher working
within the orthodox tradition, writes of Lokayata as follows:
¯
According to the Lokayatika doctrine, the four
¯
elements alone are the ultimate principles—earth,
water, fire, and air; there is none other. Only the
perceived exists; the unperceivable does not exist.
[Frank materialism and, indeed, nominalism.]
Others should not postulate [that is, infer] merit
and demerit from happiness and misery. A person
is happy or miserable through nature; there is no
other cause. [A denial of karma.] Who paints the
peacocks, or who makes the cuckoos sing? There
exists here no cause except nature. The soul is but
the body characterized by the attributes signified
by the expressions “I am stout,” “I am
youthful”…. It is not something other than the
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
body. The consciousness that is found in
[organisms] is produced in the manner of the red
color out of the combination of betel, areca nut,
and lime. [Conscience is at most a mere epiphenomenon of matter.] There is no world other than
this one: there is no heaven and there is no hell:
the realm of Siva and like regions are invented by
stupid impostors…. Liberation is death, which is
the cessation of the life breath. The wise ought not
to take pains on account of it. [That is, there is no
need to take pains on account of liberation since,
being death, nothing more and nothing less, it is
going to come upon the wise and the unwise alike.
No effort is needed to bring it about.]. It is only
the fool who wears himself out by penances, fasts,
etc.34
Sankara wrote around 800 A.D., but Lokayata is much older.
¯
Its chief work, the Brhaspati Sutra, which is not extant, is
estimated to have been composed around 600 B.C. And references to Lokayata teachings occur in other works estimated
¯
to date from an early period.35
5
The denial of the authority of the Veda by Buddhism, Jainism,
and Lokayata, did not occur without provoking a response
¯
from the upholders of Vedic tradition. In the attempt to meet
the various criticisms leveled at the authority of the Veda, six
main schools of speculative thought emerged. These schools
are usually spoken of as “orthodox”, which is a rough but not
altogether misleading rendering of “astika,” (from Sanskrit as
¯
- “is”) which is employed to mean “accepting of sacred
tradition”, that is, Vedic tradition. Over and against these are
the “heterodox” or nastika (from na as - “is not”) schools of
¯
Buddhism, Jainism, and Lokayata. Each of these different
¯
schools is referred to by the Indian commentators as a view
(darsana). They were schools in the sense that they had
CAREY
25
su tras, or basic texts expressing the central tenets in concen¯
trated form, adherents, and a rich commentarial tradition of
textual exegesis. Needless to say, as the schools developed,
divisions emerged within them. There were, additionally,
important thinkers working both at the margins of the
schools and outside their confines. Formal, intermural disputations took place, and these are recapitulated and developed
further in the commentaries.36
To get a clearer view of philosophy as it existed in ancient
India, we need to undertake a brief survey of the orthodox
schools. The range of themes taken up for specifically philosophical treatment is comparable in scope, at least, to what
one finds in Western philosophy. Some themes strike the
Westerner as not only unfamiliar, but exotic, and even bewildering, while others are familiar but approached and
developed in unexpected ways. The task of our survey is
twofold. We need to observe the philosophical mind at work
on particular questions that are interesting in their own right.
At the same time, we need to determine exactly where and
how Vedic authority comes into the picture. For it is in
assessing the character of this authority that we can estimate
the extent to which philosophy in India succeeded in distinguishing its way from that of religion.
The six orthodox schools are conveniently grouped in
¯ ¯ ¯
pairs. In the first place there is the Pu rva-Mi mamsa—Uttara¯
¯mamsa pair. “Mi mamsa” means “inquiry”; “pu rva” and
¯ ¯ ¯
Mi ¯ ¯
¯
“uttara” mean “earlier” and “later” respectively. Pu rva¯
¯mamsa takes its bearings from the earlier part of Vedic
Mi ¯ ¯
¯ ¯ ¯
lore, the Vedas proper, and Uttara-Mi mamsa takes its
bearings from the later part, in particular, the appended
Upanisads. Of the six orthodox schools of thought Pu rva¯
¯ ¯ ¯
Mi mamsa is at first glance much the most orthodox. It is
concerned with such things as the resolution of inconsistencies in the Veda, their claim to be an eternal revelation,
and how sound can be the vehicle of revelation. These
inquiries are all in the service of supporting the rule of
dharma as the central Vedic disclosure relevant to human life.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
¯ ¯ ¯
Today one might be tempted to call Pu rva-Mi mamsa “Vedic
¯
fundamentalism” were it not for the cunning of its apologetics and the subtlety of its investigations, particularly into
the nature of speech (vac), which in one Vedic hymn is
¯
presented as a goddess extolling herself as all embracing and
the first of those who are worthy of sacrifice.37 Given the
¯ ¯ ¯
uncompromising determination of Pu rva-Mi mamsa to
¯
defend the Vedic injunctions to the letter, one might expect
the texts of this school to betray the kind of blinkered
irritability one often runs up against in those committed to
the defense of indefensible positions. Instead, one finds there
what is characteristic of the texts of almost all the schools,
namely, a serene and fair minded statement of the most
powerful objections that have been advanced against the
tenets of the school in question, followed by a measured
point by point rebuttal.
¯ ¯ ¯
Uttara-Mi mamsa is usually called “Vedanta,” literally, the
¯
end of the Veda, since its authority and the focus of its
interest is the Upanisads. It is probably the school of Indian
speculative thought best known in the West, as it has well
known adherents in our time. There are several versions of
Vedanta, but the most influential is Advaita-Vedanta, literally,
¯
¯
non-dualist Vedanta. Its greatest exponent was Sankara,
¯
whose account of the heterodox school of Lokayata I quoted
¯
earlier. Advaita-Vedanta holds to the Upanisadic teaching of
¯
the oneness of all things, of the world as maya, and of the
¯ ¯
identity of ¯tman with brahman. Where, one asks, does the
a
manifold and illusory world that we mistake for reality come
from? The world is not created, either ex nihilo or out of a
¯¯
pre-existent matter. The world is the play (or sport - li la) of
38
brahman. This play has no purpose outside itself. In
particular, this play is not for the good of the world, a claim
that Sankara supports by referring to a passage from the sruti,
“It is not for the sake of all, my dear, that all is loved, but for
one’s own sake that all is loved.”39 According to AdvaitaVedanta, brahman is both the efficient and the material cause
¯
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27
of the world. We might add that it is the formal and final
cause as well.
Another pair is Sankhya-Yoga. The Sankhya school is
¯
¯
dualistic. The ultimate constituents of reality are nature and
intellect, and this school gives an intriguing account of how
the two are related. The word translated by “nature” here is
prakrti. The components are pra-, kr-, and -ti. Pra- is equivalent to our prefix pro- and could be translated as “forth.” Kris the root of the Sanskrit verb for “to make” or “to do.” And
-ti is a suffix that, like the Greek -sis, endows a verbal root
with a nominal character indicating process, as with poiesis
¯
(making) or, for that matter, physis (nature or, more literally,
growing). Prakrti is then making-forth.40 To the extent that
this making-forth is an ongoing and immanent principle of
production, and not the original and originating act of a
transcendent creator, “nature” could hardly be a better
rendering of prakrti. The etymology of this word reminds
one of Aristotle’s discussion at the beginning of the second
book of the Physics, where physis is presented as a principle
of impersonal immanent governance, the source of motion
and rest within the world, and is compared to a doctor
healing himself.41 Like Aristotle’s nature, prakrti is both what
makes and what is made.
It is worth noting that the two Sanskrit terms I have translated as “nature,” namely, prakrti and, in my account of
Lokayata, svabhava, are etymologically unrelated. The
¯
¯
former names nature as process whereas the latter, which as
we saw is derivative from the Sanskrit verb “to be,” names
nature as being, primarily in the sense of essence. Parallel to
prakrti and svabhava are the Greek terms, physis and ousia,
¯
which are also etymologically unrelated. The former, like
prakrti, names nature as process, whereas the latter is derived
from the Greek verb “to be” and, like svabhava, names nature
¯
as being, also primarily in the sense of essence. Since the
Sanskrit and Greek terms developed prior to any influence of
Greek speculative thought on Indian speculative thought or,
so far as we can tell, vice versa, the correspondences are
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
remarkable. One might suspect that these linguistic developments were not entirely independent, in spite of the absence
of any influence of one on the other. Because Greek and
Sanskrit are related languages, one might be tempted to chalk
up the comparable derivations of svabhava and ousia from
¯
the verb “to be” in their respective languages to merely
coincidental exploitations of a possibility latent in protoIndo-European, the hypothesized common ancestor of the
two languages.42 But the independent emergence of prakrti
and physis within Sanskrit and Greek as names for the whole
material order construed as immanent, ongoing, selfemergence cannot be easily dismissed as happenstance. On
the contrary, there is every reason to think that these two
terms came into being to express something already caught
sight of in the nature of things, so to speak, and, moreover,
that this discovery was the dawn of a properly philosophical
orientation and outlook.
The relationship between prakrti in the Sankhya school
¯
and physis in the philosophy of Aristotle is not limited to the
central and common concept of “making forth.” Prakrti is
animated to its activity by the presence of spirit. The word I
am translating as “spirit” here is, again, purusa, which in one
of the Vedic hymns we considered was the gigantic victim of
a primordial sacrifice, a victim who, on being dismembered
by the gods, served as the origin of the four castes. Not
surprisingly, in the Sankhya system, the concept of purusa has
¯
become demythologized, as indeed had already happened in
the Upanisads.43 By itself, spirit lacks any power to produce
things, and is accordingly regarded as a pure “witness.”44 The
relationship of purusa to prakrti is likened to a man who is
clear-sighted but lame (purusa) mounted on the shoulders of
a man who is sure-footed but blind (prakrti).45 The presence
of spirit stimulates nature to evolve out of itself a manifold of
beings. This evolution is from three elemental constituents
(gunas), which, had nature not been excited to activity by the
presence of spirit, would simply have remained in
equilibrium. These three constituents of nature are called
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29
sattva, rajas and tamas, for which there are no corresponding
English words. Sattva is buoyant and shining; rajas is stimulating and moving; tamas is heavy and enveloping. Their
functioning, we are told, is for a single purpose, like that of a
lamp.46 Exactly how the upsetting of the equilibrium of these
three constituents within primordial nature happens is
problematic because spirit itself does not act directly on
nature. Spirit engages in no action at all, but only in a pure
beholding. On the other hand, nature cannot be so blind as
to be totally unaware of the presence of spirit, since this very
presence is what provokes nature to activity. The problem has
a rough parallel, at least, in Aristotle’s conception of the
relationship of the unmoved mover, who is pure intelligence
(noesis noeseos), to what is moved, that is, to material nature.
¯
¯ ¯
To be sure, for Aristotle, some moved things, such as the
heavenly bodies and human beings, are themselves intelligent.
But certain other things, such as particles of earth and other
elements, which are also moved to their proper places at least
ultimately by the unmoved mover, are as blind as blind can
be.47
In the Sankhya school the modifications of prakrti, or
¯
nature, entail a complex and graduated evolution, one consequence of which is the individuation of purusa or spirit into
individual selves, which results in a delusion as to what they
really are. But prakrti, like Arisotle’s physis, also works for an
end. The end is the overcoming of the delusion of the
individual purusas. This overcoming of delusion is liberation.
That prakrti can be construed as non-sentient and at the
same time as nonetheless acting for an end, and furthermore
for the end of another, is addressed in the Sankhya-karika, the
¯
¯ ¯
fundamental text of this school, and in the commentaries on
this text. The argument begins, characteristically, with an
objection, in this case the objection of a theist. In an animal,
many organic processes such as digestion have a purpose but
nevertheless take place without the animal’s being conscious
of them. So another being, an omniscient and powerful deity,
in fact, must be invoked to account for these processes. After
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
all, the objector continues, there cannot be purposes unless
they are consciously intended, either by the organism or by its
providential creator. To this objection the proponent of
Sankhya responds with an example. Milk flows out of the
¯
cow for the sake of the calf, without any conscious intention
on the part of the cow (much less, one might add, on the part
of the milk). In a similar way, the whole of prakrti, which is
non-sentient, can be understood to act for the liberation of
another, namely, for the liberation of purusa. Neither divine
intention nor any other conscious intention needs to be
invoked. No intention needs to be invoked at all. Nature,
prakrti, is purposive, period.
The proponent of Sankhya then assumes the offensive
¯
and advances an argument against a divine, omniscient
creator altogether. Every sentient being acting for a purpose
does so either out of selfishness, that is, for its own good, or
out of benevolence, that is, for the good of another. Neither
of these motives could account for God’s creation of the
universe. God cannot create the universe out of selfishness.
For, on the hypothesis of the theist, he has all that he
requires. Nor can he create the universe out of benevolence.
For prior to the alleged creation of the world—which,
incidentally, is not envisioned by either party to the dispute as
ex nihilo—the purusas would be without bodies and organs,
which are the source of their delusion. Consequently, they
would not be afflicted, prior to creation, with anything that
God could be aroused through benevolent pity to remove.
Finally, if God created the world out of benevolence he
would create only happy creatures. So, why are there so many
unhappy creatures? The theist, obviously, cannot answer this
question by attributing the unhappiness of creatures to their
past deeds, as is required by the orthodox doctrine of karma.
Prior to creation of the world, purusa, whether understood as
one or many, cannot be understood to have encumbered itself
with karma.48
According to the Sankhya school, the purposive action of
¯
non-sentient prakrti is neither amorally selfish nor morally
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31
altruistic. It is amorally altruistic. Its purposiveness is an
irreducible given, not to be accounted for by appeal to
conscious design. After all, one would not infer conscious
design unless purposiveness were apprehended first. The two
concepts, purposiveness (understood as having an end or
telos) and conscious design, can be kept distinct. As students
of Western philosophy might be inclined to put it, the proposition that purposiveness presupposes conscious design is not
an analytic judgment. It is a synthetic judgment. Its denial
entails no logical contradiction: one is not logically
compelled to infer conscious design from purposiveness. The
existence of purposiveness is so obvious, particularly in living
beings, that the theist does not argue for it and the atheist
does not argue against it. Unlike the Medieval theologians
who argued from teleology to the conscious intention of a
divine artisan, and unlike the Modern philosophers and
scientists who undertook a polemic against teleology because
they feared admitting it would commit them to the existence
of a divine artisan, the Sankhya school, like Aristotle, takes
¯
teleology as a given. It no more feels a need to account for the
fact of teleology by appeal to a divine artisan than it feels a
need to account for something equally mysterious, namely, a
plurality of spirits or minds, by that same appeal.
Purposiveness is, then, simply a feature of prakrti, just as
consciousness is a feature of purusa. Neither of them can be
convincingly accounted for by appeal to something as
problematic as the intention of an omniscient creator since,
again, no rational motive can be assigned for his creative act.
The flowing of the milk from the cow to the calf is a
paradigm of this purposiveness. It occurs without any
intention from within on the part of the cow and without any
intention from without on the part of a god. The Sankhya
¯
school of orthodox thought was openly atheistic.
Sankhya is, as noted earlier, usually paired with Yoga in
¯
summaries of the orthodox views. There is more to Yoga than
the system of physical discipline and exercises familiar to us
in the West. Yoga employs the prakrti-purusa distinction, the
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
distinction between nature and spirit that we find in Sankhya,
¯
and, like that school, regards this dualism as irreducible.
Unlike Sankhya, however, Yoga is theistic. However, it intro¯
¯
duces the concept of the Lord (Isvara) more as an object
of devotion than as a causal principle. The Lord can serve as
the focal point of mental concentration. So envisioned the
Lord is but one purusa among many, though unique in his
eternal freedom from illusion and perfect cognition.49 In
some respects he seems to function chiefly as an ideal to
approximate.
The remaining pair of orthodox schools is Nyaya¯
Vaisesika. Their concerns and investigations appear, at first
glance, at the greatest remove from the Veda. The best known
teaching of the Vaisesika school is atomism. More significant
is its attempt to categorize all that in any way can be said to
be. Though Vaisesika is at least nominally theistic, its attenuated theism is hardly central to the ontological investigations it undertakes, and the sincerity of its theistic
commitment was called into question by philosophers of
other Indian schools, both ancient and modern.50
The Nyaya school is interested in the question of how
¯
knowledge is possible. According to this school, knowledge
involves a knower, what is known, the means whereby
knowledge is attained, and the act of knowing. The means of
valid cognition that are admitted by the Nyaya school are
¯
perception, comparison, inference, and verbal testimony.
“Perception is that knowledge which arises from contact of a
sense with its object, and is determinate, un-nameable, and
unerring.”51 Perception is determinate in that its object is
present in clarity and distinctness, and it is unerring because
falsity occurs only in propositions. The argument that
perception is un-nameable is directed against the claim that
all cognition has a linguistic structure. A thing can be
perceived for which we do not yet have a name. And when
something we perceive has already been given a name, the
name is not a part of the perception proper. Communicating
the name of a thing to someone who has never perceived the
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33
thing does not, by itself, produce for him a perception of it.
And even when someone has at his disposal a name for
something he actually has perceived, calling up the name does
not produce a genuinely determinate perception of the
thing.52
The Nyaya school developed, independently of Aristotle,
¯
a theory of the syllogism and principles of reasoning. Rather
than three steps—major premise, minor premise,
conclusion—the Nyaya school distinguishes five steps in the
¯
syllogism, at least as it is employed in disputation. These are:
proposition, reason, example, application, and conclusion.53
They are ordered as follows, with the favored example.
1. The proposition to be established: Sound is noneternal. This step indicates that in disputation
reasoning is directed from the beginning toward a
conclusion that it intends to establish. The
conclusion rarely pops up as an unanticipated
proposition, resulting from the fortuitous
conjunction of a major premise with a minor,
which just happen to have a middle term in
common. Not that such things do not occur, but
they never or almost never occur in a formal
disputation.
2. The reason why the proposition is affirmed:
Because it is produced. In effect, this step is an
anticipatory relating of the major premise to the
minor.
3. An example founding what is, in effect, the
major premise: A dish, which is produced, is not
eternal, so—unless our opponent produces a
counter example at this point—we say that everything that is produced is non-eternal. If the
opponent cannot at this point name a counter
example invalidating the major premise, the latter
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
has to count as established and true.
4. The application or reaffirmation: Sound is
produced. This is, in effect, the assertion of the
minor premise on the heels of the major premise if
the latter has been established by the example, i.e.,
if the opponent was unable to produce a counter
example in the preceding step.
5. The conclusion: Sound is non-eternal. This
should, of course, be the same as the proposition
stated in the first step. It is nonetheless a separate
step in the inference. The first step announces the
project. The last step concludes it.
Comparison, or knowledge by analogy, the third means of
valid cognition admitted by the Nyaya school is “the
¯
knowledge of a [new] thing through its similarity to another
thing previously well known.” The fourth and last means of
valid cognition is verbal testimony.
There is clearly a decreasing reliability reflected in the
order in which the four means of valid cognition are listed.
Perception was said to be unerring. The same was not said for
inference, since there can be faulty inference, a problem
treated specifically in the Nyaya-Sutra. Comparison is
¯
obviously less reliable than inference, since the fact that two
things, one of them familiar and the other unfamiliar, have a
certain feature in common does not, by itself, justify the
inference that every feature the one has, the other has as well.
Just as inference needs to draw its examples from the more
reliable perception, so comparison needs to anchor itself in
the more reliable inference and perception. By implication
then, verbal testimony, the last mentioned means of valid
cognition, is the least reliable of the four. It is, as we say,
“hearsay.” It is a means of valid cognition in that it might be
true; but, then again, it might not be true. Some combination
of the other three means of valid cognition must be employed
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35
to determine whether the verbal testimony comes from a
reliable source rather than from a child, a lunatic, or an
impostor. And yet verbal testimony is the sole means for the
transmission of the Veda. Consequently, we can infer that the
Nyaya school regarded Vedic authority as less than fully
¯
reliable, except when buttressed by other, more reliable,
means of valid cognition.
This inference is supported, as we shall see, by the curious
example that the Nyaya-Sutra uses in its treatment of the
¯
syllogism, an example that recurs throughout this text: the
non-eternality of sound.54
6
Of the six schools that professed allegiance to Vedic tradition,
¯ ¯ ¯
Pu rva-Mi mamsa could appear to have been the least specula¯
tively adventuresome. Among other things, it did not accept
the Vedanta teaching that the phenomenal world is illusion.
¯
Things are pretty much the way they appear. Pu rva¯
¯ ¯ ¯
Mi mamsa affirmed a rather prosaic and sober, even tough
minded, realism—with one big exception. This school based
its argument for the authority of the Veda on its presumed
eternity. In accounting for the revelation of the Veda, the
¯ ¯
Mi mamsakas had argued that it was quite literally heard by
the sages of old. We today no longer hear the Veda because it
is covered by a veil, so to speak. Unlike the sages we lack the
discernment to hear through this veil. The Veda is a hidden
but nonetheless eternal sound. An eternal sound is
¯ ¯
conceivable, argues the Mi mamsaka, because sound is incorporeal. Being incorporeal, it is not subject to decay and dissolution.
¯ ¯ ¯
The prime concern of the Pu rva-Mi mamsa school, as the
¯
¯mamsa Su tra indicates, is the explication of
first line of the Mi ¯ ¯ ¯
dharma, i.e., right conduct or duty. The medium whereby
dharma is announced is sound (sabda), which construed as
¯
verbal testimony is a means of valid cognition. Now, an interesting principle of reasoning in formal disputation, as
¯ ¯ ¯
practiced and urged by the Pu rva-Mi mamsa school, is that
¯
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
any proposition advanced, and therefore any verbal
testimony, must count as true until and unless it can be shown
to be false.55 The only way verbal testimony can be shown to
be unreliable is if its author can be shown to be untrustworthy
or if the testimony is itself preposterous.
The first line of attack will not work if the Veda—in
particular, the sound of which it is constituted—is eternal.
For verbal testimony cannot have an untrustworthy author if
it has no author at all, either human or divine. Atheism is one
¯ ¯ ¯
of the tenets of Pu rva-Mi mamsa, not in spite of, but because
¯
of its, adherence to Vedic tradition. Its atheism is not
extracted from the Veda, but read off it, so to speak, as a kind
¯ ¯
of meta-atheism. The Mi mamsaka asks, with a perfectly
straight face, if the Veda were composed by a god, might he
not be inclined to exaggerate his accomplishments a little bit,
to lie, in fact? How can we rule that possibility out? The truth
of the Veda is most plausible on the assumption that it is
¯ ¯
eternal. And it can be eternal, so the Mi mamsaka argues, only
if it has no maker, that is, no author.
The second line of attack, trying to show that the
contents of the Veda are preposterous, will not work either.
¯ ¯ ¯
For example, the opponent of Pu rva-Mi mamsa asks, “How
¯
do you know that all this [the Veda] is not like the utterance
of lunatics and children? After all, we find in it such sentences
as ‘Trees sat the sacrificial session.’”56 To this objection the
¯ ¯
Mi mamsaka responds that all such sentences can be interpreted figuratively. This particular sentence is merely a poetic
way of indicating the centrality and solemnity of the
sacrificial session. The polytheism of the Veda can also be,
and in fact has to be, demythologized. Of greater concern are
the dharmic injunctions. There are statements about the fruits
of dharma that seem to be contradicted by facts. But they
cannot really be contradicted by the facts, for the fruits are all
future relative to the enjoined action. If promised fruit
follows shortly after the enjoined action, the truth of the
Vedic promise is confirmed. If it does not follow shortly after
the enjoined action, it will most assuredly follow later on.
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37
Reincarnation is invoked. If the fruits of enjoined actions do
not follow in this life, they will most assuredly follow in the
next life. But what of people who receive fruits in this life
that the Veda declares are consequent only to specifically
enjoined actions, which these same people say they never
performed? These people are wrong. They did perform these
actions, only not in this life but, rather, in a preceding life.
The Vedic promise is not contradicted.
In spite of such ingenious ways of interpreting Vedic
assertions that seem on the face of it not to be true, there is a
¯ ¯ ¯
marked tendency in Pu rva-Mi mamsa to downplay declar¯
ative statements in the Veda across the board and to
emphasize those that are prescriptive only. The basic concern
is always dharma, that is, what ought to be done. As such, a
Vedic injunction cannot be contradicted by anything that
sense perception or any other means of valid cognition might
determine about what exists. Put another way, the ought,
precisely because it is not derived from the is, cannot be
contradicted by the is. What might appear to be the weakness
¯ ¯ ¯
of the Pu rva-Mi mamsa position, namely the virtual
¯
detachment of the ought from the is, turns out to be its
strength.
But free floating dharmic injunctions presuppose at least
the declarative sentence that the Veda is eternal, and consequently that the sound, the sabda, that reveals these injunc¯
tions, is eternal. This claim is so odd, not to say weird, that
one is inclined to tone it down. Is it possible that the
sounding of the Veda is to be understood figuratively, perhaps
as a metaphor to indicate the eternal order of things having
come to expression in language proper? No. The sounding of
the Veda is not a metaphor. The Veda is literally sounding,
sounding and resounding eternally through the cosmos.
Indeed, the very letters that go to make up the verses in the
Veda have an eternal sound.57 Put together they constitute an
articulation that is more than just noise, and these articulate
sounds are those that one hears when the Veda is recited. The
recitation that we hear only manifests a sound that is already
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
and always there. The word and the utterance manifesting it
are, we are told, analogous to a pot and the lightening
manifesting it in an otherwise dark night.58 Just as the lightening does not cause the pot to come into being, so the
utterance does not cause the sound to come into being. The
lightening only manifests the pre-existent pot, and the
utterance only manifests the pre-existent sound, which in the
case of the Veda is the very sound of eternal truth that the
sages heard. The eternally sounding Veda is in a language.
That language—it will come as no surprise—is Sanskrit. We
can perhaps see more clearly now why it was critical to freeze
the development of the Sanskrit language, particularly its
sound, early on. In any case, however strange we may find the
notion of an unmanifest eternal sound, however much of an
exception it is to everything we experience in the production
¯ ¯
of sound, the Mi mamsaka makes his point: “Prove, without
begging the question, that the Veda is not eternally
resounding throughout the universe. That you cannot hear it
is a trivial fact that does not contribute materially to the proof
you need.”
The counter-argument for the non-eternity of sound, in
the example that the Nyaya school appears at first glance to
¯
have taken out of nowhere simply to illustrate its syllogistic
theory, is directed quite obviously against the teaching of the
¯ ¯ ¯
Pu rva-Mi mamsa school. But, more strikingly, this counter¯
argument is directed against the very concept of sruti, of
“what is heard,” construed as an eternal foundation of sacred
¯
tradition.59 According to the Nyaya school, it is not sufficient
to say that sound is eternal simply because of its incorporeality. On the basis of perception and reasoning, i.e., on the
basis of experience, we know sound to be produced. At least,
we have no experience of an unproduced sound. From the
perspective of the Nyaya school, an admission of the possi¯
bility of an unproduced sound would be something like an
admission of the possibility of miracles, which are by
definition wondrous occurrences that are exceptions to the
regularity and continuity of experience. Indeed, sabda, i.e.,
¯
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39
¯ ¯ ¯
verbal testimony, as understood by Pu rva-Mi mamsa, would
¯
seem to be the miracle, the miracle par excellence, one might
say. The possibility of such a thing would not only undermine
the authority of sense perception and reasoning, it would
undercut the possibility of there being any thing like nature
in the strict sense of the word. To this concern the
¯ ¯
Mi mamsaka would respond that the Veda, though wondrous
indeed, even miraculous, is not an exception to anything. It is
an eternal miracle. The Veda is the norm. Precisely because it
is eternal it cannot be construed as an interruption to the
regularity and continuity of experience.
There was a sustained controversy between the Pu rva¯
¯ ¯ ¯
Mi mamsa and the Nyaya schools on the character of Vedic
¯
authority, turning on this very issue of the eternity of sound.
In the controversy, the primacy and timeless validity of Vedic
revelation, advanced by the putatively ultra-orthodox Pu rva¯
¯ ¯ ¯
Mi mamsa school, takes the form of an argument against the
existence of a creator God and for the eternity of the world,
precisely so the Veda can be understood to be uncreated and
its authority unqualified. The counter-argument for the
temporal character of Vedic revelation, and its subordination
to sense perception and reasoning, advanced by the epistemologically oriented Nyaya school, takes the form of an
¯
argument for a creator God and against the eternity of the
world, precisely so that the Veda can be understood to be
created and its authority qualified. If we are right in our
contention that the root of the Naiyayika denial of an eternal
¯
sound is, in effect, a denial of miracles, then it has to count
as a capital irony, at least from the Western point of view, that
this denial had to be supported by an argument for the
existence of a creator God.
The depreciation of Vedic authority, and thereby of Vedic
tradition, in the orthodox Nyaya school is not announced
¯
with trumpets. It can be discerned in the choice of a wry
example adduced ostensibly just to clarify a simple logical
distinction.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
That word is called “too generic” which, while
applying to the thing desired to be spoken of overreaches it. For example, the brahmin-hood [i.e.,
¯
the priestly caste that transmits the Vedic
tradition]—which is denoted by the term
“brahmin”—is sometimes found to be concomitant
¯
with “learning and character” and sometimes
found to over-reach it, i.e., not be concomitant
with it….60
Nyaya was not the only orthodox school to call into
¯
question, however so delicately, the authority of Vedic
tradition. The Sankhya-karika begins with a discussion of the
¯
¯ ¯
various kinds of pain and how they can best be removed.
Among pains are mental pains, of which several are
mentioned, two of them being fear and “the non-perception
of particular objects.” The text addresses this matter bluntly.
The revealed (or scriptural - ¯nusravikas) means
a
[of removing pain] is like the perceptible: it is
verily linked with impurity, destruction, and excess
(atisaya); different in form and superior thereto is
that means derived from the discriminative
knowledge of the manifest, the unmanifest, and
the knower [i.e., the discriminative knowledge
touted by the Sankhya school].
¯
The appended commentary explicates this text as follows.
The means of removing pain, consisting in the
direct discriminative knowledge of the intellect
(purusa) as apart from matter, is contrary to Vedic
means and hence is better. The Vedic remedy is
good inasmuch as it is authorized by the Veda and
as such is capable of removing pain to a certain
extent; the discriminative knowledge of the
intellect as distinct from matter is also good; and
of these two, the latter is better, superior.61
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41
Vedic testimony is recognized by the Sankhya school and by
¯
every other orthodox school (astika-darsana) as a means of
¯
valid cognition. Indeed this recognition is what stamps a
school as having an orthodox teaching (astika-mata). But
¯
¯ ¯ ¯
except in the case of Pu rva-Mi mamsa, and to a lesser extent
¯
Vedanta, the authority of Vedic testimony is tightly circum¯
scribed. We are told shortly after the passage just cited that
Vedic testimony is limited to what cannot be controverted by
the other means of valid cognition (perception and inference
for the Sankhya school) and to what is not accessible to them.
¯
This formulation could appear to be only the flip side of the
¯ ¯ ¯
Pu rva-Mi mamsa principle that any proposition advanced in
¯
disputation has to count as true until refuted. But in the
Sankhya teaching it is not clear what is left over as the specific
¯
matter for Vedic authority. For, in the passage just quoted, the
Sankhya school’s superior knowledge of the manifest (vyakta)
¯
and the unmanifest (avyakta) is explicitly contrasted with
Vedic testimony, to the disadvantage of the latter. Even
concerning the unmanifest,62 then, the “discriminative
knowledge of the intellect” advocated by the unabashedly
atheistic Sankhya school is superior to Vedic authority, to
¯
which this school nonetheless concedes a measure of ambiguously defined validity.
My earlier remarks on Sankara, arguably the greatest
philosopher India has produced, might have seemed unduly
meager. Sankara wrote near the beginning of the eighth
century A.D., and so his teaching is somewhat off topic in an
introductory account of the origin of philosophy in ancient
India. Moreover, it is not possible to present an adequate
summary of his complex, ingenious, and extended elaboration of Upanisadic monism in a few paragraphs. One issue,
though, is of particular relevance in the present context.
Sankara speaks both of an impersonal brahman, which, just as
in the Upanisads, is identical with one’s own innermost self
(atman), and of a personal lord (or governor - ¯svara), who
¯
i
qua lord would have to differ from one’s self. Or so it would
seem. One way of managing this two-fold interpretation of
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
42
the highest principle is to say that Isvara is simply the way
brahman is experienced under the conditions of illusion,
which after all is the illusion of multiplicity and otherness.
Devotion to Isvara has the salutary effect of elevating the
mind above preoccupation with worldly worries and desires,
which are mistaken for the self—a confusion of empirical ego
with transcendental ego, a Kantian might say. Detachment
from worldly concerns, which devotion to Isvara helps effect,
is a necessary condition for realizing the identity of brahman
and ¯tman, and, concomitantly, for enlightened recognition
a
of the illusoriness of all multiplicity and otherness, including
not only the world but also any lord distinct from the self.
One might have expected Sankara to reserve the term
¯svara solely for contexts in which he is speaking of the world
i
as it appears and our efforts to penetrate through this veil to
what is fundamentally real. But such is not the case. Sankara
is disinclined to treat Isvara as illusory even when regarded
from the most privileged perspective of enlightenment.63
Accordingly, one could infer a commitment to theism on
Sankara’s part, given his virtual identification of Isvara and
brahman. But, then, the realization that, through this very
identification, Isvara also becomes identical with ¯tman could
a
as easily lead one to the opposite inference. It should be
remembered that, for Sankara, Isvara is the material cause of
the phenomenal world as well as its efficient cause, a teaching
rejected by his more theistically oriented successors in
Vedanta. Moreover, in spite of using Isvara and brahman
¯
more or less interchangeably, Sankara explicitly teaches that
¯
the Lord’s lord-ness (i svaratva), presumably his lordship over
the world and over man within it, is ultimately illusory. And
in the sentence, “[H]e who, having been led to be brahman,
is consecrated to sovereignty does not wish to bow to
anybody,” Sankara the philosopher momentarily removes his
mask.64
7
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43
In the Arthasastra of Kautilya (c. 300 B.C.), whose description
¯
of the duties pertaining to the four castes I cited earlier, we
find a limiting of Vedic authority similar to what we have seen
in some of the other orthodox schools. After describing the
contents of his treatise in the first chapter, which is primarily
on politics, Kautilya devotes the second chapter to an
enumeration of the sciences (vidyas). The four sciences are
¯
¯ksiki or analytics, the Veda, economics, and the science
¯
¯nvi
a
of politics. The first science mentioned is the science of
¯
reasoning. Since ¯nvi ksiki is listed as a science, and not just a
a ¯
means of valid cognition, it would seem to have, like the
other three enumerated sciences, a subject matter of its own.
For this reason it has occasionally been translated as
“philosophy.” But we shall use the more precise translation of
“analytics,” understood as the science of reasoning.65 Shortly
after his enumeration of the four sciences, Kautilya quotes
Brhaspati, whom he does not specify as the founder of the
heterodox Lokayata school. “Vedic lore is only a cloak
¯
(samvarana) for one conversant with the ways of the world
(lokayatravid).”66 Kautilya himself takes exception to this
¯ ¯
Lokayata reduction and includes Vedic lore within his
¯
enumeration of the sciences, giving as his reason “since with
the help [of these four sciences] one can learn dharma and
material well being.” He then proceeds immediately to a
discussion of analytics, explicitly citing the Lokayata school
¯
or system as one instance of it.
Sankhya, Yoga, and Lokayata—these constitute
¯
¯
analytics. Investigating by means of analytics
dharma-and-non-dharma [dharmadharmau - a
¯
Sanskrit copulative compound] in Vedic lore,
material gain and loss in economics, good policy
and bad policy in the science of politics, as well as
the relative strength-and-weakness [balabalau ¯
copulative compound] of these [three sciences],
analytics confers benefit on the people, keeps the
mind steady in adversity and in prosperity, and
brings about proficiency in thought, speech and
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
action. Analytics is ever thought as the lamp of all
sciences, the means of all actions, and the support
of all dharma.67
This passage is interesting for several reasons. In the first
place, Kautilya includes Lokayata, along with Sankhya and
¯
¯
Yoga, as part of analytics, in spite of the fact that he has just
quoted Brhaspati, the founder of this school, as limiting
science to economics and politics. Kautilya evidently thinks
that at least some of the claims of Lokayata can be appro¯
priated by his own ostensibly orthodox account, which
includes a defense, of sorts, of the very tradition that was
excoriated and mocked by this arch-heretical school.
Moreover, according to the passage under consideration,
analytics is autonomous. As in Western philosophy, reason is
subject only to its own laws. It is analytics that determines the
scope of dharma in Vedic lore, this latter being apparently less
than fully coherent or sound in its own proper realm. Even
more strikingly, analytics investigates both the strength and
the weakness of Vedic lore. One can hardly imagine a similar
formulation of the relation of reason to revelation by a pious
Jew, Christian, or Muslim.68 Nor can one imagine any
orthodox believer saying that it is reasoning, and not sacred
scripture or holy tradition, that brings about proficiency in
thought (including belief?), speech (including prayer?), and
action (including the performance of sacrifices?).69 Most
interestingly of all, in the final clause of passage, which is the
final clause of the chapter, Kautilya assigns to analytics, rather
than to Vedic lore, the “support of all dharma.”
This mystifying conclusion is clarified in the chapter that
immediately follows, the scope of which is limited to what
Kautilya wishes to say about Vedic lore itself. Since he has
said that analytics is the “support of all dharma” we expect
him to employ reasoning, and not just an appeal to authority,
in making his case for why Vedic lore is beneficial. This
expectation is not disappointed. After a preliminary listing of
the Vedas by name and the topics they include, Kautilya says
in the third sentence of the chapter:
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45
The dharma laid down in this Vedic lore is
beneficial, as it prescribes the special duties
(svadharma) of the four castes (varnas) and the
four stages of life.
This sentence, the first substantive sentence in the chapter,
must be read as an expression of analytics, of the science of
reasoning, in the thought of Kautilya himself, and aimed at
clarifying the relative strength of Vedic lore in the “support of
all dharma.” The sentence gives the reason for why Vedic lore
is beneficial: it prescribes the duties of the four castes and the
four stages of life. This reason is meant to be accessible not
just to the orthodox but to anyone reading the treatise,
including adherents of the anti-Vedic Lokayata school, who,
¯
Kautilya implies, should have known better.70
8
We are now in a position, at last, to see what exactly constitutes orthodoxy in those schools and thinkers who
acknowledge the authority of the Veda while nonetheless
subordinating Vedic lore as a “means of valid cognition” to
perception and reasoning, that is, to powers possessed by
man as man, powers that are independent of the hearsay of
unknown sages living in the remote past. The break with
Vedic tradition occurred with the emergence of the three
heterodox schools of Buddhism, Jainism, and Lokayata.
¯
Although the first two of these are typically classified as
religions, all three of them are atheistic, the last one exuberantly so. Of the six orthodox schools that formed within early
¯ ¯ ¯
Hinduism, Sankhya is atheistic and so is Pu rva-Mi mamsa.
¯
¯
Nyaya is theistic, though, as we have seen, its theology is
¯
advanced at least in part as a counter to the excessive claims
¯ ¯ ¯
for Vedic authority made by the Pu rva-Mi mamsa school.
¯
Vaisesika adopts the theology of the Nyaya school, though
¯
theism is even more tangential to the atomism of the former
than it is to the logicism of the latter.71 Vedanta, taking its
¯
bearings from the Upanisads, emphasizes the identity of the
self with brahman and the ultimate oneness of all things, and
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Sankara’s Advaita-Vedanta, in particular, has no room for
¯
God in anything remotely resembling the Biblical sense.72
Yoga alone is unambiguously theistic, though Isvara serves
there more as an object of devotion and mental focusing than
as a causal principle per se. Still, the adherents of all six of
these schools, and the independent, no-nonsense political
realist Kautilya as well, concede at least some authority to the
Veda, with exactly how much varying from school to school
and from individual to individual. It is by virtue of this
concession that these thinkers understand themselves to be
situated within the Vedic tradition, however daring their
speculative ventures.
But why do these thinkers bother to concede any
authority at all to the Veda? Kautilya tells us why, and he tells
us as clear as day, in the passage from the Arthasastra we just
¯
considered: the Veda is beneficial. It is beneficial because it
prescribes the duties of the stages of life and of the four
castes.73 But the stages of life are subsumed under the caste
system, since they pertain only to the top three castes. Who,
then, we are led to ask, benefits from the caste system?
Kautilya’s explicit answer is that the whole people benefit.74
The more pertinent answer, which he leaves us to infer, is that
the life of free inquiry, exhibited even in the most orthodox
of these so-called orthodox schools, itself benefits from the
caste system. We noted that economic circumstances, not just
in ancient India but in the ancient world in general, simply
could not support an egalitarian social order. Whatever its
injustices and to whatever abuses it led, the rule of dharma,
of which the hierarchy of castes was much the most
conspicuous embodiment, permitted the leisure and
mandated the literacy without which philosophy could not
emerge. And it permitted surprisingly candid depreciation of
the authority of sacred tradition. The interpreters of dharma
and of sacred tradition in general, namely, the members of the
brahmin caste, enjoyed an unparalleled freedom of specu¯
lation. Within the orthodox schools of speculative thought
we see monism, dualism, an attenuated monotheism, and
CAREY
47
¯
atheism, with a deity or lord (i svara) forcefully denied,
simply ignored, identified with the self, and construed as
distinct from the self as part of a technique for disengaging
the mind from worldly concerns; arguments for the necessity
of creation and arguments against the possibility of creation;
ontological categorization of different kinds of entities;
logical and epistemological investigations; inquiries into the
material constitution of the world with cases being made for
and against an irreducible atomism; idealist and realist
accounts of the phenomenal world; and, with surprising
frequency, a distinct ranking of the authority of sacred
tradition below reasoning and ordinary perception, which is
a giant step toward dismissing the possibility of miracles out
of hand. And this broad range of speculation can be found
within the sphere of what passed for orthodoxy.
Now, although most brahmins may well have accepted in
¯
complete sincerity the whole of Vedic lore, at least to the
extent that it formed a whole, it is virtually certain, I think,
that more than a few paid only lip service to it. Of these,
some may have insisted on the authority of the Veda because
of the social privileges accorded them by the caste system it
mandated (though it should be noted that the brahmins were
¯
themselves subject to a variety of strictures, social and
otherwise). But it is highly likely that some brahmins upheld
¯
this authority solely because of the intellectual freedom it
granted them. They appealed, in a tour de force of resourcefulness, to religious authority in support of a social order that
uniquely guaranteed the possibility of unimpeded questioning
and inquiry.75 To repeat, the brahmins were not subject to any
¯
authority other than that of the king. And the king, who came
from the warrior caste and not from the brahmin caste, did
¯
not have the authority to teach the Veda. He was not in a
position, then, to compel the brahmins to toe a more conser¯
vative line in their speculations and queries. Furthermore,
there was no ecclesiastical structure, and there were no
creeds.76 The way to whatever wisdom is naturally available
to man was, for the brahmins, wide open.
¯
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Some of the most astute scholars of the tradition of speculative thought in ancient India have admitted that they find
the adherence of the orthodox schools to Vedic authority
inscrutable, given the sophistication and independence of
their views on the question of ultimate origins and on the
question of Vedic authority itself. It is remarked, with
something amounting to dismay, that the logical, physical,
and (with a few exceptions) even metaphysical speculations in
these schools are not supported by appeal to Vedic lore but by
appeal to reasoning and ordinary experience.77 The express
adherence of the orthodox schools to Vedic authority is often
put down to a thoughtless cultural bias, as though it never
occurred to the orthodox thinkers that the caste system might
be mere artifice and convention, in spite of the fact that the
heterodox schools, whose emergence provoked the orthodox
response, had taught precisely that.
9
It has been claimed that philosophy originates with the
discovery of nature, more particularly with the discovery of
the difference between nature and convention, nature being
an intrinsic governing principle inherent in the world, as
distinct from an extrinsic governing principle, i.e. a creatorGod, transcendent to the world. We saw earlier that the
concept of prakrti, particularly as developed in the orthodox
Sankhya school as a teleological, though unconscious,
¯
intrinsic governing principle, corresponds in large measure to
the Greek concept of physis. Another close correspondence is
found in the concept of svabhava, which, I noted, can be
¯
translated as “own being” or “own nature.” Lokayata
¯
contrasts svabhava directly with unseen causes and indirectly
¯
with Vedic injunctions, both ethical and ritual, that is, with
convention.
That the uncaused nature of things, their own being,
could emerge in explicit connection with a critique of
convention in the heterodox Lokayata school should, then,
¯
come as no great surprise. That nature did not emerge in
CAREY
49
explicit connection with a critique of convention in the
orthodox schools, even the most venturesome of them,
should also come as no great surprise. The precarious state of
svadharma prevented nature from being opposed to
convention within the orthodox tradition. But for this reason
a theme conspicuously present in Western philosophy is
conspicuously absent in Indian philosophy. Although the
nature of consciousness, mind, and intellect are central
questions, the question of man as such does not receive much
of an investigation. The reason for this otherwise
unaccountable omission is that even before the question is
asked the answer is given, appalling in its starkness. Man as
such is the caste animal.
But how, the student of Western philosophy will ask,
could genuinely philosophical natures endure the injustice of
such a system? To this question a sophisticated brahmin might
¯
respond, “It was precisely the passion for justice, coupled
with the attempt to elevate the fundamental principle of
reality, brahman, above all concern with justice, that led to
the doctrine of karma: one gets exactly what one deserves,
without any assistance from on high. One’s present caste
standing is determined by the moral quality of one’s past
deeds, just as one’s future caste standing is determined by the
moral quality of one’s present deeds. What’s that, if not
justice?” But it’s just a myth. “True, but it’s a salutary myth.
After all, isn’t it one of the discoveries made by philosophy
itself that all political communities have, and must have, their
myths, their noble lies, about justice?” You’re right of course,
but…. “And while we’re at it,” our sophisticated brahmin
¯
might continue, “let us not forget that the philosopher as
philosopher, in the West no less than in India, necessarily
gives wisdom a higher place than morality in his scheme of
things. What business does a philosopher have being
indignant?” (Profound silence.)
Seen in the above light, the ethical order of law and duty,
of dharma, supported by Vedic tradition, simply could not be
taught in the orthodox schools to be merely conventional, to
�50
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
be only one way among others, to be “just our way.” The
thinkers in these schools taught, quite understandably, that
Vedic dharma was the right way simply. But it is likely that the
more speculatively bold among them upheld Vedic dharma
solely for the reasons mentioned earlier. At any rate, it is
incontestable that, by institutionalizing a system in which
status and power were vested in different castes, a system in
which learning was the sine qua non for the higher if less
politically powerful, though nonetheless independent, caste,
the Veda, as interpreted by the brahmins, also institution¯
alized the possibility of speculative boldness, or philosophy.78
Still, one might object, is not the knowledge that this socalled speculative boldness aims at merely a means to
something else, namely liberation? And is not knowledge, as
an end in itself, the goal of philosophy properly understood?
There is a twofold response to this question. In the first place,
it is by no means clear that knowledge is conceived by all, or
even by the greatest, Western philosophers as an end in itself
simply. They might say that the end in itself, at least for
human beings, is happiness. If knowledge contributed not to
the happiness of the knower but to his unhappiness,
philosophy as a way of life could hardly be defended except
in moral terms. And a moral defense of philosophy would
hardly be congenial to philosophy, at least not as I have
narrowly defined it.79
In the second place, though knowledge in Indian
philosophy is indeed in the service of liberation, liberation is
not first and foremost liberation from successive reincarnations. It is, first and foremost, liberation from illusion, i.e.,
liberation from ignorance. Certainly a demythologized
concept of liberation would have occurred to those orthodox
thinkers whose allegiance to the Veda was mainly prudential.
In any case, knowledge, and neither mere belief nor moral
action and dutiful fulfillment of Vedic ritual injunctions, was
in several of the orthodox schools held to be the sole path to
liberation. More precisely, knowledge was held to be both the
necessary and the sufficient condition for liberation, or to be
CAREY
51
liberation simply. Knowledge for its own sake, knowledge as
an end in itself, then, cannot be regarded as a specific feature
of philosophy in the West in contradistinction to philosophy
in ancient India.
One of the curiosities of the Indian speculative tradition
was its tendency to become more, not less, theistic with the
passage of time. One cannot help but suspect that the
growing theistic orientation was occasioned in part by
external developments, especially by contact with Islam
following the Muslim conquest and with Christianity during
the British raj. A number of articulate and well known Indian
thinkers of the last two centuries, apparently construing
themselves as something like good will ambassadors to the
West, have offered popularized accounts of Indian speculative
thought that have exaggerated the affinities between Vedic
tradition, including the philosophical tradition, and the
revealed religions of the West, particularly Christianity. At the
other end, Westerners in search of an alternative religious
experience, free from the scrutiny of a judgmental God, have
claimed to find in Hinduism a less guilt-ridden spirituality,
one that is less dogmatically divisive and more accepting of
people for what they are.80 All this has led to the familiar
picture of Indian thought as almost uniformly mystical and
intuitive, a caricature that a number of scholars, Western and
Indian, have taken pains to correct.81 Students of the rationalist tradition of the West, from Parmenides through
Thomas Aquinas right on up to Husserl, as well as students
restricting their attention to the contemporary analytic scene,
are not inclined to regard what strikes them on first hearing
as an amorphous mix of meditation and compassion as a
substitute for thought. Few of them are aware that the ideal
of rational autonomy, to which they themselves are
committed, shaped the life of the mind in ancient India as
well.
The study of Indian philosophy provides an important
perspective on Western philosophy, a perspective from which
Western philosophy can be viewed from without but not from
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
above, and as an alternative rather than an opponent. In
particular, the study of Indian philosophy sheds unexpected
but welcome light on a theme dear to Western philosophers,
namely, the choiceworthiness of the philosophic life itself. In
the West the great antagonist to philosophy has been revealed
religion. The truth-seeking philosopher cannot be indifferent
to the possibility that the Truth might choose to reveal itself,
or rather himself, to man. For such revelation, undertaken at
the initiative of the divine and eclipsing in significance everything man could find out about ultimate principles on his
own, would render the achievements of philosophy paltry, to
say the least. Not surprisingly, then, Western philosophy has
invested a lot of energy in trying to rule out this possibility,
so much so that, viewed from the outside, it can appear to be
more interested in convincing itself of the rightness of its own
way than in apprehending ultimate principles and ontological
truth. Indian philosophy, on the other hand, devotes little
attention to justifying itself. It has no comparably great antagonist. For Vedic religion, as interpreted in the various schools
of orthodox speculation, is, as I have tried to show, not a
religion of revelation, at least not in the Biblical sense. The
existence of the divine, or the closest thing there is to the
divine, namely brahman, does not imply limitations on what
man can achieve in the way of knowing ultimate principles
and ontological truth on his own. Quite the contrary. Of
course, the Western philosopher might say that it is not just
the possibility of revelation, of a disclosure undertaken at the
initiative of the divine, that is worrisome to philosophy. Quite
apart from the special problem of election that is part and
parcel of the concept of revelation, the possibility that there
is a being who, right now, possesses the very wisdom that the
philosopher does not possess, but only loves, is humbling. To
this concern the Indian philosopher would respond that it
needn’t be regarded that way at all. Certainly not, if ¯tman is
a
indeed brahman, not just later on in some kind of misty
hereafter but here and now. He would attempt to reassure his
Western counterpart on this point: “That art thou.” It is just
CAREY
53
a matter of realizing this fundamental and ultimate truth, he
would add. And he would ask what experience the Western
philosopher has had that causes him to persist in doing battle
against an opponent so immature and unworthy of serious
consideration as is Biblical religion.
I shall not venture to suggest an answer to this question
on behalf of the Western philosopher82 The primary purpose
of this paper has been to argue that philosophy, even
according to its most austere conception as rational atheism,
did in fact emerge in ancient India.83 After all, if philosophy
is natural to man, if it is not just the dispensation of an
inscrutable historical fate, then one would expect it to have
emerged, given enough time, wherever it was not impeded.
The impediments to the emergence of philosophy are absence
of letters, absence of leisure, and the presence of a religious
or political authority hostile to unfettered speculation about
the whole, its essential constitution and its ultimate
foundation. These impediments were not operative in the
speculative tradition of ancient India. It would be surprising,
then, if philosophy had not emerged there, assuming that
historicism is wrong and that the classical Western philosophers were correct in their assessment that philosophy is
natural, that it is a permanent possibility coeval with man.
Notes
1
I have adopted the current Romanization convention for Sanskrit terms,
with one exception: I have rendered anusvara prior to labials with an
¯
“m,” but in all other cases with an “n.”
2
Rg Veda 10.129 in A Source Book in Indian Philosophy, ed. Sarvepalli
Radhakrishnan and Charles A. Moore (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1957), 23. Hereafter cited as Sourcebook. (In the interests of
greater literalness and consistency, I have modified some of the translations from this text and from others that I cite. I have entirely retranslated certain passages.) Compare 10.121 (24-25). On the original relation
¯¯
of being and non-being, see Bhagavad Gi ta (ed. and trans.Winthrop
Sargeant (Garden City, NY: Doubleday), 9.19; 11.37; and especially
13.12: the “beginningless” (anadimat), which is neither being nor non¯
¯¯
being, is identified with brahman. Compare also Bhagavad Gi ta 2.16.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Ibid. 8.89.34 (Sourcebook, 34). Compare 10.121 (24-25).
4
Rg Veda 2.12.5 in The Rig Veda: An Anthology, ed. and trans. Wendy
Doniger O’Flaherty (London: Penguin, 1981), 161.
5 See, for example, 1.164.6 (Sourcebook, 21) and 10.114.5, quoted in
The Vedic Experience—An Anthology of the Vedas, ed. and trans.
Raimundo Panikkar (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 660.
6
Vedic religion gradually turned into Hinduism. Although a distinction
can be made between them, I shall, in the interests of simplicity, treat
them as earlier and later stages of one evolving phenomenon.
7
It is sometimes said that the original fourfold division should be understood as a division into classes, and that only the polymorphous divisions
that subsequently emerged should count as caste divisions. This
distinction, however, cannot be insisted upon. The bewildering multiplicity of castes that came into being later on appears to have emerged
¯¯
out of the forbidden mixing of the original four. See Bhagavad Gi ta 1.4044 and Laws of Manu 7.24, 8.352-353, 8.418 (Sourcebook, 186,177,
187). There was also a certain overlap in the usage of the terms “class”
(varna) and “caste” (jati) in the so-called “Epic” period of ancient India.
¯
See Wilhelm Halbfass, Tradition and Reflection (Albany: SUNY Press,
1991), 350-53. The term “caste” has the advantage over “class” of
naming not merely a group into which one happens to be born, but, due
to karmic causality, the group into which one deserves to be reborn. “The
problem of a potential injustice of such exclusion [of the su dra, or
¯
servant, from the Vedic ceremonies of initiation] is…easily resolved by
referring to the doctrine of karma and rebirth, which explains and
justifies the current caste status and allows for a future ascent to higher
stages” (Ibid. 72; cf. 349. See Chandogya Upanisad 5.10.7; Manu 9.335,
¯
12.9 in Sourcebook, 66-67, 188, 173). Louis Dumont, in his important
and controversial study, Homo Hierarchicus (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1980), refers to this karmic justification of caste (359, n.
25g.), but he can hardly be said to give it proper emphasis, although it
supports his claim that hierarchy is an essentially religious concept (6566). Dumont himself tries to limit the term “castes” to the later development and uses “classes” to name the original distinction. But in the
original distinction we also find the separation of status from power that
Dumont rightly insists is constitutive of Indian society, ancient and
modern, a separation that is not readily suggested by the word “class.” In
this paper I use “caste” in referring to the original fourfold division. Since
it is only about this fourfold division that I shall be speaking, there should
be no confusion.
8
Brhadaranyaka Upanisad 4.5.15, in The Thirteen Principal Upanishads,
¯
2d rev. ed., trans. Robert Hume (Delhi: Oxford University Text, 1931),
147. The whole clause “sa eva neti netyatman” (with sandhi) is translated
¯
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55
by Hume as “That Soul is not this, it is not that,” which is fine except for
the fact that ¯tman is more literally rendered as “self ” than “soul.” The
a
Sanskrit text, moreover, does not distinguish between small and large case
letters. The demonstrative pronoun is presumably intended to distinguish
between the ¯tman, i.e., the genuine self in its purity, and the familiar
a
though spurious self that is absorbed, one might say, in maya.
¯ ¯
9
Brhadaranyaka Upanisad 1.4.10; Chandogya Upanisad 3.14.4; 8.7.4;
¯
¯
8.10.1; 8.11.1. These two Upanisads are of great antiquity. See also
Mandu kya Upanisad 2; Isa Upanisad 4-6, 15-16; and Mundaka Upanisad
¯ ¯
¯
2.1.2-4,10; 3.2.9. (These texts are all contained in The Thirteen Principal
Upanishads.) The threefold relationship of brahman, maya, and ¯tman
¯ ¯
a
forms something of a parallel to the threefold relationship of thing-initself, phenomena (the total complex of which is nature), and transcendental ego that one finds in the philosophy of Kant.
10
Chandogya Upanisad 6.9-13; 8.11.1: tat tvam asi.
¯
11
Nor should brahman be confused with brahmana, the name of a
¯
member of the priestly caste. To avoid confusion I shall adopt the
convention, employed in Sourcebook and other texts, of transliterating
the latter term as “brahmin.”
¯
12
In the West, philosophy has been concerned with validating itself as the
most choiceworthy way of life. It has been concerned in particular with
showing that the philosophical life is more choiceworthy than the life of
simple piety, that is, than the life of devotion and loving obedience to the
loving command of a providential God. The evidence closest at hand for
the existence of such a God is found in our moral experience. The moral
view of the world, which originates out of this experience, postulates
God as the ultimate author of the moral law, or as moral judge, or both.
A central project of Western philosophy, then, has been the critique of
morality, especially of such concepts as radical freedom of the will,
transcendent law, and dutiful obedience as the unconditioned condition
of the human good. There is no comparable critique of morality in
classical Indian philosophy. The reason is that in the Hindu religion, at
least in the sophisticated religion of the Upanisads, the divine is neither
the author of a moral law nor a moral judge, nor providential in any
sense recognizable in Biblical religion. The doctrine of impersonal karmic
causality lies entirely outside the theological problematic except insofar as
it supports an equally impersonal concept of the divine. See, for example
Sankhya-Pravacana Su tra 5.2. (Sourcebook, 450).
¯
¯
13
Rg Veda 10.90.11-12. Compare Brhadaranyaka Upanisad 1.4.10-15;
¯
¯¯
Bhagavad Gi ta 4.13; Manu 1.31.
14
Kautilya, Arthasastra, ed. and trans. R.P Kangle (Delhi: Motilal
¯
.
Banarsidass,1988), 2:1.3.4-7, hereafter cited as Arthasastra.
¯
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
15
The expression “twice-born” refers to the initiation (upanayana) or
investiture with the sacred thread that the members of the upper three
castes undergo. It is likened to a second birth.
16
Kautilya, 1.3.13.
17
Kautilya, 1.3.4-8. I shall use the general expression “the Veda” to refer
not only to the four Vedas but also to the appended treatises that were
accorded comparable authority in the tradition. Kangle makes the
following observation: “[A]ctually it is only in the Dharmasu tras, a
¯
branch of the Vedanga Kalpa, that the duties of the varnas [castes] and
¯
¯sramas [stages of life] are laid down in detail” (2:7). This fact may help
a
explain why su dras were not permitted even to study the Veda.
¯
18
See Leo Strauss, What is Political Philosophy (Glencoe, Ill: The Free
Press,1959), 37 and Liberalism Ancient and Modern (New York: Basic
Books,1969), 11-12.
19
Arthasastra 1.4.11-15. On the separation of the political from the
¯
religious, see Dumont, 263-93. On the concept of danda as legitimate
force, see pp. 302-03, where Dumont quotes the following passage from
the Mahabhvrata: “if there was on earth no king bearing the stick of
¯
punishment, the stronger would roast the weaker as fishes on a spike.”
See also Manu 7.22. In this connection, it is worth noting that a rise in
caste status within a single life occasionally happened as a result of
political exigency, a state affairs expressed in the dry aphorism, “Whoever
rules is a ksatriya.” See A. L. Basham, The Wonder That Was India
(Calcutta: Rupa and Co., 1954), 92.
20
Arthasastra 1.7.
¯
21
There are other end goals, namely, right action (dharma), wealth
(artha), and pleasure (kama); but these end goals are subservient to liberation, which is, above all, liberation from ignorance.
22 Hume, in his translation of the Katha Upanisad (The Thirteen Principal
Upanishads) renders the second half of 4.2.1 (353) as “A certain wise
man, while seeking immortality, introspectively beheld the soul (Atman)
face to face.” The translation is marred by the inexplicable insertion of
the phrase “face to face,” which corresponds to nothing in the Sanskrit
text, at least as it appears in Eight Upanisads, (Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama,
1989), 1:180. There the text reads, without sandhi, as follows: kas cit
¯
dhi ras pratyak ¯tmanam aiksat ¯vrttacaksuh amrttvam icchan.
a ¯
a
23
“Those who, even worshiping other divinities, sacrifice with faith
¯¯
(sraddha) sacrifice also to me,” Bhagavad Gi ta 9.23. Compare Exod.
34:14; Deut. 29:17; Ps. 96:5; John 4:22; 1 Cor.1:20.
CAREY
57
24
The Sanskrit verbal radical “vid-” means “know,” not “see.” The root
sense of “veda” does not refer to sight, though this sense is present in the
Greek “eidos” and “idea” (which were originally preceded by a digamma
having the sound of an English “w”) and also in the closely related Latin
“video” and English “vision.” All these words are conjectured to have
derived from the Indo-European root “weid-”, which itself may not have
referred exclusively to sight. Two conjectured derivatives of “weid-” in
English that do not refer exclusively to sight are “guide” and “wit.” Cf.
Calvert Watkins, The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo European
Roots (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985), 74.
25
There is nothing in Hinduism, at least in the sophisticated Upanisadic
tradition, that is comparable to, say, God’s election of Abraham.
26
Cf. W Halbfass, India and Europe (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989), 29.
.
27
It should go without saying that faith (sraddha), particularly in the
¯
carrying out of ritual performances, and devotion (bhakti) are central to
religious Hinduism, however marginal they may be in this or that speculative school. Such concepts are not absent from the Upanisads.
Occasionally, however, what at first glance seems like an unqualified
theism turns out, on close inspection, to be quite different. See, for
example, Katha 1.2.23. There the self (atman) that reveals (or discloses,
¯
vivrnute) its own (or its own character, svam) is not exactly “a thou”
¯
since it is ultimately the same as the self that is seeking it. Hume (The
Thirteen Principal Upanishads, 350) divines “the first explicit statement of
the doctrine of Grace (prasada)” just a little earlier in this section, at
¯
1.2.20. To his credit, however, he notes that prasada can also mean
¯
tranquility, that it unquestionably has this meaning in other Upanisadic
passages that he cites, and that the greatest commentator on the
Upanisads, namely, Sankara takes the term to mean precisely tranquility,
and not grace. See Eight Upanisads: With the Commentary of
¯¯
Sankaracarya, trans. Swami Gambhi rananda, (Calcutta: Motilal
¯¯
¯ ¯
Banarsidass, 1989) 1:153-54. That prasada, in the philosophical tradition
¯
at least, presupposes advance preparation and discernment (not to
mention merit) on the part of the recipient, if that’s even the word for it,
further distinguishes this notion from the Biblical conception of grace.
28
See, for example, Rg Veda 7.103; 9.112; 10.86.
29
¯
Vigrahavyavartani , Sections 21-24.
¯
30
“The worship of the Buddha is merely an act of commemoration. The
popular gods were introduced into Buddhism in its more religious form
to serve as objects for meditation,” Sourcebook, 273. Sokyo Ono, in
Shinto: The Kami Way (Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1962), gives the
following account of the adjustment that, after an initial period of
conflict, allowed for the peaceful coexistence of Shinto, which is the
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
native religion of Japan, and Buddhism, which had been imported from
without. “[I]n the eighth century a compromise was reached which
resulted in the teaching that the kami [Shinto gods] were pleased to
receive Buddhist sutras as offerings and to hear them recited in worship.
As a consequence, Buddhist temples were established alongside shrines,
ostensibly to satisfy the kami, make them into Buddhist believers, and
finally raise them to the level of buddhas” (85-86). One wonders if the
Shinto gods, in coming to recognize their own insubstantiality, were
supposed to have converted to atheism.
31
Excerpted from the Sarvadarsanasangraha in Sourcebook, 233-34. I
have added some commentary within brackets, in this text and in the
next one cited, to bring into sharper relief the central claims of this
school.
32
W Halbfass speaks of the “intriguing etymological kinship” of the
.
Sanskrit bhu with the Greek phy- from the Greek word for nature,
¯
physis, is formed. On Being and What there Is: Classical Vaisesika and the
History of Indian Ontology (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 21-22. On the
Indo-European root bheu-, see Watkins, p. 8, and the table of sound
correspondences on p. 111. In the first passage that I quoted from the Rg
Veda, the word I translated as “own determination,” which can also mean
spontaneity, namely svadha, includes the component sva, as does
¯
¯¯
svabhava. Note the use of svabhava in Bhagavad Gi ta 5.14; compare with
¯
¯
sambhavami, “I originate myself.” in 4.6.
¯
33
Sourcebook, 248.
34
Sarvasiddhatsangraha, in Sourcebook, 234-35. I commented on some of
¯
these passages in my article, “On the Discovery of Nature,” The St. John’s
Review, 46/1, (2000): 127-28, 141.
¯¯
See, for example, Baghavad Gi ta 16.8, and compare 18.71. One
occasionally comes across materialist speculation even in the sruti, the
most venerable sources of Vedic tradition. See, for example,
Brhadaranyaka Upanisad 2.4.12; compare Chandogya Upanisad 8.7-8
¯
¯
35
36
A close equivalent in the West can be found in the Summa Theologiae
of Thomas Aquinas, the articles of which commence with a statement of
objections to the thesis being proposed, followed by a quotation from
authority, often but not always scriptural, and, after this, a comprehensive
argument in favor of the thesis, typically without appeal to authority, and,
in conclusion, responses to the objections seriatim.
37 Rg Veda 10.125. The dividing up of speech by the gods, referred to in
the third verse of this hymn, reminds one of the dismemberment of the
purusa in Rg Veda 10.90.
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59
¯
Brahma-Su tras 2.1.33 in Brahma-Su tra-Bhasya of Sri Sankaracarya,
¯
¯
¯
¯¯
trans. Swami Gambhirananda, (Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1983).
38
¯
Brhadaranyaka Upanisad 2.4.5. See Brahma-Su tra-Bhasya of Sri
¯
¯
¯
Sankaracarya, 360.
¯¯
39
40
“The Discovery of Nature,” 122 ff.
41
Physics 199b31.
42
That philosophy may have emerged more naturally where IndoEuropean languages were spoken would hardly prove that the emergence
of philosophy was an accident of linguistics. After all, it is at least
thinkable—if not so easily sayable these days—that some languages are
naturally superior to others, precisely because they are more in tune with
what is fundamentally real or at least suggest a wider range of possibilities
for thought. See Martin Heidegger, Einleitung in die Metaphysik, 2d. ed.
(Tübingen:Max Niemeyer Verlag 1958), 43. See the English translation
by Ralph Manheim, Introduction to Metaphysics, (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1959), 57. In any case, the conditions favoring the
emergence of philosophy in ancient India were, as I argue in the sequel,
not so much linguistic as theologico-political.
43
See, for example, Brhadaranyaka 1.4.1; Katha 1.3.11, 2.1.12; Isa 16.
¯
¯
44
There are a plurality of purusas, in the Sankhya school. But they are all
¯
of the same kind, so the system can still be regarded as essentially
dualistic.
45
Sankhya-Karika 21 in Sourcebook, 424. This analogy, however, cannot
¯
¯ ¯
be pressed too far, since for Aristotle the divine intellect does not, as final
cause, direct nature in quite the same way that the lame man being
carried would presumably direct the blind man carrying him.
46
¯¯
Sankhya-Karika 13 in Sourcebook, 429. In the Bhagavad Gi ta it is said
¯
¯
that the gunas are present everywhere, even among the gods in heaven,
and that they, too, originate out of prakrti (18.40; cf. 3.33).
47
Physics 922b19; cf. Metaphysics 1072b14.
¯ ¯ ¯
Sankhya-Karika 56-57 in Sourcebook, 442-43. The Pu rva-Mi mamsa
¯
¯ ¯
¯
school makes similar arguments against divine creation of the world. The
notion that the play of brahman, and not any purpose outside of this
play, is responsible for the phenomenal world may have emerged in
response to arguments against creation such as the above. Sankara at least
argues this way. See his commentary on Brahma-Su tras 2.1.32-36.
¯
48
49
50
Yoga Su tra 1.23-29. (Sourcebook, 458-459).
¯
Halbfass, On Being and What There Is, 231; cf. 70 and 271. Halbfass’s
study is a comprehensive account of Vaisesika and contains translations of
some of the more interesting ontological texts of this school, 237-69. See
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
also Archibald Edward Gough, The Vaisesika Aphorisms of Kanada (New
¯
Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1975, originally published in 1873).
Knowledge of the truth is explicitly said to be the highest good in
Aphorism 4, and this may be implied as early as Aphorism 2 (see the
commentary on pp. 2-3). In Aphorism 3, authoritativeness, presumably of
the Veda, is linked to what is said in Aphorism 2. After Aphorism 4, the
author gets down to business, namely, categorizing all that exists,
beginning with substances (dravya): earth, water, fire (tejas) air, ether,
time, space, self (atman), and mind (manas). Halbfass points out that the
¯
“radical [Vaisesika] innovator…identified space, time, and ether, with
God.” On Being and What There Is, 217.
51
Nyaya-Sutra 1.1.4 in The Nyaya-Su tras of Gotama, trans. M. M.
¯
¯
¯
Statisa Chandra Vidyabhu sana, rev. and ed. Nandalal Sinha, (Delhi:
¯ ¯
Motilal Banarsidass, 1990), 3. Compare The Nyaya-Sutras of Gautama,
¯
trans. and ed. Ganganatha Jha, (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1984), 1:111,
¯ ¯
¯
hereafter referred to as Jha. Jha’s four-volume edition of the Nyaya-Sutra
¯ ¯
¯
includes a massive amount of commentary, both traditional and more
recent.
52
Compare Aristotle, On Sense and Sensible Objects 442b9.
53
Nyaya-Sutra, 1.32-39 in Sourcebook, 362-63. Jha, 1:355-445. Note
¯
¯
that Steps 3, 4 and 5 virtually replicate the classical syllogism familiar in
the West. Whatever is produced is non-eternal; sound is produced;
[therefore] sound is non-eternal. Steps 1 and 2 of the Nyaya syllogism set
¯
the stage for what we might call the syllogism proper. Step 1 is the
enunciation, and this is rarely omitted, even in the West. It suffices to
think of the propositions of Euclid’s Elements, the articles of Thomas’s
Summa Theologica, and the “Antinomies” in Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason, all of which commence with an announcement of what is about
to be demonstrated. Step 2, which is the most dispensable of the five,
foretells and encapsulates the syllogism that is about to occur. What is
most peculiar in the Nyaya syllogism is the use of an example—a single
¯
one suffices in the absence of a counter example—to establish the major
premise. The syllogism implies the presence of an opponent not so much
as the target of an elenchus but, rather, as a kind of conscience to check
the introduction of less than fully evident major premises.
54
In the Nyaya and Vaisesika schools, sabda “is of two kinds: noise
¯
¯
(dhvani) and articulate alphabet sounds (varna).” John Grimes, A Concise
Dictionary of Indian Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989), 287. In the
English version of the Nyaya-Sutra to which we have been referring, one
¯
and the same Sanskrit term, sabda, is variously rendered as “sound,”
¯
“word,” and “verbal testimony.”
55 This principle occurs in a slightly different form in the syllogistic of the
Nyaya school, where, as we saw, a universal proposition can be estab¯
CAREY
61
lished as a major premise by means of a single example, unless the
opponent can advance a counter-example.
56
See Sourcebook, 491.
57
Slokavartika, trans. G. Jha, in Sri Garib Das Oriental Series, no. 8,
¯
(India: Sri Satguru Publications), 460.
58
Slokavartika, 416
59
Grimes, A Concise Dictionary of Indian Philosophy, 301 and 339. See
¯
¯
Bruce Perry, “Early Nyaya and Hindu Orthodoxy: Anvi ksiki and
¯
Adhikara,” Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the
¯
Humanities 59 (1997): 455. “Vacaspati [a Naiyayika] thus contends that
¯
¯
the ultimacy of reasoning consists in the ability to teach someone the
validity of the Veda and the nature of the objects of knowledge. That
these cannot be conveyed without reasoning is a bold enough claim. That
Nyaya actually establishes the validity of the Vedas is extraordinary. The
¯
Vedas, which define orthodoxy, are now dependent on reasoning. It
follows that Nyaya is the most fundamental of the orthodox sciences,
¯
since it is the means by which orthodoxy itself is established.”
60
Nyaya-Sutra 1.2.13, Commentary; Sourcebook, 365; cf. Jha, 1:571-72.
¯
61
Sankhya-karika 2 in Sourcebook, 427; Gerald Larson, Classical
¯
¯ ¯
Sankhya, 2d rev. ed. (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1979), 256. Compare
¯
¯¯
Bhagavad Gi ta 2.46 and 2.52.
62
Not insignificantly, “the unmanifest” according to Sankhya is nature.
¯
The products of evolving nature, among them the particulars that lie
before our eyes, are “the manifest.” The relationship between the unmanifest process of production and the manifest products is comparable to
the relationship between natura naturans and natura naturata, respectively, in the philosophy of Spinoza.
The complexity of Sankara’s account of ¯svara is treated by Paul
i
Hacker in “Distinctive Features of the Doctrine and Terminology of
Sankara,” in Philology and Confrontation, ed. W Halbfass (Albany: SUNY
.
Press, 1995), 90-91: “What characterizes God as creator of the universe
and Lord of the universe…is ‘dependent on restriction through illusory
upadhis [deceits, or adventitious connections, i.e., the conditions of
¯
maya].’ It is possible to conceive of God as creator and Lord of the
¯ ¯
universe only in the context of mundane existence….” And yet, “[t]he
term ¯svara can be replaced for brahman everywhere….With ¯svara…is
i
i
seldom [sic!] connected the notion that there is something illusory about
it.” Not surprisingly, Sankara has sometimes been accused of an
unaccountable “illogicality” in his account of ¯svara, in spite of an
i
abundance of evidence attesting to the fact that his logical acumen was
extraordinary.
63
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
64
Vakyabhasya on the Kena Upanisad, cited in P Hacker “Relations of
¯
¯
.
Early Advaitins to Vaisnavism” in Philology and Confrontation, 38. The
word translated as “sovereignty” here is svarajyam. Compare Chandogya
¯¯
¯
Upanisad, 7.25.2, where it is said of anyone who recognizes the
omnipresence of the ¯tman (self), “he becomes sovereign” (sas svarat
a
¯
¯¯
bhavati). Whereas Gambhi rananda (564) translates svarat as “sovereign,”
¯
Hume (261) translates it as “autonomous,” which is somewhat more
accurate. The components of this word, in stem form, are sva and raj—
¯
literally, “own king.” It is worth noting here that Sankara explicitly calls
attention to a significant privilege of the ¯tman: its logically indubitable
a
existence. See Sarvepalli Radharkrishnan, Indian Philosophy, (Delhi:
Oxford University Press, Centenary Edition, 1989), 2:476.
65
Perry, 466, n. 16.
66
Arthasastra, 1.2.5. See the gloss of the Malayalam commentary (Cb):
¯
“[Vedic lore] only serves the purpose of preventing people from calling
[one conversant with the ways of the world] a nastika [one who does not
¯
accept the authority of the Veda].”(Arthasastra, 2:6).
¯
67
Arthasastra, 1.2.11.
¯
68
Compare The Decisive Treatise, Determining What the Connection is
between Religion and Philosophy, in which Averroes similarly shows how
the interpretation of the Qur’an can be carried out in a way that is
¯
compatible with the aims of philosophy.
69
It goes without saying that reason was not universally accorded such
authority and autonomy in ancient India. Perry, (450, 465), cites the
following colorful passage from the Mahabharata 12.173.47-49: “I was a
¯ ¯
savant (panditaka), a logician, a despiser of the Veda, devoted to
worthless analytics, the science of reasoning (or logic, tarkavidyam), an
utterer of logical doctrines, a speaker with reasons in assemblies, both a
reviler and haughty in speech against the twice-born concerning Vedic
rituals, heterodox (nastika), and a doubter of everything, a fool and a
¯
self-styled learned man: the full fruition of which is this—my being a
jackal, oh twice-born one.” It stands to reason that this text and others
that Perry also cites would have made sense only if certain individuals,
perhaps even whole schools, were well known to be living this
questionable life of autonomous inquiry. Compare Manu 12.95.
70
Consider, in this connection, the following passage from Leo Strauss’s
Persecution and the Art of Writing: “Of the superstitious ‘books of the
astrologers,’ the [Jewish] scholar mentions one by name, The Nabatean
Agriculture, to which he seems to ascribe Hindu origin; and of the Hindus
he says in that context that they are a people who deny Divine revelation
(the existence of a ‘book from God’)” (123). “[T]he possibility is by no
means excluded that the originators of some of the superstitious practices
CAREY
63
or beliefs, and hence perhaps the authors of some of the superstitious
codes, were themselves philosophers addressing the multitude….[The
Sabeans] believed in the eternity of the world, i.e., they agreed with the
philosophers over and against the adherents of revelation as regards the
crucial question” (124). “It is perhaps not absurd to wonder whether
books such as The Nabatean Agriculture were written, not by simpleminded adherents of superstitious creeds and practices, but by adherents
of the philosophers” (125). “Avicenna’s esoteric teaching was expounded
in his Oriental Philosophy, and he is said to have called that teaching
‘oriental’ because it is identical with the view of the people of the orient”
(126 and n. 98). Strauss refers his readers to studies on these themes by
others, but to my knowledge, he does not undertake a further exploration
of the possibility of an Indian philosophy, properly so called, in his own
published works. See, however, Liberalism Ancient and Modern, 7.
71
It has been suggested that passages in Vaisesika texts that refer to
“liberation” might be later accretions, perhaps added in response to
accusations of heterodoxy. Cf. Halbfass, India and Europe, 271.
72
That the non-dualism of Advaita-Vedanta is truly theistic was
¯
challenged by later Vedantists, who abandon strict monism in favor of
some form of dualism that allows for an ultimate and not merely
aspectual distinction between the human self and brahman.
73
“An important consequence of accepting the Vedas as valid is that the
whole orthodox social order (varnasrama), which derives from the Veda,
¯
has to be accepted as valid as well” Perry, 465.
74
Arthasastra, 2.9. The classic if extreme expression of the necessity of
¯
staying within the confines of the caste to which one has been assigned by
karma accumulated in a previous life is the following:
Better one’s own dharma defective (that is, defectively performed viguna)
Than another’s dharma well performed;
Doing the action (karma) prescribed by one’s own nature (svabhava)
¯
One does not incur guilt.
¯¯
Bhagavad Gi ta 18.47; 3.35 and Manu 10.97. Compare Socrates’ use of
the phrase “to tou hautou prattein” at Republic 433a ff.; see also 434c1.
75
Not surprisingly, neither the Buddha nor Mahavira, the founder of
Jainism, were members of the brahmin caste. However, Brhaspiti, the
¯
legendary founder of Lokayata, appears to have been a brahmin prior to
¯
¯
his apostasy. All teachers in the orthodox schools were, of course,
members of the brahmin caste since the brahmins alone were permitted to
¯
¯
teach the Veda.
76
Consider the observation of S. Radharkrishnan, “The Brahmins are not
¯
a priesthood pledged to support fixed doctrines, but an intellectual
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aristocracy charged with the moulding of the higher life of the people,”
Indian Philosophy, 1.112. Needless to say, this “moulding” can take a
variety of forms. For example, “According to all Indian traditions [the
emperor Candragupta—fourth century B.C.] was much aided in his
conquests by a very able and unscrupulous brahman advisor
¯
called…Kautilya,” A. L. Basham, The Wonder that was India, 51. The
ruler “is told [by Kautilya] to go the length of having his secret agents
disguised as gods, and allowing himself to be seen in their company, in
order that his simpler subjects may believe that he mixes with the gods on
equal terms” (84).
77
Daya Krishna forcefully asks exactly what is meant by acceptance of
the Veda in the so-called orthodox schools, but after persuasively ruling
out the inadequate answers usually given to this question, he seems to
abandon the question itself. Indian Philosophy; A Counter Perspective
(London: Oxford University Press, 1991), 7 ff.
78
“…mit Hülfe einer religiösen Organisation haben [die Brahmanen] sich
die Macht, dem Volke seine Könige zu ernennen, während sie sich selber
abseits und ausserhalb hielten und fühlten, als die Menschen höherer und
überköniglicher Aufgaben” (#61); […with the help of a religious organization the brahmins appropriated the power of naming kings for the
¯
people, while they held themselves, and felt themselves, apart and
outside, as men of higher and supra-royal tasks.] Friedrich Nietzsche,
Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Kritische Studienausgabe 5, ed.Giorgio Colli
and Mazzino Montinari, 80.
79
Cf. n. 12.
80
It goes without saying that Western admirers of Hinduism are rarely
inclined to offer a spirited defense of the caste system.
81
I have in mind Surendranth Dasgupta, Daya Krsihna, Wilhelm
Halbfass, Paul Hacker, Natalya Isayeva, Jitendra N. Mohanty, and Dale
Riepe, to name just a few.
82
For a possible answer to this question see Leo Strauss, Spinoza’s
Critique of Religion, trans. E. M. Sinclair (New York: Schocken Books,
1965), 8- 9.
83
If this is true, it follows that what is most distinctive about the West is
not philosophy but the Biblical God.
Glossary of Terms
Advaita - non-dualism (i.e., monism), a branch of Vedanta
¯
¯
¯nvi ksiki - analytics, reasoning
a ¯
¯tman - the self
a
CAREY
65
brahman - the fundamental reality
brahmin (brahmana) - a member of the priestly caste
¯
¯
dharma - law or duty
Isvara - the Lord
karma - the effect of one’s actions on the self
Kautilya - a political philosopher and author of the
Arthasastra
¯
ksatriya - a member of the warrior caste (the king is a
member of this caste)
Lokayata - a heterodox school—materialism and hedonism
¯
maya - illusion; the world of appearances
¯ ¯
¯ ¯
¯ ¯ ¯
Mi mamsakas - adherents of Pu rva Mi mamsa
¯
Nagarjuna - A Buddhist philosopher and dialectician
¯ ¯
Nyaya - an orthodox school—logic and epistemology
¯
prakrti- nature
purusa - spirit; intellect; person; witness
¯ ¯ ¯
Pu rva-Mi mamsa - an orthodox school—Vedic apologetics
¯
sabda - sound: verbal testimony
¯
sandhi - adjustments for euphony within and between
Sanskrit words
Sankhya - an orthodox school—fundamental dualism of
¯
nature and spirit
Sankara - an Indian Philosopher and proponent of AdvaitaVedanta
¯
smrti - that which is remembered - secondary “revelation”
sruti - that which was heard by the sages - primary
“revelation” = the Veda
su dra - a member of the servant caste
¯
sunya - empty; sunyata - emptiness - the fundamental
¯
¯
¯
ontological concept of Buddhism
svabhava - own being; nature
¯
svadharma - lit.“own duty” i.e., one’s duties as a member of
a given caste
Upanisads - speculative treatises appended to the Vedas
¯ ¯ ¯
Uttara-Mi mamsa = Vedanta; an orthodox school—based
¯
chiefly on the Upanisads
Vaisesika - an orthodox school—atomism and categorization
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vaisya - a member of the farmer-merchant caste
Veda - generic name four the four Vedas and appended
treatises
Vedanta (lit. “end of the Veda”) - an orthodox school based
¯
on the Upanisads
vidya - science; knowledge
¯
Yoga - an orthodox school, paired with Sankhya
¯
Some tips on how to begin pronouncing Sanskrit words Macrons over “a,” “i,” and “u” indicate a lengthening of
these vowel; “s” and “s” can both be pronounced as “sh;” and
“c” is pronounced approximately as English “ch.” The letter
r (note the dot under it) is a vowel, not a consonant (the
consonant does not have a dot under it), often pronounced by
Westerners as “ri” but closer to “er” uttered quickly and with
a hint of a trill. Otherwise, the letters can be pronounced
pretty much as written, ignoring the dots under consonants,
which signify that they are cerebrals and not dentals. Native
speakers of English have difficulty distinguishing between
cerebrals and dentals, since the English dental is actually a
cross between a genuine dental and a cerebral. I have
rendered the nasal, anusvara, prior to labials with an “m,” but
¯
in all other cases with an “n.” Unvoiced non-aspirated consonants are hard to pronounce without hearing them in
contrast to unvoiced aspirated consonants. For example,
Sanskrit aspirated “ph” is pronounced exactly like English
“p”; Sanskrit unaspirated “p” has no English equivalent, that
is, no air is expelled when it is pronounced. Voiced aspirated
consonants, such as Sanskrit “bh,” are hard to pronounce too.
67
The Forgotten Faculty: The Place of
Phronêsis or Practical Sense in Liberal
Education (Plutarch and Aristotle)
David Levine
We think in generalities; we live in details.
Airport terminal display
Reading maketh a full man,
Conference a ready man,
And Writing an exact man.
Francis Bacon
Would a new Plutarch even be possible [today]?
Nietzsche1
1. Prologue in Seminar
Educations tailored to each person
are better than those given in common.
Aristotle2
The title of tonight’s talk, The Forgotten Faculty, is
ambiguous, deliberately so. One might have anticipated a talk
on the role of the teaching faculty in modern higher
education, in particular the regrettable subordination of the
teaching function to other lesser ends in today’s universities,
thereby distorting its proper role. Important though this
subject is, this is not my subject tonight.
Indeed, it is our good fortune at St. John’s that the faculty
is rightly understood to be at the very heart of the college, the
David Levine is a tutor and former dean on the Santa Fe campus of
St. John’s College. This is the Dean’s Lecture, delivered on August 27, 2004,
in Santa Fe.
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ministers and stewards of what we call the Program. We
tutors are not content with imparting bare skills and empty
generalizations, not satisfied with conveying the results of our
own or others’ thinking without requiring that you develop
your own capacities for such thoughtfulness. We have learned
from Plato’s Meno that lecturing and learning are not correlates like throwing and catching. Thus we don’t lecture at or
‘talk down’ (katagorein) to you. In our view it is the question,
¯
and not some answer, that is the proper instrument of
education. We begin each class accordingly.
Last night your seminars began with a question. Perhaps
at that moment, or perhaps somewhat later in the evening, a
member of the seminar, a tutor or fellow student, asked a
question or made a remark that “spoke to you,” that is, it
seemed “tailor-made” just for your learning, that bore on
your perplexity, your state of understanding then and there.
In “speaking to you” it spurred you to further reflection. It
somehow enabled you to step over your settled or
unexamined view and opened up a horizon of possibility
hitherto unforeseen. All of a sudden you were engaged as
never before; you were propelled forward; you had an
investment in jointly finding out where it all led. In short, you
were actively engaged in that joint enterprise we call conversation. You were on your way to discovery.
The question or remark that prompted all this was not so
much leading as opening, not a disguised commentary but an
invitation to exploration. It didn’t necessarily provide the
missing link of an incomplete thought process but, rather,
made you think about how you had been thinking and, in so
doing, cleared the way for discovery, or it offered for consideration something that opened a window of unsuspected
prospects. Such remarks or questions may have been coincidental, but they may also have been a tailor-made question
that artfully and with foresight made for greater thoughtfulness. How is this possible? To help us with this we need to
take a bit of a detour with the help of two authors on the
program, Aristotle and Plutarch.3
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LEVINE
2. “Human Beings Like to Talk”
They fought their countries battles and
conducted their campaigns in their talk.
Pyrrhus 1.5314
Aristotle is not an especially funny man. But there is a remark
in the Nicomachean Ethics—a book freshmen will spend long
hours studying this spring—that makes me smile at least, one
that suggests a very wry and penetrating way of looking at the
world, in particular at human life and our foibles and pretensions. He observes that human beings like to “talk,” in
particular we like to talk about human excellence or virtue
(aretê). Indeed, by so “philosophizing,” we think we are being
“serious human beings” (spoudaios).5
We all recognize this tendency to speak more loudly with
words than with deeds, to posture without actually being
effective, to “philosophize” and “pontificate” in the worst
senses of those terms (as well as to second guess, to play
Monday morning quarterback, to presume to know what one
should have done “if I were only there”—in short, to enjoy
the barbershop or coffee shop conversation, etc.).
There is much in Aristotle’s wry remark, but minimally he
is seeking to redirect his reader (“transpose them,”
Heidegger), and this in a decisive way, to get us to see that the
“truth” of such reflections and discussions—of what has come
to be called “ethics”—is not to be found in the talking, and
surely not in a “theory,” but can only be in the life lived and
the numerous individual deeds out of which a life is made.
Human beings like to talk, to be sure, but Aristotle, and we,
are interested in much more than just talk.
So let us turn tonight to someone who sought to look
carefully at “lives,” the writer of Lives of the Illustrious
Greeks and Romans, the first century political philosopher
Plutarch. In his work we see men of action who are often also
thinkers and who are distinguished by their judgment as
much as by their actions. They lived their lives one insight at
a time—as we all do—yet with such quality that their actions
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70
are not a staccato series of events, but reflect and have their
source in a more developed faculty. These are men who are
not content to just talk but to act and live fully, if not also
well.
3. Much More than History
Antony was so great that he was thought by others
worthy of higher things than his own desires.
Lives, Comparison of Demetrius and Antony 2.535
There is another reason why we should turn to Plutarch.
I was walking out of the bookstore last fall and about to turn
into the coffee shop, when I overheard a sophomore say to a
friend, somewhat puzzled and maybe even a little
exasperated, “Why are we reading Plutarch? It’s only
history.” At that point, turning around, I interjected the
enthusiastic remark of Rousseau (actually he was quoting
Montaigne at the time), and I quote, “Plutarch, he’s my man”
(“C’est mon homme que Plutarque”),6 hoping thereby to
encourage a reconsideration. I don’t know if it helped that
student, but it did spur me to undertake a course of reading
this past year from which I tried to answer this question and
understand the enthusiasm for Plutarch on the part of so
many of our program authors. For these authors—and they
number not a few,7 including, in addition to Montaigne and
Rousseau, Shakespeare, Montesquieu, most of the founders
of our country (Franklin, Madison, Jefferson), Emerson,
Nietzsche, Tolstoi, etc.—for them he is not “just history” but
much more, a teacher of a higher order.8
Though I read all of Plutarch’s Lives—all 1,451 pages!—
I have to admit that it was only a first reading for most of
these, and in general this is a new arena of exploration for
me. Nevertheless, drawn by the question, I ventured forth.
Now here I am before all of you, presenting my first formulations for your consideration (1.27). As in seminar, I trust
that I am among friends, friends who help each other to think
better, more precisely and deeper, about one another’s first or
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71
nascent thoughts. Thus this dean’s lecture, my “annual essay”
if you will, is indeed an essay, an attempt, a first effort of
discovery with all the attendant uncertainty that such a
venture always entails—as many of you know well from your
own efforts of discovery. Thus your generosity and
forbearance will be called upon this evening.
In reading Plutarch we are invited to re-enter9 the realm
of the city, of the “political” (politikê) in its original meaning:
the realm of the probable and the unlikely, of the inadvertent
and the deliberate, the unpredictable as well as of “signs and
auguries,” of strife (2.42) and harmony, fortune and
misfortune, good and bad (2.104) (where “things can be
otherwise,” according to Aristotle). We re-enter, in short, the
world in which we actually live our lives, “worthy of
memory,” Plutarch would say (1.49, 100, 583; 2.61), indeed,
worthy of our deepest consideration.
Here not everything is easily seen. With some things we
need assistance, a magnifying glass if you will, in order for
them to be brought to fuller view. Plutarch helps us to
experience the contest, travails, and challenges of the soul by
portraying it writ large,10 so to speak, in the public arena, on
the world stage and on the field of battle.11 Alongside the
virtues—moderation, justice, courage, prudence—we
experience the encompassing, worldly context in which
virtue fights to raise its head and become effective: jealousy,
fear, ambition; betrayal, flattery, avarice, cultural decline, and
ambition; privilege, shame, superstition, hatred, rivalry, and
ambition; avarice, disillusionment, panic, self-interest, and
ambition.12 Here we are given an opportunity to reflect on
the distinctive features of lives lived, their relative effectiveness, their weighty consequences, and their manifold
difficulties.
In reading Plutarch we experience the complexity of the
attempt to give order to human life in the city with Lycurgus
and Numa Pomplius; the precariousness of virtue with
Themistocles, Aristides and Marcus Cato; the havoc of tyrannical ambition with Pyrrhus and Lysander; the limited effec-
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tiveness of justice with Lucullus; the disasters consequent
upon excessive caution with Nicias and Crassus. We
experience also the lamentable loss of prudence with
Pompey; the ineffectiveness of absolute principles with Cato
the Younger; the transformation of excessive tenderness into
its opposite with Alexander; the futility of virtue when undermined by life’s circumstances with Phocion; the unbridled
desire for glory with Agis; the suspect powers of eloquence
with Demosthenes and Cicero; and, of course, the dominion
of passion with Antony.
Amidst these abundant and luxurious life stories—
“histories” he sometimes calls them—are observations
perhaps neither bound nor diminished by time: we are
encouraged to reflect on “the ages of man,” the causes of
political change, on statesmanship as the “art of the possible,”
the political force of character and example (paradeigma), the
ambiguity of greatness and the liabilities of success. We are
asked to reflect as well on the fate of youthful optimism; the
clash of virtue and misfortune, the psychodynamics of human
failings; on self-transformation forced by rude experience,
the absolutist language of the passions, the self-justifying
linguistic universes of the vices; on the pathological strategies
of ambition, and the moral intractability of wealth. These,
and many more, are indeed “worthy of memory.”
Before we proceed, one further remark. In presenting
Plutarch’s mature reflections, we are reminded of Aristotle’s
concern about young people:13 young people, he says
profoundly, are, well, young. And this presents a difficulty.
Because young people lack life experience, he says, they do
not make good observers and students of “politics,” that is,
they do not make good students of their own lives in the city,
in the polis.
Here Aristotle does not mean to be insulting, only honest.
For experience can only be one’s own. It cannot be taught,
and surely cannot be borrowed or poured from one person
into another. It requires time and judgment. Thus for
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Aristotle, there is no alternative to “growing up,” to
overcoming isolating adolescence and becoming a person of
experience—“mature.” So it falls to us during our period of
personal transformation at the College (beginning this
evening) to resolve to overcome this lack, through careful
reading (1.201) and greater thoughtfulness, that we might be
“strengthened by [such] experiences (1.646),” made better
students of our own lives in the polis and better able to
navigate its often-bewildering seas.
4. The Liberal Art of Life Writing
Everyone has faults; not everyone has virtues.
Goethe
It is in bagatelles that nature comes to light.
Rousseau
At various moments throughout his work, Plutarch steps back
and reflects on the activity of writing lives. On the first such
occasion, what strikes him above all is the benefit to himself
of such exercises:
It is for the sake of others that I first commenced
writing [what he here calls] biographies [he says,
yet] I find myself...attaching myself to it for my
own [sake]; the [excellences] virtues of these great
men serving me as a sort of looking-glass [or
mirror] in which I may see how to adjust and
adorn my own life. Indeed it can be compared to
nothing but daily living and associating together;
we...entertain each successive guest, view their
‘stature and their qualities,’ and select from their
actions all that is noblest and worthiest to know.
(Timoleon 1.325)
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“What more effective means to one’s [own] improvement
[than associating with what is excellent is there]?” he
wonders. He then elaborates:
My method in the study of history, is...by the
familiarity acquired in writing, to habituate my
memory to receive and retain images of the best
and worthiest of characters. I thus am enabled to
free myself from any ignoble, base, or vicious
impressions...by the remedy of turning my
thoughts....to these noble examples.
What is striking about this passage is that for Plutarch this
kind of writing is first of all a liberating (and hence a liberal)
activity, freeing and enabling him to shape himself as he seeks
to give shape to the lives of others. He here draws on two
ancient nomic principles:14 (1) we become like those with
whom we associate. This he extends to writing and books: we
become like that about which we think and like those from
whom we choose to learn.15 And its correlate, (2) we are
moved to imitate what we admire,16 or what one might call
the principle of emulation. “The mere sight of a conspicuous
example of excellence,” he says, immediately (euthus) brings
one to admiration (thaumazesthai) and therewith brings one
to imitate the doer. Indeed for Plutarch there is nothing like
the “living example” of human character (1.99).17 The
beautiful,18 he says, moves one to action towards it (to kalon
eph’hauto praktikos kinei kai praktiken euthus hormen
entithesin) (Pericles 1.202; 2.2-3).19 As a result he “thought fit
to spend his time and pains” associating with these illustrious
Greek and Roman “guests” for the benefit both of himself
and us.
Let us note, especially for our work here at the college,
the many rewards of writing that reach beyond the final
product. Writing can be an occasion for self-discovery and
self-improvement. It is the process, after all, that is enabling.20
Later he compares writing lives to portrait painting. He
says, we first must do “honor” (2.245) to our subject and that
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75
means, in the case of human beings, to capture “the stature
and qualities” of the person and not be content with external
likenesses (the mere “face”). Yet there is a question of
judgment here. He writes:
As we would wish that a painter who is to draw a
beautiful face, in which there is yet imperfection,
should neither wholly leave out, nor yet too
pointedly express what is defective, because this
would deform it21...so it is hard, or indeed perhaps
impossible, to show the life of a man wholly free
from blemish....any lapses or faults that occur,
through human passion or political necessity, we
may [generously] regard...as the shortcoming of
some particular [excellence] virtue, than as a
natural effect of vice...[and this] out of a
tender[ness] [aidoumenous: respect] to the
weakness of nature. (Cimon 1.643-4)
Conspicuous in this reflection is a different principle of care
from what we are accustomed to. It judiciously abstains from
journalistic realism, and above all from that sensationalism by
which we are daily overwhelmed by our media. It seeks rather
a measured rendering of a whole life, without at the same
time ignoring or exaggerating the negative (see 1.699; 2.285,
394). Discretion, in this view, is the better part of realism:
discriminating, weighing, focusing, estimating (2.394),
selecting (2.445), and finally diagnosing22 (1.699). On yet
another occasion he forewarns his readers that he is not—as
we might first think and as he himself sometimes says—an
historian, “collecting mere useless pieces of learning” (1.699),
but rather that he seeks to “epitomize” the lives of his
subjects.
It must be borne in mind that my design is not to
write histories, but lives. [For] the most glorious
exploits do not always furnish us with the clearest
discoveries of [excellence and deficiency] virtue
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
and vice in men; sometimes a matter of less
moment, an expression or [even] a jest informs us
better of the character and inclinations, than the
most famous sieges, the greatest armaments, or the
bloodiest battles.... Therefore, as portrait-painters
are more exact in the lines and features of the
face, in which the character is seen, than in the
other parts of the body, so I must be allowed to
give my more particular attention to the marks
and indications of the souls of men. (Alexander
2.139)23
So I must be allowed to give my more particular attention to
the marks and indications of the souls of men. The outside of
a human being reveals the fullness of the inside, more than we
might think. Little things, after all, are not any the less
significant for their being little or not obvious; they are only
harder to discern.
It thus falls to us as readers of Plutarch to seek to emulate
his perspicacity, to attend to the fullness of being he presents
to us. That this might require that we not be unduly taken by
the great and the eventful (and “what is done publicly in open
day” (1.469)) in favor of the private and the small means that
we too must resist our own inherited tendency to look at
things from an historical perspective24 (see also 1.698)).
Plutarch’s psychographic art, then, entails a different kind of
insight, one that sees past the obviousness of “weighty
matters” to the telling marks, however small, that bespeak
and “epitomize” a soul.25
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5. “A Subtle Logic of Discrimination”
It works in practice but unfortunately not in theory.
French Diplomat26
Plutarch relates this story about Caesar:
Seeing some wealthy strangers at Rome,
carrying...puppy-dogs...embracing and making
much of them, [he] took occasion not unnaturally
to ask whether women in this country were
unused to bearing children.... By th[is] prince-like27
[that is, indirect] reprimand [Caesar] gravely
reflect[ed] upon persons who...lavish upon beasts
that affection and kindness which nature has
implanted in us to be bestowed on those of our
own kind. (Pericles 1.201)
While we may not particularly like this example—we may
ourselves have puppy-dogs—Caesar’s and Plutarch’s intent
can be made plain otherwise: human beings do not always
attend to what serves them best, indeed what nature would
have them do.
“With like reason,” Plutarch says,
may we blame those who misuse the love of
inquiry and observation which nature has
implanted in our souls, by expending it on objects
unworthy of the attention either of their eyes or
their ears, while they disregard such as are
excellent in themselves and would do them good.
We can misdirect our attention to unworthy objects. We can
even misuse our love of inquiry, philosophy. He continues,
whereas
[T]he mere outward sense, being passive...
perhaps cannot help taking notice of
everything...be it...useful or unuseful; in the
exercise of his mental perception every man...has a
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natural power to turn himself...to what he judges
desirable. Therefore it becomes a man’s duty to
pursue...the best and choicest of everything, that
he may not only employ his contemplation but
may also be improved by it.... A man ought [then]
to apply his intellectual perception to such objects
as...are apt to call it forth and allure it to its own
proper good.
We see here a suspicion of abstract speculation, of that
theorizing that takes us away to the remote reaches of
thought—the “clouds,” in Aristophanes’ image—“mere
theory,” as we and Plutarch sometimes say (Dion 2.543)—
and away from the things that bear most on our own lives.
We have control over that to which we apply our “intellectual
perception,” yet paradoxically, in Plutarch’s view, we do not
always apply ourselves well to what would do us the most
good. “We find such objects,” as we have seen, “in the works
of excellence (aretês ergois),” he says, “which also produce in
the mind [even] of mere readers...an emulation and eagerness
that may lead them on to imitation....” (1179b8-11). No less
than life experience, reading provides such formative
examples.
Understandably wary, Plutarch is not condemning
philosophy here (as some might: see 1.47628). On the
contrary, he seeks rather to focus his philosophic attention,
and therewith to redirect ours, back onto its “worthy and
proper objects.”29 In being so constrained, philosophy
remains no less indispensable to the perfection of human life:
How else can one find one’s bearings amidst the turbulence
and tides of fortune but through that human insight which
enables us, amidst it all, to be thoughtful, farsighted, circumspect, principled, and steady? This he brings us to see
repeatedly (for example, 1.329, 336).
Thus as we read Plutarch’s accounts, the reader is brought
to a new manner and degree of acuity, to a new sensitivity to
the rich complexity of human things, ordinary and extraor-
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dinary. Each life is different. Each figure vigorously seeks to
make a life of distinction out of circumstances that are, well,
never quite “tailor-made,” but rather challenging, threatening, and over the course of a career, hard to sustain. Each
“story” is treated, not abstractly, but with the attention to
detail that brings forth what is original and properly its own.
The active judgment and skills necessary to live such lives of
distinction—and write about them—is itself exemplary.
The higher degree of acuity aspired to is revealed in a
reflection on two of his subjects:
Phocion and [Cato] may be well compared
together...for assuredly there is difference enough
among virtues of the same denomination, as
between the bravery of Alcibiades and that of
Epaminondas, the prudence of Themistocles and
that of Aristides, the justice of Numa and that of
Agesilaus.... The mixture both of lenity on the one
hand, with austerity on the other; their boldness
on some occasions, and caution on others; their
extreme solicitude for the public [etc...] so that we
should need a very nice and subtle logic of
discrimination to detect and establish the distinctions between them. (Phocion 2.247)
Plutarch’s Lives are such gold mines of subtle distinctions.
They actively attempt to flesh out the overly broad categories
of abstract “theories of ethics” and, to be sure, that of the
natural generality of language.30 Plutarch paints his characterological studies with a subtlety of observation known to us
from playwrights and novelists, embedding each in their life
circumstances, rich in variables and innumerable vectors. In
this regard the Lives needs to be seen as a necessary
complement31 to our tradition of theoretical accounts of
“ethics,” allowing us to consider the fate of the effort of
virtue in the world, to consider the formative importance of
circumstance, the variety of courses of development, and the
real consequences of personal decisions, however large or
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small. He was concerned that this was what the liberal arts
did not teach often enough (2.440). Moreover, in Plutarch’s
own artful approach to writing we have seen a different sort
of touch, one that is properly self-interested, discreet,
measured, judicious, and self-reflective.
All this brought me to wonder whether there wasn’t a
different “sensibility” made evident here or more precisely, I
would venture, even a different faculty of discernment at
work. It is not just that we have here a different line of sight.
Rather, there seems to be brought to light another rational
excellence, one that has its distinction in revealing the
richness of the particular as opposed to the breadth of generality, that allows us to focus on the life lived as opposed to the
one that is, as we have come to say somewhat emptily,
“ideal.”
6. Phronêsis
It is not possible to understand phronêsis and sophia
under the guiding line of the Kantian distinction
between practical and theoretical reason.
Heidegger32
We are thus presented with a paradox of sorts: we are asked
to consider a mode of thoughtfulness that is not speculative
(1141b1), yet is deeply rational, that is not as “profound” as
theoretical wisdom (1141a21; Lives, 2.181), perhaps, yet is
more important for human life (1140b30).
Aristotle may be of help in considering this paradox. In
the middle of his account of the shaping of human
character—Chapter 6 of The Nicomachean Ethics—we find
an extended reflection on our possibilities for thoughtfulness.
He looks first at the various objects available and concludes
that there is not just one faculty, not one “reason,” but
multiple modes of truth, artful know-how, deductive
knowledge or science, and wisdom among them. In addition
he introduces us to another active condition (hexis)33 that
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may be unfamiliar to us, however one that proves to be
distinctively human: phronêsis.34
Let us step back. Aristotle does not think as we do.35 We
see this, for example, in his very different understanding of
“choice,” a concept especially important to us today. Choice,
according to Aristotle, is not just some “personal preference”
we willingly stick with. In his view “...without intellect and
thinking [and] without an active condition of character
(1139a33-4; also 1145a4f),” choice is nothing but blind selfinsistence. Moreover, we tend to focus on choice in the
abstract, either on the intention or on the outcome by itself.
But for Aristotle choice is part of an integrated event “since
[with] action there is no such thing as doing well or the
opposite without thinking or [without] character.” We will
see in a bit why this must be so.
He begins his exploration of this special capacity by
asking us first to consider what sorts of people we say have
“good sense.” Preserved in our languages is a recognition of
a unique mode of insight evident in persons whose
perspective on human things, on people and circumstances, is
particularly sound. A person of “singular judgment,” we
might say: a wise grandfather, a seasoned friend, a native
truth teller, a parent—in short, people who have taken their
long experience and made it bear on their and others’ lives.
He puts it this way: they are people who are “able to deliberate beautifully about things that are good and advantageous
for [themselves]” (1140a23-4), those also who know what is
“conducive to living well as a whole.” We look to people who
are not necessarily concerned to know things “in general” but
rather to those whose life experience has been brought to
bear on their own lives, and equally, those who are not shortsighted but seek to see how each particular event and act
might contribute to one’s overall good.
This focus on the particularity of events and actions
brings Aristotle to point out the obvious yet for us surprising
conclusion, namely, that “there is no [necessary] demonstration of these things, since all of them are capable of being
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otherwise” (1140a31-4).36 Nevertheless, despite being
indemonstrable, Aristotle is emphatic that these things are
not therefore untrue. That they are not matters of theoretical
knowledge does not invalidate them—does not make them,
as we might say, matters of “mere opinion,” and surely not
“merely relative.” (Their truth therefore is not to be
dismissed as merely mundane, merely demotic, or merely
ontic.37) Our question becomes, if not knowledge per se, what
faculty is at work discerning what is to be done?
Here Aristotle introduces phronêsis, a faculty difficult to
translate, rendered variously as practical sense, practical
judgment, practical intellect, particular reason (Thomas),
circumspection (Heidegger), prudence, and indeed
sometimes practical wisdom. “[Practical sense] is a truthdisclosing active condition (hexis alêthê meta logou pratikê)
involving reason that governs actions, concerned with what is
good and bad for human beings” (1140b3, also b20).38 This
will take some explaining.
Phronêsis, or practical sense, differs from those other
faculties that have to do with “what is everlasting” in that it
is of “the part of the soul concerned with opinions,” that is
with the world of change we live in, the world Plutarch
invited us to consider seriously. Though concerned with
opinion, it is not some mere “idea” that Aristotle is looking
at but something “far more deeply interfused” (Wordsworth).
He brings us to see this by observing that such a developed
capacity is not something one can “forget.”39 While we might
forget one of the zillion Greek forms or a proposition in
Euclid—not a good idea—we are speaking of a different kind
of thing, a state of being of the soul, a developed state of
readiness, of incipient action. And like riding a horse or
mastering a craft, he points out that, while it can be
perfected, once possessed we can’t “lose” it.40 We always
thereafter somehow have it.41 This points to a deeper mode
of having.
Indeed, we even think we see such a deeper source in
other animals. Concerning other species, Aristotle observes
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“that that which discerns well the things that concern itself is
possessed of [a kind of] ‘practical sense’” (1140a25). Animals
are said to have such a sense of what is best for them. We
mean thereby that they have a “capacity for foresight about
their own lives,” that is, they act in such a way that they do
not justly blindly react to some present stimulus but in a way
that secures their overall good. By way of contrast, Aristotle
gives the embarrassing human example of the early Greek
philosophers Thales and Anaxagoras, whom people unfortunately said were “wise but not possessed of practical sense”
(1141b3f.). He here highlights the paradox of the overly
theoretical man, who knows divine things, perhaps, but not
his own good.
In so doing Aristotle puts the man of practical sense into
further relief: “one who is a good deliberator simply is one
who, by his reasoning, is apt to hit upon what is best for a
human being among actions” (1141b12-3), he says; such a
person responds not to the demands of a syllogism but to that
of circumstance, and their reasoning ends, not in some
abstract proposition, but with action. (Phronêsis “lives in
action” [Heidegger].) Plainly this entails a different kind of
reasoning, one that “is not only about what is universal but
[also] needs to discern the particulars [in their difference] as
well...since action is [finally] concerned with particulars”
(1141b15).42
Practical sense is thus that unique faculty that is able to
integrate particulars—this, that, and the other this and that—
into a larger view that leads to action.43 Again contrasting the
theoretical man, Aristotle points out that “those who have
experience are more adept at action than those with
knowledge [alone]” (1141b17). That’s why we admire our
grandfather or friend; because they have done things that
show that they have learned the lessons of life and can turn
them to account to what one should do next. Experience with
particulars, Aristotle emphasizes here, is the more valuable in
this regard.44
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Indeed, it is this same capacity to deal with particulars, he
notes, that is also at work on the world stage—brought so
vividly to view in Plutarch—as in our own efforts to live well.
“The political art is the same active condition as practical
sense” (1141b22f). The ability requisite to craft a specific
political decree—not a general law but a specific mandate—
must have in view “an action to be performed as an ultimate
particular thing” (cp. 1137b11-32). So just as the artisan
crafting a chair, just as our own efforts to do the right thing
in given circumstances, the lawmaker is not well served by
generalities alone but must think the circumstances through
to a specific recommendation. This too, according to
Aristotle, is a species of knowledge.
But of what sort? Aristotle sees a kind of middle between
art and wisdom. While “it is clear that practical sense is not
knowledge [in the sense of science], for it is directed to an
ultimate particular” (1142a22), Aristotle is emphatic that
“knowing what pertains to oneself [and knowing what one
should do in a particular circumstance] is [yet] a species of
knowledge” (1141b33).
But how? At this point Aristotle notes something of
interest. Practical sense, he observes, would seem to focus on
...the opposite extreme from the intellect [nous],
for intellect is directed at ultimate terms of which
there is no articulation, while practical sense is
directed at the ultimate particular of which there is
no knowledge [technically speaking] but only
[simple] perception [aisthêsis]—not the perception
of the separate senses, but the sort of [“intellectual
perception” (Lives, 1.201)] by which we perceive
that the ultimate figure in mathematics is a
triangle. (1142a22-30)45
Surprisingly, the example that Aristotle gives to highlight
the particular mode of insight that is practical sense comes
from geometry. We “see” that the smallest figure into which a
rectilinear plane figure can be divided is a triangle. We see it.
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He thus asks us to consider another mode of access to things
in their completeness as wholes that he also calls
“perception,” though of particulars that are sensible only to
the mind’s “eye,” an intellectual perception, if you will.46
7. “An Eye Sharpened by Experience”
The manner of forming one’s ideas is
what gives character to the human mind.
Rousseau47
Before we proceed, let us step back for a moment and look at
the requirements of responsible action. In the earlier
chapters, Aristotle was at pains to point out that to act well
requires a great deal of thought and experience. It requires
that we somehow have a world of things in mind all at once,
as the rightness of any action “results from what is beneficial
in the end for which, the means by which, and the time in
which it ought to occur” (1142b28).48 Action is through and
through specific and circumstantial, responsive to the many
vectors that need to be factored into consideration in order
for some appropriate good to be accomplished.
Thus our question: what kind of thinking can integrate
such particularity in its particularity? Other than a name, we
may still be hard pressed to see what it precisely is, to identify
it in its own right. Aristotle thus turns to other like-seeming
faculties to contrast and therewith to delimit it. For example,
one might think that what we are talking about is someone
who is skilled at thinking things through (angchinoia;
1142b14f). While there is some overlap here, Aristotle at this
point says something by way of contrast that, if not shocking,
may at first make no sense to us as a reply. He says: “someone
who lacks self-restraint or someone of bad character
will...deliberate badly.” He does so first that we might see that
we are not looking just for some “mental agility.” Rather, we
seek a deeper, more responsive source. Surprising though it
may be, one’s thinking, he suggests here, is deeply dependent
on one’s character. He therewith challenges us to make a
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connection between things where today we see no
connection.
Might we mean by “practical sense” a kind of astuteness
of judgment (sunesis or sagacity), then? Yet “practical sense is
something that [also] imposes obligations, since the end that
belongs to it is what one ought or ought not to do” (1143a710). And astuteness is satisfied to identify distinctions (“mere
theory,” Lives, 2.543). Perhaps then we mean another form of
thoughtfulness: “the right discrimination of what is decent,”
considerateness (sungnôme), if you will? All these various
examples—skilled thinking, astuteness, considerateness,
practical sense—converge for Aristotle to the same meaning:
“All these capacities are directed at things that are ultimate [as
well as] particular.... All actions are among the things that are
particular and universal” (a27-30),49 and this requires a
different and separate faculty to apprehend (1139a9-11).
This brings Aristotle back to his earlier observation about
the similarity of theoretical intellect and practical sense. He
now sees that it is the same fundamental activity, though
differently directed, that is at work in both universal and
particular knowledge. For Aristotle, thought, whether
theoretical or practical, is always rooted in specific experiences and it is intellect, we now learn, that allows us to
apprehend these specific beginnings. “Intellect [nous],” he
observes, “is directed to what is ultimate on both sides, since
it is intellect and not reason [or speech, ou logou] that is
directed at both the first terms and the ultimate particulars”
(1143b1-6).50 On the one side, intellect discerns the ultimate,
first terms of logical demonstration. And on the other, the
very same faculty, in thinking about action, sees the other sort
of “premise,” the ultimate, if contingent, particular. “Of these
[particulars],” he says, “one must have a perception and this
[ultimate] perception [aisthêsis] is intellect.”
But by “intellect,” we now learn, Aristotle means even
more than the apprehension of these beginnings. He asks
how the several perfections he’s considered become useful to
us. It is not through theoretical wisdom (sophia) that they
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become so. Indeed, truth be told, “Wisdom contemplates
nothing by which a human being will be happy” (1143b19).
Rather it is this other faculty phronêsis that “is concerned
with things that are just and beautiful and good for a human
being [;] these are the things that it belongs to a good man to
do, and we are not more able to perform these actions
[merely] by knowing about them” (b21f). At this point we
may still be having difficulty seeing that practical sense is
more than a latent potential (a “capacity”). Rather, we have
to understand it as an active condition, a fullness of thought
that seeks to actively integrate circumstance and experience
in a complex calculus issuing in an action. And for Aristotle
knowing does not get us to such a developed and active
readiness of soul. It is rather practical sense, phronêsis, that
allows us to so engage the world (1139b1-7).
Seeing the soul as an integrated whole (and not made up
of disparate parts, distinguishable though they may be),
Aristotle now returns to his earlier perplexing insight that the
character of our minds is dependent on the character of our
characters. “The work [ergon] of a human being,” he says, “is
accomplished as a result of practical sense and of excellence
[virtue] of character” (1144a5f), for “the starting point [of
thoughtful action]...does not show itself except to a good
person.” This, Aristotle observes, is plain from its opposite:
vice warps our perspective and makes it difficult for us to see
what is good. Thus he concludes it is the “eye sharpened by
experience” (1143b9) that sees what is beautiful as an end or
highest good of action and gains its active state only with
virtue (1144a31-2; Sachs paraphrase).51 Good judgment
about the right action issues only from a person of like
quality. (Good sense here reclaims its double meaning.)
To be effective, excellence requires even more than the
having of goodness. It requires an activating intelligence
(nous), Aristotle says, the kind of intelligence that “carries
over into action,” or what he calls “virtue in the governing
sense” (1144b12f).52 And it is precisely this that “practical”
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sense makes possible53 (b17: “does not come without
practical sense”54).
Phronêsis is thus not just one among the several human
excellences: “all the excellences will be present [only] when
one excellence, practical sense, is present.” Here we see that
phronêsis is the enabling excellence.55 Moreover, at the very
beginning of his book, Aristotle emphasized that we must first
discover what is the principal activity or work, unique to a
being, for it is the perfection of this “work” that leads to its
fulfillment or happiness. We here learn that it is practical
sense that is the prerequisite to that fulfillment, our
fulfillment.56
This conclusion is striking both for what is said and who
says it: Aristotle, the man who for the tradition represents the
speculative philosopher par excellence. Yet it is Aristotle here
who urges us to develop “that other intellectual excellence,”
as the virtue that will enable us to think well and that is the
one most important for “our own proper good” and for our
lives together in the city.
8. The Looking Glass
He did not know how to govern free men.
Lysander 1.594
It is a hard thing to give laws to the Cyrenians,
abounding [as they do] in wealth and plenty.
Lucullus 1.661
Such a view of the centrality of phronêsis is shared by
Plutarch. Indeed here we see why the reading of Plutarch is
so valuable. Many things in his work are “worthy of
memory,” but unlike abstract treatments, the Lives display
pre-eminently the interplay and indeed the consequences of
character and practical sense in the world of circumstance.
We are brought back to our place in the city, re-concretized
in our thinking, our thoughts firmly founded on the rich soil
of unmediated experience.57 This Plutarch understood to be
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the proper role of “history” and “biography” in liberal
education.
But not only “in theory.” Just as he discovered for
himself, it is Plutarch’s profound hope that his readers would
find in the “looking glass” of his texts experiences wherein
their own capacities for “subtle discriminations” might be
developed and their practical sense honed. He hoped as well
that we would find therein people from whom we might
“gain experience,” both of what to avoid—and there are
plenty of lessons there to be found—and of those rare
individuals whose excellences might inspire us to emulation.
Thus for those wondering, “Why are we reading Plutarch?
It’s only history,” we would propose this as the beginning of
a reply.
So we ask you to reopen the book on “that other intellectual excellence,” phronêsis or practical sense, and reclaim
its priority for our lives. Minimally, by so doing we would
become more attentive to the complexity of human things
and the richness of the world before us; maximally we would
develop our fine judgment and perhaps begin to live up to
that with which we choose to associate ourselves (2.445).
So we ask you as well to emulate Plutarch—not just by
being “strengthened by the experience” (1.201, 646) of
reading him—but also by ourselves taking up the “looking
glass” of writing as a medium of self-discovery wherein we
may shape ourselves as we seek to discover the shape of
things.
9. Postscript in Seminar: The Faculty of the Faculty
Good judgment goes with the way
each one is educated.
Aristotle58
Lastly, let us return to where we began: seminar. By a
somewhat long and oblique route, we have been exploring a
faculty of knowledge, distinctive to human beings, that
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focuses on the confluence of the general and the specific. At
the outset we spoke about an ability that good tutors and
students possess that enables them to so craft their questions
or remarks that they are not only generally apt but are tailormade thoughts aiding learners in their personal struggles to
find their way through the confusions of a developing conversation. That is, our prompting questions or nudging remarks
might be “just right” both for the larger context—the seminar
conversation as a whole—and for you, the learner with your
particular degree of readiness and openness to possibilities.
Such just-right questioning presupposes a knowledge both of
the particular and the general; it requires that capacity, I
would submit, that Aristotle identifies as “practical sense.”
Thus we see that speaking is not the same as thinking. It
is more complex. When we speak, we not only think about
something but also speak to someone. Speaking is thus biintentional (or bi-prepositional, if you will). And it is this
additional to-ness that is required for a conversation to be
successful, for genuine communication to take place. This toness seems also to require an additional sense, that sense of
aptness, that practical sense that enables one to speak to
someone in their particularity, “where they are,” not to
mention at the right time, in the right way, etc, or all the
qualifiers that, for Aristotle, distinguishes practical sense.
Indeed, this is the distinctive excellence of a teaching
faculty59 (as opposed to a research faculty): to hear where a
particular learner is “coming from” and design our response
“to order” that our question or comment might help them as
they seek to find their way to discovery. In the midst of
perplexity, what we want and need as learners is not a lecture
or a theory but helpful, specific, “practical” guidance.
(Phronêsis is not unique to the faculty, though perhaps it is
more developed there.) Thus we do our students and one
another a disservice when we do not offer an opening
question but give a closed answer; we fail as a faculty when
we fall back into being professors, and you fail as students
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when you fall back into being passive scribes. As we learn
from Plato’s Meno, answers and abstracted, deracinated,
blind thoughts do not help us to find our way to Larissa.
Such tailor-made teaching (10.9, 1180b8-9) can only
happen in a place small enough for genuine conversation,
where faculty are present to their students and not lost in
their own thoughts, where we are all attentive to the learning
trajectories of one another, and where—and this is equally
important—students likewise are insistent that they must find
their own way to discovery.
So we ask you to make such a place a reality, to seek to
question well, to make your efforts of inquiry such that they
further both your own learning and that of your fellow
learners. And may we continue to say: Good question!
1
Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in Hard Times, #71 in Philosophy and
Truth, ed. Daniel Breazeale (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1979), 117.
2
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Joe Sachs (Newburyport, Mass.:
Focus Publishing, 2002), 10.9.1180b8-9. All references to Aristotle’s
Nicomachean Ethics—hereafter NE—are from this translation.
3
All references are from Plutarch’s Lives, trans. John Dryden (1683) and
rev. Arthur Clough (1864), 2 vols. (New York: Modern Library, 2001),
hereafter Lives.
4
See also Demosthenes 2.396: They were “...better able to recommend
than to imitate virtues of the past.”
5
NE, 2.4.1105b11-13: see also 1112a10; 6.10.143a1-20, 1179b5.
6
Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emile or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom
(New York: Basic Books, 1979), 240.
7
Montesquieu: “What Histories can be found...that please and instruct
like the Lives of Plutarch? ... I am of the Opinion with that Author, who
said, that if he was constrained to fling all the Books of the Ancients into
the Sea, Plutarch should be the last drowned.” And Emerson: “A bible for
heroes.” For an even longer list of those influenced by Plutarch, see Roger
Kimball, “Plutarch and the Issue of Character,” Lives of the Mind: The
Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse (Chicago: Ivan R.
Dee, 2002), 18-21.
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A question we should ask of all the authors on the program.
9
“Re-enter” because we live in more than one world, we moderns, with
our abstract thoughts overriding and prisming our experience.
10 Compare Plato, Republic, Book 2, where we are asked to see the city as
the magnified image of the soul.
11
“The Greeks invented the art of biography as an exercise in moral
philosophy. The lives of “pre-eminent” statesmen and generals were to
serve as ethical exemplars—both good and bad—for the rest of us, subject
as we are to the same all-too-human appetites and temptations. Thus the
early years of an Alcibiades, an Alexander, or a Cicero were mined by
Plutarch for anecdotes that might reveal an unchanging and essential
character; its elements becoming more manifest during the crucible of
adulthood and thereby accounting for the subject’s ultimate achievement”
(Victor Davis Hanson, Commentary, vol. 116, no. 5 (December 2003):
53-4.
12
“Beware of ambition, as of all the higher powers, the most destructive
and pernicious” (1.609). “For men whose ambition neither seas, nor
mountains, nor unpeopled deserts can limit, nor the bounds dividing
Europe and Asia confine their vast desires, it would be hard to expect to
forbear from injuring another ...when they close together. They are ever
naturally at war, envying and seeking advantages of one another, and
merely make use of those two words, peace and war, like current coin, to
serve their occasions, not as justice, but as expediency suggests...” (Lives,
Pyrrhus 1.527). Also, “...the innate disease of princes....” (1.523)
13
NE 1.3.1095a1-10: “Therefore good judgment goes along with the
way each one is educated.... For this reason, it is not appropriate for
young people to be students of politics, since the young are inexperienced
in the actions of life.... And since the young are apt to follow their
impulses, they would hear such discourses without purpose or benefit....
And it makes no difference whether one is young in age or immature in
character, for the deficiency doesn’t come from the time, but the living in
accord with feeling and following every impulse.” Also 6.8.1142a12-20:
“A sign of what is being said is why young people become skilled geometricians and mathematicians, and wise in respect to such things, but they
do not seem to become possessed of practical judgment, and the reason is
that practical judgment has to do with particulars, which become known
by experience, but the young are not experienced, since it is length of
time that produces experiences.” See also 6.9.1143b 10-15, and Lives,
Lucullus, 1.661.
14
Plato, Republic, Books 2-3.
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15
As we recognize in proposing a “great books program” for one
another’s improvement.
16
“For the mere sight itself of a shining and conspicuous example of
virtue in the life of their prince will bring them spontaneously to virtue,
and to a conformity with that blameless and blessed life of good-will and
mutual concord, supported by temperance and justice, which is the
highest benefit that human means can confer; and he is the truest ruler
who can best introduce it into the hearts and practice of his subjects”
(Lives, Numa Pompilius, 1.99). In this respect, there is little one can say
that can approximate the radiance of the paradeigma or example: “Now
there’s a man!” Indeed it may not be something that lends itself to logos,
“to argument and proof ” (cp. 1.420). Plutarch thereby helps us to restore
our attention to what is imposingly present even in our small worlds.
Martin Heidegger in Plato’s Sophist (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1997), renders paradeigma as “striking example”: “they show the
universal through the obviousness of some particular case, through a
definite example. This is the way to produce conviction in others. This is
the way of epagogê (Posterior Analytics, 71a8).” “To elucidate what is
familiar already at the outset is rather a matter of epagogê, the mode of
clarification proper to straightforward perception. Epagogê is clearly the
beginning, i.e. that which discloses the archê [the source]; it is the more
original, not epistêmê” (25). How to articulate what is revealed thereby
remains a question for us: do “striking examples” show the universal
through the particular or the fullness of the particular? See also
Emmanuel Levinas, “Without Identity,” Humanism of the Other, trans.
Nidra Poller (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2003), 61.
17
Aristotle too urges us to take our bearings by those who are serious
(spoudaios, paradeigma). They provide a standard or reference (not just
an illustration or instance) by which to act, from our direct experience of
their influence and from our reading of their deeds.
18 To kalon: the beautiful; see NE 3.6.1115b12-13: “…for the sake of the
beautiful, since this is the end that belongs to virtue.” See Sachs, NE, p.
49, n. 61. “Measure, proportion and harmony are in the nature of things
and we have a direct responsiveness to them that orients us in the world”
and “Measure, Moderation and the Mean,” The St. John’s Review, vol.
46, no. 2 (2002): 9.
19
“The supreme arts of temperance, of justice and wisdom, as they are
acts of judgment and selection, exercised not on good and just and
expedient only, but also on wicked, unjust, and inexpedient objects, do
not give their commendations to the mere innocence whose boast is its
inexperience of evil, and whose truer name is...simpleness and ignorance
of what all men who live aright should know.... The ancient Spartans, at
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their festivals, used to force their Helots to swallow large quantities of
raw wine, and then expose them at the public tables, to let the young
men see what it is to be drunk. And though I do not think it consistent
with humanity or with civil justice to correct one man...by corrupting
another, yet we may, I think, avail ourselves of the cases of those who
have fallen into indiscretions, and have, in high stations, made themselves
conspicuous for misconduct.... In the same manner, it seems to me likely
enough that we shall be all the more zealous and more emulous to read,
observe and imitate the better lives, if we are not left in ignorance of the
blameworthy and the bad” (Lives, Demetrius 2.445). As we become what
we do, so we live out what we have become: “...their fortunes carried out
the resemblance of their characters” (2.446).
20
95
Physiognomy does not reveal itself in large features, nor character in
great actions. It is in bagatelles [trifles] that nature comes to light. The
public things are either too uniform or too artificial; and it is almost
solely on these [public things] that modern dignity permits our authors to
dwell” (Rousseau, Emile, 240-1).
26
From a Cartesian perspective, this may be taken as an expression of
regret; though in this context it is intended as a conundrum of our onesidedly abstract orientation. (Related to me by Roger Kimball.)
27
The obliqueness of prince-like discretion.
28
See Plato, Apology of Socrates.
29
Levine, ‘I Hate Books,’ or Making Room for Learning, 3.
21
Cp. the pimple on the nose of the Miller (Chaucer, Prologue,
Canterbury Tales).
22
In Plutarch, medicine is frequently the metaphor of the diagnostic
political art—knowledge of “the causes of disorders in the body politic”
(1.609): see 1.215; 2.125, 286, 336, 560, 565, 699.
23
“Marks and indications of the soul,” see 1.337, 469, 479; 2.61, 285,
294, 324, 374, 596. Also see Xenophon, Memorabilia, 3.10.1-8.
24
Nor is he thus a “biographer.” Though he uses both terms, biography
and history, Plutarch is at pains to show that his is of a very specific sort,
unlike what we have become accustomed to expect. The history of these
terms would be interesting to explore.
25
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Here we see the origin of Montaigne’s and Rousseau’s admiration for
Plutarch. “Those who write lives,” says Montaigne, “are more suited to
me to the extent that they are interested in intentions more than in
results, in what takes place within than in what happens without. That is
why Plutarch is my man” (see n. 6). “Plutarch excels in these very details
into which we no longer dare to enter. He has an inimitable grace at
depicting great men in small things; and he is so felicitous in the choice
of his stories that often a word, a smile, a gesture is enough for him to
characterize his hero. With a joking phrase Hannibal reassures his
terrified army and makes it march laughing to the battle which won Italy
for him. Agesilaus astride a stick makes me love the Great King’s
conqueror. Caesar passing through a poor village and chatting with his
friends betrays, unthinkingly, the deceiver who said he wanted only to be
Pompey’s equal. Alexander swallows medicine and does not say a single
word; it is the most beautiful moment of his life. Aristides writes his own
name on a shell and thus justifies his surname. Philopoemen, with his
cloak off, cuts wood in his host’s kitchen. This is the true art of painting.
In this respect, Plutarch is seeking to reinitiate the Socratic turn back to
the city, though with a specifically ethical intent (see Plato, Phaedo). It is
thus not only modern thought that tends to the excessively theoretical or
abstract. In line with this, he does not read Plato as an “idealist” (see
Dion 2.543-550), but reads the dialogues as embedded in the world (a
cave though it might be) leading thereby to action. As we see as well, he
is not unaware of the precariousness of such an undertaking by
philosophy even here.
30
Consider the problem of equity at NE 5.10.1137b11-32.
31
Just as the modern novel complements the abstractness of modern
philosophy.
32
“Phronêsis is not a speculation about archê and the telos of action as
such; it is not a [theoretical] ethics, not a science, not a hexis meta logou
monon [an active condition according to reason alone] (6.5 1140b28),”
Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 40-2.
33
Hexis is variously translated as habit, disposition, active condition. We
miss what is essential therein if we fail to see it as a developed, if
incipient, mode of activity, an “active having” (Sachs). It is not just a
propensity, predisposition, orientation, or even mere capacity or
potential, but an active state of readiness that manifests itself when
circumstances require, an immanent responsiveness, if you will.
“Intelligence carries over into action,” Aristotle will say later. Consider
the sense of fullness and vitality that comes with growth and discovery, an
inner resourcefulness ready to emerge.
34
What is notable about Aristotle’s classification of the faculties of the
soul is his singling out of a capacity that we today don’t even admit as a
human capacity. It is here claimed to be different in kind from our
general intelligence. Indeed the largest part of Book 6 is dedicated to the
introduction and disclosure of phronêsis. See note 53.
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35
Aristotle presents a different view of the development of character
(“ethics”). His is not a backward looking ethic, a genetic psychology
where one is defined by one’s first beginnings. Human motivation is not
limited to hidden or subconscious sources. Rather, Aristotle’s view is
forward-looking, a growth psychology, an end directed and open to new
possibilities. The future is defining, and not just the past. Character
formation thus supersedes developmental histories, maturity supersedes
“coping mechanisms.”
36
Cp. NE 1.3.1094b22-24: “…it belongs to an educated person to look
for just so much precision in each kind of discourse as the nature of the
thing one is concerned with admits; for to demand demonstrations from
a rhetorician seems about like accepting probable conclusions from a
mathematician.”
37
“Phronêsis is a hexis of alêtheuein [truth disclosing active condition], a
disposition of human Dasein such that in it I have at my disposal my own
transparency. For its themes are the anthopina agatha [human goods].
And it is a hexis of alêtheuein which is pracktike, which lives in action”
(Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 37). Also “Phronêsis dwells in praxis still
more than in logos,” (96) and “Phronêsis is nothing if it is not carried out
in praxis” (115).
38
Who do we think of as having such a “truth disclosing condition”? The
examples Aristotle entertains range from those overseeing a household to
political figures, and in this context he gives the wonderfully ambiguous
example of Pericles, the ruler of Athens at the outset of the Peloponnesian
war (and whose full ambiguity is seen in Plutarch’s account).
39
It is at this point that Heidegger makes his famous observation:
“...Aristotle has here come across the phenomenon of conscience.
Phronêsis is nothing other than conscience set in motion, making an
action transparent. Conscience cannot be forgotten” (Plato’s Sophist, 39).
That phronêsis is not an inferential, reasoning faculty does not mean that
it is an “intuitive” faculty. It is “the other intellectual virtue.” Moreover
phronêsis for Aristotle is not given in its perfection but can and indeed
needs to be developed. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method
(New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1982), 278-89; and Ronald Beiner,
Political Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 72-82.
Earlier Heidegger writes: “For one who has learned to understand an
author it is perhaps not possible to take as a foundation for the interpretation what the author designates as the most important. It is precisely
where an author is silent that one has to begin in order to understand
what the author himself designates as the most proper” (32, 43). Here we
see the origin of deconstruction: the premises of one’s thoughts are often
inexplicit, hidden even from the thinker himself. This would seem to be
an over-reaction to the problem of embedded presuppositions. For it
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would make all science, all knowledge, mysterious, if not meaningless,
where it might only be unreflective (not necessarily wrong). Moreover it
would seem to mean that ‘truth’ ultimately resides in one’s premises.
While our conclusions are only as good as our premises, truth resides in
the author’s developed view as well. A house stands even if we can’t see
its foundations; its strength is evident in the sturdiness of the whole.
40
Gadamer puts this into relief thus: its antithesis is blindness not error
(Truth and Method, 287).
41
Aristotle notes that while it is true, in a certain sense, that “...it is
absurd for anyone to believe that...practical sense is the most serious kind
of knowledge, if a human being is not the highest thing in the cosmos”
(1141a21; also b1)—and for Aristotle we may not be the most important
beings in the cosmos—still, without forgetting the bigger picture, this
faculty remains the most important for human life, lest we not live life
well as a whole.
42
“Phronêsis makes the situation accessible; and the circumstances are
always different in every action” (Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 20); “This
circumspection [mode of circumspective disclosure] isolates that with
which the action, the bringing into being, begins” (32); “Phronêsis is the
inspection of the this-here-now, the inspection of the concrete momentoriness of the transient situation” (112).
43
It is thus a mistake to think of practical insight as the subsumption of
the particular to the universal. For example, Thomas Aquinas: “...we
must say that the practical intellect has a beginning in a universal consideration, and, according to this, is the same in subject with the speculative,
but its consideration terminates in an individual operative thing”
(Commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, trans. C.I. Litzinger
(Notre Dame, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 1964/1993), 361 (#1132)—
hereafter Commentary). Or again: “...to frame a decree that is simply the
application of universal reason to a particular practicable...” (381
[#1199]). For Thomas practical intellect is thus a subspecies of
theoretical intellect, the act of practical judgment the application of a
universal rule to a specific situation.
Whereas Aristotle says that the uniqueness of phronêsis lies in its simple
apprehension of ultimate particulars, Thomas sees it in the subordination
of specific wisdom to theoretical wisdom. Here we see the beginning of
the loss of phronêsis as a separate faculty with a unique purview and, with
the loss of continuity with the things of our world, the increasing
estrangement and subjectivity of thought (the skeptical spectator), with the
end result that this faculty, phronêsis, is largely eclipsed or lost sight of in
modern thought. All thinking becomes abstract thinking. See notes 31 and
54 above. The alienation of the Cartesian ego is not far behind. This is the
beginning of a much larger study for us. See Burt Hopkins, “Jacob Klein
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and the Phenomenological Project of Desedimenting the Formalization of
Meaning,” The St. John’s Review, vol. 47, no.2 (2003): 65.
44
For Heidegger (Plato’s Sophist, 97) the benefit of experience is the
amount of time to accumulate enough experiences to “dominate the
manifold”—not the time necessary to refine and mature one’s judgment
to the range of possibilities, to weigh their respective worth, to assess the
manifold factors as each adds yet another vector to the complex calculus
of phronêsis.
45
Sachs directs us to De Anima 431a14-18 and b3-10 as well as to NE
1109b23 and 1126b4. Attention to the fundamental role of intellect was
highlighted for me in freshman seminar two years ago by the perspicuous
questioning of Jackson Carpenter, for which I am grateful.
46
Cp. Thomas, Commentary: “However it is not apprehended by that
sense which perceives the species of proper sensibles...but by the inner
sense which perceives things sensibly conceivable. Similarly in mathematics we know the exterior triangle, or the triangle conceived as
singular, because there we also conform to a sensible conceivable singular,
as in the natural sciences...” (384-5 (#1214)); “Prudence, which perfects
particular reason, rightly to judge singular practicable relations, pertains
rather to this, i.e. inner sense” (#1215).
“Aristotle says that we know such things by perception, not the
perception of any one of the five senses, but the sort by which we
perceive that a triangle is the last kind of figure into which a polygon can
be divided (1142a 28-30). This sort of perceiving contains thinking and
imagining, but what it judges, it judges by perceiving it to be so.... “such
things are among particulars, and judgment is in the act of senseperception” (1109b23-4). But this is the calmly energetic, thought-laden
perception, Sachs, “Three Little Words,” The St. John’s Review, vol. 44,
no. 1 (1997): 12, 15.
47
Emile, 203.
48
Aristotle’s formulation of the utter specificity of action: NE
2.3.104b23: “...the ones one ought not, or when one ought not, or in a
way one ought not, or in as many other ways such distinctions are articulated.” See also 2.4.1105a3-35: “...with the things that come about as a
result of the virtues, just because they are a certain way, it is not the case
that one does them justly...but only if the one doing them does them in a
certain way, if one does them first of all knowingly, and next, having
chosen them and chosen them for their own sake, and third, being in a
stable condition and not able to be moved out of it.”
49
Thomas says this beautifully: “...the man who considers the common
features alone will not know how to proceed to action by reason of this
generality,” Commentary, 354 (#1111).
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50
“At 1142a23-27, [it is said] that intellect and practical judgment stand
at opposite extremes, directed at the unarticulated and individual terms
of thought and the ultimate particulars of perception. The two extremes
are now said to be united in the one faculty of intellect, that contemplates
the universals contained in the ultimate particulars, which can be the only
terms for a knowledge of truth. The same activity that holds a particular
thing together is at work on the soul even in perception. Thus the claim
that a single power stands at the root of theoretical and practical knowing
rests on the ultimate conclusions of the highest kind of philosophy, which
are arrived at in Bk. III of On the Soul and Bk. XII of the Metaphysics.
Here that claim asserts the unity of the human being” (Sachs, NE, 114,
n.168). See 1141b15.
51
NE 1113a29-b1; 139b4-5;1143b13-14;1144b30-32; and Sachs, NE,
117, n. 173.
52
By “governing sense”, Thomas reminds us, we mean that which will
allow us to “govern ourselves” above all, Commentary, 377 (#1185).
53
Thus it is the case, Aristotle says, that human excellence cannot be
“...just an active condition in accord with right reason,” as Socrates seems
to say at times, for example in the Meno (though see Gorgias), “but one
that [must actively] involve right reason” (NE 1144b25).
54
This is puzzling. Since choice is rational desire for Aristotle, it is inseparable from action. Yet here it is intellect that is the motive agency underlying action. Our new question: what is the relationship of reason and
desire in Aristotle?
55
“The two highest modes of alêtheuein [truth disclosure] [in Aristotle]
are phronêsis and sophia” (Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 39.)
56
Lest we still think that he is speaking of some merely practical ability
like “cleverness” [deinos], Aristotle once more helps us by making a
distinction. We’re not just speaking about some natural craftiness or
shrewdness. “...Cleverness enables one to do the things that are
conducive to the object one sets down and to achieve it... [However] if
[one’s] object is base, [then this ability] is shameless...” (1144a22-29).
Practical sense is not cleverness, though it too presupposes an ability to
achieve ends.
57
See Gadamer, Truth and Method, 288, and Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist,
25.
57
NE 1.3.1095a1-2.
57
Indeed, this is the virtue of all good conversation (Venkatesh).
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101
Kultur and the Obligations to
Philosophy
Jonathan Badger
Michael Grenke’s translations of Nietzsche’s On the Future of
Our Educational Institutions and Prefaces to Unwritten Works
offer readers of English a previously unavailable view into
Nietzsche’s thought. These works have not received as much
attention as perhaps they deserve, and Grenke’s careful and
astute English rendering of them is likely to change this.
Grenke’s strategy is to capture the subtleties of
Nietzsche’s prose by means of a rather extreme literalism. As
Grenke points out in his preface, this has occasionally
resulted in difficult English, but it succeeds in preserving
Nietzsche’s peculiar punctuation and diction, which are often
“corrected” in commercial translations. Grenke’s translations
offer an utterly reliable reflection of Nietzsche’s phrasing and
word-play. Key terms are flagged with their German counterparts, and there are ample footnotes to qualify the renderings
of ambiguous terms. Grenke has compiled and organized
relevant portions of Nietzsche’s own notes and drafts for
these works, and has included them in appendices for both
books. His approach allows the reader to track the use of
terms through these texts, and he is meticulous and disciplined in his stated aim of leaving the task of interpretation
to the reader. In this respect, these translations are exemplary.
In addition to the translation and a general introduction by
Grenke, each of the items in the Prefaces is accompanied by a
short and illuminating essay. These are written by Mathew K.
Davis, Lise van Boxel, and Grenke himself.
Friedrich Nietzsche. Prefaces to Unwritten Works. Trans. and ed. Michael W
.
Grenke, South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2005. Friedrich Nietzsche. On the
Future of Our Educational Institutions. Trans. Michael W Grenke, South
.
Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2004. Jonathan Badger is a tutor on the
Annapolis campus of St. John’s College.
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Each work emerged as a completed whole in the year
1872, and the two are deeply connected to one other. For
instance, one of the prefaces in Prefaces to Unwritten Works
is called “Thoughts on the Future of Our Educational
Institutions,” and Nietzsche suggests that it be read before On
the Future of Our Educational Institutions (Prefaces, 28).
Both books focus our attention on the individual Nietzsche
calls the “genius,” a luminary who sees beyond the horizons
of his particular time and place. The genius is unafraid to
smash tablets and to propose new configurations for human
community. Nietzsche depicts the genius sometimes as a
philosopher and other times as a poet or “artist” (see below).
The genius is a theme Nietzsche addresses in detail
elsewhere,1 but these two books specifically address the
question of our response to the genius. How should we
respond to the presence of such an individual? Nietzsche’s
view here would seem to be that the presence of the genius—
be he prophet, poet, or philosopher—carries with it a specific
imperative for the rest of us. We are obliged to allow
ourselves to be lifted by genius. How do we do this?
Nietzsche’s answer seems to be what he calls “culture”
(Kultur). A genius’ vision can in principle be transferred into
a group in the form of a culture or “way of life.” This way
can elevate the non-genius far above his natural capacities
and include him in the work of genius. Moreover, the proper
work of the non-genius includes preparing for the next
appearance of genius in the world, and this work is made
possible by the culture, which organizes and ennobles the
activity of the non-genius.
The Prefaces offers a set of meditations on why Kultur is
necessary, and On the Future of Our Educational Institutions
displays a high level thinking-through of what this might
actually mean in practice at the first stage of implementation,
namely at the level of education.
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103
The Prefaces
Prefaces to Unwritten Works is Grenke’s edition of a work
originally entitled “Five Prefaces to Five Unwritten Books,”
which was a book handmade by Nietzsche himself and
presented as a gift to Cosima Wagner in 1872, with the
expectation that Richard Wagner would also read it. The care
with which Nietzsche prepared this little volume, clearly
intended for highly regarded readers, should alert us to its
importance as a glimpse into his own conception of his larger
body of work. Many of the themes taken up in the Prefaces
are recognizable from Nietzsche’s published corpus, and we
can clearly see the outlines in it of Nietzsche’s well-known
conceptions of time, history, morality, and art. The
compactness and concision of his presentation, however,
shows us an example of how Nietzsche might have wished his
philosophy to be presented or introduced to intelligent,
educated non-philosophers. This should be of interest to
anyone who aspires to understand Nietzsche.
On first glance the topics of the five prefaces seem quite
disparate. Their titles are:
1. On the Pathos of Truth
2. Thoughts on the Future of Our Educational
Institutions
3. The Greek State
4. The Relation of Schopenhauerian Philosophy to
the German Culture
5. Homer’s Contest
Grenke’s introduction helps us see the common threads
that unify these topics. What most conspicuously emerges is
the theme of culture. Nietzsche views culture as crucial to the
proper development of human life. Modern civilization
seems stunted by either a lack of culture or bad culture.
Nietzsche challenges his readers to foster a new culture of
health, which aims to turn us toward the genius.
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The order that Nietzsche envisions holds the genius in a
place of distinction: he is either the focus or the founder (or
both) of a culture; the culture is an ongoing context in which
the rest of us lead elevated lives as we look toward the genius
and take our bearings in the light of his insight and creation.
Genius alone would seem to be a kind of meaningless dead
end. Authentic genius propagates itself through culture, so
that the entire community can be enriched, and also so that a
new genius can eventually be brought into being.
For Nietzsche there are two classes of genius, “the genius
of wisdom and of knowing,” who is the philosopher, and “the
genius in his universal concept,” who would seem to be the
artist or poet (13, note 1). The question of which of these is
actually primary is complex. In the Prefaces Nietzsche at
times locates the philosopher at the center of culture, while at
the same time he characterizes the artist as one who can
create a culture. It would seem that the two are not easily
separable.
A second unifying thread running through the Prefaces is
the theme of time (8-9). Human beings perceive time as the
annihilator that separates them from their natural vision of
themselves. We love ourselves and our products, and this love
suggests that these things should persist, should be. Time,
however, destroys them. We respond to time metaphysically
through philosophy, art, history, culture, politics, and war.
This second thread turns out to be more fundamental than
the first: culture emerges as a response to the problem of
time.
In the first preface, “On the Pathos of Truth,” Nietzsche
is explicit regarding time as a fundamental problem for man.
We recoil at the specter of everything disappearing into time;
it offends us. One response is to link together the “great
moments” into a chain that runs through the millennia: this
is the “fundamental thought of culture” (22). This rebellion
against time also brings about the notion of “truth.” Truth
stands outside of time, and hence is not subject to its
destructive power. Nietzsche recognizes Heraclitus as an
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105
exemplar of the genius who explores this kind of truthpositing in a life-affirming manner. Heraclitus, however, is
exceptional in this respect. The general run of philosophers
falls short of “art,” which aims to live, while “knowing”
achieves only annihilation (27). “Truth” is potentially annihilating in that it is indifferent to human dignity and well being:
truth informs us that human life is a short-lived, insignificant
anomaly flickering in a remote corner of an indifferent
universe. Yet truth is necessary in order for us to escape the
annihilation of time. This, it would seem, is the pathos of
truth.
This preface sets out the terms and the tone for the other
prefaces, which explore various aspects of culture, namely,
what is its source, who is responsible for it, and what should
be its proper end.
The next preface, titled “Thoughts on the Future of Our
Educational Institutions,” builds on the previous preface’s
critique of “truth.” Nietzsche here challenges the reader to set
aside his former education so that he might escape into a
position from which he may grasp the “authentic problem.”
Only then can the reader understand the nature of
Nietzsche’s proposal for a radical reformation of education, a
reformation that seeks to establish a culture that takes its
bearings from the greatest achievements of philosophy and
poetry of the past, and that seeks to make ready the
appearance of new geniuses in the future. Nietzsche is not
explicit about what this “authentic problem” is. In his introductory essay to this preface, Matthew Davis persuasively
argues that the “authentic problem” is the problem of truth,
articulated in the previous essay. The pathos of truth is
approached culturally by means of education. The next
preface is on politics, and thus we see a path forming in the
sequence of prefaces: a theoretical insight into the problem of
truth, followed by an educational response, leading into a
formulation of a political structure. This is a practical
response to the unifying themes mentioned above. Time is the
fundamental problem, and it can be mitigated by “truth.”
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Truth is posited by philosophy and given life by means of
culture, which in turn must be established through education
and politics. Philosophy, education, politics. It is striking that
the concern for education is prior to politics.
The next preface, “The Greek State,” tells us that a
consolation for the outrage of time is a species of politics
Nietzsche identifies as “artistic culture,” for which he credits
Plato. He seems here to appropriate and exploit the
Republic’s city in speech for the purpose of illustrating a
highly ordered “artistic culture” that places the genius at the
top and orders all of life according to the insights of the
genius. “Plato’s” completed “state” sought the “ever-renewed
generation and preparation of the genius” (57). The state in
its best form does not view the individual as dignified in
himself, but rather values the individual as an instrument of
genius. The individual is lifted above his natural condition of
moral and intellectual feebleness (and above his fleeting life)
to become part of the work of the genius; each ordinary life
is thus brought into the realm of genius and culture, and
thereby beyond the immediate threat of annihilation.
Nietzsche notices the irony of the fact that the poets are
ejected from this city, which Nietzsche has associated with the
artistic culture, but he also notes quite correctly that the
Republic is a product of “poetic intuition and painted with
bluntness” (57). Further, we must ask how Nietzsche would
account for the fact that “Plato” places the “genius of
wisdom” (the philosopher) at the top of this “state,” when
Nietzsche has identified this genius as derivative from the
“genius in his universal concept” (the artist). Again, he
acknowledges this contradiction, but passes over it quickly,
calling it a symptom of a struggle internal to Plato, who still
suffers from the influence of Socrates. Nietzsche calls his
interpretation of Plato’s “hieroglyph” the “secret teaching of
the connection between the state and the genius” (59,
emphasis Nietzsche’s).
Nietzsche then turns to a practical, contemporary
challenge that emerges from this analysis. To what should his
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contemporary Germans look as they contemplate what a
proper culture would look like? His response to this question
is Schopenhauer. Nietzsche offers no account here of
Schopenhauer’s philosophy; he only notes that he is “their”
(the Germans’) single philosopher in the nineteenth century
(69). He suggests that they begin with the philosopher and
then consider what culture belongs to him.
Nietzsche conspicuously avoids doing this work for his
readers. He challenges them to work out for themselves what
the culture of their time should be, and how they should
derive it from a particular philosopher. Again, strangely,
Nietzsche has selected a genius of knowledge—that is, a
philosopher—for his starting point. Thus, by this point in the
Prefaces a rich set of questions has emerged, and Grenke
intelligently frames many of them in his essay that accompanies this preface (60-4).
The final preface, “Homer’s Contest,” addresses the
culture of combat. We children of modernity have difficulty
affirming any sort of goodness in war. Our desire is for a
world of peace. Nietzsche poses a challenge for us. Our desire
for peace is a desire to escape nature, to escape time and
become eternally at rest. We must ask ourselves if this is
possible or best. Is it a meaningful solution to the annihilating
effects of time?
To get at this question, Nietzsche leads us back through
the horrors of the Trojan war, deeper into the world of the
Homeric gods, and deeper still, back into the primordial
divinities of Hesiod, who describes a reality ruled by the
“children of the night.” This is a world of cruelty, deception,
and death—the fundamental reality. The battles of the Titans,
says Nietzsche, represented a relief from the primordial
condition of chaos and disorder. Battle is “grace” and
“salvation” (83).
Two kinds of strife emerged from this initial condition:
one is merely cruel, seeking only discord, while the other is
jealous and ambitious and seeks distinction and pre-eminence.
This second type of strife is “good” strife; it leads men
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toward excellence and is life promoting, despite its violence.
It is this good strife that Nietzsche says characterizes the
Homeric contests as exemplified at Troy, and this is an answer
to the question why Homeric poetry seems to exult in the
glorious horror of warfare.
In her introductory essay to this preface (70-80), van
Boxel argues that this insight extends to our fundamental
desire to see the world coherently, to render it as intelligible.
Conflict tames the primordial chaos and thereby establishes
measure. Prior to battle, nothing is measured against anything
else; nothing is knowable. Battle is the means to establishing
the measure of one against the other. The greater is established, and thus order is established. Further, the greater
points us toward the good, which we begin to see more
clearly. Through the establishment of measure by means of
combat, the world is rendered not only intelligible but also
moral (77-8).
Nietzsche’s formulation is obscure. He claims that the
pre-Hellenic, Oriental genius envisions a motion out of
primordial chaos and cruelty by means of strife. This motion
passes first through “disgust in existence, to interpretation of
this existence as an expiating punishment, to belief in the
identity of being there [Dasein] and being guilty” (83). The
Hellenes take up this conception and extend it into a vision
of the “good strife”: the life-promoting violence leading to
victory and excellence.
Another feature of this Homeric-Hellenic view is the
conviction that an ongoing subservience to a single master is
undesirable. There will be many geniuses and they must clash
and mix.
[O]ne removes the over-towering individual, [and]
thereby now again the contest of forces awakes: a
thought that is hostile to the “exclusivity” of
genius in the modern sense, but which assumes
that, in a natural order of things, there are always
more geniuses who reciprocally incite [each other]
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to deeds, as they also reciprocally hold [each
other] within the borders of measure. That is the
kernel of the Hellenic contest-idea: it abhors
solitary mastery and fears its dangers; it requires,
as a means of protection against the genius—a
second genius. (89)
Thus, although every gift must disclose itself in fighting,
this is not a call to a master-slave ordering. It is rather a call
to a recognition of the agonistic character of human being
and seeing.
Finally, this view of being suggests that volitional action is
not possible without fighting. For Nietzsche, the Greeks
discover what it means to be free. In the absence of the
contest neither the Greek individual nor the Greek culture
can find measure, and thus cannot direct themselves. The
danger for post-Hellenic civilization is degeneration into the
primal chaos. Without the noble strife there is a sliding back
to cruelty and vengeance. Without ongoing strife and combat
man may not remain properly human.
Nietzsche was conscious that the ideas he formulated in
these prefaces were unfashionable in 1872. They are perhaps
even more unfashionable now. The liberal West has become
quite unified in its preference for individual rights and peace.
Even the proponents of particular war efforts do not defend
war on the basis of its salutary effects on soldiers or culture;
it is regarded as a necessary evil, instrumental for political
and strategic ends. The stated aims of Western military action
are the removal of brutal despots, the elimination of threats
to security, and the restoration of regional stability. However
paradoxical or contradictory, modern war is for the sake of
peace and prosperity. We wage wars to end wars.
Nietzsche challenges a belief so deeply held that it is
perhaps not even recognized as a belief. We modern liberals
do not regard love of peace as an article of faith; it is, rather,
experienced as a recognition of a manifest good. This makes
it difficult to hold Nietzsche’s challenge in front of us.
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It is nevertheless important that we take up this challenge.
If we reject Nietzsche’s claims about war, does this mean that
we reject the Homeric presentation of human life? If we
reject Nietzsche’s vision of the individual’s relation to the
genius through culture, does this mean we must reject Plato’s
Republic? Or can we rest secure in the belief that Nietzsche
offers us flawed readings of these works? Would we say that
our readings of Homer and Plato are superior to Nietzsche’s?
The mastery and power of Nietzsche’s presentation
makes it difficult to dismiss his readings out of hand, but
perhaps we have some room to maneuver. Could it be that
Nietzsche intentionally misrepresents Homer and Plato for
the sake of co-opting them into his project? Or is it that he
emphasizes particular aspects of them for the sake of
shocking their modern readers into seeing that at some point
we must make a choice between our modern prejudices and
our admiration for Homer and Plato? How would we make
such a choice? At the very least this would involve two
considerations: First, we should carefully examine the
opinions that pull us so powerfully toward perpetual peace
and universal autonomy—opinions that lead us not only to
recoil from the realities of war but also to withdraw from the
idea of the genius and the “cults” that follow in his wake;
second, we should read Plato and Homer very carefully—is
there any chance that Nietzsche is right in saying that we tend
to impose modern sensibilities upon them and thereby distort
or obscure their significance?
On the Future of Our Educational Institutions
Nietzsche’s series of lectures delivered at the University of
Basil in the winter of 1872, called On the Future of Our
Educational Institutions, was a public reading of a dialogue
set in an idyllic forest wilderness near the banks of the Rhein
in late summer. The interlocutors are an old philosopher, his
younger companion, and two passionate university students
wielding pistols. A dog also participates in the drama. There
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is in fact a great deal of dramatic action in the dialogue; as
Grenke points out in his introduction, there is “shooting,
shouting, singing, wrestling, a star falling, a torch-lit
procession, a musical signal, and, of course, biting.”
Because the speeches are situated within a drama, we are
challenged to interpret them accordingly. Where do we locate
the voice of Nietzsche? The lector identifies himself with one
of the young students, but the weightiest monologues come
from the old philosopher. Moreover, of the two students, the
“friend” is the more articulate. Finally, as a young academic,
the philosopher’s “companion” seems to occupy the lector’s
social position and professional status at the time these
lectures were delivered.
The central topic of discussion is education. What is it,
and how should it be achieved? What is its relationship to
politics and the “state”? Along the way we encounter the
concept of “culture.” According to the philosopher, many
seem to believe that becoming educated means becoming
“cultured.” What does this mean? Is this something to which
we should aspire? What are the alternatives to it? What is
culture and what is its proper status within a regime?
One of the primary concerns of the dialogue is the
democratization of education, which seems to imply—or at
least coincide with—a trivialization of the activity and the
production of countless subfields of study, all of which fail to
comprehend the greatness of ancient philosophy and poetry,
as well as the greatness of modern German visionaries such as
Goethe. Central to this loss is the deterioration of proper
language study. Contemporary Gymnasium students, says the
philosopher, are not only unable to read ancient Greek in a
way that gives them access to the power of Plato and
Sophocles, but they are also unable to speak and write
German properly. They have sunk to the level of “journalism”
(2.45-57; 3.73).
This newfangled education purports to make students
independent in their thinking, allowing them to eschew
authority and to write about whatever they please, as though
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their untutored inclinations were highly valuable. This
generates a smug and unjustifiably aloof student who remains
uninitiated into philosophy, says the old philosopher (5.1057). These students learn to be contemptuous of authority, but,
says the philosopher, they pay for their “grandiose illusion of
freedom through ever-renewing torments and doubts”
(5.111). Contemporary education indulges the personality
and the particular. It celebrates the individual and his quirks.
Proper education, says the philosopher, “should be purified
from the imprint of the subject and carried out above the
interplay of the times, as the clear mirroring of the eternal
and unchanging essence of the thing” (4.97).
The two students naturally resent this critique and point
out that their Gymnasium education has cultivated them and
given them a taste for science, which they presume to be
clearly good for mankind. The philosopher scoffs at the
proposition, and remarks that he feels “terrified” by this
development (5.105); this scientistic culture has spawned an
industry of degenerate erudition that marks an escape from
authentic life and culture.
A danger the philosopher sees is that, in the absence of
philosophic leadership within the educational institutions,
the students with the greatest capacity grow to despise
themselves under “the unendurable burden of standing
alone” without a true teacher (5.112). Another danger, he
warns, is the seduction of the best students by false gods,
namely, perverse ideological and political movements.
The philosopher is deeply concerned that the state has
taken control of pre-university education to use for its own
insidious ends. The production of serviceable citizens who
are unmoved by greatness is at odds with philosophy’s
interest in education. The old philosopher persuades his little
audience that the purpose of proper educational institutions
is to cultivate the soil in which philosophy can flourish.
These institutions would acknowledge that philosophy is
extremely rare, and requires extraordinary effort. Out of the
multitude of students only a few would be sufficiently
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endowed to participate in the work of the philosophic
schools, of which there would only be a small number in all
of Germany. A small number of teachers would emerge from
this rarified sample of students, and even these would only
serve as laborers in the service of bringing forth the rarest of
breeds, the philosopher himself. Those with “second- and
third-class gifts” can thus be brought to their full potential
and can contribute to the work of philosophy. (4.97)
As we consider this dream, we must remember that this is
not Nietzsche speaking, but a character in his lecturedialogue. This does not mean that Nietzsche does not intend
to advance such a vision of education and philosophy, but we
are obliged, as we are with Plato’s Republic, to hesitate to
conclude that this is Nietzsche’s blueprint for education.
We are encouraged, however, to consider what we think
the proper relationship is between philosophy and educational institutions, and how this relationship stands with
respect to the regime in which we live. Can educational institutions peacefully service both the needs of the nation and the
demands of philosophy (or more broadly, the demands of
genius2)? This raises a more fundamental question for us. Do
we view philosophy as an activity with an imperative? That
is, does it call us and make demands of us? If it does, how
does this call stand with respect to our “individuality,” our
“persons,” and our inclinations about what a good life should
be? Do we view philosophy as merely instrumental to our
individual lives; that is, do we grapple with philosophic texts
only so much as is pleasant and convenient for our personal
inclinations? Do we view philosophy as merely a good
exercise for thinking and talking about difficult matters, for
the sake of a higher quality of discourse in personal life, in
business life, in political life? Is philosophy then merely a
handmaid to the ordinary affairs of life?
It is likely that most of us within the academic traditions
of liberal democracies in the twenty-first century do not
respond with vigorous principled support to the idea of a
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culture of genius. We tend to believe that the artifacts of
genius are to be read and considered seriously either within
an enterprise of historical inquiry, or with a view toward a
kind of personal enlightenment. Some of us even go so far as
to believe that these notable books can help us navigate the
political and social questions of our own time. It is unusual,
however, for anyone to approach them out of a sense of
service to something else, something higher to which one
feels obliged to subordinate oneself. Academics and their
students dabble in texts that strike their fancy. The old
philosopher of Nietzsche’s dialogue claims that, for the best
students, the consequences of this casual, personal
relationship with genius are confusion, doubt, and selfloathing, as well as an unwarranted arrogance. The alternative he offers is initiation by a teacher into the proper study
of philosophy within a culture that surrounds genius. The
student is brought into a central region of the culture, and
this gives the education authenticity and authority (5.11013). The student is brought into the work of philosophy for
the sake of philosophy.
A question emerges: Are we the servants of philosophy, or
is philosophy an instrument for our “personal” ends? If we
answer in a manner that suggests that philosophy does carry
an imperative, then we must follow that imperative or reject
philosophy. If we follow it, will there be implications not just
for the individual but also for human life generally or at least
for the worldly community within which philosophy
appears?
1
2
See Gay Science, 361; Human, all too Human, 1.126,157-168.
I speak specifically of philosophy here, although Nietzsche’s conception
of the genius would seem to be broader. To be safe we might speak of
“the artist or philosopher.” I frame the issue in terms of philosophy for
several reasons. As noted above, Nietzsche makes the distinction between
“the genius in his universal concept” and “the genius of wisdom,” and we
might take care to preserve this distinction in our general understanding
here. One might reasonably conclude that the proper focal point or
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center of a Kultur would be “the genius in his universal concept,” and
this would not be the philosopher, but rather “the artist.” This, however,
does not appear to be Nietzsche’s application of his terms. He observes
and valorizes Plato’s placing philosophy in charge of the ideal regime; he
names the philosopher Schopenhauer as the best source for a new
German culture; and in On the Future of Our Educational Institutions the
account of the ordering of the institutions comes from the “old
philosopher.” We can therefore speak here in terms of philosophy and its
relation to politics and educational institutions, though we should be
mindful of the subtle relationship between Nietzsche’s “philosopher” and
his “artist,” which a more complete analysis of Nietzsche’s thought would
explore. See Nietzsche’s Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, for an
explicit account of the distinction, as well as his view that this distinction
is transcended by certain pre-Socratic philosophers.
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117
Jan Blits and the Virtues
of Commentary
John E. Alvis
The sprightliest thinker of our time once presented a lecture
on the virtues of Jane Austen beginning with a list most of the
audience considered an enumeration of defects: few settings
within unimproved nature, no symbols, tame emotions,
language under restraint, no derangements of plot, no
authorial confidences, predictable outcomes, or unabashed
moral assessments. Implicit in the lecture was a gentle reproof
of the manner of fiction writers well regarded, though, by
comparison with Austen, overwrought, as well as of the taste
of a readership similarly impolite in its avidity for strong
sensations. Timely and welcome, one might suppose, would
be something on similar lines but directed against presently
influential literary critics, too many of whom are, to the
extent permissible by academic conventions, sensationalists.
Yet, since not the least objectionable of the preoccupations of
contemporary critics is their insistence upon telling us more
of other critics than we need to know, offering a corrective by
better practice seems preferable. For that we can applaud the
example set by writers such as Jan Blits in his five books on
Shakespeare, and most recently in his study of Coriolanus.
Blits has the good sense to realize that each of
Shakespeare’s major plays affords material sufficiently
abundant to require book-length treatment for its elucidation. He devotes an entire volume to Julius Caesar (The
End of the Ancient Republic: Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar),
another to Macbeth (The Insufficiency of Virtue: Macbeth and
the Natural Order), another to Hamlet (Deadly Thought:
Jan Blits. Spirit, Soul, and City: Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. Lexington Books,
2006. John E. Alvis is a Professor in the Department of English, the
University of Dallas.
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Hamlet and the Human Soul), and a book on A Midsummer
Night’s Dream (The Soul of Athens: Shakespeare’s A
Midsummer Night’s Dream). His newest volume, Spirit, Soul,
and City: Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, is occupied with the play
probably composed last of the group Shakespeare drew out of
Plutarch’s Lives. Confining himself to a single play enables
Blits to do more than is usually done in the way of discerning
connections. One of the more striking of such discoveries
occurs with the discussion of the play’s “two endings.”
Shakespeare seems to have directed his story to one
conclusion with the success of the family embassy that turns
back a vengefully triumphant Coriolanus, yet he ends the play
a second time with the actual slaying of the title character,
since returned to Corioles, the city on behalf of which he had
warred against Rome. Blits makes sense of this peculiarity in
the play’s construction by perceiving the first climax as the
defeat of spirited ambition, and the second as the destruction
of the hero’s soul, his death coinciding with his inability to
see that his insistence upon a virtue unconditional has
continued to the end to make him the victim of conditions set
by meaner souls.
At times the dividend of dwelling upon a single play lies
in detecting overtones of particular words or phrases that
modify each other over wide intervals of text. Such a concentrated focus may also allow leisure for observing differences
in superficially similar incidents, or for developing the implications of certain repeated imagery, e.g. body parts for
members of Rome’s political organism, beast metaphors
applied to opponents, and diseases as figures for political
disorders. The tight focus also facilitates attention to
Shakespeare’s arrangement of incidents into a plot that
conveys dialectical thought by dramatic means. The focus of
the dialectic, announced in Blits’s title, is the relation between
a particular kind of civil society and the distinctive human
type that regime has produced. Coriolanus’s “spirit” and
“soul” have their genesis in his “city,” yet Shakespeare reveals
within his protagonist a persistent conflict with the
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119
community that has educated him in spirited ambition and
has by public acclamation conferred his honorific name.
But the chief benefit of Blits’s approach is that by
attending to one play at a time, it encourages the supposition
that each play is a complete and coherent body of thought
rather than an exhibit from which evidence may be extracted
in service of a critic’s thesis. You will notice that the thematic
parts of Blits’s various book titles make use of no words alien
to Shakespeare’s own usage. This is a departure from the
widespread practice of blazoning titles that advertise intent to
examine their subject from perspectives generated by modes
of thought ill sorting with Shakespearean diction. It is
refreshing to readers more used to immodest titles that decry,
say, Hegemony engaged in exploiting the dispossessed, that
promise a Deconstructing of some Ideology, or that propose
to demonstrate Undecideability (sic) vaporizing some Text
hitherto deemed determinable (Marxist powers, ideology,
and writings exempted). Blits’s satisfaction with a
Shakespearean vocabulary for rendering Shakespeare’s
thought permits his audience a less mediated acquaintance
with whatever play he discusses. The critic does not obstruct
so much the reader’s access to the thought of the poetry.
Students complain of teachers who persist in standing
between them and the light emitted from an author. Some
rare teachers know how to remove the impediment, and
come to know as well the happy result that occasionally
follows, that of learning simultaneously with the class. As far
as it appears possible to do so, Blits writes in the way of a
teacher receptive to this lesson.
Spirit, Soul, and City further distinguishes itself by its
organization. Contemporary expectations prescribe for the
commentator a vantage from the heights of which he will
profess to look over the head of the author whose work he
has contracted to elucidate. By preferring a topical division of
his own devising to the progression of action of the poem, he
declares his superiority to his subject. Blits adopts a more
modest but to my mind a more fruitful address to the task. He
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proceeds as the progression of the play prescribes, following
its development from act to act, scene after scene, line by line.
Conventional Shakespeareans will object to arranging
discussion in this manner and might well dismiss the result as
a mere “commentary.” Readers who seek to understand
Shakespeare rather than tame him might wish for more such
commentaries. From Blits we can collect the useful lesson that
an important dimension of the thought of the play comes into
view once we appreciate the dramatist’s development of
thought by repetition, congruence and incongruence, echo
and dissonance, and progression and retrogression, all of
which one best grasps when interpretive comment adheres to
plot. Never mind that college must caution students not to
peg their argument to the plot. They need not try this at
home. Still, Blits understands, and guides his reader to understand that a Shakespearean play is already a course of imaginative reasoning. Its logic will reveal itself to patient attention
operating consecutively rather than synoptically.
Obviously the risk incurred by such an organization is
that, as some parts of the play may interest us more than
others, a commentary proceeding in accord with the plot may
not sustain a constant interest. In this case, happily, a strong
theme prevents Blits’s commentary from plodding. He never
permits us to lose sight of his principal argument: that the
play examines a Roman republican community in tension
with a hero at once its product and the most serious challenge
to its survival. The book gives us to see something universal,
what one might call an anatomy of the excellences—accompanied by an exposure of the limitations—of spirited
ambition; this in conjunction with scrutiny of a perennial
problem confronted by all civil societies: how to regulate
such outsized souls as are required for defense of a nation.
While a nation must enlist men emulous for honor, it must
also secure justice and due respect for the less strenuous
temperaments these warriors lead in battle and govern during
peaceful interims. To put it another way, Shakespeare’s
Republican Rome rejects both items of advice Aristophanes
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puts in the mouth of his Aeschylus in Frogs. Shakespeare has
depicted a republic that insists upon rearing a lion within its
walls; yet having done so refuses to permit the lion to rule. In
Shakespeare’s version of Rome’s history, the republic
contrived somehow to survive until the advent of Caesar, or,
alternatively, until the city-state had extended its imperial
dominion as far as it ever would. The explanation for Rome’s
durability may lie in the republic’s ability extemporaneously
to produce at various crises institutions that in their eventual
arrangement answer to the Aristotelian scheme of a mixed
regime balancing every constituent interest with some other.
Blits assists us in perceiving how such a mixed polity can
preserve itself from external threats by breeding ambitious
generals, and yet produce families that will defy their own
blood when the ambition or indignation of such men should
threaten their country.
Blits displays one field of learning not evident from his
previous treatment of Shakespeare’s Rome in The End of the
Ancient Republic. His present work puts to effective use a
knowledge of the precepts and method of classical rhetoric
gleaned from Aristotle, Cicero, Tacitus, and Quintillian. The
benefit comes with his explication of the set speeches of
major characters. Persuasive speech was the operative art of
statesmanship for thinkers of classical antiquity. To understand rhetoric entails grasping the practical implications of
adapting political principle to political circumstance. Blits
understands this significance of rhetoric and thus he understands something essential to what Shakespeare would have
his more serious readers comprehend. Blits also shows a
command of ancient Latin historians more reliable than one
meets in any Shakespearean now writing. In contexts where
other scholars might guess that Aristotle or Cicero may have
crossed Shakespeare’s mind, this study cites appositely a half
dozen classical texts, chapter and verse, as well as such
moderns as Machiavelli, Hobbes, even Hegel, when appropriate.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Coriolanus seems to be thought of now as impressive
theater, but not comparably impressive when regarded as a
course of thought. It certainly has failed to enjoy the
reputation for philosophic scope or penetration accorded
Lear, Hamlet, and even Macbeth. Possibly the philosophic
substance of the work unfolds to readers themselves habituated to the sort of speculative thought Shakespeare would
have learned in the Elizabethan schools and from the books
favored by his contemporaries. His affinities seem to lie with
the tradition of thinking one discovers in Plato, Aristotle,
Cicero, and Plutarch, classical political philosophy inclusive
of ethical analysis and rhetoric, its practical political
instrument. The title of Blits’s book assumes this tradition by
taking “spirit” to mean thumos (spiritedness, ambition, indignation), “soul” to mean an unstable compound of reason,
spiritedness, with appetitive and aversive passions, and “city”
to mean a civil constitution combining a form of government
with a purpose of promoting a national way of life. Such
thinkers as I’ve mentioned were concerned with understanding the interrelatedness of human character and political
institutions, the latter including religious, educational, and
what in our day are termed “social” or “cultural” assumptions
relating to marriage, family, manners, and pieties. The
presiding questions for this tradition were the proper
ordering of the individual soul together with the ordering of
a regime most conducive to encouraging such souls.
Shakespeare adheres to a similar syllabus with the significant
addition of his concern to understand these issues as they
have been affected both by historical conditions perhaps
unanticipated by pagan classical thinkers—that is to say,
distinctly Christian and modern conditions—and by
challenges to classical thought posed by Machiavelli and
Bacon. This way of thinking, attributed by Locke to “the old
philosophers” and becoming less and less familiar today, Blits
finds congenial. That difference in intellectual training and
disposition accounts for the superiority of the book to other
recent studies of Shakespeare’s Roman plays. This author
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manifestly understands the mode of thought I have just
described and can therefore come closer than his contemporaries to tracking Shakespeare’s thought. Much closer.
�
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The St. John's Review, 2007/3
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2007
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Kraus, Pamela
Brann, Eva T. H.
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Zuckerman, Elliott
Curry, Elizabeth
Hunt, Frank
Sachs, Joe
Carey, James
Levine, David
Badger, Jonathan
Alvis, John E.
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Volume XLIX, number three of The St. John's Review. Published in 2007.
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The St. John’s Review
Volume XLIX, number two (2006)
Editor
Pamela Kraus
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Elizabeth Curry
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson,
President; Michael Dink, Dean. For those not on the distribution list, subscriptions are $10 for one year. Unsolicited
essays, reviews, and reasoned letters are welcome. All
manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to the Review, St. John’s College, P
.O. Box 2800,
Annapolis, MD 21404-2800. Back issues are available, at $5
per issue, from the St. John’s College Bookstore.
©2006 St. John’s College. All rights reserved; reproduction
in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing and Printing
The St. John’s Public Relations Office and the St. John’s College Print Shop
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
3
Contents
Essays and Lectures
The Fixed, The Fluid, and the Flexible:
Achilles, the River, and Homer’s World........................ 5
Mera J. Flaumenhaft
Making Up Our Minds............................................... 47
Robert Richardson
Reviews
What Good Are Friends? Lorraine Smith Pangle’s
Aristotle and the Philosophy of Friendship................... 73
Robert Goldberg
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5
The Fixed, the Fluid, and the
Flexible: Achilles, the River,
and Homer’s World
Mera J. Flaumenhaft
Homer’s Troy is a mainland city with access to the sea.
Although Troy’s riches have been acquired through trade
with other cities, in the Iliad the seafaring life is almost
entirely associated with the Greek flotilla moored on Troy’s
shores. We hear of Greek ships, Greek captains, and voyages
from Greek lands across the sea. The army of the Greeks is
enumerated in the catalogue of ships they sailed to Troy,
while the Trojans and their allies are listed by the lands they
come from. Troy has had a history of troubled relations with
the god of the sea. An early king failed to pay the promised
price for walls built by Poseidon, and the weakened city
barely survived the sea monster sent to avenge this violation.
Several generations later, a Trojan prince sailed “over the sea
in seafaring ships” (3.46-47) and stole away with the wife of
his unsuspecting host. In the Iliad Paris is the only prominent
Trojan who is said to have gone to sea.1 When the Achaean
host besieges Troy to regain Helen and destroy Priam’s city,
Poseidon takes the side of the Achaeans.
But Troy’s relationship to the watery realm is not entirely
troubled, for the city also owes its prosperity to the river
Scamander, which rises in the mountain above the land,
meets a tributary, and flows down to the “broad gulf of the
sea.” The Olympian sea god Poseidon, “who circles the earth
and shakes it,” is, like Ocean, associated with water of the
cosmos, universal water. Scamander, like all rivers in Greek
myths, is descended from Ocean. But, like the others, Troy’s
river is local water, associated with a particular place; it serves
Mera Flaumenhaft is a tutor on the Annapolis campus of St. John’s College.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
as a symbol of its “habitability.”2 It irrigates crops, provides
water for drinking and cooking, as well as hot and cold water
for the tanks in which the fabrics that so characterize Trojan
wealth are laundered (22.147-56). There is no indication in
Homer that Trojans, or others who come to Troy, navigate the
river. Ships ply the sea from coast to coast, but inland places
are usually reached by land. The river is lively; it eddies and
bubbles, swirls and crests. Because of its yellow-brown color,
the Gods call it Xanthus, but in Troy it has a personal name,
Scamander (20.74), which is also the name of the grandson of
the present ruler (6.402), the future heir to the kingship. Like
its tributary Simoieis, another source of Trojan fertility, the
river serves almost as a “landscape symbol for Troy itself.”3 As
an offspring of the “river Oceanus” from whom all the gods
are sprung (14.246, 302), Scamander is also a descendent of
immortal Zeus (14.434; 24.693). The river has its own priest,
whose name (Hypsenor, “high,” 5.75-78), like the epithet of
his father (huperthumou, “high spirited,” 5.76-77), suggests
his high status; the Trojans honor him “like a god” (5.77).
They sacrifice bulls and live horses (21.131-32) to Scamander
to insure the continued fertility of the land. An old story
predicted that Troy would survive if its Thracian ally
Rhesus—or his horses—could drink the waters of
Scamander.4 It is fitting that Zeus lifts his golden scales to
signal the death of Hector just as he and Achilles, on their
fourth circuit of the city, come to the two springs that feed
eddying Scamander (12.147, 208). When Hector dies, the
city by the river will come to its end.
Scamander has another important function in Troy.
Although its flowing and shapeless water can be removed by
the mortals who dwell around it, the river itself remains
channeled between steep banks, and its channel, which does
have a set shape and location, divides the land that surrounds
it. It is a natural landmark that, unlike the Trojan or Achaean
walls, can never be erased. Homer charts the war geographically, as the sides repeatedly cross the river, waging battle,
now at the Trojan walls, now at the Greek ships. At the end
FLAUMENHAFT
7
of the Iliad, when Priam goes to Achilles’ tent to ransom
Hector’s body, he leaves the relative safety of Troy and
crosses into the no man’s land on the other side of Troy’s
tutelary river.
In Book Twenty-one the river becomes the site of some of
Achilles’ strangest encounters as he moves towards the walls
of Troy, determined to take revenge on Hector for the death
of Patroclus. The strangeness of this part of the Iliad has
suggested to some that it is alien material, or that Homer here
regresses to a more primitive mode of thinking.5 The book
consists of four parts: the admired, realistic encounters of
Achilles with Lycaon and Asteropaeus; the battles between
Achilles and Scamander and between Scamander and
Hephaestus, which scholars sometimes compare to episodes
in other epics and folktales or describe as just plain weird;6 a
reprise of Olympian wrangling over the mortals; and the
Trojan retreat into Troy, where Priam awaits the coming of
the man who will kill his son.
This essay will suggest that, rather than pulling away from
the Iliad, Book Twenty-one points to the deepest meaning of
Achilles’ experience. Part One discusses the three river
episodes as graphic depictions of Achilles’ response to his
own mortality. Part Two offers three alternatives to his tragic
opposition to the threat of dissolution. The shield of
Hephaestus and Homer’s poetry suggest the interplay of
fixity and fluidity, stability and change, in the human soul and
in the cosmos as a whole. Odysseus, too, exemplifies a kind
of flexibility as a viable alternative to the tragic extremes of
stable fixity and unstable fluidity as they are presented in
Book Twenty-one. The essay concludes with a brief note on
another river, the one to which Achilles might return, were he
a less extraordinary man.
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1
1. Battles by the River: Achilles, Lycaon, and Asteropaeus
However the book divisions came to be, Book Twenty-one is
set off from what comes before and after it by its association
with the watery world. As Achilles drives the Trojans towards
the city, some of them “pour forth” (“streaming,” proechonta,
from cheô, 21.6) in flight. Others are pent up in the “deep
flowing river with its silver eddies, [where]…whirled about,
they swam this way and that” (21.8-11). Homer emphasizes
the noise. In addition to the usual din of battle, we hear the
sound of flowing and splashing water, now disturbed by the
confused and violent action between the riverbanks. The din
will increase, as the river speaks in human voice and bellows
in anger. At the end of Book Twenty-one, those Trojans
who have survived the episode “pour back” (or, “stream,”
esechunto, from cheô, 21.610) into the city. Between the
“streamings” which begin and end the episode, Achilles
literally battles the great Trojan stream itself.
He is first compared to a fire driving locusts into a river
and then to a huge dolphin devouring prey in a harbor. We
have entered a realm where all conventional restraints are
about to be abandoned and where natural predation is
uninhibited: big fish go after little fish, undeterred by pity,
self-control, or the laws of nations. Revenge is the sole
motive. In the catalogue of Trojan allies in Book Two Homer
mentions a foolish Carian named Nastes who came to the war
“all decked in gold, like a girl” (2.872) and was slain in the
river by Achilles, who “bore off the gold” (2.875). In Book
Twenty-one, Nastes is not named and Achilles has no interest
in gold. Before the major confrontations, he pulls from the
river twelve Trojan youths, dazed, “like fawns,” to reserve for
sacrifice on the tomb of Patroclus. In the following verses,
two other Trojans emerge from the river, only to be tossed
back after their pleas for mercy are denied. Human sacrifice
and the rejection of surrender violate the ordinary conventions of battle between civilized human beings.
FLAUMENHAFT
9
The first of these two named Trojans, Lycaon, is a son of
Priam who has only recently returned to battle, having been
ransomed previously by a gentler Achilles and returned to his
father’s house. Now, desperately “unwilling,” he is destined
for the house of Hades. Like the twelve anonymous youths,
he is “dazed,” but, unlike them, he makes a personal plea for
his life, promising many gifts if Achilles will ransom him
again. Achilles hurls his spear, which misses him, but “stands
in the ground” (eni gaiê estê, 21. 69-70), upright and fixed,
an emblem of his own refusal to be moved. Lycaon’s plea
rests on his having a different mother from Hector, although
he knows that did not deter Achilles from refusing to give
back Lycaon’s full brother, Polydorus, whose name ironically
means “many gifts.” Achilles now sounds like Agamemnon at
earlier moments when he brutally rejects pleas for ransom
and vows to let no Trojan’s son remain alive for ransom
(6.46, 11.131). In their brief but memorable exchange,
Achilles calls the naïve boy who begs for his life first “fool”
(21. 99) and then “friend” (21.106), sardonically assuring
him that he must die. Homer here reminds us that Achilles,
despite his immortal mother, is no less subject to death than
this hapless Trojan boy. Using a word associated most strongly
with Achilles himself, Lycaon says he was born minunthadion, “to a brief span of life” (21.84). He dies as all men
do in Homer’s battles; his knees and his heart are “loosened”
(luto, 21.114) and his dark blood “flows”(rhee, 21.119). In
life, men are solid beings, distinct from their surroundings,
upright and contained. In death, they dissolve, go slack, and
lose their shape and outlines. Internal fluids, no longer
contained within the channels and boundaries of a closed
body, flow forth and gather outside it in shapeless pools on
the ground.
Achilles flings more words at Lycaon as he flings him into
the river. No longer governed by his own will, the precious
son of the king of Troy will be carried away (21.120),
passively, like an object, by the “eddying Scamander…into
the broad gulf of the sea” (21.125). The savagery of Achilles’
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
treatment of Lycaon is intensified by blasphemy. He throws
Lycaon into the river as he says Lycaon has thrown many
sacrificial bulls and even living horses into the silver eddies of
Scamander. In a grotesque parody of Trojan piety, Lycaon is
a human offering to his own river. Achilles cruelly taunts him
by describing how the fish, actively leaping among the waves,
will eat his lifeless “white fat” (21.127). The mutilation of
human bodies by the fish of the sea is a horror even beyond
that of the devouring of corpses by birds and dogs on the
battlefields.7 Here the predators are even lower in the
hierarchy of living beings, are themselves more subject to the
flow of their medium, and lack the ability to express
themselves, even in cries and howls. Their human victims are
nibbled at, silently and out of view. With no bathing, burning,
or funeral ceremony, they will not be touched again by
human hands, and there will be no visible reminder of them
to those who come after. They are, quite literally, dissolved.
By now, the river is red, literally a bloodbath filled with
men, corpses and horses, and is “pondering in mind”
(21.137) how to aid the Trojans. Achilles’ next opponent is
not a son of Priam, but a Trojan ally, Asteropaeus, the
“star”(astêr) of Paeonia, who is said to be descended from
“wide-flowing [eurureontos] Axius,” his own local and “deepeddying river” (21.141-43), the “fairest water upon the
earth” (21.158). The ancestry of this new opponent is on
Achilles’ mind from the moment he sees him: “Who among
men art thou, and from whence…? Unhappy are they whose
children face my might” (21.150-51). Xanthus, angry at the
pitiless Achilles for wreaking havoc beside his banks, puts
courage in Asteropaeus’s heart. Achilles now faces a man who
is riverine in origin and proud of his ancestry. He is the only
man in Homer who is said to be ambidextrous (peridexios,
21.163); his strength is not fixed on one side, but alternates
between right and left or flows from both sides at once.
Xanthus gives him courage as he “stands forth from the
river” (21.144), holding two spears. In contrast, Achilles’
single ashen spear, which misses Asteropaeus, “fixes
FLAUMENHAFT
11
itself ”(enestêrikto, 21.168) “up to half its length” in the bank.
For all his ambidexterity, Asteropaeus is unable to draw out
this spear, which again suggests the implacable hero’s desire
for eternal fixity. In this round, the fixed defeats the fluid.
Asteropaeus wounds Achilles with his sword, making his
“dark blood start forth” (21.167). But this wound, the only
one Achilles suffers in the Iliad,8 is not fatal. It elicits, as he
kills Asteropaeus, an account of his own genealogy, which he
claims is superior to the one derived from the Paeonian river,
and, indeed, from any water, however great:
Wherefore as Zeus is mightier than rivers that
murmur seaward, so mightier too is the seed of
Zeus than the seed of a river….With him [Zeus]
does not even king Achelous vie, nor the great
might of deep-flowing Ocean, from whom all
rivers flow and every sea, and all the springs and
deep wells. (21.190-97)
Achilles easily pulls his own spear from the bank and strikes
Asteropaeus in his belly, from which all his bowels “flow”
(181, chunto from cheô). The grandson of the river Axius is
left in the sand, where the dark water “moistens”(21.202)
him, and fish and eels immediately begin to “tear the fat
about his kidneys” (21.203-4). Like Lycaon’s, his body is no
longer a shaped whole.
Achilles’ claim about his superiority is a bit puzzling. He
traces his origin, not to his immortal mother Thetis, but
through his mortal father Peleus and grandfather Aeacus, to
Zeus who, as he says in Book Nine, will honor him above all
men. Throughout the book, it is understood that his death,
anticipated from the beginning, is the legacy of Peleus. But in
Book Twenty-one Achilles’ mortality is suggested even in his
immortal mother. To be immortal is to be fixed in an
unchanging eternity. But Achilles’ mother is a sea-goddess,
the daughter of Nereus, the aged god of the sea. The old
stories tell how, unlike other goddesses, who willingly marry
mortal men, Thetis resisted marriage to Peleus. Fluid, she
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
tried to avoid his grasp by slipping through his fingers,
metamorphosing into a lion, snake, flowing water, and even
burning fire. He finally got hold of her while she was sleeping
and unable to change her form.9 She married Peleus, and
produced the swift-footed son destined to run through his
brief life brilliantly, yearning for eternity even as he ages from
moment to moment. Thetis is a minor divinity in the Iliad,
with an ambiguous relationship to the more solid gods “who
have their homes” on high Olympus. Lower than they are,
she is at home in the depths of the slippery, changing sea.
Lacking the clear, dry outline of Athena and Apollo, she
appears, in the brief third simile in the book, “like a
mist”(1.359), visible only to her son. By the time of the Iliad,
she is wed to an aging mortal from whom she has withdrawn
in distaste (18.432-35). But, despite her lesser, more fluid
status, her marriage and mortal son were the conditions that
insured Zeus’s unchanging reign. Had she married Zeus, her
immortal son would have been greater than his father.
Cosmic equilibrium is bought at the cost of human
mortality. The alternative would mean perpetual
evolution, perpetual violent succession, perpetual
disorder.10
At another time, she is said to have prevented the other
Olympians from binding Zeus (1.396-406), again insuring his
continued power.
When Patroclus is killed, Thetis and her sister nymphs,
the Nereids, anticipate the death of Achilles himself. In a cave
in the depths of the sea, they augment the waters with their
tears, as Homer, in flowing hexameters, intones a mellifluous
catalogue of their names (18.39-49). The character of
Achilles’ divine maternal origins—eternal fluidity and slip—
make all the more poignant his will to fix his character,
reputation, and memory, in the even more mutable and less
permanent world he inhabits, “the human order, where each
generation must yield to the next.”11 In any case, confronting
the very fact of descent—on either side—is problematic for
FLAUMENHAFT
13
the man who aspires to the autonomy of a god. It forces the
hero to acknowledge that his being is dependent on those
who generate him, even if these progenitors are themselves
immortal. Those old stories also tell how Thetis tried to
insure the immortality of her extraordinary child by dipping
him in the waters of another river, Styx, the boundary line
between the living and the dead. Instinctively, she held on to
him to prevent his drowning, and thus neglected to dip the
ankle by which she held him. Homer only alludes to the
stories of his birth and death, but his ancient audience—and
most readers today—knew that Achilles dies of an arrow
wound in that undipped heel.
2. Battle Against the River: Achilles and Scamander
Homer quietly foreshadows the clogging of the river in Book
Sixteen when Achilles gives Patroclus permission to enter
battle. There, he points out that, if Agamemnon had not
insulted him, the Trojans would be fleeing and “would fill the
watercourses with their dead” (16.71). After the death of
Asteropaeus, Achilles slays seven other Paeonians, until the
river rises in anger. Slipping from god to man to beast, it calls
forth “like a man” (21.213), bellows “like a bull”(21.237),
and warns him to slay his Trojan victims on the plain, not in
his waters. From now on, although it never assumes a human
form,12 the river is personified in its behavior. English translations, which require a subject pronoun, now call the river
“he.” Throughout this episode, the gods refer to the river by
its divine name, Xanthus, while the man Achilles calls it
Scamander. The narrator raises its status by using both names
or simply calling it “the river,” capitalized in some translations. The river’s streams are clogged with corpses and
cannot flow down to the sea. Achilles’ rage and self-exertion
literally have begun to interfere with the natural flow of
things. Incited by Apollo, he leaps from the bank into the
river itself, which sweeps along the bodies in his midst,
tossing corpses up onto the land, and hiding the living in his
deep eddies.
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Achilles’ battle with the river is a vivid image of what the
Iliad suggests throughout: that his desire for undying glory is
a desire to transcend human mutability, to become an
unchanging god. Consider how he differs from Diomedes,
the surrogate “best of the Achaeans” when Achilles is absent
from battle:
… he stormed across the plain like a winter
torrent at the full that with its swift flood sweeps
away the embankments; this the close-fenced
embankments hold not back, neither do the walls
of the fruitful vineyards stay its sudden coming
when the rain of Zeus drives it on. (5.87-91)
Later, at the sight of Hector, who he assumes must be
protected by some god, Diomedes gives ground, like a man
who “halts in dismay at a swift-streaming river that flows on
to the sea, and, seeing it seething with foam starts backward”
(5.597-99). Here the river suggests a boundary; Diomedes
recognizes his mortal limits and declines combat with a god.
But Achilles, confronting a real river, jumps right in. The
verse itself now imitates the action of the river, as it concentrates all its force on overwhelming Achilles.13 We have seen
how his desire for constancy makes him the uneasy progeny
of a sea goddess. Thetis has always had to visit him on earth;
he has never joined her and her sister Nereids in the watery
deep. Now he actively opposes a fluid divinity, and it is clear
that he is out of his element. While Achilles attempts to play
the role of a god in what was supposed to be a theomachy
(20.73ff.; 21.31-32), the river god behaves more and more
like a human opponent. Against Achilles’ rage, Scamander
will not slacken his own fury (menos, 12.305). His proper
motion is usually described as “fair-flowing”(eürreês), relaxed
and horizontal; now he “stands up” vertically and beats down
on Achilles’ shield. But Achilles’ land skills dissolve when he
fights with the watery deep. The great hands that have killed
so many men are powerless against water that cannot be
grasped, or pierced with a spear. His swift feet, deprived of
FLAUMENHAFT
15
solid land beneath him, cannot “stand firm” (stêrixasthai,
21.242) in the slippery flow. This is the same word used when
Achilles’ spear “sticks” in the bank; it is related to stereos,
“solid” or “rigid.” In Book Nine Phoenix says that Achilles
“stubbornly” (stereôs, 9.510) refuses to return to battle, to
“bend”(gnamptô, 9.514; see also 11.669; 23.731; 24.359).
He remains in his tent, literally unbudgeable, until he finally
allows Patroclus to enter battle. Now, fighting for his own
life, he grasps a “well-shaped”(21.243) elm in an attempt to
anchor himself. But the tree comes right up by the roots and
dams the river with its thick branches, making it even deeper.
Unlike Achilles’ dead ashen spear that resists Asteropaeus’s
attempts to free it from the earth, here a living tree easily
comes loose from the solid riverbank. Like it, the uprooted,
godlike hero, unattached to his mortal, down-to-earth home
in Phthia, is now ungrounded in Troy. Unlike the Trojans who
also are whirled around in “deep-eddying” Xanthus at the
beginning of Book Twenty-one (21. 2, 11, 15), he makes no
effort to swim.
Even when Achilles flees from the water to the bank, he
cannot outrun the swiftly running river, which pursues him,
overflowing its natural channel to flood the plain. At this fluid
violation of boundary, obscuring some primal distinction
between water and dry land in an organized world, Achilles
is said to feel fear (21. 248). Again Homer emphasizes the
impotence of swift feet and his inability to “make a stand”
(266) as the violent river “weakens his knees” and “snatches
the ground from beneath his feet” (270-71). In a peculiar
extended simile, Homer reminds us of the connection
between Scamander and Troy’s continuing fertility: the swift
river, now uncontrollable by the most powerful warrior at
Troy, is compared to the artificial and directed stream that a
farmer makes to divert water from a spring to his crops. He
clears obstructing dams of pebbles, and the stream flows
swiftly and “outstrips [phthanei] even the one that guides it”
(21.257-62). Scamander, rising high, makes the “wave of his
flood into a crest” (korusse, 21.306) like the crest of a
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
warrior’s helmet. But unlike a mortal enemy, who would
speak to him in battle, the immortal river does not address
Achilles. This battle is strikingly devoid of the usual boasts
and insults of the human contests, although the river does
exhort his “dear brother,” the tributary Simoïs, to help him
save Troy. Also missing is the usual human audience of whom
the fighting heroes are always conscious. Further distancing
this part of the Iliad from the political context of the war,
Homer does not here mention other Greeks or Trojans. To
Achilles, death in these circumstances, like the drowning of a
miserable swineherd (281-83), would be far more
contemptible than death at the hands of Hector while making
a courageous stand, exchanging speech, face to face, against
a human antagonist, before a human audience. Scamander’s
speech to Simoïs echoes Achilles’ taunt to Lycaon:
I deem that his strength shall not avail him, nor in
any way his looks, nor yet that goodly armor
which, I think, deep beneath the sea will lie
covered over (kekalummena) with slime; and he
himself I will wrap in sands and shed over him
great store of shingle past all measuring; nor will
the Achaeans know where to gather his bones,
with such a depth of silt shall I enshroud him.
Even here will be his sepulcher, nor shall he have
need of a heaped-up mound, when the Achaeans
make his funeral. (21. 316-23)
The worst disgrace for the shining hero, whose shapely glory
distinguishes him from his surroundings, is to be “covered
over.” The way of the warrior Achilles is to stand forth—
disdaining deliberate deception, surreptitious strategies, and
indirect speech—and show himself, like a bright star, or
blazing fire. He has never anticipated that his own fire might
be “quenched” by a river. Now it is fire, in the shape of an
anthropomorphized deity that must rescue him.
FLAUMENHAFT
17
3. Fire and the River: Hephaestus and Scamander
At the end of Book Eight, the Trojans await their dawn
victory over the Achaeans. On the plain between the Achaean
camp and the streams of Xanthus, “a thousand fires” burn.
This early juxtaposition of fire and water is an eerily beautiful
scene of quiet peace before the expected slaughter. When the
gods line up at the beginning of Book Twenty to fight on
behalf of the Achaeans or Trojans, Hephaestus is listed as the
opponent of Scamander (21.73-74). In Book Twenty-one,
after godlike Achilles has substituted himself for Hephaestus,
only to meet with disaster, the two gods finally do face each
other. Hera calls upon the halting, crook-footed
(kullopodion, 21.331) god to rescue the floundering, swiftfooted (podarkês) man just as he has lost his footing and is
about to be swept away in the seething flood of “foam and
blood and corpses” (21.325). Hephaestus’s shield has proven
“helpless against the river” (21.317-18); he himself must now
come to Achilles’ aid.14 The enmity of Paris and Menelaus,
Achilles and Hector, Greeks and Trojans, and of the partisan
gods on Olympus is now expanded to include the cosmic
elements themselves, as fire and water, primal nature deities,
confront each other. Personified and quick with motion,
changing but remaining themselves, they seem alive. The
opposition of the river god and the Olympian has suggested
to some the overcoming of a primordial “water world” of
flux and “pure process” by a “sky world” characterized by
“form and meaningful signs.”15 Like a hot wind, Hephaestus
“dries up”—we hear the word xêrianô three times (21. 345,
347, 348)—the plain where the swollen river has overflowed
its channel. The fire consumes the dead Trojans on the plain
and the living vegetation that the river nourishes, both in and
beside itself. The musical catalogue of waving, abundant plant
life transforms the river, now called “bright” and “fair,” from
the destructive aggressor of the previous encounter with
Achilles into the helpless victim of the harsh fire. Its “blast”
“torments” the eels and fishes that Achilles said would nibble
the fat of Lycaon and Asteropaeus. Even under the “whirls”
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
or “eddies” of water, these animals, like the plants, are not
fireproof. Finally, in a reversal of the natural quenching of fire
by water, Hephaestus “burns” the river. Unlike mortal
warriors, watery Scamander has no body parts that an
opponent can grasp or upon which he can inflict mortal
wounds. But Hephaestus can make the river seethe and boil
like his own molten metals. Homer compares the boiling to
the melting of solid hog fat into a shapeless liquid in a
cauldron on a cooking fire (21.362-64). No longer does
Scamander even “wish to flow forward, but is “stayed” (ouk
ethele proreein, all’ ischeto, 21.366). The closest the immortal
river can come to death is immobility. It cannot be evaporated
like ordinary boiling water, or consumed like corpses on a
pyre; but Hephaestus can arrest its flow.
The battle between water and fire differs from mortal
combat in another striking way: here, as with Achilles,
there is no verbal exchange between the antagonists. Hera
warns of Scamander’s soft words and threats (16. 339), but
Hephaestus, who in earlier passages is fully articulate, does
not speak to his opponent. The silence of this terrible fire, in
contrast with the speech and shouts of men and gods and the
bellowing of the river, is particularly grim. The horror abates
only when the river promises not to intercede even “when all
Troy shall burn with the burning of consuming fire, and the
warlike sons of the Achaeans shall be the burners” (21.37576). This promise evokes the terrible image of the end of
Troy, which the Iliad does not depict. Only after Scamander’s
promise does Hephaestus “quench” his fire and allow the
river to rush down again within its bed.
The ancient nature-philosophers puzzled over the primal
stuff of the cosmos. Impressed by the ubiquity of water in the
world, Thales derives all heterogeneous being from this single
substance, recognizing ice, water, and vapor as different
forms of the same fundamental material. In addition to
appearing in these three modes, water is infinitely changeable
with respect to its own form: it takes the shape of any
FLAUMENHAFT
19
container. Water itself appears relatively lacking in qualities,
but takes on the characteristics of other substances; it can be
blue, salty, hot, and smelly; and the intensity of these characteristics can vary. Solid lands appear to float on wider
expanses of water, and all life arises from the moistening of
seeds. If form and life are fundamental conditions of things
that are, one might well conclude that all things are continually solidifying into individual particularity and dissolving
into undifferentiated homogeneity, that all things are,
somehow, water.
Heraclitus asserts the fluidity of such a world, seeing its
transformations in both water and fire: all things flow; you
can’t step in the same river twice and you yourself are not the
same “you”; dry things become moist, the moist become dry;
there is exchange of all things for fire; it becomes sea or earth,
and itself again; everything gives way, and nothing is fixed.
But, if nothing self-same endures, the apparent multiplicity of
stable, articulated particulars must be an illusion.
Heterogeneity in flux becomes homogeneity, a solution of
chaotically swirling stuff, not an ordered “world.”
Furthermore, even Heraclitus’s own assertion is unstable,
since words themselves flow in time, and their meanings
cannot be univocal or fixed. Heraclitus attempts to address
this difficulty by imitating the condition he asserts in the
syntax and diction of his language. His word order takes
advantage of the fluidity of Greek, allowing, even more than
is usual, for different predications, and his words have
multiple, even conflicting, meanings. His readers are
endlessly intrigued by the infinite slipperiness of his pregnant
pronouncements16 and by the paradox of meaningful speech
about constant change. Even the fragments that remain of his
writings may be, not the victims of time, but deliberate
attempts to mimic a “world” that lacks wholeness, continuity,
and order. Diogenes Laertius says Heraclitus died of dropsy.
The story is unconfirmable, but fitting: he drowned in his
own fluids. “It is death to souls to become water.”
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
At the other extreme from Heraclitean flux in time and
place, is Parmenidean fixity, outside time and beyond place.
Pure, complete, and homogeneous in its unity, Being simply
is; there is no beginning or becoming, past, future, or
conclusion; all is solid, stationary; all Being is one. If singularity, homogeneity, stability, and permanence are the great
sticking points of the Heraclitean hypothesis, multiplicity,
heterogeneity, instability, and change slip up the partisans of
Parmenides. Language seems inadequate to this view too, for
predication itself requires multiplicity and an articulated
cosmos. In Greek, esti can stand alone, but, even a nominal
sentence, aiming at full identity of its parts, must have two
elements. Human speech is rhêsis—the “flowing” forth of
words in time. Heraclitus’s words, in brief fragments with
fluid meanings, flow together; Parmenides’ words, even the
lofty vision of the “Way of truth” in articulate Homeric
dactylic hexameter, point to silence—or to mere pointing.
Homer, of course, does not speak the metaphysical
language of the early philosophers. In his vocabulary, kosmeô
and kosmos are not abstract terms, but refer to the setting in
order of troops, dress, or behavior. But Homer’s stories and
his people do, nevertheless, suggest his own thinking about
what later writers call the “cosmos.” And, as we shall see, his
own speech is shaped to depict a world that participates in
and is informed by both fixity and fluidity, neither to the
exclusion of the other. Angered by Achilles, whose attention
is fixed first on immortal glory and then on eternal revenge,
the river threatens to dissolve the world into Heraclitean flux.
The episode suggests that both the desire for fixity and the
response in mere fluidity would destroy a heterogeneous
cosmos of changing beings that are, nevertheless, distinguishable and, in some convincing sense, enduring.
Homer repeatedly describes physiological or psychological collapse in terms of dissolution17 or as the liquefying
of firm structure. Wine and tears can bring on this kind of
collapse, and the “strength” or “limbs” of dying warriors are
“loosed” (luomai). When Priam meets Hermes on the way to
FLAUMENHAFT
21
Achilles’ tent, the old man is so overcome with fear that his
“mind became fluid” (voos chuto, 24. 358), the word used for
“pour” or “flow”(cheô) in Book Twenty-one. As Norman
Austin says “It collapsed and lost its shape.”18 In the Odyssey
Homer describes sleep as lusimelês, “limb-loosening,”
“relaxing,” (10.57), and Sappho and Archilochus use this
word to describe the effects of eros or desire.19 We too know
what it means to “drown” in wine or tears, to “be at sea” or
“out of our depths,” and “to go down the drain.”
There are, in the Iliad, suggestions of destruction by flood
of the solid, articulated world experienced by mortal men.
When no Greek warrior rises to accept Hector’s challenge,
Menelaus curses the Achaeans collectively: “would that all of
you would become earth and water” (7.99), that is, disintegrate into their constitutive elements. Many of them will die
in battle and their bodies will be reduced in fire, water, or in
the bellies of scavenger dogs, birds, fish, and worms.
Likewise, all human artifacts seem destined to disintegrate.
Poseidon objects when the Achaeans build the wall around
their ships, but Zeus assures him that it will not endure for
long (7.446ff.) In Book Twelve, Homer tells how, at the end
of the war, when the Achaeans depart, Poseidon and Apollo
will bring all the waters of the world—rivers, rain, and the
salt sea—to sweep away the wall:
Bringing against it the might of all the rivers that
flow forth from the mountains of Ida to the sea—
Rhesus [speech, or flow] and Heptorus and
Caresus and Rhodius, and Granicus and Aesepus,
and goodly Scamander and Simoïs…of all these
did Apollo turn the mouths together, and for nine
days’ space he drove their flood [rhoon] against
the wall; and Zeus rained ever continually, that the
sooner he might overwhelm the wall in the salt
sea. And the Earth-shaker, bearing his trident in
his hands…swept forth upon the waves all the
foundations of beams and stones, that the
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Achaeans had laid with toil, and made all smooth
along the strong stream [agarrhoon] of the
Hellespont and again covered the great beach with
sand, when he had swept away the wall; and the
rivers he turned to return and to flow [rhoon] in
the channel, where before they streamed [rhoon]
their fair-streaming [kallirhoon] water. (12.17-33)
The ease with which this wall will be destroyed is previewed
in Book Fifteen when Apollo breaks the Achaean trench and
wall, “as a boy scatters a sand castle by the sea” (15.360-64).
This allows Hector and the Trojans to rush over the wall like
a “great wave of the broad-wayed sea” (15.381-83). From the
standpoint of the immortal gods, human life and its constructions are easily destroyed and slip quickly into oblivion.
We should note, however, that the predicted destruction
will reduce neither the plain nor the beach to Democritean
elements or to mere swirling chaos. Rather, it will restore
them to their “natural” shape, stripped of human constructions, and marked only by the relatively permanent features
of the landscape. The paths of rivers, the stony mountains,
and the boundary between shore and sea are themselves
subject to temporary disturbance and slow change but,
compared to living and dying beings and their fabrications,
they endure in shapely permanence. The exact location of the
city of ancient Troy remained a mystery for centuries, but
Scamander has flowed in the same place since antiquity. Men
may come and go, like generations of leaves and fish in the
sea, but the cosmos and the kinds of beings that inhabit it
endure.
This is the condition for the belief of the hero that there
will be others like himself, kindred men, to tell and to hear
his story. Achilles does not explicitly acknowledge that he
requires a bard to maintain his heroism, but the hero who
asserts his autonomy is, in fact, doubly dependent: on his
parents who give him life and upon the poet who keeps him
alive in the minds of others. Nowhere in Homer is there the
prospect of the destruction of the entire human race—by
FLAUMENHAFT
23
flood or fire or any other means—or of institutions or
teachings that would definitively wipe out the characteristic
human quest for autonomy and immortality. Homer’s
depiction of such human striving is tragic, rather than merely
negative. The very qualities that make the hero outstanding
are the ones that will destroy him. Achilles’ extreme heroic
exertion finally meets its limit, but the world that produced
him will produce others like him and they will continue to
inspire awe in their fellows. The Homeric gods did not create
the world and its inhabitants, and there is no suggestion that
the gods will wipe them out. In such a world it is problematic,
but not merely evil or delusion, for mortals to aspire to
permanence. Some readers see similarities between the river
battle in Iliad 21 and those in Mesopotamian flood stories
like Gilgamesh.20 Others persuasively contrast the floods in
Gilgamesh and Genesis, where the story of Noah is meant to
“drown the natural human aspiration to apotheosis through
heroic deed.”21 Homer’s river Scamander puts an end to
Achilles’ rampage, but men like him will arise again.
Although, like the Biblical oversteppers, they do awful things,
they, like the gods, are, somehow, awesome.
Perhaps the work of Hephaestus suggests how changing,
continuous fluidity can coexist with enduring articulated
form. On at least two occasions the divine smith has been
hurled down from Olympus, but, of course, neither fall
results in his destruction. In Book Eighteen he recalls how, on
account of his lameness, Hera once hurled him down to the
watery cave of Oceanus’s daughter Eurynome and the Nereid
Thetis, “and around me flowed, murmuring with foam, the
stream of Oceanus, an immense flood” (18.402-3). For nine
years Hephaestus, himself misshapen, lived in this unshaped
watery deep, but he spent his time shaping beautiful
ornaments. His lame feet did not preclude, and perhaps they
even contributed to, the extraordinary powers he developed
in his skilled hands. Like the “ambidextrous” Asteropaeus,
the smith-god is “strong [or, “bent]-limbed on both sides,”
amphiguêeis. He is polumêtis (21.355), a “god of many
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
24
wiles,” and poluphrônos, “of great intelligence” (21.367). In
Book Twenty-one the only way he can counteract the flow of
Scamander is brutally to burn and dry up all-threatening
liquidity. But, in the face of the more gradual dissolution of
all earthly things, he solidifies the fluid into form. On lofty
Olympus, as in the deep sea, he liquefies solid metals into
shapeless fluids, and then re-forms the softened materials into
bronze houses and tripods, silver-studded chairs, golden
wheels and handmaids, and greaves of “flexible” (heanou,
18.613) tin. His most memorable masterpiece is the solid
shield of bronze, made of fused copper and tin, that he
fashions for the unbending son of the tearful water goddess.
What does it tell us about being and time in the cosmos as
Homer sees it?
2
1. Hephaestus’s Art
Scamander threatens to cover all Achilles’ beautiful armor
with slime (21.318). Although a shield may last longer than a
man, it too is not forever. Like all Hephaestus’s works,
Achilles’ shield is made of metals and glass, melted into fluids
in “melting vats” (choanisi, from cheô, “flow,” 18.613), and
then re-solidified into stable forms. But the figures on it are
not static or frozen like the Achilles whom Patroclus describes
as the pitiless offspring of grey sea and the rocky cliffs
because his mind (nous) is so unbending (apênês, 16. 33-35).
Nor are they like the stony frozen Niobe whom Achilles
describes to Priam at the end of the Iliad (24.605-17). Rather,
the wonder of the shield is that its figures seem to be alive and
in motion. This is partly because, as Lessing points out, they
come into being before our eyes, in words that take time, and
partly because they are so artfully made that they appear to
be actually engaged in the activities described.22 In the
progressive form of Homer’s verbs, the dancers are described
as dancing, the ambushers ambushing, the bull lowing, and
the field being turned over, although it is made of lifeless
FLAUMENHAFT
25
gold: “this was the marvel [thauma] of the work” (18.549).
Hephaestus makes an enduring picture of a changing life,
albeit a life that will not satisfy the aspirations of the warrior
hero of the Iliad.
The cosmos depicted on the shield combines the formal
fixity of a stable world with the living, changing life of everything associated with the human beings who live in it. Even
its river combines duration and change. The shield’s dry
riverbed—in another season, a watering place for the herds—
is the scene of an ambush (18.520-21), and men fight beside
its banks (18.533). Shortly after, the river is stable, contained,
reliably watering the cattle that low and pasture
Par’potamon keladonta, para hrodadon donakêa
Beside the sounding river, beside the waving reed
(18.576)
Noting the way it appeals to differing senses, one reader has
described this as the “most beautiful verse in Homer.”23
Another calls attention to the “rippling dactyls,” alliteration,
and chiasmus of the line.24 The pictured people are not
“immortal and ageless all their days” as the single-minded
Achilles and other heroes might wish to be. They are of
different ages, changing with the passing of time, and unlike
the gods and eternal heavenly bodies pictured there, the
mortals have no lasting names and fame. There are dead men
and animals on the shield, and red blood stains some of the
golden figures. But the elders will keep on talking, and the
boys and girls dancing, even as Achilles holds them forth on
the shield in deadly battle. The point of view of the shield is
wider than that on the battlefield where Homer’s “camera”
zooms in on the horror of war for particular—named—
people at particular moments. Hephaestus’s view suggests
that the life of men, as well as of cities, never merely ends, but
has a cyclical character. Glaucus compares such lives to the
“generations of leaves” (6.146). But the nameless leaves and
crops and cows and river, and even the nameless humans
depicted on the shield, are not merely ephemeral, “of a day.”
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Mortality and change make generation necessary, but generation itself insures a kind of continuity that even living and
dying beings can participate in. They, like the vegetation and
animals, and even their own artifices, are not immortal, but
they do recur according to regular patterns and in recognizable forms. There are recurrent, recognizable kinds of
beings in the articulated, heterogeneous cosmos; the most
interesting of them are human beings. Tragically, human
beings are often prevented from fulfilling the natural shape of
their lives, but human lives do have natural shapes, and they
generate others who are the same in kind.
Homer’s mortals are not part of a historically directed
trajectory of the sort described by the Bible, Virgil, and
Hegel. But they do achieve a kind of permanence. Although
the shield does not depict lasting personal glory, even for men
like Achilles, it does not bitterly insist on the tragic futility of
our desire for duration. Nor should it make us think, as C. S.
Lewis did, that Homer’s greatness lies in his depiction of the
human and personal tragedy built up against a background of
“meaningless flux.”26 Rather, Homer, like Hephaestus,
depicts a beautiful image of regular change in time, and a
world in which the tragedies of individual mortal lives are
intelligible. What is perhaps even more important is that he
makes us feel that these lives are worth our attempts to
understand them.
The circular pattern of return is repeated on the shield, as
if to emphasize the possibility of appropriate change that
does not simply negate existence. Thus, we hear about the
young men “whirling” (edineon, 18.494) in the wedding
dance, the judgments given in the “sacred circle” (hiero eni
kuklô, 18.504), the repeated “wheelings” (dineuontes,
18.543) of the ploughs and of the youths and maidens
dancing in circles (18.599-601), and the agricultural cycle of
the seasons. The word for these whirlings and wheelings
(from dineô) is the one used to describe the “eddies” of the
raging Scamander, as well as “deep-eddying” Ocean (10.511).
But here on the shield it suggests ordered regularity rather
FLAUMENHAFT
27
than Scamander’s destructive turbulence or the meaningless
chaos asserted by Aristophanes’ Socrates who preaches that
“Whirl”(Dinos) has replaced Zeus.26 The beginning and end
of the description of the shield call attention to circularity in
the cosmos itself: the full round moon, the circular daily
motions of most of the stars, and the Bear, or “Wagon,” that
“turns in place and has no part in the baths of
Ocean”(18.488). On the outermost rim is the “great might of
the river Ocean” (18.608), that same Ocean towards which
Scamander and Simoïs and all the other rivers flow, when
they are not unnaturally impeded. Unlike any other “river” in
the poem, Ocean is apsorroos, “backwards flowing”; turning
back into itself, it encircles the world. The edges of the
cosmos do not dissolve into watery flux; rather, the world is
surrounded, held in shape, by Ocean. Although the shield is
called a sakos, the word usually used for a rectangular shield,
we must imagine it as round.
Hephaestus’s pictures include simple agricultural and
musical implements—yokes, plows, baskets, pipes, lyres, and
bronze tips on spears—evidence of human culture beyond
mere nature. But there are no signs of more sophisticated
human technology or art. Homer depicts Hephaestus, but
Hephaestus does not depict himself and his own technology.27
Also, although there are rivers and Ocean on the shield,
Hephaestus does not depict any ships. They belong to a
different world, one in which men sail off to distant places:
to make war, to trade, and to learn how other men live. Ships
point to progress, to radical change beyond that seen in the
communities and natural world of the shield. Both Trojans
and Greeks sail the sea, but Homer’s Greeks—and, as we shall
see, one Greek man especially—are particularly associated
with the seagoing technology that brought the Greek army to
Troy, but is not the focus of the human activities depicted in
the Iliad.
Nor does Hephaestus include Olympus, the abode of the
gods, or Hades, the destination of all mortal warriors, on his
shield. The former is the clearly illuminated setting for many
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
scenes in both of Homer’s poems. In the Odyssey we are told
of the other realm, beyond the “stream of Ocean” in the
outermost circle of the shield, a realm reached by crossing the
roaring rivers of Periphlegethon and Cocytus (Blazing and
Wailing), a branch of the dread (stugeô) River Styx. On Styx,
the Iliad tells us, men and gods swear their most solemn oaths
(2.755; 8.369; 14.271; 15.37). The Iliad, which depicts the
deaths of so many men, contains no description of the land of
the dead. But in the Odyssey, the “house of Hades” is a dark,
“dank” [eurôenta, lit. “moldy,” 10.512] place, and a whole
book is devoted to exhibiting its inhabitants. The dead souls
are misty and ungraspable, but recognizable, as weakly delineated shadows of their former selves. In the indistinct realm
of the “un-seen” (a-idês), the shade of Achilles is now fixed,
eternally denouncing his former desire for fixed and shining
visible fame. He reveals his unchanged mind, however, in his
joy at the report that his son is just the way he was.
Achilles’ attempt to stop Scamander is a violation of the
natural flow of things, of nature itself, although Homer does
not use nature as a philosophical term any more than he uses
abstract philosophical language elsewhere.28 Achilles’ retreat
and his return to his main object, killing the mortal man who
killed his mortal friend, is a forced admission that, despite his
divine genealogy, he too is a mortal man. The course of the
swift-flowing river can no more be stopped than the swift
flowing of Achilles’ life can be. But Hephaestus prevents
Scamander’s attempt to dissolve the hero who aims at fixity
and to flood the dry land that ordinarily bounds the flowing
water. The god of fire reminds us that mortality does not
mean mere obliteration and oblivion, mere washing away, but
orderly change in an enduring, coherent cosmos. The river is
a river even when it flows outside its well-defined borders.
The lives of mortal men do have shape, and so do the artifacts
and stories that outlive them, even if not forever. The verbal
description of the shield is Homer’s likeness of the whole
world, the longest extended similitude in the poem.
FLAUMENHAFT
29
2. Homer’s Art
In addition to the description of the shield, there is further
evidence in Homer’s poetry of both the whole unity and the
articulated multiplicity of his cosmos. Book One introduces
the major Greek characters of the Iliad in all their particularity. Here, for the first time, we hear their identifying
epithets and see their first defining acts. Although the official
enemies against whom they test themselves are Trojans, these
men are concerned about who is the most outstanding, even
among the Greeks. They are determined to distinguish
themselves, and not to be confused with others. Thus,
Achilles and Agamemnon dispute who is the “best of the
Achaeans.” Their quarrel is filled with comparisons, but each
claims that he, as the best, is incomparable. There are only
three brief similes in Book One (47, 104, 359), and two of
them describe gods. The human actors are concerned, not
with likenesses, but with singularity.
Book Two recounts how Nestor and Odysseus rehabilitate
Agamemnon as commander and reunite the Achaeans after
the quarrel. The latter parts of the book present Homer’s
warriors both as one whole, continuous mass, and as
separate, individual elements of an articulated multitude.
Like Homer’s cosmos generally, the descriptions in Book Two
point to the very things we have been considering in Book
Twenty-one: the unifying fixity of the man who attempts to
oppose a divine river, and the dissolving fluidity of the river
that responds. As we shall see, Homer’s epithets, catalogues,
and similes have meaning only if one assumes a unified, selfsame whole consisting of a multiplicity of differentiated
elements.
The relative scarcity of metaphors in the Iliad is a sign of
the poet’s reluctance to completely collapse two compared
things into an identity. Phrases like “winged words” and the
“barrier of your teeth” are implied similes that identify the
subject and the comparison so completely that the compared
object almost disappears as its attribute is transferred to the
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
present subject. Epithets are adjectival tags, stable descriptions that characterize enduring intelligible individuals in an
enduring world. Epithets, like names, are permanent.29 Like
the phrases above, the same epithet can contain an implied
comparison when it is attached to different subjects, or an
ironic reflection when it no longer suffices to describe their
subjects. The implications of “swift-footed Achilles,” “Hector
of the shining helmet,” and “white armed Helen” deepen and
are more fully understood as the narrative unfolds and the
bearer acts out his entire story.
Agamemnon announces his plan to test the troops at the
beginning of Book Two. The people (laoi, plêthus, mass
nouns) respond immediately as soon as the leaders or elders
(plurals) arise. Homer describes this folk in a great, extended
simile, comparing the companies to the tribes (ethnea) of bees
that feed on flowers in the spring (2.87-93). The men, too,
emerge in “many tribes.” Homer’s bee simile and the subsequent description emphasize the turmoil and noise of this
“throng” as it rushes towards the water. The noise, like the
buzzing of bees and the confusing urgings of Rumor, obscures
the inner organization of the army. Stirred by Agamemnon,
the men, like the bees, are seen as a great multitude (plêthus)
that moves as the sea and corn move when they are stirred by
the winds of Zeus. (2.142-49). The crossed adjectives
produce a sub-simile between the two main ones: the “long”
sea-waves move as the “deep” fields of corn do. The wave is
simultaneously one and many, as are the field of corn stalks
and the army of warriors. We have already seen, in the river
incident in Book Twenty-one, the literal power of such waves
to stir the articulated many into a homogeneous fluid. In
these early similes the troops exhibit the same loose, or fluid
character as they come pouring out of their tents on dry land.
Although they shout “to one another” and come on in
“tribes,” they are not fully articulate, either in speech or in
body.
Prompted by Athena and by his own prudent assessment
of the situation, Odysseus quickly does articulate the disor-
FLAUMENHAFT
31
dered troops into the kings who “stand out”(exochon) and
whom he addresses individually by name, and the anonymous
men “of the people,” whom he beats into submission. His
humiliation of Thersites further organizes the Greeks, forcing
them to shape up, both as individuals and as groups, to
confront the Trojans. Nestor proposes the separating out of
the men by tribes and by clans (phula, phrêtra, 2.362). The
extended similes that follow compare them to flocks of birds,
recognized as distinct species, to undifferentiated swarms of
flies around milk pails, and to mingled goats, more visible as
individuals than the aggregates of birds and insects, but still
not articulated by name. The only named individuals are the
leaders who attended Agamemnon’s council. Agamemnon
has spoken of the relative size of the enemy (2.123-33), but
not until Homer sings the component parts of each army, do
we have a concrete and vivid picture of how many are in the
host, as well as how large it is.
Unlike the earlier similes in Book Two, the catalogues are
characterized by specificity. The armies are now two wholes
that are articulated and organized into parts identified by
their geographical origins and by their leaders. The
marshalling or ordering of the troops—the Greek word is
diekosmeon—shapes them into an ordered whole, a kosmos.
The many items in the catalogue are held together by the
general categories it describes, but the detailed description of
each item differentiates them from one another. The order in
which the different companies are listed reveals much about
the political organization of the two sides. The catalogues
describe multitudes that are now articulated masses. They
have more elaborate shapes than the two-member similes,
which usually give the extended comparison first. The Trojans
and their allies are also listed—although not enumerated—in
a catalogue in Book Two as the leaders from the different
cities lead them forth, each marshalling (kosmêsamenos) his
own men. Among them are the same Trojans who “pour” or
“flow”(cheô) into the river and city at the beginning and end
of Book Twenty-one. But by then they have been floated off
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from their allies; their former force has been dissolved into its
elements, each of whom swims for his own life. No catalogue
of names and leaders is possible in such devastating dissolution. We shall hear a few minor catalogues in the last books
of the Iliad: the names of the mourning Nereids with Thetis
in Book Sixteen, and the sons of Priam, in Book Twenty-four,
for example. They remind us how the orderly, articulated
cosmos, as we knew it at the beginning, has been disrupted by
the horrors of war.
Like the epithets and catalogues, Homer’s similes
throughout the poem suggest that his cosmos is neither a fluid
Heracleitean multiplicity nor a fixed Parmenidean “one,” but
an organized, enduring whole whose parts can be understood
and related to each other. There is not only one analogy for
each being; rather, similes contain other similes and are interwoven and overlap. They cover the cosmos with a flexible
net, not a rigid grid. The cosmos is intelligible because, in
some way, “all nature is akin.”30 The beings in this world have
stable characteristics by which they themselves can be recognized and by which they can help us to know other beings
and ourselves. Despite their special characters, even fire and
water are stable elements; this is, in fact, the necessary
condition of their occasional attempts to encroach on each
other. The gods too are stable combinations of related characteristics; they may disguise themselves before mortals, but
they do have enduring and intelligible natures. Aphrodite,
Athena, Ares, and, as we have seen, Hephaestus are all understandable as coherent collections of characteristic qualities,
ways of being, in a coherent cosmos. Even those associated
with the fluid elements in Homer’s world—Poseidon,
Oceanus, Thetis, the Nereids, and the river Scamander—
remain consistently fluid. Beneath his many shapes, Proteus,
the changeable old man of the sea in Odyssey 4, can slip from
shape to shape, as lion, serpent, leopard, boar, tree, even
“fluid water” [hugron hudôr, Odyssey, 4. 456-58]. But, at
last, he can be held down and made to speak as “himself.”
FLAUMENHAFT
33
In the extended similes the hero can be like a god, great
oak (16.482), mother bird (9.323) or the “most baneful star
in heaven”(22.26-31) only if gods, oaks, mother birds, and
Sirius, complex and multifaceted as they are, have consistent,
recognizable meanings. There are few proper names in
similes; the likenesses are not between particular individuals,
but between a particular individual, for example, and a
general category to which he is compared. People who are
said to be “like” particular named gods (Ares, Aphrodite) are
compared to them as personifications of generalized
attributes (Might, Beauty). Although the gods sometimes call
things by different names (1.403; 2.813; 14.291; 20.74;
18.487), there is no indication that human subjects are
merely projecting their own perceived structures on a chaotic
or differently organized “real” world. Homer weaves
together a picture of a natural world that is whole and
shaped, in which and by which mortal humans can take their
bearings. This is why, as Norman Austin has shown, not only
similes, but paradigmatic myths, omens, dreams and other
symbols have meaning both for gods and humans in the
poems, and also for those who read and interpret the
stories.31
The last way in which Homer avoids both the Charybdis
of Heraclitean flux and the Scylla of Parmenidean fixity is
seen in his own poetic language, which is not confounded by
the language paradoxes of either philosopher. Syllables,
words, lines, episodes, narrative and direct speech, the structures of parts and the whole, are clearly recognizable even as
the singer’s speech (rhêsis) flows (from rheô) on continuously
for hours and hours. There is nothing fragmentary about the
Iliad; it is an ordered whole. The regular and sustained
dactylic hexameter rhythm is heard even when the meter
deliberately departs from it, and the intelligible diction and
syntax endure throughout, even as we delight in the sounds,
puns, and verbal flexibility that guide our thoughts and
feelings. Homer is as subtle as Heraclitus in conveying
multiple meanings by the artful arrangement of sound and
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
syntax. But one rarely feels that one has lost one’s footing or
that there is no footing to be had in the deep flood of his
verse. Homeric wonder does not call into doubt the stability
of the multitudinous cosmos, or the adequacy of human
speech to describe it, even as it faces tragic paradoxes and the
most shattering human experiences. Similarly, unlike
Parmenides’ vision of the “Way of Truth,” the unity of
Homer’s world does not strain against the rich multiplicity of
the individual beings that dwell together in it.
The character of Homer’s poetry has offered one
conclusion to this discussion that began with Achilles and the
river. The other is to be found in the man who represents the
most interesting alternative to both the fixity we desire and
the dissolution we fear.
3. Amphibious Man
This story, like most stories in the Iliad, points to Odysseus.
Although the quarrel about the “best of the Achaeans” that
begins the Iliad arises between Achilles and Agamemnon, the
natural and conventional contenders for that title, it is
Odysseus who offers the most interesting alternative to
Achilles. In the Odyssey we do hear of a quarrel between
these two over who was the “best of the Achaeans” (8.75-78).
In fact, Odysseus and Achilles are incommensurable, as they
exemplify two entirely different ways of being human.
Achilles single-mindedly pursues individuality, purity, and
permanent glory, thereby suggesting the Parmenidean
perspective: unity, fixity, being. The life of Odysseus
embraces multiplicity, change, and becoming, but it does not
abandon the conviction that, although human beings must
suffer and die, they can lead coherent and integrated lives in
a stable cosmos. In a lived life, as opposed to a philosophical
quandary, one can step twice into the same river and one can
go home again. Homer’s two poems offer an extended
meditation on the difference between immortality and
endurance. Unlike Achilles’ tragic embrace of early death as a
means to immortal glory in an infinite future, Odysseus’s
FLAUMENHAFT
35
goals point always to continuing life in the foreseeable future.
Achilles is Homer’s hero of fixity, the man who can only
make a stand on land. A brief examination of Odysseus in
both poems does not see him as Achilles’ opposite, the hero
of Heraclitean fluidity, but as the flexible man, the one who
can endure in any medium.32 It is no surprise that Odysseus
has a special relationship to Poseidon, the earth-shaking god
of the rolling sea, a relationship that must be stabilized before
his story can be completed.
Our first view of polumêtis Odysseus in the Iliad, displays
the “man of many wiles” as a sailor, when he commands the
ship that crosses the “watery ways” (hugra keleutha, 1.312) to
return Chryseis to her father. Unlike Achilles of Phthia and
other mainland Achaeans, Odysseus rules over several small
islands in the extreme west of Greece. His special skill with
ships and his versatility generally have something to do with
his origins in a small rugged “isle in a surging sea” (poluklustôi pontôi, 4.354), “sea-girt” (amphialôi , 1.385) Ithaca.
Always at sea, he is never at sea; Derek Walcott calls his later
incarnation “sea-smart Odysseus.”33 More than any other
Homeric hero, he delights in the pleasures of a warm bath
(10.576; 6.210; 7.174, 296; 10.360; 19.356-473). His
ablutions in both books aim not at Achillean purity or
absolution, but at restoration and the continuation of a life
that he accepts as mixed, stirred, stained, scarred, alloyed.
Hephaestus sponges himself before dinner after a day’s work
at the forge (18.414-15). Similarly, Odysseus, returning from
the dirty work of the ambush in Iliad 10, washes off, first in
the sea, and then in a bath, to “refresh” himself or to “lift his
spirits”(anepsuchthen, 10.575). There is no indication that he
thinks what he has done to Dolon and Rhesus requires purification.
In his own book, he is characterized by an extraordinary
flexibility. Achilles strives always to move forward and remain
erect; Odysseus is always willing to bend over and curl up, to
turn back and change direction, in order to preserve himself.
Again and again, we hear how he is able to improvise a solid
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
platform to make a stand, even on the unstable sea.
Repeatedly he emerges from dangerous waters to dry land,
having endured the repeated attempts of Poseidon to swamp
him in “deep-eddying Ocean” (Odyssey, 10.511). The
amphibious hero is at home in all elements, and equally
prepared to resist threats of petrifaction and dissolution, both
of which would undermine his integrity as a stable, although
changing, being in time. Achilles’ furious swift motion and his
refusal to move both assert his absolute independence of
outside influences. Odysseus recognizes—or learns—that
viable autonomy and self-reliance sometimes require external
tools and coordination with others, rather than head-on
opposition. He is polumêchanos, a man “of many devices.”
Achilles’ most important “tool” is his spear, which seems
almost an extension of his own arm. His lyre accompanies a
song he sings for himself. Odysseus, in contrast, is an enthusiastic user of tools and of other men, whom he skillfully uses
as tools. Unlike Achilles’ song, Odysseus’s stories are often
tools to achieve desired ends. He has a bow, not a lyre, in his
storeroom.
Odysseus delights in the liquid warmth of good wine—
apparently mixed with water—with no adverse effects. But he
intoxicates the Cyclops with a deliberately undiluted fluid
(12.205, 209) unfamiliar to the monster, and slips through
his hands by concealing himself horizontally beneath a dumb
ram. He sails by the Sirens in his natural position, rigidly
upright and attentive to their song, but is able to remain
standing at the mast only by arranging to be tightly tied to it.
He liberates himself by being willing to bind himself,
overcoming his human limitations by resorting to a clever
device: he uses knots to maintain his freedom. Like the
ambidextrous Asteropaeus, Odysseus prepares to face the
monster Scylla with “two spears in his hands” (12.229).
When his ship is shattered in the “wine-dark sea,” he deals
with the whirlpool Charybdis, not by opposing her turbulent
(kukômenê, 12.238), sucking waters, as Achilles does
Scamander’s turbulent (kukômenos, 21.235) streams, but by
FLAUMENHAFT
37
waiting patiently for his mast and keel to be flung forth again.
He has discerned that the whirlpool, like the Cyclops, has
absolutely regular habits.34 Like Achilles in Scamander, he is
not able to “plant his feet firmly” (stêrixai posin empedon,
12.434) to save himself from her. But, unlike Achilles, in
whose hands a rooted tree comes loose from the riverbank,
Odysseus manages to cling to the branches of a tall fig tree
that remains firmly rooted. By turning the rescued keel into a
boat and “rowing with [his] hands” (12.444), he makes it to
Calypso’s island, the “navel of the sea.”
Seven years later, he builds the raft that carries him from
Calypso’s “sea-girt”(“stream-surrounded,” amphirutê, 1.198)
isle. Zeus speaks of the raft as an instrument of Odysseus’s
self-liberation; he will return home by his own devices, “not
by the escort of gods or mortal men” (5.32). Achilles never
makes anything; productive labor is base to the man who
seeks only to make himself worthy of immortal glory. His
man-slaying hands and the weapons they hold are useless
against Scamander, and he almost dies the ignominious death
of the drowned. In contrast, after seven years of enforced
inactivity, Odysseus seems to come to life again. With forged
tools, rather than forged weapons, in his hands, he constructs
a seaworthy raft with sides, mast, oar, and sail, and even a
device to move it from land into the water (5. 252-61). Here,
and throughout his story, he works in wood, a material of less
duration, but greater pliancy and flexibility than stone or
metals. A long simile explicitly compares him to a skilled
boat-builder.35
Finally, it is no surprise that, unlike Achilles, Odysseus
is a great swimmer. Swimming, like navigating, offers a
paradigm for human activity that requires strength, skill, and
calculation for self-preservation in an alien element. Unlike
fighting, it pits man against nature rather than against his
fellow men. But it requires a certain degree of knowledge and
coordination with the opponent, rather than mere opposition
aiming at his destruction. Achilles fights a river god with a
will to destroy him. Odysseus saves himself from the sea, a
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
natural element in service of his own divine nemesis, by
floating on and swimming with the sea. He knows not to fight
it, but to have confidence in the water’s power to support
him.36 In this respect, swimming is like “rowing with the arms
and legs”37 or sailing with the wind and current, rather than
against them. Man’s ability to move in water is a key sign of
his extraordinary adaptability, his ability to cross boundaries,
and his capacity to utilize, as well as oppose, the powers of
the natural world. In this regard it is Odysseus the sailor and
swimmer, rather than Achilles the warrior, whom Homer
depicts as a paradigm of human excellence. There are no
swimming or boating events in either the funeral games or in
Phaeacia. This kind of prowess is not yet an occasion for
leisurely recreation or for competitive display or glory.38 But
Homer clearly recognizes that it is in keeping with the other
virtues of his third contender for the designation “best of the
Achaeans.”
As the raft nears Phaeacia, Poseidon whips up a great
storm, “rolling before him a mighty wave” (mega kuma
kulindôn, 5.296), and Odysseus’s knees and heart are
“loosened” (or “melted,” luto, 5.406), in the Iliadic formula
for dying warriors. In the dissolving element, the familiar
metaphor suggests a more literal meaning than it has on dry
land. Like Achilles in the river, Odysseus tells himself that an
honorable death and burial on the Trojan plain would have
been preferable to drowning (5.312). Homer even makes him
think, at this moment, of the “dead son of Peleus” (5.310)
who did not drown in the sea, but died gloriously in battle. A
great wave “whirls” (elelixe) the raft around and beats down
on him from “on high” (5.313-14), just as Scamander assaults
Achilles. When the raft Odysseus has made with his hands can
no longer withstand the assault of Poseidon, he heeds Ino’s
exhortation to “swim with [your] hands” (5.344), to the land
of the Phaeacians. Unlike the Iliad’s chivalric, horse-drawn
heroes who carefully dress and arm themselves for battle,
Odysseus rides one recovered raft plank “as though he were
riding a horse” (5.371), and strips himself of Calypso’s
FLAUMENHAFT
39
garments as he prepares to face his enemy. With “arms
outstretched, eager to swim”(cheire petassas, nêchemenai
memaôs, 5.374-5), he flings his naked body into the sea.
He swims, and then “is driven,” or “wanders,”(plazeto,
5.389) for two days and two nights, and on the third day
catches sight of Phaeacia. But he soon realizes that there are
no harbors or low places on which to land; again, his “knees
are loosed and his heart melted” (5.406). For Odysseus, as for
Achilles in the deep river, it is not possible to “set both feet
firmly” (podessi stêmenai amphoteroisi, 5.413-14). He clings
to a jagged rock, until the waves rip him away. At this point,
we are told that he would have perished, had not Athena
given him “prudence” (epiphrosunên, 5.437). Homer does
not mean that Athena saves him, but that he follows his own
characteristic instinct not merely to oppose nature—the
waves—with brute strength, as Achilles does the river, but to
discern its behavior, as he did with Charybdis, and to
coordinate his own powers with those of the sea. Thus, he
makes his way “out from” (exanadus, 5.438) the main current
of the wave, and “swims alongside” (nêche parex, 5.439) it to
the mouth of a river. This river, like the Trojan Scamander, is
called “fair-flowing”(kallirooio, 5. 441). Unlike Achilles, who
impiously attempts to fight the Trojan river god, Odysseus
prays as a wandering suppliant to the Phaeacian river god
who stops the stream and holds back the waves. Odysseus lets
his “knees and strong arms bend” (ekampse, 5.443-44) and
emerges from the river to kiss the solid earth, a gesture
unimaginable in godlike Achilles. That night he curls up in an
improvised bed of dry leaves that protect him from “bitter
frost and fresh dew” (5.467), watery enemies that still
threaten to overcome him. The last leg of his journey home
begins with this improvised shelter and the home offered by
the hospitable Phaeacians. Nausikaa welcomes him by
allowing him to wash off the brine and salty crust of the sea
with fresh water from the now-calm river (5.224-26).
As we have seen, Odysseus’s ability to make or to elicit
offers of new homes does not preclude attachment to his
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
original home. Ithaca does not float like the windy isle of the
shifty king Aeolus, the home of a peculiarly static and inbred
tribe. Rather, it remains in place, awaiting the return of its
king to his ever-aging wife, son, father, and subjects.
Odysseus’s landfall on Ithaca is in the sloping harbor of
Phorkus, another “old man of the sea,” whose headlands
keep back the great waves of the open ocean. An olive tree
grows beside a cave sacred to the Naiads, river nymphs who
weave beside the “everflowing streams” (13.109), Thetis’s
companions who had wept for Achilles in the watery deep.
After twenty years at sea, Odysseus sleeps at last beside his
own native waters. When Athena reveals them as his own, he
again kisses the earth and prays to the Naiads, vowing to
dedicate gifts to them. Just as he identifies the island by its
flowing streams in the cave, so he is identified by Eurycleia
when she washes his feet and the water in her basin “flows
out” (exechethuso, 19.470). His homecoming culminates in
the identification of the wedding bed he crafted from a still
living, rooted olive tree. In contrast, Achilles meets his match
in a turbulent foreign river on whose bottom his swift feet
cannot find firm footing, and of whose waters his man-killing
hands cannot get a hold. Fixed on the promise of unchanging
eternity, Achilles loses touch with his past and rejects the
prospects of a living future. Odysseus declines Calypso’s offer
to keep him at her static island in the sea and to make him
“immortal and ageless,” in effect, to make him stand still, in
time. He chooses to return to his own island in the sea, where
nothing has stood still in his absence. Paradoxical as it
sounds, he holds onto a flowing human life in time.
The peculiar nature of his relation with Poseidon is
resolved in a strikingly Odyssean way. As punishment for
helping Odysseus emerge from the threat of immobility and
invisibility and return to life in a world of change, the
Phaeacian ship that delivered him is immobilized, turned to
stone, like Niobe at the end of the Iliad, and their city is
covered over with a great mountain (13.149-52) and lost
sight of forever. The enmity between amphibious man and
FLAUMENHAFT
41
the unstable sea is to be concluded after the adventures that
constitute the Odyssey. Odysseus is told in Hades, and he
repeats the prophesy to Penelope when he returns home, that
he will soon have to make another journey, this time inland
on the solid earth. After traveling a great distance he will
come to a place where the inhabitants are so unfamiliar with
the watery, salty ways that have been his life, that they will
mistake the oar he carries for a winnowing fan. Planting it
among them, he will serve as an ambassador for the unruly
god who has been his nemesis, and who is thus also responsible for some of his strengths. Life away from, as well as life
protected from, the vicissitudes of Poseidon is not a full
human life. The shifting sea of risks and the virtues it fosters
is a more interesting, seasoned life than the immortal life of
Calypso and the protected lives of landlubbers, Aeolians, and
Phaeacians. Gods and Phaeacians may zip from element to
element, “swift as birds on the wing or thoughts” (7.35;
5.50), but a mortal man must make his way through rough
waters and seas of pains and troubles. The viable alternative
to Achilles’ attempt to fix time and oppose watery flux is not
a becalmed flat sea, or a freshwater lake with no “deep
eddies,” but a life in time that builds, sails, swims, endures
troubles, governs men, loves a like-minded woman, and
generates a maturing son to continue life when his own time
has come to an end.
Epilogue
The man who, at the beginning of the Iliad, claims to be the
“best of the Achaeans” is nearly overwhelmed by the fluid,
churning force of the Trojan river. In Scamander, Achilles
faces an opponent beyond his experience. From this point on,
he fights only on land, where his swift feet can make a firm
stand or can outrun an opponent whose enduring shape is
visible, and who runs in only one direction.
But Homer’s use of the episodes involving Scamander
points to a related fact about the “best of the Achaeans”:
Achilles has his own tutelary river in his own homeland,
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
42
Phthia, the land where mortals waste away (phthiô) and die,
where neither life nor time is fixed forever. Like Scamander
(21.268, 326), it is called a “heaven-fed river” (16.174). It
too marks, fertilizes, and protects the land, and from it
occasionally spring forth mortal children like the Myrmidon
Menesthius (16.173-78), just as Asteropaeus’s father sprang
from the “wide-flowing Axius” in Paeonia. The proper name
of the Phthian river, Spercheius, points to Achilles, for
sperchô means “to set in rapid motion,” or, as a middle
participle, “hastening, impetuous, without loss of time.” In
Book Twenty-three, when Achilles prepares Patroclus’s body
for the funeral mound, he cuts a “yellow lock” of his own
hair to place in his dead friend’s hands. The Greek word for
“yellow,” xanthê (23.141), might remind us of the immortal
Trojan river, called Xanthus by the gods, against whom
Achilles strives in Book Twenty-one. Now, at Patroclus’s
funeral, he says that his father had vowed that he, Achilles,
upon his return (nostêsanta, 23.145) to Phthia, would offer
this hair and a hecatomb to Spercheius, and that he would
sacrifice fifty rams into his waters. Such sacrifices were often
dedicated to local rivers by boys (and girls) when they came
of age.39 Hesiod says that the daughters of Tethys and Ocean,
the nymphs, with the help of Apollo and their brothers the
Rivers—which include “divine Scamander”—bring young
boys to manhood.”40 That it was Peleus who made the vow
suggests that for his swift-footed son, there can be no normal
coming of age, and no return (nostos) to the swift-flowing
river of his native land. Like the rest of his story, the savage
slaughters and mock sacrifices near the Scamander in Book
Twenty-one bear witness to the Homeric paradox that the
fully developed heroic excellence exemplified by Achilles
must alienate the hero from the very wellsprings of his own
life.
FLAUMENHAFT
43
1
After Troy falls, Aeneas undertakes the extended voyage that takes him
from Troy to Italy. Homer only alludes to this future (20.302-08).
2
Oliver Taplin, Homeric Soundings: The Shaping of the Iliad (Oxford,
1992), 237.
3
Seth L. Schein, The Mortal Hero: An Introduction to Homer’s Iliad
(Berkeley, 1984), 75.
4
This seems to be an unstated motive for the ambush of Rhesus and his
men and horses in Book Ten of the Iliad.
5
E. T. Owen, The Story of the Iliad (Michigan, 1966), 210-12.
6
Taplin, 228.
7
But see James M. Redfield, Nature and Culture in the Iliad (Chicago,
1975), Note 15, 250.
8
Taplin, 224.
9
Proteus, the “old man of the sea” in Odyssey 4.365-570 is also hard to
pin down.
10
Laura M. Slatkin, The Power of Thetis: Allusion and Interpretation in
the Iliad (Berkeley, 1991), 103.
11
Slatkin, 113.
12
Perhaps this is why there are very few visual representations of this
incident, either in extant Greek art or later.
13
Richardson, N., The Iliad: A Commentary. Volume VI: Books 21-24
(Cambridge, 1993), 72. Note to lines 21.233-50 on enjambment, and the
progressive piling-up of sentences.
14
Atchity, Kenneth John, Homer’s Iliad: The Shield of Memory
(Carbondale and Edwardsville, Ilinois, 1978), 243.
15
Redfield, Note 15, 251.
16
Plato, Theaetetus 179E-180B; Aristotle, Rhetoric 1407b9-18.
17
Austin, Norman, Archery at the Dark of the Moon: Poetic Problems in
Homer’s Odyssey (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1975), 112.
18
Austin, 113.
19
Sappho, LP fr. 130; Archilochus, West, IEG 196.
,
20
***
Michael N. Nadler, Spontaneity and Tradition: A Study in the Oral Art
of Homer (Berkeley, 1974), 149ff.
21
Leon R. Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (New York,
2003), 167.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
22
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of
Painting and Poetry. Trans. Ellen Frothingham (New York, 1968), 114,
120-22.
23
S. E. Bassett, The Poetry of Homer (Berkeley, 1938), 156-57.
24
W B. Stanford, The Odyssey of Homer (London, 1965), I.xxii.
.
25
C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost (New York, 1970), 31. Quoted
also in Mark W Edwards, Homer: Poet of the Iliad (Baltimore, 1987),
.
322.
26
Aristophanes, Clouds, 379ff. Trans. Alan H Somerstein. The Comedies
of Aristophanes, Vol. 3 (Chicago, 1982), 46.
27
Atchity, 243.
28
The word appears only at Odyssey 10.304 to describe the môly root
that Hermes gives Odysseus.
29
Vera Lachman. Homer’s Sun Still Shines: Ancient Greece in Essays,
Poems, and Translations (New Market, Virginia, 2004), 83-84.
30
Plato, Meno 81D.
31
Chapter 2 of Austin’s Archery at the Dark of the Moon is the best
discussion I know about Homer’s “analogical” thought, the unity of the
cosmos, and correspondence between human and natural order.
32
For an extended discussion of Odysseus, see Mera J. Flaumenhaft,
“The Undercover Hero: Odysseus from Dark to Daylight,” Interpretation,
Vol. 10, No. 1, January, 1982.
33
Derek Walcott. The Odyssey: A Stage Version (New York, 1993), 1.
34
Austin, 133.
35
Again, compare the sailable, steered raft that Odysseus builds with the
merely floating ark that Noah makes, not by his own ingenuity, but by
strictly following God’s instructions. Kass, 167-68.
36
B. Franklin, “Learning to Swim,” in The Ingenious Dr. Franklin:
Selected Scientific Letters of Benjamin Franklin. Ed. Nathan G. Goodman
(Philadelphia, 1974), 41-45.
37
38
Franklin, “On Swimming,” in Goodman, 48.
Herodotus (8.89) remarks on the number of Persians who died at
Salamis because, unlike the Greeks, they did not know how to swim.
Thucydides reports that the Athenian ships preparing to sail to Sicily
strove to outdo each other in appearance and speed (6.31) and raced with
each other as they left Athens (6.32). Elaborate boat races begin Virgil’s
FLAUMENHAFT
45
funeral games (Aeneid, 5) where the events have a more communal, or
political, character than Homer’s.
39
Walter Burkert, Greek Religion. Trans. John Raffas (Cambridge, Mass.,
1985), 174-75.
40
Hesiod. The Theogony. Trans. Norman O. Brown (Indianapolis, 1953),
63.
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47
Making Up Our Minds
Robert Richardson
With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane sense. By
a conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions
and their consequences; and all things, good and bad, go by us
like a torrent. We are not wholly involved in Nature. I may be
either the drift-wood in the stream, or Indra in the sky looking
down on it. I may be affected by a theatrical exhibition; on
the other hand, I may not be affected by an actual event which
appears to concern me much more. I only know myself as a
human entity; the scene, so to speak, of thoughts and affections; and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can
stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense
my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of
a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but
spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it; and
that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the
tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind
of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was
concerned. This doubleness may easily make us poor
neighbors and friends sometimes.—Thoreau, Walden
1
“I…am sensible of a certain doubleness…” The feature of
experience that Thoreau remarks upon here is both
remarkable and commonplace. This sense we sometimes have
of being apart from ourselves is an instance of what I believe
to be the constitutive feature of human thinking, its doubling
power.
Robert Richardson is a tutor on the Santa Fe campus of St. John’s College.
This essay is a version of a lecture he delivered at Santa Fe on February 2,
2005.
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We notice things and notice our noticing; we observe
events and appraise them, hear statements and affirm or deny
them, act and assess our actions; we see one thing as being
like another and employ it as a simile; we make something
into a sign and, like a string around our finger, let it stand for
something else. We count, tell time, chronicle the past, anticipate the future and memorialize the dead. We worry and
regret. We can speak the truth or tell a lie. We play with
words and pun; we laugh and tell jokes. We wear clothes,
apply make-up and use deodorants. We accept little pieces of
paper with faces stamped on them in exchange for the goods
of life. Without “a certain doubleness,” without the ability to
stand apart from the things and feelings we experience, and
momentarily at least, even to be other than ourselves, we
would not do any of this.
“We are not wholly involved in Nature,” as Thoreau
reminds us. Our doubleness brings us into the sight of
ourselves and sets us apart from everything else. It marks us
off from our animal kindred who, if they share in it at all, do
not partake fully in the ability to observe themselves from
afar. Animals close to us in evolutionary terms and those born
and bred to share our domesticity display something like our
doubleness at times, but this power seems rudimentary in
them at most. Despite their lively awareness and evident
intelligence, it would be a stretch to suppose they can stand
aloof from themselves and appraise their own actions as
humans habitually do. They are “wholly involved in Nature”
in a way that we are not.
We do have, it is true, moments of active work or play
when, fully immersed in our actions, we think of nothing but
what we are doing and do not think to watch ourselves doing
it. These vivifying moments, complete and sufficient as they
are, give us a sense of what it means to be at one with
ourselves.
When we experience it deeply and for its own sake, the
power of witnessing can induce in us a blissful state of
oneness, which is at the other pole from our immersion in
RICHARDSON
49
immediacy. In such a moment the notion of an undifferentiated, enduring, and unalterable consciousness overarching
all of existence and containing it, yet neither affecting it nor
affected by it, is but a thought beyond. “Indra in the sky
looking down” in Thoreau’s account is, according to the
ancient Indian religion, a manifestation of the highest
consciousness: “He is the unseen Seer, the unheard Hearer,
the unthought Thinker, the ununderstood Understander.”1
“The witness, the sole thinker, devoid of qualities….without
parts, without activity, tranquil, irreproachable, spotless.”2 as
it is characterized in the Upanishads. This Vedic conception
has affinities with the view found in the western theological
tradition that the divine mind is eternally single, simple,
whole, unchanging, and impassive. It knows no doubleness.
(The old Greek gods were of a different sort. Sharing everything with humans but our mortality, they were as doubleminded as could be.)
An animal never leaves nature. The Most High, according
to many traditional accounts, lies beyond and never enters it.
We dwell somewhere in the middle, between Nature and the
pure Empyrean, confounded and confounding, looking up
and down.
One of our muddles here in the middle is what to think
about our own thinking. That we can think about thinking at
all is, of course, a consequence of our doubling power, but we
are often confused by this ability even as we exercise it. What
we are doing when we look at our thinking, how we look at
it and what we think we see—as well as what words such as
‘looking’ and ‘seeing’ are doing in this context—are among
the most vexing of questions.
In thinking about these aspects of our experience I have
arrived at beliefs which, although not unique to me, are far
from the usual ones. My aim in what follows is to state my
beliefs as boldly and simply as I can. It would please me to
find that they are more widely shared than I suppose, but I am
afraid I cannot count on this. To put the matter provocatively,
I am not trying to sweep the cobwebs out of the mind, but to
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50
sweep the mind out with the cobwebs. Preposterous as it may
seem, I do not believe we think in our minds or even that we
have minds to do our thinking in.
2
When we want to express our thinking we do a peculiar
thing. With lips, teeth, and tongue we bite and rend and
pummel the air. Out of our breath we sculpt our thoughts and
send them on their way. The medium of the air—so nearly
unresisting it scarcely seems to be a body at all—briefly,
evanescently, takes the shape of thought and carries it abroad
to rap at the portals of the public ear. Speech is a plastic art.
Our words are not so much winged as wind-carved. Perhaps
we ought to pause now and then in our palavering and pour
a libation to the mellifluous air.
It is utterly remarkable that so slight an alteration in such
a thin and subtle medium could produce such great effects.
Of all the capacities we have for shaping things this is surely
the most potent. No human activity has done more, directly
or indirectly, to change the world than the artful expulsion of
these little bursts of air.
Speaking is a public art and a public act. Once the art is
acquired it may be privately employed but that is an
accidental feature of it. The possibility of its private
employment is derived and secondary, not primary or
essential. An individual who learns to speak acquires what is
never the learner’s alone. The common tongue belongs to all
who speak it. It lives in the customary practices of its users. If
all the beings who know how to employ it cease to exist, it
dies with them. Its being is in its active use. While it is alive,
it is a potent influence, yet it is nowhere locatable. A
language, the common practices of a people’s speech, is not
in the organs of propulsion or reception; it is not in the air
between; it is not in the brains of its speakers and hearers. Its
occurrence may require all of these, but it does not belong to
or inhabit any of them.
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51
We can see, though, that there is a doubling here. The art
of speech is more than the making and hearing of sounds.
The sounds can be names that stand for things. In the giving
of names we stand apart, like an Adam in Eden, and know
both that the thing is other than the name and that the name
stands in for it. This capacity arises from the doubleness
already noted—the power to be seer and doer, observer and
actor at once—and it greatly enhances it. Only with the
burgeoning of speech, it seems, does our doubleness reach
full and telling strength. In speech doubleness finds a vehicle
that once and for all, for good or ill, transports us out of
nature. Double now, our fate pronounced, we rise—or fall—
into the world, there forever to contend with the partial
stranger each of us calls ‘myself ’. Givers of names, bearers of
names, we are now fully and forever beside ourselves.
Language and doubleness are at least fraternal twins. To
say which deserves the elder’s status is probably impossible.
The evidence which would establish the birthright of either
one is lacking. No testimony can be given until we have
learned to speak, and then it is too late: the witness is
impeached.
Like talking, the doubling power is physiologically
grounded and it, too, is an acquired skill. It develops over
time, improves with practice and is enhanced by circumstances and structures which invite it and support it. We see
this in children as they grow. Early in life they start to notice
and attend to things around them and learn their names.
They begin to distinguish between themselves and others, to
ask questions, to deliberate and choose. They become capable
of thinking about persons and things which are not immediately present, they undertake projects and pursue goals. In
time they become aware of possible opportunities or dangers
and learn to direct their own conduct and look out for
themselves. The developing skills of language grow along
with this process and are instrumental to it. Through
doubleness and its linguistic accompaniments humans extend
their awareness beyond what is immediate and present at
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hand, thereby increasing their ability to meet their needs,
satisfy more of their desires, and pursue their long term
interests.
Something like this must have happened to us as a species,
too, although we cannot say how or when. Our remote
ancestors, who were anatomically and perhaps emotionally
very much like us, apparently existed for hundreds of
thousands of years before they began to speak. Not very long
ago in the span of evolutionary time, their doubling power
developed and languages came to be. Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
perhaps to buttress his claim that pity is so natural to humans
that they could not even have learned it at their mothers’
knees, imagines the first humans living solitary lives practically from the moment of birth, gradually acquiring language,
then becoming social beings. But this is surely backwards.
Language and doubleness grow out of our social nature. In
the presence of others who respond to our gestures, return
our gaze, alter their facial expressions and aid or hinder us,
we begin to speak and to recognize ourselves as belonging to
a community which simultaneously contains each of us
individually yet is separate and apart from us.
We are not born into Nature, but into an established
world, a world founded in our doubleness. This world is
shaped by the language, customs, beliefs, institutions,
artifacts, and practices of the people we are born among. It
has developed over time, may have undergone many changes,
and may be changing even as we are born into it. Any
particular instance of it may be in conflict with itself,
threatened from outside, and gathering or losing its influence,
but it is our human home. It is what gives or denies meaning
and significance to what we do. It shapes who and what we
are, provides the boundaries—more or less plastic—of our
thinking and acting, and establishes the grounds of worth.
The self is the private counterpart of the world. It
develops in dialogue with it, sometimes in discord and
opposition, sometimes in seeming consonance. I am partly
RICHARDSON
53
the story I tell myself, partly the story the others in my world
may wish me to be, allow me to be or take me to be—and also
something as yet to be disclosed in the on-going reciprocity
of self and world.
Neither the self nor the world is primordial. Both are
artificial productions arising from human effort, articulation,
and invention. (Artificial is not, here, the antonym of real.)
Both are fluid to varying degrees. Each can change relatively
independently, but changes in the one can, and often do,
affect the other. Nothing metaphysical need be implied by the
existence of this pairing. Self and world are names for
patterns of activity that have been and may continue to be
shaped by deliberation and choice. They are especially
intimate and important to us since they represent for us the
extremes of our existence; the mine and not mine; what I am
and what I am up against, what I want and what is available
to me. They are akin to poetry and myth, but not necessarily
illusions because of that and certainly not without meaning.
Our bodies and the natural forces at work in the things
around us energize the stories of self and world and are in
turn incorporated into their unfolding episodes. From our
cultural surroundings, our personal experiences and our
thinking—including forays beyond the cultural givens—we
frame the story of the world, and under the impetus of our
aspirations, interests, and fears we undertake to act in ways
that will make the details of our own adventures in it come
out as we want them to.
When we use written marks to communicate instead of
making sounds, our doubleness is doubly confirmed. If proof
were needed for the fact of doubling, the writing and reading
of any sentence would provide it. Without the conventional
marks employed by the writer as stand-ins for words there
would be no sentence to read, and if the reader were not able
to see them as standing for words they would be taken only
for the little squiggles they really are and they would have no
other meaning.
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Writing, like speaking, depends upon and enhances our
doubling power. It gives our words a more permanent body
than air, extends their reach and greatly increases their sway.
We are inclined to say that an author puts concepts,
images, feelings, characters, or events in a text, but it would
be more accurate to say that the writer, using the conventions
of a written language, provides a set of tacit instructions
which the reader follows in order to enact or constitute the
thoughts or events which the work elicits. Literally speaking,
there are no thoughts in any book.
We are also disposed to say that the thoughts which the
work conveys enter the reader’s mind and may be stored in
the memory and later recalled. But it would be more accurate
to say that in the act of remembering, the reader’s initial
activities when encountering and comprehending the work
are reiterated, rehearsed, or re-enacted and thereby reconstituted.
Thus, just as we should circumspectly say there is nothing
in the book, so we should also circumspectly say there is
nothing of it in the mind or memory. When, as practiced
readers, we look something up in a book, we do not attend to
the marks on the page as such and scarcely notice they are
there although they are the means by which we understand
what the book says. When we remember something, the
means by which the memory is activated are not available for
our inspection, as the marks on the page are if we happen to
distract ourselves by noticing them, but in both reading and
remembering there are embodied procedures which make the
acts possible. In the act of reading, static embodiments are reactivated by procedures dynamically embodied in living
tissues; the procedures of memory are dynamically embodied
in living tissues alone; we know how to read and to remember
without, in either case, really knowing how we are able to do
it.
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RICHARDSON
3
It is surprising, when we stop to notice it, how much of our
thinking lies openly before us. Thinking is manifest in all the
things presently at hand. This table, the chairs, the carpet, the
lights, the drapes, the pictures on the walls, the doors and
windows, the walls themselves—all embody thinking. Our
needs, interests, hopes, fears, and fantasies have forged out of
the elements a multitude of things. Whether planes, trains, or
automobiles the reality is the same: thinking makes them and
thinking makes them go. In this respect, thinking is the least
mysterious enterprise there is. We see it everywhere we turn
and know it well.
Thinking is made evident just as surely, if less tangibly, in
the ordering of our common life. Courts, colleges, corporations, cities, states, musical concerts, and baseball games are
all embodiments of thinking. Our organized forms of work
and of play, of commerce and of art, are beings of thought.
Seemingly more real than the events and things they order,
they cannot be directly seen or pointed to and have no actual
location in space and time. They show up only in the activities they circumscribe. The rules of the game, the charter of
the college, the laws of the land, govern invisibly. Much
metaphysical hay might be made of this if one were so
inclined, but there is no need to loft the formal aspects of
experience into eternity to preserve what is real in them.
It would be pointless to ask, where is the justice system in
the body politic? We can locate the courthouses and the
statute books, but the system lives in the customs and
practices, the activities of its constituents. Without buildings,
books or human bodies, there would be no system, yet, real
as it is, we cannot locate it in any one of them or all of them
taken together.
Again, we might ask, where is the English language? We
can point to dictionaries and grammars, as well as books that
are written in it, but the language is not in them. It lives in the
habits and practices of those who know how to use it, but it
is not in their bodies. The language is real, it has effects and
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
consequences, the world is different because it is employed,
yet it is not anywhere. Speaking the language and thinking
thoughts are alike in this respect. The organs that make them
possible are locatable, but the language and the thoughts are
not.
Where is a game of chess or soccer? And where, we could
also ask, are science and poetry? For that matter, where in the
world is the world?
It is amazing when we stop to think about it how many
things there are that cannot be said to be in any place and yet
are constantly assumed, repeatedly invoked, and powerfully
consequential. We speak a language. We speak our minds.
There is a similarity worth pondering here.
There is a nearly unshakable conviction that the mind
exists and can be looked into. Many tell us they have taken a
look and have reported impressively on what they have seen.
Withdrawing his attention from his surroundings and peering
into his mind, Descartes plucked out his famous cogito.
Hume took a long inward look and spied an assortment of
discrete atoms of thinking which he called impressions and
ideas. William James, stepping into the celebrated chapter on
the stream of thought in his Principles of Psychology, says,
“We now begin our study of the mind from within.”3 In Kinds
of Minds, Daniel Dennett declares, “It is beyond serious
dispute that you and I each have a mind.”4 And “…each of us
knows exactly one mind from the inside, and no two of us
know the same mind from the inside.”5 We are not
“something that is all outside and no inside like a rock or a
discarded sliver of fingernail.”6
Although all people and all schools of philosophy,
according to William James, affirm this inner realm, although
many heroes of thought have dared the labyrinth hoping to
see what thinking is really like when it is at home, I must
remain outside and cannot go in. I have read the accounts of
these interior expeditions often enough over the years but I
have never been persuaded by their individual claims or
managed to see how their mutually incompatible certainties
RICHARDSON
57
might be forged into a comprehensible whole. I would cut a
sorry figure now if, like some Quixote of consciousness, I
plunged into this legendary space and went adventuring to
see what I might rescue there, then returned to defend my
fugitive darlings trolled up from the inner dark. No; better, I
think, to close the hole.
The putative effort to look into our minds, if nothing
else, takes doubleness for granted; the agent examines the
patient, although they are ‘really’ one and the same. The
mind observes the play of mind upon the mental stage. As
long as we are speaking metaphorically, and know that we are
doing so, such fancies are innocent enough. Figuratively, ‘in’
will do. Taken literally, it is a dose that is fatal to our understanding.
One important piece of evidence that this metaphor is
taken literally is the fact that, ever since Descartes, thinkers of
all sorts have made it the basis for what they consider to be a
real distinction between the internal and external worlds:
there is an inner world, intimately experienced, directly
accessible, and certainly known, and there is an external
world, which is represented in the mind in some problematic
way that leaves its real existence doubtful. By some strange
alchemy, what is so manifestly happening around us has been
transmuted into an inner world with us, as knowers,
somehow inside it. Once we have stumbled into this maze it
is impossible ever to find our way back through our own
mentations to reach the outside and see it directly and simply
as itself again.
I am not ignorant of the circumstances and the arguments
that led to this way of thinking about thinking, but in my
opinion this picture of an inner reality and a represented but
doubtful external world out yonder is exactly backwards. To
stay for the moment with this inside-outside distinction
despite its dubious character, I would have to say that
thinking is constituted outside us and then imported. What is
out there surrounding the body, encountered by it and
engaging it, is the real. The inner world is its imaginary
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58
simulacrum, an invented counterpart. In making up our
minds, we bring the outside in.
I began with speech and language and spoke in passing of
political and social structures as well as the making of things
because these instances of thinking seem to me to have more
to tell us than can be learned by trying to turn our gaze
inward in acts of introspection. I want to stay on this outward
path even though to nearly everyone else all the signposts
seem so evidently to point the other way.
4
We are constantly telling ourselves how the mind works, and
it is instructive to notice what we say. We forge an understanding, draw a conclusion, render a judgment, grasp a
problem, shape an idea, build a theory, make a decision. We
hit the nail on the head, are struck by a thought, see an idea
clearly, approach a problem, keep things in mind, get a rough
idea, have a touching thought. We apprehend and
comprehend, but in either case, behind the Latinate terms for
it, the plain English of it is, we grasp. All these motions of the
mind are metaphors, grounded in our interactions with the
things of daily life. Most of the time the mind is either a
seeing eye or a grasping hand. The notion that the mind or
consciousness does things—like a person moving in physical
space—is itself a metaphor. The mind is, in short, the double
of the body, its imaginary counterpart—and its mask. It only
exists in a manner of speaking.
Recounting his efforts to observe his “palpitating inward
life,” William James says: “Whenever my introspective glance
succeeds in turning around quickly enough to catch one of
these manifestations of spontaneity in the act, all it can ever
feel distinctly is some bodily process, for the most part taking
place within the head.”7 This picture of a mind pirouetting
inside itself reminds us a little of the hope we had when we
were children of stepping on our own shadow if only we were
quick enough. We can eliminate such shadowy motions if we
ascribe thinking to the body itself, something James often
RICHARDSON
59
seems on the brink of doing. Time and again his inner exploration of the stream of thought seems about to beach on the
shores of the body, but he backs water and paddles away.8
One aspect of his inward journey is particularly illustrative of the difficulties such ventures face. Describing his
struggle to follow and observe his thoughts, noting how they
seem to be concentrated in the neck and head, he says, “My
brain appears to me as if all shot across with lines of
direction, of which I have become conscious as my attention
has shifted from one sense-organ to another, in passing to
successive outer things, or in following trains of varying
sense-ideas.”9 Here William seems to have forsaken the role
of scientific observer and taken up his brother Henry’s art. An
introspective faculty so agile and penetrating it overleaps the
possible and spies the brain itself is simply too uncanny to be
taken for a fact.
We may describe the mind as Hume does as “a kind of
theater, where several perceptions successively make their
appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an
infinite variety of postures and situations,”10 but the actors
appear before the footlights costumed in raiment which the
solitary spectator has unwittingly sewn backstage before the
play began. Habits, conventions, language, and expectations
are part of the story of what we see with our inward gaze.
The inside story of our thinking is a work of inspired imagination. We do not look on thinking bare.
The mind is an idea but there are no ideas in the mind.
The mind does not produce thoughts; it is a product of them.
The mind is a name for a complex of activities. It is nothing
over and above these activities, and apart from them it has no
being. In this it resembles such terms as the English language,
the judicial system, the game of chess, the college, or the city.
The mind is the ether of thinking.
We would do better, I believe, to speak of minding rather
than a mind. The verbal form represents the facts more
perspicuously than the noun. Activities are the real subjects
here, and not a thing that acts. To quote James again, “If we
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could say in English ‘it thinks,’ as we say ‘it rains’ or ‘it
blows,’ we should be stating the fact most simply and with the
minimum of assumption. As we cannot, we must simply say
that thought goes on. ”11
Our many mindings, although they reside nowhere, still
go about their business unimpaired. The activities we denominate as sensing, feeling, wishing, opining, believing, liking,
and fearing go on undomiciled, as do imagining, judging,
reasoning, and the like.
Such terms, it is worth noting, are highly generic. When
we think of the range of our desires, wishes, feelings, or
beliefs we have to wonder if these general terms ever
adequately express what occurs in any particular instance,
especially when we notice how often these ways of minding
infuse one another, commingling in varied ways and countless
combinations. It is also true that many aspects of our thinking
life are too indeterminate to be singled out and named. Subtle
alterations of mood and inclination, flickering images, and
passing fancies come and go without our pausing to
acknowledge them, much less provide them with a moniker,
yet they affect us and are often significant despite their lack
of definiteness.
In contrast to this, some of our mindings are not only
specified distinctly but are ascribed to particular faculties: the
imagination, the judgment, the intellect, the understanding,
the reason, or the will. This helps satisfy our inclination to
provide a mental doer for every thinking deed, even though
there is nothing that actually answers to these names. A
thorough renovation of our thinking would require us to
renounce our inheritance and refuse to take title to them. The
absence of most of them, outside of philosophical discourse,
would probably go unnoticed but—having gained wide
acceptance since its invention in Roman times—the will is
now something of a popular favorite and likely to be missed.
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RICHARDSON
5
In denying the existence of an inner realm I do not mean to
deny that each of us has experiences uniquely our own and
known only to us. Although a lot of what we undergo is not
known to us at all, and a lot of what we know about what
happens to us is known in the same way it might be known
by anyone else since we use common words and concepts to
recognize it, report it to ourselves and comprehend it, there
is an irreducible something in each person’s experience that
is that person’s alone. You cannot have my headache, and
believe me, you wouldn’t want to. But if we look at this
closely I think it comes to very much the same as saying that
we have different bodies and different life experiences. I have
mine with its sensations and you have yours and there is no
possibility of the one being the other. We may mix our saliva
in a kiss, but I cannot secrete yours and you cannot produce
mine. We may extend our imagination to the fullest reach of
its powers, but we can never know exactly what it is like to
be each other—much less to be a creature like a bat.
If the mind is a metaphorical construct, as I believe it is,
and therefore not a place for thinking actually to be in, where
is thinking then? In the body? Well, perhaps, but can we say
just where?
Often, as we struggle with a difficult problem or confront
an issue important to us, we feel a mounting pressure in the
chest, the heart pounds, the stomach churns. This might lead
us to locate our thinking where most of humankind most of
the time has felt it to be, somewhere between the navel and
the chin.
When we are not trying to locate thinking it just seems to
hover around; it is present without being anywhere.
Sometimes it seems to float slightly above and before us, as if
somewhere nearby in the sky. The cartoonists’ use of the
thought balloon may be as good a convention for locating it
as any.
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When we are conversing with a friend and trying vigorously to make a point, thinking seems to be located in the
space between us. If we were cracking a safe we might feel it
to be concentrated at our fingertips, and at the end of a stick
if we were using it to feel our way in the dark over rough
ground. With a little practice I believe we could learn to place
it almost anywhere—on our back between our shoulder
blades, or perched on our shoulder—if we were persuaded by
a likely enough story to expect to feel it there.
There is, of course, something experientially plausible
about locating thinking in our heads. The vocal organs are in
the neck and head and, since so much of thinking is a kind of
silent speech, as the stranger points out in Plato’s Sophist, it
is easy to feel that the mind is there, too. Likewise the organs
of hearing, sight, smell, taste—and even touch if we consider
the tongue—are in the same vicinity, so it is not surprising
that we might come to take it for granted that our many
mindings are housed somewhere in our heads. However, it is
our present understanding of physiology and not the
experience of thinking itself which leads us to locate thinking
in our skulls where the brain is found. In the Tractatus
Wittgenstein says, “nothing in the visual field allows you to
infer that it is seen by an eye.”12 So, too, there is nothing in
the activity of thinking itself from which we could infer that
it goes on in a brain.
Although we frequently are aware of activity in many
parts of our body—especially the heart and lungs, the
digestive tract, and our major muscles—and we can increase
our awareness of these activities to some degree by paying
attention to them, we have no sensations from the part of the
head where the brain is housed, and the brain, unlike some
other organs of the body, does not enter our awareness. The
unnumbered firings of its synapses, those diminutive and
distant cousins of the lightning bolt, do not crackle in our
ears. Thinking doesn’t gurgle, wheeze, hiss, or hum. This
absence of sensible experience is laden with consequences
and merits further consideration, but the main point of this
RICHARDSON
63
quick survey is to see how irrelevant it is. No matter where
we decide to place thinking in the body and no matter which
bodily organ we attribute it to, when we look for it there, it
is not to be found. Open head or belly or chest, look at brain,
heart, liver, stomach, or spleen and nothing like thinking
appears. There is no mind there. This is too obvious to need
pointing out, perhaps. Still, it ought to cast a shadow of
suspicion over the use of the word “in” when talking about
our mental activities. The fact that “I do my thinking in my
study,” and “I do sums in my head,” are grammatically similar
expressions does not imply that both refer to equally
locatable places where thinking actually occurs.
Thinking is a mode of bodily activity. It is like walking,
swimming, playing a musical instrument. There is no place
where these activities reside when they are not occurring. The
fact that I know how to play the piano does not mean there
is music either in the piano or in me.
Saying that thinking is a bodily activity invites us to
compare it with other fundamental activities of the body.
Breathing, like thinking, is something I would not do without
my body. It seems locatable in a fairly straightforward way,
even though there is more to respiration than simply filling
the lungs with air and emptying them. All of its components
(excepting, some might want to argue, its impulse) are
physical things moving in physical space in detectable ways.
Thinking is not so straightforwardly locatable. That the brain
is a central organ in the process of thinking is surely true, but
we cannot find our thinking there. The motions and activities
in the brain are to some extent locatable, detectable, and
measurable, but they do not reveal our thinking. In this
respect thinking is like living. In both cases the body is indispensable. We say, speaking loosely, that life is in the body and
when we die it departs. But if we are more circumspect, we
realize that life is not a thing, and is not in the body except in
a metaphorical sense. The body’s fundamental activity is
living. All its organs, motions, and processes participate in
this activity, although not all in the same way, of course, or
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64
necessarily all at once. When the body is no longer active and
all its motions stop, we say life departs although there is
nothing to go anywhere or anywhere for it to go. In this way,
life and mind are alike. They are substantive fictions that
name complex activities and treat them as entities that are
real.
Not surprisingly, the effort to understand thinking has
about it some of the same difficulties that confound the
attempt to understand life itself. It is a wonder that life arises
from a combination of chemical elements. No explanation
seems commensurate with this amazing occurrence, just as no
account seems to explain adequately how the energies of the
body are sublimed into the vapors of thought.
The body, to varying degrees and with alterable intensities, can be aware of itself and its activities, its thinking, its
sensations, its feelings, and its impulses. It can also be aware
of this awareness. Neither in the first instance nor the second
is any other entity—substantial, spiritual, or metaphysical—
required either as a medium or an agent. The body’s ability
to do all this is prodigious, manifold, complex, astonishing—
and not well understood. But it is the body and only the body
doing it. There is nothing else to do our thinking for us.
6
The activities and excitations of our bodies, especially of our
brain and nervous system, are correlated, we are sure, with
our sensations, desires, ideas, and feelings, our thoughts of
every sort. But how does this work? It may be as James says,
that “the passing Thought itself is the only verifiable thinker,
and its empirical connection with the brain-process is the
ultimate known law.”13 Making this connection, however, is
no easy business.
One problem is that the physical part of the correlation is
not open to direct inspection. Even if I can see or feel what I
am thinking, I cannot see or feel my brain. Another observer
cannot see directly what I am thinking, or see directly what
my brain is doing, even if my skull is open and the would-be
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65
observer is looking inside with the finest equipment available.
Seeing what is going on in the brain requires a lot more than
simply looking.
It is probably too obvious to need stating, but a scientist
examining brain processes employs theories, models, and
metaphors. The atomic theory of matter is taken for granted
along with its attendant explanation of chemical reactions.
The theory of electrical discharges and other more specialized
theories about cells, neurons, and synapses, are part of the
picture as well. It might even be necessary, as some are now
suggesting, to utilize quantum mechanics and the indeterminacy principle. Additionally, some investigators embed the
affairs of brain and mind in the context of evolutionary
theory. Thus it is safe to say that no account of how the brain
works can be direct and literal. Oddly enough we can see it
do what it does only because we have garbed it figuratively in
thought.
Even to suggest the possibility of correlating thoughts and
brain states might seem to imply that our mental life can be
reduced ultimately to a complex of deterministic mechanical
causes. But this prospect is less worrisome than it might seem
to those who fear it and a great deal less likely than it is
presumed to be by many who remain committed to it as the
goal of their inquiries.
One significant deterrent to such a mechanical mapping is
the complexity of the task. To every subtle difference,
distinction, nuance, and gradation of every different thought,
feeling, insight, or perplexity, some specific bodily event or
series of events—a brain-state or a brain-process—must
correspond if we are to be told the whole affair. Imagine an
account, in terms of neurophysiological activity, of all that
any one of us has experienced since rolling out of bed this
morning and arriving here—all that we have felt, imagined,
remembered, considered, decided, seen, heard, tasted, liked,
disliked, sought, or avoided. It would make for a mighty long
story, even though for most of us nothing of much significance happened. But suppose a loved one had died, or we had
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converted to Islam or become a socialist, survived a near-fatal
accident, won the lottery, or been elected president? What
would be the neurophysiological effects of such life-changing
events? When the meaning and deliverance of everything
changes, what goes on in the brain? Some physiological alteration must correspond to every change of every kind if the
law which decrees their correlation is to be upheld. Where is
the meter for this? Who will write the equations that capture
it? Compared to this complexity and subtlety the motions of
the planets are simplicity itself and the atom smasher, with its
tinier and tinier fragmentations, a mere toy.
The crux of the matter, however, is not the size of the
task. The mode of explanation contemporary science allows
in these matters—the correlation of a mental event with an
underlying mechanism or mechanisms—can work in only one
direction if it works at all. A physical change in the brain may
be asserted to have a mental consequence, but as the one
turns into, produces, or somehow causes the other, explanation loses its grip. The thought or feeling resulting from a
change in the brain cannot enter as a term into the
mechanical relationship that is said to have caused it. By the
nature of the case it is immaterial and can have no mechanical
efficacy. There is no mechanism on the thinking side of the
presumed relationship that would make it possible for mental
activities to have consequences. There are no levers to shift us
from thought to thought and no thinking wheels to spin the
brain. This not only makes it impossible to say how one
thought leads to another but also to say how any thought can
alter a brain state. There is an explanatory gap here that
mechanistic explanations fail to bridge.
Beyond this problem lies a deeper one. Scientific
mechanism—somewhat ironically, given its historical roots—
is a determined effort to explain natural phenomena without
invoking ends, goals, or purposes. Thinking, however, is
naturally forward-looking and goal-oriented in many of its
manifestations. Whatever a complete account of thinking
might ultimately look like, if it should ever emerge, it would
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have to do justice to our purposiveness, our capacity for selfdirection, our ability to deliberate and choose, our powers of
originative making. These are aspects of thinking known to us
directly, and are fateful in their consequences. Our powers of
choice may not be always as extensive as we suppose, but they
are real nevertheless. A science noticing that it could not exist
or hope to go forward without them and thus enlightened by
the vision of their actuality might in time pursue these powers
to their natural ground and by describing their physical basis
help us understand more fully how they do what they are able
to do. But it will not work to rule out from the beginning and
by fiat all purpose and direction and then attempt to conjure
from this paucity the full story of how a human body thinks.
This is not a demand that the idea of purpose be put back into
our account of natural processes. It is only a recognition that
whatever the place of thinking in nature may be, much of it
is clearly purposeful and no tale can be persuasive which
denies this telling fact.
7
Taking the mind out of the picture and acknowledging the
body as the thinker ascribes to thinking its proper origin,
gives credit where credit is due, and brings home to us the
body’s true nature as an intelligent being. Even those
researchers and theorists who take the reality of the mind for
granted are unlikely to be satisfied until the mind’s doings are
understood in terms of body and brain, so one must ask them
what explanatory aid this imaginary entity actually provides.
It seems to be a real hindrance, multiplying entities beyond
necessity and requiring additional explanatory principles
without producing cogency or clarity. We have thought the
body and its powers too small. If we let our minds go and
think again we may see that it is proper-sized and will suffice.
The body and its energies are the foundation of the real.
Although I know it only confusedly and imperfectly, I feel my
body’s encounters, its urges, its aims and intentions, and
know that my being is grounded there. I know some of its
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capacities, am aware of many of its possibilities, and know its
vulnerabilities all too well. I know it can be injured, get out
of whack with itself, be invaded by other agents, and become
diseased. I know that it grows old and dies.
I am entirely a body, I can know only what can be known
by my body and do only what it can do. In acknowledging
this I do not deny to myself any of the real capacities or
possible attainments that an embodied consciousness, mind
or soul might claim, save one: I never have and never will go
anywhere without my body. The end of my body is the end
of me.
In a bodily sense, I have some inner awareness: some of
my innards make something known of what they are doing
some of the time. But speaking strictly and literally I have no
such inner awareness in a mental sense. I can be aware of my
thinking, but I cannot see into my mind. Except metaphorically, I have no inner being, no inner life, no mind. Those
elusive sprites of consciousness—bare sentiences, raw feels,
immediate awarenesses, pure sensations and all their
evanescent kin—are strangers to me. When I try to look for
them, they fail to appear. If I could see my own unmediated
thoughts I would be like a playwright seeing my own play
without having written it. I can enter such a drama only by
passing through the looking glass and becoming a fictional
character myself.
Although I have no inner life, in the sense in which it is
usually avowed, I am not a robot or an automaton. I think
and feel robustly and am vividly aware of it. I tend to muse
incessantly and am constantly contending with myself. In fact,
it is these musings and reflections, this almost obsessive
monitoring and self-examination, which has led me to
conclude that there is no mind lying open to our direct
inspection and that we do not do quite what we think we do
when we try to examine it. It is not the fact of these musings,
feelings, urges, and sensations that is at issue here, but their
nature and ground.
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RICHARDSON
What I am aware of when I am known to myself is my
story, the life adventure in which I am engaged, and which I
endure, enjoy, anticipate, and almost unremittingly recount
to myself. I wake to it in the morning and, if I am able, put it
to rest at night. My dreams rise out of it and into it. Beneath
its episodes are energies, urges, inclinations, and desires
whose origins and destinies exceed my understanding. I seek
to guide them as they move me. I am boy and dolphin, black
horse, white horse, chariot and charioteer; a protean shapeshifter that all the powers of science, philosophy, poetry, and
myth have not pinned to earth or caused to yield its secret up.
With its obscure prologue, its brief and feeble aftermath
in public memory, this story, because it is the meaning of life,
means as much as life itself. This is what passes in my
experience for a soul.
8
Since ‘the mind’ is a story the body tells itself, how did it
come to fall for its own fantastic tale? The lack of sensation
associated with thinking is part of the answer. In physical
work or play, when it is vigorous, the body lets us know it;
the heart pounds, we begin to breathe rapidly and perspire.
But we can think long and hard without ever breaking a
sweat. Thinking arises with such magical ease—like a genie
rubbed up from the lump of the body—nothing at all seems
to be doing it or to be needed in order to do it. The casual
way our thoughts drift off in memory or in reverie to far
away times and places or worlds that never were makes it
easy to suppose this mortal clay to be but a prison house from
which we might be freed. We might, it seems, be able to think
without a body. The myth recounted in Plato’s Meno,
purporting to show that all knowledge is only the soul’s
recollection of what it saw in a prior existence, is plausible
enough as far as direct experience can testify: so much of
what we know seems to come to us out of nowhere, bearing
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no traces of its origins. Some more or less likely tale is always
required to say how our thinking comes to us.
But there is a darker side to the story. When thinking—
bright Ariel spirit—looked down, detached and self-aware,
and saw itself bound to the body of a beast more rude than
Caliban, it revolted and began at once to sew itself a suit of
clothes. But this disguise was not enough: the body and its
excrements still offended the delicate appraisal of its own
nostrils. Worse yet, it lived by devouring its animal kindred
after tearing them limb from limb, and when it ceased to live
it betrayed its earthy origins, succumbed to a foul corruption,
stank to heaven and drew flies. Wanting no part of anything
so base, thinking revolted, took out an option on a place in
paradise and began to dream of a bodiless bliss.
I would not claim much plausibility for this mythical
portrayal of the ultimate doubling act, but without some such
affront to our appraising gaze it is hard to understand what
could have led one misguided expositor to say, and multitudes before and after him tacitly or explicitly to believe, “…I
[am] a substance whose whole essence or nature consists
entirely in thinking; and which for its existence, has need of
no place, and is not dependent on any material thing; so that
this I, that is to say the soul by which I am what I am, is
entirely distinct from the body, and would not itself cease to
be all that it is, even should the body cease to exist.”14
How desperate for safety and certainty a man must be to
willingly undergo, even in thought, such extreme selfmutilation. Yet to this day we are haunted by this dictum of
Descartes’—and still have trouble disbelieving it.
1
The Thirteen Principal Upanishads, trans. R. E. Hume (Oxford India
Paperbacks, New Delhi, 1985), Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad, (-3.8.2) 117.
2
Upanishads, trans. Hume, Svetasvatara Upanishad, (-6.11) 409 and (6.19) 410.
3
William James, The Principles of Psychology, (Dover Publications, New
York, 1950), Volume 1, 224.
RICHARDSON
71
4
Daniel C. Dennett, Kinds of Minds: Toward an Understanding of
Consciousness, (Basic Books, The Science Masters Series, Perseus Books
Group, New York, 1996) 8.
5
Dennett, Kinds, 3.
6
Dennett, Kinds, 14.
7James,
Principles, 1.300, italicized in the original.
8James,
Principles, 1.301-302, is a conspicuous instance of this.
9
James, Principles, 1.300.
10
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge, rev. P
.
H. Niddick, (2d ed, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), Bk.1, pt.4, ch.6,
253.
11
James, Principles, 1.224-225.
12
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, (Routledge and
Kegan Paul, London, 1961), ppn. 5.633, p.117.
13
James, Principles, 1.346.
14
Descartes, Discourse on Method, Part 4.
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73
What Good Are Friends?
Robert Goldberg
One might wonder whether theoretical books on friendship
are really necessary. Aren’t we all thoroughly familiar with
friendship from our own experience? Is there anything about
friendship we can learn better from books? Perhaps, however,
our experience of friendship has not always been free from
disappointment, confusion, and doubt. For instance, there
may be times we feel betrayed by friends. At other times, we
may ask more of them than they feel they can give or, in fear
of doing so, hesitate to ask as much of them as we would like.
We may have felt guilty on occasion for not giving as much of
ourselves to a friend as we might have. Such experiences can
make us wonder who our friends really are and what kind of
person we ourselves are. We may then resolve to be more
careful about choosing our friends in the future and to do
better by those we regard as true friends. Disappointment,
confusion, and doubt, however, may be signs of problems
with our very notions of friendship and of what a friend is:
we may be expecting something more, or something other,
than what friendship can deliver. Reflecting on the experience
of friendship we might ask: Just what is a friend? Is he
someone who loves you for your own sake? Someone who
cares about you at least as much as he cares about himself? Is
the true friend one who is willing to give up everything for
you, including, if need be, his own life? Are there limits to
what friends owe each other? We might also ask why we form
friendships to begin with—whether out of some need we
have for the assistance of others, or rather for the sake of the
Lorraine Smith Pangle. Aristotle and the Philosophy of Friendship. Cambridge
University Press, 2003. Robert Goldberg is a tutor on the Annapolis campus
of St. John’s College.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
enjoyment we derive from their company, or perhaps because
of the loneliness we would have to endure without them, or
from some other cause. Such questions take us to the heart of
what it means to be a human being. In pursuing answers to
them, we are led to radical questions: On what grounds, if
any, do we have obligations to others, including those who
are closest to us? Are we capable of the extreme selflessness
that good friendship seems to require? Does a life that is by
nature good need friendship? Indeed, Lorraine Smith Pangle’s
remarkable book, Aristotle and the Philosophy of Friendship,
shows that the issues of the relationship of friendship to
justice, of the possibility of selflessness in friendship, and of
the naturalness of friendship form the central themes of a
number of classic treatments of friendship, particularly the
one on which she concentrates—Books eight and nine of
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (Pangle 5).
The Ethics is a perennial favorite of St. John’s undergraduates, one of the most memorable books read in
freshman seminar and one often referred to in subsequent
years. Of its various themes, friendship may be the one that
students and other modern readers can relate to most directly.
Indeed, the Ethics is one of the few books we read at the
College, and the only philosophic one, that gives substantial
attention to friendship; two of its ten books are entirely
devoted to investigating the nature of friendship and its place
in a good human life. Not surprisingly, every student recalls
Aristotle’s threefold classification of friendships developed in
the second and third chapters of Book eight: there are friendships based on pleasure, those based on utility, and those
based on virtue. But few remember the other twelve chapters
of Book eight or the twelve of Book nine—and with good
reason, for the rest of his analysis is not nearly so clear and
concise as is his initial classification of friendship. It can also
be disturbing, as Aristotle delves into such questions as
whether we love others for their own sake or for our own
sake and whether we really wish for our friends the greatest
goods imaginable.
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75
Because we have so much at stake in understanding
Aristotle’s teaching about friendship, and also so much
difficulty in figuring out what that teaching is, it is a pleasure
to recommend Pangle’s book to our community. Pangle
provides just the kind of guidance a student of Aristotle needs
in negotiating the twists and turns of his astonishingly
complex, rich, and nuanced argument. All readers will find
her book accessible and engaging. In a mere 200 pages of
lively prose Pangle takes us through Books eight and nine of
the Ethics, with fascinating excursions into Plato’s Lysis,
Cicero’s Laelius On Friendship, and Montaigne’s Of
Friendship. The book is chiefly an interpretation of Aristotle’s
text, but it also compares and contrasts Aristotle’s views with
the views of these and other thinkers and addresses the
question why friendship is given so much attention by ancient
thinkers while being largely neglected by such modern
thinkers as Hobbes and Locke. True to its title, the book
manages to provide a comprehensive treatment of the
philosophy of friendship. For scholars, or those wishing to
pursue alternative interpretations, the book has an additional
forty pages of footnotes, largely treating other interpreters of
Aristotle. These need not be read, however, in order to follow
Pangle’s own argument; they are wholly supplementary in
character.
The Socratic Challenge
Pangle uses Plato’s Lysis to pose the questions to which her
analysis of Aristotle will eventually provide answers.1
According to Pangle, Socrates in the Lysis
pursues the unsettling idea that all friendship is
rooted in human neediness and defectiveness and
is treasured only because and only to the extent
that we hope to get from others things that we are
unable to provide for ourselves. (20)
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This appears to be connected with another of Socrates’
contentions in the Lysis, namely, that the good for human
beings consists of those things that remedy the illnesses and
defects of our bodies and souls. Hence, Socrates uses
medicine as both the prime example of something good for
human beings and the key analogy for the human good as
such. We love people and things only insofar as we believe
them to be good for us. This view seems to be contradicted
by our experience of friendship, which suggests that it
proceeds more from our virtues than from our deficiencies.
Our capacity to love, to devote ourselves to our friends, to
rise above self-interest and care for our friends for their sake
and not our own—all this comes very close to what we mean
by virtue. This capacity may even strike us as what is best in
us. Perhaps in recognition of our experience, Aristotle begins
his treatment with the observation that friendship either is a
virtue or goes together with virtue. But Socrates, for his part,
is unyielding in his insistence that friendship is rooted in our
neediness. Thus the question arises: Will friendship prove to
be an outgrowth or sign of our virtue and strength or will it
prove to be rooted in our weakness and neediness?
Pangle maintains from the start not only that Socrates’
argument in the Lysis is implausible but also that Socrates
himself would admit as much. Citing various features of the
argument, she suggests that he exaggerates the neediness at
the root of friendship in order to make an important point. It
might be true, she concedes, that the greatest or most
important human goods have the character Socrates ascribes
to them. If so, we, no less than the young men Socrates
converses with, would have to come to recognize this truth if
we are ever to become healthy in soul. But this leaves open
the possibility that other goods exist that have the character
not of medicines healing diseases but of activities we engage
in once health is achieved. Pangle tempts us to think that
friendship might be one of these. Prior to achieving health,
however, we may actually be harmed by friendship if it makes
us content to remain unhealthy in soul. Perhaps it would be
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77
more accurate to say that friendship in such a case is not
genuine. Friends are supposed to be good for us, but if the
love others have for us (and we for them) leads us to believe
we possess a goodness we do not possess, we may never take
the decisive step toward health. As Pangle puts it:
The great comfort of feeling that one belongs to
others, that they belong to oneself, and that one is
loved for oneself just as one is tends rather to
induce complacency. Pursuing the charms of such
friendship can distract us from the task of thinking
through what we need for true fulfillment, for
these charms tend to mask altogether the
neediness and unhealthiness of our souls. (35)
Friendships that harm us by concealing our defects lack what
we think of as an essential characteristic of genuine
friendship—that it is something good for us, perhaps even the
greatest good. At least until we become healthy, according to
Pangle’s interpretation of the Lysis, friendship will have two
roots: the main root of serious friendships (i.e., friendships
between those aware of their defects and intent on correcting
them) will be utility, and the root of friendship between the
ignorant and needy who remain unaware of their defects will
be kinship (35). So far, of course, we have been taking
Socrates’ word for it that the souls of the unwise—our
souls—are sick and needy. What this means, however, is
fleshed out by Pangle only in the course of the book as a
whole; it turns out that sustained reflection on our experience
of friendship itself, such as we find in the Ethics, brings to
light the very defects in soul that friendship can help to
conceal.
Aristotle’s Classification and Beyond
Pangle’s treatment of the Lysis provides a helpful introduction to Book eight of the Ethics, which then appears as a
response to the challenges posed by Socrates to our
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unexamined opinions about friendship. In this light,
Aristotle’s famous threefold classification of friendship looks
like a deliberate rejection of Socrates’ view: it leaves room for
precisely the kind of friendship Socrates denied the possibility
of—that in which one loves one’s friend for his sake and not
for one’s own. Aristotle includes among lovable things not
only the pleasant and the useful but also the good (which
seems to be something other than the useful). As Pangle
explains, love of a friend who is good may not exclude his
being good for you (and your loving him for his usefulness),
but it allows also for loving the goodness in him without
regard to its usefulness to yourself (38). However, as Pangle
cautions, Aristotle also asserts that everyone “loves what is or
seems best for himself ” as distinct from “the good” (43;
Ethics 1155b23-6). If this assertion is taken to mean that the
basis of our loving things or people is our belief that they are
good for ourselves, then how exactly does Aristotle’s position
differ from that of Socrates, according to which need is at the
root of friendship? Aristotle thus leaves us with two possibilities, according to Pangle: either friendship between those
who are good provides “the highest benefits to both partners”
(and is just a special case of friendships of utility), or friendships of pleasure and utility are those that provide to the
partners pleasure and all benefits (high and low) while
“virtuous friendships are fundamentally different” (43). In
accordance with the second possibility, Pangle contends,
Aristotle speaks of friendship “for the sake of the useful” and
of friendship “for the sake of pleasure” but of friendship “of
the good” (my italics). This evidence may seem ambiguous: it
could be taken to suggest, for instance, that, however friendships of the good may differ from other friendships, they are
alike in being for the sake of the useful and the pleasant (and
not for the sake of the good). And in any case, as Pangle
shows, the picture with respect to friendship becomes steadily
more complicated as we move away from Aristotle’s initial
classification and into the intricacies of his full argument.
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We come to see, in fact, that Aristotle’s threefold classification of friendships is by no means his last word on the
matter. For one thing, each kind of friendship has elements of
the other two. If there are friendships based on virtue, the
friends are also useful and pleasant to each other. By the same
token, partners in friendships based on utility and pleasure
may see each other as good, even if they do not live up to (or
would even reject) the strict notion of human goodness that
Aristotle articulates in the Ethics. As Aristotle himself
observes, most human beings believe that they are basically
good and that their best friends are, too (1155a31, 1166b34). Because we normally think well of ourselves and our
friends, it seems that even friendships between those who do
not possess genuine virtue may nevertheless be based partly
on the supposed good character of the friends and not only
on their utility and pleasantness to each other. Presumably,
the chief difference between friends who are good in the full,
Aristotelian sense of the term and those who are not is that
the truly good are not mistaken about what human goodness
consists in.2 Complicating things further, Aristotle soon
comes to speak as if the fundamental ground of friendship is
none of the three things he initially describes as lovable—
pleasure, utility, and the good—but rather the similarity or
likeness (homoiotês) of friends to each other (48; NE
1156b19-23; 1157b2-3; 1159b2-3). On this ground, friends
who are not good may be friends no less truly than those who
are good. The significance of friends’ similarity to each other
will prove to be one of the key issues in Aristotle’s analysis of
friendship, most notably when he comes to call the friend, in
his famous and paradoxical formulation, “another self.”
Montaigne, Aristotle, and Cicero on Devotion
Key issues that surface before then include whether we can
love friends and wish them well entirely for their sake
without regard to our own good and whether genuine
devotion or self-sacrifice is possible. Indeed, in one of the
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Ethics’ most provocative passages, Aristotle makes the case
that each human being wishes the greatest goods for himself
but only some of the greatest goods for his friends (8.7,
1159a5-12). His argument here, and a number of others he
makes in regard to friendships where the parties are not each
other’s equals (the subject of 8.7-8), calls into question our
beliefs about friendship and is intended, according to Pangle,
to incite in us a desire to examine those beliefs. Pangle
describes the beliefs she has in mind movingly:
. . . that love is the very core of what is precious in
life, that loyal devotion, even to one who fails to
return one’s love, is not foolish or ridiculous but is
supremely noble, and that loving and being loved
in return is the greatest blessing we can have as
human beings. (64)
In order to explore further the possibility that we are not
mistaken in these beliefs, Pangle turns to a brief but illuminating examination of Montaigne’s “Of Friendship” and
other essays, where he seems to support those beliefs.
Although “Of Friendship” makes a powerful case for the view
that friendship is the greatest good—“that the deepest
longing of the human heart is for the simple communion of
souls that occurs in true friendship” (56)—we come to see
that “Of Friendship” actually supports rather than refutes
Aristotle’s implication that friendship cannot itself be the
greatest good. The problems with Montaigne’s case for
friendship are pointed to by Montaigne himself. Among them
is a problem with what he calls “noble generosity,” the desire
to do good for one’s friend even at the expense of one’s own
good, a problem that Aristotle himself will eventually take up.
Pangle explains the problem this way:
To be devoted to another is, after all, to be
devoted to the good, the benefit, the utility of the
other. But if each friend, being noble-minded as
well as devoted. . . deeply desires to be a generous
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benefactor to the other, then being such a
benefactor is in fact a greater good in the
benefactor’s eyes than is the low-level good he
gives away when, for example, he pays a friend’s
debts. (69)
After quoting Montaigne to show his awareness of this
difficulty, Pangle gives an example of noble generosity that he
offers in “Of Friendship”:
To illustrate such noble generosity, Montaigne tells
the story of Eudamidas and his friends Charixenus
and Aretheus, to whom he bequeathed in his will
not money, for he was poor and had no money to
give, but the nobler opportunity of looking after
his elderly mother and his unmarried daughter,
and Montaigne tells us that both friends were well
satisfied with the gift. (69)
To clarify what she calls “a problem and indeed an absurdity”
that Montaigne himself appears to be gently calling to our
attention, she elaborates:
The absurdity consists, at bottom, in a certain
confusion or self-deception within each friend:
Each is competing for the position he covets—that
of selfless benefactor—but neither is willing to face
squarely the fact that in doing so, he is seeking
what he considers the greatest good for himself,
and that this is a good he cannot share with the
one he seeks to benefit. (69-70)
In other words, the greatest good from this point of view
appears to be one’s own nobility or virtue, which, in a sense,
is purchased at the expense of one’s friend (cf. 124). In the
case of Eudamidas, we can say that he did the nobler thing by
giving his friends the opportunity to exercise their nobility.
Had he taken the trouble to look after his elderly mother and
unmarried daughter himself, he would have deprived his
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friends of this opportunity. He thus took the greater good for
himself, a fact Montaigne himself points to by calling the one
who gives such opportunities to his friends “the liberal one.”
As for why virtue may be so important to us, consider
Pangle’s quotation from another of Montaigne’s essays
(“That To Philosophize Is To Learn To Die”): “Among the
principal benefits of virtue is disdain for death, a means that
furnishes our life with a soft tranquility and gives us a pure
and pleasant enjoyment of it, without which all other
pleasures are extinguished” (72; my italics). How virtue or,
more precisely, the belief in our own virtue, could have the
effect of leading us to disdain death, and whether that disdain
is justified, remains to be seen.
The absurdity or self-deception we have just encountered—that one believes oneself to be more concerned with
the good of one’s friend than with one’s own good—plays a
central role in the analysis of friendship that Pangle,
following Aristotle, develops in the course of her book; it is
the one strand that runs through and ties together its various
parts. A similar self-deception may operate elsewhere in our
lives, whenever we believe we are devoted to something
outside ourselves, as we learn in Pangle’s next chapter (4),
“Friendships in Politics and the Family.” Commenting on
Aristotle’s inclusion of religious associations among those
that exist for the sake of pleasure, she speaks of the following
“paradox”:
Even at the moments at which human beings are
most clearly seeking to lose themselves or
transcend or sacrifice their self-interest in devotion
to something higher, they are also pursuing their
own good by ennobling or sanctifying their lives, if
not also through the pleasure of good fellowship.
(83)
If people believe they have transcended or sacrificed their
self-interest, and thereby ennobled their lives by devoting
themselves to something higher, whereas in fact the
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enoblement they achieved was a greater good for themselves
than the goods they gave up, their situation is indeed
problematic. Leaving aside such knotty questions as whether
the object of devotion was truly higher and whether a
coherent notion of “higher” can even be given, there would
appear to be no devotion here at all: such devotion to
something or someone entails rising above oneself, but in this
case one serves oneself, indeed, it seems the deepest and
therefore most precious part of oneself.3 And where there is
no sacrifice of self-interest, there is no transcendence of self
and hence no ennoblement of the kind Pangle is discussing.
As to the character of the good we might seek to acquire
through our devotion, a suggestion emerges from Pangle’s
fascinating chapter on Cicero’s dialogue Laelius on
Friendship. The dialogue “explores the friendship and the
self-understanding of two noble Roman statesmen” (105),
Laelius and his much more famous and intellectually
impressive friend, Scipio. Pangle helps us to see the shortcomings Cicero points to in Laelius’s understanding of
himself as the devoted friend of Scipio. She shows us how
Cicero “quietly indicates that much of Laelius’s attachment to
friendship is fueled by the promise friendship seems to hold
of providing a bulwark against misfortune and death,” a
promise latent in the feeling of deserving that attends “noble
acts of selfless devotion” (120).4 Pangle seems to be
suggesting that this feeling of deserving may be a root,
perhaps even the principal root, of the belief in divine providence, the belief in a cosmos not coldly indifferent to such
acts or to the worthiness of those who perform them. But in
light of the problem already encountered, the notion that we
deserve (i.e., are worthy of or owed) something as a result of
acting for the sake of our friends becomes problematic. And
so Pangle speaks of the “confusion” or “incoherence in
Laelius’s claim to deserve honor or other protection as a
result of his great friendship for Scipio,” an incoherence
visible in his “claiming at once that such friendships are life’s
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sweetest gift and that they entail heroic steadfastness and
sacrifice” (121).
Aristotle and the Problem of Nobility in Friendship
A passage in the next chapter (6) offers further support for
the contention that we act with a view to our own good and
not from selfless devotion to others. In the context of treating
a type of utilitarian friendship that Aristotle calls “ethical”
(Ethics 1162b21ff.), Pangle notes a tendency of human beings
to shut their eyes to their own expectation of a reward for
their virtuous acts, an expectation that often becomes visible
only when they fail to receive one (if only in the form of an
acknowledgment of indebtedness). On this tendency she
observes, “Shutting one’s eyes to one’s expectations at the
time of acting does not make the act disinterested, but only
confused” (127). This tendency points to “a great paradox of
the noble: It is only when one can be indifferent to any
reward that one seems to deserve it.”5 The paradox appears
to be this: ordinarily we do not think of someone’s working
hard and ably for the sake of a reward as a disqualification for
his receiving it—for example, in an athletic contest or in
tracking down a fugitive from justice with a “price on his
head.” The case of virtue is different. Here the purity of
motive essential to virtue would be compromised by acting
for the sake of reward. Rather than leave it at the assertion
that the reward is our true motive, Pangle proposes as a
thought-experiment “two ways to choose a virtuous action
without confused expectations of reward.” One is to choose
it knowing that it is bad for oneself and one’s happiness but
nonetheless noble; the other is to choose it as not only noble
but also intrinsically good for oneself, without expectation of
reward (127-8). But do human beings ever act in either of
these ways? Casting doubt on the first, Pangle wonders
“whether such a disposition toward virtue and one’s
happiness is humanly possible” (127). Her doubt is certainly
plausible: it may well be that no one who wishes to act virtuously really believes that virtuous action is noble but funda-
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mentally bad for those who undertake it. Casting doubt on
the second, she raises the suspicion that no one is so delighted
by the purity of his own soul as not to harbor some hope of
reward for it, also a plausible doubt. Having rejected these
possibilities for avoiding confusion, however, Pangle
proceeds to ask whether demanding that we banish all hope
of reward for virtuous action and that we be content with the
great good of having a noble soul is not “too strict a standard
for perfect virtue”: couldn’t the reward be “a kind of icing on
the cake,” something we might believe we deserve and expect
to receive without the reward being the motive for which the
virtuous action was performed (128)? Yet, as she notes, we
have a sense that virtuous action is deserving of reward. This
implies that “we are unsure of whether virtuous action is
truly good in itself, or we consider it good to do it, but not as
good as benefiting from it” (129). Pangle suspects that
virtuous men secretly believe it is good to give but even better
to receive and that they cannot choose virtue for its own sake
but always act with a view to reward. She asks a provocative
question:
Can [virtuous men] be content endlessly to accept
the lesser of two goods, endlessly to be on the less
advantageous side of all their transactions with
others, without reward? (129)
If not, Pangle concludes, then they must always have at least
one eye on the reward and are to that extent confused about
their genuine motive.
In addition to her own reasoning in support of this
suspicion, Pangle has in mind several passages from the Ethics
that suggest Aristotle himself agrees that the virtuous, no less
than those who are not virtuous, aim above all at what they
believe to be their own good. When treating Ethics 8.7, for
example, Pangle cites Aristotle’s blunt assertion that “each
man wishes for his own good most of all” and might not wish
his friends all the greatest goods (59, 64). And in the two
chapters that treat self-love (9.4 and 9.8), as she notes,
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Aristotle maintains that all the friendly feelings one has
toward others one has toward oneself most of all (142; 170).
Moreover, in Ethics 9.8—the first of two culminating
chapters in his entire analysis of friendship—Aristotle himself
makes the argument that Pangle has already found signs of in
Cicero and Montaigne. In her words, this chapter indicates
that “moral nobility is not something that accrues to the
moral man incidentally as he goes about seeking to help his
fellows; it is precisely the prize that he keeps his sights fixed
upon.” Hence, “acts of apparent noble sacrifice, made by
those who understand such nobility as the highest good,
really are not acts of sacrifice at all” (175). She has prepared
us for this conclusion by quoting such statements from 9.8 as
the following:
The morally serious man. . . will do many things
for the sake of his friends and his fatherland, and
if necessary he will give up his life for them. He
will give money and honors and all contested
goods, seeking above all the noble for himself. He
would prefer to feel pleasure intensely for a short
time than mildly for a long time, and to live nobly
for one year than indifferently for many; he would
rather perform one great noble act than many
small ones. Those who give up their lives perhaps
achieve this, and they choose great nobility for
themselves. The morally serious man will give
away money so that his friends may have more,
for they thus get money, but he gets the noble: He
assigns the greatest good to himself. (172; cf.
Ethics 1169a18-29)6
Here again is the confusion to which Pangle, following
Aristotle’s indications (as well as Cicero’s and Montaigne’s),
has been calling our attention all along. The friend who
sacrifices himself in the belief that it is noble to do so is really
only trading a good he regards as lesser for one he regards as
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greater. If the nobility consists in the alleged sacrifice, there is
no nobility here at all. The morally serious man is merely
confused. Pangle uses this line of reasoning to show the
irrationality of the view that the highest good for human
beings can consist in sacrifice (or in virtue, if virtue is understood to consist in self-sacrifice or to demand it). Indeed, it is
one of the chief points of Pangle’s book, following Aristotle,
to expose the irrationality of this perspective (perhaps the
perspective we all share to the extent we are morally serious).
The irrationality of this perspective does not mean, however,
that a rational human being will not act for the sake of others.
That he may do so is confirmed for Pangle by Aristotle’s
statement that “intelligence always chooses what is best for
itself ” (176; cf. 1169a17). By reflecting on both the text and
our experience, she arrives at the following conclusion:
The intelligent mind always chooses what is best
for itself as a rational mind, and this means acting
intelligently, consistently, with self-command, and
guided by a full understanding of its own deepest
concerns which begin but do not end with the
concern for personal happiness of the being whose
mind it is. (179; my italics)
In fact, Pangle’s examination supports the view that all
human beings, including the devoted friend or the morally
serious man, choose what they believe to be best for
themselves. The person who believes he acts out of devotion
to a friend does not in fact choose his friend’s happiness in
place of his own; rather, he believes (in his heart of hearts)
that his own happiness is best served through the nobility he
believes he practices by “sacrificing” his own good for the
sake of his friend. The intelligent mind differs from the rest,
then, not in preferring what appears to be best for itself—the
others do the same thing—but only in knowing what really is
best for itself. That said, nothing that has so far come to light
rules out the possibility that human beings, including the
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most rational, will act for the sake of their friends as long as
doing so is compatible with what they believe to be their own
greatest or deepest good. If this whole line of argument is
true, it would still have to be determined what genuine
happiness consists in and what place friendship has in the life
of one who has thought through the confusions about
sacrifice, nobility, and virtue.
However, Pangle’s statement that our deepest concerns
do not end with the concern for personal happiness comes as
something of a surprise. The thrust of her main argument
appears to go in the opposite direction, and Aristotle himself
argues in Book one that the individual’s end is happiness (see,
e.g., 1097a30-4). Her formulation allows of two possible
interpretations: that the rational mind (1) has concerns in
addition to, but consistent with, the concern for personal
happiness, or that it (2) has concerns for the sake of which it
would be willing to give up personal happiness. Here in
chapter nine Pangle argues that the rational mind or human
being—the human being who has worked through the confusions she has treated and who is capable of living free of those
confusions—might under certain circumstances give up his
own good for the sake of a friend, though without any
illusions about what he’s doing (i.e., without believing that he
is thereby noble and hence somehow deserving). In support
of this possibility, Pangle invokes the example of Socrates,
who gave up “a few uncertain years in exile and in decline so
that philosophy might win renown, and so that his young
friends like Plato, who had as yet written almost nothing,
might prosper” (181). She concludes:
[T]he wisest man is the one most capable of both
the truest self-love and the truest friendship, for
only he has a mind that is perfectly good and
lovable, only he can love what he is without inner
conflicts, and only he can love another without
illusions, without competition over the noble, and
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without surreptitious expectations of repayments
or reward. (181)
One implication of this conclusion is that it is possible to love
another human being even after freeing oneself from all
illusions that ordinarily accompany love. (I take Pangle to
mean that it is out of love for Plato that Socrates could die at
least in part for Plato’s sake.) A little into the final chapter of
her book, however, we learn that this conclusion was only
provisional. To see whether it stands we must first answer the
question of the Lysis: “Why would one who is self-sufficient
treasure another enough to love him?” (183). In other words,
assuming self-sufficiency is possible, why might a person who
has it nevertheless need friends?
Is the Friend Another Self?
The opening sentence of Book nine, chapter nine, which
according to Pangle contains Aristotle’s “deepest reflections
on the relationship of friendship to human neediness” (183),
announces that it is disputed whether the happy man will
need friends or not: “For people assert that the blessed and
self-sufficient have no need of friends, because they [already]
possess the good things” (1169b3-5). The chapter gives a
series of six arguments, which seem to show that, contrary to
this assertion, even a happy human being will need friends.7
The last three of those arguments appear to elaborate two
suggestions of Aristotle’s we noted earlier but have not yet
had occasion to examine: (1) that similarity is a basis of
friendship possibly more fundamental than pleasure, utility,
or virtue and (2) that the friend is another self. Indeed, this
famous formulation, which is used only three times in the
entire Ethics, appears twice in 9.9 (its first appearance came
in 9.4). And although Aristotle doesn’t speak here of the
similarity of friends, he does speak of the activity of one’s
friend as one’s own activity, and “one’s own” or “the
kindred” (to oikeion) seems to be closely related to similarity;
the two were linked by Pangle in her treatment first of the
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Lysis and then in the Ethics (24, 48-9; but cf. Lysis 222b-c).
Furthermore, in 9.9 Aristotle focuses on the activity of
friends who are morally serious and whose activity is in that
respect similar. Of the six arguments in this chapter, the first
two (1169b8-10; b10-16) are brief, sketchy, and based more
on “conventional opinion” than the remaining four, all of
which have recourse to nature (186). The third argument
(1169b16-21) merely asserts that “man is by nature a political
being and lives together with others”; shortly after, Aristotle
concedes (to those who deny that the blessed and selfsufficient need friends) that one who is blessed has no need of
useful friends and little or no need of pleasant friends. But
does this mean that he has no need of any friends? The last
three arguments, which Pangle characterizes as Aristotle’s
“most serious” (186), purport to establish the blessed (or
happy) person’s need of friends on the basis of something
other than utility or pleasure. What, then, is that something?
Is it “the good,” as Aristotle’s initial classification of friendships would lead us to expect?
According to Aristotle’s fourth argument, that something
is instead the need the blessed person has to observe the
actions of those who are morally serious or good. Pangle
paraphrases this argument as follows:
[I]f happiness consists in living and acting, if the
activity of the good man is good and pleasant in
itself, and if what is one’s own is pleasant, then
observing the activity of good men who are one’s
own friends will be choiceworthy, too. (186)
If we look at the Ethics itself (1169b30-1170a4), we find that
the full version of this argument contains seven premises in
the form of if-clauses (five before he gives the then-clause plus
two more at the end), whose truth Aristotle does not vouch
for. Pangle shows that at least two of them are highly suspect.
One is that we are more able to observe our neighbors than
ourselves. This may be true of most of us, but in this chapter
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Aristotle is considering the blessed person, of whom Pangle
says, “the mature, wise, truly happy man, who sees his
neighbors with perfect clarity, has no inexplicable failure of
understanding when it comes to himself ” (187; see her
supporting reference to Aristotle’s Magna Moralia). The
other suspect premise is that the activity of a friend is also
somehow one’s own. Perhaps because Aristotle himself finds
these premises suspect, he proceeds to his fifth argument,
“which helps to put in perspective and explain the previous
ones” (187). It improves on the fourth argument by giving
due place to the fact that what matters most to us is our own
activity rather than that of our friends. According to
Aristotle, the life of a solitary is hard in that to be continuously active by oneself is not easy; it is easier to be continuously active together with someone else and toward others
(Ethics 1170a5-6). If we act together with a friend, we
ourselves will be more active. And, Aristotle adds, there
might also arise a certain training in virtue from living in the
company of good people. Pangle interprets Aristotle to mean
that we have a tendency to flag and that an excellent
companion can spur us on, inspire us, and confirm for us our
own excellence. However, it seems that the fully formed
human being under consideration here would not be in need
of inspiring examples. This applies not only to moral action
but to all endeavors, especially philosophy, which, in anticipation of Book ten, Pangle pays increasing attention to. She
notes that in Book ten Aristotle will argue that “the wisest
souls do not need company in order to remain active in
philosophy” (188; indeed, Aristotle maintains not only that
the theoretical man is least in need of other people but also
that theoretical activity is the most continuous—see
1177a21-22 and a27-b1). This line of thought prompts
Pangle to offer a striking suggestion: friendships at the peak
of human existence would be “more tranquil and less
intense” than friendships on the way up (189). In other
words, the most intense friendships may be those between
defective human beings. But what is the cause of the
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intensity? Pangle does not spell it out but seems to have in
mind here the need we have for those people whose assistance seems to us indispensable for acquiring the goodness we
regard as a necessary, and perhaps even the sufficient,
condition of our happiness.
Perhaps because he has yet to account for the necessity of
friendship in the life of someone at the peak of human
existence, Aristotle moves on to his sixth and final
argument—”his profoundest account of the necessity of
friendship in the happy life” (189). This argument depends
on a number of conditions (expressed in a complicated sixpart if-clause), one of which is that our enjoyment of our life
or being comes from our awareness of our life, and another
of which is that the morally serious man is disposed toward
his friend as he is toward himself. After summarizing
Aristotle’s complex argument, Pangle observes that it does
not answer the question of why a happy man will need
friends because it does not show that one will be disposed
toward a friend as one is disposed toward oneself; the
argument hasn’t proved that “friendship itself is a good
thing” (189). Rather than consider this a fatal defect in the
argument, as some other scholars appear to have done,
Pangle takes a closer look at its details to see whether an
argument for the necessity of friendship in a good life
emerges from them. What she finds is this: in the light of our
own mortality (one aspect of the determinateness or finite
character of life that Aristotle refers to at 1170a20-1)
“friendship becomes precious as a way of augmenting and
intensifying the goodness—the full active aliveness—that we
love and cannot keep” (190). Our aliveness depends not only
on our being active but also on the awareness we have of our
own activity, a point made by Aristotle partly through his
choice of verbs. Our sense of being alive is heightened by
engaging in activities with others who share our interest in
them and whose responses therefore “reflect, confirm, and
expand” our awareness. This, then, is the “deepest justification” of friendship: “its capacity to enhance the awareness
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of activity and pleasure.” The awareness of a friend engaging
together with us in the same activity is good for us because it
enhances our awareness both of our own activity and, as
Aristotle makes clear again by his choice of verbs, of our very
being—of our existing at all.
No sooner has Pangle developed this argument, however,
than she raises a most serious question about it: “How solid
a good is this good of enhanced aliveness, charged as it is by
our awareness of life’s brevity and the desire to find a
compensation for it, if not to escape it altogether? Is it a good
necessarily laced with self-deception?” (191) The selfdeception she has in mind here differs from the deception
involved in our notions of devotion and sacrifice, which she
has treated at length in the course of her book. This new
deception has to do not with the belief that we have
transcended and ennobled ourselves through sacrifice but
with the bewitching power of friendship to draw us out of
ourselves and thus distract us from thinking about the
finitude of our lives. (The two deceptions have the same root,
however: they are ways in which we cope with the
awareness—always somehow present to us—of our own
mortality.) Pangle spoke of a related deception when
commenting earlier on Aristotle’s formulation in 9.4 that a
friend is another self; at that time, she issued a caveat:
A clue to the real meaning of this enigmatic
expression is found in its other appearances in the
Nicomachean Ethics. In each case, Aristotle shows
how the friend who is loved as another self is, in
some important way, cherished as an extension of
oneself, an extension that can tempt one into the
delusion that this other really is still oneself, and as
such able to help overcome one’s limitedness and
mortality. (152)
That Aristotle has such a delusion in mind appears to be lent
support by his prior use of a related formulation (in 8.12),
which Pangle cites in this context. There Aristotle says of
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offspring that they are “like other selves” to their parents, by
having been separated from them (1161b28-9; my italics).
Despite the possibility of these deceptions, Pangle maintains
here (in chapter ten) that there is “nothing necessarily illusory
about friendship’s power to magnify and enrich life, just as
there is nothing necessarily illusory about the pleasure of
being a source of good to friends”; we can enjoy the genuine
good of enhanced aliveness that friendship offers just as long
as we resist the temptation to escape the grip of mortality “by
escaping ourselves altogether”—i.e., by going too far in
“immersing ourselves. . . in the absorbing affairs of others”
(191). At the same time, it is when we resist this temptation
that we can be a genuinely valuable friend to another, helping
him to attain the only solid happiness through “the shared
activity of thinking and helping each other to think as clearly
as possible.” This helping is itself a solid pleasure and hence
an addition to our own happiness as long as we don’t fall prey
to the illusion that we can truly live on in a friend when our
own lives have ended. Drawing on the conclusion of 9.9,
Pangle goes on to say that friendship is chiefly not about
sacrificing for friends but living in company with them, and
this means that friendship consists above all in conversation.
As Aristotle powerfully puts it, living in company with
others—in the case of human beings, as distinct from cattle—
would seem to mean sharing in discussion and thought
(1170b11-14).
I must confess that I remain suspicious of Aristotle’s
arguments purporting to establish the need for friendship in
a happy life, including the last and most powerful one. To
mention just a few of the grounds for my suspicion,
Aristotle’s fourth and sixth arguments depend on three ifclauses with a total of thirteen often elaborate parts between
them that issue in two very brief then-clauses.8 Why do the
arguments take so provisional a form? Where does Aristotle
either show that the conditions referred to in the if-clauses
are true or at least state them unambiguously as his own
views? In addition, there are not only the explicit assump-
GOLDBERG
95
tions of the if-clauses but also more hidden assumptions in
the various arguments. For example, in his preface to the
sixth argument Aristotle points to the question whether
human life is defined by perceiving or instead by thinking, but
the sixth argument depends on the view that perceiving, not
thinking, is paramount. In addition, four of the six arguments
in 9.9 (including the three that Pangle calls, rightly in my
view, the “most serious”) refer explicitly to the morally
serious person, but, as Pangle has already shown, there is
reason to think the highest type of human being (the happy
one) is the one who is wise as distinct from the one who is
merely morally serious and confused. Furthermore, Aristotle
varies his terms in 9.9, referring not only to the morally
serious but also at various points to the good and to the
decent. Are these one and the same type, or is Aristotle calling
our attention to differences among them that may be crucial
to determining whether the blessed or happy human being
has need of friends? For that matter, is to be happy the same
as to be blessed and self-sufficient? If so, is self-sufficiency,
and hence happiness, a possibility for human beings? And
what does it mean to be blessed? By moving back and forth
among these terms, Aristotle may be pointing to the question
of whether the happiness we long for as human beings is
available to us. Is he perhaps helping us to reason out the sort
of happiness or contentment man at his best can achieve? And
might it be the morally serious rather than the wise as such
for whom friendship offers the sense of enhanced aliveness
and for whom that sense is an essential ingredient of
“happiness”? These are some of the stumbling blocks I find in
accepting Aristotle’s well-hedged conclusion that “the one
who is going to be happy, then, will be in need of friends”
(1170b18-9; cf. b14-7, one last if-then sentence on which this
conclusion depends).
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
96
Conclusion
Whether or not I am thus justified in doubting Aristotle’s
arguments for the necessity of friendship in a life by nature
good, Pangle herself emphasizes that the good of friendship
remains secondary to the greatest good available to human
beings. Engaging in an activity together with friends may
enhance our enjoyment of it as well as our awareness of being
alive, but it is still activity itself that is the crucial ingredient
in happiness. Having reflected on the experience of
friendship no less than on Aristotle’s text, Pangle concludes
that what “matters most for happiness. . . is not the companionship that friendship brings but the pleasures and good
activities it augments, and even its goodness as an enhancer of
life would not be so very good if it were not for the
inevitability of death” (197). Furthermore, as Aristotle will
conclude in Book ten, it is not just any activity but rather the
activity of philosophy that can bring the happiness of which
man at his best is capable (see especially 1178a4-10). Indeed,
the argument Pangle has developed through the course of her
book helps to prepare us for Aristotle’s rather surprising
conclusion and to understand how the two books on
friendship contribute to it (and therefore why they immediately precede Book ten). Pangle observes that in the books on
friendship Aristotle
. . . shows some of his reasons for judging even
this finest of active lives to be not quite the best
simply. Even when the grave confusions
surrounding self-sacrifice are cleared away,
Aristotle insists that practical, political activity
(under which he subsumes the work of moral
education) is too much driven and constrained by
necessities to be simply choiceworthy in itself.
(199)
Once we see the true character of such activity, she continues,
philosophy appears both as the invaluable source of the
GOLDBERG
97
clarity we need if we are to be truly good and as the activity
that is the most delightful in itself, one not forced upon us by
immediate needs. In view of such considerations, the happiest
of friendships appear to be “partnerships in which the
capacity to see and enjoy and think and reflect is given the
fullest possible scope” (199). Pangle is now in position to
answer the question of whether friendship is, or is rooted in,
virtue: the impetus to friendship, Aristotle has shown, comes
largely from “weakness, deficiency, and confusion.” Thus the
apparent disagreement with the Lysis is resolved. Book ten
tellingly emphasizes “the self-sufficiency of the philosophic
life, rather than the goodness of friendship within it.” With
this in mind, it seems to me we could say that friendship
between those who possess what we may call genuine virtue
(philosophic wisdom) is based on nothing more than their
similarity (the deep interest each has in understanding things
as they are), the pleasure their companionship affords them,
and their usefulness to each other (three grounds that have
not been shown to involve, of necessity, illusion and selfdeception). If this is so, we could say that friendship between
the best human beings differs from ordinary friendship in
being admittedly based on nothing more exalted than
similarity, pleasure, and utility. The strength of the best
human beings would then be visible, at least in part, in their
not even being tempted to believe that their friendship is
rooted in or is an expression of self-transcendence.
Pangle’s book always encourages us to return to the
Ethics to test our conclusions and explore the issues further.
It does so by fully engaging us in, and basing itself on,
Aristotle’s dialectical analysis of friendship. Pangle has given
us a superb study of that analysis, one that guides readers
through Aristotle’s always dense and often uncertain
arguments, helping us to follow his analysis in its gradual
unfolding. If we ignore the details of Aristotle’s arguments,
we learn what he merely seems to be saying; with Pangle’s
highly competent assistance, we find that taking account of
the details invariably leads us toward a deeper and more
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
adequate understanding of friendship.9 In addition, Pangle
demonstrates how fruitful it is always to be thinking about
our experience of friendship in order to bring to life what
might otherwise remain sterile formulations and to enable us
to use our experience and the text to illuminate each other.
In reproducing here portions of what I take to be her central
argument (which is far more ample than my abridgement of
it might suggest), I have had to leave out much else that is
compelling in her book, such as many more eye-opening
thought-experiments and her evocative reflections on a vast
array of phenomena associated with friendship, aspects of her
study that make it not only thought-provoking but lively and
even gripping to read. Pangle performs the invaluable service
of placing Aristotle’s teaching (and not only Aristotle’s)
within reach of the careful reader determined to understand
what friendship is and what kind of good it is for human
beings.
Notes
1
Of special interest to the community is Pangle’s lively engagement with
the argument of St. John’s tutor David Bolotin’s book on the Lysis, which
includes an excellent translation (Plato’s Dialogue on Friendship [Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1989]).
2
Even here, however, there is a complication: goodness or virtue is an
ambiguous term in the Ethics; it could mean either moral virtue or intellectual virtue—and the two do not necessarily go together. Is the good
man, then, the man of moral virtue, or is he the man of intellectual
virtue? Pangle, though clearly aware of the distinction, sometimes leaves
ambiguous the sense in which she, or Aristotle, is using the terms “virtue”
and “goodness.”
3
Consider a kindred remark Nietzsche makes in responding to an
objection to his critique of “disinterestedness”: “But anyone who has
really made sacrifices knows that he wanted and got something in
return—perhaps something of himself in return for something of
himself—that he gave up here in order to have more there, perhaps in
order to be more or at least to feel that he was ‘more’” (Beyond Good
and Evil, Aphorism 220; Vintage Books: New York, 1989).
GOLDBERG
99
4
Perhaps this is one way in which virtue may lead us to a disdain for
death, as Montaigne put it.
5
By “indifferent” I take her to mean that one would perform the act (1)
even if one knew that there would be no reward of any kind for
performing it and (2) even when it would be at enormous cost to oneself.
6
How Aristotle himself can know this remains unclear. It may require a
thoroughgoing examination not only of oneself but also of others who
believe they act virtuously not for their own sake but only or above all
for the sake of others (or for virtue’s sake)—the kind of examination we
see the Socrates of Plato’s dialogues engaging in (see, e.g., Meno 77b-78b).
Aristotle may be offering not a definitive argument, then, but rather
guidance in conducting this examination for ourselves, pointing out the
crucial things to look for in examining ourselves and others.
7
The first three begin respectively at 1169b8, b10, and b16; the second
three, at 1169b28, 1170a4, and a13.
8
St. John’s tutor Joe Sachs’ translation of the Nicomachean Ethics
(Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing, 2002) is the only one I know in
English that accurately tracks these conditions.
9
This seems to me to constitute a proof that Aristotle’s writing demands
the kind of ingenuity and attention to detail that Pangle brings to the
Ethics: only thus does one uncover many genuine questions about and
problems with both friendship and our opinions about it that we would
otherwise have to say Aristotle failed to notice, thereby calling into
question his competence as a philosopher. As to why he chose to write in
so opaque a style, Pangle shows us that the subject matter requires such
writing, not only because it is intrinsically complicated but also because it
touches on many sensitive issues having to do with how we understand
both ourselves as human beings and the character of the world we live in.
�
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Hunt, Frank
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Goldberg, Robert
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The St. John’s Review
Volume XLIX, number one (2006)
Editor
Pamela Kraus
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Sarah Navarre
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson,
President; Michael Dink, Dean. For those not on the distribution list, subscriptions are $10 for one year. Unsolicited
essays, reviews, and reasoned letters are welcome. Address
correspondence to the Review, St. John’s College, P
.O. Box
2800, Annapolis, MD 21404-2800. Back issues are available,
at $5 per issue, from the St. John’s College Bookstore.
©2006 St. John’s College. All rights reserved; reproduction
in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing and Printing
The St. John’s Public Relations Office and the St. John’s College Print Shop
�2
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
3
Contents
Essays and Lectures
In the Beginning. . .
The Genesis of the St. John’s Program, 1937................ 5
Charles A. Nelson
Understanding Quantum Mechanics
with Bohr and Husserl................................................ 33
François Lurçat
Eve Separate................................................................71
Eva Brann
Going in Silence........................................................ 111
Abraham Schoener
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
5
In the Beginning. . .The Genesis
of the St. John’s Program, 1937
Charles A. Nelson
The transformation of St. John’s College in 1937—with the
introduction of what was then, and for many later years,
called the New Program—set on foot a way of learning and
teaching that has now enfolded, inspired, and perplexed
students and teachers for lo these sixty-eight years. I shall
attempt to describe and explain what took place here on this
campus in 1937. Let me say parenthetically that this is not an
exercise in nostalgia, a yearning for “the good old days.” On
the contrary, I can assure you that the College is much
stronger now than it was then, the faculty is better, and the
entering students are, on the whole, smarter, a bit better
educated, and a lot better looking!
On Tuesday, September 21, 1937, the student newspaper
here in Annapolis, announced that, under the new leadership
of Stringfellow Barr as president and Scott Buchanan as dean,
the fall term would open with a “different set-up” for the
arriving freshman class.
A different set-up indeed! Probably no other educational
institution anywhere has undertaken so radical and so swift a
transformation as took place at St. John’s in the eighty-three
days between July 1, 1937, when Barr and Buchanan took
office, and September 22, when the fall term began. Before
describing what took place on this campus that summer and
fall, I will provide some of the context by recounting activities of our two “transformers” in the preceding years.
Perhaps as good a place as any to begin is at the University of
This lecture was delivered at St. John’s College, Annapolis, September 30,
2005. Mr. Nelson is the author of three books about the founding of the
Program at the College and about the founders, Stringfellow Barr and Scott
Buchanan.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Virginia at Charlottesville, and then to go backwards and
forwards from there.
Stringfellow Barr had been a history teacher at Virginia
since 1924, and, since 1930, a full professor and the editor of
the Virginia Quarterly Review. Buchanan had been teaching
philosophy there since 1929.
Before Buchanan was appointed to the faculty, Barr had
been consulted. He recalls:
The head of the philosophy department accosted
me and asked what I knew about Scott Buchanan
. . .I said, “He’s the most remarkable man I’ve ever
met, but he’s not an easy person, and I would
rather not urge his appointment. It would mean a
great deal to me personally to have him here, but
. . .you might find him a very difficult customer to
handle.” They decided to risk it and got him.
Despite that rather ambiguous endorsement, the
friendship prospered. Both men developed formidable
reputations as teachers. They also shared a deep concern
about the inadequacies of the undergraduate curriculum.
Buchanan reported that “The college at the University was
being squeezed, exploited, and reduced to the size and
functions of a secondary preparatory school for the graduate
schools.”
This concern was sufficiently widespread that it led
President John Holcomb, in 1934, to appoint a Committee
on Honors Courses. He asked both Barr and Buchanan to
serve. This small group of six met almost weekly for a period
of about six months and issued its report in March 1935. The
report has three sections. The first is an exposure of the grave
weaknesses of the existing undergraduate curriculum, drafted
by Barr. It must have offended many members of the Virginia
faculty more senior than he. Here is an excerpt:
The able student, on his part, feels. . .that many of
the lectures now given are not worth listening to
NELSON
7
and that the textbooks assigned are not worthy of
serious study. In his more charitable moods, he
recognizes that, given the present student body, the
professor is not much to blame. Observing this
low morale on the part of both professor and
student alike, the publishers have done their best
to supply increasingly “easy” texts. . . .The selfrespecting professor has consoled himself with
research. . . .Or he has found consolation in
graduate courses in which “real work” may be
attempted. . . .The able undergraduate has turned
to athletics and other “activities”. . . .He comes to
look on the strictly curricular exercises of the
university as interruptions that must be borne
patiently but which he quite sees through. . . .
The second section of the report is a detailed plan for a
two-year “college within the college,” a required program of
tutorials, laboratory work, lectures, and discussions, all based
on the reading of the great books of the Western tradition,
including a substantial number of mathematical and scientific
works. This section was written by Buchanan. The range and
depth of the plan are extraordinary; it bears a strong resemblance to the program installed here at St. John’s.
Buchanan contended that the best materials for the
proposed curriculum are the literary and scientific classics of
Europe. He states that “all instruction will be based on the
reading, analysis, interpretation, criticism, imitation, and
discussion of the books in the following list.” That list
includes over a hundred authors, and it will look familiar to
anyone with a St. John’s connection. When the report was
circulated on the Charlottesville campus, the most startling
feature, I feel sure—apart from the very notion of an allrequired two-year program for a select twenty of the best
undergraduates—is the inclusion on this list of numerous
works in Mathematics and Science, a grand total of forty-two
titles, ranging from Euclid, Nicomachus, and Hippocrates to
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Darwin and Faraday and Lobachevski and Mendel, and
including those giants Ptolemy, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler,
Newton, and Harvey.
In Winfree Smith’s insightful book A Search for the
Liberal College, published by St. John’s in 1983, he
comments on Buchanan’s proposal:
When one considers that the plan was to read in
two years almost as many books as St. John’s
undergraduates now read in four years, and to
read in their entirety books many of which are
now read at St. John’s only in part, and that list
contained Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologicae,
Part I, Newton’s Principia, Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason, Hegel’s Phenomenology, Maxwell’s
Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, etc., one
sees the impossibility of the task.
To that one might add that there were also included
works not so inherently difficult, but very long—Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the Bible, Marx’s
Capital, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Tolstoi’s War and Peace.
What Buchanan in this report called the “machinery of
instruction,” was to be conducted in four modes: once-aweek discussion of the assigned reading for the whole class
(of no more than twenty), with two instructors in charge;
formal lectures at least once a week, based on the expository
texts; tutorials in languages and mathematics, for “formal
drill and supervised practice,” and for detailed criticism and
discussion of student papers; and a laboratory “equipped for
the performance of the crucial experiments in the history of
science, for the practice of the arts of measurement and
experimentation, and the illustration of scientific theory.”
The full report, including a third section on the elective
portion in the third and fourth years, was submitted to
President Newcomb in March 1935—and that was the end of
it! The country had not yet emerged from the Great
Depression, and the Committee report was shelved, at least in
NELSON
9
part, for lack of funds. But in retrospect one can readily
imagine how Buchanan’s plan would have been chopped to
pieces department by department if it had ever emerged as a
serious proposal.
So by this time, Barr and Buchanan had developed not
only a deep conviction of the necessity for college curricular
reform but also this specific plan for its radical transformation. It was no doubt frustrating to have worked so hard
and so productively in developing their proposal and to see
no result. (If it can be said that a seed was planted at Virginia,
it must be added that the seed was not nurtured there, and a
transplant would be required to keep it alive and growing.)
Meanwhile, at the University of Chicago, what appeared
to be a more favorable climate for curricular reform had been
created by President Robert Maynard Hutchins. He had
earlier enticed Mortimer Adler and Richard McKeon from
Columbia, and Adler had persuaded Hutchins to invite Barr
and Buchanan to come and join Hutchins’ Committee on the
Liberal Arts. They accepted, though Barr was reluctant to
leave his native Virginia and the University he loved in spite
of all its shortcomings. Although there was considerable
muttering on the Chicago campus about Hutchins’ unconventional opinions and appointments, it soon transpired that
the Committee members themselves were the chief cause of
what turned out to be a farcical failure. Buchanan’s account
is especially interesting:
The first meeting of the Committee on Liberal Arts
will never be forgotten by any of those present. It
was one of those occasions of recognition that
mark the crises in tragedies and comedies. . .and in
spite of many interchanges of lectures and papers,
McKeon, Adler, and I, each of us, had constructed
. . .quite different universes of discourse. . . .Heat
and light became thunder and lightning. There was
never another general meeting of the whole
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
committee. We agreed to disagree and to pursue
our separate courses. . . .
One significant outcome of that year’s work at Chicago
was the effect on Barr of his seminar readings with Buchanan.
He says in one of his oral history interviews, “We read the
dialogues of Plato. . .and we read the whole of Euclid’s
Elements. . .I’ve been saying ever since. . .that I would never
have touched St. John’s if this hadn’t happened.”
Chicago was, to say the least, another very frustrating
experience for both Barr and Buchanan. Later Adler claimed
that the seeds of the New Program at St. John’s “were sown
in the meetings of the Committee on the Liberal Arts at the
University of Chicago in 1936-37,” but he is wrong on two
counts. The seeds were sown at Virginia, or earlier, and the
year at Chicago added virtually nothing to the conception of
the New Program that emerged here in 1937.
In the same academic year, 1936-37, an event occurred in
Buchanan’s life that appeared to be totally unrelated to his
pursuit of educational reform but that turned out to be the
key that unlocked the door. He accepted an invitation to a
meeting of “Christian leaders” in Alexandria, Virginia, in
May, 1937, to discuss how to combat the rising threat of
Fascism and Communism in Europe. Buchanan shared a
room with a friend, Francis Pickens Miller, and they soon got
to talking about the state of college education. Miller had
recently agreed to serve on the Board of Visitors and
Governors of St. John’s, and the trustees were looking for
new leadership for an institution in deep trouble. It was not
long before Miller arranged a meeting between Barr and
Buchanan, on the one hand, and the College trustees on the
other, followed by a full day’s discussion with Richard
Cleveland, then secretary and later chairman of the College
board. An offer soon came, and so it was that Barr, reluctantly, and Buchanan, more hopeful, but no doubt with reservations, agreed to come promptly to St. John’s. Less than two
months after the Miller-Buchanan conversations in
NELSON
11
Alexandria, Barr and Buchanan were installed at St. John’s.
The world was not thus saved for democracy, but this college
found a new life.
A few words first about the college they found on arrival
here in the fall of 1937. The president, Amos Woodcock, had
just cost the college its accreditation by awarding a bachelor’s
degree to a senior against the judgment of the faculty. The
dean, a retired Navy captain, was formerly director of the
Naval Academy’s athletic program. Although there were only
twenty-four faculty members, fifteen majors were available.
There was just one faculty member in each of the departments of Art, German, Classics, Spanish, Government,
Philosophy and Psychology, and Physics. There were four
national and two local fraternities. Intercollegiate athletic
schedules were maintained in football, basketball, and
lacrosse.
St. John’s thus had a conventionally organized but weak
academic and extracurricular program. Lest it be thought a
hopeless case it is worth remembering that among the faculty
who made a successful transition to the New Program were
the very able Ford K. Brown and Richard Scofield, both
themselves Rhodes Scholars; John Kieffer, a Greek and Latin
scholar with a Harvard education; and the mathematician
George Bingley.
When Barr and Buchanan took over the all-but-bankrupt
college, they prescribed a four-year curriculum alike, in all
important respects, to that now in place here and in Santa Fe.
In the sixty-eight years since its inception, the “bones” of
what was then called the New Program—seminars on the
great books, language and mathematics tutorials, laboratory,
and a weekly all-college formal lecture—have not changed.
Significant refinements have taken place, however, as the
curriculum has undergone constant review. The most
important of these are probably (a) in the language tutorial,
instead of one year each of Greek, Latin, French, and
German, the current pattern is two years of Greek followed
by two years of French; (b) Music has found a solid place in
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
the required program; and (c) the preceptorial has been introduced.
An equally radical—perhaps even more radical—alteration in the modes of instruction accompanied the curricular
revolution. In the seminar, which became the heart and soul
of the program, a group of eighteen to twenty students sat
facing one another around a long, wide table and discussed a
book read by all. The two faculty members in charge took
turns opening the discussion with a question (not “When did
Plato write this dialogue?” but perhaps, “What is justice?”).
In the conversation that followed, students and tutors
together sought answers by reviewing and analyzing, for
instance, the conflicting definitions of justice debated in the
first book of the Republic.
The New Program called for a complete transformation
of the structure and functions of the faculty. There were no
longer any departments, ranks, or specialization. Of course
this raised questions of status and dignity and inevitably
raised the question of whether Buchanan was the leader of
the faculty so desperately needed—or simply out of his mind!
Each new member and every retained member of the existing
faculty became a “tutor” and was offered the opportunity, as
well as the challenge, of learning how to teach throughout the
curriculum. Could a physicist learn to teach Greek and to
discuss Plato’s Meno? Would a philosopher be willing to
study the conic sections of Apollonius or to dissect a frog in
the laboratory? Was this too much to ask of self-respecting
teachers with credentials from Oxford, Columbia, Princeton,
and Harvard? And there were no tenure appointments to the
faculty during the Barr-Buchanan years.
In the space of two years, all intercollegiate sports were
discontinued and were replaced by an intramural program
designed to attract and involve everyone. The fraternities,
too, were abolished, and their entryways on the campus
buildings where they had been housed were renamed by Barr
in honor of the four Maryland signers of the Declaration of
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Independence—William Paca, Charles Carroll of Carrollton,
Samuel Chase, and Thomas Stone.
Although both Barr and Buchanan hoped that their plan
would inspire other colleges to follow their lead, they did not
want it to be universally copied, even if it were feasible to do
so. That would have left the entering freshman without a
significant choice, and the freedom to choose the St. John’s
path is essential to its success. The discipline and commitment
required in order to gain the rewards of the program presupposes that the path is freely chosen. In fact, I believe that most
alumni would assert that it must be not only freely chosen,
but also pleasurable; otherwise, it isn’t worth the pain.
Buchanan was convinced that an understanding of
modern science was essential to the liberal education of the
modern man or woman, and that in turn required an understanding of—among other things—Newtonian physics.
Newton’s Principia appeared to be inaccessible to the average
college student. How could it be made accessible? Buchanan
made it accessible by plotting a chronological course of study
through mathematics, physics, and astronomy, beginning
with Euclid’s Elements and proceeding through the works of
Apollonius, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler, along
with straight mathematical exercises and accompanying
laboratory work.
The decision to abolish academic departments had several
consequences. First, Barr and Buchanan were able to assert
and dramatize their shared conviction that every faculty
member should establish as a goal, no matter how long it
would take to reach it, to teach across the curriculum, to
transcend his or her specialty, to aim to become a liberally
educated person.
Equally important, the abolition of the departments and
divisions broke through one more barrier to the direct
confrontation of a book by the student. A reading of Plato’s
Republic, for instance, would not be filtered through the lens
of political science, or philosophy, or history, or theology; the
work would speak for itself. It would not be categorized and
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thus prejudged. The student was to confront each author and
each work in its own right. Except for the necessity of reading
most of the books in translation, there would be no intervention between the author and the reader. It is this radical
departure that allows the College to claim that the great
books are the teachers, the primary faculty within which the
tutors and their students are learners together, with the tutors
as the more seasoned guides.
Lessons Learned, Lessons Applied
The transformation wrought by Barr and Buchanan here in
1937 seemed nearly miraculous to some (and errant nonsense
to others!). But in fact it was in part an incorporation of
lessons learned not only early in their lives, but especially
during the eighteen year period from their arrival as Rhodes
Scholars at Balliol College, Oxford, to their arrival in
Annapolis. I add only that they came to St. John’s not just
with lessons learned, but with that indispensable daring and
conviction without which the sturdy structure that now
flourishes here and in Santa Fe sixty-eight years later, would
not have survived the first winter.
Perhaps at this point you have some curiosity about these
two “transformers,” Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan.
What were they like? What did they do before Charlottesville
and Annapolis?
Barr—Growing Up
Stringfellow Barr, known to his family and friends since
infancy as “Winkie,” was born and grew up in Virginia, the
son of an Episcopalian bishop, and the grandson, on his
mother’s side, of Franklin Stringfellow, famous in Virginia as
a daring cavalry scout for Jeb Stuart and Robert E. Lee. After
the war Grandfather Stringfellow became a country parson,
and a man of simple convictions. Barr recalled: “He said. . .that
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he didn’t want to go to heaven if Dixie (his horse) wasn’t
there.”
Winkie grew up under the engaging influence of that
celebrated grandfather and of his learned and devoted father
who introduced him to Dickens, Shakespeare, and the Bible.
He recalls reading all of Oliver Twist out loud to his older
sister, Jane, when he was eight or nine. Even earlier, when he
was five or six, he had begun reading the Bible to the black
servants in the kitchen. And then, he says,
On my tenth birthday. . .Father gave me a
Shakespeare play. . .He said, “You won’t understand this well when you read it, but keep reading
it.” So I did. I’d do anything for him. . .I adored
him. . .I was so taken with Macbeth I wanted to
express myself somehow, but the thing that I was
taken with was not Macbeth, for God’s sake, it
was King Duncan. He was the first king I ever met
. . .I had been given. . .a funny little kimono-sortof-garment with a blue and white design on it,
with a belt. . .I would put this on, not over my
pajamas or anything, I’d walk rapidly across the
room so that the train would float better behind. .
.This had the disadvantage of leaving my belly
completely exposed, but nobody gave a damn.
It will not surprise you that this boy then grew up, went
to college and graduated from the University of Virginia at
Charlottesville. When Barr received his B.A. in 1916 he was
nineteen years old, and had behind him four years of Latin,
three years of Greek, eight years of English and English
Literature, and an abundance of extra-curricular activity. He
was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship in 1916—not surprising.
But the Brits were deep in the first World War, so he did not
take up his Rhodes until three years later. During that period,
several dramatic events shaped and matured him. In April,
1917, the United States entered the war against Germany.
Conscription had not yet begun, but Barr promptly enlisted
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in the Army in May. He was transferred to an ambulance
corps training at Allentown, and, expecting a quick trip
overseas, he began intensive study of French. But it turned
out that the Army had no vehicles available for ambulance
training; so Barr, severely flat-footed and unable to do the
foot-soldier drill, was transferred to the Sanitary Corps,
which was organizing instruction about venereal diseases,
“not a very glorious assignment, and not one I coveted.” His
talents as a speaker and writer continued to be appreciated.
When he spoke to recruits about the dangers of “the clap,”
he composed entertaining verse designed to catch their
attention. Many, like Barr, frustrated and disappointed, were
never sent overseas.
And so, Winkie Barr, having enlisted out of a sense of
duty, having suffered the humiliation of unfitness for combat
service, and having prepared uselessly to be an ambulance
driver in France, made the best of his assignment to teach
recruits the risks of venereal disease. And, somehow, he
managed to do that with a light heart!
Then, immediately after his discharge from the Army, he
was called upon to undertake what he called “the most
painful adventure of my whole life.” His adored father
suffered a mental and physical collapse, requiring Winkie’s
services as an attendant to him at a mental hospital in
Asheville. Perhaps miraculously, after six months of daily
round-the-clock attendance, his father recovered, and was
able to return home.
So when the Armistice was signed in November, Barr was
free to take up his Rhodes Scholarship at Balliol College,
Oxford. At age twenty-two, a young man of some
experience.
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Buchanan—Growing Up
Meanwhile, what about Scott Buchanan? A markedly
different sort of person with a markedly different set of
childhood and youthful experiences.
Born in a small town near Spokane, Washington, Scott, an
only child, was soon carried by his parents across the
continent to Jeffersonville, Vermont, where his father, a
country doctor, soon died. The boy was then just seven years
old. His mother and he were left in near poverty.
In an interview many years later, Buchanan recalls his
early education:
Jeffersonville was a small town, probably not over
a thousand inhabitants. There was a schoolhouse
in the middle of town next door to our house. . . .
It was a curious school, with four rooms that
included everything from the first grade through
high school. There were three grades in each room
and recitations were held in front of the room in
rotation. From the very start I was listening to
classes ahead of me and then, as I went on, to
classes behind me. So I had a sort of triple
education. . .
I had to prepare my own work but I was always
watching the teaching and learning. . .from the
other classes as I went on. It made me realize very
early how much teaching goes on between
students. . .Since then I’ve always seen a classroom
as a very lively relationship between mutual
teachers.
In his youth, Buchanan was an earnest Christian and a
“great church-goer.” “I used to count five times on Sunday
that I did something at the church.” Young Scott had been
converted by a visiting evangelist and “they took me in as a
member of the church at the age of eight. I don’t think that is
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often done but Congregationalists are free-wheeling. . . .Then
after that I began having doubts, of course. . . .By the time I
was in high school. . .I refused to take Communion. . . .I
didn’t understand why you should eat bread and drink wine
because it was the body and blood of Christ.” (I recall
Buchanan saying in my language tutorial in 1941-42 that
“hocus pocus” was a corruption of Jesus’ saying at the Last
Supper, “Hoc est corpus meus.”) These recollections may
suggest that Scott’s young life was consumed with religion
and personal reflections on the meaning of Christian
doctrine. As evidence to the contrary, he later recalled how
much he missed the winters and the ice skating in northern
Vermont.
Amherst College was a natural destination for Buchanan,
and he was admitted there, no doubt on scholarship, in 1912.
By a happy accident it was the very year that the estimable
Alexander Meiklejohn joined Amherst as President.
Somehow a bond developed between them despite a twentythree year age difference. And when Meiklejohn brought
together in his study five or six members of the faculty for a
reading and discussion of Immanuel Kant, the undergraduate
Buchanan was invited to join. The two became lifelong
friends. (When I say “the two,” I mean Meiklejohn and
Buchanan, but I might as well have said Buchanan and Kant.)
Scott Buchanan had a good academic record at Amherst.
He won the mathematics prize in his sophomore year and the
Greek prize in his junior year, he was the Ivy Orator at his
commencement and received his degree cum laude, and, most
notably, he was awarded the Rhodes Scholarship from
Massachusetts.
The United States entered the Great War in 1917, and, in
1918, Buchanan signed up for the Navy, though a pacifist and
a conscientious objector. Although he didn’t want to fight, he
thought it was wrong to escape what his college friends, who
had been drafted, were going through. In any case, after the
Armistice was signed in November, 1918, Buchanan was
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discharged from the Navy, leaving him free to take up his
Rhodes Scholarship.
Barr Meets Buchanan
And thus it happened that our two “transformers” met for the
first time at Balliol College, Oxford, in the fall of 1919. Barr
remembered vividly their first encounter:
There was a knock and I opened my door.
“Hello,” he said, “I’m Scott Buchanan,
Massachusetts.” He stood, smiling, relaxed, his
head a little on one side. He wore the heavy tweed
jacket and gray flannel “bags” that I was beginning
to recognize as the Oxford student’s favorite
costume. . . .[He said]: “I’m looking for Barr,
Virginia.”
Thus began a friendship that lasted until Buchanan’s
death forty-nine years later. But it had a rocky beginning.
Perhaps that is partly because Barr did not quite realize at first
that he was in the process of becoming Buchanan’s student.
After all, they were Rhodes Scholars together, and, although
Buchanan was two years older, they had graduated from
college only a year apart. But Barr discovered that the best
conversations seemed to take place when Buchanan was on
hand, and later, during Buchanan’s last term, an informal
seminar developed, in which Barr and several Englishmen
began to meet regularly in a discussion group led by
Buchanan. Barr recalls:
It was his curious kind of questioning that bound
them and me. . . .I had quite simply been snared
into Platonic dialectic, by a dialectician who had
staked his life on Socrates’ statement that the
unexamined life is not worth living, a dialectician
who may already have agreed with that stately first
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sentence in Aristotle’s Metaphysics: “All men desire
to know.”
Buchanan later reported that during those Oxford years
he and Barr “had spent long hours in talk about the plight of
American education.” He did not say explicitly what the
conversations encompassed, but the context suggests that one
of their main concerns was that the growth and dominance of
the graduate schools in the American universities was turning
the undergraduate years into preparation for specialization
instead of cultivating the liberal arts.
From Balliol and Oxford, Buchanan and Barr borrowed
the “don-rag.” In one of his letters to Meiklejohn from
Balliol, Buchanan describes it briefly: “Our term closed on
Monday,” he wrote, “with what is called a ‘don-rag.’ One
goes before his tutor and the Master to hear his work
commented on and discussed in approval or encouragement
for better work in the future.” Barr, years later at St. John’s,
refers to “a device we stole from English university practice,
the device which British undergraduates term a ‘don-rag,’”
and then goes on to describe what “we have adapted . . .more
nearly to our needs,” an adaptation with which most of you
are quite familiar.
Also, they borrowed the title “tutor,” and made the
tutorial not, as at Oxford, a weekly meeting of one or two
students with a tutor to discuss a paper prepared by the
student, but a small group of eight to ten students meeting
daily to study language and mathematics. (And let me interpolate here: it appears that Buchanan and Barr borrowed
liberally, but they never copied; whatever they took
underwent a Buchanian twist.)
They also took the best of the informal discussions that
had enriched their lives at Balliol and transformed them into
the “seminar,” in which the size of the group was limited to
twenty or so, in order to ensure the primacy of student participation and, by using two tutors, to counterbalance any
tendency, on the part of either, to impart “the truth.”
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Oxford encompassed many colleges of varying sizes. A
“large” college might have as many as 450 resident students.
St. John’s in the 1940’s shrank to almost nothing during the
war years, and didn’t reach 300 even after the war. But now
St. John’s, by Oxford standards, is a large college! Barr and
Buchanan, despite the experience of Amherst, Harvard, and
the University of Virginia, thought that the Oxford colleges
were about the right size.
After graduate work at Harvard and two years teaching
philosophy at City College, New York, Buchanan, in 1925,
with a Harvard doctorate in hand, began four stimulating
years at the People’s Institute at Cooper Union in New York.
He enjoyed providing adult programs for first—and second—
generation European immigrants who were not looking for
credits or degrees, but seriously interested in learning.
Perhaps of greater import for our current concerns, he
organized with the New York Public Library, eighteen great
books seminars meeting in library branches around the city,
which were led by instructors or recent graduates from
Columbia. These seminars no doubt confirmed his conviction
that the great books were accessible to a wide readership of
serious, intelligent readers, and should not be considered the
exclusive preserve of university scholars.
This was also a time of invention, exploration, and experimentation in the undergraduate program at Columbia,
where Mortimer Adler, Mark Van Doren, and Richard
McKeon were in the thick of it. Unlike the situation at many
leading research universities, the undergraduate program at
Columbia engaged the continuing attention of many of its
leading scholars and its brightest young instructors, who
quickly discovered that providing young men with an intelligible introduction to their world could not be achieved
within strictly departmental confines. They developed an
interdepartmental course, and by making it required of all
freshman underlined the conviction: “However intelligent a
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boy may be, he is in no position, when he first enters college,
to determine a curriculum for himself.”
The effort to introduce the great books into the Columbia
undergraduate program had a long and choppy history
beginning with John Erskine in 1917. The opposition came
chiefly from classical scholars provoked at the notion that any
good could come from undergraduates attempting to read
and discuss one classic a week. Many scholars also objected
that to read a masterpiece in translation was not to read the
same work at all. Erskine relished the argument and happily
reported:
I agreed. I couldn’t help adding that I marveled at
my colleagues who did their reading exclusively in
the original. I publicly offered them my sympathy
for never having read the Old Testament, nor the
words of Christ. Of course the Old Testament was
possible for any colleague who knew Hebrew, but
there was no text extant of the words of Christ in
the language he spoke.
When the faculty finally relented, Erskine offered his
course in 1920. He later said that the original instructors
were a “remarkable lot:” they included both Mortimer Adler
and Mark Van Doren.
The Columbia faculty had long been dedicated to the
small discussion group for undergraduate instruction. The
renowned Nicholas Murray Butler, president of the
University for forty-three years, said forthrightly in 1912:
“The habit of conveying information to college students by
means of lectures is wholly deplorable. It is not only a waste
of time, since the printed page would be far better than the
spoken word, but it leads to unfortunate and undesirable
intellectual habits on the part of the student.” The serious and
long-standing efforts of Columbia College to provide a sound
liberal education for undergraduates employing the great
books and the small discussion group were well known to
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Barr and Buchanan, especially through the close, enduring
friendship between Buchanan and Van Doren.
Now I have given as much attention as the occasion
allows to those activities and events leading up to the arrival
of Barr and Buchanan at St. John’s in the summer of 1937.
Barr was reluctant to come to St. John’s. He knew a bit
about the college, and what he knew was not good. He had
occasionally come to Annapolis from Charlottesville to
lecture at the Naval Academy, and he had found that the
reputation of the college next door was poor and that it had
just recently lost its accreditation. He did not see it as a
promising site for a revival of the great classical tradition.
Buchanan, on the other hand, was intrigued. Perhaps his
experiences at Virginia and Chicago had shown that only at
an institution in dreadful difficulty would they be given a free
hand to overturn completely the existing structure and install
a revolutionary new order. Barr was persuaded to make the
attempt, though he expected to fail; he just felt he had a duty
to try. Then it was left to them to sort out their respective
responsibilities. Barr relates:
Buchanan said I would have to be president. I
scoffed at the idea and reminded him that the
curriculum we had dreamed of was his baby, not
mine. But he answered he couldn’t be president;
he didn’t answer his mail. I retorted that this was
because he believed a lot of it was not worth
answering. He agreed but pointed out that his
correspondents thought it was, so I would have to
be president. I groaned and told him he would
have to be dean. He loudly objected but I declined
to budge.
I think everyone who knew these two men will agree that
it would have been incongruous, and perhaps fatal, if it had
turned out the other way. It is just possible to imagine Barr as
dean, but Buchanan as president? No way. But Barr as
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president and Buchanan as dean seem, in retrospect, almost
providentially well-suited to their respective capacities.
Buchanan’s function was to create and refine the basic
structure; to match tutors to assignments; to build faculty
understanding of the Program; to teach, and by teaching, to
embody the methods of the seminar leader and of the
language and mathematics tutor; to find new faculty members
with the capacity to learn how to be tutors, teaching across
the program, conquering unfamiliar, treacherous ground. He
also had the usual tasks of any college dean: to counsel with
students and with tutors; to provide letters of recommendation for graduating students and departing faculty
members; to respond to parents’ complaints about discipline
or lack of discipline. He also took the responsibility to set
forth in print, for all skeptics and critics to see, as he did in
the catalogues of the college, the reasons why this college had
adopted a curriculum radically different from anything else
on the academic scene.
Barr confirms that “it was Buchanan who conceived,
established, and continuously developed the St. John’s
program. In a sense he had been building it ever since his
work at Cooper Union in the late twenties.” Barr continues:
Meanwhile, my job was to interpret it to the
public by wide lecturing and by writing; to teach
one seminar on the books and usually one
language tutorial so I would understand the thing I
was publicly interpreting; to find quickly the few
men and women who could both grasp what we
were doing and finance it in time to keep the
College open; to fight off. . .three successive
attempts of the Navy Department to get possession
of our entire campus; and to reorganize the board
of the college.
One interesting sidelight: although typically we see
Buchanan as the radical force and Barr exercising some
restraint, it was Barr, against Buchanan’s advice, who
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abolished intercollegiate athletics. Buchanan thought that was
one step too many when the alumni were already deeply
disaffected, and it would be better to wait another year or
two. Barr, however, feeling directly responsible for the health
and welfare of the students, was concerned, especially with
respect to football, that the Johnnies were outclassed, battling
against bigger and better-trained opponents, and that injuries
would result for which he would be responsible. He also
noted that the scheduling of away-from-home contests
required team members to be absent from classes, and the
Program was simply too demanding to permit it: student
athletes would inevitably fall behind. Instead, he championed
a vigorous intramural sports program in which all students
could engage on a schedule consistent with their academic
obligations.
These two collaborators were very different in
temperament and capacities. Quoting Barr again:
. . .three or four years after our New Program
started I was delighted with it and Scott was
depressed with it. The difference between Scott
and me was that when I see a baby I’m enchanted
with him and Scott is always feeling, “Well, that’s
not the baby I had in mind. Babies ought to be
better than that.” All human enterprises, including
birth, seem to him a little disappointing. He’s a
Platonist in the sense that he’s got some notion of
a baby in the back of his mind that no baby lives
up to, whereas to me it’s such a miracle the little
brat is alive—so what if he has defects. His ears
stick out and he is cross-eyed, certainly, but he’s
still alive.
At Buchanan’s death in 1968, Barr said of their long
friendship and collaboration, “Aside from our dialectical
bond, he and I were in many ways incompatible; with it, our
incompatibilities made our friendship richer.”
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Since there is so much about Buchanan that helps us to
understand the Program, I turn to Winfree Smith, who was a
student of his (and of Barr’s, as well) at Charlottesville, and
who arrived here in the fall of 1941, and who continued to
teach here until his death. Although he was an admirer of
Buchanan as a teacher, he nevertheless criticized him for
being “cavalier in the way he read the great books” and goes
on to cite “blunders” he made in his reading of Aristotle and
Thomas Aquinas. Smith’s examples are convincing. They
naturally raise questions about the soundness of Buchanan’s
“scholarship.” Buchanan was not the sort of man you would
have asked to write a textbook on the history of philosophy,
nor would he have said yes if asked. His interest was not that
of a bird overhead, surveying the distant fields below, but of
a cannibal on the ground, devouring what he needed, turning
flesh to food. I remember that when he was reading the
volumes of Arnold Toynbee as they came off the press in the
1940’s, almost everything he thought about and talked about
related to Toynbee. He made Toynbee his own, so that, in a
sense, it was no longer Toynbee. He was engaged, as no other
man I have known, in the process that Michel Montaigne
called learning.
It is a sign of crudity and indigestion to throw up
what we have eaten in the same condition it was
swallowed down. The stomach had not performed
its office unless it has altered the form and
condition of what was given it to cook. . . .Bees
pillage the flowers here and there, but they then
make honey of them which is all their own; it is
no longer thyme and marjoram; so the fragments
borrowed from others he will transform and bend
together to make a work that shall be absolutely
his own; that is to say, his judgment. His
education, labor, and study aim only at forming
that.
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As a teacher, it was never Buchanan’s aim to trot out a
student who could dutifully and accurately disgorge the
opinions and precepts of Plato or Aristotle or Thomas
Aquinas or Kant. He hoped, rather, that his students, by
means of their fresh encounter with these best minds, would
begin to develop, however imperfectly, minds of their own.
That would be the beginning of lifelong self-education.
This is not the occasion for an account of the nine-andone-half years of the Barr-Buchanan leadership nor for a
recapitulation of the crises, one after another, that characterized their tenure here, some of which they themselves
created, and some of which were thrust upon them. But their
departure cannot be understood without some further
reference to the attack from the Navy. As everybody here
knows, the College is physically separated from the Academy
by nothing more than King George Street and a wall, as it was
then. The advocates for the Academy argued the necessity of
acquiring the College’s meager acres to meet further
expansion needs. (Although today’s enrollment at the
Academy is a bit over 4000, it was then projected to rise to
7500.) Perhaps you can imagine the convenience to the
Academy of an overpass somewhere along King George
Street or a tunnel underneath it connecting the two campuses
and fulfilling nicely the Academy’s requirements.
The unfolding drama involved President Roosevelt,
Eleanor Roosevelt, Secretary of State James Byrnes, Secretary
of the Navy Knox and his successor James Forrestal, Admiral
Chester Nimitz, Admiral Ernest King, both houses of
Congress, and, of course, Admiral Ben Moreell. He was the
Navy’s Goliath to our David. St. John’s defense was led by
Barr, Baltimore lawyer Richard Cleveland, and Thomas
Parran, Surgeon General of the United States, and fortunately
then chairman of the St. John’s Board. I am convinced that if
World War Two had not ended in 1945, the Navy would have
won its war with this college. This was no croquet game; it
was life or death for St. John’s. But in 1946 the Senate and
House committees decided for the College. Except for the
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accidents of war and the passage of time, the Navy would
have prevailed, and we would not be here. The narrowness of
the victory, and the pro-Navy alignment of the local business
interests with the local newspaper, led Barr and Buchanan to
believe that there would never be an end to these attacks.
They were not comforted by the language of the concluding
official letter from Secretary Forrestal stating that in view of
a resolution adopted by the House Naval Affairs Committee
to the effect that “the national emergency neither justifies nor
warrants the proposed acquisition of St. John’s campus,” the
Navy Department would acquiesce in the Committee’s disapproval, [and] that this “makes it possible for the College to
pursue its plans with assurance that it will be secure on its
historic site for the foreseeable future.” That concluding
phrase, “for the foreseeable future,” provided little comfort
to Barr and Buchanan. They could see ahead unending
attacks on the College and its vulnerable property. They were
wrong, but if one looks objectively at the situation as it was
in 1946, it is easy to understand why they thought that the
only secure future for the college lay elsewhere.
In a tribute to Barr at the memorial service for him here
in 1982, I said:
It is very hard indeed to understand, looking back,
how St. John’s College survived those first ten
years of the New Program. . . .Just as Stringfellow
Barr and Scott Buchanan were turning up the
lights on this campus in the late 1930’s, the lights
were going out all over Europe. The recently
arrived immigrants on the faculty here heard the
grim news on their radios as they plotted on their
wall maps at home the daily advance of the
German armies over Poland and Czechoslovakia
and France and the Soviet Union. My freshman
class arrived here exactly two months before Pearl
Harbor. . . .At the College there were farewell
parties virtually every week, as one small group or
NELSON
29
students after another entered the Army or the
Navy or the Marines or the Air Force. Within two
years sixty of the sixty-five members of my class
were scattered all over the world. In June 1943
there were fifteen graduating seniors; a year later
eight; in 1945, five; in 1946, three.
Yet, for me at least, the memories of the College
during those war years are not of hardship and
struggle but of exuberance, spirited conversation,
and laughter. The tone and style and mood were
set [pretty much] by Winkie; without his lively
presence, those would have been grim days indeed.
Both of the founders were highly controversial figures.
Buchanan was called “a destroyer, an irresponsible amateur,
and a corrupter of young men—a man who drew students
into worlds of the intellect too difficult for them, who made
them, as Buchanan [himself said], ‘misfits in the universe for
the time being.’”
In May of 1958, twenty-one years after Barr and
Buchanan had sprung the New Program in Annapolis, a
group of their former students organized a picnic in their
honor. The forty-four of us who gathered for the occasion
first heard from their old friend and our friend too, Mark Van
Doren. Memorably, he characterized the two men in this
fashion:
Both of them are incendiary; both are burning;
they have always burned. Scott burns slowly and
smokelessly. Winkie burns with a blaze, bright and
red and always there, always at the top of his
intensity.
When it came Buchanan’s turn to speak, he began by
saying: “I want to stage a little tableau for you, a composite
oral examination and don rag. I have some questions I want
to ask you.” It is questions, not answers, that seem to me to
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be the appropriate last words here from Buchanan, even
though these questions are admonitory, unlike most of the
questions I remember him posing to us in our seminars.
The first question is: Do you believe in and trust
your intellect, that innate power that never
sleeps?. . .Many of you have gone on to graduate
and professional learning. . . .You have fallen into
the hands of scholars and into the grooves of
practice. . . .In all these learnings and practices
have you listened to the small spontaneous voice
within that asks continually if these things are
true? Do you believe that knowledge is possible,
that truth is attainable, and that it is always your
business to seek it, although evidence is
overwhelmingly against it?
The second question. . . .Have you yet recognized
that you are and always have been your own
teacher? Liberal education has as its end the free
mind, and the free mind must be its own teacher.
Intellectual freedom begins when one says with
Socrates that he knows nothing, and then goes on
to add: I know what it is that I don’t know. Do
you know what you don’t know and therefore
what you should know? If your teacher is
affirmative and humble, then you are your own
teacher.
My third question is. . .more superficial perhaps,
but fateful, nevertheless. . .have you persuaded
yourself that there are knowledges and truths
beyond your grasp, things that you simply cannot
learn? Have you allowed adverse evidence to pile
up and force you to conclude that you are not
mathematical, not linguistic, not poetic, not
scientific, not philosophical? If you have allowed
NELSON
31
this to happen, you have arbitrarily imposed limits
on your intellectual freedom, and you have
smothered the fires from which all other freedoms
arise.
The fourth question: Do you accept the world? I
am thinking of. . .The Brothers Karamazov, when
Ivan tells Alyosha that he finds it easy to believe in
God, but that he finds it impossible to believe in
the world. Because he believes in God, he cannot
accept the world. For most of us these days, the
case is that we have believed in some things so
weakly or fanatically that other equally or more
real things have become absurd or impossible. This
results from our crippled minds. . . .I am
persuaded that the cure for this sickness of mind is
in some vigorous and rigorous attempt to deal
with that most puzzling and mysterious idea, the
idea of the world. . . .There have been other such
ideas that have governed thought, the idea of God
or Being as it puzzled and dazzled the ancient
world, the idea of Man as it stirred and fermented
the world from the Renaissance on. God and Man
have not disappeared as charts and aids to intellectual navigation, but they are in partial eclipse at
present, and the world is asking us the big
questions, questions in cosmology and science,
questions in law and government. They are not
merely speculative questions; they are as much
matters of life and death and freedom as the old
questions were. Most of us have made, with Ivan,
a pact with the devil, an agreement not to face
them and accept them—yet.
“If these questions are valid,” Buchanan concludes, “they
may come somewhere near indicating a standard by which we
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32
judge our common intellectual life, and therefore our
common education in this country.”
It will come as no surprise that Buchanan did not think
that the curriculum he had designed was definitive, the
answer. It was undertaken as a step “in search of a liberal
college,” his own descriptive phrase. This idea of “the search”
was not a transient notion. On several occasions, he imagined
curricula quite different from the one we associate with his
name. More than thirty years after the launching of the New
Program, he asked a group of the College’s students and
tutors the question with which I conclude my remarks: “How
is the search going?”
***
The chief source of material for this lecture is my recent
book, Radical Visions: Stringfellow Barr, Scott Buchanan, and
Their Efforts on behalf of Education and Politics in the
Twentieth Century, Bergin & Garvey, 2001. I have also relied
on two earlier works of mine published by the St. John’s
College Press: Stringfellow Barr: A Centennial Appreciation of
His Life and Work, 1997; and Scott Buchanan: A Centennial
Appreciation of His Life and Work, 1995. The primary
sources on which I have depended for all of the above work
include the following: J. Winfree Smith, A Search for The
Liberal College: The Beginning of The St. John’s Program;
Harris Wofford Jr., Embers of the World: Scott Buchanan’s
Conversations with Harris Wofford Jr.; Papers of Stringfellow
Barr, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia
Library; St. John’s College Papers at the Maryland State
Archives; New Program files in the Greenfield Library, St.
John’s College; Scott Buchanan Papers, Houghton Library,
Harvard University; unpublished transcripts of interviews
with Stringfellow Barr; Lionel Trilling and Justus Buchler, A
History of Columbia College on Morningside; Alexander
Meikejohn Papers, Amherst College Library; author’s private
papers and correspondence.
33
Understanding Quantum
Mechanics with Bohr and
Husserl
François Lurçat
There is no quantum world. There is only an
abstract quantum physical description. It is wrong
to think that the task of physics is to find out how
nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about
nature.
Niels Bohr1
Quantum mechanics brilliantly succeeds as a mathematical
formalism: the numbers it provides are always successfully
compared with experimental results. But it is often said to fail
as an explanatory theory allowing us to understand the laws
of atomic processes.2 Richard Feynman (1918-1988), author
of essential contributions to both the theory and its applications, once declared: “I think I can safely say that nobody
understands quantum mechanics.”3 According to Roger
Penrose, it “makes absolutely no sense.”4 And René Thom
described it as “the intellectual scandal of the century.”5
There exists, however, an interpretation of quantum
mechanics that makes it understandable. It was worked out
by Niels Bohr, author of the quantum theory of atoms, in the
François Lurçat is emeritus professor at the Université de Paris XI (Orsay). As
a theoretical physicist, he has worked on nuclear resonance (magnetic and
quadrupolar), later on particle physics; he is still busy with strong interaction
theory. He has also published several books and articles on the cultural effects
of science. He asks again and again the same question: why does Western
culture remain unable to use the works of such scholars as Husserl and Bohr
that might allow it to understand at last the nature of science? The present
essay will appear in a collection of essays: Rediscovering Phenomenology,
edited by L. Boi, P Kerszberg, and F. Patras. It is published here with the kind
.
permission of the editors.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
course of more than thirty years of researches and discussions. During the 1930s and 1940s, there was a sort of loose
consensus in its favor. But most physicists did not even try to
follow the line of Bohr’s subtle and deep arguments.
Einstein’s seminal discoveries had become classic, and he was
presently busy with topics outside the mainstream. Bohr, on
the contrary, was making essential contributions to nuclear
physics. So he was necessarily right about everything, Einstein
was a troublemaker, and the debate between both physicists
was not really relevant. In the last decades, however, the
situation has changed. Some theoreticians have proposed that
we replace the “thought experiments” discussed by Einstein
and Bohr with feasible ones. Thanks to advances made in
measurement techniques and to the ingenuity of many experimentalists, crucial experiments have been done, and their
results have supported Bohr’s conceptions.6 This might
perhaps have made these conceptions more acceptable; it
turned out, however, that they became less and less accepted.
The whiff of heresy no longer lingers about Einstein’s
thought, but now it surrounds Bohr’s. When physicists,
philosophers, and historians of science write about such
questions, as a rule they refer only vaguely to the Danish
physicist’s ideas without ever going explicitly and clearly to
his texts.7
I would like to present here an approach that in my
opinion should help to explain why Bohr’s essential contribution has been rejected for its strangeness even after its
successful confrontation with experiment. I rely on Husserl’s
definition of phenomenology in his article in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica (1929). Phenomenology, he writes,
“has established (1) an a priori psychological discipline, able
to provide the only secure basis on which a strong empirical
psychology can be built, and (2) a universal philosophy,
which can supply an organum for the methodical revision of
all the sciences.”8 My assumption is as follows: as far as
physics is concerned, the kind of methodical revision Husserl
had in mind was never undertaken; it is, however, needed
LURÇAT
35
even more urgently now that quantum physics has come to
light, in fact, at the same time as phenomenology. The lack of
revision, which has permitted the persistence of age-old
confusions, can help to explain the paradoxical rejection of
the Bohrian approach and the ensuing failure to understand
quantum mechanics.
Of course one should not forget that there are many
publications devoted to the interpretation of quantum
mechanics, some of which are quite valuable. My aim here is
not to discuss what has been done recently in this field of
research, but to go back to the origins in order to understand
why, despite so many efforts, confusion remains about several
important aspects of the problem, for instance, about such
notions as “observer,” “Copenhagen interpretation.” In my
opinion, as long as Bohr is understood to be an incomprehensible author, the beginnings of quantum mechanics will
continue to be shrouded in mist, and the same will probably
be true for quantum mechanics as a whole.
Bohr’s thought is generally considered difficult to grasp,
a difficulty commonly ascribed to what he himself called an
“inefficiency of expression.”9 One may wonder, however,
whether the clarity of classical physics, implicitly contrasted
with Bohrian obscurity, is not itself at least partly based on an
illusion. Because we are familiar with mathematically
formalized space and time, we assume a degree of clarity
about it. This familiarity has a double origin. It comes from
our technical environment, which embodies in some way
Euclidean space and Newtonian time (or, when electromagnetic signals are exchanged, Einsteinian space-time). And it
follows from a feature analyzed by Husserl: the substitution
of the mathematically substructured world of idealities for
the real world.10 The lack of clarity commonly found in Bohr,
and the inefficiency of expression for which he blames
himself, are actually effects of thought exploring virgin territories. They can be understood as traces of Bohr’s effort to
free himself from old mental habits. But the feeling of
obscurity experienced by Bohr’s readers is also due to the
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result of that effort: a reasoning free from several—most
often implicit—premises of common thought
“We take,” says Husserl, “for true being what is actually a
method.”11 By retaining only those properties of things that
can be geometrized, Galileo laid the foundations of modern
physics, but at the same time he gave credibility to the
prejudice that declared those properties to be the only real
ones: nature is mathematical, and whatever cannot be mathematized is relegated to the swamp of preconceptions and
subjective impressions.
What made classical physics understandable was the
general acceptance of its metaphysical foundations, laid by
Galileo and Descartes.12 During the twentieth century, the
development of quantum physics challenged those foundations—a major event in the history of scientific and philosophical thought. But the prevailing positivist view of
sciences did not allow that event to be understood or even
noticed. According to positivism, there are no metaphysical
foundations of sciences; there is a scientific method, the only
one that allows us to reach correct conclusions. One can thus
understand the negative reception of the Bohrian conception
of quantum mechanics. Bohr’s thought has indeed challenged
generally accepted ideas, but the status of those ideas is
misunderstood. Their metaphysical character is not recognized: they are mistaken for basic and necessary methodological principles.
Classical Physics
Why is quantum theory reputed to contain paradoxes?
Because the Galilean and Cartesian substitution of mathematical abstractions for the real world has been almost unanimously and uncritically accepted by scientists and philosophers—except, of course, phenomenologists. The strangeness
of quantum physics might even follow from affinities with
phenomenology that remain implicit. We must therefore
begin this study by taking a brief look at the Husserlian
critique of the metaphysical foundations of classical physics.
LURÇAT
37
According to Husserl,13 Galileo’s essential discovery is that of
“nature, which is in itself mathematical.” Summarizing the
Galilean view, he writes again: “Nature is, in its ‘true beingin-itself,’ mathematical.” Hence follows, for Galileo, the “law
of exact lawfulness”: every occurrence in nature must come
under exact laws. Here we apparently have the basic
principles of physical theory, used daily by scientists. Yet the
mathematical nature in question is a “methodical idea,” so
when we accept Galileo’s discoveries as “straightforward
truth,” we repeat his “naïveté,” a naïveté never overcome by
his successors. Galileo is a genius: his idea of mathematical
nature “blazes the trail for the infinite number of physical
discoveries and discoverers.” But he is “at once a discovering
and a concealing genius.” With the Galilean mathematization
begins “the surreptitious substitution of an idealized nature
for prescientifically intuited nature.” In the world where we
live, “we find nothing of geometrical idealities, no geometrical space or mathematical time with all their shapes.” This
is an important remark, Husserl observes, even though it is so
trivial. “Yet this triviality has been buried precisely by exact
science, indeed since the days of ancient geometry, through
that substitution of a methodically idealized achievement for
what is given immediately as actuality.”
Physics, then, appears as “a particular technique, the
geometrical and Galilean technique which is called physics.”
“In geometrical and natural-scientific mathematization, in the
open infinity of possible experiences, we measure the lifeworld—the world constantly given to us as actual in our
concrete world-life—for a well-fitting garb of ideas, that of
the so-called objectively scientific truths.” This garb of ideas
allows us to make predictions relevant to our practical life,
and this kind of prediction infinitely surpasses the accomplishment of everyday prediction. But, on the other hand, it
dresses up the life-world as “objectively actual and true”
nature. It is because of this substitution that the actual
meaning of the method was never understood.
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Since the days of Galileo, the substitution of a mathematical schematization of nature for the real world has
obscured the nature of classical physics; this continuing
confusion now hinders us from understanding quantum
mechanics. Believing that the trouble started with the advent
of quantum physics would be an illusion. Both the obscurity
of quantum physics and the clarity of classical physics are
grounded in the same initial mistaking of mathematized
nature for the world we live in.
For three quarters of a century, the persistent Galilean
substitution has been an insuperable obstacle in the way of
the acceptance of Bohr’s conceptions, which provide a
rational and understandable frame for quantum mechanics.
The fundamental criticism of substitution by Husserl has not
been taken into consideration, and we still pay the price for
this neglect or refusal.
Bohr’s Dissertation (1911) and Bohr’s Atom (1913)
Let us now set some milestones on the way followed by Bohr
as he discovered and developed his interpretation of quantum
mechanics. This will require placing his work in a historical
context, in order to regain with their original strength
arguments now covered with various layers of sedimentation.
In 1911, the young physicist defended his dissertation on
the electron theory of metals. Its theoretical frame was the
statistical mechanics of a gas of electrons. The main result was
that magnetic properties of metals cannot be explained in this
frame. As Rosenfeld commented in his biographical sketch,
“the very rigour of his analysis gave him, at this early stage,
the firm conviction of the necessity of a radical departure
from classical electrodynamics for the description of atomic
phenomena.”14 In 1921, the primary finding of the dissertation was rediscovered by a Dutch physicist, J.H. van
Leeuwen; it is currently known as the “Bohr-van Leeuwen
theorem.”
LURÇAT
39
Two years later, Bohr published his trilogy, On the
Constitution of Atoms and Molecules. His starting point was
Rutherford’s hypothesis: an atom is composed of a central
nucleus and peripheral electrons. In the first article, devoted
to the hydrogen atom, he assumed that the single electron of
this atom can follow only a discrete set of trajectories, characterized by a “quantum condition” involving Planck’s
constant. This means that when the electron is on one of
those allowed orbits, it is in a “stationary state” and does not
emit electromagnetic radiation. Each of the allowed orbits is
characterized by its energy. Radiation takes place only in the
transition from one orbit to a second one of smaller energy;
the difference between the energies of both orbits is taken
away by the quantum of radiation emitted. Such a process is
called a transition. From these simple assumptions Bohr
deduced the empirical Balmer formula, which describes the
main features of the hydrogen spectrum. But, however simple
they are, they represent a radical innovation with respect to
classical mechanics and electromagnetism.
In classical mechanics, there is a possible trajectory for
any initial condition (position and momentum): this
precludes any quantization of trajectories or of energies. Bohr
understood very early that this freedom of classical trajectories was incompatible with the stability of matter. As he
later explained it to Heisenberg:
What I mean by stability is the fact that always the
same substances are found, with the same
properties; always the same crystals are formed,
the same chemical compounds are created, etc.
This must mean that, after many modifications due
to external influences, an iron atom becomes again
an iron atom, with exactly the same properties as
it had previously. This cannot be understood
according to classical mechanics, above all if one
admits that it is like a planetary system. Hence
there exists in nature a tendency to produce
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
definite forms—here I use the word ‘forms’ in its
most general sense—and to make these definite
forms reappear again and again, even when they
have been perturbed and destroyed. . . .This looks
incomprehensible if one admits the basic principle
of Newtonian physics, namely the strict causal
determinism of phenomena; in other terms, if
the present state of a system must always be
determined uniquely by the state that comes
immediately before it, and only by that one.
This contradiction worried me very early.15
According to the trilogy, when a transition takes place the
frequency of the radiation emitted depends on the energy of
the initial state (before the emission of radiation) and on the
energy of the final state (after the emission). If the transition
is a process continuously unfolding in time, as are those
described by classical physics, how can we understand the
idea that the intermediate stage (the emission of radiation) is
partly determined by the final stage?16 To this, Bohr simply
answered that while the stationary states of an atom follow
the laws of usual mechanics, these laws do not hold for the
transition from one state to another.17 Later he was to
develop this idea, specifying that a description of atomic
processes in space and time is not always possible. A
transition is not a process of which the physicist can write a
history, but rather a “quantum jump.” Here we have a radical
break with the principles of classical physics, which declared
a description in space and time to be a universally valid
requirement.
In the relation of physics to experiment we can see
another aspect of the break. Newton lays down his axioms of
mechanics and draws consequences from them about
planetary motions, tides, etc. The refined calculations
performed by his successors are almost always borne out by
astronomical observations: the only exception, a detail in the
motion of Mercury, was explained by Einstein when he laid
LURÇAT
41
down new axioms in his theory of general relativity. Similarly,
Maxwell’s equations prevailed until Bohr called into question
their universal validity. This represents a new kind of
challenge. The aim is no longer to replace one theory with a
new one that better meets the Galilean ideal of identity with
the physical universe. Rather, Bohr’s atom inaugurated a new
conception of the relations between theory and experiment.
While classical mechanics and electromagnetism remain
essential to describe the stationary states of the atom, some of
their implications are rejected: stationary states are quantized
and radiationless, despite classical impossibilities. Nature can
no longer be identified with the theories of Newton (or
Einstein) and Maxwell. They are not wrong, but they have
only limited validity.
A Digression on Semiclassical Theories
As we shall see further, Bohr’s atom—“the old quantum
theory” as it is now called—is currently considered to have
been a provisional theory, superseded by quantum mechanics.
This is only a partial truth, however. Bohr’s atom still
survives under the rubric of semiclassical theories, an active
field of research nowadays.18 In atomic, molecular, and
nuclear physics, for instance, it happens in many cases that
the phenomena of interest involve a large number of
quantum states: one is thus near the limit where the correspondence principle becomes relevant, as we shall soon see.
On the other hand, as Miller puts it, semiclassical theories
play an interpretative role: they provide spatiotemporal
descriptions, of approximate validity, which nevertheless give
tools for understanding that are more efficient than what
“exact” quantum mechanical calculations can offer. In the
case of the formaldehyde molecule, for instance, or of
exchange collisions between a hydrogen atom and a
dihydrogen molecule, we are told by specialists that
“rigorous” quantum-mechanical calculations are untractable,
while semiclassical description permits both an understanding
of the phenomena and acceptable numerical results. We must
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
consider semiclassical theory, then, as the truly relevant
theory for such objects or phenomena.
Hence the idea of limited validity has not become
obsolete with the advent of quantum mechanics. The epistemological lesson of this idea is as relevant as ever: our
concepts are not written in the book of the universe, we
ourselves devise them in an effort to understand the laws of
natural and, more generally, physical phenomena.
Wave-particle Duality and Its Consequences
There is no question here of summarizing the main stages of
the development of quantum theory, or even of Bohr’s contributions to it.19 I would only like to show, relying on Bohrian
texts, how phenomenological thought can give a meaning to
quantum physics. In order to do that, some historical data
will have to be recalled; let us begin with the debate about the
quanta of radiation.
A photocell is now a familiar object (found, for instance,
in every elevator). One century ago, the photoelectric effect
was something new, unexplained by classical electromagnetism. In 1905, Einstein published an article: “On a
Heuristic Point of View about the Creation and Conversion
of Light.”20 He showed that the thermodynamic properties of
thermal radiation could be described by comparing the
radiation to a gas of light quanta (later called “photons”).
Applying this assumption to the photoelectric effect, he
obtained a simple relation (the “Einstein equation”) between
the frequency of incident light and the energy of the electrons
freed from the metal. Einstein’s “heuristic point of view” so
obviously contradicted some known properties of electromagnetic radiation (such as interferences and diffraction) that
it was received with scepticism. In 1916, however, the careful
experiments of Millikan confirmed the Einstein equation.
Another experiment went further in the same direction.
When a beam of X-rays falls on a sample of matter, a fraction
of the beam is deflected (what is called “scattering”) and its
wavelength increases. This phenomenon cannot be explained
LURÇAT
43
by classical electromagnetic theory. In 1923, however, Arthur
Holly Compton’s experiments showed that it could be understood by making use of the hypothesis of light quanta, if they
are endowed not only with energy but also with momentum.
The scattering of X-rays (now called the Compton effect) is
described as a collision between an X-quantum and an
electron. From this point on, light quanta seemed to possess
all the attributes of particles. The Compton assumption
implies a definite relation, well confirmed by experiment,
between the increase in wavelength and the angle between
scattered and incident radiation.
Thus electromagnetic theory found itself in a strange
situation: from interference and diffraction experiments
followed the inescapable conclusion that radiation has a wave
nature, while other experiments, such as those regarding the
photoelectric and Compton effects, convincingly proved its
corpuscular nature. While this mysterious duality remained
unexplained, it was generally recognized as a fact. There were
still opponents to the light quanta, however, and Bohr was
one of them. His point of view was well expressed at a
conference given in 1922:
In spite of its heuristic value, however, the
hypothesis of light-quanta, which is quite irreconciliable with so-called interference phenomena, is
not able to throw light on the nature of radiation.
I need only recall that these interference
phenomena constitute our only means of investigating the properties of radiation and therefore of
assigning any closer meaning to the frequency
which in Einstein’s theory fixes the magnitude of
the light-quantum.21
What did Bohr have against the hypothesis of light
quanta? The relation that gives the energy of a quantum
(equal to the frequency multiplied by the Planck constant),
whatever its experimental success or “heuristic value” may
be, is meaningless. Indeed, the frequency can only be
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
measured using interference phenomena that are incompatible with the hypothesis of light quanta.
But why should one look for the meaning of a physical
concept? For classical concepts, such a problem did not arise:
the concepts of classical physics were supposed to be inherent
to the physical objects that they described; nature simply was
mathematical. Classical physicists might have repeated
Galileo’s famous assertion that the book of universe is written
in geometrical characters. As far as I know, the question about
the meaning of a physical concept was first explicitly asked in
Einstein’s seminal paper about relativity theory.22 He
explained there that the usual description of the motion of a
material point (based on coordinates as a function of time)
“has no physical meaning unless we are quite clear as to what
we understand by ‘time.’” He then analyzed the experimental
procedure allowing us to establish the simultaneity of two
events located at two different places; this analysis led him to
relativistic kinematics. The important point is that the
meaning of simultaneity is disclosed by the experimental
procedure that establishes it. The reasoning that goes from
experiment to meaning is radically different from that of
classical physics, which goes from a priori mathematical
principles to the interpretation of experiments. It deviates
from the metaphysical foundations of classical physics and
gets closer to phenomenology, according to which one should
abandon dogmatic certitudes and pay attention to modes of
givenness.
When he looks for the meaning of frequency in the
experimental method for its measurement, Bohr follows in
Einstein’s footsteps; but while Einstein came back to the
Galilean identification of the universe with geometry, Bohr
did not stop moving forward towards phenomenological
thought.
Quantum Mechanics
One of the main tools used by Bohr to work out his 1913
theory of atoms was found in the relations between quantum
LURÇAT
45
and classical theories. The stationary states of the hydrogen
atom can be numbered according to increasing energies. The
number of a state is called its quantum number. Bohr noticed
that the numerical results obtained by application of the
quantum laws approach the classical results when the
quantum number becomes very large. This “correspondence
principle” was well borne out afterwards. Between 1919 and
1925, Bohr and his followers worked out the consequences
of the correspondence principle. It turned out that, in the
simplest cases, important results could be obtained, especially
about the interactions between atoms and electromagnetic
radiation; but the “systematic guessing guided by the correspondence principle”23 failed as soon as one dealt with any
systems except the simplest ones. For instance the hydrogen
atom, with its single electron, lends itself well to these
methods, but for the helium atom, which has two electrons,
they no longer work. Physicists needed to depart further from
classical physics.
The decisive step was taken in 1925 by Heisenberg. In his
article “On the Quantum-Theoretical Re-interpretation of
Kinematic and Mechanical Relations,”24 he showed how, by
transforming the differential equations of classical mechanics
into difference equations, one could get a formulation of the
expected theory—“quantum mechanics,”as it was called by
Max Born. While in classical mechanics the physical
quantities are represented by numbers, in the new theory they
are represented by matrices. Very soon this “matrix
mechanics” became a powerful tool, able to deal successfully
with problems that had defied the physics of correspondence
principle. But a theory that prescribes representing such
familiar quantities as the positions and momenta of the
electrons by mathematical objects other than numbers is not
easy to understand.
Before dealing with this difficulty, some facts should be
recalled. With Louis de Broglie’s thesis (1924), the waveparticle duality had been extended to electrons. Experiments
about the diffraction of electrons by a crystal soon confirmed
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that electrons could indeed behave as waves. In 1926, Erwin
Schrödinger raised this physical idea to the rank of a coherent
theory: wave mechanics. Starting with very different physical
conceptions he found again the results of matrix mechanics,
especially concerning the stationary states of the hydrogen
atom. He hoped that wave mechanics would lead to a theory
closer to classical physics. These hopes were to be disappointed by the ensuing developments: the Schrödinger wave
is not a classical wave, as shown by the essential fact that the
function that describes it is not real-valued but complexvalued. As Max Born showed, the squared modulus of this
function can be interpreted as a “probability of presence.”
Debates between Bohr and Heisenberg
Bohr at once recognized quantum mechanics as a father
recognizes his child. “The whole apparatus of the quantum
mechanics,” he stated in 1925, “can be regarded as a precise
formulation of the tendencies embodied in the correspondence principle.”25 Among all the debates of that time, the
most relevant for us here is the one between Bohr and
Heisenberg. While Heisenberg emphasized mathematical
formalism, Bohr wanted to understand physical concepts and
to explain them in common language. According to him,
whatever the merits of quantum mechanics, the problem of
wave-particle duality was not yet solved.
Heisenberg’s discovery of the indeterminacy relation
took place after long months of intense discussions with
Bohr. In his article,26 he first defined the notion of understanding: “We believe we understand intuitively a physical
theory when we can imagine qualitatively its experimental
consequences, and when at the same time we have recognized
that the application of the theory never implies internal
contradictions.” From the mathematical formalism of
quantum mechanics, he then deduced the indeterminacy
relations: that the product of the imprecisions with which the
position of an electron and its momentum are determined is
of the order of the Planck constant. (It will appear later that
LURÇAT
47
it is in fact a matter of inequality: the product is greater than
or equal to the constant.) He also gave a physical interpretation of the indeterminacy relation, in the case of the state of
lowest energy of the hydrogen atom. To determine the
position of the electron, one must use a microscope illuminated with a light of wavelength shorter than the size of the
electronic orbit (a notion that has no precise meaning in
quantum mechanics, but retains some sense as an order of
magnitude). Therefore we shall have to use gamma rays. The
gamma photon changes the position of the electron
(Compton effect), from which comes an imprecision in the
determination of the position; the product of the imprecisions about the position and the momentum satisfies the
Heisenberg relation.
As will be seen, Bohr criticized this demonstration; but let
us first have a look at both protagonists’ conceptions of
physical knowledge. They clashed during heated discussions
during the winter 1926-27. Unfortunately, “hardly any trace
has survived of their conversations in the documents of that
time.”27 There is, however, in an interview of Heisenberg in
1963, an analysis that agrees with what is known from other
sources:
The main point was that Bohr wanted to take this
dualism between waves and corpuscles as the
central point of the problem, and to say: “That is
the center of the whole story, and we have to start
from that side of the story in order to understand
it.” I, in some way, would say, “Well, we have a
consistent mathematical scheme and this consistent
mathematical scheme tells us everything that can
be observed. Nothing is in nature that cannot be
described by this mathematical scheme.” It was a
different way of looking at the problem because
Bohr would not like to say that nature imitates a
mathematical scheme, that nature does only things
which fit into a mathematical scheme. While I
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would say, “Well, waves and corpuscles are,
certainly, a way in which we talk and we do come
to these concepts from classical physics. Classical
physics has taught us to talk about particles and
waves, but since classical physics is not true there,
why should we stick so much to these concepts?
Why should we not simply say that we cannot use
these concepts with a very high precision,
therefore the uncertainty relations, and therefore
we have to abandon these concepts to a certain
extent. When we get beyond this range of the
classical theory, we must realize that our words
don’t fit. They don’t really get a hold in the
physical reality and therefore a new mathematical
scheme is just as good as anything because the new
mathematical scheme then tells what may be there
and what may not be there. Nature just in some
way follows the scheme.”28
After quoting this interview in his book about Bohr,
Abraham Pais adds: “Having talked countless hours with
Bohr on complementarity, I could imagine that to
Heisenberg’s ‘our words don’t fit’ he would have replied:
‘Our words have to fit, we have nothing else.’”
The difference between both conceptions most clearly
appears here. Heisenberg follows the Galilean tradition when
he imagines a nature strictly obedient to a mathematical
scheme. That can be seen also from his article, when he
explains finally:
The proposition that, for instance, the xcomponent of the velocity is “in reality” not a
number but the diagonal term of a matrix, is
perhaps no more abstract and no more unvisualizable than the statement that the electric field
strengths are “in reality” the time part of an
antisymmetric tensor of the spacetime world. The
phrase “in reality” here is as much and as little
LURÇAT
49
justified as it is in any mathematical description of
natural processes. As soon as one accepts that all
quantum-theoretical quantities are “in reality”
matrices, the quantitative laws follow without
difficulty.29
The ideas of abandoning the classical concepts and giving
up common language logically follow from Heisenberg’s
essential statement that “nature follows a mathematical
scheme,” which repeats the Galilean thesis that the universe
is written in mathematical language. As will be seen, Bohr
maintained and developed the idea that classical concepts and
common language remain necessary.
Thus the current idea of a “Copenhagen interpretation”
of quantum mechanics, supposedly worked out by Bohr and
Heisenberg, should be clarified and even rectified. The discussions between Heisenberg and Bohr were very fruitful for
both of them, and they gave rise to two different interpretations of quantum mechanics.30 The Heisenberg interpretation
continues the Pythagorean and Galilean traditions; it has
been adopted by many theoretical physicists. Bohr’s interpretation breaks with these traditions; it has deep similarities to
the Husserlian critique of the metaphysical foundations of
classical physics.
Complementarity
The close personal collaboration between Bohr and
Heisenberg came to an end in the summer of 1927, when
Heisenberg left Copenhagen to take up a professorship in
Leipzig. In September 1927, an “International Congress of
Physicists” took place in Como, on the centenary of
Alessandro Volta’s death. Bohr gave an address there: “The
Quantum Postulate and the Recent Development of Atomic
Theory.”31 He first characterized the situation of quantum
theory with respect to classical physics: on the one hand it
entails “a fundamental limitation in the classical physical
ideas, when applied to atomic phenomena”; but on the other
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hand, “our interpretation of the experimental material rests
extensively upon the classical concepts.”
Here a brief comment is in order: we are thus, from the
very beginning, at variance with the metaphysical foundations of classical physics. Concepts whose validity is subject to
a fundamental limitation cannot be found in nature as one
finds a character on a page; rather, the fact that they play an
essential role suggests that they are built by physicists to allow
an understanding of physical processes. Their privileged role
stems, inseparably, both from the features of human
knowledge and the nature of physical phenomena.
Bohr then expressed the quantum postulate: “to any
atomic process [it] attributes an essential discontinuity or
rather individuality, completely foreign to classical theories
and symbolized by Planck’s quantum of action” (by “individuality” Bohr means indivisibility).32 Indivisibility is indeed
completely foreign to the metaphysical foundations of
classical physics; in Western science the division of processes
or of objects into as many parts as may be necessary is
generally considered as a self-evident methodological
principle.33
Bohr then explains:
The postulate implies a renunciation as regards the
causal space-time co-ordination of atomic
processes. Indeed, our usual description of
physical phenomena is based entirely on the idea
that the phenomena concerned may be observed
without disturbing them appreciably. . . .Now the
quantum postulate implies that any observation of
atomic phenomena will involve an interaction with
the agency of observation not to be neglected.
Accordingly, an independent reality in the ordinary
physical sense can neither be ascribed to the
phenomena nor to the agencies of observation.
As to the indeterminacy relations, Bohr did not deduce
them from the interaction with the measuring device, but
LURÇAT
51
from classical considerations. In the theory of optical instruments, indeed, there are well-known relations between the
duration of a wave train and the width of its frequency
spectrum, and similarly between the spatial extension of the
train and the indeterminacy of its wave number. Combining
these results with the Planck relation between frequency and
photon energy, and the de Broglie relation between
wavelength and photon momentum, one gets the Heisenberg
relations.
This reasoning is essentially different from Heisenberg’s.
According to Bohr, the indeterminacy relations should not be
explained by the perturbing action of the photon used for
observation, but by the mutual limitation of the possibilities
of definition of the conjugated physical quantities.34 This
point lies at the center of the misunderstandings so often met
with, especially in pedagogical or popular accounts of the
Heisenberg relations. The central idea is the limited validity
of classical concepts, from which follows the limitation of the
possibilities of definition. The approximate validity of the
concepts of coordinates and momentum components allows
us to make picturesque representations of atomic processes.
But the very fact that their validity is only approximate
requires us to be careful when we ask such questions as
“What is the value of the coordinate?” or “What is the value
of the momentum component?” Asking such questions
carelessly means going no further than Galileo’s mathematical nature, with material points having definite values of
their coordinates and momenta. Heisenberg’s proposal takes
up again the idea of mathematical nature, simply replacing
the old mathematical concepts with new ones. Bohr’s
proposal is more fundamental: the meaning of any question
has to be clarified by defining the experimental device that
allows us to ask it concretely. Such is the meaning of an idea
that, from the point of view of the classical tradition, looks
strange and even incomprehensible—the reciprocal nonautonomy of atomic processes and experimental devices.
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The Debate with Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen (“EPR”)
In the years following the Como congress, a discussion began
between Bohr and Einstein. The account of it by Bohr is the
most illuminating of his texts.35 I will retain here only some
passages of particular relevance for a study of Bohr’s way
towards phenomenology. In 1935, Einstein, who had become
a refugee in the United States, published an article with Boris
Podolsky and Nathan Rosen entitled “Can QuantumMechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered
Complete?” (commonly known as EPR). Bohr’s answer was
published some months later under the same title.36
The first sentence in the abstract of EPR’s article at once
characterized the philosophical conception of the authors:
“In a complete theory there is an element corresponding to
each element of reality.” This shows how opposite are the
premises on both sides: as we have just seen, Bohr’s quantum
postulate states precisely that atomic processes are indivisible.
Einstein and his collaborators considered the case of two
particles A and B that have interacted in the past, between
which exists such a correlation that the measurement of a
quantity (coordinate or momentum) belonging to A immediately gives the value of this quantity for B. (That such correlations exist is a consequence of quantum mechanics.) EPR
states: “If, without in any way disturbing a system, we can
predict with certainty. . .the value of a physical quantity, then
there exists an element of physical reality corresponding to
this physical quantity.” Now, EPR continues, we can choose
to measure of A either its coordinate or its momentum.
Because of the correlation between A and B, these measurements will give the value of the coordinate or of the
momentum of B. As we did not touch B, we must conclude
that B has indeed determined values of the coordinate and the
momentum. Since according to quantum mechanics this
cannot be, it follows that the quantum-mechanical
description is incomplete.
In his answer, Bohr first outlined the general frame of the
debate. The apparent contradiction raised by EPR, he says,
LURÇAT
53
“in fact discloses only an essential inadequacy of the
customary viewpoint of natural philosophy for a rational
account of physical phenomena of the type with which we are
concerned in quantum mechanics. Indeed the finite interaction between object and measuring agencies conditioned by
the very existence of the quantum of action entails. . .the
necessity of a final renunciation of the classical ideal of
causality and a radical revision of our attitude towards the
problem of physical reality.”
Bohr then shows that the correlations, presented by EPR
in the abstract form of a mathematical expression for the
wave function of the two particles, can be realized by sending
the particles across suitably arranged diaphragms. He comes
at last to the core of the argumentation. The criterion of
physical reality proposed by EPR, he says, “contains an
ambiguity as regards the meaning of the expression ‘without
in any way disturbing a system.’” Of course there is no
mechanical disturbance of the system B. But there is “an
influence on the very conditions which define the possible
types of predictions regarding the future behavior of the
system” (Italics are Bohr’s). And he concludes: “Since these
conditions constitute an inherent element of the description
of any phenomenon to which the term ‘physical reality’ can
be properly attached, we see that the argumentation of the
mentioned authors does not justify their conclusion that
quantum-mechanical description is essentially incomplete.”
He then points out that the experimental procedures
permitting the definition of complementary quantities (such
as coordinate and momentum) are mutually exclusive; this
“provides room for new physical laws, the coexistence of
which might at first sight appear irreconcilable with the basic
principles of science.” The final conclusion then follows: “It
is just this entirely new situation as regards the description of
physical phenomena, that the notion of complementarity
aims at characterizing.”
We have here a further elaboration of ideas already
presented at the Como conference. But the critical passage of
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Bohr’s answer, quoted above, enjoys a special reputation
because John Bell had explained why he did not understand
it37 (One should not forget how fruitful Bell’s lack of understanding of Bohr’s conceptions was: it gave rise to Bell’s
fundamental discovery, perhaps the most important one in
theoretical physics in the second half of the twentieth
century). It may be useful, therefore, to comment briefly on
the italicized passage. In the first sentence, by “the very conditions that define the possible types of predictions regarding
the future behavior of the system” Bohr means the whole
experimental arrangement. The sentence then means:
choosing to measure either the coordinate or the momentum
of A has practical implications, because, in accordance with
this choice, we must modify the experimental device. The
second sentence then could be stated: in the quantum
domain, a relevant description of a real phenomenon is one
that includes the whole experimental arrangement.
The core of the contradiction between Bohr’s conception
and what he calls “the customary viewpoint of natural
philosophy” may appear even better in less formal accounts.
The physicist Robert H. Romer tells us how, as a graduate
student, he had the opportunity to spend an hour with
Einstein.38 “Do you really believe,” Einstein asked him, “that
if you would measure the z component of the spin of an atom
here, that might instantaneously have an effect on the spin of
another atom, perhaps miles away from here?” The question
here is about the correlation between two atomic objects,
already considered in EPR’s article, but in a different form,
one nearer to practically realizable experiments. Probably
inspired by David Bohm’s treatise on quantum mechanics,39
what Einstein had in view was not the coordinates and
momenta of two particles, but the spins of two atoms. To be
even nearer to experiments that have been really carried
through, we shall now speak about the correlated polarizations of two photons, emitted by a calcium atom. The result
of the measurement of polarization of photon A is random,
and the same is true for photon B. But as the two photons
LURÇAT
55
have been emitted by the same atom, when we know the
result of measurement A we can predict with certainty the
result of measurement B, and conversely. What Einstein refers
to, then, is the following paradoxical question: if the two
photons are far apart, how can the result of one of the
measurements have an influence on that of the other one?
The correlation of both experimental results has been
well proved now; for instance, in Gisin’s experiments both
measurement devices are more than 6 miles apart.40 Einstein
had always considered such correlations (which during his
lifetime were never experimentally proved) as unacceptable;
this opinion justified his opposition to quantum mechanics. In
1947, speaking to his friend Max Born about the statistical
interpretation of quantum mechanics (and hence about
quantum mechanics itself), he wrote: “I cannot, consequently,
believe it really, for the theory is incompatible with the
principle according to which physics must represent a space
and time reality, without spooky action at a distance.”41
Let Bohr and Husserl answer Einstein in an imaginary
dialogue:
“I had,” says Bohr, “answered in advance in
general terms in my Como report. What the
quantum postulate says is precisely that quantum
phenomena have a character of indivisibility
completely foreign to classical physics. Of course
one may be surprised at a feature so remote from
our every day experience, but there is nothing
unacceptable here.”
Husserl adds for his part: “When you speak about
atoms (or photons), you have in view small objects
belonging to ‘nature, which is in itself mathematical.’ You do not take into account the way by
which these supposed objects come to our
knowledge. It seems that now, experiment is for
you no longer anything else but a way of checking
the theories. If the raw experimental facts (the
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click of a counter, or a trace in a Wilson chamber)
were mere signs for elements of the mathematical
nature, one could disregard the signs and care only
about the signified. But as I have explained long
ago, it is misleading to think that in physics we are
dealing with ‘true’ physical things, while the
appearances are only signs of these true things. As
I said, ‘the perceived physical thing itself is always
and necessarily precisely the thing which the
physicist explores and scientifically determines
following the method of physics.’42 Now there is
nothing in the experimental results that would
allow us to state that the part of the experimental
arrangement located in A, for instance, deals with
a definite partial object, named the photon A; we
can only say that the complete experimental
arrangement deals with the radiation (two photons
per atom) emitted by calcium atoms. We must
abide by what is or can be actually perceived.”
“This is,” Bohr adds finally, “precisely what you
did at the time of your seminal article about
special relativity, when you discarded Newton’s
absolute space (at that time an essential part of the
supposed mathematical nature) because it has no
counterpart in the experimental methods of
measuring distances and durations.”
To follow Bohr’s and Husserl’s wise advice, we should
mention measurements carried out on the “biphotons”
emitted by calcium atoms. The correlation between the
results recorded by both parts of the experimental
arrangement (photomultipliers and polarizers on both sides)
shows that as far as the polarizations are concerned, the
biphoton is not separable into two photons. This result is
surprising, but it is the case. One of the great merits of EPR’s
article is that it raised the problem of distant correlations, a
striking proof of the originality of quantum phenomena.
LURÇAT
57
Bohr’s Report about His Discussions with Einstein:
Complementarity
This report was published in 1949, in a volume of the
collection “The Library of Living Philosophers” devoted to
Einstein.43 Going back over the successive stages of the
debate, Bohr improved or corrected several of his formulations, nearing a phenomenological approach. First he
reviewed the role of classical concepts, which he considered
essential for the description of experiments and their results
to be communicable to other people. Bohr then critically
examined the interpretation of the indeterminacy relation. “A
sentence like ‘we cannot know both the momentum and the
position of an atomic object,’” he explained:
raises at once questions as to the physical reality of
two such attributes of the object, which can be
answered only by referring to the conditions for
the unambiguous use of space-time concepts, on
the one hand, and dynamical conservation laws,
on the other hand. While the combination of these
concepts into a single picture of a causal chain of
events is the essence of classical mechanics, room
for regularities beyond the grasp of such a
description is just afforded by the circumstance
that the study of complementary phenomena
demands mutually exclusive experimental arrangements.
Let us comment on this passage. Energy and momentum,
subjected to conservation laws, allow a causal description of
atomic processes. In the Compton effect, for instance, the
collision between a photon and an electron—which in the
initial state are supposed to have definite values of energy and
momentum—is the cause of a final state in which both
particles take different directions (“scattering”). This
description allows us to discover a relation, well confirmed by
experiment, between the deflection of the X-radiation and
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the increase of its wavelength. But on the other hand a spacetime description of the X-beam is necessary for the definition
and measurement of its wavelength; such a description corresponds to experimental situations where diffraction
phenomena, described in terms of waves, can take place.
Bohr’s comment, then, is that these two descriptions require
mutually exclusive experimental arrangements. This allows a
rigorous critique of the quoted sentence (“We cannot know
both”), which implicitly assumes that the particles really have
at any time, as in classical mechanics, determined values of
coordinates and momenta. According to the Galilean
conception of nature as in itself mathematical, one may speak
about “the position (or the momentum) of the particle,”
without wondering whether these words have a precise
meaning. Bohr requires us to become aware that a particle
has such an attribute (coordinate or momentum) only as a
part of a relevant experimental arrangement. As the arrangements relative to coordinate and momentum are mutually
exclusive, the criticized sentence has no rigorous meaning.
This example shows how complementarity requires us to
get rid of the “nature mathematical in itself ” and relate any
statement about atomic objects to the experimental situation
in which it can be tested.
Bohr’s Report about His Discussions with Einstein:
The Observer and Objectivity
The report then described Einstein’s objections to some
quantum statements. In his answers, Bohr always implemented the above stated complementarity principle. He also
dealt with the random aspect of atomic processes (This is an
aspect which can be easily observed if one uses a radioactive
source of weak intensity and a counter: the only reasonable
description of the time sequence of the clicks of the counter
is as a random sequence). According to Dirac, individual
effects of that kind correspond to a choice on the part of
nature. According to Heisenberg, on the other hand, in such
cases “we have to do with a choice on the part of the
LURÇAT
59
‘observer’ constructing the measuring instruments and
reading their recording.” As he quickly refuted both points of
view, Bohr put forward an interesting argument about
Heisenberg: “It is certainly not possible for the observer to
influence the events which may appear under the conditions
he has arranged.”
This sentence briefly settles both sides of the question of
the “observer.” The observer does not create or influence the
phenomenon, but he creates the conditions of the
phenomenon. On the one hand, the laws of atomic processes
are objective, independent of our desires and of fashions (at
least in their essential content); but on the other hand, the
properties of individual atomic objects can only appear when
we, physicists, prepare an experimental arrangement and
record the results. (Or else, when we prepare the
arrangement for the automatic recording of the results.) This
statement is not a dispensable comment: it is inscribed in the
very mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics. The
basic element of the formalism is indeed an amplitude, made
of two abstract vectors; one of them represents the preparation of an experiment, while the second one represents one
of its possible results.44 Without physicists, there is neither
preparation nor results. Of course the experimental results
are objective: if the experiments are correctly and honestly
carried out, their results will be (approximately) the same in
different laboratories and different countries. One can hardly
say, however, that they are independent of human beings,
because without human beings there would be no results.
In that respect, atoms differ from physical objects of
human or astronomical dimensions. One might try to
summarize this essential difference by saying that atoms are
invisible. This formulation, however, is too cursory. Microbes
and remote galaxies seem invisible as well, but they are able
to be seen. To see them, one magnifies their image with a
microscope or a telescope; as Galileo replied to those who
questioned the objectivity of the images given by his
telescope, perhaps lynxes, with their sight better than ours,
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
can see the satellites of Jupiter he had discovered. But atomic
objects make their entrance in the sensible world of appearances thanks to a much more complex and roundabout
process: in a counter or in a Wilson-type chamber, they come
into contact with a macroscopic system in an unstable state,
in which they trigger an avalanche-type process. For the
believer of “nature mathematical in itself,” such a difference
does not deserve any attention: atoms, like stones and stars,
are “in space.” But it is an essential difference from the point
of view of common sense, as well as for the phenomenologist,
whose field of study can be defined as “the method of the
analysis of essences within the sphere of immediate
evidence.”45 Furthermore, the phenomenologist has
something to add here, because for him the essential
difference between the modes of givenness of atoms on the
one hand, and of stones and stars on the other hand, points
out that they belong to different regions of reality.46
The misunderstandings between Bohr and most physicists
stem from his claim of an essential difference between
quantum phenomena and the world of classical physics. The
drama of physics, and more particularly of quantum physics,
is that it never admitted the notion of regions of reality or,
equivalently, the notion of essential differences. When
Galileo annexed sensible appearances to the world of mathematical concepts, he put an obstacle in the way of understanding what physics really is, an obstacle still not overcome.
In his study “Einstein and the Quantum Theory,”
Abraham Pais recalls his conversations with Einstein.47 There
we find one of the most striking examples of a refusal of
essential differences. I quote Pais:
We often discussed his notions on objective reality.
I recall that during one walk Einstein suddenly
stopped, turned to me and asked whether I really
believed that the moon exists only when I look at
it.
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61
There is no question that the moon existed before human
beings were there to look at it; all the same, quantum
mechanics describes phenomena as prepared and observed by
human beings. Abiding by “nature mathematical in itself ”
leads to insuperable problems. It would probably be wiser to
take into account the notion of regions of reality, admitting
that the moon, on the one hand, and atomic objects, on the
other hand, which are given to us in such radically different
ways, belong to different regions.
This being said, one should never forget that without
Einstein and some of his followers (David Bohm, John Bell),
who resolutely and perseveringly opposed Bohr’s views, we
would have perhaps gotten no further than the Bohrian
vulgate of the 1930s and 1940s, according to which there was
essentially no problem. Today mimetism and unanimity are
harmful to science.
Bohr’s Report about His Discussions with Einstein:
The Phenomenon
Finally the report recalled a review of some terminological
questions, made by Bohr in his contribution to the
conference, “New Theories in Physics” (Warsaw, 1938):
In this connection I warned especially against
phrases, often found in the physical literature,
such as “disturbing of phenomena by observation”
or “creating physical attributes to atomic objects
by measurements.” Such phrases, which may serve
to remind one of the apparent paradoxes in
quantum theory, are at the same time apt to cause
confusion, since words like “phenomena” and
“observations,” just as “attributes” and “measurements,” are used in a way hardly compatible with
common language and practical definition.
Both phrases are in fact quotations from Heisenberg. We
have already discussed the first one, and the second one can
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be found in his article on the uncertainty relations: “The
‘trajectory’ first comes into being by the fact that we observe
it” (“Die ‘Bahn’ entsteht erst dadurch, dass wir sie
beobachten”).48 Bohr then explained how one should understand the words “phenomenon” and “observation:”
As a more appropriate way of expression I
advocated the application of the word
phenomenon exclusively to refer to the observations obtained under specified circumstances,
including an account of the whole experimental
arrangement. In such terminology, the observational problem is free of any special intricacy
since, in actual experiments, all observations are
expressed by unambiguous statements referring,
for instance, to the registration of the point at
which an electron arrives at a photographic plate.
Moreover, speaking in such a way is just suited to
emphasize that the appropriate physical interpretation of the symbolic quantum-mechanical
formalism amounts only to predictions, of determinate or statistical character, pertaining to
individual phenomena appearing under conditions
defined by classical physical concepts.
Here, Bohr defines his rules: break with “nature mathematical in itself ” and use “practical definitions,” dealing with
experiments and their results. Describe them in the language
of classical physics, appropriate to the visible world. Keep to
the definition of the phenomenon: it occurs in conditions
determined by the physicist; it consists of macroscopic
events; it is within the reach of senses, hence it can be
described in “common language.”
Finally, in the use of the notion of attribute, Bohr sees the
danger of forgetting that position, momentum, and other
quantities relating to an atomic object can only be defined in
terms of a method of measurement, which implicitly supposes
LURÇAT
63
an indissoluble bond between object and measuring
apparatus. Of course, it is not always easy to follow these
rules, for an age-old tradition constantly incites us to ask:
Where is the atom? Which path did the photon follow? But
we know that we should answer these questions with
practical definitions: if you want to know which path the
photon has followed, build and use an apparatus designed to
give an answer.
Conclusion
In his Vienna lecture of 1935, Husserl summarized the
situation of modern physical sciences:
Mathematical natural science is a wonderful
technique for making inductions with an efficiency,
a degree of probability, a precision, and a
computability that were simply unimaginable in
earlier times. As an accomplishment it is a triumph
of the human spirit. As for the rationality of its
methods and theories, however, it is a thoroughly
relative one. It even presupposes a fundamental
approach that is itself totally lacking in rationality.
Since the intuitively given surrounding world, this
merely subjective realm, is forgotten in scientific
investigation, the working subject is himself
forgotten; the scientist does not become a subject
of investigation (Accordingly, from this standpoint,
the rationality of the exact sciences is of a piece
with the rationality of the Egyptian pyramids).49
In classical physics, the oversight of the subject manifests
itself in the form of belief in mathematical nature. Galileo
began with the sensible world of appearances; he then
amputated from it of most of its qualities, and, finally, denied
the reality of the suppressed qualities. (There is no essential
difference between the Galilean illusion and the present-day
naturalistic illusion, according to which the essence of subjec-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
tivity lies in the electrochemical processes that take place in
the brain.)50
With quantum physics, the negation of the subject began
to exert its corrosive action within the physics itself. The
classical physicist did not understand the nature of his
science; the quantum physicist does not understand his very
science, and, as we have seen, he is in many cases aware of
this lack of understanding. Locked up in the Galilean prison,
he does not see the key proposed by phenomenology, a key
that Bohr, to a certain extent, rediscovered by himself.
For a long time, atoms could be reached only by speculation, first philosophical, then scientific. It became possible
to perform experiments on atoms only when scientific instruments designed to comply with theoretical notions about
their nature could be made. To make counters and chambers
of various types, one must have the electromagnetism of
Maxwell-Faraday, notions about electrical discharge in gases
or about thermodynamics, and basic notions of atomic
theory. Atoms, molecules, nuclei, particles, which are not
parts of the sensible world of appearances, can have perceptible effects and become accessible to experiment, but only in
a society with a high degree of scientific and technical development. They are given to us in quite a different way than are
stones, trees or stars.
But the essential importance of this difference can be seen
only by getting out of the metaphysical matrix inside which
the growth of classical physics took place. As long as physics
is understood as dealing with “nature mathematical by itself,”
perceptibility, or lack thereof, will continue to be reputed
unessential. In the prevailing way of understanding quantum
phenomena, quantum mechanics is a universal theory, while
classical physics is merely an approximation valid for
processes involving actions large with respect to the Planck
constant. The subjective side of the difference thus falls out of
sight, and both the way to Bohrian conceptions and the way
to phenomenology are barred.
LURÇAT
65
Quantum mechanics is really, as René Thom once put it,
an “intellectual scandal”: a theory successfully used in many
different fields of science and technology, which most people
accept without understanding it. Husserlian phenomenology
proposes a frame in which this paradoxical lack of understanding might be understood, thereby opening a way
towards recovery. It invites us to enlarge our horizons,
especially by going back over the origins of physics (of
modern physics, but not only of it). It suggests that our
irrational attitude towards quantum mechanics is part of a
wider historical fact: the global lack of understanding of the
nature of science, which became an acute problem with the
advent of modern science. In the present situation of the
world, this problem has become particularly urgent.51
I would like to thank Pamela Kraus for her kind linguistic and
editorial help.
1
Declarations of Bohr reported by A. Petersen, The Philosophy of Niels
Bohr, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 19, pp. 8-14 (1963). See also
M. Jammer, The Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics, New York, John
Wiley & Sons, 1974, p. 204.
2
I use the convenient term “atomic” to refer to such physical entities as
atoms, molecules, nuclei, and particles.
3
R.P Feynman, The Character of Physical Law, Cambridge, Mass., MIT
.
Press, 1965, p. 129.
4 R. Penrose, in: R. Penrose, C.J. Isham (eds.), Quantum Concepts in
Space and Time, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1986, p. 139.
5
R. Thom, Prédire n’est pas Expliquer, Paris, Flammarion, 1993, p. 86.
6 Conclusive experiments about the violation of Bell’s inequalities have
been made by Alain Aspect and his collaborators in Orsay: A. Aspect, P
.
Grangier, G. Roger, Physical Review Letters, Vol. 47, p. 460 (1981); Vol.
49, p. 1804 (1982). More recently, I have been interested in the experiments of Nicolas Gisin and his group in Geneva: W Tittel, J. Brendel, H.
.
Zbinden, N. Gisin, Physical Review Letters, Vol. 81, p. 3563 (1998); A.
Stefanov, H. Zbinder, N. Gisin, A. Suarez, Physical Review Letters, Vol.
88, p. 120404 (2002). Additionally, I have considered those of Anton
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Zeilinger and his group in Vienna: G. Weihs, T. Gennevein, C. Simon, H.
Weinfurter, A. Zeilinger, Physical Review Letters, Vol. 81, p. 5039 (1998).
York, Harper and Row Publ., 1971. I translate from the French translation by Paul Kessler, La Partie et le Tout, Paris Albin Michel, 1972.
7
67
16
Such is the case, for instance, of the philosopher David Z. Albert’s book
Quantum Mechanics and Experience, Cambridge, Mass. and London,
Harvard University Press, 1992; of the historian of science Mara Beller’s
book Quantum Dialogue, Chicago and London, The University of
Chicago Press, 1999; of the physicist Frank Laloë’s article “Do We Really
Understand Quantum Mechanics? Strange Correlations, Paradoxes, and
Theorems,” American Journal of Physics, Vol. 69, pp. 655-701 (2001);
and of the physicist Bernard d’Espagnat’s book Traité de Physique et de
Philosophie, Paris, Fayard, 2002.
8
E. Husserl, article Phenomenology, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. 17
(1947) (first publication: 1929). See also E. Husserl, Collected Works, Vol.
8, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht/Boston/London, 1999.
9
Commenting on his answer to Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen, Bohr
writes: “Rereading these passages, I am deeply aware of the inefficiency
of expression which must have made it very difficult to appreciate the
trend of the argumentation.” N. Bohr, “Discussions with Einstein on
Epistemological Problems in Atomic Physics,” in: P Schilpp (ed.), Albert
.A.
Einstein, Philosopher-Scientist, New York, Tudor Publishing Company,
1949. This text is reprinted in: N. Bohr, Atomic Physics and Human
Knowledge, New York, John Wiley & Sons, 1958. Also in: J. Kalckar
(ed.), Niels Bohr Collected Works, Vol. 7, Amsterdam, Elsevier, 1996, p.
234. (In the following the Collected Works is abbreviated as BCW
.)
10
E. Husserl, Die Krisis der Europäischen Wissenschaften und die
Transzendentale Phänomenologie, §9h. Translation by David Carr: The
Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Evanston,
Northwestern University Press, 1970.
11
E. Husserl, The Crisis §9h. Translation quoted, p. 51. All the analysis in
the following section is a simplified summary of this paragraph of the
Crisis.
12
See E.A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical
Science (1924; revised edition, 1932), Doubleday Anchor Books,
Doubleday & Company, Garden City, N.Y., 1954.
13
E. Husserl, The Crisis, loc. cit.
14
L. Rosenfeld, Niels Bohr, Biographical Sketch, in: J. Rud Nielsen (ed.),
Niels Bohr Collected Works, Vol. 1, Amsterdam, North-Holland Physics
Publishing, 1972, p. XIX.
15
From W Heisenberg, Der Teil und das Ganze, Munich, R. Piper & Co
.
Verlag, 1969, chapter 3. English translation: Physics and Beyond, New
The remark about the frequency determined not only by the initial
state of the atom, but also by its final state can be found in Bohr’s Nobel
Conference (1922): The Structure of the Atom, in BCW Vol. 4, 1977,
,
pp. 467-482.
17
N. Bohr, On the Constitution of Atoms and Molecules, Part I, § 1; in
BCW Vol. 2, 1981, p. 167.
,
18
W Miller, “Semiclassical Methods in Chemical Physics,” Science,
.H.
Vol. 233, pp. 171-177 (1986). T. Uzer, D. Farrelly, J.A. Milligan, P
.E.
Raines, J.P Skelton, “Celestial Mechanics on a Microscopic Scale,”
.
Science, Vol. 253, pp. 42-48 (1991).
19
The interested reader may refer to: M. Jammer, The Conceptual
Development of Quantum Mechanics, New York, Mc Graw Hill, 1966;
B.L. van der Waerden, Sources of Quantum Mechanics, Amsterdam,
North-Holland, 1967; or to A. Pais, Niels Bohr’s Times, in Physics,
Philosophy, and Polity, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1991.
20
A translation of this article is given in: D. ter Haar, The Old Quantum
Theory, Oxford, Pergamon Press, 1967.
21
N. Bohr, The Structure of the Atom, above quoted conference; see p.
470.
22
A. Einstein, Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper, Annalen der Physik,
4th series, Vol. XVII, pp. 891-921 (1905). A translation of this article is
given in: H. A. Lorentz, A. Einstein, H. Minkowski, H. Weyl, The
Principle of Relativity, New York, Dover Publications, 1952.
23
This phrase belongs to van der Waerden, see reference 19.
24
W Heisenberg, “Über Quantentheoretische Umdeutung Kinematischer
.
und Mechanischer Beziehungen,” Zeitschrift für Physik, Vol. 33, pp. 879893 (1925). A translation of this article is given in van der Waerden,
reference 19.
25
N. Bohr, “Atomic Theory and Mechanics,” Supplement to Nature,
December 5, 1925, pp. 845-852. In BCW Vol. 5, pp. 273-280.
,
26 W Heisenberg, “Über des Anschaulichen Inhalt der
.
Quantentheoretischen Kinematik und Mechanik,” Zeitschrift für Physik,
Vol. 43, pp. 172-198 (1927). The original text is given in BCW Vol. 6.
,
There is a translation in: J.A. Wheeler, W Zurek, Quantum Theory
.H.
and Measurement, Princeton University Press, 1983.
27
I have used the book by Jagdish Mehra and Helmut Rechenberg The
Historical Development of Quantum Theory, Vol. 1 to 6, New York,
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Springer-Verlag, 1982-2001. See Vol. 6, “The Completion of Quantum
Mechanics, 1926-1941,” chapter 2. The quotation is from page 151.
28
Interview of Heisenberg quoted by A. Pais, Niels Bohr’s Times. .
.quoted above, pp. 309-310.
29
W Heisenberg, “Über den Anschaulischen Inhalt,” article quoted
.
above, end of § 4; translation quoted, p. 82.
30
See the books, already quoted, of J.Mehra and H.Rechenberg, and of
A. Pais, and above all the introduction and comments of J. Kalckar to
Vol. 6 of BCW
.
31
N. Bohr, ”The Quantum Postulate and the Recent Development of
Atomic Theory,” Nature, Vol. 121, pp. 580-590 (1928). Reprinted in:
The Philosophical Writings of Niels Bohr, Vol. 1, Atomic Theory and the
Description of Nature, Ox Bow Press, Woodbridge, Connecticut, 1987.
Also in: J.A. Wheeler, W Zurek, Quantum Theory and Measurement,
.H.
book quoted above; and Vol. 6 of BCW
.
32
“The inability of the classical frame of concepts to comprise the
peculiar feature of indivisibility, or ‘individuality,’ characterizing the
elementary processes.” N. Bohr, Discussions with Einstein. The passage
quoted is at page 34 of: N. Bohr, Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge.
op. cit.
33
Descartes, for instance, states this principle explicitly in the Regulae ad
Directionem Ingenii (Rule 13), and in the Discours de la Méthode, Second
part.
34
“Indeed, a discontinuous change of energy and momentum during
observation could not prevent us from ascribing accurate values to the
space-time coordinates, as well as to the momentum-energy components
before and after the process. The reciprocal uncertainty which always
affects the values of these quantities is (. . .) essentially an outcome of the
limited accuracy with which changes in energy and momentum can be
defined, when the wave-fields used for the determination of the spacetime coordinates of the particle are sufficiently small.” (N. Bohr, “The
Quantum Postulate,” § 3)
35 N. Bohr, Discussions with Einstein. I have analyzed other aspects of the
Bohr-Einstein debate in my book Niels Bohr et la Physique Quantique,
coll. “Points Sciences,” Paris, Editions du Seuil, 2001.
36
A. Einstein, B. Podolsky, N. Rosen, Physical Review, Vol. 47, pp. 777780 (1935). N. Bohr, Physical Review, Vol. 48, pp. 696-702 (1935). Both
texts are reprinted in: J.A. Wheeler, W Zurek, Quantum Theory and
.H.
Measurement, quoted above. Also in BCW Vol. 7.
,
LURÇAT
69
37
J. Bell, “Bertlmann’s Socks and the Nature of Reality,” Journal de
Physique, Vol. 42, Coll. C2, suppl. n°3, pp. 41-61 (1981). Reprinted in: J.
Bell, Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics, Cambridge
University Press, 1987.
38
R.H. Romer, Editorial: John S. Bell (1928-1990), “The Man Who
Proved Einstein was Right,” American Journal of Physics, Vol. 59, p. 299
(1991).
39
D. Bohm, Quantum Theory, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice Hall,
1951.
40
See the articles of the Gisin group quoted above, reference 6.
41
A. Einstein, letter to Max Born, March 3, 1947, in: M. Born (ed.), The
Born-Einstein Letters, London, Macmillan, 1971. French translation by
Pierre Leccia: Albert Einstein, Max Born, Hedwig Born, Correspondance
1916-1955, Commentée par Max Born, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1972.
42
E. Husserl, Ideen zu Einer Reinen Phänomenologie und
Phänomenologischen Philosophie. I. Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die
Reine Phänomenologie (1913), p. 99. Translation by F. Kersten: Ideas
pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological
Philosophy, First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology.
Edmund Husserl, Collected Works, Vol. 2, The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff
Publishers, 1982.
43
N. Bohr, Discussions with Einstein, see note 9.
44
This is explained in textbooks, for instance by Feynman: R.P Feynman,
.
R.B. Leighton, M. Sands, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. 3,
Reading, Mass., Addison-Wesley, 1965.
45
E. Husserl, Die Idee der Phänomenologie (1907), p. 14. Translation by
Lee Hardy: The Idea of Phenomenology, Kluwer Academic Publishers,
Dordrecht/ Boston/ London, p. 70.
46
E. Husserl, Ideen zu Einer Reinen Phänomenologie und
Phänomenologischen Philosophie. Drittes Buch: Die Phänomenologie und
die Fundamente der Wissenschaften, ed. by Marly Biemel, Husserliana 5,
The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1971. Translation by Ted E. Klein and
William E. Pohl: Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a
Phenomenological Philosophy, Third Book: Phenomenology and the
Foundations of the Sciences. Edmund Husserl, Collected Works, Vol. 1,
The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1980.
47
A. Pais, Reviews of Modern Physics, Vol. 51, p. 863 (1979). The quoted
passage is at page 907.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
71
48
W Heisenberg, article quoted above (note 26), §3, page 185 of the
.
original text.
Eve Separate
49
Eva Brann
E. Husserl, Die Krisis des Europäischen Menschentums und die
Philosophie, published as an Appendix of Die Krisis der Europäischen
Wissenschaften. Translation by David Carr in The Crisis. Philosophy and
the Crisis of European Humanity, a lecture presented before the Vienna
Cultural Society on May 7 and May 10, 1935.
50
This prejudice had been already aptly criticized by Erwin Straus, Vom
Sinn der Sinne, Ein Beitrag zur Grundlegung der Psychologie, 1st edition,
1935; 2nd edition, Berlin, Heidelberg, New York, Tokyo, Springer-Verlag,
1956.
51
Such is the problem that I study in my book De la Science à l'ignorance, Paris, Editions du Rocher, 2003.
In memory of John P. McNulty (1952-2005), an acute and
sensitive reader of great books and a lovely partner in our
seminar conversations, particularly about Paradise Lost.
Contents
1. Is there a Subtext?
2. Satan’s Eve: The Schismatic Pair
3. Eve Separate: The Mother of Modernity
4. Domestic Adam: The Clod Erect
5. Poetic Milton: The Devil’s Party
6. Insipid Heaven, Sapient Hell
7. Mismanaged Monarchy
8. Infected Paradise
9. Original Siring
10. Eve’s Happy Fault and Salutary Fall
11. Wisdom Without Their Leave
For stirring up thought in general and for particular insights I warmly thank
the members of a seminar on Paradise Lost held at St. John’s College on
October 30-31, 2005: Patricia Cook and George Lucas, Margaret and Steve
Crockett, Cecie and Paul Dry, Murray Dry, Emily and Sam Kutler, Gretchen
and Barry Mazur, Joyce Olin and Chris Nelson.
At lunch with Max Kronberg, then one of our juniors (who one and all
read Paradise Lost), I asked him why God made some angels, a third, to be
precise, prone to pride and jealousy. He shot right back: “Because he wanted
all this to happen”—the very answer to justify Milton’s ways to God.
My thanks to my colleagues in Annapolis: Tom May, who told me a
number of interesting things that I’ve made mine below, and Jonathan Tuck,
who looked at the piece with a keen eye.
After completing this piece I co-led a week’s worth of alumni seminars on
Paradise Lost with my colleague David Carl in Santa Fe. In its course pretty
much everything I had noticed was brought on the scene and a lot more
(much of it by my co-leader), which is here incorporated.
Eva Brann is a tutor and former dean at St. John’s College, Annapolis.
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1. Is there a Subtext?
Milton’s Paradise Lost is a poem of such panoramic grandeur
and such human acuteness as may wean one—and has even
weaned me—from a lifelong exclusive Homerophilia. Partly
its attraction is that it is insinuatingly suspect. I keep having
the sense that something is going on that runs right counter
to the overt text. There seems to be a separate, opposed
meaning. Should it be called a hidden agenda, a subtext? On
the supposition of trust—to which I warmly subscribe—what
the words in a book say is what the author means; it is simply
the reasonable faith that the writer knows how to express
himself. So if an attentive reader discerns an under-meaning,
there is in fact a subtext, a second probably more seriously
meant meaning. Such occulted meanings are associated with
esotericism, “insiderism,” the notion that the author speaks
with a forked tongue—one text for the naively simpleminded, another for the initiable. The purpose is to protect
the author from misapprehension by ungifted, and from
persecution by orthodox, readers.
But I don’t think great authors are often in that mode.
The deep matters they raise are too well guarded from overeasy access by their inherent difficulty to want the shield of
obscurantism, while from imputations of heterodoxy there is
really no protection; its odor cannot be masked.
Consequently I have a feeling, just a sense, that something
much stranger than the double intention of a subtext runs
through Paradise Lost: that Milton’s judgments denigrate
what his representations magnify, that his characters
contradict his condemnations and justifications. I have no
idea how much a close study of his published opinions or a
deep penetration into his private thoughts could establish the
truth; I feel terminally baffled by the points I’m about to
make. I keep having the sense that some truth in this cosmic
Christian drama keeps asserting itself to Milton as poet
which, as a theologian, he suppresses. But that notion implies
that the story of this temporal episode within eternity is not
BRANN
73
altogether a made fiction but has the power of unintended
consequences that belongs to living truth; I just don’t know.
So I’ll set out my sense, in brief.
2. Satan’s Eve: The Schismatic Pair
Satan lies in wait, hardly hoping that he “might find Eve
separate.” “Eve separate he spies” (9.422, 424). She has
separated herself from her consort Adam—“split,” as our
young now say. It is a good word, the English for the Greek
verb whence comes “schism,” breaking away. Satan, in turn,
addresses her as “sole wonder” and presents himself as
“single” (9.532, 536). He often speaks of himself as “alone”
(e.g. 2.975, 3.441), but “single” had then as now another
meaning as well: unmarried. And surely he woos her; he is
the primal seducer. But it doesn’t take much. Eve, that
crooked bone, is a born schismatic as Satan is a created one.
Or it is at least a great question just how he and his host of
fallen angels come to be heaven’s splitters, the aboriginal
protestants.
Here is how they are a pair, alike in features that bear the
name of badness in Milton’s book, but are attractive in
description, and what is more have the stamp of approval in
our day.
First then, Eve too wants to be alone. We respect that: “I
need time to myself, I need space.” She is indeed the instigator of her separation from a weakly reluctant Adam. “Eve
first” speaks up: “Let us divide our labors”—she is the
inventor if not of the division of labor then of separate work
spaces!—“Sole Eve, associate sole” he answers, meaning
more than he knows, the clueless man, but then he gets it:
“but if much converse perhaps / Thee satiate, to short absence
I should yield”—though she has pleaded efficiency rather
than surfeit (9.205 ff.). He, the “patriarch of mankind,”
lectures her on free will: “O woman. . . .” But “Eve / persisted,
yet submiss.” It is what we have learned to call the
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
passive/aggressive mode, the underdog’s determined selfdefense.
She is, like Satan, a dissimulator who keeps some things
private. For she has had a week to ponder Satan’s night
visitation in which, “Squat like a toad” he whispered suggestions in her ear (I imagine the left, for this is surely a parody
of the impregnating Holy Spirit who comes to the Virgin by
the right ear in many late Medieval paintings) and manages to
“raise / At least distempered, discontented thoughts” (4.806).
Thus she surely has more in mind than mere efficiency in
weeding Paradise as she separates from her husband. As she
will later say: “Was I to have never parted from thy side? / As
good to have grown still there a lifeless rib” (9.1153).
There is a whole list of similarities of situation and
likenesses of character between the fallen angel and the
woman, for which I could cite book and line: Both are kept
at a remove from their God, he by the Son, she by her mate.
His rebelliousness is proudly asserted, her resistance submissively masked, but both have that in them that is ready to
abrogate obedience: “Our great Forbidder” she calls God,
and Satan calls him “the Threat’ner” (9.815, 687). Satan is a
brilliant sophist on the ancient model, but his clever proof to
her that a God who inspires fear is no God, so that her “fear
itself of death removes the fear” (9.702), is matched by her
clever musings: “good unknown, sure is not had, or had / And
yet unknown, is as not had at all. / In plain then, what forbids
he but to know, / Forbids us good, forbids us to be wise? /
Such prohibitions bind not” (9.756).
She is willful, restless, venturesome, poignant in her
lapse, proud as the mother of mankind. Satan is willfulness
incarnate, a great engineer, the original Adventurer (10.440),
both as explorer and in the older sense of undertaking grand
ventures, such as the development of Hell, the colonizing of
earth, and the sponsoring of the great highway that makes
Hell and this world “one continent of easy thoroughfare”
(10.392). He is, in fact, a Promethean figure, a god at odds
with his Chief, who is a patron of invention and, in his
BRANN
75
perverse way, a benefactor of mankind (Sec. 1). He is the
instigating cause of the earth’s obliquity, that skewing of the
terrestrial pole which brings us seasonal variety and moral
diversity; he is the ultimate reason for human mortality and
the succession of generations (how on earth would Eden have
held all the promised increase of immortals?), in short, of
history. There is true pathos in the racking pain of his
inability to love: About to spoil Paradise, he curses familiarly
but eerily: “O hell!” he says, seeing the bright spirits, the
humans, “whom my thoughts pursue with wonder and could
love” (4.358). There is real candor in his confession of
unwillingness to repent: He concludes a meditation on his
certain relapse were he to submit with a chillingly final
choice, “Evil be thou my good” (4.110). And there is residual
receptivity to the influence of innocent grace: Seeing Eve,
alone, “that space the Evil One abstracted stood / From his
own evil, and for the time remained / Stupidly good” (9.463).
Satan has been said to be modeled on Iago, literature’s
most notorious bad man. They are both, to be sure, racked
with resentment for being passed over by their superiors, but
there is an enormous difference in their stature: Iago suffers
meanly and mutely, Satan grandly and candidly—at least by
and to himself.
Eve cannot match his stature, but there are two capstone
transgressions in which they are nearly equal. One is the drive
to explore, experiment, experience—as he sails through the
uncreated void to explore the created world, she dreams of
flying with him to behold the earth in its immensity, the first
human to ride the skies. The second is the desire for godhead:
He thinks himself God’s equal, and she, eating, has Godhead
in her thoughts (9.790).
3. Eve Separate: The Mother of Modernity
In short, they are the original moderns, he in God’s universe,
she in our world. For there is a generic modernity: asserted
individual will; unbounded experimental science (whose root
meaning is, wonderfully, the same as that of schism: dividing,
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
cutting off); chameleon-like adaptability (Lucifer-Satan is a
master of transformations, willed and imposed: cherub, toad,
serpent; Eve too undergoes some pretty dramatic changes);
future-oriented temporality (here Satan and the Son
cooperate, one to make sin endemic, the other to make
salvation attainable); and godlike creativity (such is attributed
to man by Pico della Mirandola in that manifesto of protomodernity, the “Oration on the Dignity of Man” of the
1480’s: Adam, man, has no fixed being; rather “our
chameleon” assumes by his own free will whatever form he
selects, and so he can be as God).
But this perennial possibility is realized predominantly in
historical modernity, our epoch, within which we are
temporal compatriots. We are indeed the progeny of Eve, for
with her all its deeper characteristics originate, above all
narcissistic individualism, the thirst for liberation, the lust for
experience, a hunger for equality, and a drive to resolve all
mysteries, “to leave no problem unsolved,” as a founder of
modernity puts it (Vieta, Analytical Art, 1591).
There is a startling story Eve tells Adam, a story of her
first awakening into consciousness (4.449). “With unexperienced thought” she goes to a smooth lake, bends over it—and
falls in love with what she sees, pining for her own image
“with vain desire”; she is the first self and image worshiper.
When she first sees Adam she doesn’t much like him; he is
“less fair, / less winning soft, less amiably mild.” She runs
away; Adam tells her that she is part of him, body and soul,
and she yields. Her first love is herself—even before Satan
leaps into Paradise. Is self-love ever innocent?
Now she gets what she is longing for, experience and
experiences, discovery by trying things out and stimulation by
affects deliberately aroused. She has eaten of the Tree of the
Knowledge of Good and Evil, which the Tempter calls
“Mother of science” (9.680). She has, instantly, grown “mature
in knowledge.” She knows what to call her fascination:
“Experience, next to thee I owe, / Best guide;” “thou. . .givest
access. . .” to secret wisdom (9.807). And in short order she
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77
invents novelties now well known to us; this wisdom of hers
has much of applied science, particularly political and
psychological know-how. She tells an outright, very politic
lie, the original lie on earth: She figures first that she might
keep the secret of the fruit so as to “render me more equal,
and perhaps, / A thing not undesirable, sometime / Superior;
for inferior who is free?” (9.823). After this very contemporary manifesto of family politics, she reconsiders to herself:
What if I do die, as promised, and he takes on another Eve?
Better to die together. But to him she cleverly claims that her
“growing up to godhead” was all done for his sake, and that
he must join her “lest thou not tasting, different degree /
Disjoin us, and I then too late renounce / Duty for thee, when
fate will not permit” (9. 883). A barefaced, self-serving lie!
Of course she has already invented drug-taking and
having ecstatic experiences, and instant knowledge; experiential learning too will be her invention (10.967). Shortly she
will propose birth-control—“willful barrenness”—and
suicide to him (10.987, 1001, 1042). Ask where all the snares
and escapes of our time come from, and the answer is: Eve.
To him she calls herself the “weaker sex” (9.383), for that is
what he thinks, but her submissiveness hides a huge ambition:
Satan gets to her by addressing her as Queen of the Universe,
Empress of the World, “a goddess among gods, adored and
served” (9.547). It cannot be a really meek, dependent
woman who glories in such appellations; it is, after all, what
domineering men want as well. Recall that the primary, the
horror-inspiring transgression of Mr. Kurtz in dark Africa is
that he accepts worship and human sacrifice as a god, and he
is a very demon of force. If anything she’s a born outlaw: To
the Serpent she interprets paradisaical life as one prohibition,
and for the rest “we live / Law to ourselves, our reason is our
law” (9.653).
But from one perspective she’s no outlaw nor a rebel
either. Our political progenitor, Locke, points out that
rebellare means “to go back to a state of war,” and that the
true rebel is the contract-breaking tyrant, not his imposed-on
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subjects; they are revolutionaries (Second Treatise, para. 226).
Now Satan can claim that his monarch has in fact revoked, if
not a social contract, then a heavenly understanding, and Eve
does claim that the single prohibition is irrational in principle
and defectively promulgated: She knows neither why the tree
is forbidden, nor what the punishment means, nor when it
will be imposed.
To return to my initial perplexity: There is no question
that the above is a skewed version of these events, that Milton
expresses more respect for Adam than for Eve, that he is not
unsympathetic when he allows Adam to call her “that bad
woman” (10.837), that Satan is the Evil One. There are
formulaic explanations for my unhistoric perspective:
Milton’s poem sets out Christian doctrine, not necessarily
orthodox but fervent; I am a post-Christian modern who
believes that the soundest part of modernity is rooted in
pagan philosophy. So what seems pernicious to him seems
admirable to me. Or, alternately, Milton was in fact a revolutionary, a republican, a defender of regicide, so naturally he
has some sympathy for the adverse party in heaven and on
earth. Both explanations have plausibility, and neither
resolves the perplexity: How do Satan and Eve come to be
such exact types of modernity? Is our world Satanic or was
Hell Luciferic, “light-bringing”?, meaning: is our present
condition the consequence of a devilish seduction—as
Goethe’s Faust sells his soul to the devil for the boon of
restless experience and grand enterprise—or is it really the
other way round: that Hell was from its founding the place
of enlightenment and progress—and we moderns found that
out?
4. Domestic Adam: The Clod Erect
And then, who is really dominant in the Original Pair? The
splendor of Adam’s looks is conveyed in sonorous lines. Satan
sees the pair, distinguished from the other creatures by being
“erect and tall, / God-like erect, with native honor clad / In
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naked majesty. . .though both / Not equal, as their sex and not
equal seemed; / For contemplation he and valor formed, / For
softness she and sweet attractive grace, / He for God only, she
for God in him: / His fair large front and eyes sublime
declared / Absolute rule” (4.288).
Here is what is odd. That Adam is a well-made creature
of fine bearing and natural dignity, a good man and loving
husband, is unquestionable. But not contemplation, nor
valor, nor absolute rule are in fact his forte. He is, to put it
plainly, an upright klutz, one of those amiable, fine males a
female might well cling to, well knowing she could run circles
around him—and so Eve does.
As for contemplation. In that wonderful interlude, Books
5-7, the archangel Raphael is sent to Paradise to warn and
instruct Adam—Adam, not Eve, who sits listening “retired in
sight” (8.41), having served the angel a paradisaical meal,
which the angel, hilariously, falls to and begins “with keen
dispatch / Of real hunger, and concoctive heat / To transubstantiate” (5.437). She listens on the sidelines to the story of
Satan’s war and defeat. To be sure, it all comes too late; he
has already leaped into Paradise and entered her imagination
in a dream—part of Heaven’s mismanagement I’ll talk of
below. But when Adam’s “countenance seemed / Entering on
studious thoughts abstruse” (8.39), that is, when the
theological account of Heaven’s battles and earth’s creation
are done and the astronomical part begins, she goes off to her
gardening “not as not with such discourse / Delighted, or not
capable her ear / Of what was high,” but preferring to hear it
from her husband; the angel, though gracious, is too stiff for
her.
Here I must interject two observations: first, the question
Adam asks that sets off Raphael’s account of hypothetical
rational astronomy is a cumbrous version of one asked him by
Eve the night before, together with assurances of submission:
“God is thy law, thou mine,” she begins and then gives the
loveliest speech of companionable conjugality imaginable:
“With thee conversing I forget all time / All seasons and their
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change, all please alike” (4.637)—to end it all abruptly by
posing the most embarrassing question of celestial mechanics:
“But wherefore all night long shine these, for whom / This
glorious sight, when sleep has shut all eyes?” She wants to
know nature’s purpose, and by implication, who’s at the
cosmic center. He gives a confidently ignorant answer, but
knows enough to ask the angel: “Something yet of doubt
remains. . . .” When he computes the world’s magnitude (he
actually can’t), how is it that the firmament with its
numberless stars seems to roll through spaces incomprehensible (he’s a natural Ptolemaean, as are we all) “merely to
officiate light / Round this opacous earth” (8.13)—same
question, more Latinate vocabulary.
Second, Raphael gives, oddly, the Catholic answer. The
preface by Bishop Osiander to Copernicus’s On the
Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (1543) tries to neutralize
the heliocentric revolution by ranking it as merely an alternative hypothesis, a mathematical simplification devised in
Plato’s phrase “to save the appearances,” that is, to mathematicize the phenomena. Raphael tells Adam, never mind
fact, “rather admire.” God has left his heavenly fabric to
human conjecture and disputing, “perhaps to move / His
laughter at their quaint opinions wide / Hereafter when they
come to model heav’n / And calculate the stars . . .to save
appearances” (8.75). So much for mankind’s first and
grandest and most theologically fraught science: “What if the
sun / Be center of the world. . .?” Of course the angel knows,
as we know from Copernicus, that when astronomical
obliquity enters the world after the fall, when equator and
ecliptic come apart at an angle, so that the sun appears to
spiral up and down the earth making seasons, the more
economical way to effect this phenomenon is to push the
earth’s pole askew. Yet even then Milton insists only that
“Some say he bid the angels turn askance / The poles of earth
twice ten degrees and more. . .some say the sun was bid turn
reins” (10.668) on the now-skewed elliptic—c. 23° 51', in
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fact—which obliquity produced corruption and pestilence
and variety of season and weather for us.
And Adam, the biddable, is “fully” satisfied when
enjoined to be “lowly wise,” to descend to “speak of things at
hand, useful.” For him “experience,” which widens Eve’s
horizon, teaches “not to know at large of things remote”
(8.173); he is content to be temperate in knowledge. So much
for contemplation, which means, after all, taking a wide point
of view, theorizing. Eve is—until cowed by her lapse—more
insatiable for wisdom than that, and a keener inquirer.
Now as for valor. We hear of his proneness to passion,
which he is warned against by Raphael (8.635), and of his
pusillanimity—he has to be told to have “self-esteem”
(8.572), that contemporary buzzword—and he is, though
inconsistently, upbraided by Eve for his weakness in letting
her separate from him (10.1155) and allowing Satan to
prevail. Michael, sent to comfort Adam, goes so far as to
answer thus his accusation that the beginning of man’s woe is
by women: “From man’s effeminate slackness it begins”
(11.634). This sedentary “domestic Adam” (9.315) has a
stodgy but infirm virtue that is no match for mobile,
venturesome Eve’s spirit of independence. In the end it is he
who cannot bear to be without her; she is, after all, one of his
bones. So much for valor and for authority: “Was she thy
God?,” the “sovran Presence” asks him (10.145); the very
thought had occurred to Eve (9.790). But at the least she is
used to having the final word, one way or another: The
“patriarch of mankind” has spoken “but Eve persisted, yet
submiss, though last. . .” (9.376)—a grimly hilarious line
written by a two-timed husband.
And he’s slow (though sweet) and inattentively clueless.
Eve has told him the tale of her self-love and how he at first
repelled her. When he regales Raphael, at the end of his
visitation, with the story of his own creation and of Eve’s, it
turns out he hasn’t listened at all: He thinks she ran from him
out of coyness; she “would be wooed, and not unsought be
won” (8.503). And when the great disaster has come, and
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Eve, doomed, offers him the fruit, why does he not, simple
man, think beyond the two options of dying with her or
getting a new Eve? Why doesn’t he refrain from eating and
intercede for her?
Clearly “domestic” and “dominant” are at odds here—
maybe it is the reality of the Adamic character, that ensouled
clod of earth, that is prevailing.
5. Poetic Milton: The Devil’s Party
Much stranger things are to come, so this might be a moment
to consider theological poetry. Blake says that Milton wrote
in fetters of Heaven and at liberty of Hell because “he was a
true poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it” (The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell). I don’t know what he meant,
but I think I know what it means: The devil is—or wants to
be—autonomous, a rule unto himself (as Eve thinks they are
in Paradise); he is literally a heretic—for “heresy” is a Greek
word that means “choosing,” or as we redundantly say,
“choosing for oneself.” In the realization of self-will and selfrule, he becomes innovative. Novelty is not new with him:
Heaven starts it, knowing the possible consequences, which
are therefore not wholly unintended. So also is this poet a
maker of newness: David’s Muse, Milton’s first muse, is to
sing “Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme” (1.16; not
the first one, though. Jon Tuck tells me that the line comes
from Ariosto). His Raphael tells Adam “The secrets of
another world, perhaps / Not lawful to reveal” (5.569).
Milton writes a new epic, not “sedulous by nature to indite /
Wars” and other old heroic and chivalric shenanigans (9.27),
yet his great interlude is a magnificent war poem, though
perhaps too embarrassing to Heaven to be revealed—Milton
reveals it. We might well ask: Where does the poem leave
Scripture? The poem is far more revealing; is it revealed? It is
far more visible, a huge, magnificent moving picture, a blind
poet’s telling—and showing—“Of things invisible to mortal
sight” (3.54), “lik’ning spiritual to corporeal forms” (5.573).
Is the imaging of spirits permissible? It is “in nightly visita-
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tions unimplored” dictated to him by his second Muse, his
“celestial patroness” Urania (9.21), though a heavenly, not, as
far as I know, an orthodox source. To be sure, Milton denies
that he means the pagan Muse of Astronomy: “The meaning,
not the name I call, for thou / Nor of the muses nine” (7.5).
But surely this is equivocation. The inspiration for his books
on the cosmos comes from the Greek source of enthusiasm
(literally from entheos, the god within), one “of the muses
nine,” though he disclaims her. And so this epic does not
replace but absorbs pagan epic and pagan science, and puts
Milton in a skewed position of accepting the splendor and
deriding the culture of pagan hell (see Sec. 6., below).
To give a name to the poet’s peculiar propensity: It is a
form of Manicheanism, the teaching that evil is real and
incarnable. In a long tradition, the Neoplatonists and their
Christian partisans held that badness is nonbeing, defect of
being. For example, Adam is, understandably, a confused
Neoplatonist: When he loses his wonted composure, he
nastily calls Eve in turn “serpent,” and “this novelty on earth,
this fair defect” (10.867), not sure whether a feminine being,
that “rib / Crooked by nature” is lacking in something or
oversupplied with “pride / And wand’ring vanity.” Milton’s
Satan has no such doubts: To him his evil being is real and is
accepted, no, vaunted as such, just as the darkness of hell is a
paradoxical illumination. Surely the poet who produces a
brilliant personification of evil is a perhaps unwitting,
perhaps half self-admitted follower of Mani, not exactly of
his doctrine but of the Manichean propensity for the personification of the kingdom of darkness.
There is another huge work that makes a novel tale of a
sacred story. As Milton had expanded the second and third
chapters of Genesis, comprising that book’s two alternative
accounts of the creation of man, into a huge epic, so Thomas
Mann developed his novel, Joseph and His Brothers, from
twenty-six chapters in Genesis, telling the story of Jacob and
his sons into nearly two thousand pages; he was executing a
plan conceived by Goethe. But Mann has his “irony” to
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extenuate this dubious and so doubly engaging enterprise. He
hovers above faith, and his ultimate belief is in the allusive
imaging and reference-fraught story-telling itself.
Perhaps the poet’s—and this poet’s—indefeasible partisanship for the devil, that sets him “more at liberty” when
writing of Hell, is in just this re-creative activity: Satan thinks
he might not be a creation but an original, a self-created being
(5.860). Poets too want to be original, themselves creators, if
not of themselves, of their worlds. It makes them great
iconodules (image-servers), for they love their creatures.
Iconodulia, a term from the old iconoclastic (image-breaking)
battles culminating in the eighth and ninth centuries, was by
the opponents understood as idolatry (idol-worship), praying
to, not through, the icon. The charge goes way back, to that
ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy spoken of in
Plato’s Republic, where images are devices to distance us
from Being by ensnaring us in the desire for sights (601 ff.).
Iconodulia is a sin of which Satan, the proudly unattached
leader of that “atheist crew” (6.370) is not guilty. But who
can say that blind Milton did not love his invisible universe,
made by him and made visible to himself, better than the real
world made by God and made invisible to him, and, perhaps,
better than the ultimately invisible God? He does not, in any
case, succeed in making God lovable—or his Son interesting:
“Hail Son of God,. . .thy name / Shall be the copious matter
of my song / Henceforth . . .” (2.412), he says after two
terrific books about Satan. But the “copious matter” of the
remaining ten is not the Son either, but more Satan—and Eve.
I’ll be concentrating on the problematic vision and
thought-raising qualities of Milton’s poetry, so I want to
make here a declaration of love to the texture of words
through which these are delivered: the steady English beat of
the more than ten thousand iambic lines with their ever
varied stresses in the hyper-English produced by the mixed
Latinate and Anglo-Saxon diction—which with a little
practice begins to read like mankind’s original language.
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6. Insipid Heaven, Sapient Hell
The first two books of Paradise Lost are of paradise lost, of
hell gained. Heaven itself comes on the scene only later,
mostly at war. And this is well, because it is not attractive. I
recall Bernard Williams saying in an encyclopedia article on
death that Heaven’s eternity must be boring—all that
everlasting monotonic intoning. (In fact, in Milton’s Paradise
they play harps and occasionally sing in parts. Bach knew
better; witness the glorious victory march-by in heaven on the
words of Revelation 12:10, “Now is the salvation and the
power and realm and the might” celebrating the Son’s defeat
of Satan [Cantata fragment 50]). So the notion of celestial
tedium is wrongheaded, for incorporeal substances don’t
experience the weariness of the bodily senses. What is
offputting in the poetry of heaven is God’s ultimate invisibility, for it is simply mystifying how formless light can by
mere effulgence in fact produce any shaped copy, be it an
ethereal image—the Son (6.680)—or an embodied one—
man. I suppose there’s plenty of theology about it. In any
case, God is heard out of invisible obscurity: “Glorious
brightness. . ./ Throned inaccessible” (3.375); to Satan it
looks like “Thick clouds and dark” (2.263), to Heaven it’s a
“golden cloud” (6.28); sometimes God speaks vengefully,
from a “secret cloud” (10.32).
He often speaks peremptorily and on one occasion even
with pointedly offensive vulgarity, when he promises to seal
up hell: “See with what heat these dogs of hell advance” —as
if they were bitches. He has suffered them to enter and
possess earth, to puzzle his enemies, “That laugh, as if transported with some fit / Of passion,” thinking that it has not
happened on purpose. No, they were called up on purpose,
“My hell-hounds, to lick up the draff and filth” of man’s
polluting sin, so that gorged they might nigh burst “With
sucked and glutted offal” (10.625)—infernal vacuum
cleaners. In a human, that’s surely gross talk.
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But Heaven itself, with its unvarying obedience, is
vapid—not surely to inhabit but, unavoidably, to read about.
It is the poetic problem of goodness, which is, ipso facto,
even-tenored, uneventful, not the stuff of intense drama or
vivid imagery. It does not have the snags and hollows that
throw shadows and catch our interest: Perfect globes are
intellectually perfectly beautiful, but who wants to look at
their image for long? It is why newspapers never report that
two hundred and eighty million people went to do
respectable work and came home to enjoy their families, but
always that someone or other killed, raped or stole. So
Heaven is not interesting until there is civil war, and even
then the so easily victorious Son fades against the brilliant,
beaten Adversary, whose legions the heavenly general sweeps
so easily over the brink into chaos, like Indians driving herds
of buffalo over cliffs into canyons. Moreover, who can
exonerate Heaven from the charge that in its war was born
the notion that might makes right—and the hoary justification that right is in this case might.
As if to make up for its Chief ’s invisibility and its
remaining inhabitants’ spotlessness, Milton makes heaven
and its furniture baroquely opulent. The Son’s war chariot
with its four Cherubic faces and eyes all over, made of beryl,
crystal, sapphire, amber and all the colors of the rainbow, is
extravagantly strange (6.753); there is no such vehicle even in
Revelation, one of the Biblical sources for the war in Heaven
(12:7). This is not the style of Hell.
It is, to begin with, a place of somber and restrained
beauty. Opulence calls for Corinthian capitals, which are, as
Palladio says, the most beautiful and elegant of the orders of
columns. Pandemonium, however, rising “like an exhalation,
with sound / Of dulcet symphonies and voices sweet / Built
like a temple” (1.711)—a pagan temple, of course—employs
the severe and chaste Doric order with a golden architrave,
for gold is mined in hell. Mulciber, Greek Hephaestus, the
most gifted of the pagan gods, is the architect. The inside is
illuminated by starry lamps.
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It is a People’s Palace, and there a consultative parliament
is held, a large inclusive synod (6.156) such as is never called
in monarchic heaven. Hell is a sort of democracy. Its
presiding chief was once Latin Lucifer, the “Light-bearer,” so
called for his former brightness (7.131), but in my anachronistic ear there sounds also the word Enlightenment). Now he
is Hebrew Satan, the “Adversary” and Greek Devil, diabolus,
the “Accuser.” He is a revolutionary, a “Patron of Liberty,”
not only in seeming, as Abdiel, the counterrevolutionary
angel, claims (4.958), but in fact, as one who has been made
“free to fall” (3.99), has claimed that right for himself, and
finds his companions worthy of liberty and honor (6.420).
Thus he is termed by his lieutenants “Deliverer from new
lords, leader to free / Enjoyment of our right as gods”
(6.451). He has a bill of accusations against his tyrant, not
unlike the one found in our Declaration of Independence; he
accuses God of enforcing vassalage, “Forced hallelujahs”
(2.243), and, ironically but truly, of requiring image-worship
(5.784) in interposing the Son, his image, between himself
and his angels. Interposition is indeed the sub-theme of
Milton’s justification—strange term—of the ways of God to
man: the Son as intermediary between God and the angels
and as intercessor in man’s behalf, Adam as God’s representative to Eve and interpreter to her of Heaven’s messages, and
even Satan as Hell’s emissary to earth. This God is a deus
absconditus whose ways are incessantly indirect.
Satan is, moreover, a real leader, intrepid, of unconquerable will (2.106). He heartens and rallies his troops, and
they respond to him with trusting enthusiasm (1.663),
rejoicing in their “matchless chief ” (1.486). He is strangely
like the Son in willing to volunteer for fatally dangerous
service to his people—to go through Chaos where no devil
wants to go, to break out of by now homey hell to explore
new lands for his people’s occupation (2.402); thus he is
raised to “transcendent glory” (2.427).
Proud, rebellious, and monarchical in his spirit though he
is, he knows how to assure his loyal band of their equality: “O
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friends” (6.609) he addresses them at their great crisis, but
even before his magnificent speeches to them were all about
equality—their equality in freedom if not in power. For as
Abdiel, the Tory, points out, Lucifer is himself a prince. But
he presents himself as primus inter pares, first among equals:
No one more often utters the word “equal” linked with
“free”: “or if not equal all, yet free, / Equally free; for orders
and decrees / Jar not with liberty, but well consist. / Who can
in reason then or right assume / Monarchy over such as live
by right / His equals, if in power and splendor less, / In
freedom equal?” (5.791). And as he speaks, so, it appears, he
rules in the spirit of our Declaration: that all angels are
created equal, that they are endowed, Satan would say by
their heavenly nativity, with certain inalienable rights, among
which one is liberty—that is, their freedom derives from an
equality of rights.
From Satan’s politics to his endowments: He sits exalted,
“by merit raised / To that bad eminence” (2.5). He is a
sublime psychologist and the only wit, a mordant one, in this
high drama—except of course for Milton himself, whose wit,
insinuated into the action through his whiplash enjambments
and his fork-tongued puns, is borrowed by Satan who can
have no insight or wit but his maker’s. In Satan’s “Indeed,”
when Eve naïvely tells of their perfect freedom in heaven
except for the forbidden tree (9.656) you can hear the supercilious Englishman. When he tells Hell how he seduced Man
he adds, with a witty contempt: “with an apple;” it’s a sheer,
wickedly derogatory invention; I don’t think it was just a
juicy apple, though Satan’s put-down prevailed. Here is a
pertinent ditty (see Sec. 11.) from the early 15th century:
And all was for an appil,
An appil that he tok.
Ne hadde the appil taken ben,
The appil taken ben,
Ne hadde never our lady
A bene heven quene.
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Blessed be the time
That appil taken was.
Therefore we moun singen
‘Deo gracias.’
But Satan is more than smartly cynical; he is a great
inventor and engineer. The manufacture of that tremendous
contrivance, the cannon, which he builds in heaven, that
devilish engine which nearly routs the heavenly host in the
most tremendous cannonade I’ve ever read of, is vividly
described by Raphael in Book 6. Like Persian Xerxes, who cut
a mountain off from its mainland (Herodotus 7.22), he
refigures nature: His offspring Sin and Death cut through
Chaos “by wondrous art / Pontifical” (that is, bridge-building,
10.312) to join Hell to Paradise.
But back to Hell itself, a place of relative harmony: “O
shame to men! Devil with devil damned / Firm concord
holds, men only disagree” (1.496). It is a place of music, of
“partial,” that is, of complex polyphonic sound, as contrasted
with the simple celestial unisons, I imagine. It is also “partial”
as being of the devil’s party, of their heroic deeds, and it takes
with “ravishment / The thronging audience” (1.552).
There is, above all, the sweetest soul-charming discourse:
high reasoning “Of providence, foreknowledge, will and fate,
/ Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute.” Round and
round it goes as do conversations in a serious college: “And
found no end” (1.560). They talk, as do we on earth,
philosophy: of passion and apathy, of good and evil, of
happiness and final misery. They have the experience for it; it
is not talk abstracted from life but real inquiry.
“Vain wisdom all, and false philosophy,” this passage
concludes. That is Milton’s way with Hell and the devils. It
and they are depicted gloriously and dismissed ignominiously.
It happens over and over. The representation raises what the
judgment crushes.
Hell is altogether puzzling. Following an old Patristic
tradition, Milton has all the fallen angels assume, as devils,
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the form of the pagan gods, some Levantine and horrible,
some Greek and graceful, all vivid (1.375) and more distinctively individual than ever were the loyal archangels. All are
beautiful, and though their looks deteriorate, as angels they
can never be all bad in soul or all spoiled in form (1.483).
Satan, as I have imagined him, is the aboriginal modern,
not only in his politics, but perhaps most of all when he is at
home in hell where he asserts a modern hallmark: subjectivity, solipsistic ideation, inner-world creation: “The mind is
its own place, and in itself / Can make a heav’n of hell, or hell
of heav’n. / What matter where, if I be still the same. . .?”
(1.254). But he is not only a post-Christian, he is also a pagan
pre-Christian; he encompasses the human salvational
episode, coming before and after as it were. As G. K.
Chesterton says: “It is profoundly true that the ancient world
was more modern than the Christian” (Orthodoxy, Ch. 9).
As fallen Lucifer, in Hell Satan belongs to the Greek crew,
though more as hero than god—albeit as god too. For like the
Christian God he gives birth, though not to a Son but to a
daughter, and like Zeus he gives birth through his head, not
to wise Athena but to canny Sin. Yet primarily he is like the
Iliad’s Achilles, first in battle, and offended by a sense of
injured merit (1.98). The relation is, however, perverted for
the occasion, as displayed in Satan’s adaptation of Achilles’
words in Hades: “I would wish rather to be a slave in service
to another. . .than to be ruler over all the dead” (Odyssey
11.488). For Satan, at home in Hell, says instead: “Better to
reign in Hell than serve in Heaven” (1.263); it is how he
proudly counters good Abdiel’s “Reign thou in Hell thy
kingdom, let me serve / In heav’n God ever blest” (6.183).
Milton, to be sure, disowns Achilles: His is an “argument
/ Not less but more Heroic than the wrath / Of stern Achilles”
(9.13). And he most assuredly disowns the philosophizing of
Hell. In Paradise Regained Satan advertises ancient wisdom as
the final temptation of Jesus, sounding much like the
catalogue of a Christian college trying to persuade applicants
that a liberal education should include Greek philosophy: “All
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knowledge is not couch’d in Moses’ law, the Pentateuch or
what the prophets wrote, / The Gentiles also know, and write,
and teach / To admiration, led by Nature’s light” (P.R. 4.225).
So “To sage philosophy next lend thine ear, / From Heaven
descended to the low-rooft house / Of Socrates” (4.272).
Jesus rejects it all, though, like Milton, he is an admirer of
Plato and his Socrates. He says that Socrates “For truth’s sake
suffering death unjust, lives now / Equal in fame to proudest
Conquerours” (3.96), but explains that this “first and wisest
of them all profess’d / To know this only, that he nothing
knew” (4.293). Even so he rejects Satan’s temptation. He
neither knows nor doesn’t know these things; his “light is
from above;” any great reader must needs be “Deep verst in
books and shallow in himself ” (4.286). In this spirit Milton
comments on the pair asleep in Paradise: “O yet happiest if
ye seek / No happier state and know to know no more” (P.L.
4.774).
So heroic poetry, philosophical inquiry and book-learning
appear to be rejected as Satanic. But that’s the trouble; they
flourish in or about Hell, which is a display case of antique
lore and heroic character and liberal artistry and free inquiry
and sophistic skill. Belial is Hell’s most beautiful god “For
dignity compos’d and high exploit”—here comes the
customary whiplash—“But all was false and hollow,” for “he
could make the worse appear / The better reason” (2.110);
this is verbatim the sophistry attributed to the Clouds in
Aristophanes’ play, those clouds that are parodies of Plato’s
Ideas and the sponsors of Socrates’ Thinkery. In Hell is to be
found all that was exciting in its splendor or rousing in its
dubiousness in paganism. In Hell as in life there is no
escaping its attraction, and all the poet’s damning postscripts
cannot dim the glories of his “infernal pit.” Milton’s Satan
speaks gallantly; Milton explicates: “Vaunting aloud—but
wracked with deep despair” (1.126, my dash); it’s still the
gallantry that resonates.
“Insipid” means tasteless, savorless, as sapor means taste,
savor: Milton’s Adam, influenced by the taste of the
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forbidden fruit of knowledge, discovers its etymological
connection with sapience, wisdom (9.1018). Hell is sapient as
hell; is that an inherent truth asserting itself?
7. Mismanaged Monarchy
If Hell, when not racked with supererogatory spasms such as
the yearly Hissing when all the devils turn into writhing
snakes (10.508), is a well-run republic, Milton’s Heaven can
be said to be a mismanaged monarchy or firm. The
archangels’ inefficiency cries, so to speak to high heaven. Set
to watch out for escapees from Hell, Uriel, in his simplicity,
is, “for once beguiled” by Satan’s cherubic disguise—though
the heavenly gods are supposed to know good from evil
(3.636)—and directs him straight to Eden, where he evades
the angelic pickets posted at the gates by simply leaping over
the wall of Paradise. God lets it go: “be not dismayed,” he
says to the unsuccessful sentinels; this intrusion “your
sincerest care could not prevent” (10.37)—so what was the
point of posting them? Raphael is sent too late to prevent the
capture of Eve’s imagination, and, by his own account, the
heavenly army under Michael, outnumbering the forces
under Lucifer’s command two to one, are beaten; the Son
alone saves Heaven (Book 6).
But that’s the least of it. To take a coolly secular view, the
ruler of this polity is either deliberately disruptive or disregards some prime rules of management: Don’t add intermediate layers of authority; don’t make yourself inaccessible;
don’t rebuff your insiders; if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Everyone knows what discontent the intromission of a
provost between the president and a faculty induces in it, or
the upset that bringing in a vice-president from the outside
and disappointing fair expectations causes in companies. This
is exactly what happens in Heaven. Once all worshiped and
obeyed God alone, a God who, though inaccessible to sight,
was equally so to all. Then one day there is a newcomer, a
Son, born not created. Though it is not clear that he appears
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after the angelic creation, it is clear that he is one fine day
proclaimed and anointed—and set over all the princely
angels, God’s loyal servants, as vice regent, a head to be
acknowledged Lord (5.609). It is a novelty, an innovation
whose necessity is not apparent; God seems to be, in Caesar’s
words, simply cupidus rerum novarum, “avid for new things”
(Gallic Wars 1.18). He does not need a Son. Indeed when
Adam, shortly after his creation, asks God for a mate, God
slyly joshes him “as with a smile”: “What think’st thou then
of me. . ./ Seem I to thee sufficiently possessed / Of happiness
or not, who am alone / From all eternity, for none I know /
Second to me or like, equal much less” (8.403). Either God
has forgotten or is concealing that he too now has family, or
he is signifying that he needs none. We do know that the Son
was born—whenever it was in timeless time—before Adam
was made, though, to be sure, the possibility of innovation in
an atemporal realm is humanly incomprehensible. “When?”
makes no sense in eternity. What’s of more human consequence is that Milton’s God is playing a dangerous game with
Adam: accustoming him to the sense that persisting in one’s
desire and opposing God’s advice is permissible, even
possibly successful. For Adam gets his consort.
Naturally some angels, created proud, are outraged at
being set at a remove from the throne, at having their rights
disrespected and expectations disappointed. Over and over
Satan repeats that this is the cause—be it the mere occasion
or the actual reason—of the rebellion, which is thus a
revolution.
The engaged reader (for irreverently deadpan literalism
can be a way of respecting the story) has to ask: Is Heaven’s
action an incitement, an entrapment? God has given the
angels free will. Has he made them dissimilar in nature, some
more proud, more prone to apostasy, with more propensity
to self-assertion and offense-taking? Is he calling these flawed
ones out?
Here the question arises whether the angels, to whom
God gave the knowledge of good and evil (11.85), know evil
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by their own experience or just by contrast to good. The
latter is conceivable; Socrates in the Republic demands that a
judge should learn of badness by observation, not from
within his own soul (409). Moreover, Satan says to Gabriel
that he cannot know what it means to seek relief who “evil
hast not tried” (4.896). But then, before the angelic uprising,
what evil was there to observe? Do some, a third, have it in
them? Is Heaven rife with potentiality for evil, waiting to be
realized? Is God indeed planning a razzia, a raid on putative
infidels?
God does have foreknowledge of the event. But his
argument, that omniscience does not prove determinism, is
persuasive. An atemporal Godhead oversees our entire
temporal episode as a whole from its beginning to its end.
Earth’s history is not, after all, infinite in this story: Hell will
be sealed and Heaven opened to man. Sub specie aeternitatis,
under the perspective of eternity, foreknowledge is not
foretelling, since to observe is not to interfere (at least not
outside quantum theory). Since we see the past as fixed and
conclude that because it is done it cannot be undone—which
isn’t even so very true—therefore we think, a fortiori, so
much the more, that if it cannot be altered it must have been
necessary—which is a plain paralogism. No more need God’s
sight, which includes the end, fix beforehand what happens;
he is no cryptodeterminist. To foresee completely from a
perspective outside time is not to predict certainly from
causes within.
But it is an entirely different question whether Milton’s
God wishes for the catastrophe that he has made, at least and
at most, possible. And everything points that way. He leaves
Satan to his “dark designs” so that he might “Heap on himself
damnation” (1.214); indeed the whole historical episode,
from the angelic fall of one who wants to rival God in power
to the human fall of one who wants to be like a god in
experience to its end in the re-opening of Paradise on earth
and the first opening of Heaven to mankind, is an entertainment to the Godhead who watches it as a drama, just as
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it is an acute delight to the humans who read it as an epic. Yet
while Aristotle allows that epics contain the plots for
tragedies (Poetics 1459), Milton actually switches to the tone
of tragedy within his epic: “I must now change / Those notes
to tragic” (9.5); thus a serene epic delight is, for us humans at
least, converted into that notorious tragic pleasure whose
well-known dubiousness lies in our enjoyment of the representation of excruciated bodies and souls. Is it so for God?
To rise from the aesthetic to the ethical: The poem
abounds in conversions of good to bad and bad to good, in
missed intentions and antithetical transformations. Our labor
must be, says the Arch-Fiend, “Out of our evil seek to bring
forth good. . .And out of good still to find means to evil” (1.
163). On the brink of Paradise, it is no longer transformation
he intends but identification: “Evil be thou my good”
(4.110); here the distinction between good and evil is not, as
in Hell, perverted but simply obliterated. The angels, on the
other hand, sing in unison: “his evil / Thou usest, and from
thence creat’st more good” (7.615), and God repeats it,
meaning just the opposite from Satan. How is the human
reader not to be absorbed into all this relativistic confusion?
And all this starts with the late fathering of a crown prince.
For there is no question that this is the cause of the revolt:
being set aside, twice, once by the newly born Son, once by
the newly made image, man. Over and over Satan expresses
his sense of wrong, of merit unrecognized; in Hell he may sit
“by merit raised / To that bad eminence” (2.5; note, as usual:
first some term like “merit,” then “bad”). In heaven God
excuses the Son’s elevation: “By merit more than birthright
son of God,” (3.309). Lucifer, however—at 5.666, which is
the number of the Beast, the Antichrist, in Revelation
(13:18)—thinks “himself impaired.” “Deep malice thence
conceiving and disdain,” he whispers conspiracy to his
“companion dear,” because he feels released from loyalty by
the new laws God has imposed: “New laws from him who
reigns, new minds may raise.” Then next morning at his
palace, he, “Affecting an equality with God,” takes his royal
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seat to make that magnificent speech about the equal right to
freedom. Injured merit, ex post facto laws, subjection are the
griefs—God has, “O indignity! / Subjected to his service angel
wings” (9.154)—later compounded by the replacement of his
own contingent by newly created man. All this is as
foreseeable by us as it was foreseen by God: on earth the
CEO would be blamed, and the monarch would have a
revolution on his hands.
8. Infected Paradise
Paradise is similarly questionable. How are we to go on with
Milton’s picture of terrestrial perfection? Do those who will
one day fall never stumble, those who will soon need to be
clothed—not just for shame but warmth (10.211)—ever get
nasty colds before the world is skewed? What happens if
paradisaical lushness gets out of control as Eve worries it will,
when the leisurely gardeners can’t keep up and growth goes
rank? (10.205) Is Eve pregnant, and if not, why not, since
passion is from the first practiced in Paradise (8.511)? Do
they know death, with which they have been threatened,
more distinctly than as something not-good, in some other
way than as a blind, mystifying doom? More broadly, do they
know some bad before they know evil, some harm before sin?
Is Paradise already infected, as the serpent whose head is
“well stored with subtle wiles” (9.184) seems to signify, who,
“not nocent yet,” is physically “the fit vessel, fittest imp of
fraud” (9.89), made in effect to incarnate Satan?
Kierkegaard, in his very pertinent meditation on Paradise,
says that innocence is ignorance, it is the spirit yet asleep,
dreaming. But the dream is infected with a presentiment of
freedom, a “possibility of possibility,” which makes the spirit
anxious and, once awake, unresistant to sin (The Concept of
Anxiety 1.¶ 6).
Eve conceives sin in her dreaming imagination, through
Satan’s insinuation. Adam dreams soberly, merely of what is
then actually happening and meant to be real: God—in what
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“shape divine,” one wonders—guides him, gliding, through
Paradise; shows him “the tree whose operation brings /
Knowledge of good and ill” which God has set as the pledge
of his obedience by the Tree of Life, and warns: “The day
thou eat’st thereof, my sole command / Transgressed,
inevitably thou shalt die” (8.323); he demands a companion;
falls into another sleep, really a half-conscious, waking
anesthesia, while his “sinister,” that is, his left rib is removed
by God and shaped into Eve (8.460).
Eve dreams wildly, raptly, anxiously of what is to come,
and her “organ of fancy” is receptive to evil. We already
know that she, who falls in love with her own image, is
image-prone, and now she is the first and prime instance for
a long philosophical and theological tradition that sees in the
human imagination the effective snare of evil: desire made
visible and vivid.
One third of the inhabitants of Heaven were open to the
suggestion of evil; in Paradise, it appears, one half of the
rational beings is so—the imaginative half.
Adam delivers to Eve a well-meaning little lecture on our
cognitive constitution. He inventories first judging reason,
then “mimic fancy,” and last the five senses. On the basis of
these faculties, he trots out a soothing naturalistic explanation of the “wild work” the imaginative fancy produces in
dreams from fragments of sensation, when judgment has
retired into her private cell.
How wrong he is, the complacent man! He goes on to
discourse comfortingly of evil: “Evil into the mind of god or
man / May come and go, so unapproved, and leave / No spot
or blame behind” (5.117). How would he know, not knowing
evil—yet? But, I think, Eve does indeed now know, ahead of
him. Thus Paradise is infected before the lapse. But it is not by
the devil’s temptation, it is by God’s.
For what does the whole arboreal set-up betoken? Near
the Tree of Knowledge is the Tree of Life. We learn that more
such grow in Heaven, that after the fatal fall, man has to be
moved from the proximity of the one in Paradise, for it can
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cure mortality (11.94). Why is one of these there at all?
Surely the answer is ominous: Fallen humans who ate of it
would be fallen immortals like the fallen angels, beyond
salvation, incapable of participating in the redemptive history
about to begin. Was the primal pair’s ejection from Paradise
an act of mercy—and if so had this irremediable catastrophe
crossed Heaven’s mind? What a complexity of divine design!
But that’s a side issue; it’s the Tree of Knowledge that is
at the problematic center of the Garden. Here is the question:
Is the fruit of itself deleterious, some sort of spiritual poison,
or is it a mere incitement to disobedience? Is the real evil
ingestion or transgression? Is its intoxicating effect, which
makes Eve so “jocund and boon,” a “virtue” proceeding from
the fruit itself and the tree’s “operation” or from the sinner’s
mind? Moreover, when they have both eaten and love turns
into lust, passion into concupiscence, nakedness into
exposure, candor into shame, harmony into hate, work into
labor, what has changed? What is “the mortal sin / Original”?
(9.1003) Of passion and of carnality there was plenty before:
“Here passion first I felt, / Commotion strange” says Adam at
the first sight of Eve (8.530). Or: “half her swelling breast /
Naked met his under flowing gold / Of her loose tresses” says
Milton (4.495).
Is that very turn from love to lust the original sin, or is it
its consequence? Or is the true primal sin indeed mere
disobedience? This last thought is what Adam and Eve cannot
entertain: that mere transgression will be punished. (Indeed
so far have we come in the way of Eve that “transgressive” is,
for some postmoderns, a term of approval and a sign of
sophistication.) They both think that the acquisition of
knowledge and godlikeness is the virtue of the forbidden
fruit. Adam, to be sure, first fixes on Eve’s disobedience itself:
“how hast thou yielded to transgress / The strict forbiddance”
(9.902). But soon, he deprecates the danger that God,
“Creator wise, / Though threatening, will in earnest so
destroy / Us his prime creatures” (9.938), encouraged to
think so by his previous experience with God’s leniency. So
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he accepts the profit: a “Higher degree of life.” Eve, a more
subtle reasoner, goes even further: “What fear I then, rather
what know to fear / Under this ignorance of good and evil, /
Of God or death, of law or penalty?” (9.773) In other words,
because she is ignorant of the terms she need not fear
anything before partaking, since she doesn’t even know
what’s to be feared; “Here grows the cure for all,” she
concludes, the cure, that is, for cluelessness.
The trouble seems to be, once more, the unintelligibility
of the tree’s operation (8.323, 9.796): Is it God’s command
that threatens or the tree’s powers that are dangerous? Is it
the fruit that imparts knowledge of good and evil or the fact
of human transgression? Is that knowledge an experience or
an understanding? Once again, the question is whether their
novel unbowered daytime sex with its postcoital recriminations, whether love turned into lust, is the sin or its consequence? And over, and over, is God not only expecting but
wishing the outcome?
This last question is perhaps answerable from Milton’s
perspective. He speaks in the Areopagitica of “the doom
which Adam fell into of knowing good and evil—that is to
say, of knowing good by evil” (my italics). So knowing evil
takes precedence, and, accordingly, he, Milton, “cannot
praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue unexercised and
unbreathed [unexhausted], that never sallies out and seeks
her adversary. . .Assuredly we bring not innocence into the
world, we bring impurity much rather. . .That virtue
therefore which. . .knows not the utmost that vice promises
to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue.” To me
this signifies that the eating not only caused the world’s
obliquity but prepared the pair (and its progeny) to live in it,
that is, to keep learning by experience and experimentation,
as it had begun. But if that is so, then there is too fine a
contrivance in it all not to be an intended or at least a wishedfor consequence.
And altogether God’s gift of free will, this is the occasion
to observe, is a curiously strained thing. One of our students,
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Christopher Stuart, discussed in his junior essay, which I have
before me, an apparently scandalously inconsistent line,
spoken by Raphael to Adam. After telling him once more that
his will was by nature ordained free, “not overruled by fate
inextricable or strict necessity,” the angel says, speaking of all
created beings: “Our voluntary service he requires” (5.529).
How, the student asks, as we must do, do “voluntary” and
“require”—even “require” in the weaker sense of “ask”—go
together, when it is God who asks? Doesn’t full freedom
extend beyond the liberty to choose between the allowed and
the forbidden to the determination of choices itself? Isn’t the
deepest, innermost freedom the freedom to set one’s own
limits? Isn’t that what autonomy means? No wonder then
that Satan harps on his own kind of freedom even more than
on equality. He has fully felt that Heaven’s gift of free will has
negating strings attached.
These perplexities, however, the sequence and significance of the will to disobedience and its punishment, the
eating of the fruit and its effect, the skewing of the world, and
the resulting diversity, all seem—at least seem to me—to
converge in one type: the turning of love into lust.
When Adam shyly asks Raphael whether the angels have
intimate congress he gets a forthright answer delivered with a
“Celestial rosy red” smile. The angels “obstacle find none / Of
membrane” (8.625); their intercourse is “Easier than air with
air, if Spirits embrace, / Total they mix, union of pure with
pure / Desiring” (8.625). In Hell too there is passion: Envious
Satan sees the man and the woman “Imparadised in one
another’s arms,” and bemoans that in Hell there is only
“fierce desire, / Among our other torments not the least, / Still
unfulfilled with pain of longing” (4.506). In prelapsarian
Paradise there is passionate desire and sexual congress,
“preceded by love’s embraces,” “happy nuptial league.”
Adam and Eve’s love-making after the lapse when “in lust
they burn” inflamed with “carnal desire” is now carnal
knowledge: Adam harps on Eve’s sapience: “Eve, now I see
thou art exact of taste, / And elegant, of sapience no small
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part, / Since to each meaning savor we apply” (9.1012). Now
“that the false fruit / Far other operation first” displays (note
the fricatives), we may ask: What is that operation that turns
innocence to lasciviousness and makes them, “as the force of
that fallacious fruit” evaporates, wake up from “grosser sleep
/ Bred of unkindly fumes with conscious dreams /
Encumbered.” What has happened that when they rose, they
“As from unrest, and each the other viewing, / Soon found
their eyes how opened, and their minds how darkened”
(9.1046)?
What the fruit has done is to make them sophisticated in
sexual taste, self-conscious in their bodies, self-seeking in
view of the other’s otherness: This is schism all over, the
renunciation of trusting obedience in favor of self-determination, self-will, and selfhood in desire and the advent of
solipsistic separatism in body: They see each other as other,
their bodies as obstacles to entire interpenetration, and they
concentrate on parts that are therefore now become private,
shameful and in want of hiding (9.1090). They have, to use
Milton’s word for the music of Hell, become “partial”:
particular in taste and partisan for themselves.
Now first Adam turns, in a bad moment, from an easy
assumption of superiority to misogyny. He wishes that God
had stopped his creating after the “Spirits masculine” of
Heaven and before making “this novelty on earth” (10.890),
a female; of course he doesn’t know that angels are transsexual at pleasure (1.423); oddly enough Hell proper really
does seem exclusively masculine.
So there are these degrees, from love to lust: the total
merging of angelic congress, the selfless closeness of the
paradisaical union, then the choosy separation of fallen sex—
and a last grade, the unassuageable desire of loveless, lonely
Hell, that seems to have no female but Sin.
Thus the eating and the fruit’s operation are one:
separation. The transgression and its punishment are one:
schism. Their obliquity and the skewing of their world are
one: sophistication—that is complex and varied knowledge in
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a world of polarities. At least, so it seems to me. What I
wonder about is if it doesn’t all start with Adam’s little
prelapsarian lapses: Does it begin when he asks God for a
companion? When he fails to take Eve’s Satan-inspired dream
seriously? When he gives Eve—as God gave him—the
freedom to disobey, although he has been warned? Were
there Adamic falls before Eve’s great Fall? Yes, but he doesn’t
have it in him to sin greatly.
But then arises a much more momentous question: Is the
original sin that starts our way of being, Eve’s Eating of the
Fruit, a bad thing? This consideration is the crux of this piece.
But first one more Miltonian intricacy.
9. Original Siring
There is no female birth-giving in this poem (excepting, if you
like, Sin’s, whose monster-children keep creeping back into
her womb, 2.795). The birth of human children takes place
out of Paradise. In Adam’s last hours in Paradise Michael
shows him the prospect of human history in ever more
foreshortened overview, up to the Second Coming (Books
11– 12), while Eve, not only the “mother of mankind” by
ordinary generation but also the bearer of the “Seed” by
which the “greater deliverance” is to come (12.600), is sent
to sleep and given a separate view, once again, in a dream—a
remarkable locution, by the way, this recurrent reference to
her remote progeny, Jesus, as “the Woman’s Seed” (e.g.
12.542, 601), for he is indeed begotten without male insemination.
So whatever her condition when Paradise is lost, whether
the first offspring is engendered on that racking last night in
sin or before that yet in innocence, or afterwards in their new
world, there are no women’s births before the fall: As he is
henceforth to labor in the sweat of his brow in the fields, so
she is to labor in unparadisaical pain in childbirth (10.193).
But there are plenty of male sirings, firsts of their kind
and strange, in Heaven, Hell, and Paradise. God begets a son
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(5.603) having made the angels—geneses of which the human
imagination cannot conceive. One angel—Satan—doubts his
creation; he thinks he might be spontaneously generated, selfcreated, though he doesn’t know how (6.853). As Zeus gives
birth to Athena, so Satan gives birth to Sin from his head. She
is his brain child, born from the seat of reason, in him a
source of perversion. Soon he has congress with her, his
daughter and wife, who bears Death, who in turn rapes his
mother (2.747). Adam is formed from dust in God’s image—
who is however not an imageable original, being in his nature
invisible. Eve is, not unlike Sin, born from her wombless
progenitor’s body, not from his head but from his sinister side
(8.465, 10.885), as a body part; hence she is at once apart
and, somehow, also a lesser image of his entirety and of God
at a remove. She is—strictly speaking—at once Adam’s
offspring and his consort; like Oedipus’s fratricidal sons, one,
though not both, of her children will kill the other, earth’s
first murder (11.445).
Are these origins, these firsts of begetting, creating,
imaging, producing, even intended to be closely inquired
into? Are they just the hapless by-products of making
theological mysteries into poetic pictures in which the supernatural cannot help but appear as unnatural? Or are they
meant to be dangling perplexities, intended subtexts of
questionableness, reflections on the consequences of entertaining nightly a Muse that tells of geneses beyond Nature?
10. Eve’s Happy Fault and Salutary Fall
Back to the great perplexity—the way the poem puts itself in
question: The angelic crew falls into a hell that will at the end
of time be sealed for eternity. The mortal pair wanders into a
world that is “all before them,” a world spaciously various in
places, and eventfully progressive in time. Is man’s fall and
the sin that at once was and induced that fall a bad thing
altogether?
The answer No is considered by Adam himself, when the
Archangel Michael shows him the future and the Final
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Judgment. Then Christ will reward “his faithful and receive
them into bliss, / Whether in Heaven or Earth, for then the
Earth / Shall all be Paradise, far happier place / Than this of
Eden, and far happier days” (12.462).
To this astounding prophecy, astounding because it
announces that mankind’s posthistorical condition will
exceed its prelapsarian state in happiness, Adam responds,
with one last of those “good out of evil” turns: “O Goodness
infinite, Goodness immense, / That all this good of evil shall
produce, / And evil turn to good. . .Full of doubt I stand, /
Whether I should repent me now of sin / By me done or
occasioned, or rejoice / Much more that much more good
thereof shall spring” (12.469).
This paradox of paradoxes, that one man’s great Lapse,
that his deliberate disobedience should send mankind on the
way to the greatest bliss, so that repentance itself seems
redundant, has a theological name: the felix culpa, the
“fruitful fault.” The long history of the thought and the
phrase is traced in an article by Arthur O. Lovejoy, “Milton
and the Paradox of the Fortunate Fall” (ELH 4.3, September
1937); it is referenced in Scott Elledge’s marvelous edition of
Paradise Lost. The precise phrase felix culpa seems to come
from the “Exultet” of the Roman Liturgy, which also speaks
of the “certainly necessary fault of Adam,” giving a clear
answer to the question of divine intention. The thought,
however, goes back to the Church Fathers. Ambrose,
Augustine’s bishop, spoke of the fructiosor culpa quam
innocentia, “the more fruit-bearing fault than innocence,”
and Augustine himself says straight out that God “wisely and
exquisitely contrived” sinning so that the human creature, in
doing what it itself wishes, also fulfills God’s will—a generalization of the original sin.
Milton is said probably to have known this patristic
tradition. It seems to me that this notion, to which I referred
above, that the experience of vice is the necessary antecedent
to fully operative virtue, is along the same lines.
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Now here is something remarkable: In all of Lovejoy’s
quotations, including the little apple ditty copied above (Sec.
4.), it is Adam’s fault, Adam’s apple. Milton himself begins
Paradise Regained: “I who erewhile the happy Garden sung, /
By one man’s disobedience lost, now sing / Recover’d
Paradise to all mankind.”
But it’s not one man’s disobedience. Though he is the
apple taker, she is the apple giver, hers is the literal original
sin—if priority now, under the felix culpa doctrine, bestows a
certain credit. Hers is the first fault, for better or worse. Satan
seduces her first, she Adam; his is a very secondary apostasy.
Satan sins aboriginally as Hell’s native; Eve sins by seduction,
as Paradise’s malcontent; Adam sins derivatively, as Eve’s
husband (10.2): “She gave me of the tree, and I did eat”
(10.143). In fact for God this sinning at second hand is an
extenuating circumstance for humans.
Indeed, Eve tries to accept full responsibility and all the
punishment (10.934). Adam reproves her, God seems to
agree: “Was she thy God. . .that to her / Thou didst resign thy
manhood. . .?” (10.145), but she is undeterred (12.619). And
so is Milton, it seems, implicitly and explicitly: implicitly, in
making her book, the book of her absconding from domestic
Adam, the high point of the drama of the epic, with its
modulation to tragedy, according to its own invocation (9.6);
explicitly, when Michael, explaining why man is now in looks
more Satan’s image than God’s likeness, terms the
disfigurement “inductive mainly to the sin of Eve” (11.519).
So which is text, which subtext here? Eve is the original
sinner, and her sin is fruitful; she is, in fact, the Mother of the
Seed. She is, moreover, much more disposed to disobedience
than he, so why isn’t the Fall her drama? Isn’t it indeed so in
this poem where the events are vividly enough seen to blanch
out an old tradition in Adam’s favor—so to speak?
A disclaimer, lest these observations be imputed to me for
feminism. I’m not much for Eve. Her badness is bad: Her
adventurousness is feckless, her careless disobedience
immature, her rebelliousness shallow, her susceptibility to
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flattery foolish, her avidity for stimulation reckless, her
appetite for Godhead clueless, her lies to her husband ugly,
and her argumentation too smart by half. It is not Eve I
admire but Milton, for his second sight in knowing how
qualities connect, and then, now, and always make up into a
human type (of either sex) which I think of as characteristically modern—vivid and endangered and very familiar to a
teacher.
Besides, it isn’t even quite clear what she did for us.
Under the felix culpa doctrine Satan is an unwitting agent
provocateur for Heaven, but the Almighty in fact contradicts
this in a speech from the Throne: Let man, he says, “boast /
His knowledge of good lost, and evil got, / Happier, had it
sufficed him to have known / Good by itself, and evil not at
all” (11.86). This contrary doctrine jibes with a promise we
have heard earlier: Raphael, having transubstantiated a meal
of paradisaical fruit, explains to Adam how this nourishment
“by gradual scale sublimed” can raise man’s embodied soul
through degrees to full reason—“and reason is her being.”
For the soul is the same in kind as the angels’ though less in
degree, since man’s reason is mostly discursive, the angels’
intuitive. So then, “time may come when men / With angels
may participate,” and find that “from these corporal nutriments perhaps / Your bodies may at last turn all to spirit
. . .and winged ascent / Ethereal, as we, or may at choice /
Here or in heav’nly paradises dwell; / If ye be found
obedient” (5.483).
An amazing promise, though hedged: The route to
Heaven is through diet and obedience! Thus the Fall achieved
just a long detour to the same end: a choice of goods, either
of a dwelling in Heaven or an etherealized life in Paradise.
And Adam actually knew this before the Fall, as did Eve who
had been listening in! We do not hear much more about it.
Perhaps, we may surmise, the prospect of man etherealizing
directly from Paradise to Heaven is embarrassing to the
Father, for it leaves the Son without his salvific mission.
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So has Eve, in causing history, launched mankind on its
necessary road or on a futile byway? And did Milton intend
to throw such doubt on the need for the Son’s self-sacrifice,
his entering history as a man?
11. Wisdom Without Their Leave
“The world was all before them, where to choose / Their
place of rest, and Providence their guide: / They hand in hand
with wand’ring steps and slow / Through Eden took their
solitary way.” With this solemn iambic saunter, sad but
comforted, bereaved but hopeful, the divine epic ends and
human history begins. Yet in the very last of these tenthousand five-hundred and fifty-six lines there lurks still one
more provocation to stimulate the intellectual sensibility like
a dissonance in music: “solitary.” Does it mean “alone”?—but
they have a Guide. Does it mean “single”?—but they are a
Pair. Does it mean “at one”?—but her “meek submission”
(12.597) is dearly bought and perhaps not so very reliable or
heritable (moreover it’s not a meaning in the OED). Or could
the word perhaps intimate that this same sole humanity is
about to end, that in the poem Cain was perhaps conceived
on that first and last night—or afternoon—the first of the
“contagious fire” of “foul concupiscence” (9. 1035, 1078)
and the last on their “native soil” (11.269), in their Paradise
—Cain the first man born out of Eden, at once the first
murderer and the first city-builder (Genesis 4:17).
If Milton’s last lines intimate something obliquely but
precisely, something beyond the general hopefulness of the
opening of a wide land and a new era, namely the incipient
first natural birth on earth—a thing of course unprovable—
then not two only but a future three are leaving Paradise, and
history with its highway and so crucial byways has already
begun. For Cain’s generation is a false yet necessary start. It
is the main cause of the Flood in which it is itself destroyed.
Yet it is the indirect cause of God’s covenant by which the
earth is forever safely populated, for from Noah’s sons “was
the whole Earth overspread” (Genesis 9:19), and among their
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progeny was one Javan, the ancestor of the Ionian Athenians,
our Ancients. But that is a fantasy in the spirit of the two new
books (11-12) of prospective history that Milton added to the
second edition of Paradise Lost (1674). The point is that here
might be one last exemplification of that derivation of good
from bad that informs the poem and makes one think.
And so we did, all of us, think about this question in the
seminars that incited these reflections, but perhaps the
daughters of Eve in particular. One form of the recurrent
question was: What would we have done, what do we do and
shall we do, and, above all, let our young do, in the face of
Satanic temptation? By “Satanic temptation” I mean the
Serpent’s promise of a riskless transgression, of acute
experience, of our equalization with the gods to attain
“Wisdom without their leave” (9.725). Do we owe it to
ourselves to yield to temptation? The angels in Heaven
evidently know good from evil without being affected by evil;
they heard the report of man’s lapse “with pity” that
“violated not their bliss” (9.25). The Angels in Hell know evil
and violated bliss in its grand pathos and deep misery. Milton
preaches in the Areopagitica that we humans must know vice
practically and previously to virtue to be capable of vital
goodness.
If we permit, even encourage, the transgression of the
intellect—Satan’s temptation of Christ, resisted by him, to
liberal learning and philosophy—and also of the senses—the
“artificial paradises” of Baudelaire, drug-taking and similar
stimulation, to put it plainly—are we realizing a plan inherent
in our postlapsarian mortality? Unlike our Original Parents,
we are born as babies and grow laboriously into our adult
state, so we have no cause to be as cluelessly innocent as they
of the substance of sin and the meaning of the punishment.
Moreover, on earth it is required not only that prohibitions
be clearly promulgated but that they define an intelligible
crime, and that the punishments be understandably formulated before we are answerable—the reverse of the order
under which Eve commits the “mortal sin / Original”
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(9.1003). She knows what death, the punishment, is only
after she has sinned: It is, as she puts it with brutal brevity, “I
extinct” (9.829); before that it was “whatever thing death
be,” as Satan expresses for her the sum of her knowledge
(9.695). And, I think, she never quite learns wherein the
badness of the forbidden fruit lies beyond the fact that it is
forbidden.
But perhaps that really is the meaning of the felix culpa,
the fruitful fault: It is at once a first exercise of autonomy,
expressed as mere disobedience, and the first lesson in its
fruits, felt as potent wisdom. The poet of Paradise Lost seems
to intimate that we might do well to opt for transforming
experience over psychic intactness, to be adventurously bad
with Eve rather than stodgily good with the angels. But it is
not, I think, what he would agree to having said.
Postscript:
Two of the very problems considered in this essay, the intellectuality of pre-lapsarian man and the real cause of the Fall,
are raised by Maimonides in the Guide of the Perplexed (1.2;
translated by Shlomo Pines, 1963).
He finds this way out of the problem of Adam’s
knowledge: before the eating he knows True and False. The
evidence is in the fact of the commandment itself, for its
prohibition requires apprehension by the intellect. But for
inclining toward the desires of the imagination (which is the
villain organ for Maimonides) and the pleasures of the senses,
Adam “was punished by being deprived of that intellectual
apprehension” of True and False, and was instead “endowed
with the faculty of apprehending generally accepted things
[that is, common notions].” Thus, “he became absorbed in
judging things to be bad or fine [that is, Evil or Good].”
This is certainly an ingenious explanation of the original
nature and subsequent change in Adam’s intellect, though it
is neither hinted at in Genesis nor imagined by Milton (who
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does not endow unfallen Adam with much philosophical
intellect) that what he lost was intellectual certainty and what
he gained was conventional morality.
As for the cause of the Fall—imputed by Maimonides to
Adam alone—it was that Adam was greedy and followed his
imaginative and carnal appetites. His punishment, “corresponding to his disobedience. . .measure for measure” is that
he was deprived of good things to eat gotten without labor
and compelled to feed on the grass of the field in the sweat of
his brow (15a).
So here Maimonides is as equivocal on the point at issue
as is Milton: was the root of the transgression disobedience
or desire? (Many thanks to Barry Mazur for the reference.)
111
Going in Silence
Abraham Schoener
I tried to explain to a February Freshman why our basketball
games here at St. John’s have five quarters. I was not very
successful. It made plain to me how much we live in a queer
world of our own making. The same is true of the heroes in
Homer: they live in a very queer world, but it is a world—a
thriving whole, in which part answers to and contends with
part, in which each individual represents the whole and the
whole nurtures and challenges each individual. And it is a
whole of their own making—from the hollow ships to the
earthen walls to the roaring sea to the aromatic sacrifices,
even to the gods above and among them. I am not going to
justify these claims here; I only pause to suggest to you what
makes me believe them.
How could the heroes have created the inexhaustible sea,
the sea that carries them from port to port, the salt sea, the
wine-dark sea? Let me say only this: once the sea has become
“wine-dark” for them and for us, it is our sea. We name it by
one of our own creations, a creation that requires not only a
certain level of human intervention into the workings of
nature, but a creation that is most present to us in our own
social activities—in meals, sacrifices, celebrations. The sea
called “wine-dark” is now part of this, our social world. This
is equally true of Homer’s other words for the sea—the “saltsea” is the sea whose water we have tasted, the taste we feel
in our mouths—the sea, once again tied to our food, our
meals, our habits of seasoning.1 Through habits no different
from these, the heroes have created their world.
Abe Schoener was a tutor at St. John’s College for nine years. In the tenth
year, he went to California to learn how to make wine. He now directs a
winery named The Scholium Project. This essay was delivered as a lecture at
the Annapolis campus of St. John’s College on January 29, 1993.
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Their gods, however, we are only too happy to conceive
as human creations. There is nothing in the Iliad to support
this; all of its language points toward the contrary. In
particular, Zeus is called the “father of gods and men” in
order to show that he is the condition for the existence of
both the other gods and men, of the heroes in particular. So
let me rephrase what I said about the gods above: we should
be unwilling to see them as the creations of mortal men, but
we should still recognize how their continued presence in the
world of the heroes depends on the heroes themselves. There
are two small but important signs of this in the beginning of
the Iliad.
In Book 5, Dione consoles the wounded goddess
Aphrodite by telling her of the other gods who have been
grievously wounded by mortals. It is surprising, perhaps
shocking, to learn that Aphrodite’s wound at the hands of
Diomedes was not some amazing and unique transgression of
an immutable boundary, but only one in a series of impudent,
and successful, human assaults upon the immortals. Two
incidents stand out in my memory of these tales: Dione says
that Diomedes had attacked Hades—the king of the realm of
the dead, a figure I had always thought of as dead himself, a
mere shade—and wounded him severely and painfully. And
lest we think that only gods like the unsubstantial Hades and
delicate Aphrodite are subject to these attacks, Dione tells the
story of Ares, the god of war, who was set upon by two
heroes, trussed up, and stuffed into a huge brass jar for
thirteen months, as if he were a lost Jinni from the Arabian
Nights. Dione is clear about the consequences of this imprisonment: she says, simply, that if a certain mortal woman had
not heard his groans and freed him, he would have perished.
(5. 380 ff.) This suggests a possibility that Homer never
makes explicit: the gods are subject to starvation. We could
bottle them all up, forget about them and so starve them to
death. Their place in the world of the heroes is not
guaranteed. It depends upon a certain kind of attention, an
attention of which Zeus is deeply conscious. He says to Hera:
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For of all the cities of earth-bound human beings
that stand beneath the sun and the starry vault of
the heavens, the one most honored in my heart is
sacred Troy, and Priam, its king, and his people—
for there my altar was never without its fair share
of the feast, of the poured wine, of the roasting
meat. There we always got the prizes of honor due
us. (4. 41-49)
This almost nostalgic speech makes me think that there
are easier ways to starve the gods to death than by having to
stick them into brass jars—and that Zeus is painfully aware of
this. If we forget the gods at our meals, when we drink wine,
at our games. . . .
***
This is not the heart of what I want to discuss. I only wanted
to suggest to you that the world of the heroes is much like the
world you have entered here—a world of traditions, of traditions that are largely our own singular invention, of traditions
supported only in our common and constant activities of
talking, eating, celebrating, playing.
Singular as this world may be, it need not be in any way
cut off from larger spheres, different worlds. For instance, I
will now appeal to the world of Homeric scholarship, a world
in which the rigors of Freshman lab are unknown, in which
the population is too innocent to tremble at the name of
Kant—a world that might seem to discourage the interest of
us amateurs. Bah! I say. It is a world in which I have learned
things and had fun. I recommend it to you.
Any Homeric scholar, no matter how much of a
Freshman in the field, will be able to tell you right away that
Homer has two words for “silence,” siopei and sigei, and that
he never uses them as the subject or object of verbs but that
they occur only in the following construction: “in silence.”2
This is the subject of my essay: what does Homer mean by
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“silence”—in particular, what does it mean that Homer only
speaks of silence as that in which something else takes place?3
In attempting to answer this question, I will draw only on
the one fragment of a text that we all have in common: the
Iliad, Books 1 through 5. But this is no deprivation for us;
rather, even in this small piece of a text there is more in the
way of riches than we could ever appropriate, much less
digest. In the face of these riches, I will bluntly, almost
without discrimination, reach out for one of the gems that
shines most brightly, the beginning of Book 3:
Now once each of them had been put into order,
each with his captain, then the Trojans went out in
clamor and shrieking, like birds—just as the
clamor of cranes before the face of the sky, when
they flee winter and its endless rains, and they fly
toward the streams of the Ocean, all with a great
clamor, and bring bloodshed and destruction to
the men at the source of the Nile. And so these
cranes are surrounded by evil strife, even from the
break of day—
But the Achaians went out in silence, breathing
strength, each one eager to defend and protect the
other.
The contrast here is so striking that it could mislead us. If
we did not proceed with the greatest discrimination, we
might immediately infer from it that the Greeks and Trojans
were completely different races, almost different species, and,
further, that Homer much prefers the Achaians to the
Trojans, since he compares the latter to squawking birds but
treats the former with great and simple dignity. Let us sift
through this passage carefully.
We should recall that this description is immediately
preceded by the strange, nearly endless, enumeration of all
the battalions fighting at Troy. The enumeration seems to be
entailed by two parallel, but not identical, pieces of advice
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offered to the Achaian and Trojan generals by the wise elder
of each side. After the Achaian host has shouted its assent to
the counsel of Odysseus—that they should stay and continue
to fight for the capture of Troy—Nestor suggests to
Agamemnon that
[H]e separate the warriors by tribe and by brotherhood, so that brotherhood can bear aid to brotherhood, and tribe to tribe. . .Then you will know
who among the chiefs and who among the troops
is base, and who is brave—for each group will be
fighting by itself. (2. 362 ff.)
This seems to be Nestor’s idea: the Achaians have been
fighting in ranks as organized as they ever will be until now,
but they have been all mixed together, as if they were all one
tribe. But they are not: Achilles’ withdrawal has already made
that clear. If they now fight tribe by tribe, it will be easy to
assign honor and shame to the particular groups that particularly deserve each. This might eventually result in a new
principle for the division of the spoils, but Nestor does not
mention this. It might lead to even more contention in
assembly, but Nestor is surely thinking that it will spur the
troops on in battle, urging each group to exceed the accomplishments of the others.
This division into tribes makes the catalogue of the
Achaians a possible and even logical, if not gripping, part of
the narrative. This division is also the condition for their
eventual approach to battle, going in silence.
Now once Homer finishes his enumeration of the Achaian
tribes, he switches his attention suddenly to the Trojans. He
says that, at this time, they were holding an assembly by one
of the gates to the walled city, but he tells us nothing of what
they were saying. Instead, he describes how Iris, a minor
divinity thinly disguised, approaches the Trojan king Priam
and his son Hector and gives them the following advice:
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Since there are so many foreign allies throughout
the great city of Priam, and since one language is
not the same as another among human beings
scattered all over like seeds—because of this, let
every leader give orders only to those whom he
has led here, and once he has ordered for himself
his fellow citizens, let him lead them forth. (2. 804
ff.)
Hector receives the voice and immediately disbands the
assembly before we have heard the exchange of a single word.
Now this divine advice has the same effect among the Trojans
as it did among the Achaians: the men end up ranged for
battle according to their tribe and place of origin, and so
Homer catalogs them just as he did the Achaians. But we
should attend to the great differences here: it looks like many
of the “Trojans” are in fact foreign allies, sufficiently foreign
that they do not all speak the same language. They are thus
separated so that they do not continue to confuse each other,
but no special care is taken to unify them. The Achaians are
all set against each other in contention for the prizes of glory;
but this very contention will unite them in the same task.
They will all naturally seek the same end, and their quests are
not mutually exclusive but mutually assisting. The face of
battle is so vast and so varied that many of the tribes can win
great glory at once, and the more each damages the enemy,
the easier will be glory for all.4 But the Trojans, now divided
into battalions with no means of sure communication
between them, are isolated: they are neither pitted against
each other in contest, nor capable of joint action. They are
already fractured, even before they enter the battle, and
reduced to fighting the way a pack of dogs must fight, with
only barks and growls, or shrieks of terror, not words, to
communicate.
But even this great difference does not explain why the
Achaians would go to battle in silence. We must go back
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almost to the beginning of the book and retrace the way the
Achaian host behaves when it acts as a whole.
We should notice that when Achilles first calls the host to
assembly, this gathering is presented as nothing remarkable.
Every man takes his place, the whole is orderly and quiet, and
any man may approach the center and speak to the whole.
Agamemnon may well dominate, but he has neither exclusive
right to speak nor the right to decide who speaks. But the
assembly is not a model of thoughtful discussion. Achilles and
Agamemnon insult each other, and Agamemnon treats
Achilles so bitterly that he almost curses the assembly with
the slaughter of its king. When the gathering is finally
dissolved, Achilles has withdrawn from the host, Nestor has
been ignored—and if I had been seated among them, I would
be glad that this open forum for group discussion was now
over. This bodes badly for the Achaians’ future ability to
work together and makes their silence look like failure of
speech—not an act of strength or resolution.
***
The return of Chryseis placates Apollo, and health, if not
peace, returns to the Achaian camp. But soon Zeus begins to
carry out Achilles’ wish for vengeance, and sends a dream to
Agamemnon, to lure him to disaster. The dream urges
Agamemnon to rally the troops for battle, promising him that
the immortals intend immediate victory for him. But as if in
a sign that he needs no lures to disaster, Agamemnon decides
to stir the troops to battle by conveying the opposite message
to them—telling them that they are doomed to failure. This
has always seemed like the pitch of folly to me, and was a
cause of my despising Agamemnon further; but I think that I
now see some understanding behind it, an understanding that
would help restore the spirit to the host after the last disastrous assembly. Let me spell out this understanding in detail.
As soon as he wakes, Agamemnon has the heralds
summon the host to assembly. But on the way, he seems to
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catch the most important leaders—“a council of the greatspirited elders” as Homer calls them—and separates them
from the throng. To them he reveals his dream and his plan:
he will “make trial of the men with words, as is right, and
order them to flee, but you,” he tells the great-spirited elders,
“you hold them back with words” (2. 73 ff.). They agree, and
all proceed on to the assembly.
There are two especially important points to notice here:
the first is the use of a beautiful word, megathumos. I have
translated it as “great-spirited”, but this lacks much. Thumos
is one of the strongest words in the Greek language, but it is
hard to say what it means. It is at the heart of every hero, and
perhaps of every philosopher. It is connected to strength and
fury, desire and deliberation. Now Homer often uses this
word as the epithet of the Trojans; he never bestows it upon
the Achaians—they are, by contrast, prudently “wellgreaved.” Achilles, on the other hand, puts it to special use
early in his dispute with Agamemnon: when he addresses the
host as a whole, he calls them “the great-spirited Achaians.” I
do not think that this is mere flattery on his part; at this
moment he thinks highly of his comrades and expects them
to support him in his denunciation of the fat dog-king. But
soon it is clear that they will remain voiceless, mere
spectators; and that he can have no revenge through the
spilling of Agamemnon’s blood. But even worse, Agamemnon
picks up Achilles’ use of the word and uses it to address the
host in response. But this time, he casts it back in their faces
as a taunt. In answer to Achilles’ suggestion that Agamemnon
give up Chryseis and be rewarded with another prize later,
Agamemnon says:
So if the great-spirited Achaians give me a prize,
having fitted it to my own spirit, so that there will
be equal exchange—then fine! But if they do not
give me this, then I will myself come and seize
what I want—whether it is your prize, Achilles, or
Ajax’, or Odysseus’. (1. 135 ff.)
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He thus uses Achilles’ compliment to threaten and
humiliate them, clearly foreseeing that neither Ajax nor
Odysseus, nor any of the other “great-spirited Achaians”
would resist him. And he is right: only Achilles trembles with
anger and reaches for his sword. This taunt must have been a
great source of shame for the heroes, but still they stayed
quiet.
Now having witnessed this humiliation of his comrades,
Achilles returns his huge sword to its sheath and speaks in a
different voice: “You heavy with wine, you with the face of a
dog but the heart of a doe. . .you folk-devouring king—you
rule over men worth nothing: for otherwise, Son of Atreus,
you would be committing your last acts of insolence now.”
(1. 231 ff.)
With this, he pledges his withdrawal and throws the
scepter, a symbol for him of the Achaian concern for justice
and reverence, to the ground, swearing on it now merely as a
piece of dead wood. The Achaian host has gone from “greatspirited” to “worth nothing” in his eyes; its emblem is some
dead wood that “never more will put forth leaves or shoots
or run with sap.” These are heavy words from one of the
greatest warriors in the host, a man glorious in battle who
rose up to help save the people from the plague that was
about to destroy them. It seems impossible to me that this
change in his words could not affect the warriors, from
Diomedes and Odysseus, all of the way down to the nameless
foot soldiers and horse feeders. No matter whether they
thought Achilles was justified or overweening, their silence in
the assembly—in the face of Agamemnon and his brazen
taunts, and in front of their own men—this silence must have
been a source of shame for them. As the first book closes, the
miasma of the plague has been replaced by a different kind of
stain: the whole camp now festers with the shame of its
silence.
***
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This is where I begin to see the results that may come from
Agamemnon’s strange plan. He calls the elders together to
inform them of a plan to test the fighting-spirit, the thumos,
of the troops. The test is a test of shame: will the men be
ashamed to accept his order to break camp, or is their thumos
so broken that they will rush to the ships? The plan could
only make sense on the assumption that they will despise the
order and insist on staying. But Agamemnon makes no such
assumption; rather he proposes that when the men run, the
elders should restrain them with words.
Now this proposal implies two utterly natural assumptions on Agamemnon’s part: first, that the thumos of the
elders is indeed great, so that they will be in no way tempted
to go home; second, that the men will respond quickly and
completely to the words of the great-spirited elders—in other
words, that all they needed was a “pep-talk.”5 The whole plan
seems intended to cement the relations of Agamemnon and
his lieutenants and to provide the troops with the occasion
for a series of dramatic invigorating speeches by their leaders.
The plan seems more and more reasonable.
The assembly gathers—but not in the same way it did at
first, even in the midst of the plague.
The people were scurrying. Just as tribes of
thronging bees pour out of hollow rocks, always
coming in fresh waves, and they fly in clusters over
the spring flowers, and some hover here, some
there—just so did the many tribes of men pour
from their ships and huts and make their way in
throngs to the assembly. But Rumor, the messenger
of Zeus, blazed among them, and urged them on—
and so they began to assemble. But the assembly
was completely disordered, and the earth groaned
beneath the seated host, and there was an uproar
throughout. Nine heralds, shouting, were trying to
restrain it, if only the noise could be restrained
. . .with effort, the people were made to sit, and
SCHOENER
121
once they had ceased from their clamor, they were
made to stay seated. (2. 86 ff.)
The assembly is practically a rabble; the people move like
bees covering a field, but once they are pressed to order
themselves, they begin to shout and cry. They make the same
clamor that Homer ascribes to the Trojans at the beginning of
Book III and the same “uproar” that he ascribes to the joint
battles of the Achaians and Trojans all through the book. And
this is the beginning of an assembly. One could hardly imagine
calling these bee-men “great-spirited.” Agamemnon’s test,
and the eventual Achaian march into battle, seems doomed.
Once they are assembled, Agamemnon begins his
harangue, and it is a remarkable test. Following his own plan,
he points out that their dream-ordered departure will be a
“shameful thing to hear about—indeed even for those who
are yet to be, how in vain an Achaian host so good and so
huge warred a war without result, even in fighting with
weaker men.”
Next he expands on the difference in numbers between
the armies and points out that if all the Trojans were captured
and made cup-bearing slaves for the Achaians, there would
still be only cup-bearer for every ten Achaians. Then, as if
their spirits were not yet utterly broken by imagining the
contempt of future races, he says:
In fact, nine years have passed, and the timbers are
rotten in our boats, and the ropes have frayed
utterly, and, I suppose, our wives and infant
children are awaiting us in our halls.
Of course, if there were any infant children around, they
would not belong to the warriors—and what chilling effect
Agamemnon’s “I suppose” must have had! The heart of each
man must now be turned home with such longing and
eagerness that no desire for glory, nor martial shame, could
restrain it. And so Agamemnon closes his test thus: “All right
then, we should all obey—just as I say. Let us escape with our
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122
ships to our dear homeland—for we will assuredly never take
Troy and its wide streets.”
The results of this cruel speech are utterly predictable: the
assembly dissolves and the men fly to their ships, and with
only increasing momentum, the men are on board, and some
ships are already in the bright salt sea. Homer says: “Then the
Achaians would have had their homecoming, but beyond
what was fated.” (2. 155)
Before we consider what prevented this homecoming, we
should attend to a striking development in the language of
the poem. You will have noticed a certain abundance of
wonderful similes in the Iliad; the simile of the bees is an
instance of these. You will have noticed that they seem to
compare the events of the battlefield to moments in the world
of nature, especially to bucolic scenes of mountains and
farms, and that many of the comparisons seem odd. Let me
point this out: there is not a simile in the book until the bees
appear in Book 2, but this simile is only the beginning. Once
the troops here Agamemnon’s speech, Homer compares the
Achaians in swift succession to waves whipped by the wind
and to a wheat field knocked down by a gale; then, before
they eventually march in silence, he compares them again to
the sea, to fire, birds, flowers, and flies in a barn. But once the
Achaian begin marching, Homer describes them directly,
without simile—but then suddenly, for the first time, he
compares the Trojans to birds. We will soon understand the
reason for this development.
***
Now the Achaians do not win their homecoming because
of a remarkable series of actions by Odysseus. While the
others rushed to their ships, he, perhaps alone, did not
move—“for a great pain had seized his heart and spirit.”
Athena came to him and spurred him to prevent the sudden
departure, and when he heard her voice he began to run.
Now Homer says that when he met another leader, he spoke
SCHOENER
123
to him gently and either informed him of reminded him of
Agamemnon’s stealthy plan, and urged him just to sit down,
and to seat his followers with him. But when he met a warrior
who was not a leader—and not just a horse-feeder, but a true
warrior—and found him making noise, he would strike him
with the great scepter of the Achaians, make him sit down
and would ashame him, calling him “not worth counting,
neither in war nor in counsel.” And Homer says: “And so they
rushed back to the assembly from their ships and huts, with a
roar, as a wave of the much-resounding sea thunders along a
great beach, and the sea roars.”
We should note first that Agamemnon was perilously
wrong in his two assumptions: neither were the elders so
strong of spirit that they could withstand his test—only
Odysseus did not move; nor did the troops need only a peptalk to prepare for their next attack. They were desperate to
leave and many, even warriors, needed beatings from great
Odysseus just to sit still. This suggests that the thumos of the
whole host was nearly broken, and that Agamemnon had no
understanding of its true state. Even Odysseus and Nestor
must have misunderstood its condition, or have been terribly
weak in spirit, for neither of them—in fact, none of the
“great-spirited elders”—had objected to Agamemnon’s
foolhardy plan.
Now we must also note that the state of the restored
assembly is still far from encouraging: it is not even like tribes
of bees, but like the wild and inanimate sea, roaring incessantly and without meaning. We might wonder, who could
speak helpfully in such an assembly?
In answer to this, Homer offers us Thersites, an ugly and
impudent hunchback. We must be very careful of not taking
him as some kind of stock comic character. He rises up, lame
and misshapen, and hurls abuse at Agamemnon. We must
now notice how close he is in this respect to brilliant Achilles.
He accuses Agamemnon of keeping them in Troy only for his
own gain and urges the troops to desert. He does not speak
poorly, and perhaps he was persuasive, for suddenly Odysseus
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
appears at his side and reproaches him with “hard words,”
and strikes him with the scepter. He hits ugly Thersites hard
enough to raise a bloody welt on his back, and Homer says,
“A big tear fell from him.” (2. 269)
Tears are very serious things for Homer; the heroes,
especially the Achaians, let them fall when their friends are
taken from them, parents let them fall over lost children.
Thersites’ tear is no less serious than the rest, perhaps even
more so because of his ugliness, his utter destitution of
friends. Though he is here in Troy he will never have any one
to cry with, nor is it possible to imagine that any one would
cry if he fell beneath a Trojan arrow. Some of you know
Sophocles’ play, the Philoctetes. Perhaps it will seem just to
you that Odysseus is mistaken for Thersites by the destitute
Philoctetes in the play. (5. 440 ff.)
Now Thersites’ counsel is expressed with neither
elegance nor subtlety, nor can it sound very noble. But as the
recent rush to the ships has shown, it expresses longings
recently made public by every man of the host. These men,
already reviled by the departed Achilles, now find that they
have failed a test of their shame and courage. They have been
tempted cruelly, failed, and now each finds himself humiliated before his neighbor. It would be hard for any of them to
imagine any nobility in himself, or in his neighbor.
Then up steps miserable Thersites, who speaks the
unspeakable. He presents to the gathered host the position
they are unwilling to take, the depth to which they could
never sink. They could flee the war, but never speak publicly
with such contempt for their enterprise and their leaders. His
shameless public display restores to them their own sense of
shame; but even better, his public humiliation and
punishment presents them with the scourging that each
would consider meet for his own cowardice, and for the
cowardice of his neighbor. I hate to use words like this, but I
feel that Odysseus’ beating of Thersites provides a common
release for the abashed and humiliated army. A sign of this is
their reaction:
SCHOENER
125
And the men, though they were grieving deeply, all
laughed at him with relish; and thus one would
say, with a glance, at the one nearest him: “Oh!
Though Odysseus has certainly accomplished
numerous brave deeds, leading us in good counsel
and commanding us in battle—this deed, now, this
is by far the finest he has wrought among the
Achaians.”. . .So spoke the multitude.
I had always thought that this universal laugh was odd—
there is not much laughter in the Iliad—and a little cruel and
mean-spirited for heroes. I certainly never understood why
the men would call this “by far his finest deed.” But now I
think that the laughter the deed provides is not only appropriate but necessary, and so each warrior turns to the man
closest to him, and they all share this grisly moment that
helps restore their self-respect. For now as each one turns to
the other, and as they look at each other, each one can now
think of how different he is from Thersites—how noble by
comparison, how like Odysseus. Thus do the Achaian
warriors regain some of their great spirit.
But they are not yet ready for battle: Homer’s similes
show this. After the humiliation of Thersites, Odysseus and
Nestor finally give them the speeches of encouragement, and
the troops are ready for them: at the end they shout in assent.
But Homer compares their shout to a great wave breaking
against a high cliff. One might wonder what the cliff is here—
the Trojans are still far away. There is still something bootless
in the fury of the Achaians.
As they draw closer and closer to battle, they win new
comparisons: after sacrificing and feasting and donning their
armor, they are like a forest fire, “and their gleam, shining
everywhere, went up through the sky to the heavens.” (2. 445
ff.)
And once they take their place on the plain around the
river Scamander, now closer to Troy, Homer compares them
to
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
the many tribes of winged birds, geese, or cranes,
or long-necked swans, [that] fly here and there,
glorying in the strength of their wings, and with
clamor they advance, and the meadows resound
with them—just so did the tribes of men pour
from the ships and huts onto the plain of
Scamander; and the earth echoed terribly beneath
the tread of men and horses.
It is wonderful now to feel the men, so recently not just
wounded but crippled in their spirits, wonderful to feel them
stretching their strong arms like swans “glorying in the
strength of their wings;” terrible too to imagine the sound of
their tread, the clamor of gleaming bronze armor, the uproar
of their war cries. But suddenly they are like
the many tribes of swarming flies, buzzing through
the farmhouse at the peak of Spring, when the
pails dew with milk—in just such numbers stood
the long-haired Achaians on the plain, facing the
Trojans and eager to tear them apart.
And now all the illusions have been destroyed. Even as
the Achaians become calmer again, from roaring oceans, to
screeching birds, now to buzzing flies hovering in farm
houses, near sweet pails of fresh milk, even as we sense the
return of their great spirits, we must recognize the goal
toward which they are moving. The humiliated, brokenspirited men were rushing home; these stronger, fire-like,
swan-like, glorious men are gathering their strength in order
to kill other men. For these men, the Trojans they are eager
to tear apart, the flies will not be circling pails of milk.
Lest we see this all from the side of the apparently
mightier Achaians, Homer insists upon one more simile. In
this one, the Achaians are finally separated into their tribes
and brotherhoods; this separation, I now believe, ensures not
only a kind of team by team competition for glory, but
ensures that standing next to each man is a brother, a cousin,
SCHOENER
127
a companion from youth. No warrior is anonymous, no
warrior has disappeared. Each is, I think, painfully present to
his neighbor. This is the simile:
These men, their leaders ordered them, just as
goatherds easily order widely scattered flocks of
goats that had been mingling in the pasture, and
the leaders ordered some here and some there in
order for them to go into the battle.
I will say one thing about this simile: there are only two
reasons a goatherd would order his goats. Either he is going
to milk them or he is going to bring them to slaughter. As if
to settle our hesitation, Homer compares Agamemnon in all
of his glory to a great bull, the most pre-eminent of his herd.
We do not have to live long in the world of the Iliad to know
the destiny of the greatest, most beautiful bulls: they are
sacrificed on the most important occasions.
I do not mean to abuse you with a tedious reiteration: of
course we all know that these men are all liable to die soon—
that, in a certain sense, they are here to die. But do they know
it?
Let me suggest to you that this point distinguishes the
Achaians from the Trojans at the beginning of Book 3. The
Achaians have faced shame and humiliation, they have been
teased with images of a homecoming and have turned their
back on those images with their eyes wide open to what they
will face if they remain. As their spirits return, and as they are
calmed from the force of a sea or a forest fire to buzzing bees
and docile goats, they are seeing more and more clearly what
they will face. Notice the last two things that Homer says are
on their minds before the battle: in Book 2, directly before
the catalogue, he says “they are eager to tear the Trojans
apart;” at the beginning of Book 3 “they are eager in their
spirits to bring help to each other.” These warriors, whose
spirits have clearly returned, are not thinking about glory,
booty, even victory. Facing the Trojans, they think about
destroying them in the most terrible, beastly, inglorious way;
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
128
marching towards them, hearing their wild cries, they think
only of helping each other in the horror to come. The
Achaians go in silence because they see what is ahead of them,
because they see each other as brothers, because they still see
Agamemnon’s images of their wives and children. They
march in a hard-won silence in awe of the world they have
created and willed for themselves.6
***
1
Compare the whole literary history of the word porphureos: it surely
represents something from the realm of nature in itself, not merely
through our eyes or experience. But note that Homer never uses it of the
sea itself (only of its waves, and even so only four times or so) and favors
it instead as an epithet for something very intimately related to us: our
blood.
2
It is surely worth noting that the phrase is properly a kind of comitative
dative rather than a locative since the silence names the condition—rather
than the place—in which the action takes place. It would be awkward,
though not impossible, to translate sigei “with silence” in order to show
this. I have not embarrassed the February Freshmen with these minutiae.
One might also note that the constructions occur 14 times in the first ten
books of the Iliad, but only three times after that.
3
Silence is not properly an absence of sound, noise, talk: it is the
negation or canceling of them. It takes place, but only as the result of
something. It is not a negative state, but the opposite—an intentional
state of fullness, a state the Achaians, especially, create.
4 But cf. 6. 98 ff.: it looks like the departure of Achilles is the necessary
condition for any such distribution of glory. His might is so preeminent
that no other can win glory when he is in the fray.
5
I am afraid that when Homer, narrating Agamemnon’s summons of the
elders, calls them “great-spirited,” he is only speaking ironically. Neither
now nor when Achilles first used the word were they great-spirited.
6 The Trojans have not yet had an assembly because they have not been
terrified. This seems to be when the assembly is most necessary. Similarly,
the Trojans still make lots of noise on the way to battle: they have not yet
been shaken badly enough to be quiet.
129
�
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Kraus, Pamela
Brann, Eva T. H.
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Zuckerman, Elliott
Navarre, Sarah
Hunt, Frank
Sachs, Joe
Nelson, Charles A.
Lurçat, François
Schoener, Abraham
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The St. John’s Review
Volume XLVIII, number three (2005)
Editor
Pamela Kraus
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Sarah Navarre
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson,
President; Michael Dink, Dean. For those not on the distribution list, subscriptions are $10 for one year. Unsolicited
essays, reviews, and reasoned letters are welcome. Address
correspondence to the Review, St. John’s College, P
.O. Box
2800, Annapolis, MD 21404-2800. Back issues are available,
at $5 per issue, from the St. John’s College Bookstore.
©2005 St. John’s College. All rights reserved; reproduction
in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing and Printing
The St. John’s Public Relations Office and the St. John’s College Print Shop
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
3
Contents
Essays and Lectures
A Glance, A Look, A Stare........................................... 5
Jerry L. Thompson
Muthos and Logos.......................................................41
David Stephenson
Meaning and Truth in Klein’s
Philosophico-Mathematical Writings...........................57
Burt C. Hopkins
Addendum
Two Images.................................................................89
Chaninah Maschler
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5
A Glance, a Look, a Stare
Jerry L. Thompson
In 1968 or 1969 a friend asked me to the first session of a
workshop given in New York City by the photographer
Harold Feinstein. Feinstein was an experienced teacher, and
he began by talking to the assembled group of 20 or so about
his approach to picture-taking. He said that each of us, the
moment we stepped into his studio, had an immediate
impression, a notion, an idea of his place. That impression,
gained at first glance, was, he said, what photography was all
about. A snapshot—a view recognized and seized in a fraction
of a second—was the photographer’s view of the world.
Certainly many of the best-known photographs made
during the twenty years before my visit to Feinstein’s studio
could be connected to this understanding of how photography worked. Two of the books of photographs most
admired by young ambitious photographers at that time were
The Decisive Moment, a book that presented large reproductions of minimally-captioned photographs by Henri CartierBresson without any text other than appreciation of the
pictures, and Robert Frank’s The Americans, another book
whose main content was pictorial. Though very different in
form, in attitude, and in meaning, the two books contained
pictures that looked like quick glimpses of the worlds they
showed, views recognized and seized at first glance. I was a
beginning photographer, but I had experimented with several
cameras, and I knew that with a small camera a picture could
be made in daylight at 1/500th of a second. At that shutter
speed, the operator did not even have to hold the camera
Jerry L. Thompson has been a working photographer for more than thirty
years. He is the author of Truth and Photography (Ivan R. Dee, 2003), a
book of essays on photography, and a forthcoming book combining some of
his own photographs with a long essay on their making.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
perfectly still in order to get a clear picture. With a wideangle lens pre-focused (that is, set at the “hyperfocal”
distance setting, the setting which would allow everything off
to the horizon and most of what was as close as 3 or 4 feet
from the lens to be in focus when the aperture was
constricted for a daylight exposure), the photographer could
rush the camera to his eye to snap anything he saw within a
fraction of a second of his first awareness of the scene’s
potential to become a picture.
In discussing Feinstein’s approach after the class my
friend and I agreed that spontaneity was at its center. The
idea was to act—to respond to a strong impression—before
conscious deliberation or prolonged analysis could weigh in.
Feinstein was proposing, we decided, a theory of visual truth.
Directness and honesty of vision are most possible when the
photographer, or artist, acts spontaneously and seizes the
moment before he or she has a chance to ponder other
considerations: should I be a little farther off? Should I make
an exposure that will allow for detail in all the dark areas, or
one that will record only dramatic highlights in a sea of darkness? Should I wait for a more amiable expression to appear
on that person’s face? Should I shoot a vertical so that it can
be considered for the cover of Life magazine? Each such
deliberation, the thinking goes, chips away at the picture’s
“purity,” compromises the artist’s perception, and takes the
result further away from the “unmediated” truth of an instant
response. Such thinking found many receptive auditors in
1968 and 1969.
The rise in prominence of the so-called “AbstractExpressionist” painters had helped prepare the way. These
“New York School” painters did not usually make preliminary sketches, let alone use perspective studies or scaled
palettes. They rejected every device attached to European
(mostly French) Beaux Arts training. For them that training
was anathema; it reeked of the academy, flattery of princes,
dishonesty, decoration, and corruption. Immediacy and
THOMPSON
7
authenticity, not perspective, drawing, harmony, and a
pleasing likeness were important to them. Their ambition, as
a group, was not to copy nature but to create it.
Photographers were more hesitant to substitute their own
productions for the subjects they depicted. Most photographers then (if not now) still thought the pictures they took (or
made, to use the word many artist-photographers have
insisted using) at least referred to, but more likely clarified or
even understood, the world those pictures showed.
Photojournalism was a model for many, especially those who
worked with small hand-held cameras, and photojournalism
was generally thought able to present a kind of truth about
what was going on in the world. Photographers in 1969 were
more likely to single out Eddie Adams’s pictures of the
summary execution of a suspected Viet Cong than they were
to speculate about how many times Douglas McArthur had to
wade ashore on the Philippines until the photographer got
the picture the war effort needed.
Though they might not follow the painters all the way to
proclaiming their pictures a second, new nature, one that
could stand on its own without reference to a “subject,” many
ambitious young photographers in 1969 would have agreed
that (a) photography is art; that (b) authenticity and immediacy in art are good things; and that (c) authenticity and
immediacy are most available to an artist when working
spontaneously. Hovering in the background of this thinking is
the notion that there is something natural about this way of
working. When the photographer Nick Nixon (who began
photographing seriously in the late 1960s) was asked about
his way of working by a group of students in 1975 he said his
role was like that of a plant, a tree whose business it is to bear
fruit (I paraphrase his remarks from memory). His job, he
explained, was to produce the fruit. Discussing and analyzing
the fruit was somebody else’s job. He also said he rarely used
the camera’s controls for adjusting the drawing of the image
projected on the ground-glass viewing screen of the large
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
view camera he used. If the picture wasn’t there (that is, if he
didn’t see it whole and ready to frame), he didn’t try to fiddle
with the camera’s adjustments in order to coax a reluctant
picture to appear. John Keats would have understood all of
this, at least at the moment in February, 1818, when he wrote
to John Taylor that “In Poetry I have a few Axioms,”
including this one:
That if Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves
to a tree it had better not come at all.
Keats’s remark rightly suggests that the line of thinking I have
been discussing did not begin with Harold Feinstein, or with
the New York School painters. M. H. Abrams includes what
he calls “vegetable genius” among the theories of unconscious
genius and organic growth he finds widespread, particularly
in England and Germany, as early as the eighteenth century
(The Mirror and the Lamp, Oxford, 203). These theories have
several features in common: they hold that the artist is not
directly responsible for what he makes; that he may not
understand, in an analytical sense, what he is doing; and that
the mechanism by which he works is like that of a plant.
Johann Georg Sulzer, author of a four-volume dictionary
of aesthetic terms published between 1771 and 1774, wrote
that
It is a remarkable thing, belonging among other
mysteries of psychology, that at times certain
thoughts will not develop or let themselves be
clearly grasped when we devote our full attention
to them, yet long afterwards will present themselves in the greatest clarity of their own accord,
when we are not in search of them, so that it
seems as though in the interim they had grown
unnoticed, like a plant, and now stood before us in
their full development and bloom. (Abrams, 203)
THOMPSON
9
In 1793 Immanuel Kant went further to declare that the
productive faculty of the fine arts was properly called genius,
which he defined as “the innate mental aptitude through
which nature gives the rule to art.” This faculty of genius
cannot indicate scientifically how it brings about
its product, but rather gives the rule as nature.
Hence, where an author owes a product to his
genius, he does not know himself how the ideas
for it have entered his head, nor has he it in his
power to invent the like at pleasure, or methodically, and communicate the same to others in such
precepts as would put them in a position to
produce similar products. (Critique of Aesthetic
Judgment, ¶46; also cited by Abrams, 207)
These theories were not confined to the visual arts. The
passages quoted above speak of authors and ideas. And the
theories do not appear as the aphoristic musings of practitioners; they are not the haphazard reflections of artists
puzzling about what they do, but systematic treatments by
serious philosophical writers. These theories are presented in
the very form—discursive writing—that the activity the theories discuss, the activity of spontaneous invention, would
seem to shy away from. Writing is, after all, the setting down
of reasonable speech—argument, what Keats called “consequitive reasoning,” and what philosophers at the time of
Plato and Aristotle meant by logos: a logical train of thought.
Discursive writing involves connecting and setting down an
articulated succession of ideas.
Sometime between 1942 and 1945 Erich Auerbach wrote
one such articulated succession of ideas, a long and detailed
one, about a descriptive passage in Balzac (The essay
appeared in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in
Western Literature). In that essay, he stresses the harmony and
stylistic unity of a passage near the beginning of Le Père
Goriot (1834), which describes the first appearance of the
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pension-mistress Madame Vauquer. Every detail given by
Balzac contributes to “an intense impression of cheerless
poverty, shabbiness, and dilapidation,” and along with the
physical description, “the moral atmosphere is suggested.”
Auerbach’s discussion builds to the following observation:
The entire description, so far as we have yet
considered it, is directed to the mimetic imagination of the reader, to his memory-pictures of
similar persons and similar milieux which he may
have seen; the thesis of the “stylistic unity” of the
milieu, which included the people in it, is not
established rationally but is presented as a striking
and immediate state of things, purely suggestively,
without any proof.
By “not established rationally” and “without any proof,”
Auerbach means that Balzac does not present an extended
argument or logical train of thought to demonstrate that all
the details he names and observations he makes are in fact
related, bound in some chain of causality. According to
Auerbach, what Balzac presents is a striking and immediate
state of things, something we take in all at once, uncritically,
as if at a glance. In fact we encounter the components of this
impression one at a time, as we read, but they accumulate to
affect us as a growing ensemble, as a complete whole already
existent and gradually revealed—not as a logical proposition
or arithmetic calculation which must be worked through to
the end before we can see and accept what is meant.
“What confronts us, then, is the unity of a particular
milieu, felt as a total concept of a demonic-organic nature
and presented entirely by suggestive and sensory means,”
Auerbach concludes (416). Balzac accomplishes the remarkable feat of presenting, in words that must be read and understood in sequence, the kind of impression we would have had
if we had been there to look at the actual room. What he tells
us over the course of sixteen sentences, most of them quite
THOMPSON
11
long, we could have taken in had we been there, at a glance,
in a single glimpse, like the view we were invited to take from
the threshold of Feinstein’s studio. This is so because the
sentences do not reason with us or attempt to demonstrate—
they offer, as Auerbach says, no proof. Rather, these sentences
overwhelm us with detail and observation mixed together, an
imaginative description in which odors have moral overtones
and misfortune oozes from worn furniture.
When we know a thing at a glance, we do not consider
evidence and weigh opinions as a jury might during a
prolonged deliberation. We see the thing and know it at once
for what it is, as we recognize a face that suddenly comes into
sight without thinking, that nose, those eyes, brown hair
parted on the right: it’s John Doe! Rather than reason our way
to an identification, we somehow consult a memory-bank and
call up, all at once, the one we recognize. Recognizing this
feature of human understanding, Balzac could reasonably
expect his reader to reach into his or her memory-bank of
“pictures of similar persons” to “recognize” the intertwined
physical and moral dilapidation of Madame Vauquer and her
milieu. He doesn’t attempt to argue that this thing is
connected to that, or that the one is a cause of the other: he
presents not a thesis to argue, but a milieu to recognize; we
see it, recognize it, and take it in as a whole.
This taking in at a glance depends, as Auerbach notes, on
“memory-pictures of similar people which [the reader] may
have seen”: if I have never seen John Doe before I will not
recognize him when his face suddenly appears. If I have the
opportunity to look at him a little while, I may note a certain
kind of nose, details of grooming, hair color and texture, etc.,
and conclude that he is a certain kind of person, but I will not
“recognize” him if I don’t know him. In this instance
knowing at a glance would not be available to me, but
another approach, an approach involving sustained
reasoning, demonstration, the kind of thinking involved in a
“proof ”—such an approach might lead me somewhere. Such
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prolonged consideration would hardly have time to come
into play during a glance, but it might during a stare. But
rather than start down this path, which will lead in a different
direction, let me take the line of thinking we have been
considering—that some operations of the soul are spontaneous—a little farther back in time.
The careful reader will have noted a new word in the last
sentence. In the quotations I cited, Kant refers to mental aptitudes and to things going on the author’s head. Kant speaks
of the operations he discusses as taking place in the mind
because he saw human experience as split between two
worlds. The phenomenal world is the physical world, the
world of space and time. Everything here is completely
explained by the laws of physics. Our bodies are in this
world. This world is nature, and it is available to us through
the understanding. The other world—the noumenal world—
is a thing apart. This is a suprasensory world in which the
reason operates; it is in this world that moral judgment and
the will exist. This is the world we can know only with the
mind, which, as he notes, is in the head.
But in the last sentence of the paragraph before last I used
the word soul instead of mind. I did so in preparation for
following the line of thinking we are considering farther back
in time. Where we are headed—the thinking of Plato and
Aristotle—there is no sharp cleavage between two worlds.
There is an ordered cosmos, and there are many independent
things in that cosmos, and some of those things have souls.
Whether the soul is a thing that survives the death of the body
it inhabits is, in this world, an open question. Plato’s Socrates
likes to speculate about this from time to time, but he freely
admits that in doing so he is indulging himself, not demonstrating, and that he does so for pleasure and comfort (as in
the Phaedo, the conversation that takes place on the afternoon before his execution). Aristotle is not prone to mythological speculation.
THOMPSON
13
But whatever its ultimate fate, the soul, in the world we
are now considering, is intimately connected with the body
and the cosmos it inhabits. One kind of thinking available to
this soul is perception, and the soul perceives by using its
bodily organs of sense. This soul has motions that may take
the form of movements, either of small particles within the
body or of large things outside us through use of the limbs.
Choice and moral judgment operate not in spite of nature,
but through nature, in cooperation with it. This is so because
nature, choice, moral judgment, and everything else are parts
of an ordered cosmos. Men tend to know and seek the good,
and avoid the bad in the same way that light things tend to
rise and heavy ones fall, and for the same reason: because the
cosmos is ordered.
Not only is the cosmos ordered, but it is ordered in a way
that men can know, at least up to a point. Reasonable speech,
offered in good faith, can be answered in good faith so that
two earnest speakers working together can come to know
what neither of them could have come upon on his own. This
is one example of dialectic, and its application leads upward
from commonplace observations everyone agrees on to ideas
about these observations, from there to groupings and classifications, and on to an awareness of causes. Specific causes
have more general causes, and the discovery of proximal
sources leads to those that are more remote, more fundamental, more unifying. All this is available to those who use
reason in good faith.
“In good faith” means with the intention of discovering
the truth. This world is no Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, no
Pollyannaish rich boys’ club where only the privileged few are
taken into account, where everyone is just, noble, and good
because he (and only hes need apply) can afford it. The texts
that give us this world are full of instances of what appears to
be reasonable speech used for base ends: flatterers, tyrants,
sophists, eristics, and practitioners of all the vices are present
in these texts. The highest and best that these texts point to
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can hardly be called “Greek thought,” or “the Greek way.”
These best possibilities were defined—let alone practiced—by
only a handful of thinkers, some of whom were at odds with
the culture they lived in (Socrates was executed; Aristotle
died in exile).
But the possibility of knowing and playing a healthy part
in an ordered cosmos lives in these texts, and this broad
vision—this vision of wholeness—underlies the earliest
appearance of the spontaneous operations of the soul we
have been considering. According to translator Joe Sachs,
Aristotle’s On the Soul uses twenty-four different words to
mean thinking. The broadest of these, noein, can be thought
of as meaning “to think” in a general sense: the activity of the
soul that includes everything from sense perception to the
highest kind of reason. But one word in the cluster, theorein,
refers to just the kind of taking-in-all-as-a-whole we have
been considering: the view of Madame Vauquer’s pension,
and the glimpse of Feinstein’s studio. This verb is translated
by Sachs as to “contemplate.”
Contemplation gets a lot of attention from Aristotle. He
begins with simple examples such as recognizing a figure, say
a triangle, at first glance: we do not have to count the angles
to know it as a triangle; we see it all at once. In a similar way
we recognize a face we know, as in the example I used earlier.
On this level, contemplation is almost like simple perception,
only a bit more complex since it involves recognizing a
pattern and not just a single sensation.
But elsewhere Aristotle’s examples of contemplation are
of things more complex; in the Nicomachean Ethics he
speaks of the exercise of this ability not in the realm of
perception, but in moral judgment: he speaks of recognizing
instantly, without calculation, the right thing to do in a particular situation. Contemplation is available for all our actions,
from the lowest to the highest. Sachs has given the best exposition I know of this feature of Aristotle’s thinking; here is a
part of it:
THOMPSON
15
Like our highest knowing, our perceiving takes in
something organized and intelligible all at once
and whole. That is why we can contemplate a
scene or sight before us as well as something
purely thinkable. In neither case is the thing
grasped our product, and that is why Aristotle calls
both perception and contemplative thinking
passive (pathêtikos), but this receptiveness to being
acted upon should not be confused with inertness.
It is rather an effortful holding of oneself in readiness. Attentive seeing or concentration in thinking
requires work to keep oneself from distraction; it
is a potent passivity (dunamis) that becomes
activity in the presence of those things that feed it.
Nutrition is the active transformation of things in
the world into the living body; contemplation is
the effortful openness of the soul to a merging
into the intelligible foundation of the world.
Reading and listening are always hard work, and
hardest of all when one lets the meaning of the
speaker or author develop within oneself.
Contemplation, as Aristotle intends it, is the same
sort of act without the building up of interpretation; it is rather what he calls affirming something
not by thinking any proposition about it but by
touching it…Aristotle believes that the activity of
knowing is always at work in us and available to
us…potentially guiding everything we do in the
same way the blind grub worm is led to its food
and a plant is turned to the light. (Sachs, On the
Soul, 37)
In order to understand what this contemplation is, it is
necessary to distinguish between what we do in contemplation and what we do in deliberation, which is also thinking,
but thinking of a different kind. Deliberation involves paying
attention and thinking things through. We apply it when we
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are faced with things that could be one way or another. As a
photographer in the street I notice a small detail—the
chipped polish on a fingernail, say—and I start to wonder
about what this detail tells me. Does it mean the person is
careless of her appearance, therefore unselfconscious and
possibly willing to agree to be photographed by a stranger on
a public street? Or was the chipping an unfortunate accident,
and is the stranger sufficiently concerned about this small
mishap to be worried about how she looks, and therefore
reluctant to agree have her picture taken here and now?
Things could stand either one way or the other, and deliberation comes into play to weigh the alternatives.
When we deliberate we are in the realm of practical judgment. We are using our ability to think to figure out what is
best for us to do. Such thinking is an important part of living
in society, but it is not contemplation. Contemplation does
not, like deliberation, lead us to consider things that can be
one way or another; rather, it leads us to the awareness of
what cannot be otherwise—what Sachs, after Aristotle, calls
“the intelligible foundation of the world.” And, as he carefully says, in contemplation we are led not just to see this
“intelligible foundation,” but to merge into it, to participate
in and become a part of it.
What can this mean for a skeptical, secular, subjective,
egoistic modern? One of the attractions of Aristotle’s
thinking is that it offers a way to think about the self in the
world that is neither subjective nor egoistic. What he
proposes is that the cosmos is ordered, and that things
happen, for the most part, for reasons. He calls those reasons
causes, and he consistently finds that causes usually have
other causes; those that are farther in the background are
more general causes, which he refers to as sources. Following
this line of thought does not involve rejecting modern
science, but rather taking what modern technological science
tells us and thinking about it in the context of what we know.
To do so involves remaining skeptical that scientific explana-
THOMPSON
17
tion—especially when it can be expressed only in mathematical formulations incapable of being rendered in speech that
is not either non-sensical or hopelessly equivocal—is the
whole story, the version that eliminates any possibility it
cannot presently account for. In support of this sensible attitude, I might cite the wisdom of a thinker who began as a
physical scientist, Immanuel Kant:
The understanding which is occupied merely with
empirical exercise, and does not reflect on the
sources of its own cognition, may exercise its functions very well and very successfully, but it is quite
unable to do one thing, and that of very great
importance, to determine, mainly, the bounds that
limit its employment, and to know the laws that
lie within or without its own sphere. (Critique of
Pure Reason, “Of the Ground of the Division of all
Objects into Phenomena and Noumena”)
If we follow Aristotle in accepting the principle of an
ordered universe as a model for our thinking—and in this it
claims no more of our absolute, final, and unquestioning
belief than any proposal of modern science should—then we
can think about thinking in ways that are denied us if we
accept the world as mostly dark, silent space where particles
collide at random, a realm where some accident of chemical
connection has made it possible for “us” to “think” about
those random collisions. To follow Aristotle’s lead we do not
have to believe in anything, except in the possibility that
thinking can actually lead us to things not completely determined by what we are and what we already happen to know.
As Aristotle himself says in the Nicomachean Ethics, after
observing that “the intellect is something divine as compared
with a human being”:
But one should not follow those who advise us to
think human thoughts, since we are human, and
mortal thoughts, since we are mortal, but as far as
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possible one ought to be immortal and to do all
things with a view toward living in accord with the
most powerful thing in oneself, for even if it is
small in bulk, it rises much more above everything
else in power and worth. (10.7)
Taking what Aristotle says seriously requires accepting the
possibility of an ordered universe, and the possibility that the
intellect can perceive something of this order.
As we go through our daily lives we do notice that, for the
most part, things do seem to be connected in a causal way. If
we follow Aristotle’s thinking we start with commonplace
observations that many things seem to make a kind of sense;
if we subject these observations to reason, clarify them and
try to find some order in them, we are doing what Aristotle
did. Reading his thinking can help clarify our own, and
disclose possibilities we find attractive but might not—as
“educated” post-Enlightenment moderns—have known
about without his help.
If we can entertain his notion that our world—the world
we can discover and know—has some kind of order, then we
can approach that order in contemplation. Think of that
order as what we call in everyday speech “the big picture.”
Someone who can’t get past petty details doesn’t get the big
picture: that person can’t see the forest for the trees. If we
notice that chipped fingernail (to return to the example I used
earlier), we are paying attention to details involved in what
Aristotle calls an ultimate particular. If we use that bit of the
world as a guide to whether we should act or not—in this
example, ask permission to take a picture—we are in the
realm of practical judgment. We are deliberating. But if we
happen to be in such a state—a state of open receptivity, of
“potent passivity,” as Sachs calls it—that when we see the
chipped nail we also see something about the single human
life whose whole history up until that moment includes that
nail and the events that led first to its painting and later to its
chipping, then we are moving beyond deliberation. If we see
THOMPSON
19
not only the nail and the history that led to it, but also something fundamental about what human life on earth actually is,
in its briefness, in its vulnerability to shocks and surprises,
mishaps great and small, in its reliance on vanity and attempts
to please, and on things taken up only to be discarded in
distraction a few moments later—if we see at the same time
we see the chipped nail a whole concatenated bundle of small
ambitions and great disappointments, then we are on the
point of merging into the intellectual foundation of the
world. We are in a state where ultimate particulars and
universals both are present and connected, in a state where
we can be aware of a thing itself and of its place in a larger
order at the same time. In contemplation we see neither
without the other.
“An example is in fact a source of something universal” is
how Aristotle puts it (Nicomachean Ethics, 6.3). In contemplation we see what we can know of the world’s order
unfolding before us—not from us: it is not our product,
though we are included in it, but before us. We see what is
there to be seen. How do we know for sure that what we see
is before us, rather than merely from us, the fevered product
of an active imagination? We don’t. It may be only that. But
it also may not be only that, and years of disciplined attempts
to make it be not only that may help bring about the richer
possibility, a world disclosed to us rather than a world imagined by us. The whole of the Nicomachean Ethics makes clear
that contemplation is the highest, most difficult use of our
ability to think, and that it is not available to everyone. Only
those who are able to hold themselves so that they are not
distracted by passions, needs, local interests—all the possible
missteps Aristotle calls vices—can achieve the state of undistracted calm from which it is possible to see what is there
rather than the opportunities for profit, reminders of desire,
occasions to use a favorite skill, and so forth—the buzzing
static of everyday life familiar to every normal citizen of the
everyday world. In contemplation, we use the will to suppress
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
distraction rather than to initiate aggressive action. This
explains why photographers who are extraordinarily
talented, clever, and skillful can produce work that, though it
may hold our attention for a time, never achieves greatness or
profundity. Look at how clever I am, look what I can do, the
pictures say. If a photographer has a marketing campaign in
the back of the thinking part of his soul as he works, the
needs and possibilities of that campaign will find their ways
into the picture, and a careful, thoughtful viewer’s attempt to
penetrate that picture will be blocked somewhere in the
realm of deliberation—where strategies are hatched—before
it can arrive at contemplation. What the photographer
needed to see, and not what was there, is what the picture
will be about, what that picture will show.
This distinction may be difficult for some readers to
accept, but it is real. Recall that effort is necessary, that will
must be exerted to acquire and maintain the “potent
passivity” we are discussing; steady practice of this discipline
over a long time makes attaining the sought goal increasingly
possible. It is a prospect worth pursuing. Imagine a diligent
photographer who looks at the same or similar subjects for
thirty or forty years. The showing off and cleverness, the
willful self-full-ness get used up, sown like so many wild oats
during the first few years. Eventually he or she might settle
down, so to speak—in Aristotle’s model, come to terms with
and tame the disorganized, distracted state of uncontrolled
passions normal to childhood—and begin to see what’s really
there. A genius (in the modern sense of being extraordinarily
quick-witted, not in Kant’s more neutral descriptive sense)
might come to the same point in two or three tries, and then
go off in some other direction.
I have strayed so far from the example I began with—
standing on the threshold of Feinstein’s studio—that I have
taken this discussion back to the time of Alexander the Great,
and almost brought it full circle. Read what Sachs has written
about Aristotle not from the point of view of a student of
THOMPSON
21
ancient thought, but from the point of view of a photographer:
We can contemplate a scene or sight before us as
well as something purely thinkable…in neither
case is the thing grasped our product…receptiveness to being acted on…a potent passivity that
becomes activity in the presence of things that feed
it…the effortful openness of the soul to a merging
into the intelligible foundation of the world…
when one lets the meaning [of another] develop
within oneself…affirming something not by
thinking any proposition about it but by touching
it. (On the Soul, Sachs, 37)
These could be tenets of an aesthetic of photography that
would come into play on the doorstep of Feinstein’s studio,
at the window of Madame Vauquer’s pension, on a violent
Vietnamese street, any place or time since the invention of
the camera. This suggested aesthetic, if scrupulously
followed, would produce pictures not based on the principles
of good design, nor in accordance with the wishes of an audience or market. These pictures would not speak first and
most loudly about what the photographer knows, would not
be deliberately expressive of anything urgent about that
photographer’s own self or needs, nor would they present a
poetic construction intended to distract a viewer’s attention
from the everyday world he walks and breathes in. The
pictures stemming from such an aesthetic would be quiet and
true, diligently observant of the things in front of them, and
alert to orders of order ranging far beyond ideas about scurves and The Rule of Thirds.
What might a work of photographic art called into being
according to the principles gleaned from Aristotle be like? It
might be something like a work of another kind of art
discussed by Auerbach a little later in the same essay I
referred to earlier. This work is also a work of fiction, and
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Auerbach’s commentary concerns the author’s manner of
telling the reader about his characters’ world:
We hear the writer speak; but he expresses no
opinion and makes no comment. His role is
limited to selecting the events and translating them
into language; and this is done in the conviction
that every event, if one is able to express it purely
and completely, interprets itself and the persons
involved in it far better and more completely than
any opinion or judgment appended to it could do.
This description picks up the new note introduced by
Aristotle into what we are considering. In referring to Balzac,
Auerbach noted that that author depended on his reader’s
“mimetic imagination,” on “his [the reader’s] memorypictures of similar persons and similar milieux he may have
seen.” To the extent that this is true, Balzac expects his reader
to match the description he reads with what he already
knows. Aristotle goes further. The thing grasped is not our
product; it is achieved through “an effortful holding of
oneself in readiness,” the “effortful openness of the soul to
the structure of the intelligible world.” This is not matching
selections from our memory-banks with the stimuli that
present themselves. Relying on memory-banks is mediation;
full openness to what is is im-mediate.
Balzac appeals to what the reader already thinks and even
tells the reader what he, Balzac, thinks about the world he
describes. But the later 19th century French writer Auerbach
turns to promises to go farther in the direction Sachs indicates:
There occur in his letters…many highly informative statements on the subject of his aim in art.
They lead to a theory—mystical in the last
analysis, but in practice, like all true mysticism,
based upon reason, experience, and discipline—of
a self-forgetful absorption in the subjects of reality
23
THOMPSON
which transforms them (par une chimie
merveilleuse) and permits them to develop to
mature expression. In this fashion subjects
completely fill the writer; he forgets himself; his
heart no longer serves him save to feel the hearts
of others, and when, by fanatical patience, this
condition is achieved, the perfect expression,
which at once entirely comprehends the momentary subject and impartially judges it, comes of
itself; subjects are seen as God sees them, in their
true essence. (On the Soul, 37)
The writer referred to is, of course, Gustave Flaubert, and
the letters mentioned were written while he was at work on
Madame Bovary. His practice, and the theory of it deduced
from his letters by Auerbach, take us to the threshold of an
exciting prospect—the prospect of coming to know something that is truly foreign to us. In ordinary life this is a
prospect that presents increasing difficulties for most of us,
especially after the first dozen or twenty years of life. This
prospect is also the central challenge of photography as a
mature art.
* * * * * * * *
Photography is not primarily a studio art. The discussion so
far has been directed towards photographs that come into
being when a photographer looks at something new to him,
something strange, something beyond the range of his
familiar daily experience. Some photographers have made
discoveries while rearranging the stuff on their desks or
kitchen counters, of course, and such a familiar happening as
the play of sunlight on a window curtain can appear miraculous to a certain kind of person in a receptive mood. But for
many photographers encountering something new involves
travel, or at least walking out of the house. The specific
pictures I have mentioned so far were taken in a battle zone
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
in southeast Asia and in the Philippines; the hypothetical ones
I have speculated about would have been made in the
entryway of a strangers studio and in the corner (or at the
window) of a French pension. Travel or walking around is
easiest for the young and unattached. They have more physical stamina, and more time. So it is hardly surprising that
photographers often do more work when young than later
on.
Walker Evans continued to work with a camera until very
near the end of his life, when a fall broke his collarbone,
making it difficult for him to hold even the small camera he
was using at the time. Even before this fall, his work, though
daily or nearly so, can hardly be compared in volume and
intensity to the work he did in 1935 and 1936, when he
exposed hundreds of 8x10 negatives and dozens of rolls of
35mm (and other sizes) film on a series of auto trips that took
him through parts of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Georgia,
Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama. As an older man his
work was less strenuous, conducted at a more leisurely pace,
and less adventurous than the work he had done in his mid30s.
He took a job with Fortune magazine, and after retiring
from that, a job teaching at Yale University. As his work
became known to a new generation interested in the kind of
photography he did, he was asked to speak to school and
museum audiences from time to time. He gave a few
prepared talks, but mostly he preferred taking questions from
the audience. If a session went well, he might appraise its
success by saying, “They got a good talk out of me.”
As he aged, Evans grew more reflective, and he talked
about his own work and photography in general. Some of his
reflections were recorded on audio tapes by the institutions
that asked him to speak. Anyone who considers these talks as
a body might well come to the conclusion that Evans was
shaping an image of himself, presenting the story of his development and work as he wanted it to be understood.
THOMPSON
25
Some things he mentions again and again: he liked to talk
about going to Paris as a young man, about seeing James
Joyce once in Sylvia Beach’s bookstore but being afraid to
approach him. He liked to talk about spending time with
Hemingway in Cuba, and he frequently talked about other
writers he had read but not known: D.H. Lawrence and
Henry James, for example. He once began a question-andanswer session at a summer art program for college students
by reading a long sentence from James’s The American Scene.
That was his idea of getting the ball rolling with a roomful of
art students in 1972. A recently-published portfolio of his
photographs, most taken during the 1930s, was displayed on
the wall behind him, and the students’ questions were about
those pictures and not the passage Evans read.
Evans’s literary interests were more than a snobbish
pretension (though they were that as well). One observation
that comes up more than once in these late taped conversations (Evans died in 1975) was his debt to two French writers,
one of them Gustave Flaubert. I don’t think Evans ever cited
a specific passage in Flaubert, and I’m sure he never read
much (if any) critical writing on Flaubert. He had a low
opinion of criticism in general: he considered critical writing
to be a good deal below what is now called “creative” writing.
For Evans, writing fiction was art, and writing criticism was
not. He looked down on the English Department at Yale for
being concerned mostly with criticism instead of artistic
production.
But somehow, despite his disdain for critical analysis,
Evans managed to intuit that there was something in the
work of Flaubert—a writer of fiction—that he could learn
from and use in his work as a photographer. He was able to
intuit this, and to acquire what he needed not by making
propositions about it—not by analyzing what Flaubert had
done, and then constructing from that analysis a program to
direct his own approach to picture-taking. Rather, he
absorbed it directly, as if by osmosis, relying I think on some-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
thing like the procedure described by Immanuel Kant in the
passage quoted earlier. You might even say that Evans, in
looking at Flaubert as an artist, saw something whole and
formed—saw at a glance, if you like—something he recognized and understood, not by analysis and calculation, but
recognized in the way we recognize a triangle without
counting the angles, or the face of our friend John without
making an inventory of his features.
If the connection between Flaubert and Evans is a real
one, and I believe it is, then it may be worthwhile to try and
work out just how something of Flaubert can be seen in a
picture made by Evans. We might ask what it was that Evans
absorbed, if not from page 213 of Madame Bovary then at
least from the spirit in which Flaubert worked—a spirit
which, as we saw from the brief passage of commentary by
Auerbach and that passage’s parallels with Sachs’s distillation
of a current in Aristotle’s thinking, has special ambitions and
connections with other approaches to the world and earlier
bodies of thinking.
Let me take as a starting point the print that sits propped
up on the desk where I write. It is of a well-known Evans
picture, the flashlit view he made of kitchen utensils on the
wall of a frame house in Hale County, Alabama, in the
summer of 1936. The picture presents a small rectangle,
mostly light gray in tone. Some of the tiny spaces between the
vertical boards that form the room’s wall have been plugged,
and are quite dark gray, almost black. Others are cracks that
let in the daylight, and are white. Shadows of things on the
wall are dark, and some reflections of the flash (from a bulb,
probably) are as bright as the daylight showing through the
cracks. For the most part, then, the field we see in this picture
is gray, but the variations make a pattern—a pattern that is
sufficiently arresting, in a graphic sense, to be noticeable at
first glance. The material shown is unfamiliar to most of us
(or at least it was, until this picture became so famous), but
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27
the pattern of its display might cause anyone interested in
looking to pause, ask, What’s that? and take a closer look.
Kitchen Wall, Alabama Farmstead, 1936
Even after this preliminary, superficial examination
comments suggest themselves. This odd pattern—odd
because it is unexpected, yet graphically sure, odd because we
recognize the pattern before we identify the real-world stuff
that forms the pattern—attracts us, and causes us to linger.
Our attention has been attracted to the look of the picture.
The look of the picture may be understood as its distinctive overall form, that look that makes it different from other
pictures in the way that my face makes me different from
other faces. Just as we linger at the sight of certain faces more
than at the sight of others, so too we are more apt to linger
at the sight of certain pictures. This feature is important to
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Kant, who attempted to establish that some arrangements are
“naturally” appealing to “all men in all countries.” I am not
the one to judge how far he succeeded in this effort, but his
concern with significant form underscores its hold on our
attention.
When we are at the stage of being attracted by the look
of the picture, we are in the position we were in on the
threshold of Feinstein’s studio. We are taking in the picture as
a whole, at a glance, and we may be open to an experience of
contemplation—the experience, the reader will remember, of
letting the truth of what is seen unfold within us, directly, as
something not our product. Faced with this picture, what
would that mean?
It might mean, for a start, exerting effort to avoid distraction, freeing our attention of irrelevant demands from some
personal agenda of wants of our own. An obvious example
might be to avoid thinking about the provenance of this
particular print. How old is it? Who printed it? From what
collector or dealer did it come? What cryptic and possibly
value-enhancing notations in pencil are on the back? How
much will it bring at auction?
Each of these concerns is legitimate, in its appropriate
context, but none of them has anything at all to do with
looking at the picture contemplatively, that is, in such a way
as to let what is seen unfold within us.
In a sense, what I am describing is trying to calm down
the static so that we can approach something like the ideal
“purity” that was the justification of the spontaneous first
glance recommended by Feinstein at the first session of his
work shop. It is important to understand, however, that we
are not after a state of child-like innocence, some kind of
willful ignorance. We live in the world, and if we take this
picture seriously we will soon enough have to work very hard
at bringing as much of that world’s experience as we can to
bear on it, but only after the picture begins to tell us what we
need to bring. Before that can commence, we need to shed
THOMPSON
29
and focus, exert the effort it takes to avoid distraction and
attain quiet.
As the pattern continues to exert its hold on our attention, we may begin to survey the terrain that, at first glance,
seemed so inviting. What things do these modulated grays
disclose to our attention? The photographer’s wish to show
small details is evident, but not obsessive: the flat light of the
head-on flash illumination has minimized surface detail which
would leap to the eye if seen in hard cross-light.
The manner of rendering this humble scene hardly calls
attention to itself at all, at first glance. We have noted a
certain uneasy tension among the various things visible—the
“elements” of the “composition.” The two horizontal strips
of lath nailed across the vertical planks seem to the viewing
eye to float, in spite of the clearly-visible heads of the nails
securing them, and their echo in the darker, fuzzy marks in
the picture’s center comes into play in this connection: they
seem almost to recede in space, denying the obvious flat wall
that ends the picture’s depth. The tilt of the cross member
near the picture’s top—so flimsy a timber can scarcely be
called a beam—adds to the sense of disorder, and the objects
it supports cooperate in this impression as well. The glass jar
is cockeyed (with reference to the board edge next to it, but
who would expect a plank in this structure to keep to a true
vertical?); the metal can looks off-kilter too—unless it is
hanging true and the planks are off. The mysterious bit of
crud suspended on a tiny line from the leftmost nail confirms
the true vertical. A plate with a centered hole, odd patches of
adhering paper—one a ripped commercially-printed notice
retaining only the word fragment “AM”, in bold capitals, and
“It’s [undecipherable] ized” in small, faint, linked script—and
a single nail near the can complete the decorations on the
“ground” of this “figure-ground composition.”
Viewers familiar with other pictures by this photographer
will recognize this tense, slightly-unnerving kind of arrangement of forgettable or cast-off objects. Both the objects
shown, and their manner of framing and organization, as well
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
as the seemingly unemphatic use of light and tone are characteristic of his work. These “stylistic elements” offer interests of their own, which can be expanded upon by those who
believe the chief interest of pictures to lie in their relation to
the history of style. Or perhaps such a line of analysis is
another distraction leading away from what this picture has
to show its viewers. Indeed, the tensely-organized visual field
sets off a central focus, a “subject,” which lies at almost the
exact center of the picture, where its diagonals cross. Its
subject is the family silver chest.
The objects forming the “ground” are so nondescript, so
arrestingly organized (or disorganized), that it is easy to see
them only—that is to say, to note their visual weights and
positions without thinking too much about what they might
be, or be used for. What viewer has an experiential reference
for a topless Mason jar, or a plate with a hole in the center?
We look at the tonalities, the textures, the odd spacing, and
our experience is visual, “aesthetic.” Perhaps the can with its
quaint wooden handle and the plate, certainly the textual
fragment AM (a fragment freighted with ambiguous possible
meanings), register as knowable, if disparate, objects. Any
“kick” this recognition adds to our experience of the picture
might be related to Surrealism (the picture was made in
1936), and also “aesthetic.” It would have to do with beauty.
But at the picture’s center the rules change. The objects
shown so clearly there, and highlighted by the reflection of
the flash from their shiny surfaces, present a great load of
specific information, and of recognizable illusion. These are
utensils we know well; we feel them in our hands. We recognize the shell-like edges of one fork’s handle and note the
different pattern of the next handle over, and the lack of
ornament at all on the handle of a nearby spoon. In between
is a knife with a wooden handle (like the handle of the leftmost utensil), a handle whose halves are held together by
wire.
THOMPSON
31
No narrator or even caption is needed with material as
familiar, as everyday as this. Any viewer likely to see this
picture would recognize—and understand—the distinctions
in play among patterned, plain, wooden, broken, tarnished,
matched, and odd—as quickly as he or she might almost feel
the utensil in right or left hand, familiar from lifelong practice. These small images, so recognizable and familiar, send
out “kindred mutations” to the minds of any viewers who
bother even to identify what the picture shows. A lingering
look—the arresting organization of the picture encourages
it—raises the question of how this familiar material in the
center—the “figure”—relates to the strange unsettling
“ground” surrounding it. At this point, the picture begins to
weigh in with its full largeness of meaning, the full force of
its allusive reference.
Once the silver-chest is seen to exist in such strange form,
and understood to reside in so hostile and unsettled an environment, the imagination of an engaged viewer begins to
work. He enlists his memory-bank, allowing what he knows
to appear according to directions coming from the unfolding
representation in the picture. That imaginative work might
begin perhaps with the hands that hold, and wash, and polish,
and put away those prized salvaged utensils—might those
hands resemble the ruined members Hesiod dreamed of
preserving as new in the Golden Age? Then there might be
the odd attenuated daily chores that utilize the strange objects
on the wall, now understood as utensils also, saved and
arranged also. What sort of use might that suspended bit of
crud have? How could anyone value such a thing so much as
to hang it on the wall? Who could have such a need?
Lear has an answer: “Oh, reason not the need. Our basest
beggars/Are in the poorest thing superfluous.” This answer is
only a short space from the extreme of sympathetic identification, an extreme whose full limit finds voice in this howl:
Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this hideous storm,
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O! I have ta’en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou may’st shake the super flux to them,
And show the heavens more just.
This speech of Lear is offered as part of the front matter of
the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, in which this
picture first appeared.
We have now gone outside the picture. To have done so
at the beginning of our look at the picture—to have started
our look with a consideration of the book in which the
picture was published and its front matter might have been a
distraction. But at this point, well into an experience of the
picture, we want to know more: a question has been raised—
who could have such a need?—and anything we recall or can
learn about the picture’s first use and the circumstances of its
making can properly be called in to help answer that question. Our unfolding awareness of the picture—and of the
things in the picture—directs our thinking. In order to be in
us, the things in the picture tell us what they need. Our
memories and imaginations respond to the call and give the
picture what it needs to develop within us. When puzzles or
conflicts arise, they must be settled by thinking, and the
thinking appropriate to contemplation—theorein—is supplemented by another of Aristotle’s twenty-four kinds of
thinking—dianoein. This is the thinking that thinks things
through, as in propositions and demonstrations. This
thinking allows the viewer to sort out what he senses in that
first look, when he or she takes things all at once, as a whole.
But this problem-solving thinking, the thinking that looks at
details, identifies them, and connects them to other things we
recall from past experience—dianoein—operates in the
service and at the direction of theorein. A vision of the whole
THOMPSON
33
comes first, and as it develops it looms over and directs the
step-by-step thinking it requires in order to unfold
completely.
Evans made the pictures and determined their arrangement in the book, and their placement apart from the text.
James Agee was responsible for all the text. His huge sensibility may have worked its massy gravity on his collaborator.
Agee’s text suggests moral urgency, as if he desperately needs
to help the hardness and deprivation he observes, or at least
immolate himself to make up for it. For his part Evans is
moved so far as to wonder at what he sees—his “momentary
subject,” to use Auerbach’s phrase, and the qualification is
appropriate: Evans was not a humanitarian aid worker, but
an artist. He was in Alabama for three weeks, with the tenant
farmers for less time that that, and he stood in front of no
individual subject, including the human ones, for more than
a few minutes. But during that brief time he had available to
him the special attitude toward his “subject-matter” that had
been developing within him, and he paid close attention to
details. Close attention indeed: he, like Flaubert, gave his
momentary subject “self-forgetful absorption” so that the
subject “completely filled” him to the extent that “his heart
serves him only to feel the hearts of others”—others meaning
milieux as well as individual people. It is this “fanatical”
(Auerbach’s word used in connection with Flaubert; Evans
reported to Lincoln Kirstein that he was so stimulated by the
possibilities of photography that he sometimes thought
himself “completely crazy”) concentration that allows him to
come up with an approach, discover the approach that allows
his chosen momentary subjects to speak for themselves in
“mature expression.”
He has framed (and lighted) this picture in a characteristic
way, but this characteristic way does not overwhelm the
subject-things with his “artistry.” He has made a picture in
which the things shown can begin to work on the viewer, a
picture in which the world of the picture, the milieu it shows,
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34
can emerge as more noticeable, more important, and more
worthy of attention than the artistic milieu that set the stage
for its production.
This is what Evans found in Flaubert. According to
Auerbach, Flaubert completely dispenses with the “separation
of styles”—the notion, prevalent in Western literature prior
to the nineteenth century that only elevated figures (kings,
princes, and heroes, for example) were worthy of the serious
attention of tragedy. Humbler sorts appeared in comedy and
in satire, but were not taken as seriously as the figures in a
tragedy are. They did not come in for the serious treatment,
the close attention reserved for figures of high standing. Here
is Auerbach in an earlier essay (on Petronius):
Everything commonly realistic, everything
pertaining to everyday life, must not be treated on
any level except the comic, which permits no
problematic probing. As a result the boundaries of
realism are narrow. And if we take that word
realism a little more strictly, we are forced to
conclude that there could be no serious literary
treatment of everyday occupations and social
classes…in short of the people and its life. Linked
with this is the fact that the realists of antiquity do
not make clear the social forces underlying the
facts and conditions which they present. This
could only be done in the realm of the serio-problematic. (Auerbach, 270)
In Flaubert, however, he finds that
There are no high and low subjects; the universe is
a work of art produced without any taking of
sides, the realistic artist must imitate the procedures of Creation, and every subject in it essence
contains, before God’s eyes, both the serious and
the comic, both dignity and vulgarity….There is
no need for a general theory of levels, in which
THOMPSON
35
subjects are arranged according to their dignity, or
for any analyses by the writer commenting upon
the subject, after its presentation, with a view to
better comprehension and more accurate classification; all this must result from the presentation of
the subject itself. (Auerbach, 429-430) [italics
added]
The artist works for “a self-forgetful absorption in the
subjects of reality which transforms them (par une chemie
merveilleuse) and permits them to develop to mature expression.”
Flaubert wrote as a part of nature. In accordance with the
procedure outlined by Kant, Auerbach interpreted the rule of
nature given through Flaubert. Evans neither analyzed
Flaubert’s nature nor read the rules formulated by Auerbach
or anyone else. But he liked the look of the chimie
merveilleuse, the “self-forgetful absorption in the subjects of
reality which transforms them and permits them to develop
to mature expression”; through some trick of temperament,
talent, instinct, and sleight-of-hand he came up with his own
version of it. Flaubert found tragedy in the life of a provincial
wife, and Evans found matter for high seriousness in a poor
tenant-farmer’s makeshift kitchen. As the photographer Lee
Friedlander put it: after Walker we could take a picture of
anything.
It is hard to think of Evans’ pictures as glances. Many of
the best-known ones resemble nothing so much as direct
stares. This is so because the attention they give has a relentless quality: they are so clear, so unagitated—that is, not
dominated by a sense of urgency, a sense that something must
be done about state of affairs the camera shows. They avoid
extreme contrasts of black and white, presenting for the most
part a lucid field of modulated grays. They are composed not
only in the sense of being unruffled emotionally, but also in
the sense that they present their subjects in a way that might
be called appropriately elegant. This dignified presentation of
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
humble objects represents the artist’s rejection of the “separation of styles.” Like Van Gogh, Evans made a worn pair of
boots the subject of a picture.
In their stillness, his pictures are also like stares. Many of
Evans’s pictures from the mid-1930s were made with a view
camera, a large apparatus that must be used atop a tripod.
The view to be taken is framed in the camera’s ground glass
screen, which can be seen only when a black cloth covers
both the photographer’s head and the viewing screen of the
camera. The film must be inserted and the lens closed from its
viewing mode and reset before the film can be exposed and
the picture made. All this takes time, several seconds at least,
maybe a minute or two, and during this time the subject must
not change in any important way if the photographer is to get
on film the picture he saw on the viewing screen. And his
exposure times were not instantaneous. Exposure times of
one-half second and one full second, even in sunlight, were
recorded on the negatives storage envelopes. The pictures
look still because the subjects are still.
The subjects may have been chosen in part for their stillness, but the photographer’s concentration gives them an
extra measure of stillness. His attention to detail results in an
organization that includes even tiny features of the scene,
recording them with great fidelity while at the same time
preserving a masterly control of the whole picture, the overall
look of the scene that attracted his attention in the first place.
Utility poles and their shadows, the raking light on clapboards, the small figure of an onlooker with his head cocked
a certain way, even the clouds in the sky seems to settle into
their proper places like so many elements of an ordered
cosmos. The pictures seem still because they look inevitable.
Also, many of Evans’s best-known pictures were made
from a distance—from across the street or down the block.
He frequently used a lens of long focal length—a “telephoto,” which yields a picture with flattened perspective.
This tool allows the photographer to stand far off and yet
THOMPSON
37
keep the objects he looks at large within his picture’s frame.
The world is examined closely, yet held at arm’s length.
The unruffled stillness of these photographs and what we
know about the procedure of their making suggest that
photography’s glance can be extended in time so that it
becomes a stare. On the threshold of Feinstein’s studio we
were invited to take in what we saw in the blink of an eye,
before the corrupting influence of second thoughts could
come into play. Under Evans’s dark cloth, time slows down;
there is time for the appearance of second and even thirdthoughts. But under the discipline taught by Flaubert these do
not appear as corruptions or distractions: instead of listening
to distraction, the soul of the photographer exerts a willful
effort to avoid distraction so that the things in front of the
camera’s lens can fill it completely, obliterating (for the
moment) I want, I need, I hate, and even I know.
This extension of time from the glance to the stare
prepares the way for a further extension. The time of the
photographer’s stare at the subject, however long it lasts, will
still be brief. Life in the phenomenal world of space, time,
and traffic demands it. The “momentary” subject will pass
from view, and the photographer’s contemplative experience
of it will end. But the photograph lasts, and the picture can,
at any future time, become the subject of some viewer’s own,
later, separate contemplation. Flaubert’s discipline—and all
the possibilities available in contemplation—apply to pictureviewers as well as picture-takers.
Let me end this essay by stating the obvious: what a
photographer does when photographing, and what a viewer
does when he looking at a picture are similar, but are not the
same thing. Both photographer and viewer can look in
contemplation at what they see—I write “can look” because
contemplation is not available to all people, nor at all times.
But the attention each of the two, photographer and viewer,
gives is of a different order.
The viewer has a long time to look, a whole lifetime if the
picture’s hold on him is strong. The viewer has the possibility
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
of endless revisiting, re-thinking, exploring various leads,
various directions of thought that may arise, from time to
time, during moments of contemplation that are each
different, possibly increasingly comprehensive as the experience of the picture (and the viewer herself) mature during the
viewer’s prolonged intermittent stare.
The picture that occasions this viewing experience has to
be made during a relatively short time. How does a photographer “capture” profound order in a brief instant, at a
glance? How, at a glance, does a photographer take in the
ordered “look” of a meaningful scene and sense its connection to the ordered “intelligible foundation of the world?”
The only honest answer is, I don’t know how.
Discipline and experience help prepare the ground: a
prepared, receptive photographer who is also knowledgeable
about his art and experienced in its practice is receptive in a
way that is different, more potent, from the passive receptivity of a neophyte. Not everyone standing at the threshold
of Feinstein’s studio would see something worthy of much
attention or thought. An experienced architectural photographer might hit at once on the right place to put the camera in
order to make a picture suitable for the pages of Architectural
Digest. But another photographer—or that same photographer, if he managed to shed his professional ambition, even
for the moment needed to contemplate this “momentary”
subject—might find a view that would see in the ultimate
particulars on view there some universals truly worth
thinking about. How that happens, how genius operates in
that brief instant of time, is a mystery. Somehow, inside and
outside connect—merge, and an order that is corresponds to
an order we can know, perhaps an order great enough to
attract the attention and stimulate the thinking of viewers for
a long, long while. In that brief instant—during the photographer’s glance that discloses the look that prompts the
viewer’s stare—the photographer resembles Stevens’s
connoisseur of chaos, the pensive man:
THOMPSON
The pensive man . . . he sees that eagle float
For which the intricate Alps are a single nest.
39
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
41
Muthos and Logos
David Stephenson
What is a story? What is a good story? And how does a story
differ from other constructions of language either written or
spoken? From a lecture or essay, for example, a history, philosophical treatise or mathematical proof?
If you ever try to write a story, or even tell a tale without
writing it down, you know how difficult it is to define exactly
what you are doing—stringing words and sentences together,
yes, but to what end? A speech or a proof has a much more
obvious goal, viz. to praise or blame or persuade in the first
case and to demonstrate truth in the second. Stories teach
too, perhaps, but to say what or how they teach requires
insight into a very obscure part of the human soul, obscure
because logic does not operate in exactly the same way in
stories as in demonstration, nor can there be a simple truth to
illuminate or an action to promote. In fact, didactic stories
are universally condemned, because a concluding moral or an
explicit insight detract from the virtue of a story as such, and,
conversely, precisely those details that delight us in a story
will in general complicate any conclusion we might want to
draw from it.
Nevertheless, a story is always about something. The Iliad
and Odyssey tell you right at the beginning that they have a
subject: Achilles’ rage or Odysseus’ manhood. But if the
author does not tell you, it is usually a real chore to formulate in just a sentence or two exactly what a story is about.
Authors themselves confess to the difficulty or even disparage
the effort. Try formulating the subject of Oedipus or War and
David Stephenson is a tutor on the Annapolis campus of St. John’s College.
This lecture was presented on June 15, 2005. Mr. Stephenson’s story, “The
Glass Eye,” won first prize in the short story contest sponsored by Bards and
Sages and will be published this winter as part of their annual anthology.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Peace or Waiting for Godot and you will see how elusive is the
task.
So I’m ready to listen to analysis and advice from
anybody who offers tell me what makes a story, even
Aristotle.
Story and Plot
Before I turn to the ancients, let me consider some modern
advisors. You can find shelves in any library or bookstore
loaded with books that will teach you how to write. So they
claim. Usually half of any such book is advice on how to sell
what you have written, and the other half encourages you to
keep writing at all costs, despite rejection, ignoring family
and friends, eking minutes out of hours and hours out of days
so that you can devote every spare bit of time to the elusive
pursuit of a writing career. No, that’s not fair; they also give
advice to the wordworn: tricks of the trade; rules of the
thumb; inspiration to the perspiring. “Avoid adverbs and
adjectives,” they say; “use short sentences”; “eliminate
cliches”; “maintain tension”; “flesh out your characters”;
“show, don’t tell”; “write what you know.” Much of this is
stylistic advice. Once upon a time, you could find both
readers and authors reveling in the clever peregrinations of a
long sentence. No longer. The modern publisher presumes
that the modern reader has a modern impatience. But if all
this advice has to be taken with a grain of salt (there’s a cliche
that somehow has not lost its savor), it also contains some
useful maxims.1 A parade of adverbs and adjectives do often
weaken rather than strengthen a description, because they
imply an attribute without exhibiting it, without making you
see or feel it. That is, “wily Odysseus” cannot charm or
dismay you with his wiles until you actually see him in
disguise or hear him telling clever lies. Nor can “swift-footed
Achilles” frighten you with the ferocity of his pursuit until
you watch him outrunning a river or hectoring Hector
beneath the walls of Troy.
STEPHENSON
43
So where the modern advisors give hints about how to
catch and hold the attention of a reader or an editor, they
rarely stop to examine the nature of the activity of writing, or
of its object: the story itself. You have to go back a little ways
to find someone, like E. M. Forster, willing to tackle that
question. “The king died and then the queen died”: that is
story, he says. “The king died and then the queen died of a
broken heart”: that is plot. Here we have a serious attempt to
characterize the storyteller’s art: he must connect events as
cause and effect, and the principal causes must lie within the
characters.2
Now E. M. Forster wrote some brilliant novels—
Howard’s End, Passage to India, A Room with a View—nevertheless, I have to modify his terminology. The first version of
“the king died, etc.” is hardly even a story, in my opinion,
though it does reflect the ancestry of the word, “story,” which
is offspring of the word, “history.” That is, in Forster’s first
example, a “story” is a mere reporting of events, which can
pass for a primitive kind of history even though these events
occurred only in the writer’s imagination.3 Forster amplifies
this dry version of his little tale into a more interesting one by
making connections, but even the second version hardly presents all the rudiments of a true story. As it stands it can hardly
suffice to identify anything. We need at least another sentence
or two to put us in mind of a specific tragedy. From the point
of view of the modern writer the connection between characters and events may be all you need, but Aristotle insists
that these connections belong to the context of the individual
work, they function within its identity.
Of course, we do need to distinguish this naked version
from the one clothed with all the linguistic and imaginative
elaborations of published literature. A plot is only the barest
skeleton of what we ordinarily call a “story,” whereas print or
performance fix it in its fullness. We can agree with Forster’s
designation of such an outline as “plot” only as long as we
reserve the word “story” for a higher kind of being than the
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unconnected sequence of deaths out of which he forms his
first example. By “higher kind of being” I do not mean a socalled “short story.” In “story” we must find the essence of a
work of literature, its “soul,” as Aristotle says.
The distinction between story in its full and its synoptic
form is easy for Aristotle, since he can call any complete work
of literature (including plays) a “poem” (something made,
poiêma). For the “essential story” he has other words, words
like muthos and logos. How well do these Greek words correspond to “story” and “plot?”
Muthos vs. Logos
The clearest distinction between muthos and logos is made by
Plato rather than Aristotle. In the Phaedo (61B), Socrates says
that the god told him in his dream to make music. His
attempt to comply turns him to meter and rhythm, and to
story as well. To be a true poet, he says, he must make
muthos, not logos. However, Socrates protests that he is not
muthologikos enough to make up a story from scratch. So he
cheats. He borrows one of Aesop’s fables and adapts it to
meter. Now this bit of dialogue is interesting not only because
it separates muthos radically from logos, but because after
dividing them it recombines the terms into a single adjective,
muthologikos. Muthologikos is hard to translate: we need to
coin a noun that tells us Socrates’ flaw: he is no mythologue,
no teller of tales, no mythologician.4 Here, as so often,
Socrates pretends to a modesty he really lacks. He has no
qualms about making up a story and even calling it muthos
when he needs one in this and other dialogues.5 But the
significance of this passage for us lies in the way Socrates’
understanding of poetry forces him to keep muthos and logos
apart, which he may have forgotten to do elsewhere.
At first these terms seem almost interchangeable in
Aristotle’s Poetics, and some scholars (e.g. Fyfe) translate
them indifferently as either “plot” or “story.”6 For example,
STEPHENSON
45
at the end of chapter 17 Aristotle uses the word logos where
one might think muthos more appropriate. Here is his
complete description of the “logos” of the Odyssey:
A man is for many years away from home and his
footsteps are dogged by Poseidon and he is all
alone. Moreover, affairs at home are in such a
state that his estate is being wasted by suitors and
a plot laid against his son, but after being stormtossed he arrives himself, reveals who he is, and
attacks them, with the result that he is saved and
destroys his enemies. That is the essence (to idion),
the rest is episodes. (Fyfe, trans.)
Whether one calls this synopsis “plot” or “story” hardly
matters: the point is that even such a brief account allows us
to identify the whole work and distinguish it from any other.
It is an only slightly more extended distillation of story than
Forster’s simple “plot.” Note that Aristotle does not name the
man or his home or son. This summary is enough to fix the
game even without naming players. It is just enough to identify the book by its events alone. Names should come later in
the construction of a story, according to Aristotle, names that
indicate character by their meaning or names drawn from the
legendary list of characters that traditionally embody the
necessary traits. First sketch the story in general (katholou),
he says, then fill it in with episodes and choose names.
Perhaps it might help to see how Aristotle defines logos in
general (Poetics 20.11): “logos is a composite meaningful
utterance of which some parts mean something in themselves.” To this Aristotle adds that logos can be one either the
way a sentence is, or the way the whole Iliad is. That any
sentence is itself a logos should be clear. A word is an atom of
meaning. Out of words the sentence forms a compound that
is not just a mixture or average or blend: it is a unity that
generates new meaning out of these components. But the
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entire Iliad too is a logos, one whose parts are logoi— viz.,
sentences. From this point of view, what causes wholeness in
either a story or a sentence is clearly meaning, and the same
could perhaps be said of any logos, whether that word
signifies ratio or reason or speech.
But this is different for muthos. Muthos too is unified, but
it is unified around action, (praxis), rather than meaning.
Aristotle defines muthos as “a representation (mimêsis) of an
action. For I say,” he says, “that muthos is the synthesis of
deeds (pragmata).”
Consider Oedipus. He has performed a series of deeds,
many outside of the play: he leaves Corinth; he kills an arrogant old man at the crossroads; he solves the riddle of the
Sphinx; he marries the king’s widow and rules Thebes; he
hunts down the criminal responsible for the plague; he
consults oracles; he examines witnesses; he ignores the warnings of Tiresias and Jocasta; he looks for his true parents; he
finds out who they are; he blinds himself. The play binds all
these deeds into a single action: the action of self-discovery.
In the end, and only in the end, does he know who he is.
Thus, in a story, deeds culminate in action, and action is the
result of choice—hence the peculiarly human quality of
stories that the word logos does not capture. An epic or a
drama has a soul, and that soul is its muthos.
It is within Aristotle’s metaphor of life that one might best
seek the source of beauty in a poem, which, he says, “must be
constructed...round a single piece of action, whole and
complete in itself, with a beginning, middle and end, so that
like a single living organism it may produce its own peculiar
form of pleasure.” Beauty, he says, belongs to “a living creature or any organism composed of parts.” The very unity of
life, the unity that nature preserves in growth and reproduction, must evoke aesthetic pleasure in the scientific or philosophical observer; so also the imitation of that life in a poem
should inspire a similar wonder and delight in everyone, all
the more when it develops a story which—as story—always
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47
involves human life moved by choice and will and character
as well as desire. The analogy with nature in general is not far
to seek: praxis is to kinêsis as humanity is to nature. For
praxis—political, moral, deliberate action—is a motion
proper only to humans, and this is what moves a play or an
epic forward. A rock falls from its nature as a rock and a seed
sprouts out of its nature too; a story imitates the activity that
defines a human being as a political and social animal.
I think we must decide for ourselves whether the beauty
of a story is the cause or the result of that unity that a human
being provides through the cooperation of his own character,
means and ends, that is to say, whether beauty resides in the
representation or in the action itself. If the natural organization of a living creature, and of man in particular, is reason
for delight; so also is the construction of a poem. A poem
about human beings, therefore, a play or an epic, can bear us
a double beauty.
We might try to capture the distinction between muthos
and logos by equating them to “story” and “plot,” respectively. But if we turn to elementary plots, such as the one
Aristotle offers for the Odyssey, we find their differences
eroding. The sense of these words start to shift and overlap.
Does Aristotle’s description reflect the meaning of the epic or
its action or something else? If by “meaning” we mean what
just suffices to identify it in words, then, yes, this plot is its
meaning. But the single action, the praxis that subsumes all
the deeds of the Odysseus to his story, his muthos, is harder
to find within this description. Perhaps it lies in the homecoming itself, of which the trials and triumphs are only
details. Or maybe at the most fundamental level plot and
story are the same thing, or different aspects of the same
thing, plot emphasizing the logical sequence and progression
of events and story emphasizing their subsumption under the
larger dramatic whole of human endeavor.
An epic like the Odyssey contains many stories: it is
polymythic, one might say. There is the story of the Cyclops,
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and the story of Nausicaa, the tale of Telemachus’s trip to
Sparta and the story of the suitors’ slaughter. Similarly the
Iliad contains the “Diomediad,” Hector’s farewell, Priam’s
suit, Achilles’ scream on the wall, any one of which could
form the basis of a separate play. Each of these sequences
forms its own story. You remember Diomedes? Athena loves
him. With her help, he kills more heroes than Agamemnon
and Menelaus together, and even wounds the gods,
Aphrodite and Ares. Could not some author focus on him
alone? Or on Hector: the Trojan hero’s conquests in battle,
his sense of duty, the tender love of his wife and his son, his
willingness to sacrifice himself to protect Troy. There, too, is
a story worth isolating and presenting by itself. Each part of
the Iliad is its own story, and the whole epic is a story
composed of stories. So a story can be a higher unity in two
ways, a muthos muthôn—a story of stories, an action of
actions—or a logos logôn—a plot of plots, a meaning of
meanings. In this respect tragedies and epics differ: a tragedy
can contain only one story, one muthos, though it always
contains many logoi.
Aristotle limits the number of distinct poetic elements to
six. Muthos comes first, because he believes story to be the
aim and end of a poem. He ignores lyric poetry in this treatise, although he must know of Anacreon and Sappho and
Pindar. Why? The answer may be political: “the play’s the
thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.” Or
perhaps a poem with fewer elements is simply less of a poem.7
The remaining five poetic elements, listed in order of
importance, are: character (êthos); thought or reason (literally “thinking through”: dianoia); language, delivery or
diction (lexis, a word deriving obviously from legô); song
(melapoiia); spectacle (opsis). All of these, with the exception
of spectacle, figure in epic as well as tragedy. Character plays
an obvious role in any story. Thought, as understood here, is
the kind of thought that speech can exhibit, what displays
character and motive, but insofar as it dictates what is appro-
STEPHENSON
49
priate to a speaker and a situation, it could influence the poet
in a more general way. Aristotle refers the reader to his
Rhetoric for a full discussion of this topic. Lexis may be his
own coinage: at least, according to the Rhetoric (3.1), it is a
neglected art, however important to the public speaker— to
the poet as well, since this is what governs the choice of
words. Lexis or lexis en logô “is the interpretation by means
of words, which has the same power in prose and verse.” As
to the last two elements of a poem, melopoiia and opsis,
Aristotle says only that song is the more important.
So he has his own favorite list of features and advice to
the poet about how to improve many of them. The story must
progress from a “tightening” to a “loosening,” for example,
the first part building to a climax that turns happiness on its
head, after which the drama unravels to its natural end. For a
truly tragic effect, the hero of a story must be better than
ordinary, but must be brought low by a single failing, and his
fall must evoke pity and fear. The greatest of all writing skills
is the proper use of metaphor. This cannot be grasped from
anyone else. It is the sign of genius in a poet, since to
construct a good metaphor is to contemplate similarity.
Metaphor produces in miniature much of the pleasure of
poetry, for, Aristotle claims, we learn from metaphor the way
we learn from anything that raises our sights from species to
genus. And learning is the greatest pleasure. And so on.
Thus, the Poetics is full of such practical pointers for
writers. So is the Rhetoric. Although that treatise deals with
speeches rather than stories (the word muthos, therefore
never appears) it is worth reading for its general advice.
Aristotle could be a modern writing instructor after all. He
gives many writing tips that still work.
Other kinds of poetry might alter the order of importance
in his list. Some will disagree with Aristotle’s preferences
even in the drama or epic. Beautiful, well-crafted language,
for example: isn’t that what we love most in Shakespeare?
Wordsworth? Virginia Woolf? Should language always be
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subordinated to story-line? What about character?
Nowadays, writers often aim for “character-driven” rather
than “plot-driven” stories, that is, they spend their energy on
the development and delineation of characters, and then
pretend to sit back and let the characters lead where they will.
But this brings us back to story. Perhaps the truth is that such
works too are “story-driven,” if not plot-driven. Even those
who disregard Aristotle’s recommendation to begin with plot
must end up with some kind of unity. Can dialogue and
narrative come to life without something like a soul?
History of Muthos and Logos
Homer did not like the word, logos, or at least did not appreciate its philosophical or poetic implications. It appears only
twice in his epics: once in the Iliad and once in the Odyssey.
With only these two examples available, it is hard to discern
any peculiarities the word might entail for Homer, but it must
have been a rare or strange term to him. Patroklos takes
pleasure in logos when applying his medical knowhow to
tend Eurypylos’s wounds (Book 15). What could the word
mean here? “Chat?” “Banter?” “The anecdotes of heroes?”
The context gives us even less help with meaning in the
Odyssey, where logoi figure only among Calypso’s charms.
Maybe the word simply had not yet acquired the power
that philosophy or mathematics or even the law courts were
to give it in later times. It obviously derives from the verb
legô, whose oldest sense referred more to gathering and
selecting than to speaking, and that is how it is used in the
Iliad: in Book 23 Achilles commands his companions to
gather up (legômen) Patroklos’s bones for the funeral pyre.
From this primitive sense gradually evolved the mode of
speech signified by legô in Attic Greek.8 That is, to speak well
requires the collection and ordering of perceptions and ideas,
and this is the province of logos. Perhaps, therefore, the best
rendering of the verb in English is “recount”—one can
STEPHENSON
51
recount an experience or an adventure for the pleasure of the
audience. As to its corresponding noun, “account,” that too
can lend authority to the telling of a tale as well as reckon up
cost. Both English words express the ordering (and even
enumerating) function of discourse. In this way one can see
how after Homer the mathematical sense of the word developed naturally alongside its reference to speech.
Homer has no such hesitation about muthos. That word
laces many pages of his epics. Agamemnon sends away the
priest Chryses with a harsh word (muthos), for example, and
Nestor is accused of loving words too much (again muthos).
Sometimes, as if to emphasize Agamemnon’s despotism, its
meaning verges on “command,” but in most places, wherever
a later Greek author might use the word logos, Homer is
comfortable with muthos. In the second example one might
find a trace of its later connection to the specifics of storytelling—long-winded Nestor loves to tell tales of his past
heroism and revels in the words that recall it. But nowhere
can you discover any allusion to myth or fable or falsehood.
You accuse Nestor of exaggeration at your own peril.
Even in Plato’s dialogues the suggestion that muthos
signifies a flight of fancy would be a mistake. The “myth of
Er” in the Republic, the charioteer in the Phaedrus,
Persephone’s provisions for the rebirth of souls in the Meno:
these all have distinctive places in the dialogues, but none of
them can be dismissed as mere entertainment. Even the cave
depicted in Book 6 of the Republic is more than allegory. All
of these muthoi are more than myth. That is, muthos and
logos do not part company until much later, when truth and
fiction become the touchstones of modern discourse. They
have a long way to go before they spawn myth and logic in
the English language. Truth can adopt a mythological as well
as a dialectical or scientific form. Perhaps our modern
tendency to sunder fact from fiction absolutely makes us
exclude some mysterious region where they cooperate or
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overlap, a region Socrates saw how to exploit. Lying may be
a way to tell the truth better.
Aristotle expresses this succinctly in the Poetics: “Homer
has also taught others how best to lie,” he says (24.18), and
in constructing stories one should “choose the plausible
impossible rather than the unpersuasive possible.” Poetic
effect justifies exaggeration and distortion, he claims, as in the
case of Hector’s flight from Achilles. For Hector to outrun
swift-footed Achilles so long while the rest of the army stands
idly by strains credibility. But it also vividly exhibits Hector’s
desperation and emphasizes the imminence of Achilles’ own
demise, which will seize him soon after Hector’s death. In
answer to critics who object to a story on the grounds that it
is untrue, Aristotle suggests the reply, “But perhaps it should
be.” One can paint people as better than they are—“for the
paradigm exalts,” he says. So also other elaborations or idealizations may prove more fruitful in poetry than technical
accuracy.9
Nowhere is Aristotle’s appreciation of the value of poetry
more apparent than when he measures it against history. This
is another version of his preference of the possible to the
actual. The historian “tells what happened,” he says, “the
[poet] what might happen. On account of this, poetry is more
serious (spoudaioteron) and philosophic than history. For
poetry says things in general, but history in particular.”
History Itself
In his History of the Peloponnesian Wars, Thucydides admits
that some readers will dislike his work because it lacks
muthôdes character, which one scholar translates as
“romance.” Literally, of course, the adjective means “storylike”—muthos + eidos.10 Whether that criticism is justified or
not, I leave you to determine. But if muthos neither denies
nor requires reality for its foundation, and implies only the
unity of human action, it is possible to find much that is story-
STEPHENSON
53
like in Thucydides’ book. For Thucydides does not confine
himself to the mere reporting of facts; he is interested in
causes as a story writer is, and, if he has to seek them in the
mere inference of document and speech and event, and,
unlike the poet, has no more than speculative access to minds
of his characters, so much the better if he succeeds in finding
the plausible and persuasive in his speculations.
Indeed, there is no one character to focus on throughout
the Peloponnesian Wars except Thucydides himself, and he
appears in the flesh only once in the course of his narrative.
However, Aristotle insists (Poetics, 8.1) the unity of a poem
should not derive from the unity of the hero, but rather from
the unity of his action. If, therefore, the war between Athens
and Sparta is not just an unconnected series of advances and
retreats, debates and battles, then perhaps it has an identity
that can give it the wholeness approximating that of a story,
of a muthos. After all, what above all makes a deed one is its
purpose, and what arranges deeds into a story is the progression of a series of deeds to a higher goal that reaches beyond
and above the separate and unrelated determinations of an
individual. Consider Oedipus, who discovers his identity at
the end of a criminal investigation aimed at anyone but
himself, the procession of witnesses whose independently
innocent responses spiral slowly inward of their own accord.
Or Achilles, whose bloody triumph on the battlefield of Troy
is forced upon him by his repeated refusals to fight. It is the
oneness of action that unifies the deeds of one man, and not
the reverse, and this is the very unity celebrated in tragedy
and epic. Perhaps a better name for that kind of grand unity
is “fate,” not because the gods force it upon the heroes of
these stories, but because their lives and their deeds acquire
meaning and power and beauty precisely in our understanding of this unity.
We have to take Aristotle’s demotion of character seriously. A story does not derive its unity from the singleness of
its protagonist, but from the wholeness of its action. This is
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hard to swallow. Can an action be one if it arises out of the
deeds of more than one person? This is a question crucial to
our inquiry into the action of history. But Thucydides would
not be the only author to think about cities as analogous to
men, and thereby to suggest that they have character like men
and might even act on the world’s stage like the actors in a
play.
So, if we can find the story in the Peloponnesian Wars,
perhaps we can discover a purpose to the great concatenation
of human events that compose that conflict and that history,
one that would justify Thucydides’ claim to have written his
book “not as an essay which is to win the applause of the
moment, but as a possession for all time.”
1 Aristotle has his recommendations, too, and many of them are quite as
helpful as those of modern writers on writing. The Poetics is full of advice
to the budding poet; so is his Rhetoric: I recommend Book three of the
latter to anyone planning an essay.
2
I am assuming that the queen’s heart was broken because the king died,
otherwise the second version, which Forster offers as “plot,” remains very
incomplete and misleading.
3
That history might better include some speculation as to causes is an
objection incidental to the present distinction, though we can return to it
later.
4
It would be a mistake to settle on “mythologist” as the proper translation here.
5 Aesop’s “fables,” by the way, are muthoi for Plato, as you might expect,
but Aristotle uses the word logos when he refers to them (Rhetoric, 2.20,
passim).
6
It is worth noting that Latin retains or even extends the breadth of
meaning of the word logos in cognates, like “lex” and “lego,” but to my
knowledge has no cognate or equivalent of muthos.
7
Later, Aristotle declares epic poetry inferior to tragedy in part because it
lacks the elements of music and spectacle.
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8
So also in English, the “tale” of one’s woes could begin with enumeration, continue with anecdote, and only after much retelling finally expand
into story
9
There is either irony or venom in Aristotle’s comment, however, for he
knows Socrates attacked the poets (in the Republic and in Ion) for lacking
the technical knowledge that their subject matter requires. Aristotle seems
much more forgiving or even encouraging to the liar.
10
Could there be a pun here? muthos + ôdê rather than eidos? That is,
an allusion to the lack of melody in his history?
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57
Meaning and Truth in Klein’s
Philosophico-Mathematical
Writings
Burt C. Hopkins
I want to begin my remarks with an apology for their
imposing title, which is the product of my profession, for I
am a professional philosopher. I am therefore manifestly not
a Tutor but a Professor, and, as such, a significant portion of
what I am required to spend my time doing is called—on my
view mistakenly—“research.” One of the expectations my
profession brings with it is that my research be “specialized,”
and to this end I have spent the better part of the last twentyfive years focusing my research on the phenomenological
philosophies of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger—the
two German giants of European philosophy in the first half of
the twentieth century. Jacob Klein also spent a significant
amount of time studying these phenomenological philosophies. Moreover, he attributed great things to both philosophers: Heidegger, in Klein’s own words, was “the first man
who made me understand something written by another man,
namely Aristotle”;1 and Husserl, again in Klein’s words,
“pointed to . . . a character of speech to which the ancients
apparently did pay only scant attention,”2 a character that
Husserl, and Klein following Husserl, called “sedimentation.”
From my own studies of Husserl and Heidegger, I know
that—when viewed within the context of their own
thought—both of these characteristics singled out by Klein
Burt Hopkins is Professor of Philosophy at Seattle University, and is Secretary
of the International Circle of Husserl Scholars. He is currently completing a
book, entitled Edmund Husserl and Jacob Klein on the Origination of the
Logic of Symbolic Mathematics: An Inquiry into the Historicity of Meaning.
This essay was delivered as a lecture at St. John’s College, Santa Fe, on April
29, 2005.
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are the result of each thinker’s thematic engagement with the
concepts of meaning and truth. This consideration, therefore,
brings me back to the apology for my imposing title, because
Klein never treats either of these concepts in a thematic
manner in his writings, and I think, given the apposition of
Heidegger’s and Husserl’s philosophies to his own thought, it
is legitimate to wonder and then investigate why this is. I
should add that not only scholarly curiosity leads me to
wonder about this, but also the nature of the interrelationship
between the most fundamental problems posed by Klein’s
writings, namely, how to understand properly the radically
different conceptualities that determine the meaning and
truth of the most basic concepts that belong, respectively, to
ancient Greek and modern European science, and how best
to overcome what Klein once spoke of as the “symbolic unreality”3 that is characteristic of “the modern idea of knowledge
and science.”4
To say that meaning and truth are not thematically treated
as concepts in Klein’s writings, then, is not to say that one
cannot find in his writings discussions that take up the
meaning of things or the concept of their truth. After all,
Klein, more than any other thinker in the twentieth century,
wrote about the meaning of the ancient Greek concept of
number, and, indeed, he compared and contrasted this
concept’s meaning with the meaning of the modern concept
of number. In addition, Klein, more than any other twentieth
century thinker, wrote about the fundamental change in the
relation of science to truth that occurred when, in a process
he identified as beginning in the sixteenth century,5 the
ancient meaning of the concept of number was transformed
into the modern meaning. But it is to say that Klein neither
writes about meaning and truth as concepts—about what
contemporary professional philosophers would call “the
concepts of meaning and truth,”—nor ever discusses which
concepts of meaning and truth presumably validate or otherwise justify the philosophical claims that he makes about the
HOPKINS
59
different conceptualities of ancient Greek and modern
European science.
There is, perhaps, a ready explanation for this, namely,
that Klein had no use for what he called “Modern ‘philosophical’ jargon,”6 and that he therefore sought to avoid it as
much as possible. Talk of the concepts of meaning and truth,
even by thinkers of the stature of Husserl and Heidegger,
would have to count for Klein as such jargon, because it is the
very thesis of his magnum opus, Greek Mathematical Thought
and the Origin of Algebra,7 that the philosophical preoccupation with concepts per se is a distinctly modern preoccupation. Moreover, if not in this work, then certainly in his
subsequent lectures and essays, such a preoccupation is
viewed as a philosophical mistake. Thus, in a lecture given in
1939, Klein says, “it is doubtful whether philosophy exists
today,”8 and he clearly suggests that the reason for this is that
“all our life and thoughts are molded by” the existence of a
science that is not doubtful, namely, “mathematical physics.”
And because, in Klein’s words, “the medium of mathematical
physics, or rather its very nerve, is symbolic mathematics,”
and because, moreover, this nerve (according to his Math
Book) is only made possible by concepts that refer solely to
other concepts and not to the individual objects to which
they, as concepts, should properly and rightfully refer, on his
view contemporary “philosophy’s” near total preoccupation
with such concepts per se is not worthy of philosophy’s good
name.
According to this explanation, the attempt to investigate
the concepts of meaning and truth in Klein’s writings, especially in his philosophico-mathematical writings, that is to
say, his writings on the history of the philosophy of mathematics as well as the history of mathematics itself, would be
misguided if this inquiry were oriented by the very concepts
of meaning and truth that these writings demonstrate are a
philosophically derivative byproduct of the modern “‘scientific’ consciousness.”9 According to Klein, these concepts are
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“abstractions of abstractions…which at the same time we
interpret as being in direct contact with the world.”10 They
are hardly suitable for taking the measure of any thinker’s
thought, let alone Klein’s, of all thinkers. Klein pointed out
something that even Husserl and Heidegger did not see,
namely, that the meaning of concepts as well as the meaning
of truth underwent a radical and irrevocable transformation
of their ancient and classical “meanings” in modern thought.
Therefore to properly investigate meaning and truth in
Klein’s writings on the philosophy of mathematics, one
would have to—at least according to this line of thought—
begin by comparing the status of meaning and truth in Klein’s
writings with its status in Husserl’s and Heidegger’s.
Even though Klein mentions Heidegger by name just one
time in his writings that I know of,11 and refers to him once
more without mentioning his name,12 it is still not much of an
exaggeration to say that in a certain sense Klein’s entire
thinking is informed by a fundamental criticism of a fundamental aspect of Heidegger’s philosophy. Specifically, Klein
criticizes Heidegger’s interpretation of Plato and the role that
this interpretation plays in Heidegger’s criticism of Aristotle
and then, growing out of this criticism, Heidegger’s account
of the continuity of metaphysical thinking from ancient
Greek to contemporary twentieth-century philosophers.
Heidegger maintains that Plato’s philosophy is guided by an
unexamined presupposition about the meaning of the Being
of beings, namely, that this meaning is determined by the
static cognition of what they are, and that this cognition
conceals within itself the likewise unexamined presupposition
that, inseparable from how they are, is their constant availability in terms of their “looks” (eidos) to the logos of any
soul that bothers to look at them.
With only two references to Heidegger in all of his writings (neither one of which, by the way, directly engages
Heidegger’s interpretation of Plato), my claim about the critical relationship of Klein’s thought to Heidegger’s may
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appear to some as tenuous. However, the following considerations should remove any doubt about this matter. In 1925,
Heidegger gave a lecture course on Plato’s Sophist, which was
published after his death in a volume based on his and his
students’ notes. According to Leo Strauss, in 1925 Klein
attended Heidegger’s classes regularly.13 Toward the end of
the course, Heidegger has this to say about 253d5-e2 of the
Sophist: “I confess that I do not genuinely understand
anything of this passage and that the individual statements
have in no way become clear to me, even after long
study.”14Heidegger then goes on to single out precisely what
he does not understand:
(1.) Mian idean dia pollôn… diaisthanetai (d5ff.),
the dialectician “sees one idea throughout many,”
one determinateness of beings in its presence in
many, of which henos ekastou keimenou chôris
(d6), “each lies there detached from the others,”
such that this idea, which is seen throughout all
the others, pantê diatetamenên (d6), is extended
and ordered from all sides.
(2.) . . . kai pollas heteras allêlôn (d7), the dialectician sees many ideas, which are different from one
another in substantive content—this is partly
understandable—but then Plato adds: hupo mias
exôthen periechomenas (d7f.), “they are encompassed by one idea from the outside.”
(3.) kai mian au di’holôn pollôn en heni sunêmmenên (d8f.), the dialectician sees “that the one
idea is again gathered together into one
throughout many wholes.”
(4.) kai pollas chôris pantê diôrismenas (d9), the
dialectician sees “that many ideas are completely
detached from one another.”15
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Heidegger mentions and rejects the traditional interpretation,
which “has been eased by the introduction of a distinction
between genos and eidos, genus and species,”16 because it is
based on an “unjustifiable procedure, since Plato precisely
does not make that distinction.” Heidegger therefore
concludes, “so in fact it remains completely obscure what is
meant by this mian di’ holôn pollôn en heni sunêmmenên
[one idea is again gathered together into one throughout
many wholes], and furthermore by the hupo mias exôthen
periechesthai [they are encompassed by one idea from the
outside] and above all by the keimenou chôris [lies there
detached] within the unity of one idea.”17
The fact that Klein most likely was in attendance when
Heidegger articulated these words (or, at the very least, was
made aware of them by others who heard them), decides, of
course, nothing about the relationship of his thought to
Heidegger’s. However, the fact that the apex of the first half
of Klein’s Math Book, Chapter 7C, presents a detailed understanding of precisely what Heidegger confessed was
“completely obscure” in the Sophist, does indeed decide
something about this relationship. In that chapter, Klein presents an understanding of the Stranger’s and Theaetetus’s
dialogue in the Sophist about the division of intelligibles that
takes aim at the following: Heidegger’s philosophy of the
continuity belonging to the putative unquestioned meaning
of the Being of beings in the metaphysical tradition, a continuity that, beginning with Plato, is supposed, unquestioningly, to think that Being is the being present to the logos—in
cognition—of beings. Indeed, there can be no mistake about
this: the heart of Klein’s chapter in the Math Book offers an
understanding of the second directive in the Sophist
regarding the division of intelligibles, that is, the directive
concerning different ideas being encompassed by one idea
from the outside, which shows that “Being” is not thought
here as something present to the logos in the cognition of
beings. Moreover, Klein’s Math Book as a whole shows that,
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63
rather than continuity, there is a radical discontinuity
between the way “Being” is understood by Plato and Aristotle
and the way it is understood in modern philosophy.
Klein’s Math Book establishes its understanding of the
Stranger’s directives about division by taking into account
Aristotle’s references to the Platonic theory of “eidetic
numbers” (arithmoi eidetikoi), specifically, his report that
Plato attributed a numerical mode of being to the eidê which,
in one important respect, is distinct from the mode of being
of mathematical numbers. While others before Klein had
taken up the issue of the relationship between Greek mathematics and Greek philosophy that is so important for the
formation of both mathematical and philosophical concepts,
both generally and in the particular case of Plato’s philosophy
(most notably Julius Stentzel, J. Cook Wilson, and Oskar
Becker), Jacob Klein was the first—and remains to this day
the only18—thinker to make “an attempt”19 to do so from, in
his words, “within the structure of the arithmos concept
itself.”20 Attempts before and after Klein’s to interpret
Aristotle’s reports about Plato’s “unwritten teaching,”
namely, that the eidê are in some sense numbers, approach
talk about numbers from the conceptual level of modern
mathematics, that is to say, from the modern symbolic
concept of number. Klein’s attempt, therefore, stands alone in
its endeavor to approach both Greek mathematics and Greek
ontology from a conceptual level that does not presuppose
the basic concepts of modern mathematics.
What Klein modestly refers to in his Math Book as his
“attempt” to think the relationship between Greek mathematics and Greek ontology from “within the structure of
arithmos concept itself,” is actually a veritable philosophical,
mathematical, and historical tour de force that ranges over
ancient texts on the one hand—neo-Platonic and neoPythagorean mathematics, and Pythagorean, Platonic, and
Aristotelian philosophy—and, on the other hand, early
modern mathematics and early modern philosophy, while
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linking them all together in the modern’s interpretation of
the arithmetical work of Diophantus. Three themes orient
Klein’s historical investigations of the mathematics involved
here together with its philosophy: (1) the shift that the
meaning of the concept of number underwent in the transition from ancient Greek to modern mathematics; (2) what
makes this shift possible; and (3) the attendant shift in the
very conceptuality of the “objects” of science and knowledge
generally—in the very meaning of science and scientific truth,
from the ancient to the modern meaning.
These themes, in turn, are tied together by Klein’s
account of the similarity between (1) the Platonic attempt to
grasp the proportional relationships between numbers in
mathematics and the analogical relationships between eidê in
ontology in terms of the isomorphism of their relationships
with the very structure of the arithmos concept itself; and (2)
the modern interpretation of symbolic calculation as the
complete realization of the ancient general theory of proportions. Both the Platonic attempt and the modern interpretation, in Klein’s words, “exceeded the bounds set for the
logos,”21 precisely insofar as each assigns to eidê, to
“concepts,” a numerical characteristic. And this means
nothing more and nothing less than that for ancient Greek
philosophy, as for contemporary philosophy (insofar, that is,
as “philosophy” can still be said to exist), there is an insuperable limit to that which the logos—speech—can make intelligible, and this limit is reached when numerical characteristics
are attributed to what the Greeks called “eidê” or “ideas” and
the moderns (both the early ones, the so-called fathers of
modernity, and us, their contemporary progeny) call “general
concepts” or “general objects.”
The reason for this, according to Klein, is, for all its
complexity, relatively straightforward, namely: numbers
properly refer to individual objects, that is, to more than one
of them; numbers, therefore, refer to a “multitude” of
objects, and, moreover, to exactly “how many” of them there
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65
are, while number concepts (eidê) properly refer to the characteristics of numbers that are responsible for the exact
delimitation of the “how many” inseparable from each
number. Numbers are therefore many, and number concepts
are one, albeit not one in the sense of each one of the many
ones that are assembled together by every number, but “one”
in the very different sense of “unity.” Moreover, even though
there are many number concepts responsible for the exact
delimitation of each number, for instance, the two most
important concepts of the “odd” and the “even,” each of
these concepts is not itself many but one (in the sense of a
unity). Hence, to ascribe to any number concept a “numerical” characteristic, specifically, the characteristic of its being
many, cannot make sense, because while numbers are intrinsically multitudinous, number concepts are not. Moreover,
not just number concepts, but any concept that is related to
their being “many” of something—many horses, many
philosophers, many emotions, and so on—is one in the sense
of being a unity. Hence Klein’s conclusion, that Plato’s theory
of eidetic numbers, of concepts whose unity is in some sense
“numerical,” cannot, strictly speaking, make sense to the
logos, to speech. Likewise, because of this fundamental difference between what a number is and what a concept is, Klein
also concludes that the modern mathematical general concept
(or, what amounts to the same thing, general object) cannot,
again strictly speaking, be said to be “numerical” in a manner
that makes any sense.
Of course, the question how Klein knows that there is a
fundamental difference between numbers and number
concepts, not to mention how he can know that there is a
radical shift in the meaning of the ancient Greek concept of
number and the modern one, returns us to the topic
announced in my title. This is the case because what Klein
knows about these matters is presumably something that he
(and those who follow him on this) thinks is true. This means
that Klein must know that it is true (1) that numbers and
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number concepts, despite their relationship, are fundamentally different; (2) that the Greek and the modern concepts of
number and number concepts have different meanings; and
(3) that because of (2), the Greek and the modern meanings
of philosophical and scientific truth are different. In other
words, for Klein to know what he thinks he knows, he must
know the truth of something that cannot be true for either
“the Greeks” or “the moderns,” namely, that the true
meaning of their concepts of number and truth are radically
different. In the case of the Greeks, they did not, among
other things, live long enough to discover this truth; in the
case of the moderns, they were prevented from discovering
this because they believed (and continue to believe) that the
superiority of their concepts and truth over the ancient Greek
ones is a superiority that is based in their completion and
perfection of the Greek concepts and their truth.
But I am getting ahead of myself here. Before considering
the question of meaning and truth in Klein’s writings, we
need to return to the critical challenge that Klein’s Math Book
presents to Heidegger’s understanding of both Plato and the
continuity of the putative metaphysical meaning of the Being
of beings in the history of philosophy. As we have intimated,
this challenge takes issue with the distinctly modern preoccupation with concepts per se that informs Heidegger’s
approach to Plato’s philosophy, and therefore may have an
important bearing on the topic of meaning and truth in
Klein’s writings. Heidegger’s approach to Plato’s philosophy
supposes that the meaning of Being is not interrogated by this
philosophy but is already understood—uncritically—as the
eidos, the “look” of something that is present to cognition
and therefore available to the logos, to speech. Moreover, he
supposes that something “remains completely obscure” in the
Stranger’s dialectical directive regarding ideas that are
different from one another being perceived as encompassed
by one idea from the outside. Contrary to this last supposition, Klein’s Math Book endeavors to show that there is in the
HOPKINS
67
Sophist, albeit in a veiled way, an articulation of how ideas
that are different can nevertheless be encompassed from the
outside by one idea. Because of the nature of the problem
addressed in the Sophist, what Klein refers to as the problem
belonging to the ontological participation of the ideas with
one another, the account offered there cannot, on Klein’s
view, be expected to be “completely clear.” Nevertheless,
Klein shows, contra Heidegger, not only that it is not
“completely obscure,” but also that the question of Being is
not “one” but “twofold.” This has the following consequences: (1) Being for Plato has an intelligible structure; (2)
Being’s intelligible structure can be articulated into its parts,
although it cannot be, strictly speaking, known, because the
logos is unable to give an account of these parts that is not
paradoxical; and (3), because of the truth of (2), it is manifestly false to think, as Heidegger does, that Being in Plato is
something that has or is “meaning.” And, once the latter is
recognized to be the case, the resultant alienation from
Plato’s philosophy of the meaning of Being that Heidegger
ascribes to it, as well as that of this putative meaning’s alienation from the history of philosophy, becomes apparent.
Klein illuminates the veiled manner in which Being’s
intelligible structure is manifest in the Sophist by using
Aristotle’s account of Plato’s unwritten doctrine in a way that
takes seriously what they report while bypassing their
polemic against the report’s contents. Moreover, Klein places
the account of numbers from both Aristotle’s texts and
Plato’s dialogues within the context of his “reconstruction”
of the phenomenon of number, arithmos, which he maintains
provides the basis for the theoretical considerations about the
proper mode of being belonging to numbers that is found in
ancient Greek mathematics and philosophy. Finally, the sine
qua non of Klein’s reconstruction of the ancient Greek
arithmos is that its mode of being is non-symbolic; that is, it
is not symbolic in the sense that both the number concept and
the numbers themselves that belong to modern mathematical
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analysis—that is, to modern algebra—must be characterized
as symbolic.
Klein discerns the intelligible structure of Being in the
Sophist on the basis of what he refers to as its “arithmological”22 structure, a structure that is related to, but not identical with, the basic structure proper to the Greek arithmos.
The latter, in Klein’s words, is “grounded in the phenomenon
of counting,”23 and according to him its basic structure
precedes “all the possible differences of opinion” regarding
the mode of being of number in Greek mathematics and
philosophy. Klein characterizes this basic structure as a
“definite amount of definite things,” and singles out two
intrinsic peculiarities that belong to it. Both peculiarities, it is
important to note, assume a fundamental significance for
Klein’s understanding of the different “conceptualities” characteristic of Greek and modern science. The first peculiarity
concerns the reference to more than one thing—that is, to a
multitude that is inseparable from each arithmos. The second
concerns the exactitude of this reference: each arithmos
delimits precisely so many things.
These characteristics belonging to the structure of
arithmos are basic to and therefore underlie the different
ancient views of its mode of being, because, despite their
differences, all of these views share the common assumption
that each arithmos is both one and many: it is “many,” insofar
as it refers to more than one thing; it is “one,” insofar as each
arithmos is exactly the “unity” of the amount in question.
Accounting for how this mode of being belonging to numbers
comes about—how not only the unity of each number is able
to refer to an exactly delimited multitude, but also how each
different number is able to delimit a different amount of
things—was the business of ancient Greek theoretical arithmetic and logistic according to Klein. Significantly, for him,
neither of these Greek sciences had as their subject matter
numbers, but rather the eidê of numbers, above all the “odd”
and the “even.” Klein explains that the reason for this is
HOPKINS
69
rooted in the basic structure of the numbers themselves: theoretical mathematicians appealed to these eidê in the attempt
to account for both the one-over-many structure of number
in general, and the different amounts that characterize the
unity of each different number.
Plato, on Klein’s view, did not think that the mathematics
of his day, or, indeed, the mathematics of all time, succeeded
or could ever succeed in explaining either the basic one-overmany structure of numbers or the differentiations—in accordance with the different numbers—of the unities proper to
the being one of each different number. Plato’s reason for this
is simple: it cannot ever make sense to the discerning logos to
say that something is both one and many—that the many is
one and the one is many. Thoughtfulness about numbers,
therefore, in contrast to counting or calculating with them,
exceeds the bounds set by the logos, by speech that is intelligible, for “accounting for” what it is that is thought.
Notwithstanding this, the combined thoughtfulness of the
mathematician and the philosopher, both together, is able to
recognize in the two kinds of unity characteristic of the mode
of being of numbers (viz., the one-over-many unity in general
and the different unity of the different amounts characteristic
of each different number) the following: the mode of being
of a unity that unites separate things in a manner allowing
them to belong together even though their unity, as a whole,
is “outside” or “external” to them. And it is precisely the
“common thing” (koinon) of this unity that can be recognized
as being responsible for the belonging together, the “community” (koinonia) of mathematical things whose mode of being
is otherwise separate from one another—or of ontological
things whose mode of being, likewise, is otherwise separate
from one another. In other words, it is the structure of this
unity, which Klein refers to as “arithmological,” that holds
the key to understanding the dialectical directive in the
Sophist and thus the key to legitimating my claim that Klein’s
entire thought can be properly understood to be informed by
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a fundamental critique of Heidegger’s disputing that this
directive can be understood.
What is it that can only be recognized by the philosopher
and the theoretical mathematician, both together? The theoretical mathematician recognizes the peculiar one-over-many
mode of being of numbers, wherein each number is
composed of many things, each of which is counted not as the
thing that it is but as “one”: anything at all can be counted
only because the items really counted are understood to be
identical ones that are many, indivisible, and, therefore, intelligible. The philosopher recognizes that the two unities
involved in the mode of being of numbers cannot be
accounted for, with precision, by the eidê of numbers
appealed to by the theoretical mathematician, namely, by the
“odd” and the “even.” The philosopher realizes this because
the mode of being of the unity of each of these “concepts” is
also one over many, albeit in a different manner than that of
numbers. Each concept, the “odd,” the “even,” is both a
unity—as what can or cannot be divided evenly—and a multitude, because what can or cannot be evenly divided is
precisely not one but many. Thus the philosopher’s thoughtfulness recognizes that the thought of the theoretical mathematician mixes together that which, if our logos—our
speech—is to make sense, cannot be combined: the one and
the many. Both together, however, the philosopher and the
mathematician can recognize what neither one of them alone
can recognize: the unity of each number is something that is
“outside” of the many things, and the many ones that it
unifies as just this determinate amount. The unity of the
Stranger and Theaetetus, as two interlocutors, is, as a whole,
outside of each one of them: neither the Stranger nor
Theaetetus is “two,”—as each is rather precisely not two but
one—nevertheless, both together are exactly “two.”
This joint recognition of the common thing that is
responsible for the belonging together or community of identical ones or monads in an arithmos, however, addresses
neither the problem of accounting for the many different
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71
numbers, that is, for what makes one number, say “two,”
different from another, say “three,” nor the Stranger’s directive about the dialectician seeing one idea encompassing from
“outside” many different ideas. It does not address the first,
“mathematical” problem, because each of the wholes that are
outside of the ones or monads, and that as such compose the
common thing that is responsible for the belonging together
of the mathematical monads, must comprise a different
“common thing” in the instance of each different number—if
the fact that there are many different numbers is to be
addressed. It does not address the second, “philosophical”
problem, because the very terms of the Stranger’s directive
stipulate that the many ideas that are encompassed by one
idea are different ideas, whereas the many monads encompassed by one number are the same.
What does address these mathematical and philosophical
problems, is the Stranger’s and Theaetetus’ failed attempt to
count the first “three” of the “five” greatest ideas, namely,
Rest, Change, and Being. Even though Rest and Change are
opposites and therefore manifestly different ideas, they are
both encompassed from the “outside” by the idea of Being.
Both together have to be recognized as Being, since neither
Rest nor Change, by themselves, can be recognized as Being.
(If either Rest or Change were thought to be Being, impossible things would happen: for Rest to be, it would have to
change: for Change to be, it would have to rest.) The idea of
Being, however, cannot be recognized as something different
from Rest and Change, because then neither Rest nor Change
would be at all. Hence, the only possibility left is to recognize
that, just as neither the Stranger nor Theaetetus alone is
“two,” but only both taken together are “two,” likewise,
neither Rest nor Change is Being, but only both taken
together are Being. According to Klein, the Sophist instantiates an aspect of what Aristotle reported about Plato’s
unwritten doctrine, namely, that the ideas are in some sense
numbers, and that in addition to mathematical numbers there
are eidetic numbers. Moreover, the dialogue also exhibits the
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difference between mathematical and eidetic numbers
reported by Aristotle: that the monads of the former are
many and alike, while those of the latter are many but not
alike and are therefore not comparable. Thus the idea
belonging to Being, as a whole, is like the whole belonging to
a mathematical number: it encompasses from the “outside”
the many monads that it, as a whole, brings together;
however, it and what it brings together are also unlike a mathematical number, because the intelligible monads that the
mathematical number brings together in the unity of one
number are identical—while the intelligible monads that the
eidetic number brings together are different. This is illustrated in the Sophist: The ideas belonging to Rest and Change
are different; nevertheless, the idea belonging to Being, like
the whole belonging to number, exhibits an “arithmological”
structure, although, just as in the case of the mode of being of
the mathematical arithmos, the mode of being of the eidetic
arithmos exceeds the limits set by the logos. In the former
instance, as we have seen, this is the case for Klein because
the mode of being of both mathematical numbers and their
concepts mixes the one and the many; in the latter instance,
this is the case because the attempt to give an account of the
“parts” of Being, namely, the ideas Rest and Change separately as well as the idea of both together, counts “three” of
them—Rest “one,” Change “two,” and both together “three,”
—when, in truth, there are only “two”: the ideas of Rest and
Change. The eidetic number of the idea of Being, then, is
“Two,” not “three.”
Contra Heidegger, therefore, Klein’s Math Book shows
that Being is not characterized by Plato as the idea of something that is present to cognition and therefore available to
the logos, and, in the process of showing this, he shows that
the Stranger’s second dialectical directive is not completely
obscure. Only the “arithmological” structure of the community of ideas, that is, the one idea encompassing many ideas
from “outside,” can provide the “paradigm” for the structure
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of the one over many mode of being of mathematical
numbers, and not vice versa. Moreover, only the taxis, the
order of eidetic numbers beginning with the eidetic “Two,”
the idea of Being, can account for the many discrete mathematical numbers, for the differences in the one over many
unity of each arithmos as exactly so many. In addition, only
the “arithmological” structure of the community of ideas can
account for the many genê and eidê of that which has Being,
and for the analogia, the proportion, by means of which both
certain mathematical problems and the Being of certain
things can be understood. In other words, the “foundation”
of the Being of both quantitative and qualitative beings, of the
beings counted and calculated with by mathematical thinking,
and the beings collected and divided by dialectical thinking,
are the arithmoi eidetikoi.
As I have already suggested, because of the numerical
character that is ascribed to this foundation, specifically, to
the ascription of a number-like being to its eidetic “concepts,”
Klein maintains that the “solution” to the problem of the one
and the many that is provided by the theory of eidetic
numbers, is in his words, “bought . . . at the price of the transgression of the limits which are set for the logos.”24 For not
only is the “ordinary mode of predication, such as: ‘the horse
is an animal’, ‘the dog is an animal’, etc., no longer understandable,” but the “natural” meaning of number, as the exact
amount of a multitude of things, “is now lost.” (The former
is the case, because the “arithmological” unity is precisely
something that cannot be predicated of that which it unifies:
neither the mathematical monads in an arithmetical number,
nor the eidetic monads in an eidetic number can be said to be
the number in question, as a horse or a dog can both be said
to be an animal. The latter is the case because the monads in
an eidetic number cannot be counted and therefore do not
have an exact amount.) If Klein is right about Plato’s philosophy, this much is clear: Being is neither a concept nor something that can be known and articulated “with complete
clarity” by the logos; what can be articulated about it is its
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inseparability from its opposite, and the “common thing”—
Being—shared by each term of the opposition characteristic
of it is manifestly something that does not have or express
what the moderns would call “meaning.”
Klein’s reason for this last point is also presented in his
Math Book, and can be succinctly stated as follows: the
modern preoccupation with “meaning” is, in fact, a preoccupation with “concepts” that have as their primary referents
other concepts, and, therefore, not the individual objects to
which all concepts originally refer.25 The concepts that
provide the foundation of modern, symbolic mathematics are
paradigmatic of concepts whose fundamental mode of being
is their relationship with other concepts, all of which, in turn,
are derivative of or otherwise dependent upon the symbolic
concept of number in general for their “meaning”—a term
which must be kept sharply distinct from “intelligibility.”
Individual beings are “intelligible” as changing or resting,
indeed, as changing in one respect while simultaneously
resting in another. The “invisible looks” (eidê) of Rest and
Change, too, are “intelligible,” though not as individual
things that are resting or changing, but rather as that which
all resting and changing individual things have “in common.”
Their commonality is likewise “intelligible,” although, again,
it is not intelligible as individual things are. As we have seen,
because Being is not one but twofold for Plato, the “intelligibility” either of things or their “invisible looks” can never be
complete. In comparison with this incomplete “intelligibility,” the “meaning” of the modern symbolic concept of
number in general is completely “unintelligible.” This
concept refers neither to individual beings nor to what they
share in common, their “invisible looks”; rather, the symbolic
concept of number in general does not, properly speaking,
refer to any thing, but is itself something that is referred to as
if it were some thing, namely, as if it were an individual thing
just like the individual beings that, for the ancient Greeks, are
intelligible as resting and moving. But it is not a being like
those beings. It is not a being at all, but a cipher, a sense-
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perceptible mark (or marks) that is not only treated like some
individual thing, but, in a fundamental ontological sense, also
replaces all the individual things, individual beings, in the
world with “concepts” that cannot refer to things or beings
because the mode of being of the latter is now self-evidently
taken to be “conceptual.”
Klein’s Math Book traces the symbolic number concept’s
remarkable power both to replace individual beings with
concepts, and to do so without “detection,” to the literally
twofold mode of being “unintelligible” proper to the mathematical symbol. On the one hand, it combines a completely
indeterminate and non-perceptible concept—quantity in
general—with a completely determinate sense-perceptible
“mark.” Because this mark is indistinguishable from that with
which it is combined, viz., from the non-perceptible concept
or quantity in general, it is patently not a sign, if by “sign” we
mean a part of language that indicates something other than
itself in a manner distinguishable from the significance of
what it indicates; rather than signifying something other than
itself, the mark presents itself as what it symbolizes. For
instance, “2” does not signify something other than itself, for
example, the exact amount of some kind of object; instead, it
presents itself as the “concept of two,” which means, “the
general concept of twoness in general”26—and it does so in a
manner that involves absolutely no immediate reference to
any individual things. Therefore, to call “2” a “number sign,”
or “a” a “letter sign,” is a misnomer, since in both cases what
is meant is the “symbolic relation between the sign and what
it designates.”27 In the case of “2,” what is meant is “the
general number-character of this one number,” while in the
case of “a” what is meant is “the general numerical character
of each and every number.” On the other hand, the
completely indeterminate and non-perceptible concept from
which the sense-perceptible mark is indistinguishable assumes
the status of something whose mode of being is itself indistinguishable from other sense-perceptible individual things,
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
and, as such, it assumes the status of something that can be
“treated” just like these other sense-perceptible things,
including being counted. Most significantly, the completely
indeterminate quantitative mode of being of the concept that
is inseparable from the mathematical symbol becomes determinate precisely insofar as the sense-perceptible mark that is
inseparable from it is treated like other sense-perceptible
things, for instance, rocks, tables, copies of Klein’s Math
Book, and so on. Thus, in the case of the symbol “2,” Klein
says, “The concept of twoness is at the same time understood
as referring to two entities.”28
Both of these characteristics belonging to the mathematical symbol reveal their complete “unintelligibility” only in
comparison to the incomplete “intelligibility” of the Greek
arithmos. The Greek number’s incomplete “intelligibility”
involves the mixture of (1) the “intelligibility” to mathematical “thinking” (dianoia) of the exact determination
belonging to the amount of a definite multitude of sensible or
thinkable (and, in this latter sense, “intelligible”) beings and
(2) the “unintelligibility” to philosophical “thoughtfulness”
(phronêsis) of its one over many mode of being. In comparison and contrast, the mathematical symbol’s complete “unintelligibility” concerns (1) its absolute lack of an immediate
reference to any definite things and (2) the thing-like determinateness of its sense-perceptible mark, which presents the
“concept” of an indeterminate quantity in the manner of a
determinate object, and therefore, presents a mark that
neither signifies anything nor shares an “invisible looks” with
any other thing, as something that is nevertheless “intelligible.” In other words, Klein says that the “symbolic unreality” of the mathematical symbol is located in the fact that it
presents something intrinsically and completely “unintelligible” as something that is “intelligible.”
The mathematical symbol’s complete “unintelligibility,”
however, is not for Klein tantamount to a putative meaninglessness. On the contrary, it is precisely the character of its
mode of being as “unintelligible” that necessitates its involve-
HOPKINS
77
ment with “meaning,” namely, with the meaning that accrues
to it on the basis of the “stipulation” of rules for manipulating
otherwise “unintelligible” sense-perceptible marks, rules
whose “syntax” is derived, originally, from the rules of operation with non-symbolic numbers. Mathematical symbols are
therefore only meaningful insofar as their “pure” conceptual
mode of being is accorded a numerical significance that is
akin—somehow—to non-symbolical numbers, to amounts of
things that can be, “in principle,” counted.
Klein’s Math Book, and his lectures prior to 1940,
employs what he characterizes as “the” language of the
Schools or Scholastic language’s talk of first intentions and
second intentions, or, as he himself sometimes notes,29 the
more properly articulated distinction between the objects of
first intentions and the objects of second intentions, to
“express” the state of affairs involved here. He uses this
language to (1) describe both the shift from the ancient
“meaning” to the modern “meaning” of numbers and (2)
delineate the corresponding shift in the paradigm of the
ancient “meaning” and the modern “meaning” of what it is to
be a concept, the latter shift being characterized (likewise
prior to 1940) by Klein as the transformation of the ancient
concept’s “conceptuality.” (The scare quotes around the word
“meaning” here call attention to the fact that, strictly
speaking, for Klein, the term “meaning,” being commensurate solely with the modern concept, is therefore a
misleading, if not falsifying, basis upon which to compare and
contrast the statuses of ancient Greek and modern concepts.)
First intentions concern the existence and quiddity of an
object, its being in its own right; second intentions concern
an the object insofar as it has being in being known, in apprehension. Hence, the state of being of an object in cognition is
second, while the state of being of an object in itself is first.
Because the Greek arithmos is inseparable from the direct
reference to a multitude of definite things, the status of its
referents lends itself to being designated as first intentional.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Because the concept of “indeterminate or general quantity”
concerns an object insofar as it known, the status of its
referent lends itself to being designated as second intentional.
Moreover, the sense-perceptible mark that belongs to the
modern symbolic number is, like any other sense-perceptible
thing, the object of a first intention, and because of this, Klein
maintains that the “conceptuality” characteristic of the mode
of being belonging to the modern concept of number is tantamount to the apprehension of the object of a second intention
as having the being of the object of a first intention.
Moreover, he maintains that the modern “conceptuality” of
number is only manifest in its contrast with the ancient Greek
“conceptuality,” which is characterized by the first intentional
status of the objects to which it refers and is therefore related.
Klein also appeals to the distinction between first and
second intentions to clarify Descartes’s attempt to understand
the origin of the novel mode of being that belongs to the
symbolic number concept, an attempt that Klein maintains
was the first, as well as the last such, in the philosophical
tradition. Descartes’s attempt appealed to the power of the
imagination to assist the pure intellect in making visible to it
(the pure intellect), as a “symbol,” the indeterminate object
that it has already abstracted from its own power of knowing
determinate numbers. Abstraction in Aristotle presupposes
definite beings that are intelligible in terms of common qualities, the latter being “lifted off ” the former in accordance
with a process that is more logical than psychological;
abstraction in Descartes presupposes definite beings but not
their intelligibility, in the case at hand their “intelligibility” as
so many beings. Rather, Descartes’s abstraction works upon
the mind’s act of knowing a multitude of units, separating out
the mind’s own conceiving of that multitude, which it immediately makes objective. The mind turns and reflects on its
own knowing when it is directed to the idea of number as a
multitude of units, and, in so doing, it no longer apprehends
the multitude of units directly, in the “performed act” (actus
HOPKINS
79
exercitus) and thus as object of its first intention, but rather
indirectly, in the “signified act” (actus signatus), as object of
its second intention. Thus, notwithstanding the fact that what
is being conceived by the intellect is a multitude of units, the
intellect’s immediate apprehension of its own conceiving as
something, as one and therefore as a being, has the effect of
transforming the multitude belonging to the number into a
seemingly independent being, albeit a being that is only a
“rational being” (ens rationis). To repeat: this “rational
being” is the result of the intellect, which, secondarily (in
reflection) intends a thing already conceived before, and
intends it insofar as it has been conceived. When the rational
being is then “grasped with the aid of the imagination in such
a way that the intellect can, in turn, take it up as an object in
the mode of a ‘first intention’, we are dealing with a
symbol.”30
Abstraction for Descartes is therefore characterized by
Klein as “symbolic,” because the “concept” (Begriff) that it
yields is manifestly not something that is lifted off the intelligible qualities of things, but rather, is something whose very
mode of being is inseparable from the following: (1) the intellect’s pure—by “pure” is meant completely separate from the
things it apprehends—grasping of its own power to apprehend these qualities themselves, and (2) this power itself
being apprehended as an object whose mode of being is
nevertheless akin to the very things that its mode of being
separates itself from. Klein stresses that the “kinship”
between the power of apprehension proper to the “pure”
intellect and that which is effectively foreign to it (i.e., the
things possessing the intelligible qualities that are apprehended by the “pure” intellect’s power) is established by
making this power “visible.” The algebraic letter “signs” of
Viète or the “geometric” figures of Descartes are what accomplish this. They are what—in the language of the Schools—
allow the object of a second intention to be apprehended as
the object of a first intention, and are therefore “symbols.”
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
The indeterminate or general object yielded in “symbolic
abstraction” is neither purely a concept nor purely a “sign,”
but precisely the unimaginable and unintelligible identification of the object of a second intention with the object of a
first. This identification is “unimaginable” because “images”
properly—both for the ancient Greeks and for Descartes—
refer to either particular objects of first intentions or to their
particular “common qualities.”31 The identification between
second and first intentional objects is “unintelligible” because
for “natural” predication, to say that a concept is both
general and particular “at the same time” is nonsensical.
Nowhere that I know of does Klein write that this identification, which makes possible the symbolic “language” of
algebra and therefore, mathematical physics, is a mathematical mistake. Likewise, nowhere that I know of does Klein
write that the science that symbolic mathematics makes
possible is a philosophical mistake. Moreover, so far as I can
tell, Klein never even hints in his writings that the identification of the objects of first and second intentions means that
first and second intentions have been “confused” by modern
science, as some have suggested. What Klein does explicitly
characterize as a mistake is the view of the symbolic language
of algebra as “a purely technical or instrumental matter.”32
He writes, “it is a common mistake to believe that we can
translate the theorems of mathematical physics into ordinary
language, as if the mathematical apparatus used by the physicists were only a tool employed in expressing their theorems
more easily.”33 He also writes that the early modern “natural
philosophers,” in their self-interpretation of their new
science, the “true” physics, understood it to be the perfection
and the completion of the science of the ancients. And clearly,
Klein’s Math Book is an “argument” whose goal is to refute
the veracity of this self-interpretation, and to do so primarily
on the basis of the different “conceptualities” that are characteristic of the incomplete intelligibility of the ancient
number concept and the complete unintelligibility belonging
HOPKINS
81
to the meaning of the modern symbolic number concept.
That said, on my view it does not follow that the argument
extends also to the new science itself, that is, to the claim that
the symbolic cognition made possible by the “conception”
proper to the symbolic number concept is something that is
somehow false or less true, in comparison with the ancient
number concept and ancient “science” generally. Modern
science, mathematical physics, and the symbolic cognition
that is its main nerve, is therefore not a mistake on Klein’s
view.
What for Klein is a mistake, however, is the interpretation
of the “true” object (singular) of this science as the objects
(plural) of the first intentions that were and indeed remain
the “true” objects of ancient Greek science. The nature of this
mistake is neither “mathematical” nor, strictly speaking,
“scientific,” but philosophical. It is a mistake that was made
by the early modern inventors of mathematical physics, and
it is a mistake still made today by their innumerable progeny,
philosophers and non-philosophers alike. It is a mistake made
by Husserl, who, despite himself and the attempt present in
his last writings to restore the integrity of knowledge threatened by the all pervading tendency of “sedimentation,” of the
forgetfulness of the original meanings of our words and
concepts, nevertheless could not let go of his earliest belief in
the “mere” instrumentality of the symbolic calculus. Husserl
likened the putative “technicity” of symbolical calculation to
the “rules of the game” that govern it mechanically, rules that
originally spring from the categories and objects that are
“given” in the experience that makes our language and “traditional” Aristotelian logic both possible and intelligible.
Klein had to know about Husserl’s mistake, which is no
doubt why, among other reasons, Husserl’s name is not
mentioned once in the original version of his Math Book, and
why the concept of “intentionality” to which Klein appeals in
that book and in his writings and lectures before 1940 is that
of the Schools, not of Husserl. The reason for this can found
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
in Klein’s account of the symbolic character of the indeterminateness or generality of the modern concept of number.
While Husserl was also aware of this indeterminateness—
indeed, besides Klein was perhaps more aware of it than any
other twentieth-century thinker, calling it the concept of the
“anything whatever” (Etwas überhaupt) and assigning to its
investigation a new science, which he called “formal
ontology”—Husserl nevertheless thought that its “intentionality” could be distinguished from the sense-perceptible
marks that manifest the mathematic symbol. This, as we have
seen, is for Klein simply not possible, because, absent such
marks, the pure concepts of modern mathematics would,
quite literally, be invisible and therefore inaccessible to the
“pure intellect” that calculates with them in symbolic cognition. Moreover, such an intentional distinction between the
symbolic “signs” and the indeterminate objects to which they
are related symbolically (and therefore not “significatively”),
occludes the most important characteristic of the general
object that this symbolic relationship makes possible, namely,
the utter impossibility of its conceptual “meaning” ever referring directly to the individual things or objects in the world.
Husserl, of course, spent most of his life trying to show both
that and how the meaning of the “concept” of “something in
genteral” is “objective,” and is such in the precise sense that
the origin of its unity (as well as the origin of all its possible
modes of being and relations) is rooted ultimately in the
“phenomena” of individual objects and the “evidence” of
their individuality that is presented in the perceptual experience of them. Klein, likewise, spent most of his life trying to
show that it is a philosophical mistake to think that the
meaning of a “concept in general” could ever be traced to an
origin in individual objects and their perceptual experience.
Klein’s “reason” for trying to show this impossibility can
be found in his account of the “symbolic abstraction” in
Descartes’ articulation of the genesis proper to the mind’s
representation to itself of its pure concepts—to what makes
HOPKINS
83
such concepts “concepts,” which Klein refers to as their
modern “conceptuality.” As we have seen, Klein characterizes
the modern “conceptuality” in terms of the, comparatively
speaking, complete “unintelligibility” of the meaning proper
to the general concepts that it makes possible, an unintelligibility that emerges when this “meaning” is compared to the
incomplete intelligibility of the “conceptuality” of ancient
Greek concepts. In a word, on Klein’s view, the “conceptuality” responsible for Descartes’ articulation of what a
“concept” (Begriff) is, is not only paradigmatic for all modern
concepts, but it is also the source of the late modern problem
of providing cognition with a “foundation,” in the sense of
both establishing and providing an account of the connection
between general concepts and their “objects.” Because,
however, this connection is second intentional in the instance
of the concept of an object in general, Husserl’s attempt to
provide the sought-after foundation by appealing to “intuition,” namely, to the intuition of the relation between the
object of a second intention to the object of a first intention,
is in principle doomed to fail. It is so for the simple reason
that the status of the relation between second intentional
objects, which manifestly are not first intentional objects—
notwithstanding their philosophical misinterpretation as
such—and first intentional objects themselves, is not perceptual but symbolic.
Klein’s reason for distancing himself from Husserl’s
phenomenological account of “meaning” is therefore at once
philosophical and historical; or, rather, it presupposes a mode
of awareness that is neither one nor the other, but “both
together.” Indeed, only the presupposition of such a mode of
awareness can justify the radical distinction he makes
between the respective “meanings” of ancient and modern
“conceptuality,” which distinction, strictly speaking, annuls
the omni-temporality—or, what is the same thing, the omnihistoricality—of the very concept of “meaning” and assigns
an historical locus to the concept of truth—a locus that is
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
relative accordingly as it is proximate to the ancient Greek or
the modern “conceptuality.” Moreover, it is only the presupposition of such a mode of awareness that can account for the
status of the vantage from which Klein makes the comparison
between ancient science and philosophy and modern science
and philosophy, a vantage whose sights are indeed set on the
things themselves that are in comparison.
I, for one, do not presume to be in the position, philosophically, mathematically, historically, or otherwise
speaking, to judge that the mode of awareness presupposed
by Klein’s account of these matters is unwarranted. Indeed,
unlike Hans-Georg Gadamer, who complained that Klein
together with Leo Strauss, “employ a style in their work that
is too much a commentary, so that finally their voices are
lost,”34 I find the hermeneutical “transparency” of Klein’s
writings thought-provoking in a manner that renders trivial
the claims of “philosophical hermeneutics” regarding the
historically conditioned character of all our understanding.
For me, Klein’s writings show not only what remains, even
now, some three quarters of a century after the publication of
his Math Book, as perhaps the most significant specimens of
our “historically conditioned” understanding “in” history, but
also, that the “history” that they are in is none other than the
historia that Plato’s Socrates’ spoke about in the Phaedo.
“Historia” in that sense is a problem, concerned neither with
a contingent sequence of events or philosophical theories nor
with the “concept” or “meaning” of “history” as such, but
rather, with the problem of inquiry itself. The mode of awareness presupposed by the philosophical-mathematical-historical distinctions that Klein’s writings make regarding meaning
and truth points, on my view, to the author’s encounter with
“inquiry” (historia) as something that comes forward as a
problem whenever the question arises of the origin of whatever it is that is under discussion. To the question of whether
the inquiries in Klein’s Math Book and other writings are
“true,” I believe that the best answer would have to be some-
HOPKINS
85
thing like this: Klein has said what he thinks is true of the
matters addressed by his inquiries. The question of whether
what he has said is “correct” is one that has to be posed not
to their author and the putative concepts and meanings that
govern his “philosophy,” but to these inquiries themselves. If
Klein has not spoken correctly, it is our “task to take up the
argument and refute it.”35
That said, I would like to close with a suggestion and a
question. The suggestion: Klein’s well-known reticence to
discuss, in any detail, the presuppositions of his own thought,
may be rooted in his polite refusal of Leibniz’s invitation to
“follow him [Leibniz]—to the audience-chamber of God,”
and to join him, along with the other immortal philosophers,
“on a little stool at God’s feet.” The question: does the shift
from the ancient Greek to the modern conceptuality of
numbers, which Klein has shown applies to the cardinality of
numbers, extend to their ordinality as well? Specifically, is
there an historical locus proper to the truth of the “firstness”
of the first intentional objects and the “secondness” of the
second intentional objects by which Klein expresses the decisive shift from the ancient to the modern consciousness?
Notes
1
Jacob Klein and Leo Strauss, “A Giving of Accounts: Jacob Klein and
Leo Strauss,” The College (April 1970): 1-5, here 1. Hereafter, cited as
“Accounts.”
2
Jacob Klein, “Speech, Its Strength and Its Weaknesses,” in Lectures and
Essays, eds. Robert B. Williamson and Elliot Zuckerman (Annapolis: St.
John’s College Press, 1985): 361-374, here 370-371. Hereafter cited as
“Speech,” while the volume itself will be cited as “Essays.”
3
Jacob Klein, “Modern Rationalism,” in Essays, 53-64, here 64.
Hereafter cited as “Rationalism.”
4
Ibid.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
HOPKINS
87
5
Although sometimes he identifies it as occurring earlier, for instance,
when he stated in 1970 that it occurred “about 500 years ago”
(“Accounts,” 1).
Plato and Platonism, ed. Johannes M. Van Ophuijsen (Washington D.C.:
The Catholic University Press, 1999), 218-239; “Figure, Ratio, Form”
Plato’s Five Mathematical Studies,” Aperion XXXII, 4 (1999): 73-88.
6
19
Klein, Math Book, 62 (my italics).
20
Ibid.
21
Jabob Klein, Math Book, 184.
22
Jacob Klein, “Concept of Numbers,” 51.
23
Jacob Klein, Math Book, 54.
24
Jacob Klein, Math Book, 99.
Jacob Klein, Plato’s Trilogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1977), 2. Hereafter, cited as Trilogy.
7
Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra,
trans. Eva Brann (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1969; reprint: New
York: Dover, 1992). This work was originally published in German as
“Die griechische Logistik und die Entstehung der Algebra” in Quellen
und Studien zur Geschichte der Mathematik, Astronomie und Physik,
Abteilung B: Studien, vol. 3, no. 1 (Berlin, 1934), pp. 18–105 (Part I);
no. 2 (1936), pp. 122–235 (Part II). Hereinafter, cited as “Math Book.”
8
Jacob Klein, “The Concept of Number is Greek Mathematics and
Philosophy,” in Essays, 43-52, here 43. Hereafter cited as “Concept of
Number.”
9
Jacob Klein, Math Book, 9.
10 Jacob Klein, “Modern Rationalism,” 63.
11
Jacob Klein, “Speech,” 374. He also mentions him by name in
“Accounts,” which, however, is a transcript of a tape recording.
12
Jacob Klein, “Aristotle, an Introduction,” Essays, 171-195, here 171.
13
“Accounts,” 3.
14
Martin Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André
Schuwer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 365.
15
Ibid.
16
Ibid., 366.
17
Ibid.
18
Works by Konrad Gaiser, J.N. Findlay, and H.J. Krämer on Plato’s
“unwritten doctrine,” for all their diversity, share the following characteristics: 1) they fail to acknowledge the priority of Klein’s work on their
topic, and 2) they (perhaps, consequently) approach Plato’s “mathematics” and “eidetic numbers” from an alien conceptual level. See,
respectively: Platos Ungeschriebene Lehre (Stuttgart: E. Klett, 1968);
Plato: The Written and Unwritten Doctrines (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1974); and Plato and the Foundations of Metaphysics, trans. John
R. Catan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990). Mitchell
Miller’s work is an exception to 2); see “‘Unwritten Teachings’ in the
Parmenides,” Review of Metaphysics 48 (March 1995): 591-633;
“Dialectical Education and Unwritten Teachings in Plato’s Statesman,” in
25
There may be one possible exception to this, namely “the so-called
general theory of proportions” (Jacob Klein, “The World of Physics and
the ‘Natural’ World,” in Essays, 1-34, here 27; hereinafter, cited as
“World of Physics”) of Euclid, although Klein does not appear to be altogether of one mind about whether this “theory” really represents a case
where ancient concepts refer originally to other concepts and not to individual objects. In 1932, he wrote, “The fifth book of Euclid, in fact,
contains a ‘geometrical algebra’” (Ibid.), which he characterized as not
treating “the ratios of particular magnitudes, geometrical forms for
instance, or numbers or bodily masses or time segments, but ratios ‘in
themselves’, the wholly undetermined bearers of which are symbolized
[symbolisch . . . versinnbildlicht] by straight lines” (Ibid.). In other words,
he seems to characterize here an indeterminate or general object as corresponding to the general procedure of Euclid, and therewith, a non-individual object as the “referent” of this procedure’s “concepts.” However,
in his Math Book, which I assume was written later (it was published
1934-1936), precisely this possibility is ruled out by Klein, when he
writes, “For ancient science, the existence of a ‘general object’ is by no
means a simple consequence of a ‘general theory’” (Math Book, 161), and
he goes on to quote Aristotle’s view on this matter (in Metaphysics M 3,
1077 b 17-20) as definitive: “‘The general propositions of mathematics
[namely the ‘axioms’, i.e., the ‘common notions’, but also all theorems of
the Eudoxian theory of proportions] are not about separate things which
exist outside of and alongside of the [geometric] magnitudes and numbers,
but are just about these; not, however, insofar as they are such as to have
a magnitude or to be divisible [into discrete units]’” (Ibid.). It is therefore
upon the basis of this, apparently, later view of Klein’s that I refer to the
“all” here.
26
Ibid., 25.
27
Ibid.
28
Ibid.
�88
29
Jacob Klein, Math Book, 306, n. 324.
30
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Jacob Klein, Math Book, 208.
31
Indeed, it is for this reason that Descartes, on Klein’s view, stresses the
“power” of imagination, and not the imagination’s “images,” to assist the
pure intellect in grasping the completely indeterminate concepts that it
has separated from the ideas that the imagination offers it, because these
ideas are precisely “determinate images”—and therefore, intrinsically
unsuitable for representing to the intellect its indeterminate concepts. The
imagination’s power, however, being indeterminate insofar as it is not
limited to any particular one of its images, is able to use is own indeterminateness to enter into the “service” of the pure intellect and make
visible a “symbolic representation” of what is otherwise invisible to it, by
facilitating, as it were, the identification of the objects of first and second
intentions in the symbol’s peculiar mode of being. The imagination’s
facilitation involves, as it were, its according its “power” of visibility to
the concept’s invisibility.
32
Jacob Klein, “Modern Rationalism,” 61.
33
Ibid.
34
The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Lewis Edwin Hahn
(Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 1997), 236.
35
Plato, Meno, 75C-D.
89
Addendum
The following images correspond to pages 68 and 69 of The
St. John’s Review, volume 47, number 1 (“What Tree Is This:
In Praise of Europe’s Renaissance Printers, Publishers, and
Philologists,” by Chaninah Maschler). Omitted originally
because of print quality, they appear now at the request of the
author.
�
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Kraus, Pamela
Brann, Eva T. H.
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Zuckerman, Elliott
Navarre, Sarah
Hunt, Frank
Sachs, Joe
Thompson, Jerry L.
Stephenson, David
Hopkins, Burt C.
Maschler, Chaninah
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Volume XLVIII, number three of The St. John's Review. Published in 2005.
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The St. John’s Review
Volume XLVIII, number two (2005)
Editor
Pamela Kraus
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Audra Price
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson,
President; Harvey Flaumenhaft, Dean. For those not on the
distribution list, subscriptions are $10.00 for one year.
Unsolicited essays, reviews, and reasoned letters are welcome.
Address correspondence to the Review, St. John’s College,
P Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 21404-2800. Back issues are
.O.
available, at $5.00 per issue, from the St. John’s College
Bookstore.
©2005 St. John’s College. All rights reserved; reproduction
in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing and Printing
The St. John’s Public Relations Office and the St. John’s College Print Shop
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
3
Contents
Memorial Pieces
Memorial for Beate Ruhm von Oppen.......................... 5
Introduction to “The Tuning Fork”............................. 27
David Stephenson
The Tuning Fork..........................................................28
Beate Ruhm von Oppen
A Visit to Santayana.................................................... 43
Steve Benedict
Essays and Lectures
Kant’s Philosophical Use of Mathematics:
Negative Magnitudes...................................................49
Eva Brann
Four Poems
Where the Poet Lives...................................................73
Early Pupil
She and the Tree
Outlay
Elliott Zuckerman
Review
Platonic Pedagogy?
Eva Brann’s The Music of the Republic:
Essays on Socrates’ Conversations
and Plato’s Writings..................................................... 79
David Roochnik
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5
Memorial for
Beate Ruhm von Oppen
Introduction: Elliott Zuckerman
During her years at the College, Beate brought us her words
and her music, and her concern about how words and music
ought to fit together. Now we are devoting to her memory
some of our words and our music.
In many of her writings and in her person, we were
reminded of the history of the twentieth century. In a time of
exaggeration, she insisted upon accuracy. And by reminding
us of war, she enhanced our devotion to the activities of
peace.
***
Delia Walker
I do not want to talk about Beate’s intellectual brilliance, of
which you are all aware, but I want to talk about her as my
sister and about the time when we were young.
She was my big sister, my senior by several years. Because
of the difference in our ages and circumstances, we lived
apart more than we lived together, but I could always rely on
her help and advice.
I must often have been a burden and a responsibility, not
to say a nuisance, but she was always there for me, especially
during the difficult war years. I know she worried about me,
and she helped me and gave me courage in tricky situations.
She even tried her hand at matchmaking! I didn’t always
agree with her advice about things, but in this instance I did,
wholeheartedly, and here I am, after fifty years of happy marriage. Thank you, Beate. I know she loved Harlan very much.
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
6
In spite of being by miles the brainier of us two, she
always had unbounded confidence in my abilities and capabilities, and her belief in me was an enormous help to get me
through periods of low self-esteem and depression. Indeed, if
she had not been continually rooting for me, I might often
have given up. So today I want to say a big “thank you” to
her.
I would also like to take this opportunity to thank my
family and Beate’s friends for the tremendous support they
have given me in this sad time.
She was very enthusiastic about my playing – far more
than I deserved – and so, though I really stopped playing seriously some years ago, I have blown the dust off my flute and
together with her friend, Chester Burke, we will play some
Telemann – a composer of whom she was very fond.
[Delia Walker and Chester Burke then played the Flute Duet
in G major by Georg Philipp Telemann.]
***
Peter E. Quint
My first trip to St. John’s College was in the late spring of
1976. I returned from that visit with many vivid memories,
but the most lively and impressive were of my conversations
with a wonderful and, it seemed to me, exotic person: a
German Englishwoman, of profound leaning and extraordinary charm, who—quite amazingly—lived right here in
Maryland.
Beate Ruhm von Oppen was one of the last of a brilliant
generation of scholars—historians, scientists, philosophers,
lawyers—who, having escaped Nazi Germany, were obliged
to resume their studies or careers in another, more welcoming land. This necessity of perhaps starting anew may have
seemed like great misfortune at the outset, but it had the
advantage—for them, and certainly for us—that they were
perfectly at home in two languages and two cultures.
MEMORIAL
7
Yet as with many other victims or opponents of the Nazi
regime, the experience left Beate with a certain, let us say,
intellectual and emotional distance from her native land.
Even in recent years, I believe that Beate thought long and
hard before accepting a high honor for her distinguished life’s
work from the German government.
Some years ago Beate, with her extraordinary linguistic
skills and deep knowledge of history, was chosen to be the
English translator of the memoirs of Konrad Adenauer, the
venerable first Chancellor of post-war West Germany. For
some days the English and the French translators actually
worked in Adenauer’s house in order to receive his last
minute changes on the German manuscript. Beate told me
that the translators worked at Adenauer’s dining room table,
and apparently because the sun was streaming in, they
adjusted a window curtain in a way that made the work most
comfortable for them. But Adenauer himself would come in
and, seeing the curtain in an unfamiliar position, would
firmly move it back to the spot that he approved.
A charming and slightly ludicrous tale—but would I be
wrong in detecting, in Beate’s telling, a subtle note of disapproval that even in this trivial instance some residual authoritarian attitude survived in the avatar of the New Germany?
The work of Beate’s that will most certainly live is her
extraordinary edition of the letters of Helmuth James von
Moltke sent to his wife Freya, that “beautifully edited” work,
in the words of the Stanford historian Gordon Craig. Moltke
was a Prussian aristocrat who opposed Hitler and knew from
the outset that the war would end in catastrophic shame and
defeat for Germany. Moltke sought tirelessly to recruit likeminded Germans of the resistance, and in three meetings at
Kreisau, his East Elbian estate, he organized the drafting of
detailed principles for a new democratic Germany after
Hitler’s defeat. At the same time, Moltke was making strenuous efforts to save whatever lives he could as a legal officer in
the German intelligence service, which was, as Beate noted,
“the focal point of much opposition to the regime.” The let-
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ters reflect this ceaseless work, as well as deep concern for
Freya and their two young children, who spent the war at
Kreisau.
Moltke fell under particular suspicion shortly after the
attempt on Hitler’s life in July 1944, and following a trial
before the notorious “People’s Court,” he was executed at
Berlin-Plötzensee in early 1945. The American diplomat
George Kennan, who knew Moltke personally, called him:
“the greatest person morally, and the largest and most
enlightened in his concepts that I met on either side of the
battle lines of the Second World War.”
Beate had been led to Moltke through her work on religion and the German resistance, lectures that were delivered
at Princeton in 1971, and much of her academic life was
focused on the issues and conundrums of resistance to a
regime of repression so horrible that it would seem impossible to imagine if it had not actually occurred.
In the editions of Moltke’s letters, Beate’s indispensable
introductions and notes reflect her remarkable knowledge
and understanding of the German resistance, as well as the
broader history of the period. Indeed the notes have a sad,
elegiac quality of their own. As each new personality of the
resistance enters the scene, there is a trenchant summary of
his career which more often than not ends—as though a bell
were tolling through out the volume—with the words: “executed in August 1944”; “executed 29 September 1944”;
“executed,” “executed.” It is fitting and appropriate that the
German edition was awarded the Scholl prize, which honors
another circle of the German resistance, the Munich
University students of the White Rose movement.
Beate’s first German edition of Moltke’s letters appeared
in 1988, and in 1990 Alfred Knopf, Inc. published an edition
in New York—wonderfully translated into English by Beate—
which brought this moving document of the human spirit to
American and British readers. The English introduction
reflects the precision and trenchancy which Beate’s friends
9
MEMORIAL
will immediately recall from her brilliant and learned conversation.
Moltke’s mother was an English-speaking woman from
South Africa, and the story of Beate’s edition of her letters is
also noteworthy. When these letters found no American or
British publisher, Beate translated them into German for a
German edition. So she translated Moltke’s letters from
German into English, and his mother’s letters from English
into German. Ordinarily one only translates into one’s own
native language, but Beate, as we know, had two native languages.
In my last telephone call with Beate earlier this summer,
she recounted that she was deeply absorbed in choosing
books to be given to the St. John’s library. Despite many
upheavals, Beate had much good fortune in her life: in getting
out of Germany when she did; in finding a subject, Moltke,
who was so congenial to her independent spirit; and in reaching a place, St. John’s College, that suited her so well in its
uncompromising quest for excellence in the life of the mind.
***
Steven Werlin
I want to make two separate speeches about Beate. Both will
be short. The first begins with an anecdote. Sometime in the
1990s, when I lived in Annapolis, I had the pleasure of driving Beate either to or from the airport. It was a long drive—
she preferred Dulles to BWI or National—and I always
enjoyed the trip. I valued the chance to chat.
One time we were running a little bit late, and it started
to rain. I was speeding around the Washington beltway—too
quickly, it turned out—and my car went into a skid. Before I
regained control, we had scraped the passenger side of the
vehicle along the right-side barrier. I pulled to the side of the
road in a panic.
I asked Beate whether she was all right. I apologized. I
asked her whether she was sure was all right. I apologized
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
again. I asked her whether she was very sure she was all right
and apologized a third time. So much I remember only
approximately. I had let my car slide out of control with a
passenger who was within a half-dozen years of my grandmother’s age, and I was very upset.
Whatever I said, however many times I apologized, I must
have gone too far. The following is the part of the story I
remember very clearly: Beate finally turned to me and said,
“Steven, my dear, I made it through the bombing of London.”
I wanted to share this anecdote because I thought it
would be important for us all to think about how very funny
Beate was. I knew that others this afternoon would speak of
her scholarship and her courage. I wanted to point out that
she was a pleasure to be around.
I got to know Beate at two different dinner tables at 101
Market Street [the residence of the Klein’s], where three different sorts of dinners were served. There were large formal
occasions at which I was most often present as a waiter; there
were large informal occasions, also in the dining room, where
leftovers from formal dinners would be consumed by those
whom the hostess lovingly called her “vacuum cleaners”;
there were private dinners, for one or two friends, at the
small table in the kitchen. Beate was mainstay at all three,
because whenever she was around, conversations would be
interesting and serious, but also fun.
Here’s my second speech: I am now the Dean of Shimer
College, a small Great Books school near Chicago. I mourn
Beate’s passing for my students’ sake. I had been trying for a
couple of years to convince her to give a talk at Shimer. Most
recently I asked her to speak at commencement last spring.
She refused, saying that she was too old and unwell for the
trip.
When I heard she had passed away, I decided to try to
share my sense of her with my students, and so I invited all
who were interested to come to a Friday evening discussion
of her essay on the White Rose. It’s a lovely piece: serious and
challenging, surprising in its conclusions and beautifully writ-
11
MEMORIAL
ten in that English which she enjoyed calling “Standard MidAtlantic.”
Moved by some of her stronger claims, our conversation
focused on the importance of taking language seriously, of
paying close attention to the words that we and others use.
Much of what was said was predictable: angry claims about
the ways in which words like “terrorist” and “Nazi” and
“homeland” can be used too lightly, and the damage that
ensues when they are. But the conversation lacked depth of
passion, just as Beate said such conversation among those of
my generation and those who are younger generally do.
At a certain point, however, the conversation turned. In
order to explain how it turned, I need to share one fact about
Shimer College. At Shimer, teachers aren’t called “tutors.” It’s
not that we’re called “professors,” as we would be at most
colleges. At Shimer, there is no clear tradition. Lots of words
get used—teacher, instructor, facilitator, co-inquirer, and
worse.
We started to talk about whether it did and whether it
should matter to us what teachers are called. That question
brought the issue close to all of our lives. Several of my colleagues were present, but there were many more students—
first year, sophomore, junior, and senior—and they talked
seriously about what various decisions about the consequences that their various decisions about what word to use
in this particular instance might have. They were judging
their language, taking control of it in a serious way.
I think Beate would have been delighted.
***
Freya von Moltke
Read by Johannes Huessy
During the twelve heavy years that we lived under Hitler’s
regime in Germany, my husband, Helmuth James von
Moltke, wrote hundreds of letters to me. These letters were
not only a precious record of my husband’s thought, but also
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
12
a commentary on the events in Germany seen through the
eyes of a German and committed opponent of the Nazis. He
was executed for his opposition. For many years I kept the
letters with me as I first lived in South Africa, then back in
Germany, and eventually in the United States. Gradually I
came to realize that these letters were of historical importance and should be published. I did not believe, however,
that I was the right person to edit the letters. In Vermont,
Beate, so committed to German resistance, came into my life.
I came to love and admire her, and I entrusted the letters to
her. Over many years she edited and translated them, and
they were published in both German and English.
With Beate our letters were in very good hands. In her
work with them lively Beate invested most generously the
treasures of her gifts: her character, her mind, and mostly her
heart. And I came to cherish her friendship.
Later she began work on another collection of letters
from our family, the letters my mother-in-law, Dorothy von
Moltke, née Rose Innes, sent to her father, the Chief Justice
of South Africa from 1905 to 1935. These letters record her
life as a British-born wife and mother through World War I
and into the Nazi period, again a comment on Germany’s
troubled history of the first half of the twentieth century.
Beate translated this correspondence from English into
German, and part of the letters was published in 1999 in that
language.
So today, as you are all gathered to celebrate Beate’s life,
I want to add my voice to express my profound gratitude and
my sadness at her passing. How fortunate for her that she
died without having to leave St. John’s College.
Since I am not able to be with you in person I am very
grateful to have my words conveyed to you by one of your
students, Johannes Huessy, class of 2005, a friend of ours,
and belonging to the young generation, whom to teach had
become so central to Beate’s life.
***
MEMORIAL
13
Brother Robert Smith, F.S.C.
Beate was and is so many things to so many people that an
occasion like the present one is precious. It requires us to sort
out diverse strands in our own deeply felt but unsorted allegiances. This clarification has not been needed until now; she
was always there and ready to charm, and that was enough.
Now one needs to become explicit about what drew us to her
so strongly and for so long. That process will take a while,
and it begins for most of us now. We cannot judge ourselves
unless we fathom our enthusiasms.
Beate had an impact on people in public ways and also
privately. No generalizations can convey this, and so I rejoice
that so many people are here and have and soon will have
spoken.
I want to begin with an odd bit or two of evaluations others have made of her, principally because at least one such
view originally surprised me, but when I thought of it, it
seemed true and important. Robert Bart said something that
awakened my attention to an aspect of her I had not explicitly noted. Bart was a considerable influence in the College
for many years. He was often quite perceptive and articulated
his opinions clearly in his own idiosyncratic way. He said he
found Beate’s opinions on the work of students and her judgment of their characters to be very deep and accurate. This
judgment bears on a central matter in the life of this College.
We arrive at grades for Seminar—the central part of our work
here—by discussion and consensus between the two leaders
who share responsibility for it. We also decide in a similar
way on whether a student should be allowed to continue in
the College or not, and on whether he or she will be graduated. To show how important a judgment Bart thought he was
making about Beate, one has to realize how seriously Bart
took the matter of student evaluations. One anecdote will
suffice to show this. After an enabling meeting that started at
7 p.m. and did not end until 2 a.m., Bart was heard to say
with satisfaction to an exhausted colleague: “I think we really
did talk things out tonight.” That very careful man alerted me
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
to the real power of judging character Beate undoubtedly
possessed.
I talked about this someone else who expressed himself as
surprised by Bart’s opinion—he imagined Beate would probably have remained rather quiet on such occasions. This
shows how many sides there were to her. She was like the
man described by Pascal: when the talk turned on poetry, he
had lots to say, otherwise one would never have known he
had any views on the subject.
She was also impressive in other public ways. For many
years an important part of college life centered on dinners
given regularly by Jacob Klein and his wife. Klein was in the
opinion of most a great man and the dean whose thoughts
still influence us. People invited to give the Friday night lecture attended by all members of the Community came to
those dinners. Faculty members in turn were also invited and,
more frequently than most, Beate. It was agreed that when
she was present, her wit and general sprightliness helped
make the occasion a delight. That was certainly the opinion
of the Klein and his wife, both distinguished conversationalists themselves.
I want to bring up two more subjects. One of them is
unusual, and I think no one else is likely to have considered
it or thought it important. The other is a nostalgic look at reasons for a disappointment I have and will continue to feel
now that she is no longer reachable by telephone.
Let me turn to the first of the two topics. It will surprise
most of you.
She never attended family reunions because some Oppens
had insufficiently kept their distance from Hitler, and she was
unwilling to risk having to speak to them. She was proud of
one relative, a “parson,” to use her expression, who behaved
quite honorably.
Later, she did think of going to a family gathering, but
finally never did. She wrote an account of herself and her
father for a family publication, and she was immensely
pleased when some stranger, a man of some distinction, asked
MEMORIAL
15
her if she was indeed related to the man who was her father.
When she said yes, he told her of his admiration for him and
about the memorabilia on him and his career as an actor he
had collected.
Why am I speaking of this matter? There are, I think,
good reasons for doing so.
This aspect of her life shows both Beate’s seriousness and
her complexity. She paid respect to whatever she thought
deserved it, and this trait was balanced by her carefulness in
talking to people only about topics she thought appropriate
to a given audience. Beate never, or at least very rarely, mentioned the matters I have just spoken about. More importantly, in this very matter she did something else that goes to
the heart of who she was. In all the years she was at St. John’s,
in the annual directory published by the College, if you look
at the entry “von Oppen, Beate” you will find the words “See
Ruhm von Oppen, Beate.” She said, “My father gave me life,
but my mother’s second husband gave me nourishment and a
chance for a long life.” She always spoke of him—and she
was not sparing him in doing so—with affection and respect.
Consideration for her forbearers went along with a sense
of what is important over history. In fact some families were
the military bulwark that guaranteed continuity in a country,
and they made possible whatever degree of civilization
existed there. Beate’s respect for those who embody these
claims is of a piece with another worthwhile fact about her.
She never became an American citizen, despite her high
regard for this country and what it did for the world in two
great wars. She remembered, though, that England had
helped preserve her life and gave her an opportunity to serve
in the second great war. She said, “I swore allegiance to the
Queen and Charlie, too.” This last was her translation of “to
the Queen and her heirs.”
My second reason for talking about her origins is the
common sense and respect for herself that she showed in
keeping silent about them. Americans in one of their founding documents distanced themselves from titles, and in this
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
16
country mentioning a claim to one seems ridiculous to most.
Beate was as far removed from such a taint as possible. She
had the respect of all who knew her. She deserved it for her
personal and professional qualities. She needed no peacock
feather even if their borrowed attractiveness were valued
here.
Let me now conclude by saying how much one will miss
her. For many years I have called her whenever I heard or
read something new on any of the topics that interested the
two of us. I always wanted to hear her opinion and thereby
evaluate my own. One example: I recently read about a musical called, I think, “Quickening” composed for this year’s
Edinburgh Festival. It was on a religious subject. I immediately thought of Beate and the fact that she knew by heart
every work of every one of Bach’s cantatas. When I read
about this piece, I did not quite take the phone down and call
her about it, but I automatically thought of doing so.
Let that stand for many thoughts about the past and the
future that will preemptively summon my attention and stir
my gratitude toward someone so recently gone.
***
Ben Walker
I’d like to say a few words about my aunt Biti on behalf of
myself, my siblings, Becca and Philip, and also our partners
and children. We all called her Biti rather than Beate, so I’ll
continue to call her that throughout this talk.
Although Biti lived 4,000 miles away from us, she was a
constant presence throughout our childhoods and adult lives.
She never felt like “the aunt who lived on another continent,”
but a close and trusted friend and confidante.
She would come to visit us in England as often as she
could, normally twice a year. As we each grew up and left
home, her visits started to include trips to our homes in
Bristol, London, and Oxford, where she would come and stay
with us. She always took a very keen interest in what we were
MEMORIAL
17
doing in our lives and greatly enjoyed seeing where and how
we lived, at first hand. It was a great pleasure to have her to
stay, and you knew there would be no shortage of conversation while she was with you.
When she was back in America, we would all enjoy correspondence by letter with Biti. She was the only person with
whom I had regular correspondence by mail, and these letters
were always much more than just a quick summary of recent
events. Her letters to us would be questioning and insightful,
full of enthusiasm for whatever she was currently involved
with, full of personality and wit. Sometimes she wrote as if
she had discovered something or someone that had been a
huge secret, like Paul Scott or E.M. Forster, and she had to
share the good news with everyone.
But her handwriting was terrible; sometimes it would
take ages to decipher what she had written. She would complain about mine, and particularly Becca’s, but hers was
appalling!
Often letters would start in the normal way, but after she
had filled the sheet she was writing on, her words would spill
out onto the margins, and then on to the margins of newspaper cuttings she was sending us, as if she could never quite tell
us everything that she wanted to say.
For someone who surrounded herself with books and
even referred to her books as her friends, she was an amazingly social person. She had the ability to make friends with
people from all walks of life, young and old. She loved to talk
and was an entertaining and fascinating raconteur.
Discussions with Biti could sometimes be frustrating, as her
train of thought would often lead her seemingly miles away
from the topic being discussed, only to return twenty minutes
later via a very circuitous route; however, these conversations
were always fascinating as she would tell us about aspects of
her life that we did not know, and also stories about our own
childhoods that we had forgotten.
Her memory was quite amazing. She had the ability to
recall the most minute detail of events in her life that took
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
place decades earlier, even to the most mundane detail of
doctor’s appointments and dinner menus. Although at times
she would do the majority of the talking, conversations with
Biti were never “one way.” She took an active interest in all
of our lives, our partners and families, our work and hobbies,
our passions and thoughts.
She could drive you mad with her continual talking at
times. So it was easy to forget that Biti was a great listener.
She never felt it necessary to give advice, but she drank in all
information and would remember it. Months later she would
refer to details of a conversation that had taken place on her
last visit, and it was very reassuring. I always enjoyed talking
to her, she was wise and understanding and I felt terribly
close to her.
She also had a great sense of humour – laconic and underspoken, but never cruel. She could take you completely by
surprise with her turns of phrase, but sometimes you could
only tell that she knew how witty she was being from a twinkle in her eye. I’ll never forget her laugh, or her smile.
She really helped to form the person I am today – what
great passions she had – music and literature, history and philosophy. Such clear views about politics and religion. Good
influences for an adolescent to have in the family.
I have a copy of an autobiographical short story that she
wrote, called “The Tuning Fork,” [reprinted below] in which
she describes waiting to cross the border between Germany
and Holland in 1936. In it, she describes how, although she
was practically penniless, she spent a portion of her last 10
marks on a tuning fork. “It was a modest tuning fork, and
cheap,” she wrote, “ but it depleted my minimal resources. I
probably realised this, yet probably felt, too, that there was
not only practical but also symbolical value in a gadget that
gave you true pitch.” At the end of the story, she writes, “I
still have it. Tuning forks don’t take up much space.”
And it was those small things of symbolic significance that
meant the most to her. She wanted little, and she asked for
less. Dark chocolate and some photos seemed about it. She
MEMORIAL
19
was generous, thoughtful, and unselfish. But the small things
were important to her – the correspondence, above all, providing treasured insight into our lives, a strong link back to
her family in England, and a true measure of our love for her.
I’ve been struck, whilst going through her papers over the last
few days, quite how many letters there were from all of us to
her: it makes me realise how important a figure she was to the
whole family. But there were also letters from so many other
people—she had so many friends—people who she maintained contact with for decades and across continents.
For the last few years of her life, as many of you will
know, Biti was faced with an agonizing decision. She knew
that the time had come to move from her lovely home on
Wagner Street, and she needed to decide where to go. Should
she stay in America, or move back to the United Kingdom
after 45 years? She found this decision incredibly difficult to
make, and every time she spoke to someone else about it, her
feelings would veer from one option to another. When she
finally decided to move to a retirement community just a few
miles outside of Annapolis, we were all selfishly disappointed.
We knew that this meant we would see less and less of Biti as
she was finding continental travel more and more difficult.
Becca felt it particularly keenly. With two young children, she
knew that the opportunities to visit Biti in America would be
few.
But we all secretly knew that this was the right decision
for her to make. We knew what a unique place she had found
to live, what an amazing community, providing not only the
intellectual stimulation she thrived on, but also the social and
emotional support she needed. It was already clear to us
before she died, but has become even more so since then,
what a special place she had found in the heart of this community, how many very close friends she had, how she had
touched the lives of so many people around her. She was
every bit as loved and valued by her friends and colleagues in
Annapolis as she was by her family, and that’s why the decision was so hard for her to make.
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
20
Thank you to all of you here in Annapolis for making this
such a happy home to her for the last forty years, so far away
from her family in England. And thank you, Aunt Biti, for all
the love that you shared with us. We’ll always remember you
for the wonderful woman that you were.
***
Eva Brann
We knew each other for nearly forty-five years and for almost
twenty we lived next to each other, with only a thin dry wall
between us. We spent a lot of time in each other’s company,
eating, talking and, in the earlier years, walking.
Beate had a brisk, sometimes even brusque English exterior, a fund of stories ranging from historical happenings to
personal mishaps, a far-flung American and transatlantic
acquaintance, and a sprightly, occasionally acerbic wit.
People, among them the Graduate Institute students she liked
so much to teach, were charmed and fascinated. So was I. She
was good company, and she seemed well seated in life.
But it wasn’t quite that way. If fate had been kinder, she
would actually have been – or so I often imagined – a decisive
Englishwoman, living in a small village in one of the prettier
shires, minding the vicar’s theology and singing in his choir –
not herself a housekeeper but well-served by someone who
had become attached to her.
It wasn’t that way. She wasn’t really English but was born
in Switzerland and then, in the starving years after the First
World War, had a German childhood; she herself attributed
her small stature and some other effects to her undernourishment as an infant. She was rightly proud that because of the
complexities of her early years she grew up preternaturally
sensitive to the political climate. In the first year of the Nazi
takeover, when my own parents’ thoughts were still far from
emigration, she, a mere teenager, removed herself to
Holland, where, incidentally, she had an unlikely but often
remembered experience with a famous Indian guru. She
MEMORIAL
21
aided her family in their immigration to England, where life
was far harder for refugees than it was for those of us who
luckily landed in the States. Her university studies were
oppressed and curtailed by lack of money. There was a brief
and deeply buried expectation of happiness which ended
when the young man died in Africa under Montgomery, a
general whose cavalier strategies she despised.
Around her, complexity and anomaly accumulated.
Though she lived most of her life here, she never became an
American citizen but remained a British subject, a resident
alien who had endless troubles with the INS over her everlost green cards. She was never a full-time, regular tutor, for
she had truly no mind for mathematics. I recall hours in her
first apartment on Church Circle trying to persuade her that
a geometric diagram could display a truth expressible in
words. Nevertheless, the college was her one true home, for
her appointments, though made from year to year, were soon
made quite routinely, and she served the college well in her
own way, not least as long-time editor of St. John’s Review.
She had contracted once to write a history of twentieth-century Germany, but had to give it up, laboring, as I thought,
under too great an accumulation of detailed knowledge and
too overwhelming a sense of the responsibility for telling the
inner truth close to her political conscience. She was, one
might say, the ultimate historian, with no disposition for universals but a great urge to make the particulars express the
moral significance whose burden she so acutely felt. On the
other hand she was a good part journalist, with a reporter’s
bold inquisitiveness and a jaunty, even daring style, the style
of moral exposé. Her completed work was eminently readable and vividly opinionated.
At home nowhere and everywhere, she was up to her last
trip to see her family this summer – she died four days after
her return – an intrepid if overloaded traveler. Something in
her life left her a kind of pack-rat, with a propensity for accumulation. We used to go to yard sales together, where I’d
come away with a candlestick and she would acquire the
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
largest object around, preferably non-functional; computers
which she couldn’t use anyway, typewriters of which she had
five. I recall that we were walking once in the woods (they
were then still to be found around Annapolis), when we came
on an overgrown wreck of a truck; seeing her appraisingly
eye the seat in the cabin I shouted out a forfending
“Absolutely not!”
Her religious convictions were in suspension, oddly compacted of adherence and distance. She declared herself an
agnostic but had faith only in the faithful. Baptized a
Zwinglian, she was Jewish on her mother’s side, and therefore technically Jewish. Yet she had no relation to Judaism
and a great distaste for that emotional and academic exploitation of Jewish history which she mordantly called the
“Holocaust industry.” In fact every sort of unthinking proprietary position offended her and roused acerbic epithets. For
example, she used to call feckless pacifists “peace-mongers.”
Yet she herself occupied her special historical territory whose
invasion by uncomprehending academic forces troubled her
unceasingly.
Though she admired the Lutheran theologian and resisting martyr to the Nazis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer (with whose
complicated abstractions she could hardly deal), her real sympathy was with the Catholics because of the moral clarity to
be derived from the doctrine of works; she had the deepest
suspicion of the moral consequences of elevating subjective
faith over political deeds.
Perhaps the defining emblem of her semi-deliberate convolutions was her very name. She originally had the surname
Ruhm from her much beloved adoptive father Ernst Ruhm,
the natural father of her sister Delia. Just when a German surname would be least helpful in England she added her own
natural father’s name, von Oppen. He was an actor, a minor
matinee idol, whom she insisted on visiting when she learned
about him in her teens – a meeting at once gratifying and
wrenching. She was clearly anxious to carry with her all her
connections – all we’ve learned to call “roots” in America.
MEMORIAL
23
But the attendant results were confusion: Mail went ever
astray, being sent indifferently to all her initials, R, v. or O.
The territory she made her own, with the most detailed
mastery and avid reading, brought up to date to the very last
days, was, I think, deep down another exercise in preserving
and exonerating her origins and connections. She was, after
all, German, and German was her first language. She was,
incidentally, able to translate not only German into English,
her language of daily use (which most of us refugees can do),
but English into German as well; she was symmetrically bilingual, an unusual phenomenon. Her deep, absolutely persistent interest was in the German resistance to the Nazis. She
knew these “resistential” figures (as she called them)
minutely; they were her kin, and she worried over them and
their reputation (just as, Delia has told me, she worried about
her as the little sister). She found her hero particularly in
Helmuth von Moltke, who was hanged by the Nazis and to
whose surviving family, his wife Freya and their sons, she was
close. In publishing his correspondence with Freya in German
and in English she did his memory a great service.
As all else in her life, this was not so much an ebulliently
ardent passion as a held in, tenacious adherence. This mode
was, I think, the defining feeling of her life.
I have asked myself: What made us life-long companions?
I think above all Bach and Language. When we met in 1960
I already owned records of most of the cantatas and instrumental music. She introduced me to the motets. But above all
she sensitized me to something utterly new to me and
infinitely valuable in listening to sacred music: the relation of
the music to the words – music as an exegesis, a gloss, an
incarnation of the sacred text. This was a preoccupation
which was perhaps even more ingrained, more central, than
the Resistance, at once a deflection from and a focusing of
feeling. She also taught me, incidentally, that it is therefore
barbarous to listen to such music as a background to other
occupations – a lesson that left me at least with the grace of
qualms about doing it.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
I learned a lot too from her resistential studies. She had
an absolutely horrendous writer’s block, stemming, I think,
from the plethora of her information, her aversion to generalization, and the oppressive sense of the importance of this
work. So I got to work through each prospective publication
with her with, I sometimes think, more profit to me than to
her – one benefit being that I was able to think somewhat better of the country of my birth. And I learned to admire her
for her admirations, for to have true heroes is to me a sign of
an underlying soundness of soul.
Some part of our frequent dinners together was spent in
our common pleasure in language, her British English (to the
end a schedule remained a “shedule” for her) and my adoptive American. We rejoiced in the sayings of our German
childhood and put them into hilarious English. We tried to
find exact renderings of idioms in the other language and
rejoiced in silly literalisms. In short we disported ourselves
bilingually. Sometimes she would decode for me the affectionate scrawls of alumni letters, for she, who had an almost
undecipherable handwriting, was especially good at reading
that of others. This handwriting of hers, furiously determinate yet unreadable, always seemed to me to signify something. She was an extremely sociable, communicative being,
charming, witty, intriguing, a teller and re-teller of stories,
ranging, as I said, from historical circumstance to personal
complications. Yet her favorite medium was epistolary: contact through distance. She carried on a far-flung and persistent correspondence, letters whose typed parts were vivacious
but which were wreathed about with her hopeless supplementary scribbles. Her niece Rebecca described them lovingly
at the funeral in August. I should say here that her niece and
nephews, Rebecca, Philip, and Ben, were the human beings
she was most straightforwardly fond of, and they returned
her affection.
Here is a chief, perhaps central trait of Beate’s being that
was totally at odds with her incessant, self-circling anxiety –
a wonderful phenomenon. When real trouble struck – breast
25
MEMORIAL
cancer, heart disease, colitis – she became absolutely serene,
reasonable, patient. It was the gallantry of disaster confirmed,
and a sign of the strength beneath all the agitation.
For the rest, she was completely without pretensions
(though rightfully wanting recognition for her righteous
labors), quite without malice (except when oppressed by too
powerfully impending an opposition), generally without
falsehood (though inhibited to the point of furtiveness about
her feelings), and, all in all, as devoid of intentional harm as
a human being can well be.
In the last few years I took to listening through our thin
party wall for worrisome thumps that brought me to the
phone, for the TV that grew louder as she grew deafer but
was a sign of life, and for the ominous silences, the last of
which brought me over to find what I had feared. I might say
that the silence next door is sounding pretty loud these days.
***
Beate Ruhm von Oppenis was a tutor on the Annapolis Campus of
St. John’s College.
Elliott Zuckerman is tutor emeritus on the Annapolis Campus of
St. John’s College.
Delia Walker is the sister of Beate Ruhm von Oppen.
Peter Quint is Jacob A. France Professor of Constitutional Law at
The University of Maryland.
Steven Werlin is a graduate of St. John’s College and dean of Shimer
College.
Johannes Huessy is a student on the Annapolis campus of St. John’s
College.
Freya von Moltke is widow of Helmuth James von Moltke.
Brother Robert Smith is tutor emeritus on the Annapolis Campus of
St. John’s College.
Ben Walker is the nephew of Beate Ruhm von Oppen.
Eva Brann is former dean and tutor on the Annapolis Campus of
St. John’s College.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
27
The Tuning Fork
Beate Ruhm von Oppen
Introduction by David Stephenson
At the memorial service for Beate Ruhm von Oppen, I discovered a literary side to her I had not suspected. On that occasion her nephew mentioned a memoir, “The Tuning Fork,”
which recalls Beate’s flight as a teenage girl from Germany, a
precarious exodus even in the early days of Nazi domination.
Her family gave me a copy on request, and I immediately saw
how much it deserves publication in full in The St. John’s
Review.
The story rings as true as only experience can, neither
exaggerating nor belittling the fears or desires of a young student brought up in a time when freedom and truth were dying
only bit by bit. It is the personal character of her account that
tells me most what I want to know: why were so many
Germans persuaded by Hitler’s obvious lies and so few moved
to challenge them? Beate juxtaposes her school’s playful complicity in the new racial games against her own ambivalent
reaction to the bloody movies and songs that could move even
unsympathetic youth to tears. Her family’s reluctance to send
their child away requires no explanation; the gradual evolution of her own determination to leave “the fatherland” can
best be glimpsed in her own words.
Why purchase a tuning fork with money she might need to
live in exile? She explains her desire for “a gadget that gave
you the true pitch” in a world grown cacophonous, an instrument that she later justifies on the ground that it doesn’t “take
up much space.” But her love of music also shines through this
act of hope and daring. And that was also something she could
take with her wherever she went.
David Stephenson is a tutor on the Annapolis campus of St. John’s College.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
My own acquaintance with Beate grew primarily out of
her musical interests. After she came to St. John’s College, she
attended every musical performance and always discovered
the most appropriate compliment for every group. She was
particularly encouraging to the College’s fledgling orchestra.
Yet her comments about professional musicians could be
sharply critical. For example, though herself the source of several widely admired translations from German to English and
from English to German, she often expressed her disapproval
of translation when it pertained to music. She believed that
linguistic sonority had to play a significant part of a composition to any text: translation into English inevitably distorted
or corrupted its effect.
And her sensitivity to the nuance of verbal expression
extended well beyond music and poetry: at least some of the
power of political propaganda in general she attributed to
clever distortions of language. Hitler’s depredation of his
native language in Mein Kampf as well as in his speeches did
not deceive her more-than-musical ear. She never stopped worrying about the effects of political rhetoric in every language,
even our own.
The Tuning Fork
I was born in Switzerland at the end of the First World War
and grew up, or started to grow up, in Germany. I cannot
think back to a time when politics was not in the air. I remember the evidence of food shortages in my kindergarten and
elementary school days. I remember the feeling of insecurity
communicated by all around me when the currency collapsed, and when inflation galloped away in geometric or
exponential progression, so that, for instance, a lawyer’s or
doctor’s earnings of one day might not be enough to buy a
loaf of bread the next day.
Some years ago you could see, in the window of an
antique shop in our Main Street in Annapolis, an old German
50,000 Mark note, said to have been “used in Hitler’s
Germany.” Perhaps it was used as wallpaper. It might be more
RUHM
VON
OPPEN
29
accurate to say that it was used—as money—in pre-Hitler
Germany, though I’d hate to refer to the Weimar Republic as
just that. It was a specimen of the kind of money that helped
to bring about Hitler’s Germany. Fifty thousand Marks now
would be worth about $13,000. In “normal” times four
Marks were a dollar. The date of issue on that 50,000 Mark
note was November 19, 1922. The very fact that such a note
was printed and put into circulation was, of course, a sign
that inflation had got out of hand. In the summer of 1922 the
dollar was worth not four Marks, but over 400. The next
summer it was over 4 million. And by November 15, 1923 it
was 4 trillion (4,000,000,000,000). If my reckoning is
right—but you’d better check it—that 50,000 Mark note
issued in November 1922 was worth one-eighty-millionth of
a dollar, a year later one eight hundred thousandth of a cent.
That was very cheap wallpaper, but expensive too. What it all
meant, among other things, was the pauperization and
demoralization of the social fabric.
It was in that month, November 1923, that Hitler, the
leader of a tiny party, staged his abortive putsch or coup d’etat in Munich, when he tried for the first time, and failed, to
seize power. That year had also seen communist attempts to
seize power in central Germany; they too were foiled. Hitler
was sent to a comfortable prison for a while and used his
leisure to write his book, Mein Kampf. When he got out
again, he adopted a policy of legality and with that he eventually prevailed.
By the time I had entered elementary school, in 1924, a
new currency had been established and money once more was
money, though scarce. But I noticed my teachers were not
enthusiastic about the political system, though we dutifully
and decorously celebrated the 80th birthday of our President.
His name was Hindenburg and he had been a famous field
marshal in the First World War, halting the Russian advance
in East Prussia. Being, as it were, a personal link between the
old, pre-war empire and the new, post-war republic, and loyal
to the new constitution, he was a national figure acceptable to
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
the moderate right and moderate left and lasted a decade as
head of state, while chancellors, or heads of government, succeeded each other at a breathtaking rate. The country had
many political parties and an election system based on proportional representation, so that votes were distributed across
a wide spectrum and a large number of parties, and governments had to be formed out of coalitions of several of them.
They were correspondingly shaky and short-lived. I remember many elections during my school days and reports of violent rhetoric from left to right, as well as physical violence,
street fights, murders, assassinations.
Then, after the Wall Street crash of 1929 with its worldwide repercussions, there was another economic crisis a mere
six years after the beginning of the recovery from the earlier
one, with a growing, and intolerable, rate of unemployment.
It grew from 1.3 million in September 1929 to 3 million a
year later, to over 6 million in 1931. With a total population
of about 65 million, this meant that one in every two families
was hit. It was not only working class families that were so
affected. There was for instance, much unemployment among
academics too. The extremist parties, the Communists and
the Nazis, made great gains and finally occupied more than
half the seats in the national parliament, where they were
now able to paralyze the democratic process. They joined, for
instance, in a strike to paralyze the transport system in Berlin.
Otherwise they could fight each other to death, and did, with
casualties on both sides, despite the general strategy of the
Communists at that time to treat the social Democrats—
whom they called “social fascists” for the purpose—as their
number one enemy and to flirt with the possibility of a Nazi
victory as a promising prelude to a communist takeover. All
this impinged, of course, on a Berlin school child—the transport strike, the posters, the polarization, the combination of
both extremes against the middle, and the weakness and
apparent helplessness of the middle.
When President Heisenburg appointed Hitler Reich
Chancellor on January 30, 1933, he was acting in accordance
RUHM
VON
OPPEN
31
with the letter and perhaps even the spirit of the constitution.
Hitler’s party, the Nationalist Socialist German Workers’ (or
“Nazis” for short, to distinguish them from the “Sozis” or
Social Democrats), was by then the strongest party in the
country, with about one-third of the vote; the Social
Democrats had only one-fifth; the communists one-sixth; the
Catholic Centre Party, together with its Bavarian affiliate,
about the same. And there were many others, but all of them
had less than 10 percent of the vote, the largest of them the
Nationalists, with 8.8 percent; Hitler became the head of a
coalition government. I still remember seeing the faces of
these gentlemen in an evening paper that carried the
announcement.
No one knew what it meant. I was somewhat scared, for
I had read Hitler’s book. I had had to do it secretly, at night
with a flashlight under the bedclothes, for my parents, like
many other respectable people, regarded it as pornographic—which indeed in a manner of speaking it was. Also
it was very long, and that was probably why very few people
read it, though once its author had become ruler of the land,
it was widely and compulsorily distributed, for instance, as a
present to newlyweds, bound like a bible. But that did not, of
course, ensure its perusal.
Before saying anything about what I had found in that
book, let me, quickly, give you an account of the rest of my
Berlin schooldays, to show how life at school changed in the
seventeen months before I left. There was much talk of
national solidarity and the Community of the People. There
were changes in personnel and in the curriculum. And there
was a dramatic rate of attrition. My own class was reduced by
more than half—probably because girls (it was a girls’ school
I went to) or their parents thought that since the new regime
had set its face against too much academic education for
women (who were not to exceed ten percent of university
enrollment), it was hardly worth struggling through more
Latin and trigonometry and the rest, up to the rather stiff
school-leaving exam, which was normally taken at [age] 18.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
The teaching personnel changed in two ways: there were
a few dismissals, of Jews—we had very few Jews at my
school; and our English teacher, who was a Jew, was at first
said not be subject to dismissal because he had not only
served in the war but had even been shot in the head. But
eventually he left all the same and the next English teacher
was less good; and that one was in due course replaced by an
even worse one, a teacher trainee. The other change among
the teachers was a change in tone and color. A very few
revealed themselves as Nazis which, they said, they had been
all along but could only now, at last, openly avow to be. (On
the whole the school had been vaguely nationalistic, but
hardly Nazi.) Others toed the new line as best they could and
exhibited varying degrees of cravenness or caution and dignity, enthusiasm or moderation or reserve. Many new things
were required: the Hitler statue at the beginning of classes,
attendance at new celebrations that proliferated and at which
you had, of course, to stand at attention (with upraised arm)
when the new national anthem was played and sung. This was
the old marching song of the Nazi movement, with text by
Horst Wessel, saying: “Raise the flag, close the ranks, we
storm-troopers march in firm and steady tread. Comrades
shot by the Reds and Reactionaries are marching on with us.”
It was the battle song of the new revolution.
So there was all that. And there were changes in such subjects as history and science. Let me take biology, for that is
where I had my brief hour of glory. I had not done well with
the dissection of tulips and the like. But I shone once biology
was converted into race biology. Not only was there Mendel’s
law, about which my father had told me before (only that its
implication and application were now rather different from
what I had gathered from him), but—and this is where the
real fun came in—we now learnt about the German races,
“Aryan,” of course, all of them.
There were six, if I remember correctly, ranging in excellence from the Nordic to the East Baltic. Nordic was best
because Nordic man had created almost all the culture there
RUHM
VON
OPPEN
33
was, and he had qualities of leadership. The Mediterranean
race was also quite good (for, after all, there had been ancient
Greeks and Romans and there were modern Italians, good
fascists, full of leadership). The Mediterranean race could
most easily be memorized as a smaller, lightweight, and
darker version of the Nordic: what they had in common were
the proportions of their skulls and faces (long, narrow skull,
long face) and the characteristic ways of standing on one leg,
with no weight on the other, one standing and one play leg,
as a literal translation of the German names for them would
have it. Such legs could be seen in Greek statues, and such
were the legs of Nordic man. Now the Falic race was next
best. It shared many of the sterling qualities of the Nordic—
high-mindedness and the rest—but could be distinguished
from it by the fact that it stood squarely on two legs. No playleg there. Also its face was a bit broader. That race lacked,
somewhat, the fire of Nordic man, or let us say the thumos,
but made up for it by solidity and staying power. The color
scheme was fairly Nordic, blonde hair, blue eyes. So was that
of the East Baltic race whose virtues were less marked than
those of the Nordic and the Falic and whose features were
less distinguished, including a broader skull and a broadish
nose. I could not quite make out the use of this race, unless it
was, perhaps, territorial, to keep the Slavs out. The Slavs were
not a German race. Then there was German race that looked,
we might have said, a bit Jewish or perhaps Armenian, but it
was neither. It was Dinaric and seemed to be much the same
as what earlier classifications had called Alpine. Indeed, this
race dwelt in the mountains. It looked sturdy enough, but not
as prepossessing as the Nordic; and its head had awkward
measurements: Dinaric man had a prominent nose and not
much back to his head. But he had a redeeming feature: he
was musical.
Now all this, of course, seemed good clean fun, and easy
to visualize and memorize. Indeed there were visual aids: pictures of well know personages to help recognition and memorization: Hindenburg for the Falic race, somebody like
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Haydn for the Dinaric, Caesar for the Mediterranean. Then
there was a picture of Martin Luther, the great German
Reformer, and I forget now what race he was said to represent. To me he looked Slavic. But that, of course, could not
be. I suppose he was declared a darker type of East Baltic or
Falic. All this was child’s play, and this child played it with
zest and success.
History was harder. You could not inwardly laugh that off
and outwardly play it as a parlor game. You had to learn, or
appear to learn, appear to make your own—to some extent,
in some way, at least— and you had to read, say, and write the
things that had been neglected or “falsified” in the Weimar
Republic of evil memory, under “the System” (“in der
Systemzeit” as the Nazis referred to it). So we were all given
a short brochure on contemporary history, the recent and
most “relevant” period of German and European and world
history. It started with the German surrender at the end of the
world war, a surrender brought about by trickery abroad and
treason at home, by President Wilson’s 14 Point peace proposal, and the stab in the back of the undefeated German
army, a piece of treachery committed by Jews, Marxists, and
Catholics—feckless folk with international ties. These traitors
then set up their system of abject surrender abroad and iniquity and immorality at home. They accepted the shameful
peace treaty of Versailles, which not only saddled Germany
with sole responsibility for the war (in Article 231, which
Germans called the “war guilt clause” or “war guilt lie”), but
also provided for the payment—virtually in perpetuity—of
crippling reparations. Germany was unilaterally disarmed
(whereas Wilson had envisaged universal disarmament) and
was first blockaded by the British—after the cessations of hostilities—to enforce submission, and then, in 1923, invaded by
the French, who marched into the Ruhr valley to seize
German coal and steel production as reparation payments
were in arrears. It was reparations that caused the economic
misery during the republic’s fourteen years of shame.
Attempts to revise the reparations schedule to make it more
RUHM
VON
OPPEN
35
tolerable were fruitless and fraudulent. The last revision provided for the spreading of payments until 1988, and the
country was dying in the attempt to do the victors’ bidding.
The nation would have to stand together and rally ‘round the
Führer—or the “People’s Chancellor,” as he was then still
called—to throw off the shackles of Versailles. The cover of
this brochure had a muscular worker on it, stripped to the
waist and bursting his chains.
We also learned about the parts of Germany that had
been taken away by the Treaty of Versailles, which dictated
peace, and about the Germans who languished under foreign
domination. We learnt that German defenselessness was further aggravated by the geographic position of the country: it
was surrounded by hostile powers. Thus a bombing plane
could take off from France and fly right across Germany and
land in Czechoslovakia, without refueling. The lesson was
brought home by air-raid exercises. They were not very realistic, but they were educative. I still remember leading my little troop of classmates to their several homes, staying close to
the houses, as instructed, to avoid exposure to imagined
falling shrapnel and flying glass. That was in the first year or
so of Hitler’s power, five or six years before his war. It was
useless, of course, as an exercise in air-raid precautions, but it
was useful for fomenting fear and a spirit of national defense.
It also showed that the Czechoslovak Republic, even if militarily it amounted to no more than an aircraft base, was the
power that enabled France—or planes based in France—to
bomb the whole of Germany. And in addition—but this point
was not given too much prominence until four years later, in
the crisis leading up to the Munich settlement that dismembered the Czechoslovak Republic—the country was a political entity in which six-and-a-half million Czechs held over 3
million Germans in subjection, as second-class citizens.
Clearly the Sudeten region had to be united with Germany.
So much for what was taught in class and done in extramural exercises under the responsibility of the school. But
there was one other thing I should mention. Schools were
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
obliged to take their pupils to certain films, propaganda films
that were being shown commercially. So, obediently, our class
went to see the movie Hitlerjunge Quex, the story of a Hitler
Youth of the working class whose father was a communist and
whose mother was long-suffering and tried to cope with conditions and her husband, but in the end attempted suicide, by
gas, from misery and despair. Quex (who was a very idealized
version of an actual Hitler Youth who had been killed) first
belonged to a communist youth group, as was natural in view
of his home background. But on one occasion, one excursion,
he was so revolted by their beastly ways that he ran away
through the woods, and came upon the camp of a Nazi youth
group which instantly and deeply impressed him as his own
and the country’s salvation. (It was a sunrise scene, to make
sure we all got the point.) Here were shining faces, clean
limbs, real comradeship, purpose, discipline, dedication, and
hope. So he joined the Hitler Youth and was active, devotedly
active in the distribution of leaflets and all that. He continued, of course, to live with his parents in the working class
district of Berlin. And one day, at dawn, the communists took
their revenge, and his particular personal enemy, a brute of a
man, pursued him through the deserted streets—also through
the maze of an amusement park, a very effective, macabre,
cinematic touch that, and long before The Third Man—and
finally caught up with him and knifed him. But Quex died for
the cause, and when his friends found him, on the point of
death, and propped him up, he raised his right arm in salute
to the German future and the camera swung up to the clouds
and the sound track into the marching song of Hitler Youth,
with the lines, “The flag leads us into eternity, the flag is more
than death.”
The trouble was twofold: that the film was most effective
and affecting (however corny it may sound as I now tell it)
and it was made with terrific competence and with the participation of some very good actors; and, secondly, that the
school was under an obligation not only to take us to see it,
but also to discuss it with us. So we had our class discussion.
RUHM
VON
OPPEN
37
I do not remember much about it except for the fact that I
decided to play the part of aesthetic and dramatic critic, arguing that, powerful though the movie was, it could have been
even better if it had been less black and white (metaphorically
speaking), if it had had more nuances, more human diversity
and verisimilitude. Why did I take that line? In order not to
embarrass or endanger our teacher who was leading the discussion, who, I had reason to believe, was very unhappy
about the Nazis, and who was a widow with two children for
whom she had to provide.
Then there was a film about Joan of Arc, replete with horrors of the Hundred Years’ War. It exposed the sadism of the
British and the brutality of the Catholic clergy. On that occasion I objected to the screening of atrocities; and that was
about as far as one could go and get away with it.
On the Saturday when it was announced that the country
had left the League of Nations in protest against the continuing discrimination of Germany in the disarmament negotiations, our class of fifteen-year-old girls went off to learn how
the peasantry lived, to make us a proper part of the People’s
Community. We were to spend two days roughing it with a
farmer in Brandenburg. The regime wanted us Berliners to
experience the hard life of the rural part of the population.
We took a train to the nearest station, then walked the rest of
the way to the rather grey and bleak village, to be received by
a distinctly unfriendly farmer. We sang to cheer our progress
on the country road. Suddenly one of the girls started singing
that song about Jewish blood spurting from the knife in a better future. About two other girls joined in. I could hardly
believe my ears.
The farmer was surly. I spent a restless night with the others, who seemed undisturbed, in the hay in his barn. What
with that song and the severing of the connection with the
League—and everything else that had happened and was happening—I began to think it might be better to be elsewhere.
But my parents and my little sister were in Berlin, our home,
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with no prospect of getting out. I could see no way of leaving
the country and leaving them.
A way did offer itself some months later. The Quakers
were starting an international boarding school in Holland
and announced a summer course there. After another disturbing weekend at the end of June 1934, which saw the
bloody liquidation of the rebellious S.A. leaders and other
enemies and suspects, and when rumors were flying about
that men were being shot in the nearby cadet school at
Lichterfelde, a little group of children assembled on a platform of the Zoo Station in Berlin, to take the train to
Holland. I had just turned sixteen and may have been the oldest.
The summer school was a wild success. A bigger group of
children came from Hamburg, and many stayed on or came
back later. They were mostly Jewish or part Jewish. I was
overcome by the feeling of freedom and by meeting
grownups you could really talk to freely. And they were
devoted to the task in hand, to making us more comfortable
and teaching us English. The English lessons were so good
that, having been bottom of my class in Berlin—English was
our third foreign language after French and Latin, and my
classmates had all had some kind of head start—I found that
I had overtaken not only them, but also the teacher trainee in
charge of them when I returned for a visit.
My mother had insisted on my coming back for a secretarial course. She did not think it wise to emigrate without a
marketable skill. Then, in January 1935, my parents allowed
me to go back to Holland. The months until the beginning of
the academic year in October were bridged at the school in
Holland by my being maid of all work, baby-sitting and tutoring, even taking a class in music when the music master was
ill. Before that I spent Christmas with the family in Berlin and
visited my grandmother in Frankfurt. That was the last time
I saw her. In December four of us in the top class passed the
English university entrance exam. Two, oddly enough, went
back to Germany for good—one of them the son of the
RUHM
VON
OPPEN
39
Friends’ Yearly Meeting, who could easily have stayed
abroad. But two went back to England. I was one of them.
It was spring 1936. They took me off the train after it had
crossed the border from Germany. They asked me for my religion, for while they wanted to protect the Dutch unemployed
from the competition of foreigners, they also wanted to protect the virtue of young women. I was seventeen. They
accused me of coming to work in Holland. I denied it, though
they were right. They had no proof; but I had the burden of
proof. The fact was that I had in the previous December
passed the examination given by Oxford for entrance to
British universities. Being penniless and not wanting to be a
burden on the American uncle who had paid my school fees
for the year it had taken me to prepare for that exam at the
International Quaker School in Holland, I had gladly
accepted the school’s invitation to stay on as unpaid general
dog’s body until it was time to go to England to study, the following October. So I was earning my keep as matron’s assistant, occasional coach or tutor, baby-sitter, and so on. But
these services, however unpaid and unperformable by natives,
were work prohibited by law or regulations of the land that
was, like most European countries, struggling with an economic crisis at the very time when the Hitler regime created
large numbers of refugees or would-be refugees, trying to
keep such aliens out.
To admit my status as a worker, albeit unpaid, would have
meant being sent back to the fatherland, with the additional
black mark of having tried to flee it. So I denied it. The denial
was an automatic reflex. Unfortunately, my response to the
question about my religion was equally automatic. I said
“Protestant,” having been baptized at birth according to the
Zwinglian rite and having attended Protestant religious
instruction at my German schools, with even a spell of
Lutheran Sunday school thrown in for good measure. It was
a mistake. I did have the presence of mind and necessary minutes and pennies to send a cheery postcard about my “good
trip” to my Jewish grandmother in Frankfurt from the Dutch
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
side. I wanted to reassure; she had a heart ailment, of which
she died before the year was out.
Now I was put on the next train back to Emmerich,
where I was received, not to say taken in to custody, by the
Evangelische Bahnhofsmission. (Readers of Günter Grass may
remember his remarks about that institution in his Dog
Years.) It felt like a half-way house on the way to more serious, more purely political confinement. They were stern and
forbidding and had nothing evangelical about them. There
was even a touch of Nazism. As I was sitting, somewhat disconsolately, in a dark reception room, a boy of about eight
came in and sang one of those Nazi songs—I don’t know
why; perhaps it was just youthful exuberance. It grated
enough to make me decide to accept no food from this establishment or run the risk of having to sit at the table with these
professional Protestants. My grandmother had given me
enough provender for the day.
What I did not have was money, beyond the ten Marks
one was allowed to take out of the country. Yet, when the
woman in charge of this Internal Mission house allowed me
to go for a short walk in town, I could not resist buying a tuning fork at the window of a small music shop. I went in and
bought it. My instrument at the time was the violin, which I
played as badly as I had played the piano and would later play
the oboe. I may have justified the rash purchase to myself as
useful: a violin has to be tuned and there isn’t always a piano
or other instrument present to give the pitch. It was a modest
tuning fork and cheap; but it depleted my minimal resources.
I probably realized this, yet probably felt, too, that there was
not only practical but symbolic value in a gadget that gave
you the true pitch.
Before I went for the walk in the strange town I had telephoned my school and told my friends there what had
befallen me. They said they would certify me as a bona fide
pupil—I was taking lessons with the music master—and get
the local police to put an official endorsement on the document that would impress the Dutch border officials. The doc-
RUHM
VON
OPPEN
41
ument duly arrived by Express mail the next day, but also a
message that the police station had closed by the time my
friends got there and that they had made their statement
sound as persuasive as possible without the police backup.
They advised me not to try the same border crossing again,
from Emmerich to Zevenaar, where I was now known, but to
take another, from Cleve to Nijmegen, where I wasn’t.
This meant crossing the Rhine. I boarded the ferry, paid
my last Pfennige to the nice conductor, and asked him how
far from the landing place on the other side the railway was.
It was a fair step, especially with the luggage. He found me a
free ride to the station. This turned out to be a local butcher,
who gave me the seat beside him in his van, with the carcasses
behind us. He wasn’t an anti-Nazi. He sounded like a Nazi or
at least a loyal citizen of the Third Reich. In the absence of
money I gave him my last German postage stamps and signed
a document acknowledging my debt to him for the additional
small amount it cost to connect my old rail ticked with the
new stretch from Cleve to Nijmegen.
So off I went, crossed the frontier without further incident, and reached the school safely. The tuning fork came in
handy when we played Haydn quartets. I still have it. Tuning
forks don’t take up much space.
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43
A Visit To Santayana
Steve Benedict
Three years after graduating from St. John’s, I spent some
time in Europe traveling and studying languages and music.
In the summer of 1950, while in Rome, I persuaded a friend,
Tilghman B. Koons, to accompany me up the steep incline of
the Via San Stefano Rotondo to the Convent of the Blue
Nuns, where I knew George Santayana was living out his final
years. I had read a magazine piece a year or so earlier by Gore
Vidal reporting on an unannounced visit he had paid
Santayana two years earlier, and I brashly decided to see if
we, too, could pay our respects. Several hours after the visit,
which turned out to be more than brief, I made detailed
notes, which languished in my files for nearly 52 years. Last
July, I finally sat down to reconstruct the visit. While many of
Santayana’s philosophical observations doubtless appear in
his writings and interviews in more extended and coherent
form, I thought St. John’s readers might enjoy these late-inthe day fragments that seemed to tumble out of him with little prompting. Not exactly a conversation, it was more like
listening in to a monologue of memories and observations, in
no particular sequence, that happened to surface at the
moment. Readers more familiar with Santayana’s work than
I will doubtless be able to flesh out gaps and identify certain
allusions that remain obscure in my transcription of this longago encounter.
***
Upon arriving at the Convent on the afternoon of September
19, 1950, we were received by a nun who told us that
Steve Benedict is a 1947 graduate of St. John’s College. He retired in 2000
and is living in Spencertown, New York. His career was spent in government,
philanthropy, and education, with a primary emphasis on arts funding and
administration.
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Santayana had not been well for some time and was seeing
very few visitors. Even so, she agreed to tell him that two
American students hoped to be able to greet him. She
returned in a few minutes and told us Mr. Santayana would
see us briefly, but cautioned us not to tax his energy. She led
us into the Convent and down a long hallway on the ground
floor. Santayana was already standing at the end of the corridor in a long robe, which only partially covered his striped
pajamas. He greeted us with a handshake, looked at us with
large glistening eyes I have never forgotten, and led us into
his apartment. It was a modest space, sparely furnished, with
a cot-like bed partially screened off. He issued a firm instruction to sit down, motioning to two straight-backed chairs
–“you here, you there.” With no introductory chit-chat or
questions about who we were, he began speaking. He told us
he had recently been reading Terence for the first time and
found him very amusing and much indebted to his predecessors. He remarked that he had re-read Virgil and that
Lucretius, along with Virgil, had been important for him. He
spoke of them quite casually, as though they were contemporaries. In fact, he brought this quality of immediacy to all of
the philosophers he mentioned.
Santayana spoke of writing an article for an English book
entitled Why I Believe in What I Believe. He hadn’t intended
to contribute to it, but an Englishman pestered him with
three letters and had agreed to hold off publication for a year
if necessary in order to include his contribution. That was
very flattering, he commented. “After all,” he added, “I might
be dead in a year.” Preoccupation with the article was probably a good part of the explanation for the torrent of remarks
and opinions that followed.
Mr. Santayana had been reading a book by an
Englishman, O.F. Clarke, entitled Introduction to Berdyaev,
and added that he did not agree with Berdyaev: “Everything
is creative. There is no room [in Berdyaev] for imagination,
for reason, for spirit.” He said the article he was writing discusses what scientists call “energy,” using the figure of wind,
BENEDICT
45
which seemed better to him than other terms and images for
matter. “Wind is invisible. It can’t be touched. It ‘acts,’ causes
things to happen.” He mentioned that he has often used a
quotation on wind from Genesis: “‘The spirit of God moved
across the waters.’ Or, as the Cockney would say, ‘a devil of
a wind’–but I won’t use that in the article.”
Santayana insisted that his ideas about matter had not
changed. His only objection to his earlier books was that he
wished he had written them differently and waited until later
to write The Life of Reason. Nonetheless he thought he had
remained logically consistent. He now felt he had nothing
more to say–he had finished his work and would not write
any more books, only articles.
We asked Mr. Santayana how America looked to him
after 40 years. He replied, “I don’t want to go back. There is
too much going on there and I am kept busy enough here.
No, I don’t want to go back.” Friends had sent him Time and
Life magazines. He was amused by the advertisements–“slick,
well-groomed people coming out of their houses, buying new
cars.” But he enjoyed the pictures. This led him to reminisce
about Harvard, where he had studied for four years and then
taught: “I am completely a Harvard man,” he said. “I have
been accused of making too many rich friends. But I didn’t
seek them. They just happened to be rich.” He told us that his
best friends had big houses in the country and were able to
invite people for weekends. His most intimate friend married
a rich Washington widow. He went to dinner with them once
and found his friend at the head of the table, his friend’s
mother-in-law at the other end, his wife buried at the side
between two daughters. He was asked to stay on at the house
but declined after this experience.
“I never intended to go into philosophy and teaching. It
was all an accident,” he went on. This led him to muse on the
accidents of his life: If he had gone to England, he would
have done much more Plato, if to Germany, more German
philosophy. With a chuckle, he added that he did not have
much kinship with Goethe.
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Mr. Santayana then remarked that had just re-read T.S.
Eliot’s The Cocktail Party and didn’t understand why it is successful in performance. He thought the conversion of the girl
unconvincing. The play was too much of a tract. He thought
“Four Quartets” and the essays were much better, in his opinion. He recalled Eliot as a student of his at Harvard in his
course, “Three Philosophical Poets.” Eliot wrote an essay for
him, he said, and it was “very good–that’s an understatement.”
Then came an abrupt switch. “It is interesting that the
two most intelligent men in the history of the Western mind,
Plato and Leibniz–were dishonest. If you abstract Plato from
his mise-en-scène, which is so attractive, you don’t know
what he is saying. Plato has never been a favorite of mine, but
of course I owe him something. The Symposium, for instance,
I find very attractive. But I owe more to Aristotle and
Lucretius and others.”
Leibniz, he elaborated, tried to manipulate ideas as well
as people. He tried to bring the church together–“very
difficult”–and to make peace between states, and he had a
certain amount of success. The dishonesty revolves around
his assertions on matter (calculus, by implication, is dishonest) and the rearrangement of the elements (energy, mind,
matter, potentiality, etc.) into forms by imposing a new idea
from without. The Leibnizian calculus asserts that an infinite
number of points–which are only positions–in a line reduces
and expands them as if they were material. Leibniz tried to
manipulate people and institutions in the same way; however,
Santayana concluded, he had the right idea about spirit as
developing action, as did Hegel. The action or energy is not
internal, but occurs with respect to its history and experience–its relations with other forms and ideas. Hegel, he said,
knew this clearly.
Mr. Santayana said he had been praised by the English
critic, Collingwood, an Hegelian, for having held up the idea
as a crystal, examining all of its faces. In believing that the
spirit does not change but only moves on from experience to
BENEDICT
47
experience, Santayana concluded that the highest theoretical
and practical ideal is therefore passivity–the reception and
assimilation of experience, the “digesting” of action. I
brought up Gandhi and without hesitation Santayana said
that Western Buddhism and some of the Upanishads especially are very much akin to his beliefs. He added that he did
not mean to include Oriental Buddhism, which is different: “I
believe in the existence of an absolute truth,” not that man
can achieve it necessarily, but that human opinion strives
toward absolute truth. Others, he said, put it in different
terms: “God is truth,” or “The truth is everywhere.” I had
been smitten by Plotinus in my sophomore year at St. John’s
and was emboldened to ask if this wasn’t a form of pantheism akin to that of Plotinus. He replied, “I should think not.
All creation has a direct causal relation with respect to God
or the truth, but creation is different in Plotinus.” This led
him to criticize a French translation of Plotinus, which he
called “verbally accurate,” but added that the translator did
not really understand ideas. “He compares important passages with the Greek, but never learned Greek properly,
despite three years at Boston Latin School.”
No more books after this, Santayana said. As for his autobiography, he hoped it could be published after his death in
one volume. Marginal notes were impossible to include during the wartime printing shortage, but he hoped they could
be restored, as in his earlier books. He commented that he’d
had to dispose of many of his books because of space. He said
the room next door is crammed with books, but the nuns also
use it. “Now I never read Shakespeare. The room was always
full of nuns. And now the new Mother General is doing the
whole place over. Anyway, I probably only have a year or two
more to live.”
As he was saying this, a nun glowered at us in the doorway. We rose to depart, shook hands and asked if we could
come see him next time we were in Rome. Looking straight
at us with those penetrating eyes, he said, “Yes, please do.”
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He paused for a moment and added, “Come and see....” and
his voice trailed off.
****
George Santayana died at the Convent two years later, on
September 26, 1952, at the age of 89.
49
Kant’s Philosophical Use of
Mathematics: Negative
Magnitudes
Eva Brann
I hope that this consideration of a peculiar little work of great
interest will appeal to readers who want a taste of Kant’s
early work as well as to those who like to ruminate on the
meaning of the simplest mathematical notions. My text is an
essay called “An Attempt to Introduce the Concept of
Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy (Weltweisheit).” Its
date is 1763.
Its appeal to me has these three aspects: First there is the
tentative mode expressed in the title; here we hear Kant’s
pre-critical voice—not yet the magisterially conclusive notes
of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) but a tone at once
spiritedly daring and gropingly uncertain. A second and more
specific aspect is the inchoate appearance of major elements
of the first Critique; not only can we see its elements come
into being, but we can watch at their incipiency topics that
Kant will return to all his life. The third appealing aspect of
the essay is its pedagogic suggestiveness; for a teacher seeking
to help students reflect on mathematical formalisms, it is a
useful source.
The piece on negative magnitudes has been eclipsed by its
much longer contemporary, “The Only Possible Basis of
Proof for a Demonstration of God’s Existence (Dasein),”
dated 1763. This essay was subjected to an extensive and
deep analysis by Heidegger in his lecture course of 1927 (The
Problems of Phenomenology, translated and edited by Albert
Hofstadter, Indiana University Press, 1982, ¶8); his elucidation of Kant’s use of the term “reality” is particularly relevant
to the essay on negative magnitudes.
Eva Brann is a tutor and former dean at St. John’s College, Annapolis.
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What evidently drew Heidegger’s attention to this particular essay, however, was its brisk definition of Dasein—his
central word—as “absolute position.” When the verb “is” is
used not as a copula to relate a subject to its predicate as in
“God is omnipotent” but is asserted abruptly, absolutely, as in
“God is” or “God exists,” it signifies, Kant claims, a mere
positing of an object. By this, in Heidegger’s interpretation,
Kant means that the object is affirmed by a knowing subject
as available to perception. (I observe, incidentally, that in
order to express the character of existence as non-attributive
absolute position more adequately, Kant proposes language
that anticipates the existential quantifier of propositional
logic: We should say not “A narwhal is an animal” but “There
exists an animal, the narwhal, which has unicorn-attributes.”)
In other words, existence is not a predicate and adds no
objective attribute to God’s essence. Since it is the crux of
what Kant first called the “ontological argument” (whose best
known proponent is Anselm), that existence is a necessary
attribute of God’s essence, Kant’s understanding of existence
as a non-predicate seems to be a rejection of that proof.
Kant’s own demonstration calls on the concept of a “realground” (Realgrund), a concept that emerges in the essay on
negative magnitudes, to be discussed below. This concept in
turn involves the postulate that essence is prior to existence
and actuality to possibility. Since Heidegger’s thinking is
dominated by the reverse claim, he is a severe if respectful
critic of Kant’s understanding. He regards Kant’s exposition
of existence as a half-way house, situated between the notion
of existence as one predicate among others and his,
Heidegger’s, own understanding of Dasein as “extantness,”
i.e., “being-at-hand,” with respect to things and “being in the
world” with respect to human beings.
There is yet another contemporary essay that has bearing
on the essay about negative magnitudes, the “Enquiry
Concerning the Evidence of the Principles of Natural
Theology and Morality, in Answer to a Question Posed by the
Royal Academy of the Sciences at Berlin for 1763.” The aim
BRANN
51
of this essay (which did not win the prize) was to establish
what evidence and certainty natural theology is capable of; it
is thus a discourse on method. It begins with an investigation
of the difference between mathematics and metaphysics (a
difference that plays a major role especially in Kant’s last
work, the Opus Postumum).
Thus both pieces, the one on God’s existence and the
other on theological certainty, illuminate the essay on negative magnitudes, the former through its concept of an ultimate reality and the latter through its restrictions on the use
of mathematics in first philosophy. I will draw on them in my
exploration.
*****
Anyone who has stepped out for a moment from the routine familiarity of operations with signed numbers will have
wondered just how, say, 5, +5, |5| and -5 differ from each
other, and, furthermore, whether +5 and -5 are operations
on or qualifications of the number 5. Although his essay concerns numerable magnitudes, especially those discovered in
nature, questions of that sort seem to have been going
through Kant’s mind, as he considered the illuminations that
the actual quantification of experience might offer to philosophy.
In the essay on natural theology Kant sets out four definitive reasons why the mathematical method is inapplicable to
philosophy and is not the way to certainty in metaphysics (¶14):
1. Mathematical definitions are “synthetic,” in the sense
that the mathematician does not analyze a given concept, but
first synthesizes or constructs it, i.e., puts it together at will.
(In the first Critique synthesis will have acquired a deeper
meaning; it will no longer mean arbitrary construction but an
act of the understanding expressing in the imagination the
formative givens of the intuition.) In philosophy or, as Kant
says interchangeably, Weltweisheit, “world-wisdom” (as distinguished from the scholastic philosophy of mere, unapplied
concepts, see Logic, Intro. 3), on the other hand, definitions
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are analytic, in the sense that concepts are given to, not made
by, the philosopher, and he then endeavors to analyze them
into their implicit elements. (In the Critique a way will be
found for the philosopher too to form pure synthetic judgments.)
2. Mathematics is always concrete, in that the arithmetician symbolizes his numbers and operations perceptibly, and
the geometer visibly draws his figures. (In the Critique these
inscriptions will be within the field of the imaginative intuition.) Philosophers, on the other hand, use words exclusively, and these signify, in Kant’s understanding, abstractly,
non-pictorially. (In the Critique this rift between word and
picture is closed.)
3. The mathematician tries to employ a minimum of
unproved propositions (i.e., axioms and postulates), while
the philosopher makes indefinitely many assumptions, as
needed. (In the Critique the principles of experience will be
systematically restricted.)
4. The objects of mathematics are easy and simple (!),
those of philosophy difficult and involved.
In the Preface of “The Attempt to Introduce the Concept
of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy” Kant accordingly
eschews the introduction of mathematical method into philosophy, but censures the neglect of the application of mathematical matter to the objects of philosophy. The really useful mathematical doctrines are, however, only those that are
applicable to natural science. (This restriction prefigures the
use of mathematics in the Critique, where its role is the constitution and understanding of the system of nature, i.e., of
matter in quantitative and qualitative change.) As a preliminary example, Kant gives the continuity of space, which is, if
inexplicitly, postulated in the Euclidean geometry he assumes.
The concept of continuity will give insight, he thinks (but
explains no further), into the ultimate ground of the possibility of space. (The claim does prefigure the arguments for the
establishment of a spatial intuition in the Critique.) The main
example in this piece will, of course, be the concept of nega-
BRANN
53
tive magnitudes, which Kant now proceeds to clarify and
apply. I shall follow his arguments through the three sections
of the essay.
First Section
There are two types of opposition: logical, through contradiction and real, without contradiction. If contradictories are
logically connected, the result is a “negative nothing, an
unthinkable” (nihil negativum irrepresentabile; now as later
in the Critique, representabile = cogitabile, i.e., to think is to
represent in the cognitive faculty). Thus a body in motion is
a “something” (which is in the Critique the highest objective
concept, i.e., that of an object in general); so is a body at rest.
But a body at the same time in motion and at rest is an
unthinkable nothing. It is not so much a non-object incapable
of being as a less-than-nothing incapable of being thought.
Real-opposition (Realentgegensetzung), on the other
hand, involves no contradiction and thus no unthinkability.
For this opposition does not cancel the being of the object
thus qualified; it remains a something and thinkable (cogitabile). Suppose a body impelled in one direction and also
driven by a counterforce in the other. The resulting motion
may be none = 0, but the body so affected is not a no-thing.
Kant calls this result nihil privativum representabile, where
privativum has a dynamic sense, as of an achieved condition.
This nothing is to be termed zero = 0. (The distinction of
“logical” and “real” underlies the Critical difference between
merely analytic and synthetic, i.e., ampliative, judgments.)
Kant also refers to real-opposition as real-repugnance
(Realrepugnanz) because two precisely antagonistic predicates
of an object cancel each other, though they do not annihilate
the object they qualify. Moreover, it is somewhat arbitrary (or
rather, determined by extraneous human interests) which
pole is called negative. For example, ”dark” may seem to us
intrinsically negative, but it is cancelled by its own negation
“not-dark” (which might, of course, actually be light). Thus
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one may say that in real-repugnance both opposing predicates
are affirmative.
Kant gives, among others, the following example.
Suppose a person owes 100 dollars and is, at the same time,
owed this sum. This debtor-lender is worth 0 dollars, since
the two conditions cancel each other, but this fact does not
cancel him, the bearer of these modifications.
Kant then offers an example (slightly adjusted by me) that
expands the concept of real-opposition. Suppose a vessel
going from Portugal to Brazil is carried due west by an east
wind with an impelling force that would cause it to run 12
miles on a certain day, and is also subject to a countervailing
current retarding it by 5 miles; the boat’s total progress is
seven miles a day. Here the result is not = 0. It is clear that
Kant regards real-opposition as taking place along a scaled
spectrum of quantifiable qualities at whose center there might
be (though there is not always) a neutral fulcrum, 0.
If there is an “origin,” then on one side there are the positive quantities, on the other those that can be regarded either
as the relative negatives of the former, or as opposed positives
in their own right. Thus the opening question, what is really
meant by +5, -5 and |5|, might be answered by Kant like
this: The plus or minus sign is neither an implicit operation
nor a qualification of the number as itself inherently positive
or negative, for the number is, like its “absolute” expression
|5|, always positive. The plus and minus signs signify rather
the relation of numbers to each other: -5 is the negative of
+5; it is negative only in relation to a positive five. To be
sure, since Kant is not speaking of bare numbers but of magnitudes symbolizing quantified properties such as are representable along one dimension, magnitudes in real-opposition,
the application to pure numbers is conjectural.
Objects in real-opposition have, of course, many negations besides those directly opposing a positive: a ship sailing
westward is also not sailing southward, but its course is in
real-opposition only to the eastern direction. Moreover, there
are cases, say of lack of motion, which are not the result of
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real opposing forces but of a total absence of impelling force.
Negation that is the result of real-opposition Kant calls privatio, that which has no positive ground is called defectus or
absentia. His example of an absent or null result is what we
would call potential energy (not to be confused with “potential-opposition,” see below): “Thus the thunder that art discovered for the sake of destruction lies stored up for a future
war in the threatening silence of an arsenal of a prince, until,
when a treacherous tinder touches it, it blows up like lightning and devastates everything around it.” Aside from Kant’s
pacifistic poetry, this example shows that Kant is considering
only the magnitudes of actualized forces.
It is pretty clear that what Kant is struggling to do is to
present a conceptual underpinning for what we call directed
magnitudes as they occur in the world, including signed numbers insofar as they represent natural qualities, whose plus or
minus tells us whether we are to move respectively to the
right or the left along the line-spectrum (conceived as a
straight line, where left is negative by convention). Not that
Kant is thinking of our mathematical number line—he does
not even mention an origin (=0), and his opposition-spectra
are evidently not necessarily infinite in either direction. While
he does insist on the relative directionality of negative numbers, insofar as they countermand their positives, he also reiterates that the negatively directed magnitudes are not negative numbers insofar as these are regarded as being less
than 0.
For the use of directed magnitudes in philosophy it will in
fact be essential that the opposed quantities are indeed inherently positive, as will be shown in Section Three. Hence a
debt can be called negative capital, falling negative rising, and
so on, where it is our perspective that gives a negative emotional tint to one of the terms. Kant sums his view up in a
basic law and its converse: 1. Real-repugnance takes place
between two positives, power against power, which cannot be
contradictories but must be of the same kind (while the complement class in a contradiction, e.g., “non-dark objects,” is
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not necessarily of the “same kind” as “dark objects”; they
might be invisible objects). 2. Where a positive opposes its
proper positive, a real cancellation will occur.
Furthermore certain rules of operation follow. For example, if the opposites are quantitatively equal, their sum will =
0, or A – A = 0, which shows, Kant explains, that both A’s are
positive (since A = A). Also A + 0 = A and A – 0 = A, since
no oppositions are involved. But 0 – A is philosophically
impossible since positives cannot be subtracted from nothing:
There are no inherently negative qualities and so, as was said,
no directed magnitudes inherently less than 0 (!). This oddsounding but unavoidable consequence will have important
metaphysical implications.
Real-repugnance, strange though its label be, has an
Aristotelian antecedent. It is, I want to argue, a dynamic version of the logical opposition Aristotle calls contrariety
(Metaphysics 10.4). Kant himself says as much in his
Anthropology of 1798; he there contrasts contradiction or
logical opposition (Gegenteil) with contrariety or real-opposition (Widerspiel, ¶60).
As a formal logical opposition contrariety occurs in the
Square of Opposition, which is a tabulation of the
Aristotelian doctrine on the subject: If the basic proposition
is “Every S is P its contradictory is “Some S is not P” and its
,”
contrary is “No S is P Contradictories cannot both be true
.”
nor can they both be false, but contraries, though they cannot
both be true, can both be false; for if not every S be P yet
,
might it be false that no S is P Contrary propositions bear a
.
certain formal relation to contrary terms, for these cannot
both at once belong to an object but they might both fail to
belong to it. Thus an object could not be at once pitch black
and pure white, but it need not be either, which is untrue of
contradictories, such as black and not-black.
The above paragraph is really a digression to show that it
is not contrary propositions but contrary terms denoting
qualities that are related to Kant’s real-opposition. Contraries
are qualities that are not simply in abrupt polar opposition
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(though their extremes delimit a maximum difference) but
are connected through a spectrum of gradations. Aristotle
makes privation a particular case of contrariety, and for Kant
negation, interpreted as privatio, in German Beraubung,
meaning “deprivation,” introduces into some of the ranges of
opposition a kind of null point or zero through which the
quality goes by degrees into a negative or oppositional mode.
(As was noted, not all the spectra have such a center; for
example when bodies are brought to rest = 0 by countervailing forces this 0 is not an origin in the spectrum of forces but
is a net effect in the bodies’ position, measured in spatial
extension rather than as qualitative intensity.) Some of Kant’s
examples will be given below.
What turns contrariety into real-repugnance is the
dynamic view Kant takes of this opposition: It means not just
being supinely, matter-of-factly opposed; it means being
antagonistically, aggressively opposed. Moreover, this striving
in many different dimensions of quality is quantifiable in
degrees of intensity, as Kant’s examples will show.
Second Section
Kant now calls for examples from 1. physics, 2. psychology,
3. morality.
1. In physics his prime example is impenetrability, which
is a positive force, a true repulsion that might thus also be
called “negative attraction.” For attraction is a cause, contrarily directed, by which a body compels others to push into
its own space.
2. From psychology (Seelenlehre) come Kant’s most pungent examples of real-opposition. He raises the question
whether aversion could be called “negative pleasure.” The
fact that in German aversion, Unlust, looks like a direct contradictory of pleasure, Lust, gives him pause, but he observes
that in “real-understanding” (Realverstand), meaning in
actual psychic perception, aversion is not just a negation of
desire or even its diminution, but a real-repugnance, a positive perception. Then, to illustrate, comes an almost comical
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quantification: A Spartan mother hears of her son’s heroism;
a high degree of pleasure ensues, say of 4 degrees. Then
comes the news of his death. If the resulting Unlust were a
mere negation, a mere negation of the Lust, it would equal 0.
But 4 + 0 = 4, as if the death made no difference to her
delight. Kant concedes however (some notion of a mother’s
feeling!) that the positive Unlust of his death, the real-repugnance, will diminish the mother’s Lust at her son’s bravery by
one degree; it will therefore = 3.
In the same vein, disgust is negative desire, hate negative
love, ugliness negative beauty, error negative truth, and so on.
Kant warns against regarding this terminology as mere word
mongering: It is a philosophical pitfall to regard the evils of
positive privation as mere defects. Thus Kant is denying,
surely quite incidentally, the theological doctrine (found in
Plotinus, Augustine, Thomas) of evil as privation of good (privatio boni), for in Kant’s view in this essay evil, though a relative negation, is yet a positive force.
3. Kant naturally regards his concept of real-opposition as
having important uses in philosophy insofar as it is “practical
prudence” (Weltweisheit), that is, applied morality. Nonvirtue (Untugend) is, in human beings, not a mere denial of
virtue (Tugend), but a positively negative virtue, vice. This is
the case because humans, unlike animals that are morally
unendowed, have an “inner moral feeling” that drives them
to good actions. For instance they harbor a law of neighborly
love. To do bad deeds, human beings have to overcome this
natural inclination to good. (A quarter century later, in the
second Critique, the Critique of Practical Reason, 1788, Kant
will, on the contrary, see the test of true morality in the overcoming of natural inclinations.)
Thus certain people must make a noticeable effort to
engage even in sins of omission (such as neglecting to offer
neighborly help), which differ from sins of commission (hurting one’s neighbor) only in degree; hence the slide from the
one to the other is all too smooth, though the beginning is
effortful.
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Kant apologizes for what may seem to enlightened readers the prolixity of his exposition. He is writing for a
“indocile breed of judges, which, because they spend their
lives with a single book, understand nothing but what is contained therein.” The book is, I imagine, the Bible.
In an appended Remark, Kant forestalls the notion that
the world conceived in such a dynamic balance is capable neither of augmentation nor perfection. He points out (1) that
in potential oppositions (to be explained below) though the
total quantity of effect may = 0, yet there may be an increase
in apparent change, as when bodies widen the distance
between them; (2) that it is the very antagonism of natural
forces that keeps the world in its perfectly regular courses;
and (3) that though desire and aversion do balance each other
considered as positive quantities oppositely signed, who
would claim that aversion is to be called a perfection?
Moreover, though the net quantity of moral action in two
people may be the same, yet the quality of the one who acted
from the better intention is to be more greatly valued. Kant
adds that these calculi do not apply to the godhead, which is
blessed not through an external good but through itself.
Third Section
Kant introduces this section, which contains his startling
application of the concept of real-opposition to metaphysics,
by insisting once more that it is a mere attempt, very imperfect though promising: It is better to put before the public
uncertain essays than dogmatically decked-out pretenses of
profundity. This section is accordingly called “Containing
Some Reflections Which Can Be Preparatory for the
Application of the Concept Here Thought Out to the Objects
of Philosophy.” I dwell on this language because it is not a
tone familiar to those of us who have spent time with the
three Critiques.
1. Everyone easily understands how it is that something is
not—the positive ground for its being is absent; there is no
reason for it to be. But how does something cease to be? The
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question arises because we must understand every passingaway as a negative becoming. As such it requires a real or positive ground.
In the first two sections Kant had spoken of real-opposition or real-repugnance, by which were meant normally
apprehensible contrarieties. Now, in the third section, he
introduces real-grounds (Realgründe). As far as I can make
out from the examples, real-grounds are natural, including
psychic, causes: forces, powers, and acts exercised by material
or psychic agents. “Real” here is used not as in real-opposition, which is opposed to logical contradiction, but it seems
to mean “affecting perceptible existence.” Real-grounds seem
to be a first-level, underlying causal reality, apprehended
through its effects. Thus Kant uses “reality”—and, as we shall
see, “existence,” “being” (Wesen), as well as “actuality”
(Wirklichkeit)—quite loosely in these exploratory essays;
Heidegger shows that Kant’s later systematic meaning of reality is the “whatness” of a thing, all its possible predicates, its
essence, while existence is perceptibility.
Kant’s examples are mainly from the soul. It costs real
effort to refrain from laughing, to dissipate grief, even to
abstract from a manifold representation for the sake of clarity; thus abstraction is negative attention. Even the apparently
random succession of thoughts has real grounds, which are
“hidden in the depths of the mind (Geist),” i.e., in what we
call the subconscious. Whether the change is in the condition
of matter and thus through external causes, or of the mind
and thus through inner causes, the necessity for a causal realopposition remains the same.
Kant is focusing here, it seems to me, on a partial converse to, and a kind of complement of, a question, evidently
not asked by the ancients, which is to become a modern preoccupation: “Why does something exist rather than nothing?” It was first raised as a metaphysical problem with a theological answer by Leibniz (The Principles of Nature and
Grace, Founded on Reason, 1714), and was repeatedly taken
up by Heidegger (especially in the end of What is
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Metaphysics, 1949), who treated it as “the basic question of
metaphysics,” though to be resolved without recourse to theology.
Leibniz asks for a reason, sufficient and ultimate, to
account for the existence of a universe of things in progress
and finds it in God. Kant, on the other hand, asks for an adequate reason why a present condition in the world should go
out of existence and finds real-opposition as the cause. It is,
however, an unexplained cause, which, Kant says at the end
of the essay, he has been and will be thinking about and will
in the future write about. This appears to be a harbinger of
Critical works not to appear for almost two decades.
Meanwhile the metaphysical consequences are exceedingly
strange: The sum total of all real grounds equals zero, and
“the whole of the world is in itself Nothing.” More of this
below.
2. Kant says that the theses to be here proposed seem to
him “of the most extreme importance.” First, however, he
distinguishes real-opposition, or as he now calls it, “actual”
opposition, from “possible” or “potential” opposition. The
latter type of opposites are also each other’s negatives, real to
be sure, but not, as it happens, in conflict. Thus two forces,
each other’s opposites, may be driving two different bodies in
opposite directions: They have the potential to cancel each
other’s motion but do not actually do so in the given situation. So also one person’s desire may be the other’s aversion,
yet their ability to stymie each other is only a possibility.
Kant then offers the following first general thesis:
In all natural changes of the world their positive
sum, insofar as it is estimated by the addition of
agreeing (not opposed) positions and the subtraction from one another of those in real-opposition,
is neither increased nor diminished.
Recall Newton’s Third Law of Motion (Philophiae
Naturalis Principia Mathematica, 1687):
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To every action there is opposed an equal reaction:
or, the mutual actions of two bodies upon each
other are always equal, and directed to contrary
parts.
It is pretty evident that Kant is struggling to ground in
metaphysics and apply to the human world the most dynamic
of Newton’s Laws of Motion or perhaps the Law of the
Conservation of Momentum, which is implied in (or, some
argue, implies) the law of equal action and reaction; it states
that when the forces acting on bodies in the same and in contrary directions are summed (over time) the quantity of
motion (i.e., the mass compounded with velocity = mv) is not
changed. Kant says without proof that although this rule of
mechanics is not usually deduced from the metaphysical
ground from which his first thesis is derived, yet it could be.
(The first Critique will be partly devoted to giving the transcendental grounds of the laws of motion and conservation.)
Not only bodies in motion but souls in emotion obey the
law of conservation, and so do humans in action.
Astoundingly, Kant really means this: For every “worldchange,” i.e., every “natural” change (which includes the psychic realm) there is an equal and opposed change, so that the
sum of measured final positions, i.e., states of existence taken
globally, is equal to what it was before the change, or the total
effect = 0.
Every becoming, then, induces an actual or potential
counter-becoming or cessation. It can now be seen why Kant
introduced potential real-opposition: Kant’s forces not only
act in opposed pairs but they may act on different objects, i.e.,
the real-opposition may not be actualized in one body or one
soul or even in the same mode in one soul. Nevertheless these
potential oppositions enter into the summed effects of the
world-total.
Kant then goes on to give more concrete non-mechanical
examples—though these are not non-natural, because (as will
still be true in the Critiques) the soul, excepting in its practi-
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cal-moral employment of reason, is subject to natural
dynamic forces. The examples of this third section differ
from the ones in the previous section exactly as the course of
the exposition requires: They are cases not of actual but of
potential real-opposition. Thus if one person’s pleasure and
displeasure arise not from the same object, but the same
ground that caused pleasure in one object is also the true
ground for feeling displeasure in another, then in analogy to
two bodies moving in contrary directions by repulsion, there
is one potential real-ground and cause for the positive and the
negative feeling. These feelings oppose but also bypass each
other; they may cancel each other but need not do so. This is
why the Stoic sage had to eradicate all pleasurable drives—
because they always engender an associated but diverse displeasure that affects the final value of the pleasure, though
perhaps not the actual pleasure itself. Even in the use of the
understanding, we find that to the degree that one idea is clarified, the others may be obscured, though surely not by the
clarification. Kant adds that in the most perfect Being the
zero sum result does not hold, as will be shown.
Now comes the second thesis, which is simply the translation of the first thesis into its causative grounds:
All real-grounds of the universe, if one sums those
similarly directed and subtracts those opposed to
one another, yield a result which is equal to zero.
Kant immediately states: “The whole of the world is in
itself nothing, except insofar as it is something through the
will of someone other.” Regarded by itself, the sum of all
existing reality = 0; the world is an almost Heraclitean system of balanced oppositions, of mutually negating positivities. In relation to the divine will the sum of all possible reality, of the world’s existence, is, however, positive. But it itself
is not therefore in real-opposition to the divine will; it is not
the godhead’s relative negation. Consequently existence, i.e.,
whatever is perceptibly there in the world, is through its
internal relations nothing, but in relation to the grounding
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will of the divinity it is something; it is positive. For there can
be no real-opposition of the world to the divine will. (This
thought is still to be found in the Opus Postumum; there too
the real-opposition of forces is metaphysically exploited.)
The nullity of the physical and psychical world in its
summed effects, the nothingness of the underlying universe
of summed causes, and the positivity of creation only in relation to God—Kant presents these results without any discernible pathos, without acknowledgment that this cancellation of the world-whole of effect and cause might bear a religious or moral interpretation beyond the intellectual proof of
God’s existence. Nor can I discover that he ever reverted to
this nullifying construal of the laws of conservation. Perhaps
it is to be regarded as a passing notion that served as a spur
to further inquiry into the world’s relation to its ground.
(Kant does hold on to the “law of the antagonism in all community of matter by means of motion”; any divergence from
its reciprocity would, he now argues, move the very center of
gravity of the universe, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural
Science of 1786, ¶563. In this essay too the notion of realopposition is put to work in the specific antagonism of repulsion and attraction, forces which between them are responsible for the way matter, i.e., “the movable,” fills space.
However, the explanation of these forces in their specificity
remains an unsolved problem for Kant into the Opus
Postumum.)
So Kant concludes by making explicit the heretofore tacitly assumed converse of the proposition that the realgrounds are responsible for the null-ity of existence: Because
the internal sum of existence is zero, it follows that the “realgrounds,” i.e., the forces and powers producing effects in the
world, must be in a corresponding opposition: The realm of
existing and possible reality is in itself shot through with
grounding polarities that cancel existence, though in respect
to the divine will (Kant does not speak of “God” in this context) it has positive being (Wesen). This overt conclusion of
the last section is surprising since it follows close on the asser-
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tion that the zero sum of all existence flows necessarily from
the grounding being (Wesen) of the world; it is hard to tell
whether we are to infer from the zero sum of effects to the
underlying real-opposition of causes or whether these causes
are posited first. I hesitate to detect Kant in unwittingly circular reasoning here. (He is, to be sure, the master of intentional circularity in the Critique, where the grounds of the
possibility of experience are inferred from experience while
experience is certified by the grounds. Perhaps the apparent
circle in the above paragraph is a precursor of critical thinking.)
The metaphysical intention is however quite clear: (1)
The world exists as a complex of quantifiably opposed
effects; negative magnitudes express such relative opposition;
when summed with their positives they yield zero. (2)
Underlying these existences, there is a realm of grounds;
these are forces, powers and actions; they are also in mutually cancelling opposition, and, like their effects, they are so
only relative to each other. (3) In respect to an ultimate
ground they are positive, but since no real-opposition to it is
possible their positivity is not a relation of opposition to the
divinity. Kant himself knows that he has not yet sufficiently
clarified the character of real-grounds, nor their relation to
the divine will.
His first definition of a real-ground actually occurs in a
General Remark appended to the third, final section of the
essay. A logical ground is one whose consequence can be
clearly seen through the law of identity; for example composition is a ground of divisibility, i.e., it is identical with part of
the meaning of the concept and can be educed from it analytically. A real-ground, by contrast, has a relation to its effect
which, although quite truly expressed as a concept, yet allows
no judgment, no true understanding, of the real-ground’s
mode of action. In other words, the relation of a real cause to
its effect is not apprehensible by mere logical analysis. (Here,
of course, is formulated the problem that Kant will solve in
the Critique by means of the “synthetic judgment a priori”—
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the cognition in which real connections are made—not, of
course, by the logical law of identity but through our cognitive constitution.)
In this essay, this understanding of a real-ground raises—
for the first time for Kant—the fundamental question of causation: “How should I understand it THAT, BECAUSE
THERE IS SOMETHING, THERE IS SOMETHING ELSE?”
The will of God is something. The existing world is something else altogether. Yet the will of God is the ultimate realground of the world’s existence. Kant says that no talk of
cause, effect, power and act will help: God and world are
totally each other’s other and yet through one of them the
other is posited. And the same holds on a lower level for the
natural causes in the world, be they of an event or its cancellation. Kant promises an explication in the future, but for
now he remarks only that the relation of real-ground to what
is posited or cancelled through it cannot be expressed in a
judgment, i.e., a mental “representation of the unity of a consciousness of different representations,” but is in fact only a
mere, non-analyzable concept, that is, a general representation or a thought (Logic ¶1, 17). Kant is saying that the relation of an effect to its cause cannot be articulated as an
affirmed attribution of a predicate to a subject. It is his way
of expressing Hume’s rejection of empirically grounded causation. (In the Critique the attempt to make God’s causal relation to the world comprehensible to reason will be shown to
be hopeless, but causality within the world will be grounded
in the very constitution of the spatial intuition.)
So ends the essay in which the reflection on negative magnitudes has led, through the concept of real-opposition,
directly to the problem of causal connection and indirectly to
God as ultimate cause. I have not done justice to the
exploratory tone of the essay, to Kant’s witty derision of
those who get stuck in premature dogmatism, and to his sense
of having made a mere, even insufficiently explicated, beginning, but a beginning of something very important: the
inquiry into causation.
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*****
An elucidation of some of the matters left unclear in the
essay on negative magnitudes occurs in the essay on “The
Only Possible Grounds of Proof for a Demonstration of
God’s Existence” of the same year (1763), and it seems to me
so daring that I cannot resist carrying this exposition a little
further. The reflections I shall refer to are not those that most
interested Heidegger, the ones concerning existence as position, but those dwelling on the relation of possibility to actuality (or as Kant says, to existence) and on an absolutely necessary “existent” (Dasein; First Part, Second and Third
Reflections).
Possibility, Kant says, depends entirely on the law of contradiction: That is a possible something the thought of which
accords with what is thought in it. This “comparison” of a
subject with its predicates through the law of contradiction is
to be called logical or formal possibility; a triangle cannot
have other than three angles, for that would contradict its
definition. But it also has something additional, a given character as a triangle in general or in particular, say a rightangled triangle; these are the data of its material or real possibility.
Therewith possibility without prior existence is abolished. For a thing is not impossible—a “no-thing”—only
when contradictory predications are made of it, when it is
formally impossible, but also when it offers no real material,
no data, to thinking. For then all thinking ceases, for everything possible must be something thinkable, must offer stuff
for thought. It follows that for Kant possibility is conditioned
on actuality.
There is, to be sure, no formal inner contradiction in the
brute negation of all existence, since nothing has been posited
to begin with. But that there be a possibility and that
nonetheless nothing actual exist—that is contradictory. For if
nothing exists, nothing material is given to be thought about.
Therefore to say that nothing exists is, according to the previous analysis of existence (Dasein) as a positing act of
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thought, to think and say that there is absolutely nothing.
And then to add that something is possible is clearly self-contradictory, for no material for thinking at all is given.
Thinking involves material givens; without them it contradicts its own character. Thus the cancellation of the material
data of possibility also cancels possibility. It is absolutely
impossible that nothing should exist. I understand Kant to
mean that one can—logically—deny all existence, but having
denied it one cannot then retrieve its possibility.
The only really elucidating example of a necessary existence is, Kant says, that of the unique Subject (i.e., God), to
be touched on below. Meanwhile, if we ask, for example,
how existence precedes possibility in respect to “body,” we
may grant that the concept body contains no logical impossibility, yet to call on its predicates of extension, impenetrability, force, to be the data of possibility (either assumed or
experienced) in the absence of actually existing, given bodies,
is quite unwarranted. Without such data the concept “body”
is empty. (We see here the forerunner of the dictum in the first
Critique that the mere functions of the understanding are
empty without the givens of intuition.)
Then Kant explains the concept of an absolutely necessary existence. To say that it is that whose contradictory is in
itself impossible is a merely nominal explanation. Since existence is no predicate, its denial can never conflict with other
predicates. However to deny the positing of the thing itself is
not a denial of predicates but of something else, and hence is
not contradictory. Kant is looking not for logical but “realnecessity” (Realnotwendigkeit), for what cannot be denied in
any “real-explanation” (Realerklärung). This is it: “What I am
to regard as absolutely nothing and impossible must be that
which eradicates all thinking.” Now total nonexistence in fact
cancels all the material and data of thought, and hence it is
impossible.
It follows that there is an absolutely necessary being. For
all possibility assumes something actual, whose cancellation
would itself cancel all inner possibility, i.e., the real coherence
BRANN
69
of predicates. That part of existence, on the other hand,
which does not provide the material for all that is thinkable,
but without which there would still be matter for thought—
and thus possibility—that part is, although in a real sense possible, yet in the same sense conditionally possible, i.e., contingent; not all existence is necessary. (In his Inaugural
Dissertation of 1770 Kant will say that all worldly substances
are in fact contingent since they maintain reciprocal relations,
while necessary beings are independent, ¶19; an earlier version of this existence proof is to be found in Kant’s Nova
dilucidatio of 1755.)
Kant now goes on to show that the one necessary, noncontingent existence is God, a being that is one, simple,
unchangeable, eternal, and a spirit. But its philosophically
most important attribute is that it is (in scholastic terms) the
ens realissimum, the most real being, that which contains the
highest reality. For it contains all the givens, the data, of possibility either as directly determining other existences or as
being the real-ground of which they are the consequences. (In
the Critique, the ens realissimum will be relegated to the status of an ideal of reason, a regulative idea that marshals our
thoughts of the world; in the Opus Postumum God is once
more the most real existence, though one reason necessarily
posits for itself.)
Does the attribution to God of the most and the highest
reality mean that all realities, i.e., all real attributes, must be
assigned to God? Here the concepts of the essay on negative
magnitudes come into their own: It is common doctrine that
one reality can never contradict another reality, since both are
truly affirmed. But this assertion leaves out of account the
notion of real-repugnance, i.e., of real-opposition. Realities
may, indeed must, oppose each other without one of them
being in itself negative. That was the essay’s main finding. In
God, however, even real-opposition cannot take place,
because that would result in privation or defect and would
contradict God’s maximal reality. Thus God contains no realities in opposition to his positive predicates; for example, the
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real-oppositions attributable to bodies, such as being subject
to contrary forces, cannot without contradiction belong to a
being that has intellect and will; hence the ens realissimus has
clear positive determinations.
It is, it seems to me, implicit in these pre-Critical essays
that neither existence (Dasein) nor actuality (Wirklichkeit) is
as yet convertible with subjective perceptibility, though both
will indeed be so later, as Heidegger observes. Instead these
terms mean objective givenness, thereness, be it sensorily
received or essentially apprehended. The road to the first
Critique will be the development of this conversion from the
object of experience as given to the subject to its being constituted in the subject. The roots, however, of the primacy of
the subject are already present in one respect, now to be
shown.
*****
There is, then, necessarily a God, a being comprehending
not all, but all the highest positive reality. He is a real-ground
of the world; the world, in turn, amounts quantitatively to a
self-cancelled nothing, though it may well be qualitatively
positive. One way to get hold of this—by Kant’s own frequent confession—still inchoate complex is to ask just how
daring a departure from tradition it is.
Kant, who without naming Anselm is attempting to rebut
his argument for the existence of God, calls his own proof
“ontological” (later in the Critique that is what he will call
Anselm-type proofs). Anselm argues (Proslogium 2, 4) that
God is a maximal being whose essence is to be thought as
largely and inclusively as possible; thus it must include the
predicate existence. This—that existence is a predicate—is
what Kant denies, but he accepts something that seems to me
even deeper in, or rather behind, Anselm’s argument: that
when I must think that God exists, he exists. But this is thinking of the type Kant himself engages in when he makes God’s
existence follow from the existential necessities of thinking:
What is required for thinking to be possible must necessarily
exist. (This type of proof becomes explicit in the Opus
BRANN
71
Postumum.) Here Anselm and Kant are brothers under the
skin. I can think of counterarguments to their assumption
(though without being quite persuaded by them): Is it utterly
impossible that a being that must exist in thought fails to exist
in fact—is it so totally unthinkable? Is it not possible to think
that thinking can do utterly without the material, the data
grounded either in a highest reality, as in the essay on God’s
existence, or in some sensory influx from a transcendent outside, as in the first Critique? Is it unthinkable that possibilities
do not disappear when actualities fail, but that there is spontaneous, autonomous, self-generated, worldless thinking?
Kant has, it seems, levered the Cartesian-type certification for
personal existence; Cogito, ergo sum, “I think, therefore I
am,” into a proof of God’s existence: Cogito ergo Deus est,
“I think therefore there is a God.” But what if “I think”
entails instead: “I make the world,” if I myself give myself the
data?
Such misgivings and intimations aside (they will become
Kant’s own in the Opus Postumum), he has found an
approach to a question that seems never to have occupied the
ancients and was, as was mentioned, first formulated by
Leibniz (Principles of Nature and Grace, 7): “Why does something exist rather than nothing?, especially since ‘nothing’ is
simpler and easier than ‘something.’” Leibniz finds the
answer in the ultimate sufficient reason called God. Kant
argues the other way around: Nothing is harder than something, indeed impossible for thought, and God becomes necessary not as a sufficient reason inferred from the world’s
existence but as a necessary being implied by human thinking.
In 1763, having proved in one essay the necessary existence of the highest and most real ground and so (for the time
being) answered Leibniz’s question, Kant is left with the
unanswered next question of the essay on negative magnitudes quoted above, which he prints in block letters: “How
can I understand THAT BECAUSE SOMETHING IS, SOMETHING ELSE MIGHT BE?” In other words, having proved
God’s existence, how can I understand him, or his agents in
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
the world, as causal grounds? (This very same question will,
as was said, be presented in the Critique as unanswerable by
logical thinking alone, but solved with the aid of the a priori
relations given in the intuition.)
By 1781, the year of the first edition of the first Critique,
Kant will have given up not only his own so circumstantially
prepared ontological proof, the only possible one, as he had
once thought, but also in principle any expectation of a theoretical demonstration of God’s existence—and so, it seems,
any rational explanation of the first question, why there is
existence at all.
The second question, on the other hand, is just what the
Critique addresses. Kant distinguishes cosmological freedom,
the power to make an absolute beginning, from causality
according to natural law, which is rule-governed consequence
acting within what already exists. An insight into the first,
into absolute causation, i.e., creation, Kant shows, is in principle impossible for us, for it is beyond the limits of human
reason. The second causality, that of lawful succession, of
cause and effect in natural events, is grounded in the synthesizing character of our cognitive constitution. The essays here
considered show Kant—and for my part I find this intellectually moving—casting about for disparate clues to the concepts
and claims which would one day come to cohere in his master edifice.
73
Four Poems
Elliott Zuckerman
Where the Poet Lives
I saw the poet once
in furnished rooms above the estaminet.
There were others in his train, and I
just tagged along.
Foremost were my sidekick feelings.
If only earlier in the evening
I’d found the man alone
at his table in the whitewashed space,
the waiters not quite in position yet,
and memorably our eyes had met.
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
74
ZUCKERMAN
Early Pupil
She saw that her piano and only hers
was missing black notes here and there
and deemed that this deficiency was due
somehow to my neglect, a lack
of thoroughness. But never
did she carp for long, clever
enough at twelve to know
that parents don’t pay cash for caviling.
Have it your way, she’d imply.
Go ahead and
have it your way, for all you teachers
insist on throwing bowling-balls overhand.
To the narrow living room of the detached
brick building in the borough’s heart
I brought her Haydn. It was
a hurdle that the piece, her first, was titled ‘Air,’
suggesting emptiness to her, and breathing.
I told her something about sonatas,
and life chez Esterhaz,
then asked the girl to name the head
bewigged in the oval insert on the page.
‘That is George Washington,’ she said.
Among the portraits later in the book,
she stopped at Purcell in a flowing wig.
I played the left hand ostinato,
and told her how a Trojan prig
abandoned the passionate empress Dido
to fiery death, while we can hear
the drooping half-steps of imperial despair.
Pointing to Purcell’s hair,
‘At last,’ she said, ‘a lady composer.’
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76
ZUCKERMAN
She and the Tree
Outlay
On that flat terrain is there a tree?
Given at least one tree, she likes to arrange her limbs
in imitation of the branches, seeking
a quiet contraposto.
We place ourselves on stools, shoes at the rungs,
the ales in steins on the expanse between us,
midway in bowls the usual cashews,
and new pistachios.
Her earlier attempts will be ignored,
for rearrangements are encouraged.
But when at last she settles on a pose,
they’ll give that pose her name.
Though hands can reach across to hands,
no actual touch dare fluster the display:
all my intent and all your puzzlement
diffused in what we say.
They emphasize the silence of the landscape,
she and the tree.
I wonder whether anything that hangs
high in the air among the pleasantries
could close those almond eyes.
77
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
79
Platonic Pedagogy?
David Roochnik
No Platonic dialogue depicts a conversation between two
equally mature philosophers. There is neither a friendly collaboration, nor a serious battle, between peers. Instead, the
dialogues are consistently asymmetrical. Two familiar kinds
of conversations are those between an older Socrates and a
younger man (Glaucon, for example) who is, at best, a potential philosopher, and between Socrates and a non-philosopher
(such as Protagoras, Laches, or Agathon). What is conspicuously missing is a dialogue between Socrates and a thinker
offering a well-developed theoretical position, such as the
Eleatic Stranger or Timaeus, neither of whom receives as
much as a question from a present but silent Socrates.
One explanation of this absence is that the dialogues are
thoroughly pedagogical works. Their function, on this
account, is not to present a positive or systematic theory,
which is why they do not depict a symmetrical exchange
between two theorists (who either agree or disagree), but an
encounter whose asymmetry is designed to invite the reader
to participate. As Eva Brann puts it, Plato “wants us as soon
as possible to join [the dialogue], to be converted from passive perusal to active participation, to be drawn in among the
other silent interlocutors” (p. 88).
One version of this “pedagogical thesis” would maintain
that by entering the conversation the reader, guided by the
dialogue’s clues, can, and so should, attempt to reconstruct
the teaching or theory (or logos) it implicitly contains. A second version would argue that the dialogue contains no positive theory at all. On this account, Socrates’ attempt to drive
Eva Brann. The Music of the Republic: Essays on Socrates’ Conversations and
Plato’s Writings. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2004. David Roochnik is
Associate Professor of Philosophy at Boston University.
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his interlocutors into thinking—and Plato’s attempt to
achieve the same with his readers—is the teaching. This may
sound odd, because pedagogy seems to be a means to an end.
The teacher teaches the student who, upon completion of the
instruction, is no longer a student, but instead is one who
knows. Perhaps, however, the dialogues are asymmetrical
because they are essentially pedagogical. In other words, perhaps Plato eschewed the sort of symmetrical dialogue that
would communicate a positive theory—not to mention the
fact that he never wrote a monological treatise—because he
believed there was no positive or independent theory that
could be detached from the attempt to teach it. (Brann’s own
definition of a “theory” is “a conceptual construction
designed in principle to yield satisfying explanations for every
problem brought to it” [p. 322].) Perhaps pedagogy, the leading of the younger by the older, is an end in itself. Or, to put
it somewhat strangely, perhaps pedagogy itself is the truth.
Such a view comes close to a form of skepticism, although not
of the Pyrrhonian or Academic varieties described by Sextus
Empiricus. (See Outlines of Pyrrhonism, 1.1 and 1.4.)
I think Eva Brann might accept some of these remarks,
but I am not sure which of the two versions of the pedagogical thesis (if either) she would favor. Certainly, hers is a book
written by a teacher for students. Included in this collection
of essays are three “introductions”: to the Phaedo, Republic,
and Sophist. One essay, “Socrates’ Legacy: Plato’s Phaedo,”
was written for a student journal, and another is titled,
“‘Teaching Plato’ to Undergraduates.” It and three others—
“Why Justice? The Answer of the Republic,” “The Tyrant’s
Temperance: Charmides,” and “Imitative Poetry: Book X of
the Republic”—were delivered as lectures at undergraduate
colleges.
“Socrates’ Legacy: Plato’s Phaedo,” which Brann
describes as a “view, very sketchily stated, of Plato’s Phaedo,
which might help a serious student in reading the dialogue”
(p. 36), lays out twenty-one questions that she thinks Plato
“insinuates into the purported demonstrations of the soul’s
ROOCHNIK
81
immortality” (p. 37). These are followed by a paragraph containing fourteen sentences, the first two of which are declarative, the following twelve of which are interrogative. She
concludes the essay by imagining Socrates joining a conversation about them today. “He would not care so much about
devising well-formulated breakthroughs for received issues as
for staying with the inquiry at its origin in wonder...he
is…asking [the young men who participate in this conversation] to keep his perplexities alive. For that is what philosophizing means to him” (p. 41).
These remarks suggest that Brann would favor the second
of the two versions of the pedagogical thesis described above.
So too would her description of “Plato’s Theory of Ideas.”
Despite using this well-worn academic phrase as the title of
one of her own essays, she asserts that “the Ideas are not a
theory” (p. 322) at all, and so she recommends that we “convert the falsely familiar title “‘Plato’s Theory of Ideas’ to
‘Socrates’ Hypotheses of the Eide’” (p. 324). In a similar fashion, her description of “recollection” as a “myth” (p. 332)
rather than a theory, and her declaration that in the Timaeus
“the Timaean story of the origin and nature of time is not the
Socratic, and therefore not a central Platonic, theory”
(p. 275), but instead may even “supply the reason why Plato
has offered none” (p. 272), also seems to imply that beyond
teaching lies no positive theory at all. Brann seems to believe
that, at the end of the day, the philosopher must “go back to
the beginning” (palin ex archês), and ask her questions, provoke her students, yet again. Teaching, in this sense, is an end
in itself.
There are philosophical explanations of why this would
be the case. One is famously suggested in the Seventh Letter
and is quoted by Brann (on p. 320):
There is no treatise of mine about these things,
nor ever will be; for it is not sayable like other
kinds of learning, but out of much communion
which has taken place around this business, and
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
from living together, suddenly, like a light kindled
from a leaping fire, it gets into the soul, and from
there on nourishes itself.
If Plato believes that “these things” are not sayable, then
there can be no positive theory of them, and thus neither a
monological treatise nor a symmetrical dialogue would be an
appropriate form of philosophical expression.
Another possibility, which I can here only state, is that the
dialogues resist symmetry, resist theory, because they are
attempts to do justice to “the constitution of the soul…its
topography” (p. 251), and this “topography” is itself assymetrical. Perhaps Plato wrote the sort of dialogues he did, in
which the partners are invariably unequal, because the soul is
somehow unequal to itself.
The eponymous, and far the longest, essay of this book,
“The Music of Plato’s Republic,” seems to challenge the
notion that the dialogues are essentially pedagogical, and
instead to favor the first of the two versions of the pedagogical thesis mentioned above, namely, that the Republic is
meant to teach the reader how to reconstruct the theoretical
doctrine to which it only points. Consider the following comments that Eva Brann makes about the images of the sun, the
divided-line, and the cave: “The logos behind these images is
absent in the Republic, but its terms may be recovered from
Plato’s oral ‘Unwritten Teachings,’ particularly the lecture—
or several colloquia—Concerning the Good…In these
terms…the Image of the Good represents the One and the
Image of the Cave the Indefinite Dyad” (p. 156). Later in the
essay, employing a diagram of great complexity (p. 195),
Brann begins to articulate such a logos, such a doctrine:
This scheme shows the Good as presiding over and
bonding a kind of pervasive duplication: The
Good as the cause of knowledge is responsible for
the unifying confrontation of knower and
known…and thus originates the soul…The Good
is as well the direct source of beingness…Finally,
ROOCHNIK
83
as generating source, the Good puts forth the sun,
a sensible secondary source that reduplicates the
whole structure of Being on the lower level of
sense and Becoming (p. 195-6).
Brann draws on both the Parmenides and the Sophist to
articulate the details of such a theory, a project that occupies
a major portion of this essay.
This attempt to “recover” the positive logos of the
Republic is consonant with the assertive tone that pervades
“The Music of the Republic.” The essay begins, for example,
with this statement: “The Republic is composed of concentric
rings encompassing a center” (p. 108). Books 1 and 9-10, on
Brann’s reading, comprise the outermost circle, and set the
mythic context of the entire work. Books 2-4 and then 8-9
are “the broad inner ring” consisting “of the construction and
destruction of the successive forms of a pattern city in
‘speech’” (p. 116). Books 5-7 “presents the actual founding of
a city ‘in deed’” (p. 116). This structure is diagrammed on
page 117, which is one of thirteen such diagrams found in the
essay.
This structural account of the form of the dialogue—an
account that seems of a piece with the attempt to recover its
complexly structured content—can be challenged. Consider
the following alternative: Book 1, as Socrates himself states in
Book 2, “is only a prelude” (prooimion: 357a2). In the
Rhetoric, Aristotle discusses this term. It is, he says, “the
beginning of a speech” (3.14.1) whose “necessary and specific
function…is to make clear what is the end (telos) for which
the speech is being given” (3.14.5). Brann’s arguments that
Book 1 establishes a mythic context are not without philological basis. Still, the bulk of Book 1 is a series not of mythic
allusions, but of refutations, almost all of which operate on
the basis of the “techne analogy.” So, for example, Socrates
refutes Polemarchus’ assertion that it is “just to give to everyone what is fitting” (332c2) by smuggling in the assumption
that justice is an art, a form of expertise, a techne. As medi-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
cine gives what is fitting—drugs, food and drinks—to bodies,
and cooking gives what is fitting—seasonings—to meats, so
too (if the analogy holds) must justice give what is fitting to
the determinate object of its expertise. (See 332c-d.) Because
no such object can be identified, the definition is rejected.
Socrates, then, begins the refutations of Book 1 with an
assumption, justice is a techne, which he neither makes
explicit nor defends. The refutations succeed because the
techne model of justice proves to be inadequate. Nonetheless,
it remains the case that justice, even if it is not a techne, must
still be regarded as a form of knowledge. Book 1 is a
prooimion suggesting the telos of the Republic because it sets
out a task: to give an account of justice as a non-technical
form of knowledge.
What follows Book 1 are not concentric rings but, to borrow Socrates’ own metaphor, three successive “waves” of
argumentation that become progressively more difficult to
“swim through.” Books 2-4 construct an “arithmetical” or
technical conception of both city and soul that ultimately
proves to be deficient. Books 5-7 are a response to this deficiency, but suffer from limitations of their own. As a result,
they are followed by Books 8-10, which, despite the scant
attention they receive from commentators, are rich with
insight (especially psychological insight) and so actually culminate the dialogue rather than serve as merely a descent and
completion of the ring structure.
This little sketch (elaborated and defended in detail in my
Beautiful City: The Dialectical Character of Plato’s Republic)
is mentioned only to raise a question. Is the purpose of the
essay “The Music of Plato’s Republic” to uncover a positive
teaching of the dialogue, one communicated by means of the
ring structure Brann attributes to it, and then conceptually
elaborated in a “recovered” logos about the Good? If so, does
this essay stand at odds with the otherwise interrogative and
aporetic stance seemingly taken by so many of the other
essays in this book?
ROOCHNIK
85
Perhaps “The Music of the Republic” is not quite what it
seems to be. Even though it includes a significant number of
diagrams, some of them (such as the one on p. 220) quite elegant, and contains numerically adumbrated outlines of the
arguments, and even though it seems to offer first steps
towards a coherent account of the whole (i.e., a theory), perhaps this is but the mathematical “sheen” of the essay and
does not fully reflect its author’s understanding of the full
content of the dialogue. In other words, a meta-mathematical
doctrine may not lie at the heart of the Republic. Perhaps
Brann’s diagrams and outlines, and her putative recovery of
the logos, perform a function more like that Socrates attributes in Book 7 to arithmetic, that “lowly business of distinguishing the one, the two and the three” (522c): “to draw the
soul from becoming to being” (521d). In other words, while
mathematics is without doubt of significant value, it is not the
model of a genuinely philosophical logos. Instead, arithmetic
and its kindred mathematical technai are conceived by Plato
to have instrumental value. As such, they are pedagogical in
nature. They are meant to inspire and provoke, to turn the
reader towards the project of philosophy. They are meant, in
short, to be questioned. The goal of Brann’s longest and most
“mathematical” of essays, then, is not to offer the last word
on the Republic, but to convert the reader “from passive
perusal to active participation.”
To sum up: is the apparent assertiveness, the “theoretical
optimism,” of “The Music of the Republic” compatible with
a thoroughly interrogative essay like “Socrates’ Legacy:
Plato’s Phaedo?” I believe it is. If I am right, then one of the
many virtues of this beautiful book is that it effectively imitates the Platonic dialogues themselves.
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ROOCHNIK
87
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The St. John’s Review
Volume XLVIII, number one (2004)
Editor
Pamela Kraus
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
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The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
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3
Contents
Classical Mathematics and Its Transformation
St. John’s College, Annapolis
June 5-6, 2004
Foreword.......................................................................5
Harvey Flaumenhaft
Why We Won’t Let You Speak Of the Square
Root of Two..................................................................7
Harvey Flaumenhaft
The Husserlian Context of Klein’s
Mathematical Work.....................................................43
Burt C. Hopkins
Words, Diagrams, and Symbols: Greek and
Modern Mathematics or “On the Need to Rewrite
the History Of Greek Mathematics” Revisited............71
Sabetai Unguru
A Note on the Opposite Sections and Conjugate
Sections In Apollonius of Perga’s Conica.....................91
Michael N. Fried
Viète on the Solution of Equations and the
Construction Of Problems.........................................115
Richard Ferrier
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5
Foreword
Harvey Flaumenhaft
On the weekend of June 5-6, 2004, the Annapolis campus of
St. John’s College hosted a conference on the topic of classical mathematics and its transformation. This is a pivotal topic
in the program of instruction here at St. John’s, where classes
consist in the discussion of great books ancient and modern,
and where approximately half of the entirely prescribed curriculum may be classified as either mathematics or heavily
mathematical natural science.
The topic was made truly pivotal at St. John’s by Jacob
Klein, who joined the faculty in the second year of the New
Program (1938-39) and became Dean eleven years later. Just
a few years before arriving at St. John’s, Klein had published
Die Griechische Logistik und die Entstehung der Algebra (later
translated by another Dean—Eva Brann—as Greek
Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra). In a letter
written just a few weeks after arriving at the College, Klein
said, “It is almost unbelievable to me that all the things that
occupied me for years, that is, the whole theme of my work,
are realized here. The people don’t do quite right, very much
is superficial and they are not quite right about certain fundamentals. But it….is clear that I am in the right spot.”
Klein’s presence, and his book because of his presence, had a
deepening and correcting effect on the life of this college, and
through this college, on intellectual life far beyond our halls.
The effects of his work pervade the conference papers, which
are printed as this issue of The St. John’s Review.
The conference took place through the generosity of the
Andrew W Mellon Foundation, as the culminating event
.
under a large grant supporting faculty study groups led by
me, over several years, on the topic of the conference. The
Harvey Flaumenhaft is Dean at the Annapolis Campus of St. John’s College.
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grant also supported groups on the same topic on the Santa
Fe campus, with participation by faculty members from
Thomas Aquinas College. Grateful acknowledgment is due to
Sus3an Borden, the college’s Manager of Foundation
Relations in Annapolis, who did a great deal of work, under
very severe time constraints, to set up the conference.
7
Why We Won’t Let You Speak
of the Square Root of Two
Harvey Flaumenhaft
Part One
Progress and Preservation in Science
We often take for granted the terms, the methods, and the
premises that prevail in our own time and place. We take for
granted, as the starting-points for our own thinking, the outcomes of a process of thinking by our predecessors.
What happens is something like this: Questions are asked,
and answers are given. These answers in turn provoke new
questions, with their own answers. The new questions are
built from the answers that were given to the old questions,
but the old questions are now no longer asked. Foundations
get covered over by what is built upon them.
Progress can thus lead to a kind of forgetfulness, making
us less thoughtful in some ways than the people whom we go
beyond. We can become more thoughtful, though, by attending to the thinking that is out of sight but still at work in the
achievements it has generated. To be thoughtful human
beings—to be thoughtful about what it is that makes us
Harvey Flaumenhaft is Dean at the Annapolis campus of St. John’s College. This
paper was delivered in the form of a Friday-night formal lecture at St. John’s
College in Annapolis on 27 August 1999.
The first part of it is adapted from the “Series Editor’s Preface” in the
volumes of Masterworks of Discovery: Guided Studies of Great Texts in Science
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993-1997).
The last part is adapted from the “Introductory Note on Apollonius” in
Apollonius of Perga, Conics: Books I-III, new revised edition, Dana Densmore,
ed. (Santa Fe, NM: Green Lion Press, 1998).
The three parts placed between them are adapted from the manuscript
How Much and How Many: The Euclidean Foundation for Comparisons of Size
in Classical Geometry (forthcoming from Green Lion Press), which is part of the
larger manuscript Insights and Manipulations: Classical Geometry and Its
Transformation—A Guidebook: Volume I, Starting up with Apollonius; Volume
II, From Apollonius to Descartes (also forthcoming).
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
human—we need to read the record of the thinking that has
shaped the world around us, and still shapes our minds.
Scientific thinking is a fundamental part of that record,
but it is a part that is read even less than the rest, largely. That
is often held to be because of the opinion that books in science, unlike those in the humanities, simply become outdated: in science, the past is held to be passé.
Now science is indeed progressive, and progress is a good
thing; but so is preservation. Progress even requires preservation: unless there is keeping, our getting is little but losing—
and keeping takes plenty of work.
Precisely if science is essentially progressive, we can truly
understand it only by seeing its progress as progress. This
means that our minds must move through its progressive
stages. We ourselves must think through the process of
thought that has given us what we would otherwise thoughtlessly accept as given. By refusing to be the passive recipients
of ready-made presuppositions and approaches, we can avoid
becoming their prisoners. Only by actively taking part in discovery—only by engaging in re-discovery ourselves—can we
avoid both blind reaction against the scientific enterprise and
blind submission to it.
We and our world are products of a process of thinking,
and truly thoughtful thinking is peculiar: it cannot simply
outgrow the thinking it grows out of. When we utter deceptively simple phrases that in fact are the outcome of a complex development of thought—phrases like “the square root
of two”—we may work wonders as we use them in building
vast and intricate structures from the labors of millions of
people, but we do not truly know what we are doing unless
we at some time ask the questions which the words employed
so casually now were once an attempt to answer.
The education of a human being requires learning about
the process by which the human race gets its education, and
there is no better way to do that than to read the writings of
those master-students who have been the master-teachers.
FLAUMENHAFT
9
Part Two
Manyness: The Classical Notion of Number
The first great teachers of the West, and subsequently the rest
of the world, were the classical teachers who wrote in Greek
some two-and-a-half millennia ago. In their language the
word for things that are learned or learnable is mathêmata,
and the art that deals with the mathêmata is mathêmatikê—
the English for which is “mathematics.”
In mathematics, the first and fundamental classic work is
the Elements of Euclid. From its Seventh Book we learn that
a number is a number of things of some kind. When there are
more than one of something, their number is the “multitude”
of them. It tells how many of them there are. Suppose, for
example, that in a field there are seven cows, four goats, and
one dog. If we count cows, then the cow is our unit, the cow
being that according to which any being in the field will count
as one item; and there is a multitude of seven such units in
the field. If we count animals, however, then the animal is our
unit; and now there is a multitude of twelve units. Of cows,
there are seven; but of animals, there are twelve.
Of dogs as dogs, there is no reason to make a count (as
distinguished from including them in the count of animals).
There is no reason to count dogs, for the field does not contain dogs. It contains only one dog, and one dog alone does
not constitute any multitude of dogs. If what we were thinking was “There is only one dog in the field,” we might say
“There is one dog in the field”; but if we were not thinking
of that single dog in relation to some possible multitude of
dogs, we would simply say “There is a dog in the field.” Of
pigs, there is no reason to make a count, for the field does not
contain a single pig, let alone a multitude of pigs.
If there had earlier been six horses in the field, which
were then lent out, the field might now be said to lack six
horses; but while six is the multitude of horses that are lacking from the field, there is not any multitude of horses in the
field.
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If we chop up one of the cows, arranging to divide its
remains into four equal pieces, and we take three of them,
then we have not taken any multitude of cows. We have taken
merely three pieces that are each a fourth part in the equal
division of what is a heap of the makings for beef stew.
And so when we have several items, each of which counts
as one of what we are counting, then what we obtain by
counting is a number. The numbers, in order, are these: two
units, three units, four units, and so on. The numbers, we
might even say, are these: a duo, a trio, a quartet, and so on.
To us, nowadays, that seems strange: a lot seems to be lacking.
“One” does not name a multitude of units: although a
unit can be combined with, or be compared with, any number of units, a unit is not itself a number—so “one” does not
name a number. “Zero” also does not name a number, for
there is no multitude of units when there are no units for a
multitude to be composed of. Neither does “negative-six”
name any multitude, although “six” does; “six” names a number, but there is no number named “negative-six”—and hence
there is no number named “positive-six” either.
Although “three” names a number of units, and so does
“four,” “three-fourths” does not name a number of units—
for if the unit is broken up, then, being no longer unitary, it
ceases to be a unit. The Latin word for breaking is “fraction.”
A fraction is not a number. (Of course we can, if we wish,
take a new unit—say, a fourth part of a cow’s equally divided
carcass—and then take three of these new units.)
As for “the square root of two,” it is not a number;
indeed, as we shall soon see, it is not even a fraction. And neither is “pi” a number.
To say it again, the numbers are: two units, three units,
four units, and so on—taking as many units as we please.
That is what Euclid tells us; and, after telling us, Euclid goes
on to speak of the relations among different numbers.
We learn, for example, that because fifteen “measures”
sixty—that is to say, because a multitude of fifteen units taken
FLAUMENHAFT
11
four times is equal to a multitude of sixty units—fifteen is
called “part” of sixty, and sixty is called a “multiple” of fifteen.
But fifteen is not “part” of forty, because you cannot get
a multitude of forty units by taking a multitude of fifteen
units some number of times. That is to say: the multitude of
fifteen units does not “measure” forty units. Both fifteen units
and forty units are, however, measured by five units; and five
units, which is the eighth part of forty units (the part obtained
by dividing forty units into eight equal parts), is also the third
part of fifteen units, so fifteen units is three of the eighth parts
of forty units. This is to say that fifteen units, which is not a
“part” of forty units, is “parts” of it. Indeed, a smaller number, if it is not part of a larger number, must be parts of it,
since both numbers must—just because they are numbers—be
measured by the unit.
After that, Euclid goes on to tell us about sorts of numbers, and the ways in which they are related, numbers such as
those that are “even,” or “odd,” or “even-times-even,” or
“even-times-odd,” or “odd-times-odd,” or “prime,” and so
on.
Numbers are thus of interest not only with respect to
their relations of size, but also with respect to their relations
of kind. Even and odd are distinguished by divisibility into
two equal parts (or by odd’s differing from even by a unit),
and the more complex terms here are distinguished with
respect to “measuring by a number according to another
number”—which nowadays would be stated thus: “dividing
by an integer so as to yield another integer as quotient without a remainder.”
Euclid thus defines some kinds of numbers by employing
notions such as being greater than or equal to or having a certain difference in size. However, he also sorts numbers into
kinds by referring to shape. What might lead to doing that?
We might use a dot to represent a unit, and then represent a number by dots in a line. For example, four would be
represented as it is at the top of Chart 1. We might then rep-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
resent in a shape the number produced by taking a number
some number of times. For example, the number produced
when four is taken three times would be represented as it is
in the middle of the chart, where we see that the numbers
four and three are “sides” of the “plane” number twelve; and
similarly, six and four are “sides” of the “plane” number
twenty-four. But the number twenty-four can also be represented as a solid, as it is at the bottom of the chart: the numbers four and three and two are “sides” of the “solid” number twenty-four.
So Euclid speaks of numbers that are “sides,” “plane,”
and “solid,” and also of the multiplication of a number by a
number, and then of the sorts of numerical products of such
multiplication—such as the numbers called “square” and
“cube,” whose factors are called “sides.”
But he does not represent numbers by dots in lines. To use
dots would force us to pick this or that number. To signify not
this or that number, but rather any number at all, it is more
convenient to use bare lines, without indicating how many
dots are carried on each line, although it might be confusing
that we then also have to represent by a line the unit.
FLAUMENHAFT
13
On the other hand, since the unit does have a ratio to any
number, as does any number to any other number, and since
the product of multiplying any number by any other number
is also a number, it might make everything more convenient
if we represent as lines not just the numbers that are “sides,”
as well as any “side” that is a unit, but also all the figurate
numbers that we can produce. After all, though the sort of
number called a “square” number may be somehow different
from the sort of number called a “cube,” it is nonetheless true
that any “square” number has a ratio to any “cube” number
(since any number has a ratio to any other number), whereas
a square cannot have a ratio to a cube (since they are not magnitudes of the same kind). If we go along with speaking in this
way, however, we must take care to keep in mind that when
it is numbers that are called “sides” or “squares” or “cubes”
we are not engaged in speech about figures; we are using figures of speech. Several of the books of Euclid’s Elements deal
with what would nowadays be called “number theory” rather
than “geometry.”
The numbers in the classical sense—the multitudes two,
three, four, and so on—tell us the result of a count, and
nowadays we often speak as if those numbers, the countingnumbers, are merely some of the items contained in an
expanded system that we call “the real numbers.”
Whenever we put numbers of things together we get
some number of things, and whenever we take a number of
things a number of times we get some number of things; but
only sometimes can we take a given number of things away
from a given number of things, and even when we can, only
sometimes can we get some number of things by doing so. For
example, we cannot take seven things away from five things;
and although we can take six things away from seven things,
we will not have a number of things left if we do, but only a
single thing. It is also only sometimes that we can divide a
given number of things into a given number of equal parts. A
multitude of ten things can be divided into five equal parts,
but a multitude of eight things cannot. In dividing a many-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
ness, there is constraint from which we are free in dividing a
muchness.
We often measure a muchness to say just how much of it
there is compared with some other muchness: having chosen
some unit of muchness, we count how many times such a unit
must be taken in order to be equal to the muchness that we
are measuring. A line, for example, is a kind of a muchness:
there is more line in a longer line than in a shorter line. If two
lines are not of equal size, one of them is greater than the
other. Lines are magnitudes. If we measure them, we obtain
multitudes that tell their sizes—their lengths. But magnitudes
are not multitudes. Whereas the size of a magnitude has to do
with how much of it there is, the size of a multitude has to do
with how many units it is composed of.
Not only magnitudes, but multitudes as well are often
measured: we measure these by using other multitudes to
measure them. Thus, we say that twelve is six taken two
times, or is twice six. We say, moreover, that eight is twice the
third part of twelve, or—to abbreviate—that eight is twothirds of twelve. “Two-thirds” does not name a multitude
(unless we say that we are merely treating a third part of
twelve as a new unit) but “two-thirds” is nonetheless a
numerical expression. If we therefore begin to treat it like the
name of a number, we are on the road to devising a system of
fractions. “Two-thirds” of something is less than one such
something, but it is not fewer. Two-thirds are fewer than
three-thirds—but to say this, we must have broken the unit
into three new and smaller units. The numerator of a fraction
is a number or else it is “one.” The denominator is also a
number: it is the number of parts that result from a division
(although we will allow a denominator as well as a numerator to be “one.”) With a fraction, we divide into equal parts
and then we count them. A fraction is not itself a number (a
multitude), but it may be the counterpart of a number.
“Twelve-sixths” is not the number “two”; but it is a counterpart, among the fractions, of the item “two” among the numbers. Another counterpart of the number “two” is the fraction
FLAUMENHAFT
15
“eight-fourths.” Those counterparts are really the same counterpart differently expressed, since they are both equal to the
fraction whose numerator is the number “two” and whose
denominator is “one.”
As with division, so with subtraction. In taking things
away, we may get a numerical expression that we can treat
like a number in certain respects. When we have twelve
horses and eight of them are taken away, there is a remainder
of four horses. But if eleven are taken away, then there are
not horses left; only a single horse remains. And if twelve
horses are taken away, then not even a single horse is left:
none remain. But twelve horses can be compared with a single horse: the twelve are to the one as twenty-four are to two.
“Twenty-four” and “two” are numbers, and “twelve” is also a
number—so “one” is like a number in being comparable with
a number as a number is. Moreover, “one” can be added to a
number as a number can be, and “one” is sometimes what we
reply when asked how many of some kind of thing there are.
“One” is therefore a numerical word even if it is not a number. But in that case, so is “none”: if twelve horses are taken
away, leaving not a single horse, and we are asked how many
remain, we can then say “none.” Now suppose that Farmer
Brown owes fourteen horses to Farmer Gray, but has in his
possession only ten horses. Farmer Gray takes away the ten.
How many horses does Farmer Brown now own? None. But
he might be said in some sense to own even less than none,
for he still owes four. If we did say that, then we would have
to say that he owns four less than no horses, or that fourteen
less than ten is four less than none. But then we would be
counting, not horses-owned, but horses-either-owned-orowed. We would be letting the payment of four-horses-owed
count as wealth equal to no-horses-either-owed-or-owned.
Again, as with the fractions, we have numerical expressions
that we are beginning to treat like numbers. We are on the
road to devising a system of so-called “rational numbers,”
which includes “negative” items as well as such non-negative
items as “zero” and “one” in addition to fractions (which
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
include the counterparts of those multitudes that were first
called “numbers”—namely, two, three, four, and so on).
We must say “counterparts” because the multitude
“three,” for example, while it corresponds to, is not the same
as “the positive fraction nine-thirds” or “the positive integer
three.” We have not brought about an expansion of a number
system by merely introducing additional new items alongside
old ones; rather, we have made a new system which contains
some items that correspond to the items in the old system, but
that differ from the old items in being items of the very same
new sort as are the new items that do not have correspondents in the old system. For example: although the number
“three” is a multitude, “positive three” is not a multitude; it
is an item defined by its place in a system where, among other
things, “positive six” takes the place belonging to the item
that is the outcome of such operations as multiplying “negative two” by “negative three.”
We have just taken a look at part of the road that leads
from numbers in the classical sense to what we nowadays are
used to thinking of as numbers. We have looked at some steps
on the road to the so-called “rational numbers,” the so-called
numbers that have something to do with ratios. But the system of what we nowadays are used to thinking of as numbers
is the system of “real numbers,” only some of which are items
that have counterparts among the items in the system of
“rational numbers.” The system of what we nowadays are
used to thinking of as numbers is replete with “irrational
numbers,” some of them “algebraic” (such as “the square root
of two”) and some of them “transcendental” (such as “pi”).
Classically, numbers are multitudes, and there may be
some number-ratio that is the same as the relation in size of
some one magnitude to another. But there does not have to
be a number-ratio that is the same. If there did have to be
such a ratio of numbers for every ratio of magnitudes, then
there would not have been a reason for devising a system of
“real numbers.” The reason for taking the step from “rational
FLAUMENHAFT
17
numbers” to “real numbers” has to do with the difference
between multitudes and magnitudes.
The difference between how we can speak about multitudes (that is, numbers in the classical sense) and how we can
speak about magnitudes classically manifests itself in the
statements with which Euclid begins his treatment of magnitudes in the Fifth Book of the Elements and his treatment
afterwards of numbers in the Seventh Book.
Although Euclid says what number is, he does not say
what magnitude is. Examples of magnitudes can be found in
his propositions, however. After the Fifth Book of the
Elements demonstrates many propositions about the ratios of
magnitudes as such, these are used by later books of the
Elements to demonstrate propositions about such magnitudes
as straight lines, triangles, rectangles, circles, pyramids, cubes,
and spheres. Such magnitudes correspond to what we nowadays call lengths, areas, and volumes. Weight is yet another
sort of magnitude. Though weights are not mentioned in the
Elements, what Euclid says there about magnitudes generally
is applied by Archimedes to weights in particular.
At the beginning of the Fifth Book, Euclid defines ratio
for magnitudes; but at the beginning of the Seventh Book he
does not define ratio for numbers. There in the Fifth Book he
also defines magnitudes’ being in the same ratio, and only
after doing that does he define magnitudes’ being proportional. But here in the Seventh Book he does not define numbers’ being in the same ratio: he goes directly into defining
numbers’ being proportional, which he needs to do in order
to define the similarity of numbers that are of the sorts called
“plane” or “solid.”
The Greek term translated as “proportional” is analogon.
After a prefix (ana) meaning “up; again,” the term contains a
form of the word logos. This is the Greek term translated as
“ratio.” Logos is derived from the same root from which we
get “collect” (which is what the root means); and in most
contexts, it can be translated as “speech” or as “reason.”
Proportionality is, in Greek, analogia (from which we get
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
“analogy”), a condition in which terms that are different may
be said to carry or hold up again the same articulable relationship.
Later in the Elements, in the enunciation of the fifth
proposition of the Tenth Book, for example, Euclid does use
the term “same ratio” in speaking of ratios that are numerical. In the definitions with which the Tenth Book begins,
Euclid says that lines which have no numerical ratios to a
given straight line are called “logos-less”—that is, alogoi. This
Greek term for lines lacking any articulable ratios to a given
line is translated (through the Latin) as “irrational.”
Such a line and the given line to which it is referred cannot both be measured by the same unit, no matter how small
a unit we may use to try to measure them together. They are
“without a measurement together”—that is, asymmetra. This
Greek term is translated (through the Latin) as “incommensurable.” Because magnitudes of the same kind can be incommensurable, magnitudes are radically different from multitudes, and so we must speak of them differently.
Part Three
Muchness Not Related Like Manyness: Incommensurability
Let us turn now to the classic example of incommensurability: let us consider the relation between the side of a square
and its diagonal.
If a square’s diagonal were in fact commensurable with its
side, then the ratio of the diagonal to the side would be the
ratio of some number to some other number. But it cannot be
that. Why not? Because if it were, then it would have two
incompatible properties: one property belongs to any ratio
whatever which a number has to a number, and the other
property follows from that particular ratio which a square’s
diagonal has to its side. Let us convince ourselves that there is
such a contradiction.
First, let us look at that property which belongs to any
ratio whatever that is numerical. It is this: any numerical ratio
whatever must either be in lowest terms already, or be
FLAUMENHAFT
19
reducible to them eventually. Consider, for example, the ratio
that thirty has to seventy. Those two numbers have in common the factors two and five; so, dividing each of them by
ten, we see that the ratio that thirty has to seventy is the same
as the ratio that three has to seven. The ratio of three to seven
is the ratio of thirty to seventy reduced to lowest terms. If a
ratio of one number to another number were not reducible to
lowest terms, then the two original numbers would have to
contain an endless supply of common factors, which is impossible: any number must sooner or later run out of factors if
you keep canceling them out by division.
This property of every ratio that a number has to a number cannot belong to the special ratio that a square’s diagonal
has to its side. To see why this is so, consider a given square.
If you make a new square using as the side of the new square
the diagonal of the given square, then the new square will be
double the size of the original square.
Chart 2 shows that doubling. In the left-hand portion of
the chart, the diagonal of a square divides it into two triangles, and it takes four of these triangles to fill up a new square
which has as its own side that diagonal. In the right-hand portion, the chart also shows what happens if we now make
another new square, using as this newest square’s own side a
half of the diagonal of the original square. The original
square, now being itself a square on the newest square’s diagonal, will itself be double the size of this newest square—
since this newest square is made up of two triangles, and it
takes four of these triangles to make up the original square.
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Let us suppose that it were in fact possible to divide a
square’s diagonal as well as its side into pieces that are all of
the same size. Let us count the pieces and say that K is the
number of pieces into which we have divided the diagonal,
and that L is the number of pieces into which we have divided
the side. By taking as a unit any of those equal pieces into
which we have supposedly divided the diagonal and the side,
we have measured the two lines together: the ratio which the
number K has to the number L would be the same as the ratio
which the square’s diagonal has to its side.
Now, disregarding for a moment just what ratio the number K has to the number L, but considering only that it is supposed to be a ratio of numbers—which, as such, must be
reducible to lowest terms—we can say that there would have
to be two numbers (let us call them P and Q) such that (1) P
and Q do not have a single factor in common and (2) the ratio
that P has to Q is the same ratio that K has to L. Since the
ratio that K has to L is supposed to be a ratio of numbers,
there cannot be any such pair of numbers as K and L unless
there is also such a pair of numbers as P and Q. (If the ratio
of K to L is already in lowest terms, then we will just let K
and L themselves be called by the names P and Q.) So now we
have P being the number of equal pieces into which the
square’s diagonal is divided, and Q being the number of such
pieces into which the square’s side is divided. And now we
will see that there just cannot be any such numbers as P and
Q because this pair of numbers would have to satisfy contradictory requirements.
The first requirement results from the necessities of numbers; the second, from the consequences of configuring lines.
Because (as has been said) the ratio of P to Q is a ratio of
numbers reduced to lowest terms, P and Q are numbers that
cannot have a single common factor; but (as will be shown)
because the ratio of P to Q is the same ratio that a square’s
diagonal has to its side, P and Q must both be numbers divisible by the number two. That is to say, P and Q are such that
they cannot both be divisible by the same number, and yet
FLAUMENHAFT
21
they also must both be divisible by the number two—a direct
contradiction.
Now we must see just why the latter claim is true. We ask:
why is it, that if any pair of numbers are in that special ratio
which a square’s diagonal has to its side, then both numbers
must be divisible by the number two?
In order to see why, we must first take note of another
fact about numbers: if some number has been multiplied by
itself and the product is an even number, then the number
that was multiplied by itself must itself have been a number
that is even. (The reason is simple. A number cannot be both
odd and even—it must be one or the other—and when two
even numbers are multiplied together, then the number that
is the product is also even; however, when two odd numbers
are multiplied together, then the number that is the product
is not even but odd.) That said, we are now ready to see why
it is that if any two numbers are in that special ratio which a
square’s diagonal has to its side, then they must have the factor two in common.
The numbers P and Q have the factor two in common
because both of them must be even. They must both be even
because each of them when multiplied by itself will give a
product that must be double another number—and therefore
each must itself be double some number. Why?
Look at the left-hand portion of Chart 3, and consider
why P must be an even number. Because the square on the
diagonal is double the square on the side, the number produced when P is taken P times is double the number produced
when Q is taken Q times. Hence (since any number which is
double some other number must itself be even) the multiplication of P by itself produces an even number, and hence the
number P itself must be even.
And now look at the right-hand portion of the chart, and
consider why Q also must be an even number. Since it has
already been shown that P must be an even number, it follows
that there must be another number that is half of P—call this
number H. But because the square on the side is double the
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
square on the half-diagonal, it follows that the number produced when Q is taken Q times is double the number produced when H is taken H times. Hence (since, as we said
before, any number which is double some other number must
itself be even) the multiplication of Q by itself produces a
number that is even, and hence the number Q itself must be
even.
Since both P and Q must therefore be even numbers, they
must have the number two as a common factor, even though
they cannot have any number as a common factor. It is therefore absurd to say that there is a pair of numbers like P and
Q. And hence there cannot be a pair of numbers like that K
and L which we supposed that there could be.
If a pair of numbers did in fact have the same ratio that
the square’s diagonal has to its side, then no matter how
many times we halved both numerical terms in the ratio, both
terms that we got would have to remain even. But no pair of
numbers can be like that. Each number of the pair would
have to contain the number two as a factor in endless supply.
Such a ratio would be irreducible to lowest terms, because no
matter how many common two’s we were to strike as factors
from the terms of the ratio, there would still have to be yet
FLAUMENHAFT
23
another two in each. No number, however, can contain an
endless supply of factors.
It is therefore self-contradictory to say that any ratio can
be a ratio of one number to another and also be the ratio of a
square’s diagonal to its side. To avoid being led into absurdity,
we must say that a square’s diagonal and its side are incommensurable.
The diagonal of a square and its side are not the only pair
of lines that are incommensurable. In the tenth proposition of
the Tenth Book of the Elements, Euclid begins to show us
how to find many incommensurable lines. After presenting
thirteen sorts of them, he concludes the Tenth Book by saying that from what he has presented, there arise innumerably
many others.
That makes it hard to say what we mean when we say that
one pair of lines is in the same ratio as another pair of lines.
Even if we could somehow ignore the difficulty with the ratio
of a square’s diagonal to its side, other ones like it would still
keep popping up all over the place, since the ratio of a
square’s diagonal to its side is only one of innumerably many
ratios of incommensurable lines. And it is not only with lines
that the difficulty arises. Whatever the kind of magnitudes
that are being compared, whatever it is with respect to which
they are greater or smaller, comparisons of muchness are not
as such reducible to comparisons of manyness. The sizes of
magnitudes cannot always be compared by comparing counts
obtained by measuring. Magnitudes of any kind can be
incommensurable. It is true that one cube may have to
another, or one weight may have to another, the same ratio
that three has to five, for example; but the one cube may have
to the other, or the one weight may have to the other, the
same ratio that a square’s diagonal has to its side.
Magnitudes are called “incommensurable”—incapable of
being measured together—not when they are of different
kinds, but rather when they are not measurable by the same
unit even though they are of the very same kind. Two magnitudes may be of the very same kind and yet it may be true that
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
whatever unit measures either one of them will not measure
the other one too. By a unit’s “measuring” a magnitude, we
mean that when the unit is multiplied (that is, when it is taken
some number of times), it can equal that magnitude.
Therefore, when magnitudes of the same kind are incommensurable, one of them has to the other a ratio that is not
the same as any numerical ratio.
The demonstrable existence of incommensurability
means that comparisons of size can only be approximated by
using numbers. We can, to be sure, be ever more exact—even
as exact as we please—but if we wish to speak with absolute
exactness, numbers fail us.
For the ancient Pythagoreans, who were the first to conceive of the world as thoroughly mathematical, knowledge of
the world was knowledge of numerical relationships. In the
world stretching out around us, the Pythagoreans saw correlations between shapes and numbers, such as we encountered
when we considered kinds of numbers, “square” numbers
and “cube” numbers, for example.
The Pythagoreans noted also that the movements of the
heavenly bodies take place in cycles. Their changes in position, and their returns to the same configuration, have
rhythms related by recurring numbers that we get by watching the skies and counting the times. With numbers, the
world goes round. We are surrounded by a cosmos. (Cosmos
is the Greek word for a “beautiful adornment.”) The beauty
on high appears to us down here in numbers.
But even the qualitative features of the world of nature
show a wondrous correlation with numbers: numbers make
the world sing. It is not merely that rhythm is numerical, it is
that tone or at least pitch, is too. If a string stretched by a
weight is plucked, it gives off some sound. The pitch of the
sound will be lowered as the string is lengthened. If another
string is plucked (a string of the same material and thickness,
and stretched by the same weight) then the longer the string
the lower will be the pitch of the sound produced by plucking it. Now, what set the Pythagoreans thinking was the rela-
FLAUMENHAFT
25
tion between numbers and harmony. (Harmonia is the Greek
word for “the condition in which one thing fits another”; a
word from carpentry thus is used to describe music.) When
the lengths of two strings of the sort just mentioned are
adjusted so that one of them has to the other the same ratio
that one small number has to another, or to the unit, then
there is music. With the Pythagoreans’ mathematicization of
music, mathematical physics begins.
Thus not only were the sights on high seen to be an
expression of mathematical relationships, so were the sounds
down here that enter our souls and powerfully move what
lies deep down within us. Thinking that nature is a display of
numerical relationships, and that human souls are gotten into
order by attending to those relationships, the Pythagoreans
formed societies that sought to shape the thinking of the
political societies of their time by being the givers of their
laws. It is said that when the discovery of incommensurability was first revealed to outsiders, thus making public the
insufficiency of number, the man who thus had undermined
the Pythagorean enterprise was murdered.
But never mind the whole wide world; even the relationships of size in mere geometrical figures cannot be understood simply in terms of multitudes. If geometry could in fact
be simply arithmeticized; if we could just measure lines
together, getting numbers which we could then just multiply
together, and thus simply express as equations all the relationships that we have to handle, then much in Euclid, in
Apollonius, and in the other classical mathematicians that is
difficult to handle could be handled much more easily—and
Descartes in the seventeenth century would not have had to
undertake a radical transformation of geometry. Instead of
manipulating equations, however, we must in the study of
classical mathematics learn to deal with non-numerical ratios
of magnitudes, and with boxes that are built from lines
devised to exhibit those ratios.
However, before we can freely deal with ratios, we must
learn what can be meant by calling two ratios the same—even
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when they are not the same as some numerical ratio. Euclid
tells us that in the Fifth Book of the Elements. That is long
before his discussion of number, which does not take place
until the Seventh Book, thus raising a question about what
kind of a teacher he is: after all, is it not a principle of good
teaching that questions should be raised before answers are
presented?
Incommensurability is responsible for the difficulty of
Euclid’s definition of sameness of ratio for magnitudes, as
well as for the difficulty that modern readers encounter in the
classical presentation of relationships of size generally. Let us
now look at that definition.
Part Four
Muchness Related After All: Euclid’s Definition of Same
Ratio
We insist that even when two magnitudes are incommensurable, their ratio can be the same as the ratio of two other
incommensurable magnitudes. For example, we insist that the
ratio which one square’s diagonal has to its side is the same
ratio which another square’s diagonal has to its own side.
Sameness of ratio for magnitudes is therefore not to be
defined in terms of measuring magnitudes: we could so define
it only if we could divide each of the magnitudes into pieces,
each equal to some magnitude that is small enough to be a
suitable unit, and then, when we counted up all of those small
equal pieces, we found no left-over unaccounted-for evensmaller piece of either of the magnitudes; but we cannot do
that with magnitudes that are incommensurable. Although we
can say that two ratios of magnitudes are the same as each
other if they are both the same as the same ratio of numbers,
we will not say that they are the same as each other only if
they are both the same as the same ratio of numbers.
What, then, is to be said instead? According to Euclid,
this: “Magnitudes are said to be in the same ratio, the first to
the second and the third to the fourth, when, if any equimultiples whatever be taken of the first and third, and any equi-
FLAUMENHAFT
27
multiples whatever of the second and fourth, the former equimultiples alike exceed, are alike equal to, or alike fall short of,
the latter equimultiples respectively taken in corresponding
order.”
When Euclid says for ratios of magnitudes, what sameness is, it is very difficult at first to understand just what he
means. While his definition may be the proper departure
point on a road that we need to travel, for a beginner it seems
to constitute a locked gate.
A key to open that locked gate, however, is this fact:
while there is no ratio of numbers that is the same as a ratio
of incommensurable straight lines, nonetheless every ratio of
numbers is either greater or less than such a ratio of straight
lines. That is to say: whatever ratio of numbers we may take,
we can decide whether the ratio of one line to another is
greater or less than it.
For example, we might ask: which is greater—the ratio of
the one line to the other, or the ratio of seven to twelve? We
would divide the second line into twelve equal parts, and
then take one of those pieces in order to measure the first
line. Suppose that this first line, although it may be longer
than six of these pieces put together, turns out to be shorter
than seven of them. We would conclude that the first line has
to the other line a ratio that is less than the numerical ratio of
seven to twelve.
Let us consider the ratio of lines that has been of such
concern to us, the ratio which a square’s diagonal has to its
side. And let us take the following ratio of numbers: the ratio
which that three has to two. As we have seen, the ratio of
lines that we are considering cannot be the same as any ratio
of numbers whatever; so it must be either greater or else less
than that ratio of numbers which we have taken. Which is it?
It must be less—because if it were greater (that is: if the
diagonal were greater than three-halves of the side), then the
diagonal taken two times would have to be greater than the
side taken three times. But if that were so, then a new square
whose side was the diagonal of the original square would
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have to be more than double the original square, as is shown
in Chart 4.
Having thus shown that the ratio of a square’s diagonal to
its side is less than the ratio which three has to two, we could
in like manner also show that the ratio of those two lines is
greater than the ratio that, say, four has to three. And we
could go on showing, for the ratio of any pair of numbers
which we choose, that the ratio of a square’s diagonal to its
side is greater or is less than the ratio of the pair of numbers
chosen.
Indeed, although no ratio of numbers is the same as the
ratio of a square’s diagonal to its side, we can nonetheless
confine this ratio of lines as closely as we please by using pairs
FLAUMENHAFT
29
of ratios of numbers, as follows. (The results are shown in
Chart 5.) Let us divide the square’s side into ten equal parts,
and take such a tenth part as the unit; then the diagonal will
be longer than fourteen of these units but shorter than fifteen
of them; then let us consider what we get when we take as the
unit the side’s hundredth part, and then its thousandth. We
can go on and on in that way, eventually reaching numbers
large enough to give us a pair of number-ratios that differ
from each other as little as we please; we can show it to be
greater than the ever-so-slightly-smaller number-ratio, and
smaller than the ever-so-slightly-greater number-ratio. So,
although the ratio of a square’s diagonal to its side cannot be
the same as any number-ratio, it can be confined between a
pair of number-ratios that differ from each other as little as
we please.
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The question that we want to answer, however, is not
when it is that ratios of magnitudes are almost the same, but
rather when it is that they are the very same—even when they
are not both the same as the same ratio of numbers. The key
to the answer, restating what we said, is this: given any ratio
of magnitudes, any ratio of numbers that is not the same as it
must be either greater than it or smaller.
That gives us the following answer: given two ratios of
magnitudes, they will be the same as each other (whether or
not they are the same as some ratio of numbers) whenever it
is true that—taking any ratio of numbers whatever—if this
ratio of numbers is greater than the one ratio of magnitudes,
then it is also greater than the other; and if it is less than the
one, then it is also less than the other.
Euclid’s definition seems much more complicated than
that, however, because it emphasizes “equimultiples.” Why
does it do that? Because that makes it simpler to compare
ratios of magnitudes with ratios of numbers: taking multiples
is a way to make the comparisons without performing any
divisions. We could in fact get a definition by using division,
but the definition would be clumsier if we did.
Let us put the notion of equi-multiples aside for a
moment, and consider multiples simply, in contradistinction
to divisions into parts.
Suppose, for example, that the ratio of some magnitude
(A) to another magnitude (B) is greater than the ratio of nine
to seven but less than the ratio of ten to seven. This means
that if we divide B into seven equal parts and we use as a unit
(for trying to measure A) one of those seventh parts of B, then
A will turn out to be greater than nine of those parts of B, but
less than ten of them. If A and B happen to be incommensurable, then, no matter how many equal parts into which we
divide B—that is, no matter how small we make the B-measuring unit with which we try to measure A, we will find that
we cannot divide A into pieces of that size without having a
smaller piece left over.
FLAUMENHAFT
31
So, in comparing the ratio of A to B with the numerical
ratio of some multitude m to some multitude n, it is less awkward to speak of A-taken-n-times and of B-taken-m-times
than to speak of the little piece of A that may be left over
when we divide A into m pieces that are each equal to the nth
part of B—or, in other words, the little piece that may be left
over in A, no matter how small are the equal parts into which
we divide B. To make the requisite comparisons, we must
consider multiples of magnitudes, but we need not consider
parts of them; we have to multiply, but we do not also have
to divide. Instead of trying to measure magnitudes together,
by dividing them and counting the parts, we can speak merely
of multiples of the magnitudes.
What we have just now seen is this: to say that the ratio
of magnitude A to magnitude B is either the same as the
numerical ratio of m to n, or is greater or less than it, is to say
that A-taken-n-times is either equal to B-taken-m-times, or is
greater or less than it. Let us take that and put it together with
what we saw earlier—which was this: to say that the ratio of
A to B is the same as the ratio of C to D is to say that whatever numerical ratio you may take (say, of m to n) this ratio
of numbers will not be the same as, or greater than, or less
than one of the ratios of magnitudes unless it is likewise so
with respect to the other one.
All that remains is for multiples of a certain sort to be
brought in—namely, “equi-multiples.” Equimultiples of two
magnitudes are two other magnitudes that are obtained by
multiplying the two original magnitudes an equal number of
times. Here, as Chart 5 shows, both ratios’ antecedent terms
(namely, A and C) are each taken n times, and their consequent terms (namely, B and D) are each taken m times. In
other words, equimultiples (nA and nC) are taken of the first
and third magnitudes (A and C); and also equimultiples (mB
and mD) are taken of the second and fourth magnitudes (B
and D). And m and n are any numbers at all: we are interested
in all the equimultiples of the first and third magnitudes, and
also of the second and fourth ones.
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Now at last we are in a position to see that Euclid’s definition is not so bewildering as might have seemed at first
glance. There are several ways of saying what we can do with
what we have seen. In abbreviated form, they are exhibited in
Chart 7.
FLAUMENHAFT
33
Now in interpreting the chart, just remember that whenever we say “IF something, THEN something else,” that is
equivalent to saying “NOT something UNLESS something
else.” So, the ways laid out in the chart are these:
First way: Staying with ratios, we can say that two ratios
of magnitudes (call them the ratios of A to B, and of C to D)
are the same if, and only if, whatever numerical ratio we may
take (say the ratio that some number called m has to some
other number called n) the following is true: that numerical
ratio which m has to n will not be the same as, or greater
than, or less than one of the two ratios of magnitudes, unless
it is likewise so with respect to the other one.
Second way: We might want to get more explicit by making divisions into equal parts—that is, divide B into n equal
parts and do the same to D (these, B and D, being the conse-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
quent terms of the two ratios). Then the ratios would be the
same if the following is true: antecedent term A will not be
greater than, or less than, or equal to m of those nth parts of
its consequent term B unless the other antecedent term C is
likewise so with respect to that same number m of those nth
parts of its own consequent term D.
Third way: Someone who was willing to do all that
(namely, willing to divide magnitudes into equal parts and
then count them up and compare sizes) might insist on using
fractions to restate that as follows: A will not be greater than,
or less than, or equal to m/nths of B unless C is likewise so
with respect to that same fraction (m/nths) of D.
Fourth, and final way: Rather than getting into the complicated business of dividing, counting divisions, and comparing sizes, even though we can briefly restate it all by using
fractions, we might simply take multiples alone; and then we
would say that the ratios are the same if the following is true:
A-taken-n-times will not be greater than, or less than, or
equal to B-taken-m-times unless C-taken-exactly-as-manytimes-as-A is likewise so with respect to D-taken-exactly-asmany-times-as-B.
Those are several ways to determine, despite incommensurability, when we may say that the ratio of one magnitude
to another is the same as the ratio of a third magnitude to a
fourth one. The first way formulates our initial insight, and
the final way formulates Euclid’s definition of same ratio for
magnitudes. Euclid’s definition, like the others, covers all
ratios of magnitudes, whether or not they are the same as
ratios of multitudes; but, unlike the others, it manages to do
so by speaking simply of multitudes of magnitudes.
Magnitudes and multitudes are not the same as each
other, nor is either of them the same as ratios of them, but
magnitudes and multitudes and their ratios are all, in a way,
alike. How?
In the first place, any two magnitudes of the same kind
are equal, or else one of them is greater than the other; and
likewise, any two multitudes are equal, or else one of them is
FLAUMENHAFT
35
greater than the other. Moreover, any magnitude has a ratio
to any other magnitude of the same kind, just as any multitude has a ratio to another multitude. Finally, any two ratios
(whatever it may be that they are ratios of, whether magnitudes or multitudes) are the same as each other, or else one of
them is greater than the other. This last fact supplies the
insight that enabled Euclid to define same ratio for magnitudes regardless of whether the magnitudes are commensurable.
Euclid’s definition can help us to understand what
enabled Dedekind several thousand years afterward to define
“the real numbers” in terms of “the rational numbers.”
Dedekind found himself in the following situation. In modern times, after proportions containing magnitudes and multitudes had given way to equations containing “real numbers,” there was still some difficulty in saying just what “real
numbers” were. To say much about the matter, it seemed necessary to refer not only to multitudes to which we come by
counting (that is, numbers in the strict sense) but also to magnitudes that we visualize (namely, lines). If we place the
counting numbers along a line (as in the top portion of Chart
8), it is then clear not only where to put all the “rational numbers,” including those which are fractional and those which
are non-positive (as in the middle portion of the chart)—but
also where to put such “irrationals” as “the square root of
two.” To put “the square root of two” in its place, for example, (as in the bottom portion of the chart) just erect a square
that has a side that is a unit long, and swing its diagonal
down.
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But if “the square root of two” is a number, it should be
definable without appealing to visualization. After all, we
need not visualize in order to count, or even to go on to think
up fractions and negatives. That thought troubled Dedekind
as he taught calculus in the nineteenth century, relying upon
appeals to a number-line. He finally saw how to treat “real
numbers” (the modern counterpart of Euclidean ratios of linear magnitudes) in terms of collections of “rational numbers”
(the modern counterpart of Euclidean ratios of numbers),
thus making it more plausible to speak of the “real numbers”
as really numbers.
Reading Dedekind is one way to think about what it
means to rely on a system of “real numbers.” Unless we do
think through the meaning of relying on a system of real
numbers, many of the things we take for granted in the modern world are without foundation.
But does Dedekind’s work simply represent progress
beyond Euclid’s, or are very important differences covered
over by the important similarities between what Dedekind
had his mind on and Euclid his?
Ratios relate multitudes, or magnitudes. Ratios (like multitudes) have homogeneity, and also (like magnitudes) have
continuity; but magnitudes do not have homogeneity, and
multitudes do not have continuity. Ratios themselves are
FLAUMENHAFT
37
therefore not things of the very same sort as the things that
they relate.
Ratios are not things of the same sort as quotients either.
To be sure, ratios are like quotients in that they are quantitative. Like any two magnitudes of the same sort, or any two
multitudes—or any two quotients—any two ratios (whether
of magnitudes or of multitudes) have an order of size. But
quotients, unlike ratios, are like what they are quotients of: a
quotient is itself a “real number” that is obtained through the
operation of dividing a “real number” by a “real number”; if
A and B are “real numbers,” then the quotient A/B is a “real
number” also.
Yet, although ratios and “real numbers” are things of different sorts, they do have a similarity—and not merely that
they are both quantitative. Although the magnitudes are not
homogeneous, and the multitudes are not continuous, the
ratios are both homogeneous and continuous—and so also
are “the real numbers.”
Part Five
Mathematics and the Modern Mind
In all this, we have been considering the classical handling of
numbers and lines in its difference from modern notions
which conflate the two, but we have not considered what it
was that led to the conflation. That is, indeed, an immensely
important matter, but it is too long a story to be told now. To
tell that tangled tale, one must traverse much of the road that
constitutes the Mathematics Tutorial at St. John’s College.
Along that arduous road, it is easy to be overwhelmed, however, and thus to lose sight of why it is worth our while to traverse it at all—so perhaps at least something should be said
about it now.
Euclid’s Elements prepares us for a higher study in geometry, the Conics of Apollonius. This was, for almost two-anda-half millenia, the classic text on the curves which—following the innovative terminology of Apollonius—came to be
called the “parabola,” the “hyperbola,” and the “ellipse.”
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Apollonius’ conic sections were lines first obtained upon a
plane by cutting a cone in various ways; they were then characterized by relative sizes and shapes of certain boxes formed
by associated straight lines standing in certain ratios. After
Descartes, although the names of those curves persisted, and
they continued to be called collectively “the conic sections,”
they nonetheless eventually ceased to be studied as such: they
came to be studied algebraically. But although Descartes’
Geometry may be in fact what it has been called—the greatest single step in the progress of the exact sciences—no one
could clearly see it as that without studying Apollonius, for
Cartesian mathematics has shaped the world we live in and
shapes our minds as well.
Apollonius tells his tale obliquely. He does not give us
questions, but rather gives us only answers that are too hard
to sort out and remember unless we ourselves figure out what
questions to ask. About Apollonius as a teacher we must ask
whether his work is informed by wisdom and benevolence.
Descartes did not think so. In his own Geometry, and in his
sketch of rules for giving direction to the native wit,
Descartes found fault with the ancient mathematicians.
Descartes severely criticizes them—for being show-offs.
He says that they made analyses in the course of figuring
things out, but then, instead of being helpful teachers who
show their students how to do what they themselves had
done, they behaved like builders who get rid of the scaffolding that has made construction possible. Thus they sought to
be admired for conjuring up one spectacular thing to look at
after another, without a sign of how they might have found
and put together what they present.
Descartes also suggests, however, that they did not fully
know what they were doing. They did not see that what they
had could be a universal method. They operated differently
for different sorts of materials because they treated materials
for operation as simply objects to be viewed. Hence they
learned haphazardly, rather than methodically, and therefore
they did not learn much. Mathematics for them was a matter
FLAUMENHAFT
39
of wonderful spectacle rather than material for methodical
operation. The characteristic activity of the ancient mathematicians was the presentation of theorems, not the transmission and application of the ability to solve problems.
They had not discovered the first and most important
thing to be discovered: the significance of discovery. They
had not discovered the power that leads to discovery and the
power that comes from discovery. They were not aware that
the first tools to build are tools for making tools. They were
too clever to be properly simple, and too simple to be truly
clever. They were blinded by a petty ambition. Too overcome
by their ambition, they could not be ambitious on the greatest scale.
Were the ancient mathematicians as teachers guilty of the
charges set out in that Cartesian critique? Were they guilty of
the obtuseness of which Descartes in his Geometry accused
them—were they guilty of the desultory fooling-around and
disingenuous showing-off of which Descartes had accused
them earlier, in his Rules? You cannot know unless you study
them.
In any case, the study of Euclid and Apollonius gives
access to the sources of the tremendous transformation in
thought whose outcome has been the mathematicization of
the world around us and the primacy of mathematical physics
in the life of the mind. Scientific technology and technological science have depended upon a transformation in mathematics which made it possible for the sciences as such to be
mathematicized, so that the exact sciences became knowledge
par excellence. The modern project for mastering nature has
relied upon the use of equations, often represented by graphs,
to solve problems. When the equation replaced the proportion as the heart of mathematics, and geometric theoremdemonstration lost its primacy to algebraic problem-solving,
an immense power was generated. It was because of this that
Descartes’ Geometry received that accolade of being called
the greatest single step in the progress of the exact sciences.
To determine whether it was indeed such a step, we need to
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
know what it was a step from as well as what it was a step
toward. We cannot understand what Descartes did to transform mathematics unless we understand what it was that
underwent the transformation. By studying classical mathematics on its own terms, we prepare ourselves to consider
Descartes’ critique of classical mathematics and his transformation not only of mathematics but of the world of learning
generally—and therewith his work in transforming the whole
wide world.
It is in the study of Apollonius on the conic sections that
the modern reader who has been properly prepared by reading Euclid can most easily see both the achievement of classical mathematics and the difficulty that led Descartes and his
followers to turn away from it.
It all has to do with ratio, and with notions of number
and of magnitude. For Apollonius, as for Euclid before him,
the handling of ratios is founded upon a certain view of the
relation between numbers and magnitudes. When Descartes
made his new beginning, almost two millenia later, he said
that the ancients were handicapped by their having a scruple
against using the terms of arithmetic in geometry. Descartes
attributed this to their not seeing clearly enough the relation
between the two mathematical sciences. Before modern readers can appreciate why Descartes wanted to overcome the
scruple, and what he saw that enabled him to do it, they must
be clear about just what that scruple was. Readers must, at
least for a while, make themselves at home in a world where
how-much and how-many are kept distinct, a world which
gives an account of shapes in terms of geometric proportions
rather than in terms of the equations of algebra. For a while,
readers must stop saying “AB-squared,” and must speak
instead of “the square arising from the line AB”; they must
learn to put ratios together instead of multiplying fractions;
they must not speak of “the square root of two.”
Mathematical modernity gets under way with Descartes’
Geometry. By homogenizing what is studied, and by making
the central activity the manipulative working of the mind,
FLAUMENHAFT
41
rather than its visualizing of form and its insight into what
informs the act of vision, Descartes transformed mathematics
into a tool with which physics can master nature. He went
public with his project in a cunning discourse about the
method of well conducting one’s reason and seeking the truth
in the sciences; and this discourse introduced a collection of
scientific try-outs of this method, the third and last of which
was his Geometry.
For those who study Euclid and Apollonius in a world
transformed by Descartes, many questions arise: What is the
relation between the demonstration of theorems and the solving of problems? What separates the notions of how-much
and how-many? Why try to overcome that separation by the
notion of quantity as represented by a number-line? What is
the difference between a mathematics of proportions, which
arises to provide images for viewing being, and a mathematics of equations, which arises to provide tools for mastering
nature? How does mathematics get transformed into what
can be taken as a system of signs that refer to signs—as a symbolism which is meaningless until applied, when it becomes a
source of immense power? What is mathematics, and why
study it? What is learning, and what promotes it?
With minds that are shaped by the thinking of yesterday
and of the days before it, we struggle to answer the questions
of today, in a world transformed by the minds that did the
thinking. We will proceed more thoughtfully in the days
ahead if we have thought through that thinking for ourselves.
Our scientific past is not passé.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
43
The Husserlian Context of
Klein’s Mathematical Work
Burt C. Hopkins
I have to begin my remarks with the admission of my ignorance about their ultimate topic, which is neither Edmund
Husserl’s nor Jacob Klein’s philosophy of mathematics nor,
for that matter mathematics itself, but numbers. I do not
know what numbers are. To be sure, I can say and read, usually with great accuracy, the numerals that indicate the prices
of things, street addresses, what time it is, the totals on my
pay stubs, the typically negative balance in my checkbook at
the end of each month, and so on. Moreover, I know how to
count and calculate with them, though usually with less accuracy no matter how much I try to concentrate on what I am
doing.
But if I am asked or try to think about what they are
when, for instance, I say my address is six hundred fifty-three
Bell Street, or that my house has two bedrooms, or that I only
have twenty bottles of wine left, it is obvious to me that I do
not know what I am talking about. Of course, I know that my
address refers to my abode, that my bedrooms are the rooms
in the house with beds, and that my wine is something I drink
solely for its medicinal purposes. But the six hundred fiftythree, the two, or the twenty, what are they? I do not know.
Likewise, if I am asked or try to think about what the
numbers are with which I calculate, when for instance I think
that because I need one-half pound of steak per person to
feed each of my dinner guests, that I expect five guests, and
that therefore I need two and a half pounds to feed my guests,
Burt Hopkins is Professor of Philosophy at Seattle University, and is Secretary
of the International Circle of Husserl scholars. He is the author of a book,
forthcoming from the University of Wisconsin Press, entitled Edmund Husserl
and Jacob Klein on the Origination of the Logic of Symbolic Mathematics:
An Inquiry into the Historicity of Meaning.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
or when I think that the price of two and a half pounds of
steak, at eight ninety-nine per pound is twenty-two dollars
and forty-seven and a half cents, I know well enough what
dinner guests, steak, and dollars and cents are. But the one
half and the eight ninety-nine with which I calculate, and the
two and a half and twenty-two and forty-seven and a half that
are the results of my calculations, what are they? I do notknow.
Some among us will say and, indeed have already said for
a long time, that numbers, any numbers, are amounts of
things, specifically, amounts of whatever it is that we count in
order to answer the question how many of the things in question there are. In my examples above, to talk or think about
two as the amount of my bedrooms, twenty as the amount of
my bottles of wine, five as the amount of my dinner guests,
eight ninety-nine as the amount of money it takes to buy a
pound of steak, twenty-two and forty-seven and a half as the
amount of money it takes to buy two and a half pounds of
steak, certainly does seem to make sense. But what about my
house address? Is six hundred fifty-three the answer to the
question of how many of my house? Or is the one half pound
of steak needed to feed each dinner guest the answer to the
question how many of pounds of steak? The numbers here do
not straight away appear to be telling us how many houses my
house is, since the answer to that question is that it is not
many at all but one; neither do numbers tell us how many
pounds of steak are needed to feed each dinner guest because
each does not need many pounds at all but only a half a
pound. And, to complicate things deliberately, let us consider
what it means, numerically speaking, if I have a negative balance in my checkbook at the end of the month. Whatever the
amount of the negative number, let us hypothetically say it is
an even negative one hundred six dollars, that certainly does
not seem to provide the answer to the question of how many
dollars and cents I have.
For the moment, however, let us push these concerns
aside and assume that a number really is the amount of some-
HOPKINS
45
thing. Moreover, let us suppose that the amount of something
or its number first makes sense to us when we count more
than one of something. Finally, let us suppose that any group,
that is, any collection of more than one of something, no matter how big, has a number, which is to say, an exact or definite amount that answers the question how many with
respect to the things in the group, and that this can be arrived
at by counting. Does this really answer the question what a
number is? Or, more precisely, does this really answer the
question what numbers are? I say numbers because when we
count we always use more than one number to arrive at the
exact amount of something, even though once we arrive there
we conclude the count by saying a single number.
What, then, are the numbers two, three, seven, or, if I
have a lot of enumerative stamina, five hundred eighteen, that
I say when, having nothing better to do, I count the grains of
sand I have decided to put into separate piles? Or, what are
the numbers two, three, seven, five hundred eighteen, that I
say when I count the crystals of salt that I use to duplicate the
numbers of grains of sand I previously put into piles? The
things counted and therefore their amounts are not the same;
that is to say, an amount of grains of sand and an amount of
salt crystals are different things. But are their numbers the
same? Is the two that is the amount of grains of sand the same
two that is the amount of crystals of salt?
If number is supposed really to be the amount of something, and if the stress is placed on the of something, then
number, as its (the something’s) amount, would be nothing
more or less than the two grains of sand, or, the two crystals
of salt, both of which, being different somethings, would also
be different numbers. This situation would be illustrated were
I to say that there are a number of people I do not know in
the room. If I proceeded to count them, whatever number I
came up with would be not just an exact amount of anything
whatever, but precisely the exact amount of people I do not
know in the room.
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On the other hand, if the stress were placed on the how
many of the amounts in question, then two would indeed be
how many grains of sand and crystals of salt there are in my
smallest piles of each, and therefore their amounts and hence
numbers would indeed be the same. This situation would be
illustrated were I to say all dogs, if they are naturally formed,
have the same number of legs, namely, four. The exact number is the same, though the legs are not, because, silly as it
sounds to say this, different dogs have different legs.
Now some might want to put an end to this whole line of
inquiry, but especially to my last question about whether
numbers of different things are different or the same, by saying that the obvious answer is that what numbers are are
abstract concepts. Hence they are really ideas, ideas that we
can relate to different things when we want to count or want
to apply the results of our calculations. But we do not have
to. Thus I can add 4 to 6 and get 10. I can multiply 10 times
10 and get 100, and so on, without having to think or answer
anybody’s question about 4 of what, or 6 of what, or 10 of
what, and so on. Just as it makes perfect sense to say that 2
plus 2 is 4, it does not make any sense to say 2 plus 3 is 4,
because everybody who can count knows 2 plus 3 is 5.
Perhaps. But perhaps not. And this is where Husserl and
then eventually Klein come in. But first Husserl. It is generally known that Edmund Husserl, the German philosopher
who, as the founder of the so-called phenomenological movement in philosophy, was responsible for one of the two dominant approaches to philosophy in the last century (the other
being so-called analytic philosophy), was originally a mathematician. Known likewise is that his first book, published in
1891, is titled Philosophy of Arithmetic.1 However, the contents of this book are not so well known, because, among
other reasons, soon after its publication both its author and
Gottlob Frege had some very critical things to say about
them.
For our purposes, however, the contents of the book are
more important than their criticism of them. From beginning
HOPKINS
47
to end, the book concerns the answer to the question whether
numbers are really abstract concepts that make perfect sense
without saying or thinking what they are numbers of; or
whether to make sense as numbers, numbers have to be spoken or thought about as being numbers of something. Husserl
began his answer to this question by first distinguishing
between two kinds of numbers, one of which he called
“authentic” and the other “symbolic.” We will discuss the latter first, because even though, as its name suggests, it is the
less authoritative kind of number, it is also the one with
which we are usually more familiar. A number is symbolic in
Husserl’s understanding when the number and the sign used
to designate it are indistinguishable. For example: 3. Most of
us have no doubt been taught or learned that this is the number three rather than what it really is, which is a number sign
or numeral. Indeed, even though most of us are also aware of
other numerals, for instance, Roman numerals, my suspicion
is that when we see such numerals we immediately interpret
what they really mean in terms of our numeral system, a system that was actually invented by the Arabs. A symbolic number, then, is a number that most of us—with or without thinking about it—identify with the sign that we either write or
read.
Most of us, that is, unless we have thought about the fact
that the signs used to designate numerals, and therefore these
numerals themselves, are based on what were originally and
still remain conventions, even if they are no longer recognized as such. Different conventions mean different numerals, as we have just seen. But what about the numbers? Do
different numerals mean different numbers? Many when
faced with this question conclude no. Their thinking here is
that numbers remain the same, however different the numerals that express them, because numbers are really concepts.
Hence, no matter what numeral or word is used to express
the number three, ‘three’ is a concept that remains the same
because it is not identical with some numeral (which is subject to change) or with a word from some language (which is
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subject to variability). Moreover, for just this reason number
is a properly abstract concept: it remains identical with itself
no matter what sign or word is used to express it.
Despite the sophistication of this view of number, it is
dead wrong according to Husserl, because if numbers were
really abstract concepts in this sense, then the most basic
operation of arithmetic—addition—becomes unintelligible.
For instance, if in adding the number two to the number two,
what we are really adding is the abstract concept of the number two to another (!) abstract concept of the number two,
then arriving at their putative sum, the abstract concept
‘four’, becomes a great mystery. Most obviously, there is the
problem of how a concept that is supposed to remain identical can nevertheless change into another concept that is also
supposed to remain identical. That is, the abstract concept
‘two’ is not supposed to be able to change as words and signs
can and do, but to remain what it is, namely, the number two.
Yet precisely this supposition has to be abandoned if talk of
adding the concept of two to the concept of two to get the
concept of four is to make sense, since when the number two
is added to the number two the sum is not two number twos
but the number four.
Indeed, it is precisely this consideration that led Husserl
to the realization that authentic numbers are not abstract concepts. This is, admittedly, a difficult thought. What, then, are
they, these authentic numbers, if they are not abstract concepts? Husserl’s answer is that they are the definite amounts
of definite things that have been grouped together by the
mind. What kind of things? Literally any kind. What definite
amounts? Pretty much the first ten, namely two, three, four,
five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Why are zero and one not
among these? Because they are not definite amounts, which in
the case of zero is obvious, while in the case of one is less so
but still fairly obvious, since one is not an amount; it is not
many. What has the mind to do with authentic numbers?
Plenty for Husserl, since not only do authentic numbers first
show up in counting, but also, only those definite things can
HOPKINS
49
be counted that have been grouped together by it to compose
what Husserl, and as we shall also see, ancient Greek philosophers and mathematicians, called a multiplicity. Moreover—
and this is the most important consideration for our purposes—an authentic number really is something that manifestly cannot be found in either the reality of the definite
things that are counted or in any relationship among them.
This last point requires closer scrutiny. If we ask how is it
that the first authentic number, two, is able to register a definite amount of definite things as ‘two’, in the sense that in
saying or thinking the number two, the things in question are
recognized as being exactly two with regard to their number,
we are then asking about something that is different from the
things that this number numbers as two. Husserl, following a
long philosophical and mathematical tradition, refers to what
is asked about in this question as the unity of this number. In
asking it, we are asking how it is that distinct things, in this
case two of them, can nevertheless be brought together as
precisely this, namely, the two that is articulated by the number two. This all-important question about the unity of
authentic numbers becomes more explicit when we consider
Husserl’s reason for thinking that only the first ten or so definite amounts can be authentic numbers. Husserl’s reason is
deceptively simple: the mind can only apprehend—all at
once—each of the definite items that are numbered in a number when these things do not exceed ten. When the amount
of definite things in a multiplicity of things exceeds ten, each
one of them cannot be apprehended all at once by the mind
as when, for instance, it counts thirty of them.
These considerations, do not provide us yet with
Husserl’s answer to the question of the unity of authentic
numbers, but only address what is at stake in it. What is at
stake is that in registering the definite amount of definite
things, an authentic number is bringing them together in a
way that cannot be explained by each of the things so brought
together, no matter whether these are considered by themselves or as each relates to the other things. Each considered
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by itself cannot explain it for the simple reason that authentic numbers are always amounts of something that is more
than one. Considering the relations among things cannot
explain it either—they may be side by side, or on top of, or
bigger and smaller than one another, and so on, because none
of these relations is even remotely numerical. Each definite
thing, as one thing, can only be registered as having a number by being brought together with other definite things, each
of which is also one, a bringing together which does not
apprehend the things brought together singly but precisely as
all together.
Husserl’s explanation of how the mind does this is as simple as it is remarkable. The mind combines things into groups
or collections in such a way that what is grouped or collected
forms a whole that is different from the group members or
collected items, even though as the whole of just these members or items, it is clearly related to them. For example, in a
row of trees, a gaggle of geese, or a flock of birds, what is
named by the row, gaggle, and flock is the whole Husserl has
in mind, a whole that cannot be separated from what it is a
whole of any more than it can be identified totally with it.
Authentic numbers for Husserl are also comprised of wholes
like this, so that the whole of the number three is clearly
related to each of the things it registers as three, without,
however, its being totally identical with them. Two distinct
but related things are involved for Husserl here. One is the
fact that there are groups and collections of this kind, and the
other is that they have their origin in the mind. The talk
about the mind’s involvement in originating groups and collections of things does not mean that these things are only figments of the mind. Husserl only mentions the mind to
explain something very specific, the fact that the unity, the
whole of authentic numbers that we have been talking about,
is neither an abstract concept nor something that can be
explained by the definite things it registers as to their exact
number. Once this is recognized, and only once it is recognized, are we then in a position to understand why Husserl
HOPKINS
51
tried to explain this unity—this being a whole—of authentic
numbers by the way the mind organizes and grasps things as
groups and collections.
Husserl is very specific about this. The mind considers
each thing that it groups or collects as something that belongs
to the whole of whatever it is grouping and collecting. In the
case of authentic numbers, it considers each as something, a
certain one, without attending in the slightest to any other
qualities that belong to what it collects. This is the case
because unlike other groups and collections, which are
groups of something specific, for example, geese or trees,
authentic numbers are wholes of quite literally anything
whatever. The moons of Jupiter, Homer’s psyche, the city of
Annapolis, etc., can be collected together and the collection
registered as an authentic number—so long, of course, as the
amount in the collection does not get too big. The process of
forming authentic numbers, as well as other kinds of groups
and collections, is expressed in language according to Husserl
by the word “and,” although both this process and the wholes
it generates are for him most decidedly not anything linguistic. Hence the formation of a group, such as the group or
whole of students in a room, comes about when one student
and one student and one student and one student, and so on,
are collected by the mind. Note well, however, that in this
example not just anything can be grouped together, but only
what belongs to the whole that is being grouped, namely, students. Likewise, the formation of a collection, the whole of
which is the red objects in a room, comes about when one of
any kind of red object and one of any kind of red object and
one of any kind of red object, and so on, are collected by the
mind. Again, as in the whole that is a group, not just anything
can be collected. Finally, the formation of a collection, the
whole of which is its number, comes about when something
and something are collected, and then the process is stopped.
More precisely, when the process of collecting is stopped
after something and something are collected, the first authentic number, two, is the result. Likewise, when something and
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
something, and something are collected, the authentic number three is the result, and so on, until the limit of authentic
numbers, ten, comes about.
Authentic numbers, then, are just such collections of
something, which is to say, of anything that can be considered
as simply one thing, without any other qualities or determinations of it being relevant to its belonging to a collection
that is numbered. Since its being just one is the only thing relevant here, Husserl follows a long tradition and refers to
these collected ones as “units.” Because authentic numbers
are amounts of units, Husserl can explain on their basis what
the understanding of numbers as abstract concepts cannot,
namely, addition. Adding two and two involves the combination of ‘one unit and one unit’ with ‘one unit and one unit’,
and hence, there is no mystery here, since ‘one unit and one
unit, added to ‘one unit and one unit’, yields ‘one unit and
one unit, and one unit, and one unit’, which is the authentic
number four.
Before considering what Husserl thinks happens to numbers when their number exceeds ten and they are no longer
authentic, let us step back for a minute. I have been talking
now for some time about something I have acknowledged my
ignorance of, namely, what numbers are. After considering
two common views of them—one that considers them to be
amounts of something and the other that considers them to
be abstract concepts—I have turned our attention to the contents of Husserl’s book on the philosophy of arithmetic. The
very question it attempts to answer is which of these two
views of number is correct. So far I have pointed out that
Husserl begins this investigation by distinguishing between
authentic and symbolic numbers, both of which we have now
discussed in some detail. Indeed, at this point it might seem
that Husserl’s answer to the question of whether numbers are
amounts of something or abstract concepts is pretty obvious,
since authentic numbers can explain what abstract conceptual
numbers cannot, namely, the basic operations of arithmetic.
However, things are not that simple because when we con-
HOPKINS
53
sider numbers greater than ten, Husserl thinks that they
become inauthentic, as they cannot be authentic. They cannot
be authentic, it will be recalled, because the mind cannot
grasp more than ten things all at once. Symbolic numbers on
Husserl’s understanding are therefore also in this sense inauthentic.
Even though they are inauthentic, however, symbolic
numbers are not inferior, mathematically speaking, to authentic ones for Husserl. On the contrary, because they deal with
numbers larger than ten, they come in handy any time calculation with large numbers is required, since without them, we
would be reduced to counting units when we calculate with
such numbers, which no doubt would be both tedious and
time consuming. At the time Husserl wrote his first book,
mathematicians and philosophers wanted an explanation
how it was possible to do what no one denies can be done: to
calculate with inauthentic numbers, which are symbolic and
so in some sense are abstract concepts. In the first ten chapters of The Philosophy of Arithmetic, Husserl attempted to
prove that authentic numbers and symbolic numbers are logically equivalent because each refers to the same objects,
specifically, the collections of more than one unit that authentic numbers register the first ten amounts of. He argued that
authentic numbers do this directly and symbolic numbers
indirectly. When Husserl reached chapter eleven, however, he
realized something that shook him to his depths, quite literally. (He later recounted a decade-long depression that
ensued as a result.) He realized not only that symbolic numbers did not refer to the same objects as authentic ones—to
collections of units—but also that the basic operations with
quantities that are known, what he called general arithmetic,
could only be explained on the basis of the very opposite of
what he had argued in the first ten chapters. General arithmetic only makes sense if the numbers it uses are symbolic in
the sense I discussed above, wherein the sign and the numerical concept are identical so that a number is interpreted to be
the sign that we write or read—what Husserl called “sense-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
perceptible” signs. Husserl also realized he had no idea of
how this is possible. As he described it some two decades
later, “how symbolic thinking is ‘possible’, how...mathematical...relations constitute themselves in the mind...and can be
objectively valid, all this remained mysterious.”2
Thus we can say that, while recognizing that some numbers are clearly definite amounts of units and others are
abstract, symbolic concepts because they do not refer to such
units, Husserl came to see that he did not know what either
of them really is. Husserl eventually thought he could solve
this mystery by explaining the manipulation of symbolic
numbers, or, more precisely, number symbols, as well as all
mathematical symbols, in terms of what he called “the rules
of a game,” rules that were invented not by mathematics but
by logic. Mathematics thus came to be understood by Husserl
as a branch of logic. Moreover, Husserl thought that all the
rules invented by logic have their foundation in concepts that
are true of other concepts, these other concepts, in turn,
being true of anything whatever, that is, anything that can be
experienced and therefore thought of as an individual object.
As a consequence, Husserl’s eventual explanation of how
symbolic mathematics is possible, in The Crisis of European
Sciences, was really not so far from his failed first attempt at
explanation. To be sure, his later explanation does not characterize number symbols as referring to the same objects that
authentic numbers do, namely to units, but it did trace the
truth of the logic that invented the rules for manipulating
them to a basis in individual objects. This, we shall soon see,
is a problem if we follow Jacob Klein’s mathematical investigations, which I am going to suggest can best be followed by
first considering their Husserlian context.
The bulk of Klein’s mathematical investigations are contained in his Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of
Algebra, which as many of you know was originally published
in German as two long articles in 1934 and 1936 and translated into English in 1968 by St. John’s tutor and former
Dean of the College, Eva Brann.3 The historical nature of the
HOPKINS
55
topic announced by its title might initially seem to be far
removed from what we now know is the systematic nature of
Husserl’s topic in Philosophy of Arithmetic. However, one
does not need to read very far in Klein’s book to discover that
he understands the key to the historical investigation of his
topic to lie precisely in the distinction between symbolic and
non-symbolic numbers. Specifically, he expresses the view
from the start not only that the symbolic number concept is
something that makes modern, algebraic mathematics possible, but also, that symbolic numbers were entirely unknown
to ancient Greek mathematicians and philosophers. The very
point of departure for Klein’s investigation of the origin of
algebra is therefore informed by his view that unless the nonequivalence of ancient Greek numbers and modern symbolic
numbers is recognized, the change in the nature of the very
concept of number that took place with the transformation of
classical mathematics into modern mathematics in the sixteenth century will go unrecognized.
Klein’s thought here can be made clearer by closely considering precisely how he characterizes the difference
between the ancient Greek numbers and the modern symbolic ones. Ancient Greek numbers or arithmoi are manifestly
not abstract concepts, but rather beings that determine definite amounts of definite things. In contrast, symbolic numbers
are characterized by him to be abstract concepts that do not
refer to anything definite except that which is referred to by
their sense-perceptible signs. When we consider the fact that
Husserl articulated the difference between authentic and
symbolic numbers in precisely these terms, the resemblance
between Klein’s and Husserl’s view of the distinction between
symbolic and non-symbolic numbers is striking. So striking is
it in fact that some have drawn the conclusion that Husserl
should be given precedence in this matter, as either the source
or the major influence on Klein’s formulation of the distinction in question.4 These matters, however, are not so simple.
To begin, it is important to keep in mind that Husserl
sought in Philosophy of Arithmetic to demonstrate the logical
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equivalence of non-symbolic and symbolic numbers, whereas
Klein’s book begins with the insight that this is impossible, an
insight, as we have seen, Husserl arrived at only reluctantly.
Moreover, subsequent to his first book Husserl explains the
relationship between symbolic and authentic numbers as a
matter of logic. In his Logical Investigations (1900) and
Formal and Transcendental Logic (1927), the relationship is
explained as a matter of the translation of logical truths into
rules for the manipulation of symbols. Logical truths for
Husserl are rooted in concepts that are true of other concepts, other concepts that, in turn, can be traced back to
truths that are rooted in individual objects. Husserl calls the
rules established on the basis of this logic the “rules of a
game,” because even though they permit calculational operations on symbols that yield mathematically correct results,
these operations and hence the very process of symbolic calculation have nothing to do with insight into concepts that
pertain to the objects to which they are ultimately related,
and therefore nothing to do with real knowledge. In a word,
Husserl thought he resolved the issue of symbolic and
authentic numbers by exposing symbolic calculation to be a
“technique” whose cognitive justification can only be provided on the basis of the conceptual knowledge of individual
objects that logic provides.
Klein, however, thought otherwise. He thought that it is
impossible to explain the sharp distinction between non-symbolic and symbolic numbers on the basis of the knowledge—
logical or any other kind—of individual objects. He conducted an historical investigation into how an aspect proper
to ancient Greek arithmoi was transformed into modern symbolical numbers and concluded that the objects referred to by
each kind of number are fundamentally different. The objects
referred to by arithmoi are definite, which is to say, individual. The objects referred to by symbolic numbers are indefinite. They refer neither to individuals nor to their qualities
and are therefore indeterminate. Individual objects, both
Husserl and Klein agree, are objects that we encounter in our
HOPKINS
57
experience of the world and thus, they can be pointed to.
Moreover, their qualities, which either some (general qualities) or all (universal qualities) individual objects share, are
qualities that, even though they are not individual, can nevertheless be spoken about in connection with the individual
objects that we do encounter in the world. For instance, we
can point to dogs and cats, each one of which is therefore
individual. We can also talk about their general or universal
qualities and relate these to the individual dogs and cats that
we encounter in the world. Indeterminate objects, on the
contrary, can never be encountered in our experience of the
world, and therefore they cannnot be pointed to. Husserl and
Klein also agree that because their objects are not determinate
in this very precise sense, symbolic numbers cannot have a
direct relationship to any individual objects in the world or to
their qualities. Finally, both Husserl and Klein agree that symbolic numbers themselves, and not their indeterminate
objects, are nevertheless encountered in the world: namely,
they are encountered as the sense-perceptible signs that, we
mentioned earlier, many of us interpret as numbers.
Where Husserl and Klein disagree, or more accurately,
where Klein would have had to express his departure from
Husserl’s understanding of the relationship between symbolic
and non-symbolic numbers, had he chosen to do so, has to do
with the possibility of theoretically clarifying the philosophical meaning of symbolic numbers. Husserl thought this could
be done—indeed, he thought he did it in his two books on
logic. Klein did not think it could be done. In fact, as we shall
see, Klein’s mathematics book explains why the very attempt
to clarify theoretically the philosophical meaning of symbolic
numbers and mathematical symbolism generally is doomed to
failure. It is so doomed because all the concepts available to
provide such a theoretical clarification, without exception,
only make sense when the philosophers or anyone else using
them are talking about individual objects and their qualities.
Klein explains why this is the case by establishing a fundamental difference in what he calls the “conceptuality”5 of
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the concepts that belong to ancient Greek and modern science. He uses this term to articulate both the way in which
the concepts proper to these respective sciences are structured and the status of their relationship to the non-conceptual realities of both the mind and the world. Klein thinks
that despite the continuity discernable in the technical vocabulary of ancient Greek mathematics and philosophy and their
modern counterparts, the mathematical and philosophical
significance of each of the words in it is nevertheless radically
divergent for the ancients and moderns. Thus in his view the
fundamental significance of words like knowledge, truth,
concept, form, matter, nature, energy, number, and so on is
completely different for the ancient Greeks and the moderns
because of the differences in the respective conceptualities of
each. In other words, Klein thinks that these conceptualities
shape the meaning of words, rather than the other way
around, that is, rather than the significance of words shaping
the structure of the conceptualities.
Klein locates the key example of the shift from the
ancient Greek to the modern conceptuality in the transformation the concept of number undergoes in the sixteenth
century. Prior to Viète’s invention of the mathematical symbol, the concept of number according to Klein always only
meant a definite amount of definite things, a meaning that
was established by the ancient Greeks and that remained
operative in both European mathematics and the Europeans’
everyday praxis of counting and calculation until the invention of algebra. Klein claimed in his book—but did not elaborate—that this transformation is paradigmatic for the conceptuality that structures the modern consciousness of the
world.
Before considering in more detail Klein’s account of this
exemplary transformation of the conceptuality of number, a
few words about the potentially misleading talk of the “concept” of number are in order. Klein engages in such talk when
his investigation is comparing what he refers to as the different “number concepts” of ancient Greek and modern mathe-
HOPKINS
59
matics. It is potentially misleading because for Klein the most
salient difference between in these number concepts is
located in the fact that the ancient Greek “concept” of number is precisely something that is not at all a concept, but a
being, while the modern “concept” of number is precisely
something that is not a being but a concept. The object of the
word “concept” in these comparative contexts is, I think,
clearly the “conceptuality” of ancient Greek and modern
numbers, which means it would be a mistake to attribute to
Klein in such contexts the thought that in ancient Greek and
modern mathematics numbers are concepts, albeit different
in kind. Klein, however, also talks about the ancient Greek
“arithmos-concept” (arithmos-Begriff or Anzahl-Begriff) and
the modern “number-concept” (Zahl-Begriff), which again is
potentially misleading, for the same reasons. Yet here, too,
careful consideration again discloses that such talk always
occurs within the context of his comparison of what he presents as the different ancient Greek and modern characterizations of numbers, only one of which formulated them as concepts.
Before elaborating Klein’s account of these different characterizations, I want to raise and then answer one more question. From what perspective was Klein able to compare the
ancient Greek and modern numbers? Klein, after all, was neither ancient nor Greek but, by his own admission, thoroughly
modern. How, then, was he able nevertheless to get sufficient
distance from the presuppositions that inform his modernity,
from his modern outlook and consciousness, such that he
could encounter and investigate what, again by his own
admission, are the radically different presuppositions of the
ancient Greeks?
I think the answer to this question can be found in the single reference in Klein’s published work to Husserl’s
Philosophy of Arithmetic.6 It occurs in “Phenomenology and
the History of Science,” an article Klein wrote for a memorial
volume of essays on Husserl’s phenomenology published in
1940, two years after Husserl’s death. In this article Klein did
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not at all hesitate to articulate the philosophical significance
of his 1934 and 1936 investigations of ancient Greek mathematics and the origin of modern algebra in terms of Husserl’s
last writings, which were published in 1936 and1939.7 In
these writings Husserl traces the cause of the crisis of
European sciences to their failure to grasp properly the scope
and limits of scientific methods that are rooted in modern
mathematics for understanding the non-physical, which is to
say human spiritual reality together with the world of its
immediate concerns. I will come back to this theme at the end
of my remarks. I want to focus for now on Klein’s reference
to what he characterizes in this article as Husserl’s “earliest
philosophical problem,” namely “the ‘logic’ of symbolic
mathematics.” He asserts, “The paramount importance of
this problem can be easily grasped, if we think of the role that
symbolic mathematics has played in the development of modern science since the end of the sixteenth century.” Klein concludes his remarks on “Husserl’s logical researches” by saying
that these researches “amount in fact to a reproduction and
precise understanding of the ‘formalization’ which took place
in mathematics (and philosophy) ever since Viète and
Descartes paved the way for modern science.”
Klein’s qualification that Husserl’s logical researches
“amount . . . to” both a “reproduction” and “precise understanding” of the “formalization” in mathematics initiated by
Viète contains the key to my answer to the question. It indicates that Klein, but not Husserl, was aware of the historical
significance of these researches. The result of the “formalization” in mathematics referred to here by Klein concerns the
“indeterminacy” of the object of mathematical symbols that I
called attention to earlier, the absence of any direct reference
to both individual objects and their general and universal
qualities that is the mathematical symbols’ most salient characteristic. Because Klein thought Husserl’s logical researches
in Philosophy of Arithmetic amount in fact to the reproduction and precise understanding of the historical genesis of this
formalization, it would follow from this that Klein under-
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61
stood that work’s investigation of the relationship between
authentic and symbolic numbers to mirror what his own
research presents as the relationship between the ancient
Greek arithmos and the modern symbolic number.
This being the case, the question of image and original
suggested by my mirror metaphor arises, namely, did
Husserl’s investigations mirror Klein’s or Klein’s Husserl’s?
Here I think chronology is relevant, which would suggest that
what enabled Klein to encounter the presuppositions of both
his own modern as well as the ancient Greek conceptuality
was Husserl’s reluctant discovery in Philosophy of Arithmetic
that the formal conceptual status of symbolic numbers cannot
be rendered intelligible in terms of authentic numbers. By
saying this, however, I want to emphasize in the strongest
terms possible that I am not suggesting what some others
have suggested, namely, that what makes Klein’s comparison
of the conceptuality of the ancient Greek and modern numbers possible is his projection of Husserl’s “concepts” of
authentic and symbolic numbers back into the history of
mathematics.8 On the contrary, I want to suggest and then
develop a much more subtle and more radical claim.
Husserl’s failure provided Klein with the guiding clue that
enabled him to trace and illuminate certain historical dimensions of that very failure. Klein detected an historical transformation of non-symbolic numbers: an aspect of their conceptuality was transformed into symbolic numbers. This discovery resulted in a more definitive philosophical account of
both kinds of numbers. Moreover, Klein discovered something of which Husserl had not the slightest inkling, namely,
that the formal conceptuality of symbolic numbers, and symbolic conceptuality in general, cannot be made intelligible on
the basis of theoretical concepts traceable to ancient Greek
science. And that discovery highlighted something more ominous: built into symbolic cognition is the misguided selfunderstanding that evaluates its own cognitive status as the
ever-increasing perfection of ancient Greek science’s theoretical aspirations.
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Klein’s account of the origination of algebra is really the
story of the simultaneous invention of the mathematical symbol, the symbolic formulae it makes possible, and the resultant novel art of symbolic calculation. It is a story with a such
a complex array of intricate subplots and such a diverse cast
of characters that it is not always easy to follow the action,
especially given its approximately two-thousand-year time
span. It is also a difficult story to follow, since not only are
there really no good and bad guys to identify with or to dislike, but its beginning as well as its ending is obscure. The
action takes place, for the most part, in the realm of pure
beings and pure concepts, a realm that is invisible to the eyes
and in which all the actors are likewise invisible and therefore, with some justification, referred to by many as
“abstract.” Despite its otherworldly aura, it is a story well
worth trying to follow because what it is about is the origin
of the mistaken identity of the very technique that has
enabled mathematical physics and the technology spawned
from it quite literally to transform the world. Unraveling the
plot is an exercise in discovering the true identity of this technique and, in the process, rediscovering something essential
about our relation to the world that the events surrounding
the technique’s origination continue to make it easy for us to
forget.
Turning now to the story: we have already seen that nonsymbolic and symbolic numbers are key players in Klein’s
tale. Guided by our discussion of Husserl’s account of them,
we are in a position to see what it means to say with Klein
that the non-symbolic numbers of the ancient Greeks are not
concepts, let alone abstract concepts: being definite amounts
of definite things, arithmoi were initially understood not only
to be inseparable from things but also to be what is responsible for the well-ordered arrangement proper to all their parts
and qualities. In other words, they were understood by the
Pythagoreans as the very being of everything that is. To be is
to be countable, and because to be countable each thing has
to be one, the one was very important, as was the odd and the
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63
even, since whatever is counted ends up being odd or even.
The one or the unit (monas), as something without which
counting is impossible, is therefore the most basic principle
(archê) of arithmos. The odd and the even, which order the
arithmos of everything countable, insofar as it has to be one
or the other, manifest the first two kinds (eidê) of arithmoi.
Moreover, since the even can be divided without ever arriving at a final arithmos, while the odd cannot be divided
evenly at all, because a one is always left over, these two kinds
are understood, respectively, as unlimited and limit.
It is important to note here three things, according to
Klein: (1) the arithmoi are inseparable from that which is
countable; (2) the most basic principle as well as the kinds of
arithmoi are not themselves arithmoi. In other words, they
are not numerical if by numerical we understand, as the
ancient Greeks did, number to be a definite amount of definite things; and (3) the arithmoi, being inseparable from what
is countable, are not abstract entities, and because they are
different from both their most basic principle and their kinds,
they are not even remotely “conceptual,” assuming for the
moment that it is even appropriate to use this adjective to
refer to the archê and eidê of arithmoi. It is important to note
these three things because, on Klein’s telling, no matter how
much the ancient Greek characterization of the mode of
being of arithmoi changes in what become, in Plato and
Aristotle, the two paradigmatic ways of its understanding it,
these three things about the arithmoi remain constant. In
Klein’s words, “All these characterizations stem from one and
the same original intuition [Anschauung], one oriented to the
phenomenon of counting.”9
While the discovery of incommensurable magnitudes
brought to an end the Pythagorean dream of a world in which
being counted was identical with being measured, Plato’s
positing of the invisible, indivisible, and therefore sensibly
pure mode of being of the archê of arithmoi brought into
being another dream, the dream of what Klein calls an arithmological ordering of the eidê responsible for arithmoi as
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well as anything else that is a being. As Klein relates it, Plato
realized that the Pythagorean account of the archê of arithmoi, the one or the unit, as something that is quite literally
inseparable from the sensible things that are countable on its
basis, presented an obstacle to understanding the true relation
of arithmoi to the soul when it counts. This is the case
because Plato must have noticed that even before, the soul
counts each one of the definite things that it perceives, it
already has some understanding of the arithmoi it employs in
arriving at the arithmos of such things. According to Klein,
Plato must have thought this possible because prior to counting sensible things the soul has available to it arithmoi that are
definite amounts of intelligible (noêta) units, intelligible in the
sense that they cannot be seen with the eyes, cannot be
divided like the things seen with the eyes, and cannot be
unequal like the things seen by the eyes. Just like the
Pythagoreans’ sensible arithmoi, these intelligible arithmoi
are either odd or even, though unlike the Pythagorean eidê,
those belonging to intelligible arithmoi are likewise intelligible, and thus cannot be seen with the eyes.
Now it has to be stressed here that absolutely nothing is
either abstract or general about Plato’s intelligible arithmoi.
They are not abstract because they are not lifted off anything.
They are not general because they are precisely definite
amounts of definite things, albeit in this case the things are
noeta. Moreover, they are not general because, just like the
Pythagorean arithmoi, they are not concepts: each arithmos is
a definite whole, the unity of which is exactly so and so many
intelligible units. What allows intelligible numbers to be used
in the counting of anything whatever is what Plato’s Socrates
never tired of pointing out to his interlocutors, namely, that
the true referents of our speech, in counting off amounts of
things or in anything else, are not sensible but intelligible
beings. Thus in counting what the soul is really aiming at
when it counts off in speech, the definite amounts of definite
sensible things, things that in being counted are treated as sensible units, are definite amounts of intelligible units. Indeed, it
HOPKINS
65
is precisely this state of affairs that allows the soul to count
anything that happens to be before it, since the true units of
its counting are not those that can be seen but precisely those
that can only be thought.
Plato’s way of explaining how the availability of intelligible arithmoi to the soul enables it to count anything whatever
means that these intelligible units are manifestly unlike the
units in Husserl’s authentic numbers. Plato’s intelligible units
explain the ability of arithmoi to count anything whatever
because they, and not the “whatever,” are each arithmos’ true
referent. In other words, for Plato—and for that matter, for
all the ancient Greeks including Aristotle10—there is no such
concept of any thing, or any object, or any being whatever.
Such a concept, as we have seen, is explained by Husserl in
terms of an abstracting activity of the mind that is so powerful it is powerful enough to create a concept so general that
literally anything whatever (Etwas überhaupt) can “fall under
it.” This is to say, for Husserl the mind is able to create a formal concept that has absolutely no determinate reference to
any individual thing in the world or to the general and universal qualities of such things. Klein’s point, and in my judgment the point is the fulcrum upon which the story told in his
math book pivots, is that until Viète invented algebra, the
power behind this abstraction—what Klein calls a symbol
generating abstraction—was something that the world had
never seen before.
Husserl’s concept of the units in authentic numbers is
therefore modern, which is something Klein was not only no
doubt aware of, but it is also no doubt the reason why Klein
silently passed over in silence Husserl’s investigations of the
logic of symbolic mathematics. Indeed, Klein’s book also
bypassed any reference to Husserl’s concept of intentionality
when he articulated the difference between the conceptuality
of non-symbolic and symbolic numbers in terms of the mediaeval concept of intentionality, and, again, no doubt it was for
the same reason: a part of the composition of Husserl’s concept of intentionality was already determined by the very for-
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mality that Klein was investigating the origin of, in the shift
from non-symbolic to symbolic numbers. Once this is realized, Klein’s use of the medieval concepts of first and second
intentional objects, rather than Husserl’s concepts of straightforward and categorial intentional objects, to talk about the
difference in the mode of being of non-symbolic and symbolic numbers makes perfect sense.
The transformation of an aspect of the ancient Greek
arithmoi into the modern, symbolic numbers, however, does
not make perfect sense. That is, Klein’s account of the shift in
the referent of ancient Greek and modern symbolic numbers
is something that does not, and indeed cannot, render theoretically transparent the philosophical meaning of either the
shift or the different numbers in question. The characterization of ancient Greek arithmoi in terms of their direct
encounter with either sense perceptible objects encountered
in the world or with intelligible objects encountered in the
soul—what Klein reports the medievals called first-intentional objects—does not explain what such arithmoi are, in
the precise sense of how it is that the different arithmoi render intelligible the different definite amount that characterizes each arithmos. Indeed, Klein never suggests that the concept of a first-intentional object can do this. Likewise, the
characterization of symbolic numbers as having their referent
in the mind’s conception, a conception the medievals called
the object of a second intention, does not render theoretically
perspicuous what symbolic numbers are, either. To characterize symbolic numbers as pertaining to that aspect of arithmoi
that concerns the “how many” of something, while at the
same time no longer pertaining to its exact determination that
each arithmos brings about, does not clarify theoretically
what a symbolic number is. In other words, pointing out that
the conceptuality of symbolic numbers disregards both the
units of the something whose definite amount it is the
province of arithmoi to determine and the exact amount of
these units that each arithmos registers, does not explain
what a symbolic number is—and neither does Klein’s account
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67
of how more than this shift is involved in its conceptuality.
Klein affirms that what is required in order for us to be dealing with a symbolic number is that the second-intentional
mode of being of the “how many,” which brings into the
world for the first time a formal concept because it is now
shorn of any connection to either first-intentional objects or
the exact determination of their amount, be expressed in a
sense-perceptible sign that is grasped by the mind as the object
of a first intention.
What Klein’s talk of objects of first and second intentions
accomplishes is to call attention to something that nobody
else in the twentieth century had seen, namely, that the invention of symbolic cognition represents nothing less than a
reversal of the pre-modern relationship between concepts
and objects: what were concepts for the ancient Greeks are
now objects and what were objects for them are now concepts. Modern “theoretical thinking,” being symbolical, is
thus necessarily blind to this reversal. Ancient “theoretical
thinking,” not being symbolical, is likewise necessarily blind
to it. It does not follow from this, however, that thinking per
se must remain blind to it. On the contrary, for a thinking that
is on its guard against falling victim to the most shameful
ignorance, that is, to thinking it knows what, in truth, no
mortal can know, not only is the shift in conceptuality articulated by Klein something that can be seen, but once seen, it
is something that the soul’s phronesis can never forget.
If we had more time, I would continue my remarks by
calling attention to what I think is the key to Klein’s account
of how something like a symbol generating abstraction was
able to come into the world, namely on the basis of Viète’s,
Stevin’s, Descartes’s, and Wallis’s formulating the method of
an art that permits calculation with what the ancient Greeks
characterized not as arithmoi but as their eidê. And, indeed, I
would call attention to the fact that, for Klein, with this not
only do the true objects of mathematics become conceptual,
that is, formal, but also, such concepts at the same time
become numerical. Finally, I would call attention to the par-
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allel Klein draws between the breaking of the bounds of the
intelligibility proper to the logos that is the result of Plato’s
formulation of the eidê of beings as having an arithmological
structure and the similar breaking of these bounds by Viète’s
numerical formulation of the symbolic calculation with the
species of numbers in symbolic cognition,11 and then ask the
following question: Do both of these attempts to comprehend beings theoretically transcend the limits of what can be
spoken of intelligibly for the same simple reason, namely, that
their theories presuppose a knowledge of what no mortal can
claim in truth really to know, namely that most wondrous gift
of the gods to humans—one and number?
Before I conclude, I would like to return very briefly to
Klein’s memorial essay on Husserl that I mentioned earlier
and to the matter of his articulation in that essay of the philosophical meaning of his mathematical investigations in terms
of Husserl’s of last writings, the so-called crisis texts. It is
important to draw attention here to the chronology of Klein’s
mathematical investigations and Husserl’s last writings,
because it is only in these writings that Husserl connects the
two themes that had already informed Klein’s earlier investigations of the history of mathematical concepts. Prior to
1936, when the second part of Klein’s investigations were
published, Husserl therefore had not yet recognized what
Klein had already recognized, and indeed investigated extensively, guided as I have suggested by Husserl’s first—and
failed—investigation of the relationship between non-symbolic and symbolic numbers. Klein recognized the connection
between the philosophical meaning of mathematical concepts
and the history of their origination.
Notes
Edmund Husserl, Philosophie der Arithmetik, ed. Lothar Eley,
Husserliana XII (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1970), 245; English translation: The Philosophy of Arithmetic, trans. Dallas Willard
(Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003).
1
HOPKINS
69
Edmund Husserl, Introductions to the Logical Investigations, ed.
Eugen Fink, trans. Philip J. Bossert and Curtis H. Peters (The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975), 35. German text, “Entwurf einer
‘Vorrede’ zu den ‘Logischen Untersuchungen’ (1913),” Tijdschrift
voor Philosophie (1939): 106-133, here 127.
2
Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of
Algebra, trans. Eva Brann (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1969;
reprint: New York: Dover, 1992). This work was originally published in German as “Die griechische Logistik und die Entstehung
der Algebra” in Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte der
Mathematik, Astronomie und Physik, Abteilung B: Studien, vol. 3,
no. 1 (Berlin, 1934), pp. 18–105 (Part I); no. 2 (1936), pp.
122–235 (Part II). Hereinafter referred to as GMTOA.
3
See the following: Hiram Caton, who claims that “Klein projects
Husserl back upon Viète and Descartes,” (Studi International Di
Filosophia, Vol 3 (Autumn, 1971): 222-226, here 225; J. Phillip
Miller, who writes “Although Husserl’s own analyses move on the
level of a priori possibility, Klein’s work shows how fruitful these
analyses can be when the categories they generate are used in studying the actual history of mathematical thought,” (Numbers in
Presence and Absence [The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982], 132;
Joshua Kates’ account is more circumspect, as he notes “[i]t is difficult to capture adequately . . . how much of Klein’s understanding
of Greek number is already to be found in Husserl, despite the
important differences between them,” (“Philosophy First, Last, and
Counting: Edmund Husserl, Jacob Klein, and Plato’s
Arithmological Eidê,” (Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, Vol.
25, Number 1 (2004), 65-97, here 94.
4
This is the literal translation of the word in question here,
“Begrifflichkeit,” which is rendered for the most part as “intentionality” in the English translation GMTOA. Because of this, the point
I make below about the “concept of number” and “number concepts” will be more familiar to readers of Klein’s original German
text.
5
Jacob Klein, “Phenomenology and the History of Science,” in
Philosophical Essays in Memory of Edmund Husserl, ed. Marvin
Farber (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1940),
143–163; reprinted in Jacob Klein, Lectures and Essays, ed. Robert
6
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B. Williamson and Elliott Zuckerman (Annapolis, Md.: St. John’s
Press, 1985), 65–84, here 70.
Edmund Husserl, “The Origin of Geometry,” in The Crisis of
European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David
Carr (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970). The
German text was originally published in a heavily edited form by
Eugen Fink as “Die Frage nach dem Ursprung der Geometrie als
intentional-historisches Problem,” Revue internationale de
Philosophie I (1939). Fink’s typescript of Husserl’s original, and significantly different, 1936 text (which is the text translated by Carr)
was published as Beilage III in Die Krisis der europäischen
Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine
Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, ed. Walter
Biemel, Husserliana VI (The Hague: Nijhoff, 11954, 21976).
Edmund Husserl, “Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und
die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die
phänomenologische Philosophie,” Philosophia I (1936), (the text of
this article is reprinted as §§ 1–27 of the text edited by Biemel).
7
8
See note 4 above.
9
GMOT, 54.
Aristotle’s dispute with Plato over the mode of being of the arithmoi studied by the discipline of mathematics was about the origin
of the units that they are the definite amounts of, and not whether
theoretical arithmoi are definite amounts of units.
10
“As Plato had once tried to grasp the highest science ‘arithmologically’ and therewith exceeded the bounds set for the logos (cf.
Part I, Section 7C), so here [in Viète’s invention of symbolic calculation] the ‘arithmetical’ interpretation leads to . . . the conception
of a symbolic mathematics,” the implication being, of course, that
such a conception exceeds the same bounds as did Plato’s attempt
to grasp dialectic in terms of the arithmoi eidetikoi (GMOT, 184).
11
71
Words, Diagrams, and Symbols:
Greek and Modern
Mathematics or “On the Need
To Rewrite The History of
Greek Mathematics” Revisited
Sabetai Unguru
Mademoiselle de Sommery, as Stendhal tells us in De
l’Amour, was caught “en flagrant delit,” i.e., in flagranti, by
her lover, who was shaken seeing his “amante” bedding down
another man. Mademoiselle was surprised by her lover’s
angry reaction and denied brazenly the event. When he
protested, she cried out: “Oh, well, I can see that you no
longer love me, you would rather trust your eyes than what I
tell you.”
The historian of mathematics should behave like
Mademoiselle’s lover: believe his eyes and not what mathematicians-turned-historians tell him about the texts he studies. There are optical illusions, it is true, but they are to be
preferred to the illusionary mental constructs of the mathematical historians. A text is a text is a text. Moreover,
metaphors aside, not everything is a text and it behooves the
cultural critic, and surely the historian, to relate only to written records as texts. Furthermore, texts are about something
definite and not every conceivable interpretation suits them
all. The Conica is about conic sections not about women. It
deals with three (or four) kinds of lines obtained by cutting a
Sabetai Unguru is Professor Emeritus and former Director of the Cohen
Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at the
University of Tel-Aviv. He is the author of a controversial study with the title
“On the Need to Rewrite the History of Greek Mathematics,” as well as of a
two-volume introduction to the history of mathematics. He is (with Michael
Fried) the co-author of Apollonius of Perga’s Conica: Text, Context, Subtext.
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conic surface with a plane, lines baptized by Apollonius as
parabolas, ellipses, hyperbolas, and opposite sections. It does
not deal with a classification of women according to their
degree of perfection, as seen by a male chauvinist pig, hiding
his true intentions behind the cloud of mathematical jargon.
Texts are made of words, sometimes accompanied by
illustrations; in the case of Greek geometry, the texts are
made of words and diagrams, C’est tout. And the diagram is,
in a very definite sense, the proposition. The words accompanying it serve to show how the diagram is obtained; they
provide us the diagram in statu nascendi. But in principle it
would be possible to supply the absent words to an extant
diagram, though I doubt the possibility of understanding a
reasonably sophisticated geometrical text in the absence of
diagrams. If there is a manipulative aspect to Greek geometry,
and I think there is, it resides in the construction, the bringing into being of the diagram, while the steps of the process
are supplied by the words accompanying the diagram, typically in the kataskeue (construction).
There are no true symbols in a Greek mathematical text.
What looks like symbols to the untrained modern eye are
actually proper names for identifying mathematical objects.
They are not symbols, and cannot be manipulated, as algebraic symbols are. Even in Diophantus, which is a late and
special case, his so-called symbols are actually verbal abbreviations, making his Arithmetica an instance of syncopated, not
symbolic, algebra, in Nesselmann’s tripartite division (Die
Algebra der Griechen).
In modern, post-Cartesian mathematical texts, on the
other hand, there are words and diagrams and symbols, but
the actual necessity of the first two ingredients is minimal,
serving heuristic, pedagogical, and rhetorical needs that can
be dispensed with, leaving the text in its symbolic nakedness.
It is no exaggeration to see modern mathematics as symbolic,
while ancient mathematics cannot be seen historically in symbolic terms. This being the case, interpretations of ancient
mathematical texts relying on their symbolic transmogrifica-
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tion are inadequate and distorting. They are ahistorical and
anachronistic, making them unacceptable for an understanding of ancient mathematics in its own right.
An ancient text—mathematical, philosophical, literary, or
whatever—is the product of a culture foreign to ours, whose
concerns, values, aims, standards, ideals, etc., are, as a rule, as
alien to ours as can be. Though, inescapably, all history is retrospective history, the approach described and decried by
Detlef D. Spalt, in his Vom Mythos der mathematischen
Vernunft (1981), as Resultatismus, or, “Orwellsche 1984Geschichtsschreibung für den grossen Bruder Vernunft,” that
takes its bearings and criteria from what it sees as the modern
outcome of a lengthy, linear, and necessary evolution of concepts and operations, looking always back at the past in light
of its modern offspring, is necessarily a highly distorting
approach, since it adopts unashamedly the perspective of the
present to (in this order) judge and understand the past.
Taken at face value, Percy W Bridgman’s statement that the
.
past has meaning only in terms of the present is simply not
true. The historian’s stance is rather the opposite: the present
has meaning only in terms of the past. Prima facie and on
principled grounds therefore, an interpretation of any written, reasonably extensive document belonging to an ancient
culture that results in its totally unproblematic and absolute
assimilation to our own is suspect. That this is so is, more or
less, acceptable when it comes to cultural artifacts other than
mathematical ones, which seem to enjoy the privilege of perdurablility and universality. The immunity from cultural
specificity that mathematical truths command stems from the
prevailing view that their outward appearance—their packaging, as it were—and their purely mathematical content—the
packaged merchandise, as it were—are neutral, unrelated,
and mutually independent items. It is a calamitous view and
the root of all evil in the historiography of mathematics.
But there is another entrance into an ancient text, mathematical or not, one that does no violence to it, that does not
break the inviolable unity of form and content and then enter
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
victoriously through the shambles it created, with the claim
that the text is now understood; it is rather an ingress that
accepts willingly and respectfully the unity of the text without pulverizing its inseparable aspects, bringing to its understanding both critical acumen and full acceptance of its outward appearance. This is the historical approach. The mathematical and historical approaches are antagonistic. Whoever
breaks and enters typically returns from his escapades with
other spoils than the peaceful and courteous caller.
Let me be more specific. Faced with an ancient mathematical text, the modern interpreter has an initial choice.
First is the mathematical approach. It consists of two steps:
(1) try to find out how one would do it (solve the problem,
prove the proposition, perform the construction, etc.) and
then (2) attempt to understand the ancient procedure in light
of the answer to step (1). Instead of this preeminently mathematical approach, however, the modern interpreter can
refuse to decipher the text by appealing to modern methods,
using for its understanding only ancient methods available to
the text’s author. This is the historical approach. Needless to
repeat, the spoils of interpretation differ according to the two
approaches followed. The longstanding traditional approach
has been the mathematical, though in the last three decades
or so the historical approach is gaining increasingly more and
more ground and, at least in the domain of ancient Greek
mathematics, seems to be now the prevailing one. What
seems certain is that in practice no compromise is possible
between the mathematical and historical methodological
principles. Adopting one or the other has fateful consequences for one’s research, effectively determining the nature
of the results reached and the tenor of the inferences used in
reaching them.
What I am saying, then, is that despite the numerous and
varied styles of writing the history of mathematics throughout the centuries, it is possible to group all histories of mathematics into two broad categories, the “mathematical” and
the “historical.” The former sees mathematics as eternal, its
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truths unchanging and unaffected by their formal appearance,
and sees the mathematical kernel of those truths as being
independent of their outward mode of expression; the latter
denies this independence and looks upon past mathematics as
an unbreakable unity between form and content, a unity,
moreover, that enables one to grasp mathematics as a historical discipline, the truths of which are indelibly embedded in
changing linguistic structures. It is only this approach that is
apt to avoid anachronism in the study of the mathematics of
other eras.
To make this a historical talk, what is needed are specific,
historical examples, supporting the preceding generalizations. I have offered numerous such examples in my published work, most recently in the book I published with
Michael Fried, Apollonius of Perga’s Conica: Text, Context,
Subtext (2001). However, I would like now to enrich my
offerings by drawing illustrations from historical sources less
drawn upon in the past. One such source is Euclid’s Data.
In one of the attacks launched against a notorious article
of 1975, “On the Need to Rewrite the History of Greek
Mathematics,” Hans Freudenthal argues that, had its author
been aware of the existence of the Data, he “would never
have claimed there were no equations in Greek geometry.”
For Freudenthal, and not only for him, the Data is a “textbook on solving equations.” He summarizes the 94 propositions contained therein in a succinctly and strikingly epigrammatic statement: “Given certain magnitudes a, b, c and
a relation F(a, b, c, x), then x, too, is given.” But the fact
remains that Greek geometry contained no equations. One
cannot find even one equation in the entire text of the Data.
Proof (as the Hindu mathematician would say): “Look!”
Unless one has at his disposal the algebraic language and the
capacity to translate into it, it is impossible to sum up this little treatise of rather varied content as offhandedly as
Freudenthal has done, Indeed, had Euclid at his disposal
Freudenthal’s functional notation, it is rather easy to infer
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
that he would not have needed 94 propositions to get his
point across.
Each case in Euclid’s Data is unique, having its own
method of analysis, and none is subsumable under or
reducible to other cases, though, of course, later propositions
rely on earlier ones. Thus, “The ratio of given magnitudes to
one another is given” (proposition 1) and “If a given magnitude have a given ratio to some other magnitude, the other is
also given in magnitude” (proposition 2)—to use perhaps the
simplest illustration possible—are not for Euclid both
instances of “Given a, b, c and y=F(a, b, c, x), x is also given,”
but are two different problems, interesting in their own right,
having their own solutions. Of course, Freudenthal’s description is mathematically correct. Historically, however, it is
wanting. Heath is much more to the point when he says:
The Data…are still concerned with elementary
geometry [my italics], though forming part of the
introduction to higher analysis. Their form is that
of propositions proving that, if certain things in a
figure [my italics] are given (in magnitude, in
species, etc.), something else is given. The subjectmatter is much the same as that of the planimetrical books of the Elements, to which the Data are
often supplementary.
This is what the Data is, not a textbook on solving equations, but a treatise presenting another approach to elementary geometry—other than that of the Elements, that is.
As an example of this characterization of the Data, I shall
present proposition 16, in the new translation of C. M.
Taisbak [Euclid’s Data or The Importance of Being Given,
(Copenhagen, 2003)]:
If two magnitudes have a given ratio to one
another, and from the one a given magnitude be
subtracted, while to the other a given magnitude
be added, the whole will be greater than in ratio to
the remainder by a given magnitude (p. 75).
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First we must clarify the meaning of the expression “greater
than in ratio...by a given.” Definition 11 of the Data reads:
A magnitude is by a given greater than in ratio to a
magnitude if, when the given magnitude be subtracted, the remainder has a given ratio to the
same. (p. 35)
The meaning of this definition is, according to Taisbak, as follows (p. 57): “M is by the given G greater than the magnitude
L which has to N a given ratio;” in other words, M=L+G
and L:N is a given ratio.
Back to the proof of prop. 16:
Let two magnitudes AB, CD have a given ratio to one
another. From CD let the given magnitude CE be subtracted
and to AB let the given magnitude ZA be added.
Then, the whole ZB is greater than in ratio to the remainder
DE by a given magnitude.
Z
C
A
E
H
D
B
Now, since the ratio AB:CD is given and AH can be obtained,
by Dt. 4, from AH:CE::AB:CD, i.e., AH:CE is also given, it
follows that CE is also given. Hence, AH is given (by Dt. 2).
But AZ is given; therefore the whole ZH is given (by Dt. 3).
Since AH:CE::AB:CD, the ratio HB:ED of the remainders is
also given, by V 19 and Def. 2, i.e., HB:ED::AB:CD. But HZ
.
is given; therefore, ZB is by a given greater than in ratio to
ED (Def. 11), Q.E.D.
No algebra appears here, and although the language of
givens, the idiosyncratic concept “by a given greater than in
ratio” and the sui generis concatenation of inferences burden
the understanding, the proposition is clear and rather simple.
It is graspable as it stands, without any appeal to foreign
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
tools. And yet, Clemens Thaer, in his Die Data von Euklid
(1962), proceeds as follows to its clarification:
Let a:b=k , then the proposition claims that if x=ky, then
(x+c)=k(y-d)+(c+kd), which is, of course, correct mathematically, but this blatantly algebraic procedure betrays the
Data. It is a betrayal since ratios in Greek mathematics are
not real numbers, i.e., the initial substitution a:b=k is not
kosher. Though there is some controversy about the status of
ratios in the Elements, with respect to their being two, or
four-place relations, their status in the Data is uncontroversial: a ratio P:Q is an individual item “however impalpable. A
and B are magnitudes, most often (and least problematically)
understood to be line segments; one may think of them as
positive real numbers, that is as lengths of line segments, while
remembering that the Greek geometers could not think like
that, for want of such numbers” (Taisbak, Euclid’s
Dedomena, p. 32). Taisbak claims that distorting “clarifications” like the one above characterize all of Thaer’s algebraizations. He goes on to say:
About the following four theorems (Dt 17-20) he
maintains that they prove that all linear transformations, {ax+b a, b ℜ} form a group (‘dass die
ganzen linearen Substitutionen einer
Veraenderlichen eine Gruppe bilden’). I am not sure
I understand what he means to say, and the Data
certainly does not help me,—so probably Euclid
would not understand either. (p. 77)
Let us take our next example from Archimedes. Against
Freudenthal’s assertion, Archimedes’ works are not
“instances of algebraic procedure in Greek mathematics.”
Heath’s edition of The Works of Archimedes (1897) is “in
modern notation.” It is faithful only to the disembodied
mathematical content of the Archimedean text, but not to its
form. And this is crucial. If one abandons Archimedes’ form
and transcribes his rhetorical statements by means of algebraic symbols, manipulating and transforming the latter, then
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79
clearly “the algebraic procedure” appears. But this procedure
itself is not “in Greek mathematics.” It is a result, as
Freudenthal himself states it, of “replacing vernacular by artificial language, and numbering variables by cardinals, a quite
recent mathematical tool.” Indeed! Archimedes’ text is
anchored securely in the terra firma of Greek geometry. If one
is not willing to compress wording, to replace “vernacular”
by artificial language, to introduce variables and number
them by cardinals, and to apply all the other technical tricks
which are “quite recent mathematical tools,” then
Archimedes’ proof of Proposition 10 of Peri Helikon is geometric, not algebraic. This was discerned in a curious way
even by Heath, who justified his algebraic procedure and the
use of the symbols , “in order to exhibit the geometrical character of the proof” (p. 109, my italics).
Dijksterhuis himself in his Archimedes said: “In a representation of Greek proofs in the symbolism of modern algebra it is often precisely the most characteristic qualities of the
classical argument which are lost, so that the reader is not sufficiently obliged to enter into the train of thought of the original.” So let us oblige ourselves to enter into the train of
thought of the original by having a look at the 10th proposition of Peri Helikon.
I shall give you the full enunciation and then set at its side
Heath’s algebraic variant:
If any number of lines, exceeding one another by
the same magnitude, are set one after the other,
the excess being equal to the smallest, and if one
takes other lines in the same number, each of
which is equal to the magnitude of the greatest of
the first lines, [then] the squares on the lines equal
to the greatest, augmented by the square on the
greatest, and by the rectangle the sides of which
are the smallest line and the sum of all lines
exceeding one another by the same magnitude are
equivalent to thrice the sum of the squares on the
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
80
lines which exceed one another by the same
amount.
The enunciation is geometrical and it is accompanied by simple, linear diagrams.
And here is Heath’s enunciation:
If A1, A2, A3, ..., An be n lines forming and ascending
arithemetical progression in which the common
difference is equal to A1, the least term, then
(n+1) An2+A1 (A1+A2+...+An)=3(A12+A22+...+An2)........
…the result is equivalent to
12+22+32+...+n2=n(n=1)(2n+1)
6
The proof is not difficult, but very long (more than three
pages in Mugler’s edition of Archimedes’ works, if one
includes the porism), and I think we can dispense with it, but
not before pointing out the fact that it lies squarely within the
realm of traditional Greek geometry, relying on Elements 2.4,
it is true, which, as is well known, belongs to the so-called
geometric algebra, but which, as I have argued elsewhere, is
strictly geometric; additionally, the porism relies on Elements
6.20.
As in the enunciation, Archimedes formulates consistently
his statements in terms of lines squares, and rectangles, which
he manipulates à la Grecque, and his diagrammatic notation
is not at all perspicuous to a modern eye, making his transformations opaque, or at least cloudy, to a mind spoiled by
the easy mechanics of algebraic manipulations and their
immediate visual transparency. This makes following his elementary inferences quite difficult and almost forces upon the
reader recourse to algebraic notation. Such a procedure, how-
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81
ever, easy, pellucid, and revealing as it is, is not legitimate historically.
What I have said about the proposition applies in its
entirety to the porism following it, out of which Heath makes
two corollaries!
Let us, again, limit ourselves to the enunciations of
Archimedes and Heath, which substantiate our characterization. Archimedes first:
It is manifest from the preceding that the sum of
the squares on the lines equal to the greatest is
inferior to the triple of the sum of the squares on
the lines exceeding one another by the same
magnitude, because, if one adds to it [the former]
some [magnitudes], it becomes that triple, but
that it is superior to the triple of the second sum
diminished by the square on the greatest line,
since what is added [to the first sum] is inferior
to the triple square of the greatest line. It is for
this [very] reason that, when one describes similar
figures on all the lines, both on those exceeding
one another by the same magnitude, as well as
on those which are equal to the greatest line, the
sum of the figures described on the lines which
are equal to the greatest line is inferior to the
triple of the sum of the figures described on the
lines exceeding one another by the same magnitude, but it is superior to the triple of the second
sum, which is diminished by the figure constructed
on the greatest line, because similar figures are in
the same ratio as the squares [on their sides].
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
82
Now Heath:
Cor. 1. It follows from this proposition that
nAn2<3(A12+ A22+...+An2), and also that
nAn2<3(A12+ A22+...+An-12).
Cor. 2. All the results will equally hold if similar
figures are substituted for squares.
The differences between Archimedes and Heath are blatant.
Faithfulness to the Archimedean way of doing things
demands, therefore, the rejection of an edition of his works
“edited in modern notation.” There is no escape for the historian but to take texts at their face value.
One last example I shall draw from Diophantus’s
Arithmetica. Diophantus is an exception in the long tradition
of Greek mathematics, which is largely geometric. Living
probably in the third century A.D., his preserved work is an
instance, the only one of its kind in Greek mathematics, of
what we call algebra. It is a sui generis algebra, however, in
which the notations are properly nonexistent, except for the
unknown, arithmos, which is itself most likely an abbreviation, and a few abbreviations for powers of the unknown and
for the unit, monas. That is all. This is what makes his rhetorical algebra syncopated, according to Nesselmann’s classification. It is an algebra in which there is a total lack of true,
operative symbols, including symbols for operations, relations, and the exponential notation, with the exception of a
symbol for subtraction, in which the exceptional skill of
Diophantus enables him somehow to overcome with great
dexterity the built-in drawbacks of his Arithmetica. This
Greek algebra, however, is most emphatically not geometric
algebra. If anything, it is conceptually a far away relation to
what has been traditionally called Babylonian algebra, perhaps not even this, in light of the recent researches of Jens
UNGURU
83
Hoyrup, who identifies the geometrical roots of the
Babylonian recipes [Lengths,Widths, Surfaces, (Springer,
2002)].
Whatever it is, it is largely a collection of problems, to be
solved by means of skilful guesses and less by systematic
methods (though one also finds methods, for example, a general method for the solution of what we call determinate
equations of the second degree and another for double equations of the second degree), involving specific known numbers. It is not a book of propositions to be proved, but rather
of exercises to be solved, leading mostly to simple determinate and indeterminate equations, by means of which one
finds the required numbers, which are always rational, quite
often non-integral. Still, despite what I just said, one finds in
the treatise also some “porisms” and other propositions in the
theory of numbers, which proved themselves influential in
the history of the theory of numbers, especially in Fermat’s
work. Thus, Diophantus knew that no number of the form
8n+7 can be the sum of three squares, and that for an odd
number, 2n+1, to be the sum of two squares, n itself must not
be odd, which means that no number of the form 4n+3 or
4n-1 can be the sum of two squares.
Now, some simple illustrations from the Arithmetica, to
get the flavor of the true Algebra der Griechen:
Problem 1. To divide a given number into two
numbers, the difference of which is known.
Let the given number be 100, and let the difference be 40 monads; to find the numbers.
Let us assume that the smaller number is 1 arithmos; hence, the greater number is 1 arithmos and
40 units. Therefore, the sum of the two numbers
becomes 2 arithmoi and 40 units. But the given
sum is 100 units; hence, 100 units are equal to 2
arithmoi and 40 units. Let us subtract the like
from the like, that is, 40 units from 100 and, also,
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
84
the same 40 units from the 2 arithmoi and 40
units. The two remaining arithmoi equal 60 units
and each arithmos becomes 30 units.
Let us return to what we assumed: the smaller
number will be 30 units, while the greater will be
70 units, and the validation is obvious.
And here is Heath’s faithful version of the solution:
Given number is 100, given difference 40.
Lesser number required x. Therefore
2x+40=100
x=30.
The required numbers are 70, 30.
Problem 2. Diophantus:
It is necessary to divide a given number into two
numbers having a given ratio.
Let us require to divide 60 into two numbers in
triplicate ratio.
Let us assume that the smaller number is 1 arithmos; hence, the greater number will be 3 arithmoi,
and thus the greater number is thrice the smaller
number. It is also necessary that the sum of the
two numbers be 60 units. But the sum of the two
numbers is 4 arithmoi; hence 4 arithmoi are equal
to 60 units, and the arithmos is therefore 15 units.
Hence, the smaller number will be 15 units, and
the greater 45 units.
Heath:
Given number 60, given ratio 3:1.
Two numbers x, 3x. Therefore x=15.
The numbers are 45, 15.
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Finally, an example of what is called indeterminate analysis of
the third degree:
Problem 4.8. Diophantus:
To add the same number to a cube and its side and
make the same.
Let the number to be added be 1 arithmos and the
side of the cube be a certain amount of arithmoi.
Let this amount be 2 arithmoi and it follows that
the cube is 8 cubic arithmoi.
Now if one adds 1 arithmos to 2 arithmoi, they
become 3 arithmoi, while if one adds it to the 8
cubic arithmoi, they become 8 cubic arithmoi and
1 arithmos, which are equal to 27 cubic arithmoi.
Let us subtract 8 cubic arithmoi, and it follows
that the remaining 19 cubic arithmoi will become
equal to 1 arithmos. Let us divide all by the arithmos, and 19 squared arithmoi will be equal to
1 unit.
But 1 unit is a square, and if 19, the amount of
square arithmoi, were a square, the problem would
be solved. But the 19 squares find their origin in
the excess by which 27 cubic arithmoi exceed 8
cubic arithmoi; and 27 cubic arithmoi are the cube
of 3 arithmoi, while 8 cubic arithmoi are the cube
of 2 arithmoi. But the two arithmoi are taken by
hypothesis, and 3 arithmoi exceed by one the
amount taken arbitrarily as the side. Therefore, we
are led to finding two numbers which exceed one
another by one unit, and the cubes of which
exceed one another by a square.
Let one of those numbers be 1 arithmos, and the
other 1 arithmos plus 1 unit. Hence the excess of
their cubes is 3 square arithmoi plus 3 arithmoi
plus 1 unit. Let us set this excess equal to the
square the side of which is 1 unit less 2 arithmoi,
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
86
and the arithmos becomes 7 units. Let us return to
what we supposed, and one of the numbers will be
7 and the other 8.
Let us now return to the original question and
assume the number to be added to be 1 arithmos,
and the side of the cube to be 7 arithmoi. This
cube will be then 343 cubic arithmoi. Hence, if
one adds the arithmos to each of these last numbers, one will become 8 arithmoi and the other
343 cubic arithmoi plus 1 arithmos. But we
wanted this last expression to be a cube the side of
which is 8 arithmoi; hence 512 cubic arithmoi are
equal to 343 cubic arithmoi plus 1 arithmos, and
1
the arithmos becomes 13.
Returning to the things we assumed, the cube will
343
7
1
be 2197, the side 13, and the number to be added 13.
I assume you could follow, at least in outline,
Diophantus’s solution procedure, though this is not essential
for my main purpose. (For those of you who could not follow
after all the details, which, as I said, is not really necessary, a
glance at Heath’s, or Ver Eecke’s, Diophantus would clarify
matters.) My purpose is to compare Diophantus to his modern editors. This time, instead of Heath, I shall take, however,
Nesselmann.
Nesselmann:
It is necessary that x3+y=(x+y)3, i.e., 3x2+3xy+y2=1.
Solving for y, we get y=
1
2
2
[-3x±√4-3x ].
4mn
Putting 4-3x2=(2-=m x)2, one gets x= 3n2+m2.
n
Hence, y=
-6mn±(m2-3n2)
3n2+m2
. Taking only the + sign,
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for y to be positive, it is necessary that m2-3n2>6mn,
or,
m2 -6 m
n
n2
>3, or, ( m -3)2>12, or ( m >3+√12.
n
n
Diophantus’s solution corresponds to m=7, n=1.
Now this is historical faithfulness!
Time to conclude. Historians must take the past seriously.
For historians of science and mathematics, this means taking
texts seriously. How does one do this? By reading them as
they are, in their nakedness, as it were, in the language in
which they were written, without shortcuts and transmogrification, resulting in their translation into scientific and mathematical languages which became historically available only
long after they were written. It is, therefore, crucial that the
form of those texts remain inviolable. Without this, anachronism, i.e., historical misunderstanding, becomes rampant and
the resulting interpretation is misinterpretation. As Benjamin
Farrington put it,
History is the most fundamental science, for there
is no human knowledge which cannot lose its scientific character when men forget the conditions
under which it originated, the questions which it
answered, and the function it was created to serve.
A great part of the mysticism and superstition of
educated men consists of knowledge which has
broken loose from its historical moorings.
In 1975 an article appeared in the Archive for History of
Exact Sciences, arguing for the need to rewrite the history of
Greek mathematics. In one of its many footnotes, namely the
one numbered 126, attention is called to an important book,
Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra. The
footnote in question contains a parenthesis, saying:
[L]et me urge those readers who have a choice and
wish to read [this] highly interesting study to refer
back to the original German articles: somehow the
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
pomposity, stuffiness, and turgidity of the author’s
style are better accommodated by the Teutonic
cadences than by the more friendly sounds of the
perfidious Albion.
This was a nasty and uncalled for remark, attributable to the
author’s hubris.
How pleasantly and embarrassingly surprised must he
have been, then, when, a few weeks after the article’s appearance in the Archive, a postcard from the slighted author of the
book (to whom no reprint was sent!) arrived, saying: “Dear
Dr.,… Thank you very much for your important article in the
Archive.…” In character, you may say. Indeed.
As a belated, and highly inappropriate atonement for that
unsavory footnote, its author would like to finish this lecture
with a highly pertinent and lengthy quotation from an article
written by the great scholar he so carelessly slighted:
[T]he relation between ancient and modern
mathematics has increasingly become the focus
of historical investigation… Two general lines of
interpretation can be distinguished here. One—
the prevailing view—sees in the history of science
a continuous forward progress interrupted, at
most, by periods of stagnation. On this view, forward progress takes place with ‘logical necessity,’
accordingly, writing the history of a mathematical
theorem or of a physical principle basically means
analyzing its logic. The usual presentations,
especially of the history of mathematics, picture
a rectilinear course; all of its accidents and
irregularities disappear behind the logical
straightness of the whole path.
The second interpretation emphasizes that the
different stages along this path are incomparable.…it sees in Greek mathematics a science totally
distict from modern mathematics.…Both interpretations, however, start from the present-day
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condition of science. The first measures ancient by
the standard of modern science and pursues the
individual threads leading back from the valid theorems of contemporary science to the anticipatory
steps taken towards them in antiquity.… The
second interpretation strives to bring into relief,
not what is common, but what divides ancient and
modern science. It too, however, interprets the
otherness of ancient mathematics...in terms of the
results of contemporary science. Consequently, it
recognizes only a counter-image of itself in ancient
science, a counter-image which still stands on its
own conceptual level.
Both interpretations fail to do justice to the true
state of the case. There can be no doubt that the
science of the seventeenth century represents a
direct continuation of ancient science. On the
other hand, neither can we deny their differences…above all, in their basic initiatives, in
their whole disposition (habitus). The difficulty is
precisely to avoid interpreting their differences
and their affinity one-sidedly in terms of the new
science. The issues at stake cannot be divorced
from the specific conceptual framework within
which they are interpreted.…
We need to approach ancient science on a basis
appropriate to it, a basis provided by that science
itself. Only on this basis can we measure the
transformation ancient science underwent in the
seventeenth century—a transformation unique
and unparalleled in the history of man.…
This modern consciousness is to be understood
not simply as a linear continuation of ancient
επιστημη, but as the result of a fundamental
conceptual shift which took place in the modern
era, a shift we can nowadays scarcely grasp.
89
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91
The name of the man who wrote these lines is, as I am sure
you know, Jacob Klein. Yehi Zichro Baruch! May his memory
be blessed!
A Note on the Opposite
Sections and Conjugate Sections
in Apollonius of Perga’s Conica
90
Michael N. Fried
Introduction
To a careful reader of Apollonius of Perga’s Conica, the difference between Apollonius’ view of conic sections and ours
ought to be evident on nearly every page of the work. Yet this
has not always been the case. Indeed, it has not always been
easy to persuade readers that there really is something Greek
about Apollonius’ mathematics. Partly to blame is the seductive power of the algebraic framework in which we study
conic sections today and in which historians of mathematics
have interpreted the book in past years.1 Viewed algebraically,
for example, all of Book 4 of the Conica—the book concerning the number of points at which conic sections can meet—
can be reduced to a single proposition, namely, that a system
of two quadratic equations in two unknowns can have at
most four solutions. This tremendous power allowing one to
obtain results corresponding to ones in the Conica makes it
all too easy to think that Apollonius’ own text, in effect, can
be bypassed and replaced by an updated algebraic version of
it. However, there are things in the Conica that are refractory
to this kind of modernization of the text and show its essentially geometric character. One of these, surely, is that most
peculiar entity in the Conica, the opposite sections; it is they
that I shall turn my attention to in this note. In particular, I
want to show something about status of the opposite sections
in the Conica and show, among other things, why their status,
Michael Fried teaches mathematics education at Ben-Gurion University of the
Negev. He is the author of a translation, with introduction, of Book Four of
the Conics of Apollonius, and is the co-author (with Sabetai Unguru) of
Apollonius of Perga’s Conica: Text, Context, and Subtext.
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92
why their place in the Conica, is different from that of the
conjugate sections.
The Absence of the Opposite Sections from the Modern View
The reason why looking at the opposite sections is a good
way to re-focus on Apollonius’ text, rather than on an algebraic reconstruction of it, is simply that the opposite sections
do not exist in modern mathematics. For us, there is only the
hyperbola. Our view of the hyperbola, on the other hand, is
that it is a curve consisting “of two open branches extending
to infinity.”2 That we are not bothered by one curve consisting of two is directly related to our defining the hyperbola, as
we do the other conics, by means of an equation. Defining it
this way, the hyperbola becomes merely a set of points given
by coordinates, say the Cartesian coordinates (x, y), satisfying
an equation such as this:
x2 - y2
=1
a2 b2
Hence, there is nothing shocking when we discover that this
set of points consists of two disjoint subsets, one containing
points whose x coordinates are less than or equal to –a
(where a is taken to be a positive real number) and one containing points whose x coordinates are greater than or equal
to +a; the only relevant question to ask is whether the coordinates of a given point satisfy or do not satisfy the given
algebraic relation.3 The equation, in this view, tells all; it contains all the essential information about the object; in a sense,
the equation of the hyperbola is the hyperbola (see Fried &
Unguru, 2001, pp. 102-103; Klein, 1981, pp. 28-29). To
speak about opposite sections in addition to the hyperbola is
unnecessary because they are not distinguished by different
equations.
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The Opposite Sections in the Conica
The point of view above has also been the point of departure
for an older, but still much listened to, generation of historians of mathematics. Zeuthen (1886) and Heath (1921,
1896), leaders of that generation, had no doubt that
Apollonius’ achievement was in the uncovering and elucidation of the equations of the conic sections and that
Apollonius understood the conic sections in an algebraic
spirit. For them, Apollonius’ view was the modern view. Thus
Zeuthen writes:
An ellipse, parabola or hyperbola is here [in Book
1] planimetrically determined as a curve which is
represented by the equation (3), (1) or (2) [the
Cartesian equations for the ellipse, parabola, and
hyperbola, respectively] in a system of parallel
coordinates with any angle between the axes.
Thus, apart from the determination of the position
of these curves, they seem to depend on three constants, namely, that angle [between the axes, or,
equivalently, the ordinate angle], p [latus rectum],
and a [the length of the diameter] (Zeuthen, 1886,
p. 67).
And Heath, echoing Zeuthen, writes:
Apollonius, in deriving the three conics from any
cone cut in the most general manner, seeks to find
the relation between the coordinates of any point
on the curve referred to the original diameter and
the tangent at its extremity as axes (in general
oblique), and proceeds to deduce from the relation, when found, the other properties of the
curves. His method does not essentially differ from
that of modern analytical geometry except that in
Apollonius geometrical operations take the place
of algebraic calculations (Heath, 1896, p. cxvi)
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
As for why Apollonius notwithstanding referred to both
opposite sections and hyperbolas, Heath remarks that, “Since
[Apollonius] was the first to treat the double-branch hyperbola fully [emphasis added], he generally discusses the hyperbola (i.e., the single branch) [Heath’s emphasis] along with
the ellipse, and the opposites [Heath’s emphasis], as he calls
the double-branch hyperbola, separately” (Heath, 1921,
p.139). Zeuthen simply says that, as a matter of terminology,
“What [Apollonius] calls an hyperbola is always only a hyperbola-branch” (Zeuthen, 1886, p. 67). But these remarks are
hardly satisfying. First, while it is most likely that Apollonius
was truly the first to treat the “‘double-branch hyperbola”’—
that is, the opposite sections—fully, the opposite sections
were not so completely unfamiliar to his contemporaries that
he had to continually remind them of their existence; indeed,
in the preface to Book 4 he refers to the opposite sections as
if they were known and discussed, at least by Conon of Samos
and Nicoteles of Cyrene. Second, although Zeuthen’s remark
is not meant to explain Apollonius’ use of both terms, it still
begs the question: if what Apollonius called the hyperbola is
truly represented by the Cartesian equation and therefore, is
the modern double-branched hyperbola (as Zeuthen unambiguously implies throughout his book), why cause confusion
by referring to a branch of the hyperbola as the hyperbola
and the two branches together as something else, namely, the
opposite sections? Zeuthen himself never speaks of “opposite
sections” but only of the “two (or “corresponding”) branches
of the hyperbola” the “whole hyperbola” (vollständige
Hyperbel), and, most often, simply the “hyperbola.” In this
way, he and his followers, including Heath, merely push aside
as if nugatory the obvious fact that in the Conica, from start
to finish, there are hyperbolas and there are opposite sections.
The opposite sections (hai tomai antikeimenai) are quite
prominent in the work. They figure in 24 of the 53 propositions in Book 2; 41 of the 56 propositions in Book 3, and 38
of the 57 propositions in Book 4. In all these propositions,
Apollonius treats opposite sections as something apart from
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hyperbolas. A sign of this is that the opposite sections are separated from the hyperbola in the enunciations of propositions. For example, the statement of proposition 3.42 is: “If
in an hyperbola or ellipse or circumference of a circle or opposite sections [emphasis added] straight lines are drawn from
the vertices of the diameter parallel to an ordinate, and some
other straight line at random is drawn tangent, it will cut off
from them straight lines containing a rectangle equal to the
fourth part of the figure to the same diameter.” 3.44 reads, “If
two straight lines touching an hyperbola or opposite sections
[emphasis added] meet the asymptotes, then the straight lines
drawn to the sections will be parallel to the straight line joining the points of contact.” If one knew nothing about the
opposite sections, these statements would suggest that the
hyperbola and the opposite sections were as different from
one another as the hyperbola is different from the ellipse.5
The proofs of these two particular propositions make little
distinction between the hyperbola and opposite sections. In
3.44 a separate diagram for the opposite sections is needed to
bring out a case that applies to the two sections together, but
in 3.42 not even that is needed, despite Heiberg’s insistence
on adding an extra diagram for the opposite sections anyway
(fig. 1). Nothing from the logical rigor would be lost if
Apollonius referred only to the opposite sections in these
propositions. So even where the logic does not require it,
Apollonius makes a point to separate, in words verbally, the
hyperbola from the opposite sections.
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96
Fig. 1: Conica 3.42 (Heiberg)
Α
Ζ
Μ
Η
Θ
97
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Fig. 2: Diagram for Conica 1.14
H
Ε
N
Ξ
Δ
Κ
P
O
Θ
Γ
Α
Y
K
Λ
Β
T
Μ
Η
Ζ
Θ
Ε
Δ
Κ
Β
A
Λ
Γ
Of course this is not to say there is no connection
between the opposite sections and the hyperbola, for the central property of the opposite sections is that they are composed of two hyperbolas. Apollonius proves this in the
proposition that introduces the opposite sections, proposition 1.14:
If the vertically opposite surfaces are cut by a
plane not through the vertex [see fig. 2], the section on each of the two surfaces will be that which
is called the hyperbola [emphasis added]; and the
diameter of the two sections will be the same
straight line; and the straight lines, to which the
straight lines drawn to the diameter parallel to the
straight line in the cone’s base are applied in
square, are equal; and the transverse side of the
figure, that between the vertices of the sections, is
common. And let such sections be called opposite
(kaleisthôsan de hai toiautai tomai antikeimenai)
Π
E
Z
B
M
Λ
Σ
Γ
Δ
This is also the way he refers to the opposite sections
later, especially in Book 4, where he consistently speaks of
“an hyperbola and its opposite section.”7 The genitive in
those phrases suggests that the opposite section belongs to the
given hyperbola, that is, every hyperbola has its very own
opposite section.
The most striking instance in which Apollonius refers to
the opposite sections as two hyperbolas is in his construction
of the opposite sections in 1.59. It is worth reviewing how
this construction is carried out. Apollonius asks, specifically,
for the following:
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98
Fig. 3: Diagram for Conica, 1.59
Δ
A
E
B
H
Γ
K
Z
Θ
Given two straight lines perpendicular to one
another, find opposite [sections], whose diameter
is one of the given straight lines and whose vertices are the ends of the straight line, and the lines
dropped in a given angle in each of the sections
will [equal] in square [the rectangles] applied to
the other [straight line] and exceeding by a [rectangle] similar to that contained by the given
straight lines.8
Let BE and BΘ be the given lines and let H be the given
angle (see fig. 3). Choosing BE to be the transverse diameter
(plagia) and BΘ to be the upright side of the figure (orthia),
Apollonius says to construct an hyperbola ABΓ, adding, that
“This is to be done as has been set out before (prosgegraptai).” For the latter, he has in mind 1.54-55 where he shows
how an hyperbola is constructed having a given diameter,
upright side, and ordinate angle. Next he says: let EK have
been drawn through E perpendicular to BE and equal to BΘ,
and draw an hyperbola ΔEZ having BE as its diameter, EK its
upright side, and H its ordinate angle, again, presumably,
relying on 1.54-55. With that, he concludes: “It is evident
(phaneron dê) that B and E [i.e., ABΓ and ΔEZ] are opposite
[sections] and they have one diameter and equal upright
sides.” I shall return to the question whether it truly is evident
that B and E are opposite sections, but for now what is
important to understand is that Apollonius constructs the
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opposite sections by constructing one hyperbola and then
another.
Hence the opposite sections are two hyperbolas but not
any two hyperbolas; they are two hyperbolas somehow
linked together; they belong to one another the way identical
twins do.9 In a sense, then, Apollonius, as I understand him
and as Zeuthen understands him, begins with the hyperbola;
however, we disagree about the direction in which he proceeds. Whereas Zeuthen begins with the hyperbola as the
two-branched curve given by the Cartesian equation and then
focuses on the single branch, which Apollonius calls the
hyperbola, my view is that Apollonius begins with the single
connected curve, which he calls the hyperbola, and then
investigates the opposite sections in terms of it. Although
Ockham’s razor would probably fall on the side of the latter
view, we need to get a better grasp of this peculiar situation
wherein two well-defined curves, the two hyperbolas, become
together a distinct geometrical entity, the opposite sections.
To do this, let us consider the ways in which two conic sections are juxtaposed in the Conica, that is to say, let us consider how Apollonius treats pluralities of curves.
Pluralities of Curves
Surely, the juxtapositions of conic sections are to be found in
Book 4 of the Conica. The very point of that book is to investigate the ways in which conic sections can come together—
whether they touch, whether they intersect, at how many
points can they touch, at how many they can intersect, and so
on. The variety of configurations Apollonius considers can be
seen in the diagram for, say, 4.56:
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Fig.4: Diagram for Conica 4.56
Δ
Δ
Γ
Γ
Γ
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straight lines drawn to either of the curved lines parallel to
some straight line…and I call that straight line the upright
diameter which, lying between the two curved lines, bisects
all the straight lines intercepted between the curved lines and
drawn parallel to some straight line.” An illustration for the
upright and transverse diameter can be seen in fig. 5 below,
which is not a diagram from Apollonius’ text.
Δ
Fig. 5 The upright and transverse diameters
Δ
Γ
Δ
Δ
Γ
Γ
As discussed elsewhere,10 one of the fundamental facts
explored in Book 4 is the ability of conic sections to be placed
arbitrarily in the plane, as Euclid postulates for circles and
lines—a fact partially justifying Book 4’s inclusion into what
Apollonius terms a “course in the elements of conics.” But it
is this arbitrariness that makes the question of the plurality of
conic sections in Book 4 the exact opposite of the one we are
trying answer about the opposite sections; for the opposite
sections are not thrown together; they belong together.
The first indication that a pair of curves may be associated
with one another as the opposite sections is given by
Apollonius in the definitions at the start of Book 1. Among
these definitions are those for the transverse and upright
diameters (diametros plagia and diametros orthia). Having
defined the diameter of a curved line, Apollonius continues,
“Likewise, of any two curved lines (duo kampulôn grammôn)
lying in one plane, I call that straight line the transverse diameter which cuts the two curved lines and bisects all the
These definitions prepare us for the transverse diameter
of the opposite sections introduced in the same proposition
in which the opposite sections themselves are defined, 1.14;
that the two hyperbolas making up the opposite sections have
a common diameter is one of the things that links them
together. Interestingly enough, the upright diameter, which is
the diameter explicitly defined for two curves and that which
is most clearly applicable to the opposite sections,11 is rarely
used by Apollonius: it is used twice in Book 2 (2.37, 38) and
once in Book 7 (7.6); and even in those cases Apollonius is
quick to identify it as one of a pair of conjugate diameters
(suzugeis diametroi), which are good for both two curves and
one. So while Apollonius provides for the possibility of distinct curves linked together, he seems almost to avoid the
idea, at least with regards to the opposite sections.
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The Conjugate Sections
But the opposite sections are not the only curves linked
together in the Conica. What Apollonius calls the conjugate
sections (hai tomai suzugeis) consist of four hyperbolas, or, to
be precise, two pairs of opposite sections.12 The very word
Fig.6: Conjugate Sections
K
H
Γ
B
A
Δ
Λ
Θ
suzugeis refers to a couple yoked together, a married pair.13
What links them together? First, by the definition given them
in 1.60, the diameter of the one pair is the conjugate diameter of the other, that is, if the diameters of AB and ΓΔ are D
and d, respectively, then lines drawn in AB parallel to d will
be bisected by D, and vice versa; moreover, D is equal in
square to the rectangle contained by d and the latus rectum
with respect to d (this rectangle being the “figure” or eidos of
the opposite sections), while d is equal in square to the rectangle contained by D and the latus rectum with respect to D.
Second, as Apollonius shows in 2.17, “The asymptotes [lines
HΘ and ΛΚ in fig. 6] of conjugate opposite sections are common.” This is also shown for the opposite sections in 2.15;
these shared asymptotes are certainly a crucial unifier not
only of the conjugate sections but also of the two opposite
sections themselves.14
Compared to the arbitrary juxtapositions of conic sections presented in Book 4, the opposite sections and the conjugate sections seem to be quite similar in that their component curves are bound by means of asymptotes and diameters.
Indeed, Apollonius often treats the opposite sections and conjugate sections in analogous propositions for instance: 2.41
states, “If in opposite sections two straight lines not through
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the center cut each other, then they do not bisect each other”;
and 2.42, states that “If in conjugate opposite sections two
straight lines not through the center cut each other, they do
not bisect each other.” Yet this close connection between the
opposite sections and conjugate sections raises the question
about why the opposite sections nevertheless enjoy a status in
the Conica that the conjugate sections do not? Why, in particular, are the conjugate sections never mentioned in conjunction with the other conic sections as are the opposite sections? Why are only the opposite sections included in the
clique, parabola, hyperbola, ellipse, and opposite sections?15
For this, we must return to the beginning of the Conica, for
the answer has very much to do with beginnings.
The Genesis of the Opposite Sections
The Conica opens not with the definition of the conic sections, but with the definition of the conic surface (kônikê
epiphaneia) from which arises the figure of the cone. Here is
Apollonius’ definition:
If from a point a straight line is joined to the circumference of a circle which is not in the same
plane with the point, and the line is produced in
both directions, and if, with the point remaining
fixed, the straight line being rotated about the circumference of the circle returns to the same place
from which it began, then the generated surface
composed of the two surfaces lying vertically
opposite one another, each of which increases
indefinitely as the generating straight line is produced indefinitely, I call a conic surface, and I call
the fixed point the vertex…..And the figure contained by the circle and by the conic surface
between the vertex and the circumference of the
circle I call a cone.
The definition is vivid and visual owing in large part to its
motion-imbued language. Motion, as is well known, is
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
avoided in Greek mathematics. Thus, much has been made of
the hints of motion in Elements, 1.4. But avoiding motion
seems to be a desideratum chiefly for propositions and
demonstrations, for motion in definitions is not all that
unusual. Besides this one from the Conica, Archimedes gives
similar kinematic definitions for conoids and spheroids in the
letter opening On Conoids and Spheroids, and Euclid himself
defines the cone, sphere, and cylinder in Book 11 of the
Elements by means of rotating a triangle, semicircle, and rectangle, respectively. The presence of motion in these definitions gives one the sense that one is witnessing the very coming to be of the objects being defined. In this way, such definitions take on a mythic quality; one almost wants to see the
demiourgos turning the generating line about the circumference of the base circle.
Fig.7: The Conic Surface
Following the definitions, Apollonius proceeds in ten
propositions to develop the basic properties of sections of
cones and, in particular, to show (in 1.7) how a cone may be
cut so that the section produced will be endowed with a
diameter. When the reader arrives at 1.11, which begins the
series of four propositions defining the parabola, hyperbola,
ellipse, and opposite sections, one is ready to see how these
sections arise within the cone. I do not use the word “see”
lightly. In these propositions, Apollonius dedicates considerable space both in the enunciation and in the body of the
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proof to describe the sequence of geometrical operations
undertaken to produce the particular sections; just as one witnesses the coming to be of the conical surface and cone, now
one witnesses the coming to be of the conic sections.
Of all the sections presented in 1.11-14, the one that is
most obviously related to Apollonius’ cone is in fact the
opposite sections. The reason is clear when one considers
Apollonius’ definition of the conical surface and cone. When
Euclid, by contrast, defines a cone in Book 11 of the
Elements, he does it by describing the rotation of a right triangle about one of its legs. Hence, Euclid begins by defining
the figure of the cone; moreover, Euclid’s cone, from the
start, is right, that is, its axis is perpendicular to its base, and
it is bounded. Apollonius begins by defining a conic surface,
which is generally oblique (since the line from the fixed point
to the center of the circle about whose circumference the generating line turns is not necessarily perpendicular to the plane
of the circle), unbounded, and, significantly, double. The cone
arises from this surface as the figure (schema) contained by
the base circle and the vertex. Later, in proposition 1.4,
Apollonius shows that by cutting the conic surface with
planes parallel to that of the base circle any number of cones
may be produced from the conical surface. In this way, the
two vertically opposite surfaces (hai kata koruphên
epiphaneiae) of the conic surfaces give rise to cones on either
side of the vertex.
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Fig. 8: Conica 1.4
Η
Δ
Ε
Θ
A
A
Α
Θ
Δ
Κ
Β
E
H
K
B
Z
Γ
Z
Κ
Θ
Γ
Δ
H
Β
Ε
Ζ
Γ
The doubleness of the conic surface and the double set of
cones that arise from it is (together with its obliqueness)
surely one of the most striking aspects of Apollonius’ definition. So, when Apollonius defines the opposite sections in
1.14, the definition is not entirely unexpected; it has been
prefigured in the definition of the conic surface itself. Indeed,
while the hyperbola is defined in terms of the figure of the
cone, which is defined by means of the conic surface, the
opposite sections are defined in terms of the conic surface,
and in this sense, the opposite sections are prior to the hyperbola. It is worth observing in this connection that 1.14 is the
last proposition in the book in which the conic surface
appears, as if to say that it no longer has to appear, having
served its purpose.
But here a little more needs to be said. For while it is true
that the conic surface does not appear again in the Conica,
the cone does: it reappears in Book 6, where it is used to
carry out various constructions connected with similar and
equal conic sections, and, most importantly, at the end of
Book 1, where Apollonius constructs conic sections in a plane
having given diameters, latera recta, and ordinate angles. In
the latter constructions, Apollonius generally proceeds by
taking the given plane as the cutting plane and then constructing the cone cut by that plane so that the section pro-
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duced is the section required. One might expect, therefore,
that when in 1.59 he set out to construct opposite sections,
he would similarly have constructed the conic surface cut by
the given plane to produce opposite sections. But, as we saw
above, this is not what he does. Applying 1.54-55 in the same
sequence, he constructs one hyperbola and then another.
Furthermore, if one follows 1.54-55 to the letter in constructing the hyperbolas on both sides of BE, which involves
constructing cones as I have remarked, one does not arrive at
the two vertical opposite surfaces composing the conic surface without significantly altering the construction in 1.5455. Can Apollonius truly say, then, as he does, that “it is evident” (phaneron de) that opposite sections are produced in
1.59? I think he can. For when he produces the first hyperbola in 1.59, he does so by producing a cone, in accordance
with 1.54-55; but the cone is only a figure cut off from a
conic surface, and we know from 1.14 that when the plane of
the first hyperbola cuts the opposite surface of the conic surface it will produce the opposite section of the first hyperbola. What remains for Apollonius is only to produce that
second hyperbola so that it has the right diameter, latus rectum, and ordinate direction, which is precisely what he
does.16 So, although the conic surface does not appear explicitly in 1.59, it is still there implicitly. In fact, this is the case
with all the constructions at the end of Book 1: the initial
construction of the parabola, ellipse, and hyperbola, in which
the ordinate direction is right, is carried out by explicitly constructing a cone, but in the continuation of the constructions,
that is, in the cases in which the ordinate directions are not
right, the cone does not appear. In this way, I think it is wrong
to think Apollonius is trying to break away from the cone; the
conic sections are rooted in the cone. Indeed, it is like the
roots of a tree: although the roots are unseen, the leaves, even
those at the very summit of the tree, will not survive without
them.
Thus we can still say with confidence that the opposite
sections have the special status that they do because of their
immediate origin in the double conic surface. They inherit
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
their doubleness directly from the doubleness of the conic
surface; their unity they obtain from the single plane that cuts
the surface. This geometric birth of the opposite sections sets
them apart from the conjugate sections and puts them in the
same class as the parabola, ellipse, and hyperbola.
Summary and Concluding Remarks
Apollonius’ treatment of the opposite sections tells us much
about his mathematical world—mostly because these sections
are not found outside of it. In modern mathematics there is
only the hyperbola, and the hyperbola has two branches. In
Apollonius’ geometry there is an hyperbola and there are
opposite sections. The hyperbola is produced by cutting a
cone; it has an opposite section since the conic surface from
which the cone arises extends not only below but also above
the vertex of the cone. The opposite sections are linked by
their common asymptotes and common diameter. The conjugate sections are linked similarly by common asymptotes and,
though not a common diameter, by conjugate diameters.
However, this kind of linkage seems to be less compelling for
Apollonius than the linkage arising from the single plane cutting the conic surface, for only the opposite sections, and not
the conjugate sections, are spoken of in conjunction with the
other conic sections.
Earlier I referred to Apollonius’ definition of the conic
surface as having a mythic quality. This was to give some
explanation of the motion-filled description constituting the
definition and to highlight the possibility that the development of the conic sections from the conic surface and the figure of the cone was, for Apollonius, nothing short of a spectacle of mathematical genesis. The use of the word “myth” in
a mathematical context is jarring for modern ears; mathematics, if to anything, should be related to logos not muthos.
But in the Greek world, it must be recalled, muthos and logos
overlapped as well as being opposed (Peters, 1967, pp. 120121), so that relationship between the two was one of tension
rather than exclusion. Cassirer has gone far to show that the
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myth-making function is fundamental to human experience,
and I rather agree with him when he says:
The mythical form of conception is not something
superadded to certain definite elements of empirical existence; instead, the primary “experience”
itself is steeped in the imagery of myth and saturated with its atmosphere. Man lives with objects
only in so far as he lives with these forms; he
reveals reality to himself, and himself to reality in
that he lets himself and the environment enter into
this plastic medium, in which the two do not
merely make contact, but fuse with each other.
(Cassirer, 1946, p. 10)
Be that as it may, the use of the word “myth” in the context
of the Conica does suggest a view of Apollonius as one very
much engaged with the being of his objects and where they
come from; indeed, the distance we feel between myth and
mathematics is partly the result of an overly pragmatic view
of mathematics in which properties take precedence over origins, a view which is characteristically modern. In this paper,
I have tried to show that if we disregard visible geometrical
origins and focus only on abstract relations, such as are captured in an algebraic equation, it becomes difficult to understand why the opposite sections enjoy the status they do in
the Conica as conic sections different from the hyperbola,
and why their status is different from that of the conjugate
sections—and, conversely, I have tried to show that the opposite sections bring us back to the importance of geometrical
origins in the Conica and, in so doing, allow us one key to the
character of classical mathematics.
Bibliography
Apollonius. (1891, 1893). Apollonii Pergaei quae Graece exstant
cum commentariis antiquis. Edited by I. L. Heiberg. 2 volumes.
Leipzig: Teubner.
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Apollonius. (1998). Apollonius of Perga Conics Books I-III.
Translated by R. Catesby Taliaferro. Santa Fe: Green Lion Press.
Apollonius. (2002). Apollonius of Perga Conics Book IV. Translated
with introduction and notes by Michael N. Fried. Santa Fe: Green
Lion Press.
Cassirer, E. (1946). Language and Myth. New York: Harper and
Brothers.
Fried, Michael N. and Unguru, Sabetai. (2001). Apollonius of
Perga’s Conica: Text, Context, Subtext. Leiden: Brill.
Goodwin, W W & Gulick, C. B. (1992). Greek Grammar. New
. .
Rochelle: Aristide D. Caratzas.
Heath, Thomas L. (1896). Apollonius of Perga, Treatise on Conic
Sections. Cambridge: At the University Press.
Heath, Sir Thomas L. (1921). A History of Greek Mathematics,
2 vols., Oxford: At the Clarendon Press (repr., New York: Dover
Publications, Inc., 1981).
Klein, Jacob (1981). “The World of Physics and the Natural
World.” The St. John’s Review, 33 (1): 22-34
Peters, F. E. (1967). Greek Philosophical Terms. New York: New
York University Press.
Sommerville, D. M. Y. (1946). Analytic Conics. London: G. Bell
and Sons, Ltd.
Toomer, G. J. (1990). Apollonius Conics Books V to VII: The Arabic
Translation of the Lost Greek Original in the Version of the Banu
Musa. 2 vols. (Sources in the History of Mathematics and Physical
Sciences, 9), New York: Springer-Verlag
Toomer, G. J. (1970). Apollonius of Perga, in DSB, 1, 179-193.
Youschkevitch, A. P (1976). The Concept of Function up to the
.
Middle of the 19th Century. Archive for History of Exact Sciences
16, pp. 37-88.
Zeuthen, H. G. (1886). Die Lehre von den Kegelschnitten im
Altertum, Kopenhagen, (repr., Hildesheim:Georg Olms
Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1966).
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111
Notes
The algebraic reading of the Conica as an historical interpretation
has, of course, Zeuthen (1886) as its greatest representative;
indeed, Zeuthen’s view of the Conica was completely adopted by
Heath (1896) and, to some extent, by Toomer as well (Toomer,
1990, 1970).
1
From Sommerville (1946), but, needless to say, a similar description can be found in any other textbook of analytic geometry.
2
In this connection, it is worth recalling that the sense in which
functions such as f(x) = a/x (whose graph, of course, is also an
hyperbola) are to be considered continuous or not has itself an
interesting history, one that shows again how history rarely moves
in straight lines. For Euler, “continuity” referred to the rule, so that
a function, like f(x) = a/x, governed by a single analytic equation
should called “continuous.” Although this view still echoes in our
calling the hyperbola one curve with two branches, Euler’s
approach to the continuity of functions gave away to a more geometrical view of continuity, that is, where continuity has much to
do with connectedness in the work Cauchy and Bolzano (For a
detailed discussion of these shifts in the meaning of continuity in
the history of the function concept, see Youschkevitch, 1976).
3
They are less prominent, however, in the extant later books,
Books 5-7 and in Book 1, where they appear in only 9 propositions.
4
The same argument also shows the difficulty in maintaining that,
for Apollonius, the circle was a kind of ellipse. The relationship
between the ellipse and the circle has been discussed extensively in
Michael N. Fried & Sabetai Unguru, Apollonius of Perga’s Conica:
Text, Context, Subtext, chap. 7.
5
Unless stated otherwise, all translations from Books 1-3 are from
R. Catesby Taliaferro in Apollonius of Perga Conics: Books I-III
(Green Lion edition).
6
For example in 4.48 (although any proposition from among 4.4154 could be taken as an example) we have in the ekthesis: estôsan
antikeimenai hai ABΓ, Δ, kai huperbole tis he AHΓ...kai tês AHΓ
antikeimene estô he E.
7
8
My translation.
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For this reason, one might expect the dual to be used in referring
to the opposite sections instead of the simple plural. The dual was
used for denoting “natural pairs” (see W W Goodwin & C. B.
. .
Gulick, Greek Grammar, §§ 170, 838, 914). But, as Christian
Marinus Taisbak has pointed out to me, it seems that by Hellenistic
times “the dual had become more or less obsolete.”
9
Fried & Unguru, op. cit., chap. 3; Fried, M. N., Apollonius of
Perga: Conics Book IV, pp. xxi-xxvii.
10
Thus, it is not at all surprising that the figure Eutocius uses to
illustrate Apollonius’ general definition of the transverse diameter is
evidently a pair of opposite sections (Heiberg, 2.201), and not, say,
a pair of circles, which would have served as well and which I have
used above.
11
12
The conjugate sections are introduced in the last proposition of
Book 1, proposition 60. Besides 1.60, the conjugate sections appear
also in propositions 2.17-23,42-43; 3.13-15,23-26,28-29, as well
as in a very striking proposition in Book 7, 7.31.
For the verb suzeugnumi, from which suzugeis is derived, Liddell
and Scott give the definitions, “to yoke together, couple or
pair…esp. in marriage.” It is worth noting that in 4.49, 50, 51
Apollonius uses the same adjective suzugeis to refer to opposite sections.
13
14
See Fried & Unguru, op.cit., pp. 123-124.
In Book 4, particularly in 4.25 (which is the central theorem of
the book: “A section of a cone does not cut a section of a cone or
circumference of a circle at more than four points”) the opposite do
seem to be separated from the other conic sections. In this specific
case, however, Heath’s argument above might be correct, namely,
that the cases involving the opposite sections, as Apollonius stresses
in the preface, were new and needed to be highlighted. It may also
be that 4.25 does actually intend the opposite sections, even though
the proof for the opposite sections comes latter; that kind of nexus
is not unusual in the Conica. Whatever the case, it still remains that,
unlike the opposite sections, the conjugate sections do not appear at
all in Book 4.
15
One might argue here that he is using a result here from Book 6,
namely, that two hyperbolas having the equal and similar figures are
16
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equal (6.2), but this could be argued regarding all the constructions
at the end of Book 1.
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115
Viète on the Solution of
Equations and the Construction
of Problems
Richard Ferrier
Introduction
I wish to do two things in this paper, first to review the
grounds for taking François Viète as a pivotal figure in the
history of thought, and second to clarify an interesting technical aspect of his work, namely, what he called the “exegetical art.” This clarification will show Viète to be a traditional
thinker as well as a revolutionary one, by showing how he
stops short of writing symbolic formulae or solutions to problems in geometry.
The second part is much longer, and will take us through
some proofs, none terribly difficult, I hope. The mathematical climax is the analysis of the inscription of a regular heptagon in a circle, an example of the exegetical art in action
taken from Viète’s work.
The Importance of Viète
According to Jacob Klein, the man chiefly responsible for
interest in Viète in the last 70 years, “The very nature of
man’s understanding of the world is henceforth, (that is to
say, after Viète’s work), governed by the symbolic number
concept. In Viète’s ‘general analytic’ this symbolic concept of
number appears for the first time, namely in the form of the
species.” Now this last remark needs clarification, particularly
in its use of the term “species,” that is “form” or “eidos,” but
also, perhaps, in the notion of symbolic mathematics that Mr.
Richard Ferrier teaches at Thomas Aquinas College. He has written, but not
yet published, a study of Viète’s transformative work on the analytic art.
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Klein is drawing upon (Greek Mathematical Thought and the
Origin of Algebra, p. 185). I will give a very brief account of
what I think he means.
It comes to something like this. The letters upon which
we operate when we do algebra are not signs of the same
order as the words of common speech. They do not immediately intend or signify anything. They are ciphers related to
each other by rules of connection analogous to syntax in a
spoken language. It is by those rules alone that they acquire
what “meaning” they have. That meaning is now called “syntactic” as opposed to “semantic” meaning. The equals symbol
in an equation does not mean, “is the same in magnitude or
number.” It is rather a relation between two other terms, say
A and B, which happens to be a convertible relation, so if the
first relation holds, A = B, so also the second, B = A holds.
If you give this symbol enough of the behaviors or of the
characteristics that ordinary equality has, then what will be
valid for its use, that is, what will be consistent to say of it
once you have posited the suitable rules governing its role in
a system of such symbols, will also be true of arithmetic or
geometry. This presumes, of course, that you interpret all the
symbols as the kind of beings that arithmetic considers, relations of inequality and equality, numbers themselves, and so
forth. But prior to this interpretation, the set of symbols does
not signify numbers, magnitudes, equalities, additions, divisions, or any other determinate kind of mathematical being.
Moreover, the indetermination in the single letter symbols
gives rise to the notion of a variable, which in turn underlies
modern mathematical or formal logic. Such mathematics is
symbolic mathematics. Mr. Klein claims that the symbolic
concept of number originates in the work of François Viète,
and that this concept comes to dominate modern mathematical thought and to influence modern conceptuality altogether.
Now I do not intend to demonstrate these larger claims
or to argue for them, but rather to look into some particulars
connected with Klein’s view of Viète. First let us note this
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aspect of his view: Klein says, “The symbolic concept of number appears for the first time . . . in the form of the species.”
How can that be? How is it that the term “species” can be the
entry point for the modern notion of number, and in general
for a mode of cognition, symbolic cognition, to enter mathematics?
This is what I understand Mr. Klein to mean, and I think
he is correct: Viète found a use of the word “eidos” in a text
of solutions to number problems, an ancient text, the
Arithmetica of Diophantus, where the word is used for the
unknown number. That is, Diophantus calls the unknown a
“species.” Viète conjoined this use to a discussion of a
method of finding unknown magnitudes in geometry. This
method is called analysis. In geometrical analysis, authors
such as Archimedes and Apollonius operate on unknown or
not actually given lines and figures as though they were given.
Viète, then, brought these two together: (1) the name
“species” or “eidos” for the unknown or, as we would say,
variable; and (2) operating or calculating without making any
distinction between unknown and known quantities. But he
went further. He replaced the given quantities, numbers, or
magnitudes with more species, and so produced the first
modern literal or non-numerical algebra, which he called
“species logistic,” that is, computation in forms.
A very elementary example may serve to clarify this idea
somewhat. You are familiar with the problem of finding a
fourth proportional. Now if you express that in algebra you
would come up with something like this: let ‘x’ stand for the
unknown. x is to a as b is to c. In that expression the letter ‘x’
does not stand for something you now have or know. It is not
clear how you should add or multiply or in any way deal with
something that you do not yet have.
Let us ignore this mystery of operating on what is not
there for you, what is not given. Writing x is to a as b is to c,
you take the product of means and extremes, and you wind
up with x times c = a times b. Then you divide both products
by c and you have x = a times b divided by c, where a, b, and
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c are the givens that will determine x, and when you have that
you have a formula for making x be given to you. Of course,
you cannot compute x unless a, b, and c are actual numbers,
say 4, 5, and 10. If these are the given numbers, then x is
given as well, and it is the number 2. Neither can you construct x, unless you have determinate magnitudes, say straight
lines, as the three givens.
If you keep the letters a, b, and c and you allow a, b, and
c to be equally indeterminate with x, then you no longer have
a definite x so much as a kind of relation between a, b, c, and
x. In algebra, we stop with this relation, calling it both the
formula and the solution to our problem. That is what happens when the particular numbers of an ordinary problem—
to find the fourth proportional—are replaced by signs for the
possibility of finding such a number. You no longer can take
a times b and divide it by c, because a, b, and c are just as
indeterminate as the original unknown. This is what I mean
when I say that Viète used Diophantus’ term species to designate not only the unknowns but also the knowns. He called
the resulting field of calculations and operations, and the consequences of performing them according to laws set out,
“species logistic,” that is, calculation in species.
If we take two easy steps beyond what Viète did, writing
a formula for quadratics and using two unknowns as axes in
a plane, his work leads directly to negative, irrational and
complex numbers, to the idea of a variable, and to analytic
geometry. All this stems from letting the symbol, the
“species,” stand in for the determinate number or magnitude
of classical mathematics.
Viète himself puts it this way, (he uses the term “zetetic,”
which I will discuss later). “The zetetic art does not employ
its logic on numbers, which was the tediousness of ancient
analysts, but uses its logic through a logistic which in a new
way has to do with species. This logistic is much more successful and powerful than the numerical one.” So Viète commands our attention as the originator of the modern algebraic
number concept, and the notion of mathematics as a symbolic
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science not immediately about anything but the arrangements
of its own terms into systems. I say Viète commands our
attention as the originator. Now it is of course the case that
however revolutionary Viète thought he was and however
proud he was of his accomplishment, he did not see all the
things that came from it, for example, imaginary numbers, or
co-ordinate geometry. How did he think of his work? He considered his work largely a restoration of a way of seeking that
went back to Plato. I say he considered it largely a restoration
because there is an addition to the restored analysis that Viète
expressly claims as his own, which he calls exegetic, and it is
this part that I would like to set out next.
The principal ancient text from which Viète formed his
view of analysis is the Seventh book of the Collectio of
Pappus. Pappus distinguishes between seeking, or “zetetic,”
and providing, or “poristic” analyses. This difference answers
to the difference between the propositions in the Elements
that end “Q.E.D” and those that end “Q.E.F.,” that is,
between theorems and problems. There are two types of
analysis, since there are two types of propositions with which
geometers are ordinarily concerned. Viète, for reasons too
subtle to lay out here, read Pappus in another way, making
zetetic and poristic parts of one procedure, a procedure ordinarily applied to a problem, not a theorem. Still, he conceived
of his work as a restoration of the lost art—or perhaps the
partially lost art—of analysis, that is, as a renovation, not an
innovation. That is a striking characteristic of Viète and his
contemporaries. You find in them a preference for the lost or
partially recovered sources in antiquity, for Democritus over
Aristotle, and when Plato is not fully available, for Plato over
Aristotle, for Archimedes over Euclid, and in general for
whatever the schoolmen did not hand on over what the
schoolmen did hand on. They sought the key to the deepest
truths in the arts and sciences in a correct restoration of the
faultily preserved sources of antiquity in preference to accepting the ones that they had received more perfectly intact from
their teachers.
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This is what Viète says: “And although the ancients had
set forth a two-fold analysis, the zetetic and the poristic, it is
nevertheless fitting that there be established also a third kind,
which may be called ‘rhetic’, [telling] or ‘exegetic’, [showing
or exhibiting], so that there is a zetetic art by which is found
the equation or proportion between the magnitude that is
being sought, and those that are given, a poristic art, by which
from the equation or proportion the truth of the theorem set
up is examined, and an exegetic art, by which from the equation set up or the proportion there is exhibited the magnitude
itself which is being sought.” As if to emphasize his own
achievement in completing the method of analysis, he says,
“And thus the whole threefold analytical art, claiming for
itself this office may be defined as the science of right finding
in mathematics.” As to the importance of the third part,
rhetic or exegetic, he says in another place, “Rhetic and
exegetic must be considered to be most powerfully pertinent
to the establishment of the art, since the two remaining provide examples rather than rules.” He emphasizes the importance of the third part in the remarkable concluding words of
the introduction to the analytic art: “Finally, the analytical
art, having at last been put into the threefold form of zetetic,
poristic, and exegetic, appropriates to itself by rights the
proud problem of problems: To leave no problem unsolved.”
What exactly is the third part of the analytic art, the
showing or exegetic part, the part that Viète himself emphasized and considered his own invention? One way to proceed
to answer would be to read or re-read the parts of Viète’s
Isagoge that touch on exegetics. If your experience is like
mine, though, you know that it is one thing to have someone
describe a procedure, especially a mathematical procedure,
another to know it from having carried it out. Accordingly, I
propose to explicate Viète’s notion of exegesis by doing some
geometry. To prepare for the example of exegetics taken from
Viète, we will look at a problem of my own.
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Viète’s Exegetic Art
Analysis Bootcamp
Our practice will be the analysis of the construction of a regular polygon, the pentagon.
Problem: to inscribe a regular pentagon in a circle.
Figure 1 Inscription of a regular pentagon in a circle
Now the analysis of a construction always starts this way:
suppose you already have what you want to make.
Let it be done, or rather as they say, “let it have been
done.” Our figure is, then, given not really but hypothetically.
ABXCY is supposed to be a regular pentagon in a circle. All
the sides are equal, equal sides subtend equal arcs, equal arcs
subtend equal angles at the circumference, and therefore
angle ACB is precisely half the angle ABC, and is also half the
angle CAB.
The triangle CAB is therefore an isosceles triangle, CA
equaling BC, with the vertex angle half the angles at the base.
Next let the angle at A be bisected by AD. The two half
angles then will each be equal to the angle ACD and the triangle ADC will also be an isosceles triangle.
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Since the angle BAD is equal to the angle ACD, if a circle
be described through the three points A, D, C, the line AB
will be tangent to that circle, for the angle that a tangent
makes with a chord is equal to the angle subtended by the
same arc at the circumference. But the square on a tangent is
equal to the rectangle contained by the whole secant and the
part outside the circle, that is BC and BD, i.e., the square on
AB = rectangle BD, BC. But inasmuch as AB = AD = DC,
then the square on DC = the rectangle BD, BC.
Well, then, if I had this pentagon in this circle, I would
have this line BC cut at a point D so that the square on DC,
the greater segment, is equal to the rectangle contained by the
whole line and the lesser segment. But there is a proposition
that tells me how to do that, the eleventh proposition in the
second book of the Elements. So, let it be done and then
prove “forwards,” or synthetically, all the connections that I
just established “backwards,” or analytically, and at the end
we will really have our pentagon in a circle.
Now, that is a classical geometrical analysis and synthesis
of the sort you would find in the second book of Apollonius,
numerous places in Archimedes, and in Pappus. I have not
used anything algebraic. But, let us indulge ourselves in some
algebra, and look at the equation here: the square on DC =
BD, BC. Calling BC ‘a’, and DC ‘x’, the equation is x2 = a(ax). “And,” you could say to yourself, “if I could only solve for
x, then I would know how long to make DC, and if I could
make DC then I could do the problem. But this is a quadratic
equation, and I can solve it.”
That is the method of analysis. I include here what came
to be called the ‘resolution.’ We began in the classical mode
by looking at the angles and finding a proportion, which we
resolved into an equality between a square and a rectangle.
When we reach this point, we can either continue in the classical mode by thinking of the equality in geometrical terms,
and do the synthesis as a construction, which would be the
answer to the problem. Or we can examine the equality alge-
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braically and work with it in that mode to reach a formula for
x, and consider the formula the solution of the problem.
Recall what Viète said about exegetics: it is supposed to
provide the unknown magnitude itself, to exhibit or construct
it. One would expect exegetics to provide the way for finding
such an unknown as we had in the present problem, that is,
it would seem to be some sort of procedure for cutting the
line BD at a point like D that will produce the requisite properties. One is tempted to think that the procedure intended is
to use the quadratic formula to solve for x, and then interpret
the right hand side as a series of simple geometric constructions. As we shall see later, though, this is an error. Viète’s
exegetic art is not the mechanical exploitation of the formulae of solved equations.
Analysis with Live Ammunition
Next, we will see what Viète does in a real problem that is
considerably more complex but of greater interest.
The problem is to inscribe a regular seven-sided polygon,
a heptagon, in a circle. It is taken from Viète’s published work
and is a real instance of the kind of solution Viète promises in
the introduction, that is, it is a real instance, I think, of
exegetics. To solve it we will need a postulate and two lemmas.
Postulate: To draw a straight line from any point to any two
lines so that they cut off on it any possible predetermined
interval. (I have illustrated this in the next figure. See figure 2.)
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Figure 2 Postulate
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Figure 3 First Lemma: Trisection of an angle:
First Lemma: To trisect a given angle.
Let the given angle be DCE.
The point called the pole is the “any point” of the postulate. “To draw a straight line from any point”: so the straight
line must pass through the pole. “To draw it to any two
lines”—those two lines are the curved line and the straight
line below—“so that they cut off on it any possible predetermined interval”—the interval is up there above; it is given in
advance, predetermined, and what I would like you to grant
me in this postulate is the power to put a line through that
pole so that between those two other lines, that interval is cut
off. Now I must say, “Any possible predetermined interval”
because as is obvious to the eye, I guess, in this figure, if I
made that interval too short, I could not fit the line through
the pole so as to have that interval cut off on it no matter
what. If the two given lines were, for another example, concentric circles, and if the pole were the center of the circle,
then this postulate would be of no use at all because the only
distance between those two lines on lines drawn from the
center of the circle is the difference between their radii; that
is all I could have. So I must say, “any possible predetermined
interval.” If it is possible, I would like the right to place that
line passing through the pole so as to have that distance intercepted on it. This postulate is mentioned in the Isagoge. To
the reader who has not read more of Viète than the Isagoge,
it is not clear why that is in there at all—but he asks for that
postulate for certain purposes, and I ask for it, too.
Let a circle be described with C as center and radius CD.
With pole D and interval = CD we use the postulate to insert
line ABD, so that the interval falls between the circle and the
line CE extended.
I say that angle BAC is 1/3 of angle DCE.
Since AB = BC = CD, the triangle BCD is isosceles, with
equal angles at B and D. But each of these is double the angle
at A. And the one at D together with A is equal to angle DCE.
In the case where the angle to be trisected is greater than 135
degrees, we use the equal exterior angles at B and D, which
are again each twice the angle at A, as in the second figure.
Q.E.F.
Second Lemma: In the first figure for Lemma 1, if we construct DE=CD, the following equality holds:
The cube on AC, minus three times the solid contained by
AC and the square on AB, is equal to the solid contained by
CE and the square on AB.
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Figure 4 Lemma 2: cube AC - 3 times solid (AC, sq. AB) = solid (CE, sq. AB)
Looking at the figure (figure 4), if I drop perpendiculars
BI, DK, and erect a perpendicular CH and extend it, on the
vertical line FHCG I have the situation presented in the
Elements 2.5, that is, I have a straight line bisected and cut
somewhere else, and therefore the square on the half will
equal the sum of the rectangle contained by the unequal segments and the square on the segment between the bisection
point and the point making the unequal cut. And looking at
the straight lines BHD and FHG, I have the situation of 3.35,
namely two lines in a circle cutting each other. When two
lines in a circle cut each other, the rectangles contained by the
segments are equal. I will use those properties and the
Pythagorean Theorem and a few other elementary truths to
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demonstrate the lemma, but the key ones are the ones I just
indicated.
The proof is given next to the figure. The square on AB,
which, since AB = BC is the same as the square on CG, is
equal by that proposition in the second book of the Elements
to the square on CH and the rectangle contained by the
unequal segments FH, HG. But the square on AB minus the
square on CH will be the rectangle which is in turn equal to
the rectangle BH, HD by the other proposition from the third
book, namely that rectangles made of the segments of two
intersecting lines in a circle are equal. Now the square on
CH, by the Pythagorean Theorem, will be equal to the difference between the square on the hypotenuse AH and the
square on AC. But since BI is a perpendicular drawn from the
vertex of an isosceles triangle, it will bisect the base AC, and,
BI being parallel to HC, the line AH will also be bisected at
B, so that the square on AH is four times the square on its
half, AB. Then the square on CH is the difference between
four times the square on AB and the square on AC. Next,
from that and the line above, namely, that the difference
between the square on AB and the square on CH is equal to
the rectangle BH HD, the square on AC minus 3 times the
square on AB will be equal to the rectangle BH HD. Now that
is almost where I want to be because I am interested in the
cube on AC, and the difference between that and—I am looking at the conclusion now—three times the solid contained by
AC and the square on AB. I have those solids with the height
removed, as it were, I just need the height AC and I have
those solids. That is my next goal.
Then BH is to HD as IC is to CK, since any two lines cut
by parallel lines are cut proportionally. And if BH is to HD as
IC is to CK, then it is also in the same ratio as their doubles
AC and CE. So that BH is to HD as AC is to CE. Then, taking the common height, BH, the square on BH is to the rectangle BH, HD as AC is to CE. But BH is equal to AB so that
the square on AB is to the difference between the square on
AC and three times the square on AB—that was what we
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
found equal to the rectangle BH, HD—in the same ratio,
namely as AC is to CE.
Then taking means and extremes, the solid contained by
the means is equal to the solid contained by the extremes,
namely the cube on AC, minus three times the solid contained
by AC and the square on AB is equal to the solid contained
by CE and the square on AB. Q.E.D.
I would note at this point that everything we have gone
through in these preliminaries is strictly classical, synthetic
geometry. It could all have been done by Archimedes or
Apollonius, and some of it, in fact, was done by them.
Now let us see what interest this second lemma might
hold. It seems to me the easiest thing would be to look at this
figure given below (figure 5) which removes all the middle
steps and just looks at the result.
Figure 5
If you have two isosceles triangles with equal sides p and
unequal sides q and x, then you get an equation answering to
the equality that I gave in the geometrical mode namely that
x3 – 3xp2 = qp2 or, in short, this is a geometrical configuration that answers to a cubic equation. If you have ever gone
back and looked at things in Euclid, trying to express them in
equations, you will know that cubics are unusual. You almost
always get squares. This theorem answers to a cubic equation.
And that is why Viète proves it. He proves this theorem in
order to give a geometrical counterpart to that cubic equation.
If the terms in the equations are interpreted as the sides
and bases of the triangles in this theorem, then the solution
FERRIER
129
of the interpreted equation would reduce to the construction
of this figure. That is, if you could construct the triangles set
up this way, and in particular if you could give yourself x,
then you would have solved this equation, this interpreted
equation, as I would like to speak of it. To put this another
way, if x3-3xp2+qp2, then x can be found as the base of an
isosceles triangle whose equal sides are p and whose base
angle is 1/3 the base angle of an isosceles triangle with sides
p and base q. Now the angles of such a triangle, namely the
one with two sides p and a base q, are given. Why? Because
the whole triangle is given. If you have three sides you have
a determinate triangle, and so the angles are given. And given
two equal sides and any one angle in an isosceles triangle, the
remaining side and the remaining angles are also given.
Consequently the base of the flatter triangle would be given.
Thus all we need to do to solve for x is to trisect a given
angle. This is easily done by means of our first lemma.
To review: we have a postulate that allows us to insert a
rotating line through a given point across two lines so as to
have cut off on it any interval. We have found a figure that
answers to a certain cubic equation, namely, paired isosceles
triangles with a 3:1 base angle ratio, that answers to a certain
cubic equation, and we obtained this figure by trisecting an
angle. Those are the preliminaries.
Last, let us see how Viète inscribes a regular seven-sided
polygon in a circle. This problem, incidentally, is Viète’s own
final problem in his Supplementum Geometriae, his completion of geometry. I have chosen it not only for its intrinsic
interest but also because I think Viète, who calls the
Supplementum a work in exegetics, gave this problem as a
specimen of the workings of his exegetic art.
Problem: To inscribe a regular heptagon in a circle.
Let it have been done. (See figure 6.)
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Figure 6 Inscription of a regular heptagon in a circle
And let BE be one side of the heptagon; then the angle ECB
will be 1/7 of two right angles. Then the angle at E, CEA, will
also be 1/7 because that is an isosceles triangle, EAC. Then
the angle EAB will be 2/7 because it is the sum of those. Now
from the point E let ED be drawn equal to the radius of the
circle, and where it cuts the circle at F let the line FA be
FERRIER
131
drawn to the center. Then we have two isosceles triangles of
the sort in the trisection lemma from which it follows that the
angle FAC is three times angle EDA. It is the same figure that
we had in the trisection lemma. In the triangle EAC the two
smaller angles each being 1/7 of two right angles, the remaining angle at A is 5/7 of two right angles, but the whole angle
FAC being triple the angle at D, which is itself 2/7, will be
6/7. The remaining angle FAE will be 1/7 of two right angles.
It will be equal then to the angle AEC, so that the lines FA and
EC will be parallel.
Since those two lines are parallel they cut the sides of the
triangles DEC and DFA proportionately, so DE is to DC as
DF is to DA. But, by another proposition from book 3 of the
Elements, the book of circles, the rectangle contained by the
segments of a secant, that is, the whole secant and the part
outside, DF, DE, is equal to the rectangle contained by the
segments of any other secant drawn from the same point outside. So DB, DC equals DE, DF. Then, turning that equality
into a proportion: DE is to DC as DB is to DF, but as DE is
to DC as DF is to DA, therefore DB, DF, DA are continuously
proportional. Then, in a continuous proportion the first is to
the third in the duplicate ratio, or as the squares, on any
terms in the ratios and also any terms having the same ratio
as those terms. So DB is to DA as square DE is to square DC.
But DE was by construction made equal to the radius so DB
is to DA as square AB is to square DC. Here we stop.
How does one know when to stop in an analysis? Well,
here is one way I know in this one. You stop when you have
projected the ratios you know in various parts of the figure
down to ratios on one line. It happens in the synthetic proofs
of Apollonius, too. You take a number of ratios in the figure
and when you transform them into a proportion all on a single line, that tells you how the lengths in that line are related.
That is where we are now. We have taken the ratios that exist
through the figure because of its shape and we have turned
them into a proportion among the parts of one line. That is
also beautifully adapted for conversion into an equation.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
That line, of course, is the diameter extended, DBAC, and
our proportion is DB is to DA as square AB is to square DC.
Let us turn this into species logistic, or algebra. What do
we need to construct the heptagon that we do not know? Is
it not clear that we need to know DB? If we knew DB, we
could locate point D and since DE is equal to a radius, we
could just swing a radius out from D and cut off the other end
of the side of the heptagon, and we would be done. So DB is
the unknown, and that is the only term we need to find on
this line, on the diameter extended. So call DB ‘x’, and the
radius ‘r’. DA will then be (r+x), and DC will be (2r+x). The
proportion then may be written: x: (r+x) :: r:(2r+x). Means
and extremes can be taken, yielding the equation: x3 + 4rx2
+ 3r2x = r3.
This does not look very promising. It is a cubic, and we
have a pattern for solving a cubic, but not this cubic. Happily,
there is an algebraic gimmick that Viète invented called
“plasma,” which will do the trick. (Almost none of Viète’s
technical terms passed into common use, by the way.
Accordingly, it is like reading ancient law-books to read him
talking about his procedure. One of the few Viètean terms
that did last was “coefficient,” but “plasma” did not.)
“Plasma” is the technique of getting rid of an unwanted term
in an algebraic expression by taking a substitute variable. In a
way you might say that is what you do when you complete
the square in solving a quadratic. You find the right thing to
remove the middle term, the term that is just an x, and then
it is just a simple square; it is no longer a three-term expression. Now in cubics if you could remove two terms at once,
then all you would have to do is take cube roots and you can
solve them in much the same way you solve quadratics.
Plasma gets rid of one term, a term in x or x squared, but
unfortunately only one. The substitution that you make to do
it is y = x + 4/3r, or x = y – 4/3r. Let that substitution have
7
been made, and you get the equation in y:y3 – 7 r2y= 27r3.
3
FERRIER
133
Now if we let p = r √7/3, and r/3 be q, this equation
transforms into our pattern y3 – 3yp2 = qp2. Point D gives x
and y, and hence one side of our heptagon. Since we have the
side, we can just go around the circle six more times and the
problem is done.
I omit a slight digression in Viète’s analysis here. It is
done for reasons of elegance and does not substantially
change the argument. This is the pivot point of the argument,
where we move from analysis to synthesis. Viète’s synthesis
runs through the analysis backwards: first the analysis in the
equations and proportions, and then the analysis in the
angles, until he has a proof that the figure that he had made
in the circle is a regular seven-sided figure. I will omit the synthesis.
It must be noted, however, that not only would every
ancient geometer have provided a synthesis, but that Viète,
too, gives it in the Supplementum Geometria, the text from
which this all comes. Indeed, it is all that he gives. What I
have laid out here is a reconstructed analysis following his
remarks on how to do these sorts of problems. That is, he
says that the proof will be the reverse of the analysis and that
the analyst dissimulates and does not show you everything he
did. This seems to me to be a kind of challenge to readers of
those texts to find out what he did do. Descartes says just that
in his Géométrie. So that is what I have given you: it is a
reconstructed analysis of his problem. Like Descartes, Viète
complains that the Ancients covered their tracks and then
does the same himself!
Conclusion
A survey of our procedure is now in order. First, we did
not do something that the discussion of exegetics in the
Isagoge might suggest. I think also it is what Mr. Klein’s book
suggests, and I know it is what I thought when I first read the
Isagoge myself. We did not, using algebra, or as Viète calls it,
species logistic, solve the equation to which we had reduced
our problem. That equation would be the first one that had
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
the fours in it, and that we later on reduced by plasma to
another equation. At no point in working with that equation
did we solve for the unknown in the shape of a formula.
There is not an algebraic or analytic solution to that equation;
it is not to be found. You perhaps may wonder if I misspoke
my thought there: absolutely not. In fact, the cubic equation
involved here is the so-called “irreducible cubic,” which
means that it cannot be solved by algebra. If you try to solve
it by algebra, you involve yourself with imaginary quantities,
and every attempt you make to get rid of them is like stepping on the bump in the rug: they pop up again elsewhere.
They cannot be gotten rid of. So it is not just that he failed to
do it. He cannot do it; no one can do it.
Exegetics, then, does not mean performing the geometric
counterpart of an algebraic solution as it is laid out in a formula. It does not mean getting -b±√b2-4ac
for example, and then
2a
going through the squaring,
adding, subtracting, and so on in geometry, with the formula
laid out for you as a kind of blueprint. This is something to
which the opening pages of Descartes’ Géométrie point. I say
“point” because I am not sure even Descartes does it; you
have to think for awhile to see whether he intends his figures
to be the simple exploitation of his operation or not. Perhaps
they are not exploitations of the quadratic formula, but independently given geometrical constructions. As is so often the
case with the foxy Descartes, he does not say enough to help
us be sure what he has in mind. It is defensible, though, in the
light of what he does say, that he intends you to have a geometric counterpart for each algebraic operation, and just to
exploit the formula directly. That is at least defensible in
Descartes. In Viète it is not so.
So what did we do if we did not do that? Well, first we
performed an ordinary geometrical analysis of the sort
Archimedes might have done. This ended in a proportion.
That proportion was then treated as an item in logistic. We
forgot that it was about lines and just regarded it as a number
of items in a logistic relation. It was transformed until it
FERRIER
135
reached a certain form. What form? A form we knew in
advance from our first lemma to have its geometrical counterpart in a constructable figure—that is, constructable if you
grant our postulate. Then, after we had noted certain proper
elegances pertaining to this particular problem, we proceeded
synthetically (or rather, we would have if we had gone
through all of the steps), first constructing the requisite line
and then the whole polygon, and then, via the resulting equation and other relations, proving that it is indeed a regular
seven-sided figure in a given circle. Zetetic is Viète’s name for
the first two parts of this procedure, both the geometrical
part terminating in the proportion and the algebraic analysis
in which we reach an equation in standard form.
Zetetic ended when the equation to which the problem
had been reduced fit one of a number of standard forms, our
lemma for cubics being one such form. This lemma provides
the principal exegetical part. By means of this lemma, we can
now find the unknown, in this case the line DB. Exegetics as
a procedure is regular and synthetic. I mean those terms
strictly, that is, the construction is a standard, mechanical
exploitation of the equation that can be given by a standard
construction. The complete synthesis simply runs through the
zetetics in reverse order. If your problem reduces to a cubic
of another form (this is the same with the one we have been
examining, but with the signs on the left side of the equation
switched: 3p2x – x3 = p2q) there is, in the Supplementum,
another, similar exegetical lemma you can use to start your
construction, and the situation is quite the same for problems
such as inscribing the pentagon, reducing to quadratic equations.
Viète treats quadratics in another treatise, and it is an
extraordinarily puzzling little work. Almost everything in it is
painfully obvious, at least the first 14 or so propositions are,
and it has the rather odd and stuffy title, which I think should
now make sense, “The Standard Enumeration of Geometrical
Results.” It is a handbook; it is like a carpenter’s manual.
When you have one of these, build in this order that, etc. He
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
does this for quadratic equations and for certain biquadratic
equations. Moreover, in all these cases, the proof, which follows the construction, as in Euclid, is a straightforward reversal of the geometrical and logistic analyses that preceded—
now that, I think, fits Viète’s language in his introduction; it
makes sense of his language.
So exegetics in practice comes to this. It is the provision
and employment of a series of standard constructions for
finding unknown quantities when such quantities are
enmeshed in equations of various degrees, without solving
the equations. This is important, since it manifests the way
Viète stands in two camps, modern or symbolic, and ancient
or constructive. Though species logistic is of profound value
to him, he never rests in the fully analytical or symbolic solution to his equations. They must always be perfected by realization in construction or computation, artful synthetic and
non-symbolic procedures.
I hope we may now see why Viète wrote, “Exegetic comprises a series of rules, and is therefore to be considered the
most important part of analytic, for these rules first confer on
the analytic art its character as an art, while zetetic and poristic consist essentially of examples.” The analyst who knows
exegetics will know what the standard constructable forms in
each degree are, and he will accordingly know what to aim at
in his zetesis, in his analysis. This will in turn inform his
development of the techniques of species logistic, and finally,
if he believes, as Viète came to believe, that he has all the
exegetics that can be, he may well boast that, “The analytical
art, having at last been put into the threeform form of zetetic,
poristic, and exegetic, appropriates to itself by right the
proud problem of problems, which is to leave no problem
unsolved.”
�
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The St. John’s Review
Volume 55.2 (Spring 2014)
Editor
William Pastille
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
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Pamela Kraus, Dean. All manuscripts are subject to blind review.
Address correspondence to The St. John’s Review, St. John’s
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©2014 St. John’s College. All rights reserved. Reproduction in
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ISSN 0277-4720
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��Contents
Essays & Lectures
The Mutuality of Imagining and Thinking: On Dennis Sepper’s
Understanding Imagination: The Reason of Images ..................1
Eva Brann
Similarity and Equality in Euclid and Apollonius ............................17
Michael N. Fried
The Soul’s Choice of Life.................................................................41
Greg Recco
Artistic Expression in Animals .........................................................61
Linda Wiener
Poems
Troy...................................................................................................82
Hannah Eagleson
Three Poems from Les Fleurs du Mal
by Charles Baudelaire...................................................................84
Peter Kalkavage
The Second Sense .............................................................................88
Elliott Zuckerman
Review
To Save the Ideas
Book Review of Daniel Sherman’s Soul, World, and Idea:
An Interpretation of Plato’s Republic and Phaedo ...................89
Eva Brann
��The Mutuality of
Imagining and Thinking:
On Dennis Sepper’s
Understanding Imagination:
The Reason of Images1
Eva Brann
When Professor Rosemann invited me to this colloquium—small
in scale, but to my mind great in significance—I told him that I
conceived my talk on Dennis Sepper’s newly published Understanding Imagination as a sort of book review, which earned me a
wonderful possession, a copy of this magnum opus, as he called
it, rightly.
There cannot be even the hint of a wink in this appellation. It is
indeed a magnum opus, magnificent, powerful, and copious. I want
to address this last feature first, since it colors the reading of the
book.
This work takes its time. Since, to describe its thesis in a first
approximation, there is no activity homo sapiens sapiens engages
in as such that is not imaginative, Sepper ventures into all sorts of
intellectual territory and calls on a variety of theories and concepts.
The point is that instead of dropping names allusively and naming
notions abbreviatedly he takes his time in explaining what he uses,
and he does it so that a reader can follow. He needs the idea of a
field. Do we all know off-hand what a field, formally speaking, is?
1. New York: Springer, 2013. This review-lecture was written for a colloquium held on October 30, 2013 in honor of the book by the Department
of Philosophy at the University of Dallas, Irving, Texas, where Professor
Sepper teaches. Eva Brann, tutor at St. John’s College, Annapolis, was invited to be the main speaker because Professor Sepper has had close relations to St. John’s, and because her book The World of the Imagination
(Savage, MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 1991), is cited in Understanding
Imagination as a sort of predecessor in the attempt to treat the imagination
somewhat comprehensively and with due regard to the reflective tradition.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Well, now we know. Is everyone interested in the imagination familiar with Saussurian linguistic theory? Well, a lucid exposition
is given. Does that sane remainder among us who is convinced that
opining without some grounding in the tradition of thought is like
Chanticleer standing on top of a middenheap crowing, know exactly why, and how, to study texts of the past? Well, though I come
from a school that deliberately resorts to that tradition as a treasury
of texts, yet on reading Dennis Sepper’s first introductory chapter
I felt better armed in what looks at the moment like a rear-guard
action in its defense. Let me quickly inject here that I think this is
a sufficiently winnable battle, that the last shall soon enough be
first, and that books like this one will belong to the special forces
of this fight. One element in its effectiveness is precisely that its
generalities are highly and acutely specified. What I mean by that
I’ll say before long, and I’ll even express some misgivings. But
they are the queries and doubts of a reader who has been made to
think hard.
So let me begin my review of the content of Understanding
Imagination by saying that the plenitude of notions introduced is
lucidly organized. This book knows exactly where it’s going. The
title announces the comprehensive topic of the book. (Topic, topos,
topology, topography, I should say, are not casual but carefully expounded terms of the work.) This overarching topic is the imagination and its two aspects: the activity of imagining, and its
product, images. First, the imagination is to be understood, that is,
subjected to thinking. And anyone who has ever developed an interest in this topic will know that this endeavor opens a can of
worms—particularly the problematic idea that one mental function
can be applied to another, and the implied pseudo-traditional notion that the imagination is in fact a separable faculty. (I’ll explain
“pseudo-traditional” in a moment.) The subtitle, then, implies that
this understanding will yield the “reason of images.” Now believe
it or not, the book itself contains an explication, applicable to this
phrase, of genitives, objective and subjective. Thus “the reason of
images” means both “what is the reason we have images, how and
for what purpose they come about” (objective) and “the rationality
belonging to images themselves, how images and logoi (reasons
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
3
and ratios) are identical” (subjective). The main title has a similar
double meaning. The book will make good on both parts of the
promise, to elucidate both the activity and the product of images—
and, of course, these expositions will raise questions.
The organization of so large a number of mental motions must,
as I said, be lucid, and it is. I’ll first set it out summarily, then permit myself to pick out the particular aspects that got to me, and finally formulate some of the aforesaid queries. That’s as much as
to say that this is a personal take on the book, but that way of proceeding needs no excuse in respect to this work. For the author
himself has some keen observations bearing on the strenuous selfdenial of the impersonal approach, with which I have my own experience: Academic treatments of the inner life, driven by some
misguided notion of objectivity (I don’t want to say, individual inadequacy) quite often read as if the scholar had mislaid his soul
and excised his personal experience while writing on, say, the passions, the will, or the imagination. In these matters, our author
might agree, taking it personally gains something even more valuable than objectivity—call it verity.
I must say at this point what “taking it personally” shouldn’t
mean. Dennis gives the most generous praise and acknowledgment
to my own book, The World of the Imagination, which he clearly
regards as a worthy predecessor to be worthily superseded. There’s
no cause for grief in that. What better chance for an afterlife than
to find a delimited place in the next, more global treatment? At the
end, I’ll indicate briefly how the picture-making view of the imagination preferred in my book both accommodates itself and is recalcitrant to Dennis’s topology.
Chapter 1 begins by giving shape to the questions that matter
about the imagination: How do we come by the idea? Why is it
important? And it promises answers. It then goes on to a critique
of what Sepper calls “the occluded-occulted tradition” of sapient
imagining. He mounts a fair attack on what one might call the
canned version of the tradition, the “pseudo-tradition,” which is
divorced from the subtleties of the actual texts and thus set up to
miss the meaning. Here he produces a pointed answer to two questions: One, what killed the tradition? Answer: survey-type, textless
�4
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
textbook accounts. And two, what have the original texts to give
us? Answer: fresh, unstereotyped approaches to truth.
Chapter 2 offers a five-line definition of the imagination, which
is deliberately comprehensive and incidentally shows that good
books are written back to front. My students tend to think, wrongly,
I believe, that philosophy is about and ends in definitions. Yet it is
a part of the intelligent plan of this book that it begins by focusing
the mind on the topic by means of this definition. It is a risky and
arresting strategy: risky because, unlike the Socratic initiation of a
search by means of a definition that is at once popular and self-refuting, Sepper’s definition is at once demanding and conclusive;
arresting because you can tell that it is new-old, not one of the
going formulas, yet rooted in the intellectual tradition.
His ultimate aim is, as I said, comprehensiveness, initiated by
actually practicing imagining, by attending to the act. There are
guided exercises asking you to determine such aspects as how
much of imaginative remembering is reproduction, how much
detail is present, etc. There is a first engagement with various approaches, such as psychologism, which regards knowledge as
“what people in fact think” rather than “what objects actually
are,” and works on the supposition that we have similar, naturally
given, minds which have before them mental objects, and also
posits that both the mind’s thinking and its objects are accessible
to introspection. One can see that “having images”—pictures
held in or before the mind—goes well with this school of thought.
It is, however, afflicted with many quandaries. Its opponent, antipsychologism, argues that it is not from mental, thus subjective,
objects that knowledge comes but from objective public objects,
from logic, mathematics, the world. Internal objects are denied
in favor of overt behavior; mental images, at least the claim that
there are well-formed, stable mental pictures, are obvious targets
of anti-psychologism. It, too, has its difficulties.
Sepper gives notice that he will sail between these Clashing
Rocks: A mental image must be somehow based both in its situation and its forming activity—must be both public and private.
To escape falsifying fixations, we must reradicalize imagination,
recover its roots, its ontology. Sepper proposes a guiding idea
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that will avoid getting caught in the conventional commonplaces:
a “topology” of the imagination.
Chapter 3 could be said to set out the methodology of the book,
but that would be falsifying Sepper’s enterprise, which is premethodological. I might describe it as putting to work, for all it’s
worth, a well-found metaphor. Topos, the Greek word for “place,”
has many spaces—physical territories supporting settled locales;
reversely, mathematical fields constituted from the relations among
its elements, its sites; topological space in which expansible shapes
undergo transformations without tearing; and the index in which
rhetorical “common-places,” in Greek, topoi, can be looked up.
These are all versions of a “conceptual topology.” This rich notion
is the notable discovery, or I should say, rediscovery of the book.
Sepper finds that certain philosophers’ writings about imagination,
when directly approached, in fact employed a conceptual topology
all along.
Here is a very preliminary description of the topological approach, as exercised by people who have some preparation:
They have not acquired just a greater quantity of discrete
ideas and their associations. They have cultivated new
fields of imagination as such, as whole fields; they have
learned to mark out special positions in the field; they
have come to isolate (or section out) subfields and sometimes they learn how to relate the various fields to one
another in a new entity or a new field (94).
This much is already evident about a topological understanding
of the imagination: It will see imagining as holistic, fluid, multilevelled—and all that to the second degree. I mean that the above
is not only a description of the imagination but also of the understanding of imagination. For if the imagination is a “topography,”
a placing-in-fields activity, so much the more must its understanding
be a “topology,” an account of a topography. And conversely, if the
approach is adequate in its metaphoricity—for “place” as primarily
used and defined by Aristotle, is a phenomenon of extension—then
so must the imagination be a power of metaphorical placing. But
this is not Sepper’s explicit vocabulary; it is perhaps more an expression of my misgivings, which I’ll articulate at the end.
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Chapters 4 through 7 then do what is obviously next: give a
reradicalized reading of the deepest philosophical texts bearing on
the subject—Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant.
Chapter 8, on post-Kantian treatments, displays what happens
sooner or later to anyone who tries to trace the tradition of a topic
chronologically. Eventually things fall apart into multifariousness;
one is obliged to choose a few authors out of a multitude. Sepper
concentrates on those, namely Wittgenstein (in his Tractatus) and
Saussure, who exemplify an important consequence of his own
heuristic, his topological device: that logos, far from being the antithesis of an image, is an image.
To explain the assertion that the overlapping of language with
imaging is implied in the topological approach, I must return to
Chapter 3 to introduce Sepper’s notion of “biplanarity.” It refers
to a sort of double sight by which one imaginative plane is simultaneously present with another, and the imaginer sees one in terms
of the other. It is first mentioned as a sort of dissociation, such as
happens when one distances oneself from the sense-filled experience of the world in order to see it as reason-resistant appearance,
opposed to intelligible being, if one is Socratically inclined. Or reversely, if one tends to Husserlian phenomenology, then it is real
existence that is “bracketed,” so that one may see the world as an
analyzable phenomenon. Later this relation between the planes is
called a projection. “Seeing-as” has in fact become a topos.
So logos or reason and image or picture can live simultaneously
on two planes while being, moreover, somehow projectible—that
is, in some aspect isomorphic. I have some misgivings about this
rather broad application of the notion of projection that I will offer
later on.
Now before going to those central chapters that revive the tradition and reradicalize the problem, let me just complete the sketch
of the book’s organization.
Chapter 9, the last chapter, presents the initial definition, now
endowed with enough mental material to shed the term definition
and to become a delimitation—a kinder, gentler, more inclusivesounding term. Like any thoughtful philosopher (there is, after all,
the other kind), Sepper does not in fact highly value definitions,
because they are too bare, and he says that they never deliver an
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
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unpackable essence. Nonetheless his now much amplified delimitation does invite an analytic reading. I will sketch out what this
reading yields, since that is the crux of the book, yet I know full
well that I’m reversing Sepper’s deliberate expansion. But what
else to do? Let me call it whetting your appetites.
So: the imagination is an activity; one might say that the imagination is nothing but imagining. This identification does an end
run around the “mental modularity” debate, which is concerned
with the problem hinted at before: whether the mind has a multiplicity of distinct faculties or is a global activity. The imagination
is neither a separate faculty nor an undiscriminable activity. This
imagining is a third something, quite positive, quite specific. It acts
evocatively, calls something forth, and that in a dual way: “abstractional” and “concretional.” Its evocative work produces on the one
hand something drawn away from, abstracted from, detached from
the original. But on the other hand, the emergent imaginative phenomenon has—this is my term now, (Sepper avoids it)—quasi-sensory characteristics, reminiscent of the embodied original insofar
as that it is a concretion, a thickening, of features. The definition
then goes on to specify this activity of imagining. First, it envisions
imaginative fields of concern with a basically potential nature, in
which the fixities of the sensory world become fluid. Second, it
exploits this potentiality to allow the projection of field upon field,
that is, of biplanarity. I have, of course, truncated this concluding
exposition and so robbed it of its subtlety.
The chapter then gathers in the topics that give the potential features form, actualize them, as it were, and so shape the field into a
topography, an expression of the field’s potentials. Recall that these
topoi or topics are figurative places, mental foci.
Here are some examples: Imagining begins with “the emergence
of appearance as appearance,” a formulation that implies “not as
appearance of a stably real thing,” and which is, by reason of this
divorce from reality, both initially placeable in the imaginative
field and essentially evanescent. Fixing this appearance, giving it
firmer shape is a further work of the imagination.
A second topic is the image as inchoate, labile, and contextual.
Contextuality in particular is a recurrent and crucial topic, since in
its shiftiness it partly explains the mobile character of images, but
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even more because context is placing, and placement is the necessary correlative of place. Further on, a topic zeroes in on imagining
as abstracting from perception. One might say “abstraction from
perception” is the preliminary activity that yields appearances as
appearances, since perception is the sensing of things as things.
But one can regard this abstraction from perception also in an opposite way: When the imagination strips the thing of its perceptual
accidents it produces a rationalized image, one having the lucidity
of reason—reason in image-shape. I think of diagrams and blueprints in connection with this.
Nine such topoi are mentioned, features both of and in the field
that have now become topics, subject-areas for future study and
theorizing, and with these “areas” the book concludes. One stems
from Sepper’s unapologetic acknowledgment that he has “cognitivized” the imagination and omitted the human depths of affectivity. He regards the future incorporation of these factors as
plausible and predicts a complex inquiry.
Another concern is the anthropological positioning of the imagination: How does the imagination fit into our humanity? Sepper
suggests that Heidegger’s Being and Time might be translated into
a more conventional philosophical anthropology, in which terms
like attunement (Stimmung) might be put to use. Here I am driven
to an aside: I would applaud this outcome, because if such a normalized derivation had been plausibly accomplished, that would
imply what some of us suspect—that Heidegger’s original existential analytic is, after all, an ordinary ontic anthropology ratcheted
up by fiat into an extraordinary ontology.
Ontology is indeed another concern. Sepper’s envisions ontological explanations that are imaginative in the sense of being fieldto-field projections, one field being the explanatory, the other the
explained field. A bonus is that this duality avoids destructive reductionism, since in the imaginative mode the field elucidated is
not collapsed into the explaining field. Simultaneity of levels is
maintained, and the object explained survives in its plane, unreduced to its explanatory elements in the underlying parallel plane.
Finally an ethics of imagination is adumbrated. Sepper speaks
of an ethos of imagination as the “inhabitable place of imagina-
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
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tion”—how we live in its fields. Such a way of life will develop
an ethics that requires this way of life to be good. His book has
shown that thinking and imagining are inseparable. The obsession
with formal and procedural rationality and the relegation of imagination to the arts is disastrous in children’s education and, by implication, to adult practice:
The only adequate way of developing rationality is to develop our ability to imagine comprehensively; we must
start with ourselves, or we will inevitably fail our children and the future world (524).
In leaping from the first three chapters to the last, I have hollowed out the nourishing marrow of Understanding Imagination,
the “reradicalized” readings of imagination’s great philosophical
texts. I would keep you here past lunch, dinner, and nightcap, if I
attempted to fill the gap. Those interpretations are based on close
and acute textual analyses, and they take their time.
Instead I will try to say, briefly, in gist, what in each of the four
philosophers to which Sepper gives a chapter is particularly germane to the delineation of the imagination just outlined. In this
sketchy review I shall have to omit entirely the history-of-ideas
glue that holds these philosophers steady in the context of a—putatively—coherent development.
It is, incidentally, not clear to me what the actual order of discovery was: Did Sepper formulate his understanding of the imagination first and then discover previously occulted corroboration
in the textual tradition, or was it the other way around, or both simultaneously? Maybe he will tell us later.
I’m not sure whether this attempt to pinpoint the intention of an
extended exposition, to find the crux of a highly textured lay-out,
amounts to a subversion or a highlighting of Sepper’s work. Anyhow, I mean it for the latter and will try not to miss the point, but
if Dennis says I did, I will gladly yield to correction. So, then:
Chapter 4: Plato. The chapter intends a major correction of standard interpretations that downplay images in the dialogues. In fact,
“for Plato reality is mimetic,” meaning that the levels of being are
seen as a cascade of images along which the viewer rises and descends in inquiry. Moreover the image-beings produced by what I
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might call “ontological imaging” are analogically connected, that
is, by proportions constituted of logoi, ratios—as in the Divided
Line of the Republic. So they can be said to be logos-involved
(though I’m not sure that ratio-logos so readily translates into reason-logos). I also want to add that Plato calls the lowest human
thought capacity eikasia, “image-recognition,” but then puts it to
work throughout the realm of knowing, for the ascent of knowing
is through recognizing images as images.
Chapter 5: Aristotle. Next, the imagination is retrieved from a
truncated conventional account of Aristotle’s On the Soul which
suppresses two aspects—that imagination seems to be a sort of motion and that it is one aspect of intellection. The imagination’s motion is that of abstracting from the matter of the sensory object and
locating the resulting appearance in the thinking, noetic part of the
soul. There, as “intellectualized imagination” (Sepper’s term), it
functions freely over a field of shifting conformations and contexts,
over a topography. Here I want to add that Aristotle calls even the
Divine Intellect a topos eidōn, a “place of forms,” and the very fact
that this description is figurative (since the Intellect is beyond all
place) may strengthen Sepper’s claim: thoughts and images are
“concreted” in the highest reaches.
Chapter 6: Descartes. Now the topological view of the imagination is refounded in modernity, though again conventional imagination-suppressing selectivity has obscured this fact. Descartes is
a persistent practitioner of the imagination, particularly in the
mathematization of physical nature. Imagination, however, is identified as an activity of the intellect, which is capable of “remotion,”
of stepping back from its imagined figures to rethink them as
purely intellectual existences. Thus intellect exceeds imagination
so as to become, from beyond it, the source of its directed mobility,
that is, the source of its biplanarity and field-topography.
Chapter 7: Kant. Sepper precedes his exposition with an account
of the post-Cartesian occultation of the imagination by rationalism
and its revival within a new science of sensibility, aesthetics. To
these developments Kant responds with a radical epistemology—
an account, called “transcendental,” as yielding knowledge going
beyond the only conscious material knowledge possible, an account
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that traces experience to its root. This root is dual, a passively receptive sensibility “looked at” by intuition, and an actively constructive conceptuality “functioning” by understanding. The
sensibility is again dual, consisting of transcendental, that is, hypersensory space and time. Spatiality and temporality are thus with
us from the first, a priori. Into these notional receptacles flows—
from somewhere—a sensory manifold, an unstructured matter. The
imagination is a synthesizing power, a power of “placing together”
disparate elements, both at the very origin and on several higher
knowledge-producing levels of the soul. Thus imagination is, for
the first time in philosophy, productive before it is reproductive. It
is now knowledge-shaping rather than knowledge-aiding, as it was
for Aristotle, for whom it presented to thought the sensible world
without its matter. The first work of Kant’s transcendental imagination is that of informing the sense-manifold spatially and temporally, so that all sensation of the world comes to our
consciousness “in” space and “in” time, extendedly and sequentially. Mathematics, then, is a product of another imaginative synthesis, which directs thinking to invoke, to inscribe, in space
particular geometric figures, and also calls on time to develop them
progressively. Of the several syntheses, the highest and deepest,
most original, hence most mysterious, work of the imagination is
done by a procedure that is called a schematism. It “puts together,”
or rather infuses, the functions of the understanding, which is a rational power, with the space and time, the pure intuitions of the
sensibility, which is a receptive mode. On the face of it, their disparateness would seem to preclude this miracle of involvement.
But the imagination provides the ground of their union. One example: “Substance,” as a mere rational notion, is an empty concept.
When time-informed it becomes the more concrete category of that
which persists in time, a locus of underlying stability.
There are further syntheses, those that produce the ascending
ways consciousness deals with the representations before it: first,
an “apprehension,” a mere awareness of a representation as an
item; then, a “reproduction” of the representation as a memoryimage; finally, a “recognition” that by coming under concepts the
representation is now stably settled in consciousness and fully ac-
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quired by self-consciousness.
So the Kantian imagination is an activity responsible for the togetherness of analytically disparate factors. It works at the roots of
consciousness, to give it its basic constitution, and then over multiple and layered fields of knowing, by projections from the level
of mere awareness to full self-consciousness. Sepper says that
Kant, as the most consequential representative of the eclipsed tradition, “brought the . . . intelligible dynamism of imagining to a
high point that was not exceeded even by the romantics”—which
is saying a lot, and rightly.
To summarize my summary: Plato introduces an ontological
imagination, whose places are held together in a bond of logoi, ratios. Aristotle adds a psychological activity working at the crux of
human knowing, between thing and soul. Descartes conceives an
intellect that contains and directs the imagination; hence the dynamism of images—their mobility, responsiveness to context, and
biplanarity—is not intrinsic to images but is the inspiriting work
of the intellect. And Kant discovers a synthetic power merging sensibility and understanding, the two aspects of cognitive consciousness; this power originates at its unknowable root of the human
subject and works at all its levels.
These four philosophers anticipate in various degrees of prominence the two chief elements of Sepper’s analysis: the close linkage of reason with imagination and the shifting field-topography
notion of mobile imagining. And they corroborate his respect for
the tradition as a source of illumination.
Now, to do my job as reviewer, I should subjoin some misgivings—and I do mean misgivings and queries, not criticisms and
condemnations.
First, then, I’ll articulate a sort of global unease about explanatory delineations like Sepper’s efforts that make the—surely
heroic—attempt to capture the mobile multifariousness and closeup complexity of embodied beings, and particularly, of their mental
life. In one of his many helpful footnotes he explains the mental
motions of “abstracting” and “prescinding” (drawing off and cutting away), both of which are a kind of simplifying fixative; the
imagination itself, as a cooperating power of understanding works
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with these devices. If the project is to understand understanding
imagination through a descriptive analysis that preserves the flexible richness of a participating power, a certain swampy doubletalk is the penalty. So for example, a key word, topos, carries,
as I pointed out, the dual meaning of a given subject of inquiry
fitted into a topology and of a placing function of the imagination
producing a topography. And the imagination itself appears—indeed early Descartes is the predecessor here—in two forms. On
the one hand, it is a general power of figurative reconception—
whence its relation to human “creativity.” This human power is,
of course, nothing like the divine creation of the Bible that makes
a world out of chaos; it is rather a new perspective on an old situation or its reconfiguration. This general imagination is a Protean
power. On the other hand, there is also the narrower power of producing and manipulating images; it is a rather specialized capability. I wonder if prescinding, cutting away, containing, would
not be an authorial virtue here. But then again, if something, the
imagination par excellence, is by nature duplicitous, perhaps its
account must display intentional ambiguities and homonymous
doublings—never mind Occam’s Razor and its injunction not to
multiply explanatory entities.
The second item is only a specification of the first. Certain notions don’t seem to lend themselves to clarity—for example, contextualization and fusion. A context, as Sepper fully appreciates, is
logically definable by what is sometimes called an infinite judgment, as the indefinitely large negativity surrounding a place. So
“contextualization” means putting a small island in a large ocean
and calling that a placement. This misgiving, incidentally, reaches
to all those unhelpful politico-socio-economico-psychological explanations: You can’t zero in on an apprehended “this” by means
of too-big-to-know “that.” Something analogous goes for fusion,
the togetherness of word and thought or thing and image. It doesn’t,
incidentally, matter whether the cognitive union is to be of thought
with a material object or with its matter-stripped image; their mutuality is, by the very reason of being a fact, a mystery, and it might
be most incisive to call it that.
Third, this mutuality or reciprocity of intellect and imagination
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seems to me the mystery of mysteries, one attested to by the very
variety of grappling devices proposed for their union, precisely because of their structural dissimilarity. All of Sepper’s four philosophers, however they may assimilate the intellect to its object—as,
for example, when Aristotle analogizes sensing and intellection—
at the end of their ruminations admit, either explicitly or implicitly,
the existence of a non-sensing, imageless power of intellect. This
shows, I think, that in those high reaches the intellect itself is an
imageless power. How does a power which at its purest is placeless
come to govern placements?
These considerations make me wonder about the biplanar, fieldto-field-projecting imagination. It is, to begin with, a very congenial notion to me, this double-sight (for which Dennis kindly gives
me credit), in which an image over- or underlies worldly events,
lending them a resonance from other world-venues. Such are the
Homeric similes of the Iliad that alleviate the excruciating concentration of the battlefield by overlaying it with a bonding analogy
to the rest of the world, from the heavens to the household.
But that template notion presupposes some articulated similarity,
some isomorphism, and I have not quite understood on what basis
Sepper’s fields are actually projectible onto one another, how they
are homologous. For example, he says that there is something perverse in the claim that geometry is left behind in analytic, that is
algebraic, geometry. And yet there is a powerful notion, set out recently in Burt Hopkins’s extended commentary on Jacob Klein’s
work on the origin of algebra,2 that just this is the case. Symbolic
mathematics casts loose from image-mathematics and thereby
founds the very modernity Sepper is trying to reform, the world of
abstract reckoning that has suppressed concrete imagining and has
no structural relation to it and is simply not homologous with it.
Another example is word-painting, the power of language to
arouse mental images. No one knows just how words intend toward
and reach the world, nor, therefore, how they instigate its images.
So, it seems to me, the field of thinking and its articulation in words,
2. Burt Hopkins, The Origin of the Logic of Symbolic Mathematics: Edmund Husserl and Jacob Klein (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
2011). Jacob Klein was the third Dean of the New Program at St. John’s.
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this field of logos, is not, at least not obviously, in the field-to-field
relation to the imagination that the notion of a reasoning image requires—and yet I know that language often delineates pictures and
passion usually infuses words.
That brings me to a fourth and final query. Sepper quite intentionally barely touches the relation of imagining to phantasy, to
painting, and to the passions. Might it not be that in relation to
these the understanding of imagination requires different rubrics
and emphases from those in Understanding Imagination? I’ll post
brief surmises.
Cognitively useful imaging is fed from the outside face, so to
speak, of consciousness by the sensed world. Phantasy, by which
I mean fiction, presents what-is-not, and so offers a re-presentation
of no worldly original. No receptive taker-in of a fiction thinks of
it as a re-arranged reality, a reality-collage. Should one not consider
that there might be a conduit from the inside, for which the term
“unconscious” is just an evasive makeshift? Although I am here in
the company of soberly sane thinkers, I am nevertheless suggesting
that one might seriously consider what the practitioners of poetry
meant by the Muses, who live on Olympus and not in neuronal networks. The question here is, Whence comes imagining in its most
life-enhancing aspect?
When the visual arts are drawn into the inquiry, painting is apt
to come front and center, because, if a painting is (as we pre-postmoderns tend to think) an externalization of a mental image (of
course modified in its passage from quasi- to real space), then the
embodied product might in turn throw light on that immaterial
image. It might be that we are drawn to flat-medium imagery because it reminds us of our soul’s imagining—in its plane dimension
(that is, lacking volume), in its immobility (or virtual mobility),
and in what I’ll call its momentousness (its excerpting from the
banal spatial and temporal context a moment of intensified significance). The question here is, Whence issues the imagination’s
most poignant work? Even to ask that question is, to be sure, a surreptitious bit of special pleading on my part, since the answers I’ve
just suggested are the ones given in my book.
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And finally, when the imagination is properly related to the passions, from the devastating storms of erotic desire to the delicate
atmospheres of esthetic feeling, might the imagination not appear
in yet another capacity than that of abstracting from the round reality outside, or of receiving influxes from a ghostly source beyond?
I mean the capacity to transmogrify the blind shapelessness of our
most intimate psychic condition, our affectivity, into formed feeling—a phrase that surely describes some of our internal imagery.
The question here would be whether the image as an effluvium of
feeling is the same as or different from the cognitive, the art-producing, the Muse-inspired image. Thus the question of questions:
Is the imagination—be it activity, capacity, power, faculty—one or
many? Almost two and a half millennia, and we are still in medias
res. Well, I seem to have talked myself into acknowledging that
Dennis’s multiplication of entities may mirror the way things are.
Thus Understanding Imagination is a wonderfully anticipatory
waystation. So here, in conclusion, are my wishes for the book:
First, that it gain influence enough to encourage a new round of
broadly conceived image-inquiries aided by fresh, close attention
to the great predecessors and perhaps some new, ingeniously devised, imagination-informed image-research. And then, that its call
be heeded for a reform which I’ll put in my own words: There is
in our world a strong strain of relentless reductionism and blind
rationalism whose inevitable complements are mechanical creativity-mongering and thoughtless image-proliferation. One antidote,
perhaps only topically applicable—but then positive good usually
is local—would be a revivified attention to the reason of images.
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Similarity and Equality in
Euclid and Apollonius
Michael N. Fried
By Way of Introduction
My subject today is the meaning of similarity and equality in Euclid and Apollonius—and, by implication, in Greek mathematics
generally during its climax in Hellenistic times. But before I actually begin, I want to say just a few words about history of mathematics and St. John’s College, and I would like to do so by telling
a little story. I told this story the last time I spoke at St. John’s,1
but I would like to tell it again, for I still think about it and am
still unsettled by it.
Not long after I finished my doctorate, I was invited to Delphi
for a meeting of historians of ancient mathematics—a small intimate group, only slightly larger than a St. John’s seminar. During
one of the morning coffee breaks, Alexander Jones, the classicist
and historian of Greek mathematics, casually asked how I felt having made the transition from a St. John’s way of thinking to a historian’s. Like a good seminar question, I was stunned by this, and
I was not sure how to answer. This was mainly because I could not
decide whether there really was a difference between a St. John’s
way of thinking and the way of thinking of a historian of ideas,
that is, whether it really was true I had made any kind of transition
at all.
With a kind of dullness until that moment, I had no trouble, on
the one hand, claiming that in the work I was doing as a historian of
Greek mathematics I was continuing what I had learned at St. John’s,
and, on the other hand, feeling frustration, sometimes bordering on
Michael N. Fried is Professor of Science and Technology Education at
Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Beer-Sheva, Israel. This lecture
was delivered on July 31, 2013 at St. John’s College in Santa Fe.
1. At the conference Classical Mathematics and Its Transformation, held
at the Annapolis campus in 2004.
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resentment, at having to explain yet again how, despite its centering
on texts mostly written long ago, the St. John’s approach was not
historical. Jones’s question made me face the possibility that there
might be a real contradiction here. Of course the reason it still preoccupies me is not because I am overly concerned about my identity
as a Johnny, but because it raises the question of history altogether.
Let me say just a word about this.
When Alexander Jones contrasted the study of history with the St.
John’s program he had in mind, I believe, a view of history, particularly the history of ideas, in which the thought of thinkers in the past
is assumed to be conditioned by times and contexts; understanding
Euclid or Apollonius must, in that view, always be mediated. The contrast with St. John’s may have been based on a mere caricature of the
College where students deal with “eternal ideas” able to be grasped in
an unmediated way. But there is another non-historical view of Euclid
and Apollonius that involves assuming such authors can be read with
no mediation beyond a good Greek lexicon, one that is related to that
caricature version of St. John’s, while not, I hasten to add, the St.
John’s way. It is that in which one comes to mathematics of the past
through modern mathematical concepts and methods, as if the mathematicians of the past were merely writing about the same ideas in a
different language—as John Edensor Littlewood famously said, like
“fellows of another college.”2 Modern mathematical ideas, for those
who approach ancient texts in this way, do not mediate a reading of
the past, but only clarify what those older mathematicians were actually saying. Modern mathematical insight, on that view, becomes the
key to historical insight. A historian like Jones could well see that same
modern insight as obscuring what the mathematicians of the past understood.
For Jones, what the older mathematicians were actually saying is
what they did say in the body of texts they left behind. In order to recover the original meaning of those texts, if we can, one must read
them attentively and with the thought that they were meant to be read.
This unmediated reading of texts, I think, is not far from what one
tries to do at St. John’s. The difficulty here is that having read the texts
2. Quoted in G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician’s Apology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), 81.
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one must nevertheless interpret them—and what it means to interpret
can be interpreted in many ways! Here there can be deep divisions in
outlook.
It may be that Alexander Jones, as a historian of mathematics, is a
historicist, that is, that he truly believes mathematics to be entirely a
product of historical forces so that Greek mathematics, say, belongs
immovably to its own time. In that case he would certainly see a divide
between the way he relates to the past and the way one does at St.
John’s. But whether he really is a historicist I do not know; I never
asked him. Whatever the case, in approaching the history of mathematics, he must, as I must as well, begin at least with a working assumption that the mathematics of the past is different from that of the
present.
The subject of this lecture is not the idea of history, to use the title
of R. G. Collingwood’s famous book,3 and so I shall have to risk your
being left with the impression that this working assumption is only a
kind of maxim. However, I do want to stress that it is in fact fundamental to the way a historian must come to the past. For example, in
the chapter on historical experience in Michael Oakeshott’s Experience and Its Modes, the author distinguishes different kinds of past,
of which one is the historical past, or, we might say, the historians’
past:
The differentia [emphasis in the original] of the historical past
lies in its very disparity from what is contemporary. The historian does not set out to discover a past where the same beliefs, the same actions, the same intentions obtain as those
which occupy his own world. His business is to elucidate a
past independent of the present, and he is never (as an historian) tempted to subsume past events under general rules. He
is concerned with a particular past. It is true, of course, that
the historian postulates a general similarity between the historical past and the present, because he assumes the possibility
of understanding what belongs to the historical past. But his
particular business lies, not with this bare and general similarity, but with the detailed dissimilarity of past and present.
3. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1946), which collects together the author’s works on his philosophy
of history.
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He is concerned with the past as past, and with each moment
of the past in so far as it is unlike any other moment.4
As a position regarding the way one should come to the past rather
than a position about how the past really is, this is not very different
from a good rule for listening or reading well, as we try to do at St.
John’s: you will listen better to what authors are trying to say if you
do not assume you already know what they are saying—if you assume, rather, that they are saying something different from anything
you have ever heard before.
That said, we are creatures of the present; we cannot pretend the
present does not affect us in any way. For this reason, it is at least useful, if not essential, to be cognizant of the present even while we are
trying to find a very different past. So, while my purpose today is to
try to clarify the notions of similarity and equality in Euclid and Apollonius, I want to begin with a certain aspect of how we moderns tend
to think about similarity and equality: I hope it will help to bring out
the tremendous difference and even strangeness in the ways these notions were understood in classical times.
Similarity and Equality in a Modern Context
Let me begin with a problem someone gave to me sometime before
my flight from Israel to Santa Fe (it is a long flight so it is always
good to have a mathematics problem to work on in transit). The
solution I will present is a modern one.
Let A and B be given points and let C lie on a given
circle. Let P be the centroid of triangle ABC. Find
the locus of point P.
Let E be the midpoint of AB. Then if EC is any line from E to a
point C on the circle, EP:EC=1:3, since P is the centroid of triangle
ACB. Hence, we may think of E as a center of similitude—a point
from which the plane is dilated or contracted uniformly, that is,
that the distance between points is enlarged or diminished by a
fixed ratio (3:1 in this case). The locus PP′P″ is then the image of
4. Michael Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1933), 106.
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circle CC′C″ via a contraction relative to E. Therefore, the locus
PP′P″ is a circle having a radius 1/3 that of the given circle CC′C″.
By the same argument, we can see that if C moved on any other
shape, say, an ellipse or a square, the locus of P would also be an
ellipse or a square 1/3 the dimensions of the original ellipse or
square.
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In fact, it can be a completely arbitrary shape.
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In every case, the locus required is a shape similar to the original
shape and 1/3 its dimensions.
For our purposes, there are two things we should observe. The
first is the form of the problem, the mere question of locus. What
does it mean to “Find the locus of P”? The idea of locus, or in
Greek, topos, is not an easy one. It would require a lecture of its
own. Yet, it is related, I think, to my main subject, similarity and
equality. I shall say a word about this later.
The second thing to observe, putting the difficulties of locus
aside, is my own way of answering the question, namely, “The
locus required is a shape similar to the original shape” What allows me to speak so generally? Why is it that I need to know nothing about the original shape, none of its special properties? What
allows me, a post-nineteenth century person, to speak of the similarity of a shape I know nothing about?
The answer to this is that in solving the problem I only referred
to a relation between EC, wherever C happens to be, and EP. More
precisely, I took P as an image of C when the entire plane was
contracted by a factor of 1/3 with respect to the point E. That ABC
happened to be a triangle and that P was the centroid of ABC was
really incidental. More importantly, in the original problem, the
fact that the point C moved along a circle was incidental. I did
not, even once, refer to a property of circles!
The modern turn here is precisely to ignore any particular shape
and give all of one’s attention to the space in which it is found.
The contraction by 1/3 is of the space itself, the entire plane:
everything in it will be contracted, shrunk, by a factor of 1/3, so
whatever the shape, it will be the same, only smaller (and in another instance of course it could also be larger)—it is as if we
make a change of scale. This kind of transformation of the plane
is called a “dilation,” and, in general, we can speak about similarity in terms of a dilation combined with other transformations
of the plane that preserve distances between points, translations,
reflections, rotations (these are known as “isometries”).5 This centering on the space is crucial in almost every aspect of modern
5. In fact, it turns out to be enough to speak about reflections: translations
and rotations can be defined in terms of combinations of reflections.
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mathematics.6 And it is what links similarity and equality, or congruence. For since a dilation is determined by the factor of contraction or enlargement, one can speak of a unit dilation where the
factor is 1. Congruence—and we shall have to confront the problem of congruence versus equality later—is only a special case of
similarity, so that if two figures are congruent they are automatically similar as well.
I want drive home the point that modern geometry is colored by
its emphasis on space by quoting a nineteenth century geometer
who is thought of as a classical geometer, that is, one whose work
is not governed by algebraic ideas—and, indeed, he is considered
one of the greatest geometers of nineteenth century. This is Jakob
Steiner. One of the ideas Steiner developed (though he may not
have invented it) was called the “center of similitude.” In the problem above, this is the point E, the point with respect to which we
dilate the plane. Steiner speaks of this in more than one work; here
is how he describes it in “Geometrical Constructions with a Ruler
Given a Fixed Circle with its Center”:
If in a plane through any point E we draw rays (lines) in
all directions EA1, EB1, EC1, . . . and by means of these
rays, so connect with one another all points of the plane
that to every point A1 on such a ray as EA1 corresponds another point A2 on the same ray; and indeed, under the condition that the distance of every two corresponding points
from the point E, and EA1 and EA2, have throughout one
and the same given ratio, as n1:n2, then such a system of
correspondence is thereby brought about that the plane is
6. I think Jacob Klein put his finger on the same tendency when he wrote,
“Descartes’s concept of extensio identifies the extendedness of extension
with extension itself. Our present-day concept of space can be traced directly back to this. Present-day Mathematics and Physics designate as
‘Euclidean Space’ the domain of symbolic exhibition by means of linesegments, a domain which is defined by a coordinate system, a rational
system, as we say nowadays. ‘Euclidean Space’ is by no means the domain of the figures and structures studied by Euclid and the rest of Greek
mathematics. It is rather only the symbolic illustration of the general
character of the extendedness of those structures.” Jacob Klein, “The
World of Physics and the ‘Natural’ World,” The St. John’s Review 28.1
(1981): 29.
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traversed twice. Or, we can also imagine that two planes,
which may be called α and α′, lie one upon the other, while
every point may be considered as belonging as well in one
as in the other plane.7
Although Steiner will use the center of similitude specifically for
circles, lines, and angles, his way of presenting it in terms of a
transformation of the entire plane—or, as we would say, a mapping
of one plane onto another—shows the generality of his conception.
So, to reiterate the main point above, similarity can be a general
notion for us since in our modern mathematics similarity refers to
such an operation on the entire plane in which geometric figures
live. And because we focus on the entire plane rather than the objects themselves, the particularity of the objects deemed similar becomes unimportant, as we have seen. It is in this way that the
conception of similarity in Euclid and Apollonius (and, I would
add, Archimedes as well) is profoundly different from that in modern, post-nineteenth-century mathematics.8
7. Jakob Steiner, “Geometrical Constructions with a Ruler Given a Fixed Circle with its Center,” trans. M. E. Stark, ed. R. C. Archibald, Scripta Mathematica 4 (1948): 222. Steiner’s diagram is slightly different from the one
included above, for there are a few more points he wants to emphasize beyond
the mere definition.
8. For this reason, comments such as this from Jeremy Gray seem to me completely wrongheaded: “The Greek geometrical proofs worked because of assumptions made about the underlying space, which are reflected in the ideas
of congruence, similarity, and parallelism.” (Jeremy Gray, Ideas of Space
[Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979], 29.)
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Similarity in Euclid and Apollonius
In some ways, the radical departure of the modern conception of similarity from the classical Greek conception has everything do with
how mathematicians like Euclid and Apollonius treated the plane itself. The plane, epipedon, in Greek geometry has, one might say, two
expressions, 1) as an object, and 2) as a place. As an object, it can be
considered in relation to other objects, for example, it may be inclined
to another plane, or a line may be inclined to it. It may cut another
figure, a parallelepiped as in Euclid, Elements XI.25 (“If a parallelepipedal solid be cut by a plane which is parallel to the opposite
planes, then, as the base is to the base so will the solid be to the solid”),
or as in Apollonius, Conics I.11-14 where the conic sections are produced by cutting a cone by a plane. Sometimes a plane is nearly identified with part of itself, as in the face of a solid figure (see for
example, Elements XI, Definitions 9 and 10), in which case it becomes an object in a sense not much different from the way a triangle
is an object.
As a place, it is not something manipulated: it is there, and there
are things in it—they can be manipulated, but it cannot.9 Thus in Elements I, Definition 8, “A plane angle is the inclination to one another
of two lines in a plane (en epipedōi) which meet one another and do
not lie in a straight line.” Again in Book XI, Proposition 1, “A part of
a straight line cannot be in the plane of reference (en tōi hupokeimenōi
epipedōi) and a part in a plane more elevated,” the plane is an immovable place. This phrase “the plane of reference,” or “the plane
placed under,” as a place on which things may be situated, also appears in Apollonius’s Conics I.5210 where Apollonius constructs a
parabola in a plane. Even though the plane is not the exclusive field
of action here, as it is in Book I of the Elements, and may have a relation to other objects or be constructed, it is, nevertheless, unmanipulated in these contexts, a that-with-respect-to-which other things may
be manipulated. It is also the place in which the similarity of figures
9. This idea is important in connection to Book IV of the Conics. See Michael
Fried, Apollonius of Perga’s Conics, Book IV: Translation, Introduction, and
Diagrams (Santa Fe: Green Lion Press, 2002).
10. See, for example, Apollonii Pergaei quae Graece exstant cum commentariis antiquis, ed. I. L. Heiberg, Vol. 1 (Leipzig: Teubner, 1891), 160, line 15.
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is explored. Of course the plane is a place in which the similarity of
figures is explored for the moderns as well; however, they do so by
treating the plane as a place that is able to be manipulated, as if the
place were an object. As such, it can also be compared to other planes,
as we saw in the example from Jakob Steiner.11
To return to the main point, however, the upshot of the ancient
view is that the similarity of figures must be a comparison of the figures themselves within a plane. One’s attention, therefore, must be
sharply focused on the figures and their properties. The foundation
of similarity rests in the look of geometrical figures. I use the word
“look” intentionally; it is a fair translation of the Greek word eidos,
which besides its well-known Platonic context has a mathematical
meaning of “shape,” or “form” in the sense of “shape.” For example,
in Euclid’s Data, Definition 3, we find the following explanation:
“Rectilineal figures are said to be given in form (tōi eidei), if the angles are given one by one and the ratios of the sides to one another
are given.”12 This definition is notable not only because of its resemblance to the definition of similarity in the Elements (see below), but
also because it makes clear that “similar” is related to something the
figures themselves possess,13 namely, their own look or form: for
one figure to be similar (homoios) to another means that they are in
possession of the same shape, the same form, the same look.
The shape of a person may be different from the person, but the
shape of a triangle is impossible to separate from what it is to be
a triangle. In geometry, the shape of something depends on what
that something is. There are, for this reason, as many criteria for
similar figures as there are different kinds of shapes: this is why
for the Greek mathematician there is no single governing rule for
11. See pp. 24-25 above.
12. Translation from Christian Marinus Taisbak, Euclid’s Data: The Importance of Being Given (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2003), 115.
Taisbak’s book contains a deep discussion of the idea of “givenness in form”
and of Euclid’s Data generally.
13. In this connection, Taisbak points out, “The Elements compare triangles.
The Data deals with individuals [emphasis in the original], and with the
‘knowledge’ we may have of such individual triangles, within the language
of Givens.” (Taisbak, Euclid’s Data, 126-127.)
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determining similarity. In the Elements, for example, we have the
following different criteria for similarity:
Elements III, Def. 11, Similar circular segments: “Similar
segments of circles are those which contain equal angles
or in which there are angles equal to one another.”
Elements VI, Def. 1, Similar rectilineal figures: “Similar
rectilineal figures are such that they have each of their angles equal and sides about the equal angles proportional.”
Elements IX, Def. 9, Similar solid figures: “Similar solid
figures are those contained by similar plane areas
(epipedōn) equal in number.”
Elements IX, Def. 24, Similar cones and cylinders: “Similar cones and cylinders are those of which the axes and
diameters of the bases are proportional.”
Add to these other definitions from Apollonius and Archimedes:
Apollonius, Conics VI, Def. 2, Similar conic sections: “[S]imilar [conic sections] are such that, when ordinates are drawn
in them to fall on the axes, the ratios of the ordinates to the
lengths they cut off from the axes from the vertex of the section are equal to one another, while the ratios to each other of
the portions which the ordinates cut off from the axes are
equal ratios.”14
Archimedes, Conoids and Spheroids, Introduction, Similar obtuse-angled conoids (i.e. hyperbolas of revolution): “Obtuse-angled conoids are called similar when
the cones containing the conoids are similar.”
Each of these definitions demands prior knowledge of the object
to which the word “similar” is being applied; for example, one
must know that the angles contained in a segment of a circle are
all equal so that one can speak of the angle of the segment. The
necessity of such prerequisite knowledge precludes a general definition of similarity: “similar” always awaits the particular geometrical entities which are to be similar—even ratio and
14. All translations of Books V-VII are from G. J. Toomer, Apollonius Conics
Books V to VII: The Arabic Translation of the Lost Greek Original in the Version of the Banu Musa, 2 vols., (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1990).
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proportion is not fundamental, as the case of similar circular segments shows. And since “similar” for triangles is one thing and
“similar” for conic sections something else, one could not ask
whether some shape is similar to some other shape without first
assuming that they are of the same type—a polygon, for example,
or, again, a conic section.15
Thus, while Apollonius can ask whether or not a parabola is similar to a hyperbola or even an ellipse in Conics VI.14, the question
remains strictly within the context of the similarity of conic sections for which there is a general definition. And when we look at
that general definition, we see how deeply it is rooted in the foundations of conic sections developed in Book I of the Conics. Let
us restate it:
Similar [conic sections] are such that, when ordinates are
drawn in them to fall on the axes, the ratios of the ordinates to the lengths they cut off from the axes from the
vertex of the section are equal to one another, while the
ratios to each other of the portions which the ordinates
cut off from the axes are equal ratios.
15. I am referring of course to “similarity” in its strict mathematical sense, as
opposed to the use of “similar,” in a non-mathematical context, even within
a mathematical work. For example, in the preface to his Phenomena, Euclid
writes that “if a cone or cylinder be cut by a plane not parallel to the base, the
resulting section is a section of an acute-angled cone which is similar to a
shield (homoia thureōi).” (Euclidis Phaenomena et Scripta Musica, ed. Heinrich Menge and I. L. Heiberg [Leipzig: Teubner, 1916], 6.)
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So, suppose ACD and PMN are two conic sections. Let AB and
PQ be their respective axes, and let CEC′, DFD′, MRM′, NSN′
be drawn ordinatewise.
Then ACD and PMN are similar if CC′:EA::MM′:RP and
DD′:FA::NN′:SP whenever AE:PR::AF:PS.
In order to follow this definition one must understand what
an axis is and what lines drawn ordinatewise means—and, naturally, one must understand that every conic section has an axis,
or, more generally, a diameter with respect to which lines may
be drawn ordinatewise.16 Unlike the little problem with which
I began the discussion, a proposition about similarity in Apollonius’s Conics must concern conic sections and their particular properties: Conics VI, the book which treats similarity (and
equality) is, after all, a book about conic sections!
As an easy example of how Apollonius uses the definition
and how not only its formulation but also its use depends on the
properties of conic sections, consider Conics VI.11, which
proves that every parabola is similar to every other parabola.
Here is a paraphrase of the proof.
Suppose AB and GD are two parabolas, AK, GO are their
axes, and AP, GR are their respective latera recta.
16. There are other definitions, notably one implied by Archimedes for
the ellipse and hyperbola. If PQ and pq are the axes of, say, the two ellipses and AR is an arbitrary ordinate in the one while bs is an arbitrary
ordinate in the other, Archimedes says that the two ellipses will be similar if it is true that:
sq.AR:rectPR,RQ = sq.bs:rect.ps,sq
Note that nothing is said about where R and s are on the respective axes.
The condition is equivalent to Conics, VI.12, for this ratio is always that
of the latus rectum to the transverse diameter, by Conics, I. 21. I might
add that although Toomer calls this a definition, Archimedes does not:
he simply states the fact that the conics will be similar if this is so—and
that at the end of a proposition! (See Conoids and Spheroids, Proposition
14 ad fin., in T. L. Heath, The Works of Archimedes [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1897], 125.) In any case, like Apollonius’s definition of similarity, this condition of Archimedes is also tied closely to
conic sections as opposed to any other kind of shape.
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Let AK:AP::GO:GR, and suppose Z and Q are arbitrary points on
AK.
Choose M and C so that they cut GO into segments having the same
ratios as the corresponding segments defined by Z and Q.
In parabola AB, draw EZI, HQS, BKT ordinatewise, that is perpendicular to AK since AK is an axis. Similarly, in GD, draw LMU, NCF,
DOX ordinatewise.
Now, by Conics I.11, BK and DO are mean proportionals between
AP and AK and GR and GO, respectively (i.e., AP:BK::BK:AK and
GR:DO::DO:GO)
Therefore, BK:AK::DO:GO, so that BT:AK::DX:GO [since
BT=2BK and DX=2DO].
Since AP:AK::GR:GO, AK:AQ::GO:GC, therefore, AP:AQ::GR:GC.
Thus, repeating the argument used to prove BT:AK::DX:GO above,
we can show also HS:AQ::NF:GC and, again, EI:AZ::LU:GM.
And so Apollonius concludes:
Therefore, the ratio of each of the lines BT, HS, EI,
which are perpendiculars to the axis [AK], to the
amounts which they cut off from the axis, namely, to
AK, AQ AZ is equal, respectively, to the ratio of the
lines DX, NF, LU, which are perpendiculars to the axis
[GO], to the amounts which they cut off from the axis,
namely OG, CG, MG.
And the ratios of the segments cut off from one of
the axes to the segments cut off from the other are
equal.
So section AB is similar to section GD.
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Again, what I wish to stress about this proof is not the details of
the argument, but the mere fact of its appealing at every step to the
specific properties of the parabola demonstrated in Conics I.
Perhaps the most striking reflection of how the similarity of
conic sections completely depends on the definition of conic sections, their geometric identity as the section of a cone, is the fact
that book ends with a set of eight constructions involving the cone
and locating conic sections within the cone, for example, “Given
a cone and given a parabola, find a cone containing the parabola
that is similar to the given cone” (Conics VI.31). Significantly,
Book VI is the only book in the Conics, besides Book I, in which
the cone appears explicitly.
We need now to move on to the question of equality. For, remember, Conics VI is not just about similarity, but also about
equality.
Equality in Euclid and Apollonius
As we noted above, with the modern view of similarity in which
similarity relates to a transformation of the space in which objects
are found, congruence becomes a completely derivative notion. And
here I should say that moderns speak about congruence and not
equality—and I think there is much to say about that—but more
often than not the use of one or the other is a matter of convention.
For example, when Hilbert comes to the axioms of congruence in
his Foundations of Geometry he more than once uses the expression
“kongruent oder gleich,” that is, “congruent or equal.” That it can
be a matter of convention is an important aspect of the modern perspective. Greek mathematicians do have a special designation,
“equal and similar” (isos te kai homoios); nevertheless, they do not
have a separate term for the relation of “congruence.” We shall have
to confront this combination “equal and similar” later, but for now
suffice it to say that there are only two basic terms “equal” and “similar.” The difficulty of their relationship cannot be swept away.
Thomas Heath’s treatment of this, for example, is quite unsatisfying.
When Euclid uses the word “equal,” isos, in a manner corresponding
to our notion of congruence, Heath just takes that to be the sense of
the word, and when Euclid then uses it in a manner corresponding
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to our notion of equal areas (Elements I.35), Heath says this is
“equality in a new sense.”17 Nevertheless, Euclid does use the same
word, isos. One cannot escape that.
For Euclid at least, equality is a very general notion, and it is certainly one of principal themes of Book I of the Elements, if not the
principal theme. As such, it is an idea that undergoes development
in the book; one might say the book develops a kind of theory of
equality. Let us consider briefly the overall direction of that development.
The theory of equality is contained in the five Common Notions
(koinai ennoiai) at the start of Book I of the Elements.18 These Common Notions are the following:
1. Things equal to the same thing are equal to one another.
2. And if equal things be adjoined (prostethēi) to the
same thing, the wholes are equal.
3. And if equals be removed from the same thing, the remainders are equal.
4. And things fitting (epharmozonta) on one another are
equal to one another.
5. And the whole is greater than the part.19
Of these, the fourth provides the basic criterion, the basic test for
equality: if one figure can be fitted exactly on top of another, then
the figures are equal (isos). It makes its first appearance in proposition I.4, which states that two triangles will be equal if they have
17. T. L. Heath, The Thirteen Books of Euclid’s Elements, Vol. 1 (New
York: Dover, 1956), 327.
18. Heiberg mentions other common notions appearing in some manuscripts; for example, “If unequals be adjoined to unequals, the whole is
unequal” and “Doubles of the same thing are equal to one another,” as
well as, “Two lines do not contain a space.” Except for the last about two
lines not containing a space—which, as Proclus himself seems to suggest,
is odd fish among the others—all of these common notions, therefore,
concern equality—and even that last common notion may be connected
to the nature of coinciding.
19. My translation.
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equal sides surrounding an equal angle. The entire demonstration,
problematic though it may be, plays on Common Notion 4: equal
lines are fitted on equal lines; the equal angle is fitted on the equal
angle; this forces the one triangle to fit on the other, so that the two
are equal.
In fact, that equal lines can be fitted on equal lines and equal angles on equal angles is not truly an application of Common Notion
4, but its converse; however, with simple undivided objects like
lines and angles, being equal and fitting on one another are treated
as identical relations.20 And in this connection we must return to
Book VI of the Conics for a moment. For Apollonius takes the criterion for equality provided by Common Notion 4 as the very definition of equality of conic sections:
Conic sections which are called equal are those which
can be fitted, one on another, so that the one does not exceed the other. Those which are said to be unequal are
those for which that is not so.
In the Elements, however, Euclid shows that the converse of
Common Notion 4 cannot be assumed in all generality. It is here
that the other Common Notions clarify why the criterion of “fitting on one another” is sufficient but not necessary for equality:
in Elements I.35, Euclid shows that things can be equal without
having the same shape, that is, without being able to fit on one on
the other.
Proposition I.35 states that “Parallelograms on the same base
and in the same parallels are equal to one another.” Thus the
proposition tells us that parallelograms such as ABCD and EBCF,
which are clearly not the same shape, may, nevertheless be equal.
It is instructive to look at Euclid’s proof of the proposition (in
paraphrase):
Since ABCD is a parallelogram, AD is equal to BC.
For the same reason, EF is equal to BC. Whence also
AD is equal EZ (by Common Notion 1); and DE is
common; therefore, the whole AE is equal to the whole
20. See Michael N. Fried and Sabetai Unguru, Apollonius of Perga’s
Conica: Text, Context, Subtext (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 228.
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DF (by Common Notion 2).21 But also AB is equal to
DC. So the two lines EA, AB are equal to the two lines
DF, DC, each to each. Also the angle contained by FDC
is equal to the angle contained by EAB, the exterior to
the interior. Therefore, the base EB is equal to the base
FC and the triangle EAB is equal to the triangle FDC
(by I.4 and, derivatively therefore, Common Notion 4];
let the common part DGE have been removed; therefore, the remaining trapezoid ABGD is equal to the remaining trapezoid EGCF (by Common Notion 3); let
the common triangle BGC have been adjoined; the
whole parallelogram ABCD is therefore equal to the
whole parallelogram EBCF (by Common Notion 2).
The parallelograms being on the same base and in the
same parallels are, therefore, equal to one another.
What we see in this proposition is no “new conception of equality,”
as Heath says; on the contrary, what we see is that the Common Notions—which comprise, as I said, the theory of equality—begin from
the basic notion of “fitting on one another” to show how equality applies also to shapes that do not fit on one another. It is an elaboration
of equality, a spelling out of the theory, not a new kind of equality. Even
Elements I.47, the “Pythagorean Theorem,” can be seen in this light,
since it shows not only how one figure can equal another of a different
shape, but also how one figure can equal two others of the same shape.
21. It is typical that Common Notions 2 and 3 are used when a single thing
is removed from two equals. This assumes that anything that can be equal
to something is always at least equal to itself. It is curious—and perhaps significant—that this fundamental fact is missing from the Common Notions.
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And, I would argue, Book II continues this inquiry with its attention to
how one or several rectangles may equal other rectangles.
This elaboration of the idea of equality demonstrates how things
can be equal even though they have far from the same shape. Conversely, things can be of the same shape and yet not be equal. Aristotle points this out, tellingly enough, in the section on motion
and alteration in the Categories (15a, 30-33): “there are things that
increase and are not thereby altered as well. For example, if a gnomon is added, a square is increased in its size but does not undergo
alteration (ēuxētai men, alloioteron de ouden gegenētai).
Thus, in both directions, equality of figures is not identical with
sameness of shape. Equality cannot be subsumed under similarity
and similarity under equality. Yet, equality has to do with shape in
some way. It is rooted in shape inasmuch as superimposition is its
basic test; and it can be used to probe shape, for example, in showing that a line through the center of an ellipse divides an ellipse
into two equal halves (Conics VI.4 and 5). But, again, because
equality does not necessarily mean sameness of shape, shape itself
cannot be its main object. That main object of equality is similarity.
Thus it is a kind of counterpoint between similarity and equality,
rather than a logical dependence one way or another, that characterizes how these ideas appear in Apollonius and Euclid.
Equal and similar
The logical disconnection between equal and similar is particularly
clear in the Conics, where propositions for similarity are kept separate from those on equality: one proposition will show when two
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sections are equal and a different proposition later in the book will
show when they are similar. Now we must return to the idea of
“equal and similar” (isos te kai homoios) in Apollonius and Euclid,
for here the two notions do come together. But it is a peculiar coming-together—not a logical joining, but only slightly more than a
mere conjunction. This has the effect of forming a new term while
leaving the independence of the original terms. There is “equal,”
there is “similar,” and there is “equal and similar.”
As a unit of meaning, Charles Mugler, in his dictionary of Greek
mathematical terminology, notes a non-mathematical use of isos te
kai homoios: he cites Thucydides’s account of the battle between
Corinth and Corcyra over the fate of Epidamnus, in which Corinth
at one point advertised Epidamnus as a colony where citizens would
be “in perfect equality” (epi tēi isēi kai homoiai).22 The two words
isos and homoios come together almost as mutual intensifiers. Greek
mathematics does not use intensifiers—“really round,” “really
straight,” “really parallel,” “really similar” don’t appear! Yet “equal
and similar” does seem to have the sense of “equal in every way.”
And this puts objects into a new class. Thus, in the Elements, “equal
and similar” solid figures makes its appearance in Book XI, Definition 10 as an independent definition after the definition of similar
solid figures quoted above: “Equal and similar solid figures are those
contained by similar plane areas equal in number and in magnitude.”
Euclid might have defined equal and similar solid figures as similar
solid figures whose faces are not only similar but equal as well—
that is, he might have subordinated “equal and similar solids” to
“similar solids,” and, therefore, also have eliminated any need for a
separate definition. Obviously there is a relationship between “similar solids” and “equal and similar solids,” but in Euclidean discourse
it is a relationship between inhabitants of distinct categories.
This understanding of “equal and similar” can also be seen in
Book VI of Apollonius’s Conics. Proposition VI.16, for example,
tells us that “Opposite sections are similar and equal.” The proof
runs as follows: in Conics I.14, Apollonius proved that the latera
recta of the opposite sections are equal; therefore, the figures of the
22. Charles Mugler, Dictionaire historique de la terminologie géométrique
des Grecs (Paris: Librairie C. Klincksieck, 1958).
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two opposite sections (the rectangle whose sides are the latus rectum
and the transverse axis) are equal and also similar; therefore, by VI.2,
the hyperbolas are equal (this is unmentioned in the text), and, by
VI.12, they are similar. The proof is simple, but there is a subtlety.
In proposition VI.2, Apollonius proved that “If the figures that are
constructed on the transverse axes of hyperbolas or ellipses are equal
and similar, then the sections [themselves] will be equal.” From this,
as I said, it follows that the opposite sections are equal, which, by
Appolonius’s definition (in contrast to Euclid’s Common Notion 4),
means they may be fitted one on the other. It would seem then an
immediate inference that they are also similar, that they have the
same shape. But Apollonius says this only after VI.12, which shows
that if the figures of hyperbolas (or ellipses) are similar then the hyperbolas (or ellipses) are similar, and what is more, he cites only
VI.12 as his justification.
Therefore, for Apollonius, to be equal—even when this means
“able to be fit one on another,”—and to be similar are different relations: the assertion that the opposite sections are “equal and similar”
demands proving that the distinction can be made. For us moderns,
who see a logical connection between “equal” and similar,” saying
“similar and equal” is understandable but redundant—like saying
“rectangular and square.”
Conclusion
Let us then go over the ground again and see where we have arrived.
The modern notion of a transformation of a plane ignores the particularity of a given object and acts only on the space within which it is
placed. Such transformations can be chosen in many ways, but, for
similarity, one can be chosen so that all distances between points in
the original space can be dilated or contracted by a fixed ratio; the
ratio, treated as a number, can be greater than 1, less than 1, or equal
to 1. In this way, similarity and equality can be taken as concepts that
are not fundamentally different, equality being the case when the fixed
ratio happens to be 1.
This way of approaching the subject of similarity and equality is
foreign to the mathematics of Euclid and Apollonius because of its
roots in specific geometric figures and their specific properties. Similarity in Greek geometry begins and ends in the sameness of shape.
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Equality begins with the sameness of shape, with superimposition, but
its special character, as seen explicitly in Euclid, is its ability to depart
from the sameness of shape. In this way, similarity and equality are
independent, so that recognizing a similarity, a sameness of shape, is
a different process from recognizing an identity, even though the
processes are tantalizingly close—should I say similar? Still, the two
processes can meet, and when they do, they create a third notion,
“equal and similar.” But, as I argued above, they create a third notion
precisely because they are not joined in logical way—they are simply
brought together.
But this presents us with a difficulty. If similarity and equality are
indeed independent notions, what then is Book VI of the Conics really
about? It cannot be exclusively about shape, as I have thought in the
past, because that, as I have argued, is the province of similarity, not
of equality. So when Apollonius describes Book VI as a book about
similarity and equality in the letter introducing the entire Conics, does
he mean to say that it is simply about two unrelated or vaguely related
topics? Perhaps.
But I think there is more to it than that, chiefly for two reasons. The
first is, as we have noted above, the reappearance of the cone in Book
VI, drawing us back to conic sections as whole, definable objects. The
second is the form of the definition of equality, which is, I believe,
more problematic than similarity, as I have implied throughout this
lecture. The difference between this definition and Euclid’s Common
Notion 4 is found in its second phrase, “Those [conic sections] which
are said to be unequal are those for which that is not so”—making superimposition the exclusive test of equality for conic sections. Thus,
when Apollonius wants to show that sections, or segments of sections,
are equal, he assumes typically that there is some point that does not
coincide with a point on the section presumed equal, and then demonstrates that contradiction follows. What I would like to bring out is
that equality has something to do with every point on the conic section.
In this way, what links similarity23 and equality is their way of looking
at a conic section, or a segment of a conic section, all at once.
23. In the Protagoras (331e), Plato has Protagoras make the remark, concerning justice and holiness, that we should not call things dissimilar just
because there is one point of dissimilarity between them. Socrates replies,
“I was surprised at this.”
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This is the connection, I believe, in which the problem of similarity and equality is related to the idea of locus, which I mentioned
in regard to the little problem with which I started. It too concerns
not an arbitrary place, but a definite identifiable place, all of whose
points have a certain property. It too, in other words, concerns in
some way the whole of conic sections, but in a less direct way.
There is no time, of course, to go into this in detail here, but I do
want to make clear that as we approach an understanding of similarity and equality, it is likely we shall also approach an understanding of other fundamental notions in Greek mathematics.
This, I might add as a final word, was the not the view of older
historians of mathematics, such as H. G. Zeuthen (1839-1920).
Zeuthen had no doubt that the modern point of view was Apollonius’s point of view, and on that basis wrote his expansive and deep
work on the ancient theory of conic sections (Zeuthen, 1886), which
set the tone of Apollonius scholarship for almost a century.24 He
could brush Conics VI aside, saying that it was “of no great significance” in the attempt to understand the Greek theory of conic sections.25 I hope that the discussion here makes that statement moot,
to the say the least.
24. H. G. Zeuthen, Die Lehre von den Kegelschnitten im Altertum (Kopenhagen: Höst und Sohn, 1886).
25. Zeuthen, 384.
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The Soul’s Choice of Life
Greg Recco
Most dreams are forgotten, perhaps even before the night has
passed. Others obtrude into daytime thought, even as their meaning
remains obscure. They haunt us, and seem to promise a rare and
precious revelation. Their coming insistently to mind implies a
faint undertone of reproach, like hearing your name repeated on
waking, before you are quite sure who you are. Such dreams seem
to call from afar, and from where we stand, they can only seem
alien. But we also suspect that we are the ones who are out of place,
and that the dream is calling us back from our wandering. In this
recollection of the unfamiliar, we sense dimly that we are tied to
what is familiar by only a specious kinship, and that our true home
lies elsewhere.
This sort of strange appeal that calls us back from estrangement
can occur not only in dreams or visions, but also in deliberately
produced works of art such as poems, paintings, and stories. In refusing to make any ordinary sort of sense, they contradict our
everyday understanding and invite us to speak along with them in
something like a foreign tongue. The dialogues of Plato, in particular, contain many examples of images or tales of this sort, beguiling works of imagination that linger in memory on the far horizon
of intelligibility. For those of us who read and talk together about
Plato with some frequency, such tales or images have become part
of the vocabulary of our thought—perhaps even a large part, just
as loan-words can come to outnumber a language’s own stock of
true-born names. Before moving on to our main theme, it will be
worthwhile to reflect briefly on a familiar example—the image of
the cave in the Republic—so that we can begin to meditate on how
such images work and what they accomplish.
Socrates asks his interlocutor Glaucon to imagine a cave in
which people are chained in such a way as to be able to see only
what is directly before them, the cave wall on which shadows are
Greg Recco is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. This
lecture was delivered in Annapolis on 12 November 2012.
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projected by a fire above and behind them. Glaucon exclaims that
these are “strange prisoners” (515a).1 “Like us,” Socrates replies.
But then something odd happens. At the very moment when we
might expect Socrates to offer the key by which to decipher these
unfamiliar letters, he instead continues to speak in the language
of the image. The prisoners are “like us,” he continues, “for do
you suppose such men would have seen anything of themselves
or one another other than the shadows cast by the fire on the wall
facing them?” Now, this is not so strange a move as to pose an
impossible task of interpretation, especially to someone who has
thought about the image for some time. We might start with the
idea that our ordinary efforts to know are wrongly oriented and
thus largely unsuccessful, and from there move on to the idea that
this concerns not only our attempts to know the world but even
our self-knowledge and knowledge of others. That sounds about
right. But we should try to imagine what Socrates’s reply would
sound like to someone who had never heard the rest, to someone
who has not had the time to think about it, to someone who does
not know where Socrates is going. To this person, Socrates’s response must seem pretty nearly the opposite of the explanation
that Glaucon’s remark implicitly requested. After hearing it, Glaucon would probably still say that the prisoners are strange, perhaps
as a sort of polite way of saying that the man telling him about
the prisoners is strange—and it would be hard to disagree.
But whether or not Glaucon meant his remark as a reproach, and
however strange Socrates’s speech is, its strangeness does not stem
from some madness of his, some disordered state of his powers of
thought or imagination. What is truly strange here is not the image
to which he gives voice, but the situation it is intended to portray,
namely, the fact that creatures destined for knowledge should
spend their lives so unaware of, and so unwittingly cooperative
with, the powerful impediments to knowing that characterize their
situation. The proper way to hear Socrates’s response to Glaucon’s
remark about the prisoners’ strangeness is thus affirmatively—not
“the prisoners are not strange; they are like us,” but, “they are like
1. Translations throughout are lightly adapted from Allan Bloom’s The
Republic of Plato (New York: Basic Books, 1968).
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us, strange.” And his explanation is an explanation not of the prisoners’ likeness to us but of their strangeness; again, “do you suppose such men”—those described in the image—“would have seen
anything of themselves or of each other than the shadows?” Given
what Socrates is trying to accomplish, deflecting the question of
likeness and going farther into the image may be the only way to
make it work. The image presents important features of our epistemic situation that are normally difficult to discern, but that we
can come to perceive if we take up an initially unfamiliar and awkward perspective, make it our own, and then turn this view back
on what had previously gone unquestioned. In order to know, we
must learn to speak strangely.
With a few small, though significant, differences, this kind of
change in understanding is what is aimed at by the final pages of
the Republic, the so-called Myth of Er (614b-621b). It, too, is a
fantastical story that represents in figurative form an important but
overlooked dimension of our actual situation. Its fantastical character is not a product of wild genius, but arises from Plato’s rigorous attention to both the nature of human freedom and the
difficulty of discerning it from within our ordinary perspective.
In the case of the cave image our learned familiarity with it
makes it relatively easy to put a name to what it is about; unlike
Glaucon, we have read the Republic. And we get some more help
from the fact that Socrates tells us outright what the image is meant
to be an image of. “Make an image,” he says, “of our nature in its
education and want of education” (514a). The Myth of Er, by contrast, is not presented as an image of anything at all. It is ostensibly
the report of a man who returned from the dead to tell of what
awaits souls after life. Socrates presents it as the completion of the
dialogue’s investigation of justice, inasmuch as it gives an account
of the good and bad that come from being just or unjust, not in this
life, but after death.
In this connection, the story is a fitting end for the dialogue, in
that it recapitulates a theme first sounded very near the beginning.
Cephalus reports that as a young man he scoffed at the stories of
punishment in the afterlife, but old age has found him and his agemates more fearful of what is to come. They are looking back over
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lives that contain perhaps no small measure of wrongdoing.
Cephalus is thankful for his wealth, above all for the ability it gives
him to conduct the costly private rituals of expiation that his fear
has made seem prudent. Socrates’s return to this theme at the end
of the dialogue, then, seems to endorse Cephalus’s anxious piety,
at least in confirming that there is something to fear for those who
have done wrong. But the story contains much more than is necessary for this purpose and, indeed, much that does not directly or
obviously further it. Also, it is just very strange. Even with some
degree of paraphrase, it will take a short while to recount it. So
here it is.
Upon his death, the soul of Er traveled along with other souls of
the dead and came to a place where there were two openings in the
earth and two in the sky, above and across from them. Between the
pairs of openings sat judges, who directed the just to continue to
the right and upward through the opening in the sky, and the unjust
to go to the left and downward into the earth. Er himself they instructed to remain, observe, and report what he saw on his return
to the world of the living. What he saw first was this: as some souls
were going into the two openings indicated by the judges, other
souls were coming out of the others, some up from earth, others
down from the heavens. All those who had returned went off with
delight to a nearby meadow, where they made camp and engaged
in conversation. Those who had known each other in life greeted
each other and asked what it was like in the other place. So they
all told their stories, some lamenting and crying as they recalled
all they had seen and undergone in the thousand-year journey beneath the earth, the others telling of the beauty of the sights and
experiences above. In general, those who came from below the
earth said they had received a tenfold punishment for each of their
acts of injustice, once each hundred years, on the grounds that a
human life was about a hundred years long. For acts of impiety towards the gods, the penalty was yet worse. Of one particularly terrible tyrant named Ardiaeus it was related that when his thousand
years had passed and it was his turn to go up, he and other perpetrators of unholy deeds were rejected by the opening. Men standing
nearby seized them, then bound them, flayed them, and dragged
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them along the rough ground in the sight of the others, finally casting them into the pit of Tartarus, from which none return. Fear of
being rejected by the opening and subjected to this torment was
thus the last of the punishments for souls who had lived an unjust
life. The rewards for justice were said to be the counterparts of
these.
On the eighth day, the souls who had returned were made to
leave the meadow and continue their journey. In four days’ time,
they came to a place from which they could see a sort of pillar of
light stretched from above through all of heaven and earth, like a
rainbow. This light was said to bind the earth and the heavens and
be connected to a complex, interlocking arrangement of whorls
forming a sort of spindle, which belongs to the goddess Ananke or
Necessity. Her daughters, the Fates Atropos, Clotho, and Lachesis,
put their hands to the turning of these otherworldly whorls and
were associated with the three dimensions of time: Atropos, she
who cannot be turned, with the future, Clotho, the weaver, with the
present, and Lachesis, the dispenser of lots, with the past.
The souls were then brought before Lachesis. Her spokesman
gathered up the lots and patterns of lives that lay in her lap, and
then delivered the goddess’s message to the souls arrayed before
him. He said: “This is the speech of Ananke’s maiden daughter,
Lachesis: ‘Ephemeral souls, this is the beginning of another deathbringing cycle for the mortal race. A spirit shall not be allotted to
you, but you shall choose a spirit. Let the holder of the first lot
make the first choice of a life to which it shall be bound by Ananke.
Virtue is without a master; as each honors her, it shall have more
or less of her. The blame belongs to the chooser; the god is blameless.’”
Then the lots were distributed to the souls and the patterns of
lives were laid out on the ground before them, lives of all sorts—
lives of animals and tyrants, lives of the famous and the obscure—
and these lives far outnumbered the souls present.
The spokesman continued: “Even for the one who comes forward last, if he chooses intelligently and lives earnestly, a life to
be happy with has been laid out, and not a bad one. Let the first
not be careless in his choice, nor the last disheartened.”
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Since the soul’s choice of life is my theme, let me quote without
paraphrase the section that follows, which deals most directly with
that choice.
“And the first to choose came forward and immediately chose
the greatest tyranny, and, because of folly and gluttony, chose without having considered everything adequately; and it escaped his
notice that eating his own children and other evils were fated to be
a part of that life. When he considered it at his leisure, he beat his
breast and lamented the choice, not abiding by the spokesman’s
forewarning. For he didn’t blame himself for the evils but chance,
demons, and anything rather than himself. He was one of those
who had come from heaven, having lived under an orderly constitution in his former life, partaking of virtue by habit, without philosophy. And, it may be said, not the least number of those who
were caught in such circumstances came from heaven, because
they were unpracticed in labors. But most of those who came from
the earth, because they themselves had labored and had seen the
labors of others, weren’t in a rush to make their choices. For just
this reason, and because of the chance of the lot, there was an exchange of evils and goods for most of the souls.”
“He said that this was a sight surely worth seeing: how each of
the several souls chose a life. For it was pitiable, laughable, and
wonderful to see. For the most part the choice was made according
to the habit of their former life. He said he saw a soul that once belonged to Orpheus choosing the life of a swan, out of hatred for
womankind; because he died at their hands, he refused to be generated in and born of a woman. He saw Thamyras’s soul choosing
the life of a nightingale. And he also saw a swan changing to the
choice of a human life; other musical animals did the same thing.
The soul that got the twentieth lot chose the life of a lion; it was
the soul of Telamonian Ajax, which shunned becoming a human
being, for it remembered the judgment of arms. And after it was
the soul of Agamemnon; it, too, hated humankind as a result of its
sufferings and therefore changed to the life of an eagle. Atalanta’s
soul had drawn one of the middle lots; it saw the great honors of
an athletic man and couldn’t pass them by but took them. After this
he saw that of Epieius, son of Panopeus, going into the nature of
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an artisan woman. And far out among the last he saw the soul of
the buffoon Thersites, clothing itself as an ape. And by chance the
soul of Odysseus had drawn the last lot of all and went to choose;
from memory of its former labors, it had recovered from love of
honor; it went around for a long time looking for the life of a private man who minds his own business; and with effort it found one
lying somewhere, neglected by the others. It said when it saw this
life that it would have done the same even if it had drawn the first
lot, and was delighted to choose it. And from the other beasts, similarly some went into human lives and into one another—the unjust
changing into savage ones, the just into tame ones, and there were
all kinds of mixtures.”
So far the report of Er. Socrates interrupts his recounting it just
once, to emphasize the supreme importance of this choice of a life
and to point out that we really ought to devote all our energies to
acquiring the art of making this choice well. His way of talking
about what would make for a good choice is very interesting, and
I will return to it near the end of this lecture. But for now, let us reflect on the many ways in which the story gives the attentive reader
pause and does not simply supplement the dialogue’s account of
what justice is and what effect it has on souls. The story, it must
be said, does not do just what it was said to do.
In the first place, it is worth reflecting on how extravagant the
whole section on the souls’ choice of life is. The account was introduced and admitted on the pretext that it would supplement the
dialogue’s account of the power that justice has in the soul without
the assistance of reputation or other external benefits. Like other
such familiar tales, it accomplishes this by adding to whatever uncertain external benefits justice and injustice might win in life and
among humans, a certain and unerring exactitude in punishment
and reward from the gods in a sort of life after life. So, one might
reasonably inquire how this purpose is advanced at all by the elaborate account of the spindle of Necessity or the whole idea of souls
choosing their next life, not to mention the many examples of particular choices made by souls famous and unknown. At most, one
might argue that the fact that the lives for which the souls are being
rewarded or punished were of their own choosing underscores
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souls’ responsibility for their own justice or injustice, and thus
shows that the rewards and punishments are deserved. Even according to this explanation, however, the wealth of detail concerning particular souls’ choices, as well as the cosmic backdrop, would
be only so much ornament.
But of all the reasons for taking the Myth of Er as a figure for
something other than what it is said to be, the most compelling is
the fact that the rewards and punishments pointedly do not have
the character we might expect they ought to have: they are ineffectual or at least unfathomably obscure in their mechanism.
That the rewards for a just life are ineffectual we learn from the
example of the soul that draws the first lot and chooses its next life
first. It had come from heaven, and apparently a thousand years’
worth of beautiful sights and enjoyment was not enough to persuade it of anything but its own fitness to be the biggest tyrant of
all. Although it was happy enough to reach immediately for this
life, it was also particularly resistant to taking responsibility for its
own choice when it became clear that the life contained many evils.
This kind of remorse over bad choices, Socrates’s summary indicates, was not uncommon among those who came down from the
heavens.
What of the others? Those who had toiled and suffered below
the earth and had seen the toils and suffering of others were said
to choose more carefully, and thus on the whole, we are told, there
was an exchange of goods and evils for most souls. This might lead
one to the conclusion that while the rewards do not promote the
choice of justice, the punishments do.
But several things undercut the confidence we might have in the
efficacy of posthumous punishments: in particular, the fate of the
incurable or unholy, the complete forgetfulness of the living, and
above all the impossibility of adequately representing injustice to
the unjust perspective. As for the first, there are those like Ardiaeus,
for whose crimes, it seems, no finite punishment could be adequate, on the grounds that his soul was incurable, and possibly also
because of the enormity of his crimes, which transcend the horizon
of justice altogether, being not only unjust but also unholy.
A second problem with the notion that the punishments of the
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afterlife are effective in curbing injustice lies in the fact that souls
are made to drink from the river of Carelessness on the plain of
Forgetfulness before continuing into the life they have chosen, and,
as a result, forget everything. Those who have chosen a just life,
being the majority of those who completed the underground passage, will go through it and then join those who make the heavenly
passage. Now having forgotten their former labors, they are likely
to choose hastily and with misplaced confidence in their ability to
discern what is a good life. Interestingly, this “exchange of goods
and evils” for most souls was already inscribed, so to speak, in the
topography of the place of judgment: the opening that leads out of
heaven is located above and opposite the one that leads into the
earth, as the one that leads out of the earth lies below and opposite
the opening that leads back into heaven. Forgetfulness and carelessness seem to guarantee that there will be a revolution not only
of whorls, but also of souls. But forgetfulness and carelessness are
not magical effects brought about by the eponymous plain and
river. If punishment is the engine driving the motion of souls upwards and towards justice, then the beautiful sights and enjoyment
found in the heavenly passage do no less to drive them down, towards injustice. This is precisely not the image of a world-order
that uses rewards and punishments to produce justice with mechanical accuracy and inevitability, but the image of a world-order that
strongly inclines souls towards an eternal and predictable alternation of good and bad. Why should this be the purpose of the cosmos?
A third problem with the account is that it is difficult to see what
the souls must be in order for their passage to be able to teach them
anything. This difficulty is thrown into relief by a significant omission. Of the souls returning from beneath the earth, Socrates says:
“They were punished for each injustice once every hundred years;
taking this as the length of a human life, they could in this way pay
off the penalty for the injustice ten times over. Thus, for example,
if some men were causes of the death of many, either by betraying
cities or armies and had reduced men to slavery, or were involved
in any other wrongdoing”—and here I interrupt to note that just
where one might hope to learn precisely how such acts are an-
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swered in that other place, Socrates concludes simply, “they received for each of these things tenfold sufferings.” In other words,
Socrates provides us with no specific information. Plato handles
the issue of narration very deftly here, for he has Socrates preface
this section with a warning about its incompleteness; Socrates says,
“Now, to go through the many things would take a long time, Glaucon. But the chief thing is this,” and then proceeds with the summary I just read. But if the purpose of resorting to summary was
to avoid trouble, then it is difficult to understand Socrates’s choice
of examples.
In the first place, the list of specific forms of injustice by itself
leads one to expect a similarly specific list of punishments. Also,
the fact that each “cycle” of punishments is calibrated to the length
of an average human life supports the expectation that punishments
will somehow correspond to, mirror, or just repeat in inverted form
the particular wrongs one has done. But the examples of injustice
Socrates in fact offers do not fulfill any of these expectations, for
the important reason that the victims of these injustices are in each
case many in number. If a man betrays an entire city, how can his
single life (or a single afterlife) stand any chance of comprising
the myriad injustices done to his fellow citizens? If he sold dozens
into slavery, how could his life encompass suffering the same fate
dozens of times? Even if somehow it could, it would also have to
contain dozens of instances of the state of freedom that slavery destroys. And each of these would have to be in some way pristine,
so that the evil that is enslavement could have its full effect on the
soul being punished in this way—for enslaving one person twice
is not the same as enslaving two different people. In general, then,
it is unclear how a single life can have the evil it does to many represented to it effectively.
One solution to this conundrum, of course, is to take one sort of
evil to stand for all others, to serve as a kind of medium of exchange. Maybe pain could serve as such a punitive currency, repaying specific evils with generic badness. The extravagant
punishment of the soul of Ardiaeus, however, serves both as an example of this sort of thinking and as a sign of its insufficiency. The
punishment is not only of infinite duration; it is also unimaginably
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intense, and the one being punished in this way does not in any
way signal to us what his experience is. Now, it is possible, of
course, that we hear nothing from the soul of Ardiaeus because
there is no need. If his soul is incurable, perhaps his punishment is
not for him but an example to others, and in order for him to serve
as an example, all that matters is that they take his experience as
an example, whatever he himself may think of it. Consistent with
this interpretation is the presence of the guards who point out to
the others why these souls are being singled out for such treatment;
that is, it seems at least in part to be a show put on for their benefit.
Also consistent with this view is the claim that what improves the
judgment of those who make the underground passage is not just
that they have labored and suffered themselves, but also that they
have seen the labors and sufferings of others. Nonetheless, the absence of the directly suffering soul’s perspective on the single particular punishment reported to us underscores the problem,
outlined by omission in the preceding passage, of how a soul’s evil
can be represented to it—and this remains a problem.
If the soul’s thousand-year journey below the earth is to teach it
anything—as the improvement in its choice of life suggests it
does—then the soul must somehow have the evils it engaged in as
though they were something good presented to it as what they in
fact are. But in order to recognize one’s own wrongdoing for what
it is, the perpetrator must have a different perspective than was
available to him during the act, and this kind of thoroughgoing
change in perspective is, as we have learned, terribly difficult. In
the cave image, it is represented as a turning around that can simultaneously be a passage from what is darker to what is brighter
(that is, an actual improvement) and a passage from what is perceived clearly and comfortably to what is perceived only dimly
and painfully (that is, an apparent worsening). Something else is
needed: a trustworthy and trusted guide who can articulate what is
happening to the soul being forcibly turned around in this way. In
the end, pain by itself is too diffuse, too immediate, and too uncontextualized to bear the articulated meaning that would be necessary in order to effect this change, a fact that is perhaps hinted at
by the punishment’s tenfold repetition. Even the torture of the souls
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of the unholy, which might seem to stand on its own as an object
lesson in the wages of wrongdoing, is supplemented in the story
by agents standing by to explain it, which suggests that it cannot
bear its meaning within itself on its own.
In the case of both punishments and rewards, then, the report of
Er sets up certain expectations or requirements that it then pointedly does not or cannot fulfill. The rewards for a just life, we feel,
ought to reinforce the choice of justice, but instead they are presented as strongly correlated with the careless haste and entitled
self-importance that lead to a bad choice of life. As for the punishments, while they are said to have the effect they ought to, still,
the mechanism by which they are meant to accomplish this is
markedly obscure, and inquiring more closely into it only makes
the confusion more intense, particularly by directing attention to
the source of the problem: the soul and its perception of, or perspective on, the good. If the myth’s self-presentation is at odds with
its content, particularly in its central conceit, we have to turn elsewhere to discover its real import. One thing that is clear, as we
have just seen, is that the story concerns the soul. Just what is the
soul in this story?
One phrase in the description of souls’ choice of lives incidentally brings to the fore one of the key features of the myth’s portrayal of the soul. Er saw “a soul that used to belong to Orpheus”
choosing the life of a swan. The striking phrase “used to belong”
underlines something that must be assumed in order for the story
to work at all, and it does so compactly and forcefully. For the myth
to work, a soul, whatever else it may be, cannot be identical with
any named person. The name “Orpheus” must indicate the temporary composite of an otherwise anonymous soul with the singer’s
life whose story we know from myth. Any name, then, must miss
the soul and indicate only such a composite, even my name or
yours. The possessive in the phrase “my soul” becomes particularly
obscure. If I were to utter the words “my soul,” who would I be
saying the soul belongs to, and what would I be taking myself to
be that is distinct from my soul? Who or what is speaking when
the words “my soul” are uttered? Whatever we might previously
have thought it was, the story is now telling us that a soul is not
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identical with a life or a person, since it precedes and outlives both.
One possible source for this strange conception of the soul is the
discussion of its immortality earlier in Book 10 (608d-612a).
There, the question arises how the soul can be both immortal and
capable of being at odds with itself. Self-opposition (of the sort examined in Book 4) is associated with being composite, and this, in
turn, is associated with change and decay. A soul composed of
parts, it seems, could only be mortal. Instead of investigating this
dilemma, Socrates merely suggests that the view of soul that we
have—and that he and his interlocutors have had throughout the
whole of the dialogue—is like the view one would have of how a
man looks if one were to see only the statue of him that had lain at
the bottom of the sea for many years and become disfigured and
covered with shells, seaweed, rocks and so forth, as in the case of
the statue of Glaucus. The image more or less directly asserts that
our embeddedness in body, change, and manyness has made our
souls unrecognizable. This is an unpromising starting point, but
Socrates remains confident and ventures the guess that the soul’s
true nature is to be found by our looking to its philosophia, its love
of wisdom. This recalls another account of the division of the soul
that emerges from the yet earlier discussion of the terrible evils of
tragic poetry in Book 10. This account divides the soul’s philosophical, calculating, law-abiding part, which suffers misfortune
in silence and tranquility, from another part, which indulges in loud
lamentation. The latter is itself indulged by writers of tragedies,
who trick even the decent man into weeping immoderately at the
misfortunes of another on the grounds that this is at least not selfpitying, and is only a kind of play (606a-b). The gist seems to be
that the first part of the soul would do its work better without the
second. Both accounts, then, solve the problem of manyness by
making one part stand for the whole. Whatever the merits or faults
of such a solution, we should consider that if the true identity of
the soul should turn out to be only its rational part understood in
this way, then the whole drama of existence—the stories of our
lives as we commonly understand them—would be wholly irrelevant, composed entirely of a sort of encrustation of alien matter
that only serves to obscure the soul from view. By themselves, on
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this view, souls might essentially have nothing to do with lives.
While these two prior discussions of soul seem relevant to the
myth and are consonant with some aspects of its sharp distinctions
between soul and person and between soul and life, they are at odds
with others. Souls in the myth are not heartless calculating machines, but beings capable of feeling and expressing emotion.
When the souls complete their respective journeys, they go off
“with delight” to the meadow where they confer. When those who
came from the underground passage recount what they have seen
and undergone there, they cry and lament in recalling it. When
these souls are nearing the exit and see some like the soul of Ardiaeus being rejected, they experience a great fear, which they note
is only one among many they have suffered. In sum, then, the souls
in the story respond emotively and expressively to their situation,
even during this time when they are presumed to exist in separation
from body and life.
In addition to transitory affections such as a moment of fear,
souls in the myth also have longer-standing dispositions or traits
of character. The soul of Ajax, son of Telamon, bitterly recalls the
judgment that granted the arms of the departed hero Achilles to
Odysseus instead of to him, and so flees humanity. The souls of
Orpheus and Agamemnon, in turn, make their choices of animal
lives out of long-standing hatred, of women in the first case and
of humanity in general in the second. In each case, these quasi-permanent states were crystallized, so to speak, by the trauma of their
previous lives (the very ones we associate with their names, as if
their souls had become those single lives). Their hatreds and resentment are very much not the passions of a moment, as they appear to have persisted unchanged and utterly undiminished
throughout their millennial journeys. A final, most significant example of a state or characteristic of soul allowed by the myth is
that of the soul of Odysseus, which “from memory of its former
labors, . . . had recovered from love of honor.” Somehow, the soul
as portrayed in the myth is capable of being affected by its life,
and affected in such a way as to be able to learn, not just greedily
carry forward the savor of bitter memory. In either case, however,
what we see is that however distinct souls may be from lives, their
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lives affect them. In light of this, perhaps it is time finally to turn
directly to what the story must take a life to be.
This is in one way the most straightforward and familiar element
of the story; everyone knows what a life is, what it is composed
of, why it is important, what makes it good or bad, and so forth. In
another way, however, the central conceit of the myth of Er requires a life to be something that is almost impossible to understand. Recall that the life contains elements like wealth or poverty,
good or bad birth, strength, beauty, political office or rule, and indeed everything that could characterize a life, or almost everything.
For, as was explained, since the soul that lives the life must be
changed by it, the life considered by itself does not contain an “ordering” or “arrangement” of soul (taxis). If our question is what
we ought to remove in thought from our usual conception of what
a life is in order to arrive at an idea of the lives whose paradigms
lie in the lap of Lachesis, the answer is both simple and perplexing:
we must remove everything that soul is. As it has done in many
places, the dialogue is once again causing a problem by treating a
distinction as a separation. When Socrates manages to bring the
conversation to a halt of this sort, he often turns to an image or example that retroactively modifies one of the discussion’s starting
points. We could try the same, and instead of trying to proceed with
delimitation or definition in the face of aporia, we might turn to an
example of what the myth takes to be a life, which it obligingly
provides.
None of the lives is very extensively described, but the first example of a life that is chosen is among the fullest. The nameless
soul that drew the first lot—which “participated in virtue out of
habit, without philosophy” after living in “an ordered regime”—
picked the life containing the biggest tyranny straightaway, “but it
escaped its notice that eating his children and other evils accompanied this.” It escaped his notice. How strange. How can we understand this? Should we agree with the old song that “the large print
giveth and the small print taketh away”?2 Do the events or elements
of a life presented to choice differ in their prominence, such that
some would count as the large print, and some as the small? And
2. Tom Waits, “Step Right Up” (Small Change, Asylum Records, 1976).
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what would determine which appear more or less prominent? Just
what is written or figured on the paradigms of lives in the lap of
Lachesis? In the example just considered, the great tyranny looks
good at first, but when the soul “considered the life at its leisure,”
it discovered its evils, and was unhappy with its lot.
In a way, this latter portrait of a life is familiar and cogent: a life
containing an apparent good may of necessity also contain actual
evils that counterbalance or even outweigh the apparent good. But
in another way, this is an unsatisfactory way of talking about a life.
It tries to mark the badness of the life that contains one sort of fact
sometimes thought to be good (being a tyrant) by pointing out that
it also contains another sort of fact, which is generally acknowledged to be bad (eating one’s children). The whole question of
what makes a life good or bad has been reduced to the piecemeal
evaluation of particulars, and the summation of such judgments,
as in what is sometimes called a rubric.
But we really ought to doubt this soul’s assessment of its chosen
life, since we have already been told that it makes the choice affected by folly and gluttony. It could be so misguided as to be mistaken about which of the life’s elements is good and which bad. In
fact, we have already been told in Book 9 that the worst possible
eventuality for a soul that is tyrannically inclined is for it to become
an actual tyrant. Conversely, it may be that something as horrible
as eating his children is an appropriate accompaniment to the
“large print” of his being a tyrant.
But just inverting the assessment this foolish soul made of each
of these facts does not really solve the deeper problem, of which
the problem of the relative prominence of a life’s parts—its large
and its small print—is just a symptom. The component elements
of a life in the myth are subject to two seemingly contradictory demands: they must be “without an arrangement of soul,” and thus
be somehow meaningless, and they must be capable of “leading”
the soul to being just or unjust, and thus somehow have a meaning.
As for the former term of the contradiction, given that there are
good and bad among rich and poor alike, wealth, to pick one example, looks like the sort of thing that the Stoic Epictetus would
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call indifferent, something that is of no importance when compared
with the greater question of whether we are living well, and does
not by itself answer the question. As for the latter, however, the
soul that has learned the art of choosing lives well, Socrates says,
will call lives good or bad depending on whether they “lead to
virtue or vice.” But now we have to ask: how can events be said to
“lead” to virtue or vice at all unless they have within them the germ
of a sense, an incipient significance that is preserved in what it
gives rise to?
As in other similar cases, the commentary on the myth is quite
relevant and helpful, if somewhat oblique. Socrates portrays in
some detail the person who has acquired the art of choosing lives
well. He says: “He will take into account all the things we have
just mentioned and how in combination and separately they affect
the virtue of a life. Thus he may know the effects, bad and good,
of beauty mixed with poverty or wealth and accompanied by this
or that habit of soul; and the effects of any particular mixture with
one another of good and bad birth, private station and ruling office,
strength and weakness, facility and difficulty in learning, and all
such things that are connected with a soul by nature or are acquired.
From all this he will be able to draw a conclusion and choose—
while looking off toward the nature of the soul—between the worse
and the better life, calling worse the one that leads it toward becoming more unjust, and better the one that leads it to becoming
more just” (618c-e).
One of the most striking things in this passage, I think, is the intensity of its emphasis on combination. The possessor of the art of
choosing lives is said to consider the elements of lives both “separately and in combination” but all the examples are of complex
configurations. Here, then, is one way in which something can both
have a meaning and not have it in itself: it can have its meaning in
being combined with something else. Note that the myth helps us
here. The composition of elements that makes up each life is not
something chosen; the lives have already been assembled by the
time the souls have to choose them. Rather, souls are to call lives
good or bad on the basis of no element in them, but on the basis of
what living such a life will work in the soul that lives it. That is,
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what was being chosen (whether or not this escaped the choosers’
notice) was not an indifferently composed aggregate of particular
life-events or features, but something whose value lies on another
level.
Another striking feature of the passage is how thoroughly confusing it makes the separation of life and soul that lies at the basis
of the myth. In the first place, the possessor of the art is said to
know about the effects of mixtures that include elements such as
“this or that habit of soul.” This seems directly opposed to the
claim that lives are without an “ordering” or “arrangement” of soul.
Including this feature does not in itself introduce an inconsistency;
rather, it states the problem well: the soul that sets out to have
wealth or any other good thing will be changed by its pursuit, so
that there is no guarantee it will still want or be able to enjoy what
it was pursuing by the time it gets it. The one who possesses the
art would have to be able to predict what changes the living of a
life would work in the soul. In short, what makes elements of a life
part of a life that can be called good or bad is their connection with
the soul that has to live that life—the suffering, rejoicing, experiencing, remembering, expressing, and thinking being. These powers are what lend to those events or conditions whatever sense they
have. Here we see another way in which a life has a meaning, but
not in itself; it has a meaning in and for a soul.
To state the matter most generally, elements of a life are capable
of having a meaning that is not in them because that’s just what it
is to be an element of a life: to be a “Here” that is also, with all the
weight Plotinus gives the word, a “There.” The seeming paradox
is just the reality of our situation, and one that Plato has been carefully directing our attention to throughout the dialogue. We spend
as much time as we do in this dialogue on the proper organization
of an educational program not merely for the stated reason—that
we need guardians who will be both harsh with the city’s enemies
and gentle with its citizens. Rather, as the central books show and
the final myth signifies, the deeper issue is that what is most immediately apparent is always somehow a distraction from the intelligible reality of what is. But the sensible is not merely
something other than the intelligible: it is the region wherein the
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intelligible shows itself; it is where we live. The small things matter. The ball I learn to catch may be little more than arbitrary mineral, vegetable, and animal products refashioned to the measure of
a human hand, but the act of catching that this ball makes possible
is an emblem and anticipation of all sorts of future forms of mastery. The little bumps and tussles of playground life are like so
many prophetic utterances spoken to us in childhood that foretell
adult life’s disappointments—its alliances and betrayals, its kindness and its savagery—and they foretell them with both the accuracy and the obscurity that are characteristic of an oracle. Our lives
consist not in isolated events, but in pattern and paradigm, eidē on
the move.
This strange mode of being of the elements of our lives is a feature of the world of the myth of Er that also happens to be a feature
of our world; it is the literally true thing at the center of a mass of
figurative falsehoods, and around which the whole turns. It is the
true thing that seems strange to us who have become strangers to
it. The elements of lives can appear big or small, cruel twists of
fate, or irrelevant impediments to powers we find we do not need
to get by. We who live them do not experience ourselves as having
chosen them. But reflecting on the image of our souls choosing
our lives can awaken us from the dream-state in which we treat the
meanings of our lives as beings, as ta onta, as things that always
are, with no tincture of ambiguity or self-opposition, no dependence on perspective or interpretation, no horizon of possible transformation. On the contrary, we should recognize our lives in their
truth: they are the materials—somehow both indifferent and essential—out of which souls weave the tissue of meaning they first put
on and then inhabit; they are elements that stand to our souls and
hearts as those other elements—earth, air, fire, and water—stand
to the multifariously capable bodies of living beings of all kinds,
their material support and flesh. When the elements of our bodies
or lives fail us, we break, but when they cooperate, we succeed in
being something they would not be on their own, something other
and beyond.
The myth tells us that we need to learn how to cooperate with
these elements and their ways, so that we may make a good pas-
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sage in this life and the next, and perhaps in the next after that. But
what would make for a good passage? What should we hope for?
A well-deserved reward? Or a suffering that makes the soul better?
The beautiful sights and pleasant experiences that the myth sets up
as a reward for a good life carry with them the same ambiguity as
the goods of this life: many souls are not improved by them, but
turn out worse. To answer the question, we might think of the soul
that once belonged to Odysseus. Of this restless and clever soul,
we were not told whether it had come down from heaven or up
from the earth, only that memory of its former labors had cured it.
Those labors could have been carried out on earth as part of the
life we associate with Odysseus’s name—where he struggled to
regain his home after long years in foreign lands, losing all his
comrades—or they could have been performed as payment in that
place beneath the earth, some days’ journey from the spindle of
Necessity where lives are woven. Perhaps our hope and prayer
should be the same as his could have been: may we all perform
such labors, and remember them, and be cured of what ails us.
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Artistic Expression in Animals
Linda Wiener
I have three main goals in this lecture. The first, and most important, is to inspire you to be more open to and aware of the animals
all around you. The second is to give some history of a fascinating
debate on animal color and behavior that began in the early twentieth century in the United States; this will illustrate how difficult
it is to elicit any sort of Truth from the phenomena of nature. The
third is to persuade you that, at least some of the time, animals engage in artistic expression for its own sake.
Ever since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species
in 1859,1 by far the most popular way of interpreting the appearance and behavior of organisms has been through the theory of natural selection. According to this theory, if a mutation appears in an
animal and that mutation helps the animal survive and reproduce
better than similar animals in their environment, the mutation and
the animals that carry it will be preserved while others will eventually decline and die out. But ever since this theory was published
there has been dissent. The most well known dissents are from religious objectors, however there have always been some scientists,
naturalists, philosophers, and others who work intimately with
plants and animals who accept the theory of evolution through natural selection, but believe that it is not sufficient to account for all
the phenomena of nature. I am one of this latter group.
In this lecture, I will use the lens of artistic expression in animals
as a way of exploring this question. I begin with an example from
bird song. I was at a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony,
Linda Wiener is a tutor at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
This paper is adapted from a lecture delivered at the College’s Annapolis
campus on September 6, 2013. The original lecture involved images and
some video clips. This version makes do with some photographs, as well
as links to images on the web. Be sure to open the links and look at the
images while reading!
1. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, first edition (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2001.
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given by the Santa Fe Community Orchestra at the Santa Fe Opera
House in May, 2008. The opera house is covered on top, but open
around the sides. At the very beginning of the third movement, a
flock of house finches flew in and perched above the orchestra.
One male joined in singing with the music in such a way that it
seemed a part of the piece. He sang for most of the third movement
and at the very end of that movement, when the orchestra plays
four notes, the bird came in afterward, using the contact chirps of
the species, and mimicked those last four notes.
This is an example of a bird singing in his capacity as a musician. He shows that he knows something about music and can employ it appropriately outside its use for attracting mates and
protecting territories. This propensity of a least some birds to sing
outside the mating and nesting seasons was noted by Thoreau and
more recently by David Rothenberg in his book Why Birds Sing.2
David is a philosopher and jazz clarinetist. He plays his clarinet
with birds in aviaries and in the wild, sometimes with remarkable
results. As with the bird at the opera house, some birds respond
musically to his musical prompting. I particularly like a duet he
participated in with a laughing thrush; it can be heard online.3
Rothenberg concludes that birds sing because they enjoy it.
Other animals have been reported to respond to human music. I
read that crickets will approach when they hear music and start
singing. My own experiments with two species of crickets were
inconclusive; they chirped so much it was hard to tell when they
were responding to music and when they were chirping in their
natural rhythms. I have been told stories of raccoons coming on
stage during a concert. There is also record of a bear doing the
same thing (Fig. 1).
Moving on from music, probably the most famous artistic animals are the bowerbirds of Australia and New Guinea. For instance,
the satin bowerbird builds an oval shaped bower out of sticks and
decorates it with mostly blue objects. This includes flowers, berries,
and even human-made items like plastic drinking straws. Other
species have differently shaped bowers and use different color
2. David Rothenberg, Why Birds Sing (New York: Basic Books, 2005).
3. http://www.whybirdssing.com
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Fig. 1: Bear at concert4
schemes. The vogelkop bowerbird builds a conical bower and decorates mostly with red and orange objects.5 The females come
around to check out the male bowers, the males dance for them, and
then the female selects a male to mate with. She then goes off to
build a nest and raises the young on her own.
This is a classic example of what Darwin called “sexual selection” in his book Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex.6
In Darwin’s account, the females have aesthetic standards and
whichever male best meets those standards is the one she chooses
as a mate.
Darwin thought sexual selection less rigorous than ordinary natural selection because it was not a life and death matter. Recently,
Darwin's view of sexual selection has been revised. Now, the
building, decorating, and dancing activities of the male are seen
as direct reflections of the actual genetic quality of the males. The
females are selecting the males not according to an aesthetic standard, but according to which are the most genetically fit. This
brings sexual selection theory more in line with the classic theory
of natural selection.
4. From Carl Marty, Northenaire’s Ginger and Her Woodland Orphans
(Park Falls, Wisconsin: MacGregor Litho, 1953).
5. http://www.duskyswondersite.com/animals/bower-birds
6. Charles Darwin, Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (New
York: Penguin, 2004).
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A group of birds called the catbirds, in the same family as the
bower birds, helps raise a few questions about this modern understanding. In the catbirds, the males and females cooperate to build
the nest and rear the young; on average catbirds rear more offspring than the bowerbirds. An alternative explanation for bowerbird behavior is that the bower birds have “chosen” in some way
to forgo their maximum reproductive potential in order to devote
energy to the creation and appreciation of art.
Closer to home, there are other collecting and decorating animals. The pack rat of the Southwestern states is one. They are
beloved by archaeologists because they collect all sorts of things
from their surroundings and store them in their nests. An ancient
pack rat nest can tell scientists a lot about the sorts of things that
were around at the time. Pack rats are also famous for being destructive when they choose to nest in your home or vehicle. Whenever I hear friends complain about a pack rat nest, I beg them for
photographs.
Pack rats have different preferences when constructing their
nests. Sometimes, it is just a bunch of sticks and a few fabulous
items they have collected. My friends Betsy and Jamie had a nest
in their vehicle with a central white fluffy nest structure, then an
attractive bed of greens with dried red chiles piled in the center
(Fig. 2a). My friends Robert and Susan had a pack rat nest in their
vehicle with a central grey fluffy nest structure surrounded by a
variety of sticks, stems, and cholla cactus pads (Fig. 2b).
Fig. 2a
Photo by Jaimie Haskell
Fig. 2b
Photo by Robert Schlaer
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ESSAYS & LECTURES | WIENER
Another friend, Pam, tells this story about a pack rat nest she
found in her truck. She was so mad when she saw the nest, she
threw everything on the ground; when she came back some time
later, it was all back in the truck. Not only that, it was back in just
the way it had been before, with each major element, stems, sticks,
and other items in exactly the same spot. This shows us that the
nest isn’t just a bunch of stuff thrown around. The pack rat arranges
her space to her own taste. Just as when someone messes up one
of your rooms, you put it back to its original arrangement, so too
does the pack rat.
Let’s look at some domestic animals. I had three ferrets over a
period of about nine years. They were all avid collectors. They had
stashes of the stuff they collected; there was a main stash usually
under and couch or in a cabinet, and smaller satellite stashes in
various locations. I noticed that they went through periods of collecting. My ferret Fennel collected soft things like beanie babies
and stuffed animals for a while and then switched to hard things
like pill bottles and vials. They also had a sense of value. If they
found something unusual, it would be hidden way in the back underneath other items in the stash, whereas a common object like a
pencil would just be thrown in anywhere.
My colleague Llyd Wells in Santa Fe has a ferret named Tomato
who makes stashes.
Tomato keeps a stash of mostly soft items in the closet in the
bedroom (Fig. 3a) and another stash of mostly harder rubber items
under the sink in the bathroom (Fig. 3b). Llyd will switch an item
Fig. 3a
Tomato’s bedroom stash
Fig. 3b
Tomato’s bathroom stash
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
out of one stash into the other and Tomato is quick to “correct”
this. Tomato has organized her stashes and knows how they are
supposed to be.
If it seems like I am talking about ferret collecting in much the
same way I might talk about human collecting, it is because I am.
This brings up the bad word anthropomorphism. I am accused of
projecting my own desires, intentions, and activities onto the ferrets. However, if I see an animal acting in much the same way I
would in a similar situation, why shouldn't I, at least as a first step,
assume that it is acting with similar desires and motivations? After
all, the ferret, the pack rat, and me are all children of nature. We
have all evolved on this earth; why should we be assumed to be so
alien to one another?
Here is one more example from our domestic animals. Robby
is a dog who belongs to friends Jonathan and Barbara. He has a
basket of stuffed animals and when his people are away he makes
careful arrangements of them on the living room floor. A typical
one has four evenly spaced animals in a straight line, with one off
center (Fig. 4a). A slightly more complex arrangement has two of
the same animals, in different colors, together. There are two animals, evenly spaced on either side of these two and then down from
the ends, another animal on each side with different, but still even,
spacing (Fig. 4b).
Fig. 4a
Robby’s animals, simple
Fig. 4b
Robby’s animals, complex
Also typical of Robby’s work: the stuffed frog is in every arrange-
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | WIENER
67
ment. This is definitely not the work of an animal just throwing
things around because he is mad that his people are away.
A few years ago on YouTube there was a doberman who made
similar stuffed animal arrangements, though he went in more for
circular patterns. Let me take a moment to recommend YouTube
as a valuable source of information about animal behavior. Now
that most people have small video cameras or cell phones with
them all the time, an amazing variety of animal behavior has been
recorded and put online. Behaviors that I would have been called
crazy for reporting ten years ago are now accessible to everyone.
And everyone can judge for themself.
These collecting and decorating behaviors show us a range of
possibilities in nature. They are essential to the reproductive biology of the bower birds and certainly serve a utilitarian function for
them. For pack rats and ferrets these activities are typical of the
species, but do not serve any essential functions that we know of.
Robby the dog’s activities are not at all typical of the species, but
such behavior pops up now and then among dogs. I have read of
other cases in which one or a few animals engage in these kinds of
activities, though, again, they are not typical of the species. There
were a group of pigs7 who made arrangements out of shingles and
dirt and even a wolverine who made arrangements of sticks in a
chain link fence, left them up for a few days, and then made a new
arrangement.8
I suggest that the musical, collecting, and decorating activities I
have been chronicling are not always specifically evolved to serve
mating rituals or other survival needs, but may be part of a much
broader expressiveness in the natural world that can be turned to
utilitarian functions, but need not be.
When we look at invertebrates, it is a little harder to judge what
they intend, because they are not so closely related to us. Let’s look
at a few examples that might count as art for art’s sake. The decorator urchin collects various materials from the ocean floor and
7. Noel Perrin, Second Person Rural (Boston: David R. Godine, 1980).
8. Douglas Chadwick, The Wolverine Way (Ventura, California: Patagonia
Books; 2010).
9. http://www.flickr.com/photos/benjaminbull/2844381114
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puts them on top of its spines. I have read that this is for camouflage, but the photos that I have seen do not support this; they are
all highly visible.9
Harvester ants are common in the Southwestern United States.
Their nests are covered with small stones and are famous as collecting sites for various materials that people want. Some are covered
in crystals and sparkle in the sun. People know they are the place to
go to find turquoise and beads. Paleontologists find small fossils
from rodents on their nests, and scientists studying radioactive minerals go to their nests to find trinitite, the mineral formed from the
first atomic bomb test at the Trinity site in New Mexico.10
Garden spiders, also called writing spiders, build orb webs and
decorate them with zig zag patterns that are different for each
species.11 Henri Fabre, the great French entomologist, called these
their “signature.” I had, until recently, not read any plausible accounts of their function. It turns out, however, that the silk in the
“signature” is different from the web silk. It reflects ultraviolet
light and may function to attract insects into the web.
This is still untested, but does seem plausible. Even so, a further
question is why the web is decorated in just this way. Why do such
decorations seem more than is needed to fulfill the functions they
serve? This is one of the main questions that David Rothenberg,
the man who wrote Why Birds Sing, pursues in a more recent book
called Survival of the Beautiful.12
Usually when we think about animals and art, we are not thinking
about the arrangement of a pack rat’s nest or the beads on a harvester ant’s nest. We are thinking, rather, that animals are beautiful.
Humans have long appropriated bird feathers and animal skins for
our own adornment. I am an entomologist, and so I look at insects
a lot. Consider this beetle (Fig. 5)—the highly ornamented form of
the legs, the shape and texture of the thorax, the colors and patterns
on the wing covers. It is a fantastic animal and only has to be put
on a background and photographed to be easily seen as art. This is
10. http://www.flickr.com/photos/mouser-nerdbot/5334689193
11. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Argiope_aurantia_web.jpg
12. David Rothenberg, Survival of the Beautiful: Art, Science, and Evolution (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2011).
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69
Fig. 5
“Coleoptera” by Jo Whaley
one of the ideas behind a book, The Theater of Insects,13 that I collaborated on with photographer Jo Whaley.
Other insect colors are understood as serving important protective functions. The great purple hairstreak, a butterfly I see in New
Mexico, has prominent white polka dots set in a black background
on its head and thorax, a bright orange abdomen, and iridescent
scales on its wings.14 The top of the wings are a beautiful irridescent purple. The bold black, white, and orange colors are referred
to as warning coloration. Insects that are poisonous such as the
black and orange monarch butterfly, or dangerous like the yellowand-black-striped wasps and bees, have these kinds of color patterns. The theory is that predators such as birds learn to avoid these
patterns and so the animals are protected. Also, insects that are neither poisonous nor dangerous may evolve these patterns to fool
predators into refusing to eat them.
The peacock spiders, a group of jumping spiders, have wonderful bright color patterns, and special flag-like structures on their
second pair of legs.15 They do elaborate courtship dances for the
females. This again seems like a classic example of sexual selection in that the colors, patterns, ornaments, and dancing serve an
13. Jo Whaley, Deborah Klochko, and Linda Wiener, The Theater of Insects (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2008).
14. http://www.jeffpippen.com/butterflies/greatpurplehairstreak.htm
15. http://amazinglist.net/2013/02/the-peacock-spider-maratus-volans
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essential function in attaining a mate.
Consider, however, the radiolarians. They are one-celled animals
that live in the ocean. They are an old lineage, existing for over
600 million years. They have an amazing variety of forms, ornaments, and textures that serve no known functions.16 It seems that
as soon as there were animals, even just single-celled ones, there
was already a tendency toward elaboration. Again, I suggest that
such elaboration may be part of a basic expressive function of nature. Such appearances are not necessarily evolved to serve particular survival or reproductive functions.
Hold that thought. Now I am going to turn to the debate I mentioned earlier. Abbott Thayer was a well known portrait painter in
New England at the turn of the twentieth century. He was famous
for portraits of women with angel’s wings. He was also famous for
his theory of animal coloration. With his son Gerald, he published
a book in 1909 called Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom.17 I came across this book quite by accident about eight years
ago and was enthralled by it. Contrary to the theory of his day, and
also contrary to the theory of our day, the Thayers thought that all
animal colors were concealing.
The frontispiece of the book, a painting, shows a male peacock
with his colorful tail concealed in the colorful leaves on the forest
floor and his beautiful blue neck concealed against the sky (Fig. 6).
This vantage would be from the point of view of a ground predator
such as a fox.
More plausible, perhaps, is his photographic plate of a grouse
showing it concealed in its forest environment (Fig. 7).
Almost everyone would agree that grouse are well concealed in
the forests in which they live. But, Thayer goes further. He tells us
that if you want to know what a forest looks like, you should not go
around looking at forests because they will confuse you with their
idiosyncracies. You should look at animals such as the grouse who
must be concealed wherever they are in the forest. Thayer writes:
16. http://incrediblebeings.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/radiolarians-10species-2.jpg
17. Gerald Thayer and Abbott Thayer, Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom (New York: MacMillan, 1909).
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | WIENER
71
Fig. 6
Thayer plate of a grouse
concealed in the forest
Fig. 7
Thayer plate of a grouse
concealed in the woods
They are, in the best sense of the word, triumphs of art;
and in a sense they are absolute, as human art can never
be . . . There he will find it in epitome, painted and perfected by nature herself. Color and pattern, line and shading, all are true beyond the power of man to imitate, or
even fully to discern.18
It was this insight that led Thayer to become the father of military camouflage. He went around trying to get the U. S. military
18. Thayer, 240.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
to adopt the idea. He failed, though the French military took him
up on it. Now, of course, military camouflage is well established
everywhere.
Under the influence of this book, I was failing to see animals
everywhere. Driving in the high plains along Route 285 in New
Mexico in the early spring, I would think of Thayer’s claim that
antelope are marked so as to be concealed on the patchy background of snow and bare soil.19 I would be thinking that there were
hundreds of antelope out there, but that I could not see any of them.
The problem with this construal is that in fact you can see them,
especially if you are looking for them.
One person who read Thayer’s book and was incensed by it was
Theodore Roosevelt. In fact, he was so incensed that he published
a 120-page rebuttal in the Bulletin of the American Museum of
Natural History.20 Roosevelt writes: “It is impossible to go over
page by page the really countless erroneous statements, wild
guesses, and absurd interpretations of fact which the book contains.” He cuts the Thayers some slack because of their artistic temperaments, but finds their lack of knowledge inexcusable. As you
may know, Roosevelt was famous as a big game hunter and could
easily take the point of view of a predator. He was also an excellent
naturalist and knew the names and habits of all the small birds and
mammals that lived around him. Going back to the frontispiece,
Roosevelt points out that if the peacock is indeed concealed in the
forest environment, then the peahen—which is very differently colored—must be conspicuous in that environment.
Here is a summary of some of his main objections: First, Roosevelt says that it is our eyes, and not the colors of the animals,
that determine whether we will see them. He tells us that his native
guides in Africa could often see animals he failed to pick out. Further, cover is more important in concealing animals than their colors, motion is also more important than colors, and besides, most
predators hunt by scent and do not use their eyes until they are very
19. http://kenarcherphotos.com/p953706307/h1BF0CD15#h1bf0cd15
20. Theodore Roosevelt, "Revealing and Concealing Coloration in Birds
and Mammals,” Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 30
(1911):119-239.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | WIENER
73
close—and by then they already know the animal is there. All these
objections have merit. In fact, Roosevelt almost, not quite, but almost, claims that all animals are conspicuously colored, the opposite of the Thayers’ claim.
Before going on I want to relate an incident that happened while
I was still very much under the influence of Thayer’s book. I was
watching mallard ducks on a pond at sunset with my daughter. The
speckled brown females were difficult to see wherever they were—
on the bank, in a tree, or in the water. The males, which Thayer
claims are concealingly colored in the pond environment, were
very easy to see.21 We were watching a particular male swim across
the pond, and at one point it suddenly and completely disappeared.
That is, its white back matched the sparkly white water of the pond
at sunset, its brown breast matched the reflection of a tree trunk in
the water, and its green head matched the reflection of foliage in
the water. It was so startling that I actually jumped. Then, a halfsecond or a second later, it swam out of that position and again
could be easily seen.
So, Thayer is only a little bit right when he claims that male mallards are concealed in their pond environment. For the most part
they are not. However, a kind of secret was revealed through this
experience. They seem somehow born of their environment. It was
as if someone had taken a piece out of a jigsaw puzzle of a pond
at sunset and turned it into a male mallard duck.
One more important participant in this debate on animal coloration was John Burroughs, a naturalist and writer from New York
state. He published an essay in 1908 entitled “Gay Plumes and
Dull.”22 In it he takes up the topic of concealing coloration. He has
his own set of objections to the theory. He points out that if concealing coloration were so important to animal survival, you would
expect all animals in a given environment to be the same color, yet
we see that they are not. Also, we would expect concealingly colored animals such as grouse to be more abundant than brightly col21. http://www.flickr.com/photos/mclap/4366013629
22. John Burroughs, “Gay Plumes and Dull,” in Leaf and Tendril (New
York: Houghton Mifflin, 1908).
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
ored animals such as male cardinals and pheasants, and we would
expect the females of these last two species to be more abundant
than the males. Yet, this is not what we see. From experience I can
say that this is also the case with insects. Species with concealing
colors are not more numerous as a rule than brightly colored ones.
Burroughs writes:
Whatever truth there may be in this theory of protective
coloration, one has only to look about him to discover
that it is a matter which Nature does not have very much
at heart. She plays fast and loose with it on every hand.
Now she seems to set great store by it, the next moment
she discards it entirely.23
Burroughs accounts for the colors of the antelope and other animals like this:
Things in nature blend and harmonize. One thing
matches with another. . . . Arctic life will blend more or
less with Arctic snows, tree animals will show greater
variety in tint and form, plains animals will be dull of
hue like the plains . . . through the law of natural assimilation, like begetting like, variety breeding variety.24
He reaches for a “law of natural assimilation” to explain this,
and also reaches for another natural law to explain differences in
coloration between males and females of the same species:
His gay plumes are the badge of his masculinity . . . the
riot and overflow of the male sexual principle.25
Females being generally more dull in hue partake in a more passive female principle of nature. Burroughs still feels that the appearances have not been fully accounted for. He goes further,
speculating that:
It is like the caprice of fashion . . . exaggerated plumes,
fantastic colors, and monstrous beaks of many birds in
both hemispheres have as little apparent utility, and seem
23. Burroughs, Leaf and Tendril, 61.
24. Ibid., 80.
25. Ibid., 95.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | WIENER
75
to be quite as much the result of caprice, as are any of
the extreme fashions in dress among human beings.26
Even in the animal world, there is fashion. One man who takes
up this theme, decades later, is Roger Caillois, a French philosopher who published a book in 1964 entitled The Mask of Medusa.27
Caillois was especially interested in the phenomenon of mimicry
in the insect world. The dead leaf butterfly is a good exarnple.28
The undersides of the wings are a perfect mimic of a dead leaf,
complete with leaf veins, fungal spots, and a broken stem. If this
butterfly was immobile in leaves on a forest floor, you would never
see it. However, it is not uncommon to see these insects outside of
the environment where they would be concealed, as if they are,
perhaps, showing off.
Another spectacular mimetic caterpillar is Hemeroplanes triptolemus, found in Central America.29 It looks like a regular caterpillar when it is feeding on a branch, however in the last stage
before it pupates, if disturbed, it turns upside down and comes at
you looking for all the world like a tree viper, though the “eyes”
are not real and cannot see. The theory is that birds or other predators think they are in the presence of an animal that is dangerous to
them and are frightened away, instead of eating the caterpillar. It is
thought that any caterpillar that deviates from the perfect mimetic
form will be spotted and eaten by predators until, eventually, the
most perfect mimics are “created” by this selective predation.
Many butterflies and moths are known as snake mimics. The
spicebush swallowtail, native to the United States, is one such
caterpillar.30 To me, this caterpillar looks more like a friendly
stuffed toy snake than a dangerous enemy. We need to wonder why
it is that the first mimic is so perfect if this second one is an effective deterrent of predation. Adults may also be identified as snake
26. Ibid., 90.
27. Roger Caillois, The Mask of Medusa, tr. George Ordish (New York:
C. N. Potter, 1964).
28. http://beastlyvirtues.blogspot.com/2013/03/fuxianhuia-who.html
29. http://madasamarinebiologist.com/post/16015203836/snake-mimiccatepillar
30. http://www.pinterest.com/pin/459859811920520201/
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
mimics. Philip Howse, of Southampton University in England
claims that the wing of the atlas moth is a cobra mimic.30 Look at
a whole atlas moth.31 Again, we are led to wonder why, if birds are
such astute and perceptive predators, they don’t know that cobras
are five feet long and live in the rice paddies, not five inches long
and hanging in the air.
Caillois notes this “aimless delirium of perfection in nature,”
and proposes that mimicry is an autonomous force in the world of
biology that does not require utilitarian explanations. He goes further and also invokes, like Burroughs, a principle of fashion, connecting it with the phenomenon of mimicry:
But in the case of man, fashion is also a phenomenon of
mimicry, of an obscure contagion of fascination with a
model which is imitated for no real reason.32
The plant hoppers are a group of sap-sucking insects that live
on trees and shrubs. They have an astounding variety of forms.33
They may resemble wasps as one of the photos on the foregoing
site sort of does. You can see the black and white stripes, the narrow “wasp waist,” and a variety of pointed projections that may
deter a predator. Notice that the real body is underneath the wings.
The whole “wasp” is a projection of the prothoracic segment. It is
as if the plant hopper is wearing a mask or a costume. If we look
at other plant hoppers, we will be impressed that many do not seem
to be mimics at all. Their colors, shapes, and ornaments seem more
like the work of a playful, creative imagination.
So far, I have been referring to art as something like “the beautiful.” Now we are seeing, in the natural world, a different category
of art, that of mask and costume, a category that has a wide variety
of functions in the human world. Caillois was especially interested
in an insect called the lantern bug (Fig. 8). They are related to the
30. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/8082739/Butterflies-andmoths-mimic-snakes-and-foxes-to-fool-predators-claims-researcher.html
31. http://butterflycircle.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-atlas-moth-chroniclesepisode-1.html
32. Caillois, The Mask of Medusa, 41.
33. http://femtasia.blogspot.com/2010/11/membracidae.html
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | WIENER
77
Fig. 8
Lantern Bug34
tree hoppers and also live by sucking sap from trees. It is a Swiss
army knife of a bug; the forewings mimic dead leaves, when they
are lifted up there are two prominent eye spots. These are generally
interpreted as looking like vertebrate eyes so that a potential predator, thinking it is in the presence of a larger predator that could be
a danger to it, will be frightened away. Best of all, it has a large alligator mask above its real head. You can see the eyes, the nostrils,
and the row of teeth. Again, we must question. Don’t the predators
know that alligators are 6 feet long and live in the river, rather than
an inch or so long and in a tree?
Caillois compares the lantern bug to a human shaman. The dead
leaf forewings are its cloak of invisibility which can be suddenly
thrown off to reveal the conscious being who had been hidden. He
writes:
Where there was nothing, there is suddenly horror. The
insect knows how to frighten; what is more it gives rise
34. James Duncan, Introduction to Entomology, Vol. 1 [Vol. 30 of The
Naturalist’s Library, ed. Sir William Jardine] (Edinburgh: W. H. Lizars,
1840), Plate 22.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
to a particular kind of fear, an imaginary terror not corresponding to any real danger . . . working through the
strange and fantastic.35
One further example of this phenomenon is the oleander hawkmoth caterpillar, Daphnis nerii.36 This caterpillar, when viewed
from a certain angle, exhibits creepy glowing eyes that do not look
like those of any animal, but evoke horror. They have the same kind
of effect as eyes painted on a shield or the bow of a ship. This suggests that birds, monkeys and other predators may be susceptible
to a kind of existential dread brought on by these false, staring eyes.
The wide range of such costume- and mask-effects in insects
mirrors the many uses of masks in human communities. There
are masks to disguise, to camoflauge, to frighten, to take on the
look and energies of another kind of creature—there are even
masks just for play. If we go with Caillois’s thought, we can see
that humans are not isolated from the rest of the natural world by
our art, our mythology, our psychology. We belong to the world
and can see aspects of these human features represented in the
behavior, or printed on the actual anatomy, of other animals.
I have been arguing that there is more going on in the world of
biology than natural selection for the purposes of survival and reproduction. Especially today, when most thinking about evolution
is connected with thinking about genes, we confine ourselves to a
narrow range of interpretation of biological phenomena. As a result,
we are continually underestimating the capacities of animals, and
this underestimation takes place before there are any data. We are
always tempted to read the capacities of animals off of their genes
or anatomy and from the theory of natural selection. No matter how
many times this is shown to be wrong-headed, these strategies are
constantly invoked. Truly, it is not possible to know what an animal
is capable of without actually observing its behavior for a long time
under a variety of circumstances.
It is assumed that bees have such tiny brains that they cannot do
symbolic reasoning, but showing that they do somehow does not
35. Caillois, The Mask of Medusa, 104.
36. http://www.flickr.com/photos/77995220@N00/9398097107
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79
challenge the general principle. When we limit beforehand what
we believe is possible, we often cannot see what is right in front
of our eyes, or we fail to reflect about it at all because we have already sorted out the observed appearance or behavior into one of
our preset categories. One thing is warning coloration, another is
sexual selection, another is protective coloration—and we’re done.
Not only do we fail to see, we lose a language that is adequate to
the actual phenomena. We lose a sense of Nature with a capital
“N,” a nature rife with potentiality and surprises, Nature as a principle of motion and change. Only the poets still use this sort of language with a good conscience.
I’ve been using the lens of artistic expression in animals as a
way to explore this issue.
Here at the end, in the coda, I would like to switch to a different
sort of example to illustrate this point. A few years ago there
showed up on YouTube some footage of an elk, named Shooter, at
the Pocatello Zoo in Idaho, saving a marmot from drowning in a
water tank.37 There were two witnesses, a veterinarian and an educator. The whole event took about 15 minutes. The elk was pawing at the water and with his big unwieldy antlers, trying to get his
head in the tank. Finally he lifted out the marmot, put it on the
ground, and gently nudged it with his foot. In a little while the marmot shook itself and ran into its hole. It is wonderful footage.
The odd thing to me was the narrative of the witnesses. Even as
we are watching, they are explaining that elk don’t do this. They
are all about survival. They speculate that it is only because
Shooter lives in a zoo and has his needs met that he can develop
more elaborate behavior. The scientist in me immediately asks how
we know that elk don’t do this. Do we have dozens of examples of
marmots squeaking in distress as they drown in mountain lakes
while elk graze unconcernedly on the shore? We don’t really know
as we only have one example of an elk confronted with this situation. Underlying the narrative is the view that elk behavior is
generic and aimed only toward survival. I suggest that the elk and
37. http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/story?id=8211416
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the marmot, who after all live in the exact same place, know each
other. This may be an act of individual friendship, not calling for
any explanation at all in terms of natural selection.
I hope I have stimulated you to look more carefully and think
more widely when you observe animals. The world of animal appearance and behavior is wide and wonderful. The next step is for
you to go outside and start looking around for yourself.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Troy
Hannah Eagleson
Eris
You cannot even bite into it,
Feel color burst in your mouth,
Taste nectar on your tongue.
Hard gold spinning down the table,
Stopping talk,
Clanging pitchers,
Breaking glasses.
Spilling wine
On immortal gowns.
Setting at war
Beauty, wisdom, power
Unleashing the bronze spear and gleaming chariot,
The arrows’ iron,
Drawing jagged lines.
Eve had at least the momentary taste,
Flavor widening her eyes,
Fruit in her mouth
In exchange for Eden lost.
Troy fell for an apple no one tasted.
�POEMS | EAGLESON
Judgment
Did Priam ever wonder,
Why Paris? Like a filigree circlet,
Looking fine enough, delicately wrought,
But not much use in battle.
Why not Hector, steady and strong,
Brave and to be trusted?
Why not honey-tongued Odysseus on the other side,
Or fierce Agamemnon himself?
Why should Paris be unlucky enough
To stumble near the gods’ celebration,
Fool enough to think he could judge
Among beauty, wisdom, power?
And who would choose beauty?
What good is that,
To managing a kingdom?
Does it build the walls or feed the hungry?
Does it grow the wheat or press the grapes?
Does it strengthen the gates or make the wells run deeper?
Who would have thought that epics begin
Not with the bright spear or bronze helmet,
Not even with the twist of golden hair,
But with the slight prince
Strayed to the wrong table,
Making a fool’s choice?
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Three Poems from Les Fleurs du Mal
by Charles Baudelaire
Translated by Peter Kalkavage
The Swan (to Victor Hugo)
I
Andromache, I think of you! That little stream,
Poor and gloomy mirror where once there shone so bright
The tremendous majesty of your widow’s grief,
That lying Simoïs that grew great through your tears,1
Impregnated at once my fertile memory,
As I made my way across the new Carrousel. 2
Old Paris is no more (the form of one’s hometown
Is quicker to change, alas! than a mortal’s heart);
I see but in my mind that whole camp of makeshift huts,
Those piles of capitals, rough-hewn, and column-shafts,
The grass, the massive blocks turned green by standing pools,
And shining in the panes the scattered bric-a-brac.
There a menagerie at one time was spread out;
There I saw, one morning, under skies cold and clear,
At the hour when Work wakes, when street cleaners push
A menacing storm into the silent air,
A swan that had recently escaped from his cage,
And, scraping the dry pavement with his webby feet,
Was dragging his white plumage on the rugged ground.
Near a waterless ditch, the beast, opening his beak,
1. In the Aeneid (III, 302), Andromache, now a refugee in Epirus, weeps
for Hector near a “false” Simoïs, a river near Troy.
2. The Place du Carrousel, an area near the Louvre, underwent continual
renovation in the 1850s.
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85
Was nervously bathing his wings in the dust,
And said, heart full of his beautiful native lake:
“Water, when will you rain? Lightning, when will you roar?”
I see this ill-starred wretch, a strange and fatal myth,
Toward the heavens sometimes, like Man in Ovid’s poem,3
Toward the heavens ironic and cruelly blue,
On his convulsive neck straining his thirsty head,
As though he were addressing reproaches to God!
II
Paris changes! But nothing in my melancholy
Has budged! New palaces and scaffoldings and blocks,
Old quarters, all turns to allegory for me,
And my precious memories are heavier than rocks.
In front of that Louvre too an image weighs me down:4
I think of my great swan, with his gestures insane,
Like people in exile, ludicrous and sublime,
And gnawed by relentless desire! And then of you,
Andromache, fallen from a great husband’s arms,
Vile beast of the field, under Pyrrhus’s proud hand,
Near a bodiless grave, bent over in a swoon;
Hector’s widow, alas! and Helenus’s wife!5
I think of the negress, all consumptive and thin,
Trudging in the mud, and searching with haggard eye
For the now-absent palms of proud Africa’s land
In the distance behind the immense wall of fog;
3. Metamorphoses I, 84-85: “All other animals look downward; Man,/
Alone, erect, can raise his face toward Heaven.” (Ovid, Metamorphoses,
trans. Rolfe Humphries [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960], 5.)
4. That Louvre, i.e., the Louvre before the reconstruction in 1852 that
eliminated the old streets separating the Louvre from the Palace of the
Tuileries.
5. After the fall of Troy, Andromache and Helenus (Priam’s son) became
the slaves of Achilles’s son, Pyrrhus, who eventually let them marry
(Aeneid III, 321-336).
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Of whoever has lost what will never return—
Ever, ever! Of those who sate themselves with tears
And are suckled by Grief as by a good she-wolf!
Of skin-and-bone orphans withering like flowers!
And so, in the forest that inexiles my mind
An old Memory sounds with full blast of the horn!
I think of the sailors forgotten on an isle,
Of captives, the vanquished! . . . and many others still!
Fogs and Rains
O ends of autumn, winters, springtimes steeped in mud,
Sleepy-headed seasons! I love you and I praise you
For enveloping thus both my heart and my brain
With a vaporous shroud and a vague sort of tomb.
On that vast open plain where the cold storm-wind plays,
Where the weathercock rasps through the long drawn-out nights,
My soul, even better than in spring’s tepid time,
Will proceed to spread wide its great raven-black wings.
Nothing is more sweet to the funereal heart,
And on which for so long winter’s chill has come down,
O seasons drenched in pallor, you queens of our clime,
Than the unchanging look of your deathly-white gloom,
—Lest it be, on a night without moon, two by two,
To put sorrow to sleep on a perilous bed.
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87
The Vampire
You who, like a thrust of the knife,
Entered inside my plaintive heart;
You who, as mighty as a herd
Of demons, came, adorned and mad,
To make your bed and your domain
Of my humiliated mind;
—Obscene one, to whom I am bound
Like the galley slave to his chain,
Like the hard gambler to his game,
Like the wretched sot to his bottle,
Like the carrion to its vermin,
—Accursèd, accursèd be you!
I pleaded with the rapid blade
To win my freedom back by force,
And told the poison, schooled in guile,
To come and aid my coward’s will.
Alas! the poison and the blade
Both held me in disdain and said:
“You’re not worthy to be relieved
From your accursèd servitude,
Fool! —if from that empire of hers
Our efforts would deliver you,
Your kisses would resuscitate
The cadaver of your vampire!”
�POEMS | ZUCKERMAN
The Second Sense
Elliott Zuckerman
Listen: In wind and water,
the second sense
records a message for the sixth
Before our birth
only a patch of reason moved the pulse
Before the germ
of anything like melody,
maternal heartbeat set the meter’s pace
In harmony
the pulse ascends to the unheard. Though sound
is left below, compatible numbers
continue climbing
That’s why the masters of man’s sound
enthralled by breeze and shower
and friendliness of field and leaf
reiterate the triad tirelessly
sustained beyond the call of need or taste
The level field
the rising cliff or tree
are the co-ordinates of the soul
In simple chords sustained
beyond all reason
one master celebrated greenery
striding and hunched, hands clasped behind his back.
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To Save the Ideas
A Review of Daniel Sherman’s Soul, World, and Idea: An
Interpretation of Plato’s Republic and Phaedo. Lanham,
MD: Lexington Books, 2013. viii + 410 pages, $110.
Eva Brann
“To save the phenomena” of heavenly motions by undergirding
them with rational, that is, mathematical, hypotheses—that is said
to be the problem Plato set for astronomers in a passage from the
Republic frequently referenced by Daniel Sherman.1 His own
project is, as I understand it, the inverse one: to save the Platonic
ideas by a new interpretation of the dialogues in the title of his
book. It might be said to be the deeper and more difficult problem
to solve—and just as enticing.
But what, you may think, is the use of an inviting review, when
you blanch at the price? This book, written by an alumnus of St.
John’s (Annapolis, 1963) after a long teaching career and obviously
much study and reflection, should be kept in mind by anyone of us
who has more than a nostalgic interest in the Platonic dialogues; if
you can’t afford it, you might persuade your local library to acquire
it or get it for you on interlibrary loan.
It is surely a book not to be overlooked in any serious study of
the Platonic dialogues, not just the Republic and the Phaedo. But—
in any responsible review there must be “buts,” and I’ll get them
out of the way, the more uninhibitedly to do this huge work justice—its very volume raises some obstacles, thought-provoking
enough to induce the following little prefatory meditation on voluminousness.
There is an aphorism by Callimachus (third century BCE), the
most famous librarian of the great ancient Library at Alexandria:
mega biblion, mega kakon, which our wicked undergraduates at
St. John’s used to translate: “A great book is a great evil.” What he
actually meant is probably: “A long book is a big pain,” since he
1. Republic 528 ff. Simplicius (Commentary 2.43, 46) reports Plato’s
challenge to the astronomers.
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considered long epics to be antiquated. Having, on several occasions, inflicted such pain, I have come to think of book length as
an independently significant factor. For one thing, it is involved
with the distinction between “primary” and “secondary” literature—between a difficult, rebarbative original and its ancillary elucidation. There’s “learning’s crabbed text” and then “there’s the
comment,” as Robert Browning says in “The Grammarian’s Funeral.”
A primary text may be as long as it pleases, say, the roughly
seven hundred pages of the Critique of Pure Reason or the nearly
double that of War and Peace. But a secondary text, a commenting
explication? Well, how can it help but be a good deal longer than
the original? It is, after all, an explication or “unfolding,” an explanation or “planing-out,” an exposition or “setting-out,” an elucidation or “bringing-to-light.” Anything that is smoothed-out will
be larger in bulk than it was in its original implicitness or self-entanglement. However, the length of an exegesis that “leads-out” of
a textual complexity is a very real problem of human temporality.
Even for willing learners, since ars longa, vita brevis, if the artfulness of the text is great and the commentator tries to be adequate
to it, there is the risk of displacing it, because human life is always
short on time. Moreover, while words clarify, wordiness obscures
matters.
To my mind this means that to make up for its preempting bulk,
an interpretation has the obligation to be easier—and so, faster—
to read, and the interpreter has the obligation to accordingly be
willing to accept a loss of subtlety and depth. Although one might
say that a great text is one long aphorism, being too brief for what
it bears, surely the difference between a weighty text and its analysis is not merely that of succinctness and amplitude. In addition,
an interpretation should willingly forego that mysterious penumbra
of connotation and resonance which attends a great book and candidly admit that a great author’s scope is apt to exceed the interpreter’s perspective (not withstanding his—dubious—advantage
of an added historical distance). To say it plainly: secondary writing has a smoothing function; to it shallowness is mandatory. So
much here for one of its qualities; more about its quantity below.
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There is a now often deprecated notion behind the “primary/secondary” distinction which goes beyond that of “original/commentary,” namely, “great/not-so-great.” The one main mark of textual
greatness is just this: exposition-proneness. Whatever spatial
metaphor you may apply to the effort—illuminating the surface,
delving into the depths, unrolling the convolutions—there is always more to be said about it. The exegete may be exhausted; the
book never is. Put another way: A great book will contain many
serendipities but few inadvertencies. (Even Homer nods, but rarely.)
Thus the interpreter’s care is safely invested; there will be returns.
I have slipped from “commentary” to “interpretation” because,
while a commentary might be pretty innocent, hovering around the
factual extrinsicalities of the text, interpretations get inside it and
are fraught with potential culpability. First of these is inadequacy
to the meaning of the text: To interpret well, you have to begin
reading literally, attend to the letter of the text. Any willing student
can be trained to do that. But then it gets complicated, especially
for the Socratic dialogues of Plato. Who among the participants
understands what Socrates is asking and what he himself is saying?
What is Socrates’s intention? Where is Plato? Which words or suppressions bear the meaning of the conversation? In what sayings
or silences is its locus of truth? The effort of cluing this out is very
nearly simultaneous with the exposition of that truth or of its occlusion—here’s a version of that notorious “hermeneutic circle,” that
the parts are known by the whole, but also, inversely, the whole by
its parts.2 Inadequacy, lack of acuteness in construing the text from
both ends, here vitiates the interpretation—but that is not at all the
problem of Sherman’s book, and thus not my problem here.
Second, the pedagogic ineffectiveness of interpretative commentary: I want to frame this aspect of secondary writing as a large
problem, so to speak, that is little regarded—the problem of bulk.
Having myself perpetrated several big books, I suppose I’m qualified. Here’s the problem: In writing of that sort there are levels of
aboutness. At the bottom there is, once again, what the primary
2. The “hermeneutic” or interpretational art is named after the herald-god
Hermes, one of whose offices it was to convey plainly the meaning of
messages.
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book literally says. On top of that (or wherever it’s to be located)
there is the originating writer’s meaning—not that he failed in saying
what he intended, but that he may have reached for a new language
to convey his original notions, or that he may have suppressed complete articulation so as to involve the attentive reader. For most (no
longer all) interpreters, it is an article of hermeneutic faith that there
is such an implicit meaning, that its novel language often needs an
interpreter, that the author’s intention is often not immediately obvious—and that they’re elected to open up the book to others’ view.
So on top of that comes the secondary writer’s own understanding
of the primary text, which any candid commentator will, by that
little margin of modest doubt, know how to distinguish from its
underlying template. And now, to top it off, there is a tertiary level,
huge and growing: the more or less deviationist opinions of all the
fellow interpreters, who each have different perspectives, reconcilable and irreconcilable. And in this perspectival fecundity lies
the proof both of the primary text’s grander scope and of its human
limitations.
Secondary bulk is a real and present danger: smoothing turns
into smothering. Oddly enough, there is a device for the self-neutralization of big secondary books: the Index. For original books,
excerpted reading is a hermeneutic no-no, precisely because of the
hermeneutic circle, because the clue to the whole may lie in any
or all parts. Not so in interpretative commentaries, whose writer
should not be out to piggy-back a masterpiece on the underlying
text, but should help the user to check out names, find definitive
passages, and follow up themes. Indices affirm the secondary
writer’s modesty; a detailed index signifies the writer’s blanket
permission to spot-read, to use the interpretation in thinking about
the text thus served. Primary texts usually aren’t indexed to begin
with. Soul, World, and Idea has an index, but I wish Lexington
Books had invested in a more ample one.
“Careful” unpacking, analysis, reading, is a phrase, the favorite
one in Soul, World, and Idea, of hermeneutic virtue. Here’s the
“but”: it leads to pertinent paraphrases of the text to be interpreted,
together with commenting qualifications, modifications, cautious
retractions—in short, to lengthiness. Add to this the dutiful inclu-
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sion, both in the text and in long footnotes, of tertiary commentary,
in which the work comes to grips with, analyzes, critiques, or accepts a large number of contemporary interpretations by fellow
scholars. Just as the careful reading often yields welcome insights
(of which I’ll give an example a little below), the referencing of
scholarship is often helpful. Instead of just citing names and numbers, Sherman actually reproduces arguments. But it nearly doubles
the book’s length.
I am, as they say, “conflicted” about both of these efforts: the
written record of “careful reading” and the learned absorption of
“scholarship.” Who can doubt the value of carefully thinking
through a worthy text by engaging in extensive internal i-dotting
or the propriety of responsively considering others’ understandings
and making a mental note of their putative mistakes? But, then,
isn’t it the next best step to allow the bulk—not the gist—of our
own thinkings and others’ errors to pass away, unpublished, into
forgetfulness? Treat them as ephemeral, and let them die within
days of their birth (as do those eponymous ephemerids, the
mayflies) and enter forgetfulness, there to become the soil of reflection. Shouldn’t philosophy be resolutely anti-cumulative, ever
at the beginning? Absent a firm settlement of my misgivings about
bulky writings and extensive sourcing, I take refuge in a very practical solution: at least to pay attention to what is near and dear, and
certainly to the works of alumni.
So let me start with a sample of insights Daniel Sherman’s book
offers, combining close reading and responsiveness to scholarship
(p. 165). An interesting issue is “the autonomy of philosophy” seen
in personal terms, namely as the ability of ordinarily thoughtful
human beings to withstand the social order. Pierre Bourdieu, a
French sociologist, surmises that the categories imposed by the
power structure are intractable because they are unconsciously involved in the very struggle to escape them; thus even the not-soconforming characters of the Republic respond to Socrates’s
sedition with responses varying from “metaphysical fury,” through
friendly doubt, to sullen withdrawal. Against this defeatism, Sherman pits his interpretation of Platonic discourse as being very
awarely situated in medias res. Socrates indeed operates, albeit
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quite consciously, in the context of the social setting and its implicit
opinions. He employs dialogic practices to make these explicit and
to ascend, starting from within the social and natural world, to the
alternative realm of Ideas; the ideas are thus both continuous with
and opposed to the given social context, hence in a tension of critique and acceptance with respect to ordinary meanings. One might
say that Sherman saves the autonomy of thinking from circumstance by arguing that it is its very implication in the opinionenvironment of the world which, when brought to awareness,
gives it its rightful claim to independent knowledge. (P. 165.)
I’ve begun with this example, taken from the middle of the book,
because it is typical of Sherman’s saving, composing, middle-ofthe-way responses to exaggeratedly alienating views of Plato’s
project. Now it’s time to give a glimpse of the over-all structure of
the book, chapter by chapter. Keep in mind that this is a dense exposition, consisting of four-hundred meticulously argued pages, so
my summary will be skeletal indeed, and my queries will loom
larger than they would were the detail not suppressed.
The Introduction sets out the interrelation of cognizing soul,
experienced world, and Sherman’s own conception of discourseembedded ideas, in the Republic and the Phaedo. He reviews the
various values accorded by scholars to their dramatic aspect, from
mere embellishment, through an attendant enactment of philosophical life to an inextricable involvement of action and argument.
Jacob Klein3 was an early and vivid proponent of this third view,
and Sherman recalls Klein’s influence on him in the warm appreciation of his Preface. In particular, Klein’s close-to-life reading
of the dialogues is reflected in Sherman’s “most radical and challenging suggestion”: the ideas are not atemporal beings separated
from the world but have a temporal, world-implicated dimension;
consequently the Platonic account of ideal being can the better be
the operative basis of a philosophic life of learning, teaching, talking. Images and image-making—and image-recognition, I would
add—will be crucial in drawing the ideas into human cognition
and moral activity.
3. Jacob Klein (1899-1978) was tutor (1938-69) and dean (1948-58) at
St. John’s College, and teacher until his death.
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Chapter 1. The Interlocutor’s Request analyzes the problems
posed to Socrates in the Republic by Plato’s two brothers, Glaucon and Adeimantus: to show that justice is an inherent good,
hence a source of happiness. Here, I might comment, is a first
occasion for Sherman’s “careful parsing”; he delves deep into
the shallowness of Socrates’s talking partners. I think that approach, a dimension of the whole book, is a little hard on these
young men, as well as the all-but-boys of the Phaedo. After all,
they are there all night in the Republic and all day in the Phaedo,
attentive and eager; they do about as well as would any of us. If
I’d been there I wouldn’t have intruded my every mental reservation either, and, I think, that the same experience of a tacit
critical descant that Plato asks of a reader, Socrates respects in
his companions. We must supply knowing smiles, snickers,
raised eyebrows, furrowed brows, just as in a St. John’s seminar.
I think Socrates is more apt to bring out his present partners’
strengths than to expose their efforts to our cavils—if they’re
young.
To satisfy the brothers’ request Socrates sets up that problemfraught analogy between the offices of the castes of a well-constituted political community and the powers of the parts of the
soul. Sherman’s thorough expository prose obscures a little—a
dramatic hiccup would have helped—the arresting political assumption of this magnifying image, in which the individual psychology is said to be mirrored in the communal “constitution”
(whence the Greek title Politeia, “Polity”): civic justice is understood as the image of psychic adjustment. The consideration
of imaging becomes more urgent.
Chapter 2. Discourse treats of the possibility of realizing a
city so constituted. Recall here that Socrates in fact gives an unambiguous final answer: It makes no difference whether the
ideal city will ever exist or is just a model laid up in heaven; the
point is to practice our inner politics in its image—to use its politeia in turn as a model for constituting our own, individual,
psychic balance (592b). However, Sherman introduces several
levels on which the possibility question may play out. One condition for the existence of the just city is that a philosopher-king
will turn up—and, I would add, before he arrives there must be
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a pre-royal philosopher-founder—a proven unlikelihood, as is
shown by Plato’s misadventures with Syracuse’s tyrant-dynasty,
set out in his Letters. Therefore Sherman now reviews these
royal philosophers’ nature and their education, and in preparation, the underlying characteristics of degrees of cognition and
their objects. Thus the “digression of the central books” (p. 77)
is justified. Some readers may recall that Rousseau saw the center of the Republic in these books. Whatever the title may imply,
he says, it is really a treatise on education (Émile I) and, I might
add, on the constitution of the soul and the beings of the world.
Apparently, Sherman agrees (p. 137). However, he regards the
application of the ontology (the account of Being) and its realization in a program of education as provisional, incomplete.
The Phaedo is a necessary supplement. In any case, for him the
prerequisite imaging of the ideal in discourse looms yet larger.
Chapter 3. The Cave: Education and the Lack of It deals with
the Image of the Cave (the venue of human life) and the Divided Line (the gradation of beings and the ascent of cognition). Sherman takes the cave to be the city and, in clever
accord with the order of the Republic’s earlier books, where
city precedes soul, but in reversal of Books VI-VII, where the
enabling ontological line precedes the consequent civic cave,
manages neatly to insinuate his main thesis, the implication of
the Ideas in the human experience and knowledge of the world.
A bonus is Sherman’s account and critique of Heidegger’s interpretation of the Cave Image as embodying a loss of openness to the direct presence of beings, a receptivity still retained
by the Presocratics. Sherman shows that Heidegger himself actually appeals to the “ungrasped essence,” said to be deformed
by discourse, an appeal that vitiates the purity of his cherished
immediacy. Since Sherman himself supposes that beings come,
so to speak, into Being only in thinking and its speech, he argues that Plato’s image-dynamics more adequately facilitates
the sharing of Ideas between soul and world than does Heidegger’s hope of “unhiddenness.”
Chapter 4. The Divided Line and Dynamic of Ascent gives a
dynamic interpretation of the Divided Line, as an ascent and
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descent, turn and turn-about, of living thinking, whose motor,
so to speak, is imaging: the Divided Line represents the cosmos, both its shifting appearances and its stable beings, as a
top-down cascade of images and a bottom-up effort of imagerecognition.4 Sherman begins with the triple causation attributed to the Idea of the Good, which is off the line, “beyond
Being.” It is a hyper-principle that brings things into being, allows them to flourish, and makes them knowable (as its image,
the sun, causes birth, growth, and visibility). Sherman deals
with a scholarly claim (Annas’s) that the Good is too impersonal and offers no human fulfillment thus: As the source of
the world’s intelligibility it is surely good for human beings. I
would add that the Good was in Plato’s “Unwritten Doctrines”5
named the One; thus it is a principle of unification, hence responsible for all human community, be it the civic union of
politics or the private bond of friendship; that is why it is introduced in the Republic.
There follows a close reading of the Line as a ladder of dialectic
ascent, which cannot be thrown away—“a serious claim” (p. 134)
moving toward Sherman’s interpretation of the Ideas as tied to psychic activity. The problem of images comes ever more front and
center in a critique of one scholar’s (Patterson’s) analytic treatment
of the sort of things the original Forms (Ideas) must be if worldly
things are their images: The Form is what its name says it is, but
not as having the qualities its namesake images possess. This
makes more sense than you’d think (though like all analytic expla4. “Image-recognition,” which is the mode of ascent along the Divided
Line, is Jacob Klein’s rectifying translation of eikasia, often understood
as a mode of guessing, conjecturing (as by Sherman himself, p. 151). Thus
the ability to distinguish between original and copy becomes the basic and
pervasive ontological capacity. Images, the objects recognized by imagerecognition, the central problem of Plato’s Sophist, present a never-ending
enticement to ontological reflection, some of which is being carried on in
issues of this journal: Review of Eva Brann, The World of the Imagination
(1991) by Dennis Sepper, The St. John’s Review 42.1 (1993): 1-19; review
of Dennis Sepper, Understanding Imagination (2013) by Eva Brann in
this issue, 1-16; and now this review of Sherman’s book.
5. Plato’s oral speculations, reported first by Aristotle.
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nations it’s flatly clarifying rather than brightly illuminating): A
Horse-Form is what a horse in truth is, but it’s not for riding. Sherman must object. Whatever this analysis of being a form means, it
implies that forms, ideas, are quite separate in kind from their physical images; he is preparing to bring forward a way of understanding the (moderated) separateness of Ideas from Soul and World
that requires their (ultimate) interdependence. The rest of the chapter concerns the soul’s different cognitive relations to the rising reality of the objects represented by the upright Line.
Chapter 5. Education and the Mind’s Eye attends to
Socrates’s filling in the lack of education in the Cave with the
education for the philosophic rulers. Sherman dwells on the
significance of Socrates’s beginning the program of study with
arithmetic—not the technique of numerical calculation but the
science of the nature of numbers.6 This science, beginning with
the unit, the one that constitutes each of the unit-assemblages
called arithmos, has special powers of philosophical levitation.
The “one” that is the beginning of counting-up, of generating
numbers, is, one might say, the inverted image of the One that
is the principle of the unity of all that is, the Good: the least
constituent mirrors the whole constitution.
From the first study I pass directly—Sherman leaves no such
lacuna—to the final one, dialectic, which dwells on the Ideas:
“Dialectic, then, produces the image of discourse [my italics]
as the song of reason of which the relations of Ideas as a harmony of the whole is the ultimate objective content” (p. 198).
Sherman means this literally: the identity of Ideas is inseparable from the relations among them, and those relations are insubstantial, it would seem. By “insubstantial” I mean that
normally relations emanate from and terminate in beings,
6. He takes his departure from Jacob Klein’s Greek Mathematical
Thought and the Origin of Algebra (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1992). Alumni
of the St. John’s Program will recognize all the elements of Socrates’s
program of learning, but will want to ponder the fact that we begin our
mathematical studies with Euclid’s geometry, with shapes and magnitudes
rather than with numbers and multitudes. I’d like to hear speculations
about, and opinions of, this pedagogic reversal.
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which is why humans have to be somebody to relate to somebody. It’s not that existence as a mere node of relations is unthinkable, but rather that it’s demeaning. However, since the
treatment of the objects of dialectic, the Ideas, is deliberately
inexplicit in the Republic, it is in any case insufficient for a
persuasive theory of ideal being, and that deficiency makes
room for Sherman’s speculation.
Chapters 6-8. The Phaedo’s Arguments for Immortality, The
Problem of Wrong Beginnings, From Logos to Idea—these
chapters bring in the Phaedo’s fuller account of the soul as capable of learning and its more direct treatment of the Ideas as
necessary hypotheses; “image” and “separation” (chorismos)
are the concepts to be further clarified (p. 211).
In Chapter 6, the issue is whether the separation of the soul
from the body that the Phaedo appears to propose, be it as a
means of moral purification or as a condition of immortality,
is to be taken literally or imagistically, whether it is logos or
mythos (p. 221, though as it turns out logoi are also “images”).
Sherman prepares for his denial of this separate existence of
the soul and that of the Forms, whose separation is implicated
in the immortality and thus in the separability of the soul, by
arguing that if the reading of the text is properly dramatic, separation will always appear as “mythical” (p. 256), that is to say,
figurative—and that the naive boys of the Phaedo are not up
to the image-recognition required by Socrates’s myths.
It is a little absurd to balk at a book’s bulk and then to ask
for more. But, by concentrating on the boys’ inept literalism,7
an image-ontology, though projected in Chapter 7, is displaced
by a critique of the interlocutor’s powers of image-recognition
and interpretation. Such an ontology would, I think, give an
account of two aspects of image-being: 1. whence comes the
difference in plenitude of being that distinguishes an original
from its image, that admixture of being and non-being which
7. I keep saying “boys.” Simmias and Cebes are neaniskoi (Phaedo 89a),
adolescents with incipient whiskers or youths with first beards. To me
they seem the age of freshman, boys and men in turn.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
makes an image a mere image to the detriment of its dignity
(as set out in Plato’s Sophist);8 and 2. what is that similarity,
that admixture of sameness and difference, that connects an
image to its original—a far more complex question. It is this
second inquiry that would seem to me pertinent to Sherman’s
central thesis, which will involve a right reading of imagistic
logoi or rational mythoi. Here is how the philosophical problem
of similitude presents itself to me: Can objects from realms that
are conjoined by no exhibitable “isomorphism,” no structural
identity, have an image-relation? How far can the ordinary
word “image” be stretched, salva significatione, with its meaning being saved?
But perhaps before ontology should come phenomenology, an
account of the way imagining works and images appear.9 Sherman
puts to use a long passage from Proust’s Remembrance of Things
Past (p. 236), a practice I like very much because good novelists
are master-phenomenologists—it’s their métier. Marcel is enamored of a black-eyed woman, but every time he re-envisions her
the memory presents her as blue-eyed—as he says, because she
was a blonde. Perhaps, he perversely concludes, if her eyes had
not been so strikingly, intensely black, he would not have been so
particulièrement amoureux with her as blue-eyed. Sherman understands Proust’s passage—due notice being given to its perversity—
to illuminate a kind of “recollection,” here of dredging up those
image-memories from the soul in which the image of an object
brings with it the image of a person, as in the Phaedo a lyre is associated with its owner, a beloved boy. His point is that this boyimage lacks observed detail; it is of a “total person,” and the details
8. Generally the original is distinguished by several primacies: in time,
dimensionality, functionality, reality. Not so in representative art: A
mound of two-dimensional, inedible, unreal apples, painted by Cezanne
from a prior arrangement, is generally regarded with more respect (and
certainly costs more) than a bag of Pink Ladies bought by anyone at the
supermarket. That’s the valuation Socrates wants, on ontological grounds,
to forestall in Republic X.
9. As Sherman comes near saying (p. 388). For if human discourse is
image-making, then its interpretation is image-recognition (p. 391).
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may well be mistaken. But—here’s the difficulty—Marcel is not
making a mistake. He knows, first and last, that the woman is
black-eyed. He is engaging in deliberate perversity: the imaginative potentiation by willful modulation of an observed reality that
is too opaquely positive for a languid sensibility. More simply put:
Marcel rearranges reality on the slight excuse of blondness to make
it his; so adjusted, it furnishes the object of his self-pleasingly
repetitive daydreams (je repensai); you might call it bed-ridden
love.10
I’ve picked on the Proust passage because Sherman infers from
it a solution to the problem of similarity I posed just above:
The picture does not look exactly like its original, but
then neither does the lyre look like the young boy, yet
we bridge this difficulty by our ability to respond to the
image as image. The sense of both “like” and “unlike”
is in fact multiple; it can be both in order of vivacity (picture vs. object) and visual resemblance (lyre-person).
And this is true of relations of the non-visible of “resemblance” and recollection (p. 237).
Sherman concludes that in the lyre-boy passage Plato is stressing
the possibility of such non-similar resemblance (I’ve intentionally
put it as a contradiction in terms), and that is what I want to question: When push comes to shove, how far up the ascent to Being
can image-recognition take you without obscuring the very nature
of the objects, the Ideas, which you want to attain?11
10. Proust’s way with love meets its refutation in a charming movie, It
Happened in Brooklyn, a 1947 film directed by Richard Whorf, starring
Frank Sinatra, Peter Lawford, and Jimmy Durante. The Sinatra character
takes his girl for granted, Lawford’s is really in love with her. Durante
(Brooklyn’s wise man) tests Sinatra: What’s the color of her eyes? He
dithers: perhaps blue? And so with other detail. Lawford knows on the
instant: brown. Q.E.D.: True love is hyper-observant; in fact that’s its
hallmark: acutely observational concentration.
11. Sherman has certainly considered, but apparently without consequence, the notion that for the highest thought, for noesis, the imagelogos might fail (p. 392, n. 1); but perhaps it is fairer to say that because
he gives so much “a wider interpretation” of images and image-making,
he considers the restriction overcome.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
In Chapter 8, From Logos to Idea, Sherman’s thesis is fully developed, once again with the aid of the Phaedo, where on his last
day Socrates himself says more about the Ideas than anywhere
else.12 Socrates recounts his taking refuge in the use of of logoi for
looking at the truth of beings, lest his soul be blinded by sensory
looking. To pursue this way Socrates has recourse to hypothesizing
(literally, “sup-posing”), a way of proceeding by hypotheses,
namely Ideas, such as the Beautiful Itself (Phaedo 100a ff.). Sherman observes helpfully that a Socratic hypothesis is not, as for us,
a theory to be verified by being tested against experience, but the
converse: experience derives such being and intelligibility as it has
through some sort of presence in it of the forms (pp. 294-5).
But to test (worldly) things against the (transcendental) idea
means—and here I am not certain I follow (that is, understand
rightly or, if I do, agree)—to test them against the “idea functioning
as a logos” (ibid.). Moreover, it now turns out that “the hypotheses
as the particular idea expressed as a dianoetic [discursive] logos is
the idea at work,” and that this logos-idea is in fact to be verified,
not to the detriment of the idea but to the logos which may have
applied it wrongly by misclassifying the things of which it meant
to give an account. This human action (praxis) is, then, “a verification of the idea as logos, that is to say, as a hypothesis which is
an image of its idea” (p. 299; I’ve italicized the last clause). But
Socrates has already said that his images are both deficient and not
logoi: “for I don’t at all concede that somebody who looks into beings in accounts [logoi] looks at them in likenesses [images] to a
greater extent than one who does so in actions” (Phaedo 100a)13—
namely, does not look at them at all.
12. Along with his first appearance, as a boy in the Parmenides, so that
they are shown to preoccupy him first and last as problems; the Socratic
Ideas are ever works-in-progress. In the Symposium and the Phaedrus the
vision of the Ideas is imaginatively consummated.
13. I’ve taken this rendering from Plato’s Phaedo, trans., with introduction
and glossary by Eva Brann, Peter Kalkavage, and Eric Salem (Newburyport, MA: Focus, 1998). We thought that “in actions” means something
like “in sensory reality” (p. 14). My own sense, expressed elsewhere, is
that the Phaedo’s blatantly unpersuasive arguments for the immortality of
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The clearest formulation of Sherman’s thesis I found is this:
“The subjective form reflected in a logos must be seen as an image
of the objective Idea: the form is a rational image” (p. 217). The
soul’s ability to make and read “noetic images”14 is its very immortality, and the ideas it images are correspondingly eternal (p.
320). The logos-involved soul, that is, the form-informed soul and
the ideas share an ontology because they are interdependent;
“though something more than concepts, ideas do not have any real
independent existence outside this human dialectical triad of world,
soul and idea” (p. 387). And, as the logos-soul, the soul of the subjective form, is immortal and atemporal in the act of knowing in
which it accepts the eternal idea, so, reciprocally, the objective
ideas are timeless because they are congruent with the soul, not
because of some otherworldly stability (ibid.).
This account, if I have it correct, is certainly circular,15 which is no
argument against it. The most invulnerable philosophical accounts
are circular; they are ontological mirror images of the above-mentioned hermeneutic circle: Grounds “cause” consequences, consequences “confirm” grounds; inquiry requires pre-knowledge,
knowledge comes from inquiry. But in this perfect mutuality of
soul and idea, the outside third, the world (and the Idea of the Good
that makes the world intelligible) have somehow dropped out; how
are worldly things, which ideas were to serve both as causes
(sources of existence) and as reasons (sources of intelligibility),
actually involved in the triad?
the soul are each occasions for Socrates’s formulating the questions he is
leaving behind; he is handing on his forms as works-in-progress, as problems for future philosophy.
14. Sherman apparently identifies “rational” (dianoetic, discursive) and
“noetic” (intellective, directly beheld); they are, however, different segments
on the Divided Line.
15. While circularity—certainly no venial sin in secular argumentation—
is excusable in philosophical discourse, equivocation is, except in deliberate, inspired double-speak (such as Socrates’s “invisible looks,” the
Ideas) not so acceptable. I think some of my difficulties stem from subtle
meaning-shifts in key words such as image, separation, soul, rationality—
shifts away from common usage and also variations of use within the book.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
There is surely much at stake here for those of us who have the
sense that the explication of these matters might be, in all unhyperbolic sobriety, a matter of life and death. The reason is that, if we
believe that philosophical reflection (even if only occasional) makes
life more—and death less—real, this is an ever-present question:
Are there supersensible realms for us but also beyond us, attainable
but not just yet? And Sherman is surely speaking to just that question, but perhaps not altogether clearly.
Chapter 9. Closing the Circle. Now Sherman “closes the circle”
by returning to the Republic, to its last book. On the basis of his
theory of thinking as primarily image-recognition, he defends
Socrates’s condemnation of the imitative arts as practiced primarily
by painters and also poets against various scholarly critiques:
Socrates is not simply against the fine arts and their ways with reality, but he, in fact, has knowledge of a more veracious imagemaking and a more truth-telling myth-making (p. 349). So
Sherman ends by recurring to the inadequacy of the conversation
partners here, especially the vein of reward-seeking he discerns in
Glaucon (which is, in accord with the pervasive human theme of
the Republic, the happiness to be gotten from practicing justice
even incognito). Finally he resumes his own hermeneutic preoccupation by interpreting in his own mode the final myth, the myth
of Er, who returned from the Afterworld: It requires us “to see
through our images to the invisible in this life” (p. 379).16
Although it is not Sherman’s modus scribendi to collect his theses in one place succinctly and crisply as he goes, the Conclusion
does contain some summations, and therefore I may properly park
my three main queries under its title, ready to withdraw them if
I’ve misread the text.
16. That sounds just like our understanding in the Phaedo translation: the
Socratic invitation to practice death in this life (61c ff.) intends us to rise
in thought to the invisible realm here and now (and, of course, now and
then). But we did not mean that the realm of invisibility is somehow subjective, that is, only equivocally objective, psychically objective, so to
speak, or, on the other hand, that human beings come within actual sight
of it—except perhaps Socrates in the several episodes mentioned in the
dialogues, when he seems to be enraptured (e.g., Symposium 175b, 220c).
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1. This three-pronged question eventually arises in reading Platonic texts: Do the thirty-six dialogues form a somewhat organic
corpus, are the dialogues parts of a whole, or is each dialogue its
own dialectic universe, a conversational world of its own? In reading dialogues, we should, I have no doubt, begin with the latter
supposition. But for a global interpretation it seems necessary to
take notice of the ensemble. Sherman leaves the erotic dialogues,
the Symposium and the Phaedrus, out of account, and in these (as
well as in Plato’s Seventh Letter) the ascent to the Ideas is a work
of love, the virtues are practiced to disencumber the soul from the
world, the logos ceases as the soul comes within sight of the Ideas,
and the sojourn with them has an ecstatic element. In fact, in the
Symposium it is said explicitly of the paradigm form, Beauty, that
it is “neither some logos nor some knowledge” (211a).17 So I think
that Sherman’s sort of implication, his dialogical immanence, has
to be balanced, reconciled—whatever—with the other-world separateness of the Ideas as desirable and distinct objects. And, to be
sure, that is practically impossible within the constraints of “careful” dissection, scholarly respectability, and the effort to keep Plato
plausible to contemporaries. For it requires a certain—rightly suspect—suspension of scrupulosity.18
2. I have misgivings about a Socratic (though not so much about
a Platonic) ontology of the soul. To be sure, Socrates is a master
of psychology, of the soul’s phenomenology. But it seems to me
that in the Socratic dialogues, and so in Plato’s view of Socrates,
the human soul hovers outside and around the structure of beings
and Being. As Sherman flips the Socratic sequence of Divided Line
and Cave, to give preeminence to the human context, so he seems
to me to have flipped the Divided Line laterally, so to speak. Reading left to right, the four line segments representing objects of
17. However, the logos—not as thinking but as uttered language—is
imaged, “as in a mirror,” namely, in sounds (Theaetetus 206d).
18. It is a fair question what role the very desire for a beautiful Beyond
plays in making it plausible. One side might well say that such longing
vitiates sober inquiry. The other may counter that, on the contrary, the
desire is itself a testimonial to transcendence, since it is fed by veracious
intimations.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
knowledge come first, on the left side, together with their inherent
kind of knowability. The four corresponding human capacities, including image-recognition, are appended in one sentence (Republic
513d) to the right—an afterthought, as it were. But Sherman gives
them priority. Perhaps the thoughtful soul’s standing among beings
remained a rousing enough problem in the Platonic Academy for
Aristotle to center his own philosophy around its solution, achieved
by setting up the unmovable moving divinity of his cosmos as Nous,
“Thought” or “Intellect,” whose activity is noesis, “intellection,”
the highest power for Socrates. Thus Aristotle made possible an integration of soul and being—and a soul-ontology. For now beings
do not one-sidedly inform the soul, but intellect reciprocally moves
the world into its own being, its fulfillment.
But if it is the case that the soul for Socrates is not within but
about being, then it may be difficult to make it the part-parent of
the Ideas. And even if the soul is a being among beings, I don’t
grasp just how the Ideas can be in their relation to it dependent and
also in themselves independent, in short, how they can be both subjective and objective. I am all for paradoxes; I think our world is
such that they are its most adequate type of speech—provided the
inner nature of the beings that elicit them is first clearly worked
out, so that paradoxical speech is summary speech, language that
collects necessarily disparate insights. That is why I here conclude
with queries rather than with counter-claims—because I’m not sure
how the “both/and” is justified, what mental incongruities I must—
and would willingly—entertain to get the good of the duality.
3. Now comes the more technical crux of these inquiries. Just
how is logos imagistic? Out of the welter of uses for the word
logos, let me choose the two most prominent ones: word (or noun)
and rational discourse (or thoughtful speech). One word names,
intends (how is unknown) numerous instances, distinct in time,
place, or shape (morphe) and yet the same in some respect (or we
would not have a natural inclination to use this logos collectively);
that something “same” in all of them is what a logos picks out and
names; it is Socrates’s form (idea). A word conveys (how is unknown) the idea without being in any normal sense a likeness: I
think it is impossible to detect any image-function in this naming-
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107
logos without stretching the meaning out of all recognition. I shall
say why.
“Rational discourse” consists largely of propositions conveying
meaning. Some of these sentences are descriptive and raise mental
images (how is unknown), and such logoi are indeed image-making
(Plato, Sophist 234c). Others, however, are not descriptive but dialectic or “dianoetic;” they “think through” the thought-structure
of appearances and beings, and such logoi are only forcibly imagistic. To be sure, in the lower reaches, some logical arguments can
indeed sometimes be represented in spatial diagrams19 (how is unknown), because the logic-diagrams image not the proposition but
a mental image, a quasi-spatial corralling of class-members: Visualize “All bulls are bovines” as a herd of cattle, enclosed in a
barbed-wire fence, which includes a round pen just for the uncastrated males; then erase the cattle and retain the spatial schematism.
So, if, going from the second to the third part of the Divided
Line, I recognize by the power of dianoetic (thoughtful) imagerecognition that a geometric sphere is the true, more being-replete
original of a soccer ball (quite a feat, since to ordinary thoughtless
image-recognition the ball is surely more real), it is not because
the logos is an image but because it isn’t; it’s about images; it comprehends them. In other words, insights of image-recognition (eikasia) seem to be expressible in logoi, but they aren’t images.20 I have
a suspicion why that is: The logos has a negative capability: not or
non-, while images have no inherent negativity. They have the
same thoroughgoing positivity as the spatial world. It takes words
to dub any aspect or space, even emptiness, as a not-this or an absence. As I said, with Sherman I like to see the novelists bear me
out: The fatal Marabar Cave, in Forster’s Passage to India (Ch.
XIV), is the venue of negation in words, but in experience it is a
resounding “boum”—for negation has no sensory image as such,
and so propositions that are negated can’t be wordlessly imaged.
19. Such as Euler diagrams.
20. Sherman actually speaks mostly of image-making rather than imagerecognition. But I think the logos penetrates rather than produces images.
The difficulty may be located just here: What, in Sherman’s view, is the
work, what are the processes proper to logos?
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
In sum, I’m not sure whether language intends, symbolizes, or represents,21 but it doesn’t seem to be at all isomorphic with sensible
objects so as to image them. And when it comes to speech about
the Forms, verbal, expressible thinking seems to fail, as Sherman’s
helpful report of scholars’ battles, for example, with self-predication22 amply shows.
****
These queries have been about Sherman’s unquestionably
thought-arousing interpretation of the Republic and the
Phaedo, or rather, about its philosophical consequences; indeed
they are the very proof of its interest. But Sherman also has,
besides the intention of doing the texts justice by reading them
as conversations among differently inclined and diversely responsive human beings, a motive, a hoped-for effect, which his
interpretation is to serve: to let us, with Socrates, “see ourselves as essentially engaging collectively in a discourse that
brings us together rather than drives us apart” (p. 392). And
that aim is beyond querying; what is an open question, one on
whose terms Sherman’s opus focuses the mind, is this: Do we
come closer to the way things are by recourse to the workinghypothesis of Ideas, unattainable in this life but informing the
soul from beyond with expectant desire and responsive logoi?
Or do we do better by means of Sherman’s thesis of a human
rationality so inseparably involved with the Ideas that they are
“not manifest” outside this union, within which they are interpretable “as essentially atemporal experience wholly in this
21. I half suspect that Sherman would answer my difficulty by saying that
he has enlarged the meaning of “image” so as to mean representation, a
way of re-presenting something, of recalling, of standing-for a thing, that
requires no similarity. I think it would still be necessary to show how
logos “represents.” The proper naming of logos’s relation to the things it
is about is, I think, the perplexity of language.
22. For example is the Idea of Justice itself just? The problem is a version
of the question raised in a note above: Is “similarity” reciprocal between
an idea and its copy? I should say that to me philosophy becomes wonderful just when “rational speech” (actually a redundancy: logikos logos)
fails, becomes para-doxical, “counter-credible.”
�ESSAYS & LECTURES |
109
life” (p. 386)—as our experience, it seems, not as unequivocally separate Beings?
Has Daniel Sherman saved the Ideas and if so, are they
Socrates’s Ideas? I leave that question open. But he has surely
done his part to see that the “myth was saved” (Republic, 621b)
and is now before us to consider—just as Er did by not drinking of the River of Forgetting.
�
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Sachs, Joe
Fried, Michael N.
Recco, Gregory
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The St. John’s Review
Volume 55.1 (Fall 2013)
Editor
William Pastille
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
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��Contents
Essays & Lectures
Tocqueville’s Worst Fears Realized? The Political Implications
of Ralph Waldo Emerson’sTranscendental Spiritualism .............1
Bryan-Paul Frost
“At the Very Center of the Plenitude”: Goethe’s Grand Attempt
to Overcome the 18th Century; or, How Freshman Laboratory
Saved Goethe From the General Sickness of his Age ..................40
David Levine
Special Section: Justice
Editor’s Note .....................................................................................70
The Actual Intention of Plato’s Dialogues on
on Justice and Statesmanship .......................................................71
Eva Brann
Reflections on Justice in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s
The Brothers Karamazov..............................................................80
Chester Burke
Peaceniks and Warmongers: The Disunity of Virtue
in Plato’s Statesman......................................................................89
Peter Kalkavage
Raskolnikov’s Redemption ...............................................................99
Nicholas Maistrellis
Justice in Plato’s Statesman ............................................................110
Eric Salem
Reviews
Getting to Know Kierkegaard Better
Book Review of Richard McCombs’s
The Paradoxical Rationality of Søren Kierkegaard. ..............119
James Carey
Plato’s Political Polyphony
Book Review of Plato: Statesman,translated by
Eva Brann, Peter Kalkavage, and Eric Salem. .........................134
Gregory Recco
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
�Tocqueville’s Worst Fears Realized?
The Political Implications of
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s
Transcendental Spiritualism
Bryan-Paul Frost
It’s fitting that James Cameron’s “Avatar” arrived in theaters
at Christmastime. Like the holiday season itself, the science
fiction epic is a crass embodiment of capitalistic excess
wrapped around a deeply felt religious message. It’s at once
the blockbuster to end all blockbusters, and the Gospel According to James.
But not the Christian Gospel. Instead, “Avatar” is
Cameron’s long apologia for pantheism—a faith that
equates God with Nature, and calls humanity into religious
communion with the natural world. . . .
If this narrative sounds familiar, that’s because pantheism
has been Hollywood’s religion of choice for a generation
now. It’s the truth that Kevin Costner discovered when he
went dancing with wolves. It’s the metaphysic woven
through Disney cartoons like “The Lion King” and “Pocahontas.” And it’s the dogma of George Lucas’s Jedi, whose
mystical Force “surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the
galaxy together.”
Hollywood keeps returning to these themes because millions of Americans respond favorably to them. . . . A recent
Pew Forum report on how Americans mix and match theology found that many self-professed Christians hold beliefs
about the “spiritual energy” of trees and mountains that
would fit right in among the indigo-tinged Na’Vi.
As usual, Alexis de Tocqueville saw it coming.
—Ross Douthat, “Heaven and Nature,”
New York Times, December 2009
In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville delivered a blunt
verdict on the increasing popularity, in democratic countries, of pantheism: “Among the different systems with whose aid philosophy
Bryan-Paul Frost is the Elias “Bo” Ackal, Jr./BORSF Endowed Professor of
Political Science and adjunct professor of Philosophy at the University of
Louisiana at Lafayette.
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seeks to explain the universe, pantheism appears to me one of the
most appropriate to seduce the human mind in democratic centuries;
all who remain enamored of the genuine greatness of man should
unite and do combat against it.” For a writer whose moderation and
nonpartisanship are well known, these remarks are a heavy indictment indeed. Why did Tocqueville believe that pantheism is both
so alluring and so debilitating to democratic peoples? And whom
precisely did he blame for the seduction? The second of these questions is easier to answer. Tocqueville singles out the Germans and
the French for introducing pantheism into philosophy and literature, respectively. The editors of one of the most recent translations
of Democracy in America indicate that Tocqueville probably has
in mind philosophers such as Leibnitz, Fichte, and Hegel, on the
one side, and writers such as Alphonse de Lamartine and Edgar
Quinet, on the other side.1
Since Tocqueville found the democratic urge to be particularly
strong in the United States, one is naturally led to wonder whether
there might not be some American authors whose writings exhibit
the same worrisome tendencies. This paper will enlarge on Tocqueville’s critique by studying an American essayist who, probably
unwittingly, revealed in more concrete detail the full extent of Tocqueville’s fears about pantheism: Ralph Waldo Emerson.
At first glance, Emerson seems an unlikely mark for such a
charge. After all, in such inspirational essays as “Self-Reliance,”
he seems to champion “human individuality” and greatness, and
is a severe critic of majority tyranny, intellectual apathy, and the
slavish pursuit of wealth and reputation—all of which Tocqueville
too denounced as unhealthy extremes to which democracy is prone.
On the other hand, Emerson was also a founding member of, and
chief spokesperson for, the American Transcendentalist movement,
and his religious convictions had strong strains of Neoplatonic and
pantheistic spiritualism. Emerson’s transcendentalism had no little
impact on his political and ethical writings: indeed, his unique
brand of spontaneity, intuition, and creativity was based upon an
individual hearkening to the voice of God within him, a God that
permeated all nature and with the aid of whom one sought to act
in conformity with one’s unique calling. Emerson’s thought, it
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turns out, despite its apparent support for individual greatness, rests
on spiritual principles that eventually corrode, and ultimately undermine, both genuine human nobility and healthy democratic
ethics. In what follows, we will attempt to uncover the political
implications and effects of Emerson’s spiritualism—a spiritualism
whose basic tenets, as the preceding epigraph makes clear, are still
very influential today.
Easy Answers, Unmoored Souls:
The Debilitating Effects of Pantheism and Fatalism
Tocqueville’s brief treatment of pantheism (DA 2.1.7, 425–26) occurs as part of his discussion of the “Influence of Democracy on
Intellectual Movement in the United States.” The purpose of this
section is to articulate how the mind of a democratic people is influenced and shaped by democracy itself. This is an especially important topic in relation to democracy; for, as Tocqueville points
out earlier in the book, democrats rely only on their own reason
when judging or evaluating, and not on such factors as age, experience, tradition, class, and so on—precisely because, as egalitarians, they bow to no superior authority (DA 2.1.1, 403–4). One
might say this about the philosophic method of Americans, who
closely follow Cartesian precepts, Tocqueville says, without ever
having read Descartes themselves: in America, Je pense, donc je
suis means “I am the only one who can be relied upon to judge
things which are of concern to me.”
Of course, Tocqueville knows that democrats are not all
equally capable of making wise and informed decisions on their
own, and they will thus turn to sources of authority and intellectual
devices that will not offend their pride or undermine their fundamental belief in equality. In fact, Tocqueville argues, democrats
turn to an anonymous but omnipresent public opinion to supply
convenient answers and ready-made beliefs. He identifies the
source of this behavior in what he calls “the theory of equality applied to intellects”: “The moral empire of the majority is founded
in part on the idea that there is more enlightenment and wisdom in
many men united than in one alone” (DA 1.2.7, 236). Indeed, democrats are particularly susceptible to rely on and trust public opin-
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ion inasmuch as egalitarianism isolates and atomizes individuals
from one another; consequently, to go against public opinion leaves
one feeling small, feeble, and helpless (DA 2.1.2, 408–9). Moreover, Tocqueville explains why democrats have a tendency for general ideas and over-simplifications: these tools make thinking and
judging easier, even if they inevitably compromise accuracy. This
ease in thinking passes for skill, and so, overlooking the sloppiness
introduced by generalities, democratic peoples become prouder of
their intelligence even as they become lazier in their thinking (DA
2.1.3 and 4, 411–16).
Tocqueville notes, however, that there is at least one area in
which dogmatic or fixed opinions and general ideas are salutary
for democratic peoples, namely, in matters of religion. Religion
provides the necessary counterweight to the ill effects of individual
isolation or atomization and love of material pleasure—the twin
dangers to which democrats are most prone. By raising one’s mind
to the heavens, and by inculcating duties to one’s fellows, religion
imposes obligations and responsibilities that are contrary to the desires democrats would likely pursue if left to themselves (DA 2.1.5,
417–19). It is in this context that Tocqueville turns to pantheism,
and in this context it appears to be the culmination of his critique
of democratic thought.
Democrats are attracted to pantheism for two principal reasons.
In the first place, pantheism feeds the democratic prejudice to reject
all traditional sources of authority and rely exclusively on one’s
own reason. As everyone is part of the same, undifferentiated
whole (God included!), no claim to superiority or authority can
hold: human particularity or individuality is obliterated in universal
homogeneity. But it is precisely the elimination of particularity or
individuality that, while being so attractive to democrats, is also
so dangerous. Democrats are further atomized and enfeebled as
everyone is swallowed up in the whole, which encompasses all
Being. As Tocqueville explains: “As conditions become more
equal and each man in particular becomes more like all the others,
weaker and smaller, one gets used to no longer viewing citizens so
as to consider only the people; one forgets individuals so as to think
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only of the species” (DA 2.1.7, 426). We are, quite literally, withdrawn into our own little world, and this leaves democrats all the
more susceptible to the crushing and deadening weight of public
opinion: indeed, public opinion might become ever more despotic
as pantheism takes hold, for there is nothing—not even God Himself—that can stand as a bulwark against its dictates and demands.
To use language Tocqueville will use later in part 2 of the same
Volume (DA 2.2.2, 482: “On Individualism in Democratic Countries”): while democracy fosters the creation of atomized and isolated individuals, pantheism then eliminates the particularity of the
individuals thus created.
In the second place, pantheism appeals to the desire for unity,
general ideas, and single-minded explanations—indeed, it satisfies
this desire as no other religious or philosophic doctrine can. By reducing all Being—God and man, visible and invisible, change and
continuity—into a single whole, which alone is eternal and true
and real, democrats generate remarkably crisp, easy, and pleasing
answers when it comes to those first questions about human existence which trouble the soul (cf. DA 2.1.5, 418). By the same
token, however, this easy solution has deleterious effects on the
(already limited) intellectual capacity of democratic peoples: pantheism “nourishes the haughtiness and flatters the laziness of their
minds” (DA 2.1.7, 426) in the same way as all general ideas do.
But pantheism is more problematic than this. By collapsing the
material and immaterial world into a single whole, pantheism inadvertently collapses, or even eliminates, the tension between the
duties and obligations we owe to others and to heaven, on the one
hand, and the earthly desire for material well-being and pleasure,
on the other hand. Tocqueville is hardly so sanguine as to believe
that this tension could ever be overcome. He cautions religions that
they should neither try to uproot the desire for well-being (the implication is that this desire is generally stronger than the desires
proper to religion) nor try to provoke unnecessary conflicts with
generally accepted public opinions. Nevertheless, by keeping this
tension alive and well, democratic society is able to enjoy the salutary effects of religion and avoid the spiritual degradation to which
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democracy is prone. In sum, pantheism both exacerbates the worst
effects of what Tocqueville describes as “individualism” and undermines the salutary effects of religion on a democratic people.
One peculiar aspect of Tocqueville’s discussion is that it is not
quite clear whether pantheism is a philosophic doctrine or a religious system, or both, or neither. Tocqueville describes pantheism
as both a “doctrine” and a “system,” and in the latter case, he once
indirectly implies that it is a “philosophic system.” He never states,
however, that it is a “religious” doctrine or system. Nonetheless,
Tocqueville also seems to oppose pantheism to philosophy per se,
as when he says that the “Germans introduce [pantheism] into philosophy,” and that “[a]mong the different systems with whose aid
philosophy seeks to explain the universe, pantheism appears to me
one of the most appropriate to seduce the human mind in democratic centuries” (DA 2.1.7, 425–26). Could it be that pantheism is
a sort of secular religion, a sort of middle ground between Christianity and atheism? And if this is true, then would not the growing
strength of pantheism be one indication that a people are moving
away from religion properly speaking? In this respect, it is important to note that Tocqueville concludes the chapter preceding his
discussion of pantheism, “On the Progress of Catholicism in the
United States,” with this prediction:
It is one of the most familiar weaknesses of the human
intellect to want to reconcile contrary principles and to
buy peace at the expense of logic. Therefore there always have been and always will be men who, after having submitted some of their religious beliefs to an
authority, want to spare several others and let their
minds float at random between obedience and freedom.
But I am brought to believe that the number of these
will be smaller in democratic than in other centuries
and that our descendants will tend more and more to
be divided into only two parts, those leaving Christianity entirely and others entering into the bosom of the
Roman Church (DA 2.1.6, 425).
To the extent that pantheism is not a religion—to the extent that pantheism signifies the near absence of true religious conviction—then
a people embracing pantheism will be prone to moral and political
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servitude, as Tocqueville tried to show a bit earlier in the text.
When religion is destroyed in a people, doubt takes
hold of the highest portions of the intellect and half paralyzes all the others. Each becomes accustomed to having only confused and changing notions about matters
that most interest those like him and himself; one defends one’s opinions badly or abandons them, and as
one despairs of being able to resolve by oneself the
greatest problems that human destiny presents, one is
reduced, like a coward, to not thinking about them at
all.
Such a state cannot fail to enervate souls; it slackens
the springs of the will and prepares citizens for servitude.
Not only does it then happen that they allow their
freedom to be taken away, but often they give it over.
When authority in the matter of religion no longer
exists, nor in the matter of politics, men are soon frightened at the aspect of this limitless independence. This
perpetual agitation of all things makes them restive and
fatigues them. As everything is moving in the world of
the intellect, they want at least that all be firm and stable in the material order; and as they are no longer able
to recapture their former beliefs, they give themselves
a master (DA 2.1.5, 418).
Since pantheism appears to loosen religious sentiment, the widespread acceptance of this “doctrine” among a democratic people
might well indicate that they are becoming enervated and susceptible to bondage in the form of political salvation. Thus, although
Tocqueville claims that new religions cannot be easily established
in democratic times (for no one is willing to submit to an “intellectual authority” which is “outside of and above humanity” [DA
2.1.2, 408]), pantheism can be established, precisely because the
source of its belief is not outside of humanity, but within it, and
because it is not really a religion as Tocqueville understands the
term.
We can round off our consideration of Tocqueville’s ideas
about the effects of democracy on the thought of its citizens by
looking briefly at his discussion of the tendencies of democratic
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historians, a topic he said he would discuss at the beginning of the
chapter on pantheism. Democratic historians, he says, are prone to
underestimate or ignore the role of particular causes—that is “great
men”—in the course of history. He finds the root of this tendency
in democracy itself.
When . . . all citizens are independent of one another,
and each of them is weak, one finds none who exert a
very great or above all a very lasting power over the
mass. At first sight, individuals seem absolutely powerless over it, and one would say that society advances
all by itself—by the free and spontaneous concourse of
all the men who compose it (DA 2.1.20, 470).
Historians who adopt this attitude tend to think that history has a
sort of inevitable motion that cannot be regulated by human
agency.
When any trace of the action of individuals on nations
is lost, it often happens that one sees the world moving
without discovering its motor. As it becomes very difficult to perceive and analyze the reasons that, acting
separately on the will of each citizen, in the end produce the movement of the people, one is tempted to believe that this movement is not voluntary and that,
without knowing it, societies obey a superior, dominating force (DA 2.1.20, 471).
Such a force seems nearly impossible to resist, and belief in it leads
first to the conclusion that human freedom is illusory, and then to the
deduction that individuals are not responsible even for their own actions, let alone for the actions of their nation.
Even if one should discover on earth the general fact
that directs the particular wills of all individuals, that
does not save human freedom. A cause vast enough to
be applied to millions of men at once and strong enough
to incline all together in the same direction easily seems
irresistible; after having seen that one yields to it, one is
quite close to believing that one cannot resist it (DA
2.1.20, 471).
If the notion of such an irresistible force were to gain widespread
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currency in the thought of a democratic people, society would simply grind to a halt due to the general belief that no one is strong
enough to take any action that matters, any action that can push
back against the tide of history. The very possibility of human
greatness would fade out, because the freedom that nourishes that
possibility would no longer present itself to the mind.
Historians who live in democratic times, therefore, not
only deny to a few citizens the power to act on the destiny of a people, they also take away from peoples themselves the ability to modify their own fate, and they
subject them either to an inflexible providence or to a
sort of blind fatality. . . .
If this doctrine of fatality, which has so many attractions for those who write history in democratic times,
passed from writers to their readers, thus penetrating the
entire mass of citizens and taking hold of the public
mind, one can foresee that it would soon paralyze the
movement of the new societies (DA 2.1.20, 471–72).
In summary: Tocqueville understood that living in democratic
times could lead to modes of thought that would be highly detrimental, both for the freedom of the individual and for the freedom
of the whole people. In particular, the doctrines of pantheism and
fatalism dispose people to subservience: the first because it enhances individualism and weakens the moral force of religion; the
second because it eliminates the feeling that the individual has any
agency in, or responsibility for, the course taken by events. If Tocqueville is right, then anything that assists the spread of pantheism
and fatalism will present a danger to democratic societies.
Emerson’s Transcendental Spiritualism
In order to understand the political implications of Emerson’s spiritualism, and to see if that understanding leads to precisely the
consequences that Tocqueville feared, it is first necessary to lay
out Emerson’s views on transcendentalism, in particular, and on
Christianity, in general. Our effort here will be focused on showing
that Emerson’s spiritualism is remarkably similar to Tocqueville’s
pantheism.
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Although Emerson is often referred to as one of the principal innovators of American Transcendentalism, in his essay “The Transcendentalist” (1843), he denies that transcendentalism is a new or
original school of thought. In fact, he says, the roots of transcendentalism—which he also calls idealism—are as old as thinking
itself, and it is one of only two modes of thinking.
As thinkers, mankind have ever divided into two sects,
Materialists and Idealists; the first class founding on
experience, the second on consciousness; the first class
beginning to think from the data of the senses, the second class perceive that the senses are not final, and say,
The senses give us representations of things, but what
are the things themselves, they cannot tell. The materialist insists on facts, on history, on the force of circumstances and the animal wants of man; the idealist
on the power of Thought and of Will, on inspiration,
on miracle, on individual culture. These two modes of
thinking are both natural, but the idealist contends that
his way of thinking is in higher nature. He concedes all
that the other affirms, admits the impressions of sense,
admits their coherency, their use and beauty, and then
asks the materialist for his grounds of assurance that
things are as his senses represent them. But I, he says,
affirm facts not affected by the illusions of sense, facts
which are of the same nature as the faculty which reports them, and not liable to doubt; facts which in their
first appearance to us assume a native superiority to
material facts, degrading these into a language by
which the first are to be spoken; facts which it only
needs a retirement from the senses to discern. Every
materialist will be an idealist; but an idealist can never
go backward to be a materialist (RE 81).2
Whereas a materialist (e.g., John Locke) acknowledges the independent existence of an external world accessible through sense
impression and confirmed through experience, a transcendentalist
or idealist (e.g., Immanuel Kant) privileges his own consciousness
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and intuition, arguing that the “external world” is mental or spiritual, and is only apprehended or revealed through an individual,
self-conscious mind. The transcendentalist does not dispute that
objects are perceived by the senses; rather, he questions whether
sense perception is an accurate, complete, and final representation
of the object in itself.
After arguing that the materialist’s confidence in the solidity
of facts and figures is ill founded, Emerson makes the following
comparison:
In the order of thought, the materialist takes his departure from the external world, and esteems a man as one
product of that. The idealist takes his departure from his
consciousness, and reckons the world an appearance.
The materialist respects sensible masses, Society, Government, social art and luxury, every establishment,
every mass, whether majority of numbers, or extent of
space, or amount of objects, every social action. The
idealist has another measure, which is metaphysical,
namely the rank which things themselves take in his
consciousness; not at all the size or appearance. Mind
is the only reality, of which men and all other natures
are better or worse reflectors. Nature, literature, history,
are only subjective phenomena. . . . His thought—that
is the Universe. His experience inclines him to behold
the procession of facts you call the world, as flowing
perpetually outward from an invisible, unsounded centre in himself, centre alike of him and of them, and necessitating him to regard all things as having a
subjective or relative existence, relative to that aforesaid
Unknown Centre of him (RE 82–83).
While Emerson’s transcendentalist appears at first glance to be
wholly sovereign and self-determined, he is also open to influences
or forces from without—albeit influences of a certain sort:
The Transcendentalist adopts the whole connection of
spiritual doctrine. He believes in miracle, in the perpetual openness of the human mind to new influx of light
and power; he believes in inspiration, and in ecstasy. He
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wishes that the spiritual principle should be suffered to
demonstrate itself to the end, in all possible applications
to the state of man, without the admission of anything
unspiritual; that is, anything positive, dogmatic, personal. Thus the spiritual measure of inspiration is the
depth of the thought, and never, who said it? And so he
resists all attempts to palm other rules and measures
onthe spirit than its own (RE 84).
In order to develop a more detailed image of the transcendentalist, we must attempt to concretize Emerson’s elliptical remarks
about “spirituality.” What—or who—is this “Universe” which
“beckons and calls” the transcendentalist from inactivity “to
work,” which issues him the “highest command,” and with which
he seeks some sort of “union” (RE 91 and 95)? Emerson refers to
this deity or highest principle in a variety of ways with no discernable difference in meaning: in the essay “The Over-Soul” (1841)
alone, he uses the terms “Unity,” “Over-Soul,” “the eternal ONE,”
“Highest Law,” “Supreme Mind,” “Maker,” “Divine mind,” “Omniscience,” and “God” quite interchangeably. All of these terms
seem to refer to a transcendent spiritual force that permeates and
animates all existence—both human and non-human nature, organic and inorganic—and that binds and unites everything together
in a pure and sublime oneness or wholeness.
We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles.
Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise
silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and
particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. And this
deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is
all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing
seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one (RE 237).
Every individual is contained within this whole, and although the
ultimate source of both our being and the whole is unknown or hidden, before its power our soul is laid bare and we are revealed for
who we are.
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The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the
present, and the only prophet of that which must be, is
that great nature in which we rest as the earth lies in the
soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity, that Over-Soul,
within which every man’s particular being is contained
and made one with all other; that common heart of
which all sincere conversation is the worship, to which
all right action is submission; that overpowering reality
which confutes our tricks and talents, and constrains
every one to pass for what he is, and to speak from his
character and not from his tongue (RE 237).
13
Our communion with and access to this deity is through our own
soul, which Emerson states is neither an “organ,” nor a “function,”
nor a “faculty”: the soul is the unpossessed and unpossessable
“background of our being” which transcends time and space. If a
man is the “facade of a temple wherein all wisdom and all good
abide,” the soul would be a light shining from within or behind this
facade, illuminating all and giving direction to our will and intellect; and when we allow the soul to “have its way through us,” intellect becomes genius, will virtue, and affection becomes love (RE
238–39).
The perception and disclosure of truth in and through the
soul—“an influx of the Divine mind into our mind”—is what
Emerson calls “revelation.” Although revelation varies in both its
intensity and character—from the transfiguring to the tepid, from
the prophetic to the prosaic—all persons have the capacity to be
so moved, and all persons who are so moved belong to the same
general class of individuals, whether they be a Socrates or a St.
Paul. One reason for this vast resemblance among “prophets” is
that the “nature of these revelations is the same; they are perceptions of the absolute law” (RE 243–44). Unfortunately, the precise
content of this law is not articulated—indeed, it cannot and should
not be articulated. Revelation does not occur through words, nor
does it respond to our questions.
Revelation is the disclosure of the soul. The popular notion of a revelation is that it is a telling of fortunes. In
past oracles of the soul the understanding seeks to find
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answers to sensual questions, and undertakes to tell from
God how long men shall exist, what their hands shall do
and who shall be their company, adding names and dates
and places. But we must pick no locks. We must check
this low curiosity. An answer in words is delusive; it is
really no answer to the questions you ask. . . . Men ask
concerning the immortality of the soul, the employments
of heaven, the state of the sinner, and so forth. They even
dream that Jesus has left replies to precisely these interrogatories. Never a moment did that sublime spirit speak
in their patois. To truth, justice, love, the attributes of the
soul, the idea of immutableness is essentially associated.
Jesus, living in these moral sentiments, heedless of sensual fortunes, heeding only the manifestations of these,
never made the separation of the idea of duration from
the essence of these attributes, nor uttered a syllable concerning the duration of the soul. It was left to his disciples to sever duration from the moral elements, and to
teach the immortality of the soul as a doctrine, and maintain it by evidences. The moment the doctrine of the immortality is separately taught, man is already fallen. . . .
These questions which we lust to ask about the future
are a confession of sin. God has no answer for them.
No answer in words can reply to a question of things
(RE 244–45).
We must apparently rest content with Emerson’s assurances that,
if we “forego all low curiosity” and live in the infinite present of
today, these questions will somehow be answered or resolved
through the silent workings of the soul. The key to existence is an
almost child-like innocence, simplicity, and authenticity, complete
honesty with oneself and with others, utter openness to the OverSoul and consequently all creation through it; being insincere, sophistic, or double in any way indicates disharmony in the soul and
distance from God.
These remarks naturally raise the question as to whether
Emerson’s deity is a caring or providential being. To begin with,
in what sense would one pray to this entity? Certainly, Emerson
does not understand prayer in any ordinary or traditional sense.
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He describes his notion of prayer in “Self-Reliance”:
In what prayers do men allow themselves! That which
they call a holy office is not so much as brave and
manly. Prayer looks abroad and asks for some foreign
addition to come through some foreign virtue, and loses
itself in endless mazes of natural and supernatural, and
mediatorial and miraculous. Prayer that craves a particular commodity, anything less than all good, is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life
from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a
beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works good. But prayer as a means to effect a private end is meanness and theft. It supposes
dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness. As
soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg. He
will then see prayer in all action. The prayer of the
farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer of the
rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are true
prayers heard throughout nature, though for cheap ends
(RE 147–48).
Those who pray or beg to attain some selfish end (material goods
or worldly success) falsely assume a separation between themselves and the divine; those who express regret or recite creeds display an “infirmity” of the will or intellect (RE 148). Properly
speaking, prayer is the act of a healthy, self-reliant individual contemplating or celebrating the existence of God within his soul, and
it can be manifested in the simplest actions.
Nonetheless, Emerson’s deity is more than a transcendent spirit
animating existence, for he also affirms that God the “Maker of all
things and all persons stands behind us and casts his dread omniscience through us over things” (RE 242–43). This supreme creator,
however, is not the God of the Old Testament, but the divine mind
or soul of Plotinus and the Neoplatonists: the world is an emanation
or overflow from the divine mind; all creation is contained within
this whole, and all the variety in nature is encompassed within this
unity (RE 18ff., 118–19, 252ff., 293). Although the divine maker
can apparently choose to inspire specific individuals, and although
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he sent Jesus into the world (albeit not in the sense of his being the
son of God), God does not perform miracles in any ordinary or traditional sense of the word. Christianity’s moral doctrines and not
its miracles are what move Emerson to belief, and the attempt to
convert others through miracles is a spiritual abomination: genuine
conversion comes through genuine instruction, and this is strictly
a matter of free internal acceptance, without any external compulsion whatsoever (RE 67–69, 106–8, 237). The greatest miracle of
all would seem to be the shattering and transfiguring beauty of the
universe as well as the immutable natural laws that govern its operation. At all events, whatever the precise character of this personal and mystic union with the Over-Soul, it seems ecstatic,
ineffable, and utterly compelling; it is much more a matter of the
heart than the intellect; and it does not rely on traditions, institutions, and rituals.
Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act of the
soul. The simplest person who in his integrity worships
God, becomes God; yet for ever and ever the influx of
this better and universal self is new and unsearchable. It
inspires awe and astonishment. How dear, how soothing
to man, arises the idea of God, peopling the lonely place,
effacing the scars of our mistakes and disappointments!
When we have broken our god of tradition and ceased
from our god of rhetoric, then may God fire the heart
with his presence. . . .
Let man then learn the revelation of all nature and all
thought to his heart; this, namely, that the Highest dwells
with him; that the sources of nature are in his own mind,
if the sentiment of duty is there. But if he would know
what the great God speaketh, he must ‘go into his closet
and shut the door,’ as Jesus said. God will not make himself manifest to cowards. He must greatly listen to himself, withdrawing himself from all the accents of other
men’s devotion. Even their prayers are hurtful to him,
until he have made his own (RE 248–49).
Although much more could certainly be said about Emerson’s transcendentalism, it seems clear from this overview that, at least from
Tocqueville’s perspective, Emerson’s “religious” system or doc-
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trine exhibits precisely those characteristics Tocqueville had described about pantheism: the material and immaterial world is encompassed in an undifferentiated unity or whole to which we are
inextricably and inexplicably linked.
Having briefly discussed Emerson’s transcendentalism, let us
now turn to the question of whether it exhibits some of the dangerous characteristics that Tocqueville feared. Does Emerson’s
spiritualism, for example, nourish “the haughtiness” and flatter
“the laziness” of our minds in the same way that all general ideas
do? A strong indication is Emerson’s doubt, in “The Over-Soul,”
about whether everyday language can capture the deity’s essence:
Every man’s words who speaks from that life must
sound vain to those who do not dwell in the same
thought on their own part. I dare not speak for it. My
words do not carry its august sense; they fall short and
cold. Only itself can inspire whom it will, and behold!
their speech shall be lyrical, and sweet, and universal
as the rising of the wind. Yet I desire, even by profane
words, if I may not use sacred, to indicate the heaven
of this deity, and to report what hints I have collected
of the transcendent simplicity and energy of the Highest Law (RE 237–38).
Clearly, Emerson thinks that language, unaided by divine inspiration, cannot convey divine insights. In fact, he suggests in the Harvard Divinity School Address of 1838 that the very attempt to
communicate religion has an inherently corrupting effect. Historical Christianity, for example, has fallen away, he says, from the
true message of Jesus.
Historical Christianity has fallen into the error that corrupts all attempts to communicate religion. As it appears to us, and as it has appeared for ages, it is not the
doctrine of the soul, but an exaggeration of the personal, the positive, the ritual. It has dwelt, it dwells,
with noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus.
The soul knows no persons. It invites every man to expand to the full circle of the universe, and will have no
preferences but those of spontaneous love (RE 68).
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Similarly, in “Self-Reliance” (1841) he also faults “all philosophy”
in its attempt to inquire into the divine source of such entities as
life, being, justice, and the soul.
We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes
us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity. When
we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams. If we
ask whence this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul
that causes, all philosophy is at fault. Its presence or its
absence is all we can affirm. Every man discriminates
between the voluntary acts of his mind, and his involuntary perceptions, and knows that to his involuntary
perceptions a perfect faith is due. He may err in the expression of them, but he knows that these things are so,
like day and night, not to be disputed (RE 141–42).
It would seem that certain subjects are off-limits to philosophical
speculation because to communicate one’s findings profanes the
subject matter and is thus a sacrilege. Ultimately, Emerson’s religious understanding might be ineffable or untranslatable because
it rests on an entirely individual, and therefore inherently subjective, communion or experience. Emerson’s religious system or
doctrine is sweepingly comprehensive, but he relieves us from having to think about its specifics by cutting off all philosophic discussion. Thus Emerson forces his spiritual ideas to be extremely
simple and general.
But it is precisely this generality which, while appealing to
lazy minds, also leaves people without any real answers to those
fundamental questions of human existence that Tocqueville sees
as critical in religious dogma. Without answers to those questions,
democratic intellects expose themselves to all sorts of dangers. Although Emerson claims that questions concerning the immortality
of the soul, providence, and the afterlife are not properly asked of,
or answered by, his deity, Tocqueville has warned us that the democratic soul will become enervated or even paralyzed over time by
seeking answers to all these deep questions, and then become ripe
for political and moral enslavement.
Indeed, one wonders whether Tocqueville would even consider
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Emerson’s spirituality to be a religion at all inasmuch as it refuses
to provide answers about primary questions. At the very least, by
collapsing the tension between the material and immaterial world,
Emerson seems to have undermined what Tocqueville sees as the
salutary effect of religion on a democratic ethos, namely, promoting duties to others and limiting the unbridled pursuit of wealth.
Of course, there is nothing in Emerson’s spiritualism that encourages the opposite tendencies, and Emerson says on more than one
occasion that the mere pursuit of wealth is slavish. Nevertheless,
absent any sort of “divine sanction” or “divine punishment” to
deter those who might be tempted to forego their obligations to
others, one wonders how Emerson’s transcendentalism, over the
long run, could fully support a healthy democratic ethos when
democratic passions run so clearly in the opposite direction.
Unitarian Christianity
This assessment of Emerson’s spiritualism needs some amplification. After all, Emerson was (however briefly) a Unitarian minister,
and therefore his rather “unorthodox” transcendentalism must be
understood in the context of his more “orthodox” Christianity. Certainly any complete account of Emerson’s religiosity must give
due weight to his understanding of Christ and Christianity; but, as
we shall see, even when this is taken into account, it is difficult to
reach conclusions that differ much from our previous assessment.
Let us begin with Emerson’s sermon called “The Lord’s Supper,” delivered on Sunday 9 September 1832, in which Emerson
argues that a close reading of the New Testament indicates Jesus
never intended the Eucharist to become a permanent institutional
ritual of the Church; and even if he did intend it, the ritual is actually harmful to the genuine religious sentiment Jesus intended to
instill (RE 99–109).3 But even aside from these claims, Emerson
finds the most persuasive case against the Eucharist in the aversion
which he has to the symbolism of the bread and the wine, which
he refers to as “the elements”:
Passing other objections, I come to this, that the use of
the elements, however suitable to the people and the
modes of thought in the East, where it originated, is
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foreign and unsuited to affect us. Whatever long usage
and strong association may have done in some individuals to deaden this repulsion, I apprehend that their use
is rather tolerated than loved by any of us. We are not
accustomed to express our thoughts or emotions by
symbolical actions. Most men find the bread and wine
no aid to devotion, and to some it is a painful impediment. To eat bread is one thing; to love the precepts of
Christ and resolve to obey them is quite another.
The statement of this objection leads me to say that
I think this difficulty, wherever it is felt, to be entitled
to the greatest weight. It is alone a sufficient objection
to the ordinance. It is my own objection. This mode of
commemorating Christ is not suitable to me. That is
reason enough why I should abandon it. If I believed
that it was enjoined by Jesus on his disciples, and that
he even contemplated making permanent this mode of
commemoration, every way agreeable to an Eastern
mind, and yet on trial it was disagreeable to my own
feelings, I should not adopt it. I should choose other
ways which, as more effectual upon me, he would approve more. For I choose that my remembrances of him
should be pleasing, affecting, religious. I will love him
as a glorified friend, after the free way of friendship,
and not pay him a stiff sign of respect, as men do those
whom they fear. A passage read from his discourses, a
moving provocation to works like his, any act or meeting which tends to awaken a pure thought, a flow of
love, an original design of virtue, I call a worthy, a true
commemoration (RE 106–7).
Because every religious ritual has the potential to impinge upon
the autonomy and independence of the soul—upon its freedom to
choose the manner and method of worship—no ritual or form can
ever be declared inviolate and sacrosanct.
Freedom is the essence of this faith [i.e., Christianity].
It has for its object simply to make men good and wise.
Its institutions then should be as flexible as the wants
of men. That form out of which the life and suitable-
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ness have departed should be as worthless in its eyes
as the dead leaves that are falling around us (RE 108).
To hold onto outmoded rituals is to betray the very purpose of
Christ’s crucifixion, for Jesus was sent to deliver mankind from
religions in which ritual forms are more important than personal
transformation.
That for which Paul lived and died so gloriously; that
for which Jesus gave himself to be crucified; the end
that animated the thousand martyrs and heroes who
have followed his steps, was to redeem us from a formal
religion, and teach us to seek our well-being in the formation of the soul. The whole world was full of idols
and ordinances. The Jewish was a religion of forms; it
was all body, it had no life, and the Almighty God was
pleased to qualify and send forth a man to teach men
that they must serve him with the heart; that only that
life was religious which was thoroughly good; that sacrifice was smoke, and forms were shadows (RE 108).
In the end, Emerson himself will judge the worthiness of all traditional ceremonies, conventions, and customs—even those that
Jesus might have specifically ordained.
Emerson’s departure from the traditional institutions and doctrines of Christianity is even more pronounced in his Harvard Divinity School Address, in which he identifies two fundamental
errors in the administration of the Christian church. He describes
the first in this way:
It [historical Christianity] has dwelt, it dwells, with
noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus. The
soul knows no persons. It invites every man to expand
to the full circle of the universe, and will have no preferences but those of spontaneous love. But by this eastern monarchy of a Christianity, which indolence and
fear have built, the friend of man is made the injurer of
man. The manner in which his name is surrounded with
expressions which were once sallies of admiration and
love, but are now petrified into official titles, kills all
generous sympathy and liking (RE 68).
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The Church’s obsession with the personality of Jesus distorts and
vulgarizes his teaching by claiming that he was the son of God.
Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He
saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by
its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived
in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history he estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to
what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates
himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take
possession of his World. He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, ‘I am divine. Through me, God acts;
through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or see
thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think.’ But what
a distortion did his doctrine and memory suffer in the
same, in the next, and the following ages! There is no
doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by
the Understanding. The understanding caught this high
chant from the poet’s lips, and said, in the next age,
‘This was Jehovah come down out of heaven. I will kill
you, if you say he was a man.’ The idioms of his language and the figures of his rhetoric have usurped the
place of his truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes (RE 67–68).
The Church fails to understand that Jesus was a prophet not because he was divine, but because he alone saw the divinity of all
men. 4
The second great error of the Church is a consequence of the
first: by regarding Jesus and his message as an historical figure
who established the religion in the far distant past, the living spirit
is extinguished from present worship. By failing to make the soul
in all its glory the foundation of religious instruction, contemporary
preachers (unintentionally, to be sure) smother the joyous temperament in their congregations that characterizes genuine piety. This,
in turn, corrodes the faith of the nation as a whole. Rehearsed rather
than inspired, doctrinaire rather than personal, formal rather than
uplifting, monotone rather than celebratory, “historical Christianity
destroys the power of preaching, by withdrawing it from the ex-
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ploration of the moral nature of man” (RE 73). Emerson offers his
auditors a vivid sampler of the sorts of “moral” subjects whose absence in American churches causes people to think twice about
participating in public worship:
In how many churches, by how many prophets, tell me,
is man made sensible that he is an infinite Soul; that
the earth and heavens are passing into his mind; that he
is drinking forever the soul of God? Where now sounds
the persuasion, that by its very melody imparadises my
heart, and so affirms its own origin in heaven? Where
shall I hear words such as in elder ages drew men to
leave all and follow—father and mother, house and
land, wife and child? Where shall I hear these August
laws of moral being so pronounced as to fill my ear,
and I feel ennobled by the offer of my uttermost action
and passion? The test of the true faith, certainly, should
be its power to charm and command the soul, as the
laws of nature control the activity of the hands—so
commanding that we find pleasure and honor in obeying. The faith should blend with the light of rising and
of setting suns, with the flying cloud, the singing bird,
and the breath of flowers. But now the priest’s Sabbath
has lost the splendor of nature; it is unlovely; we are
glad when it is done (RE 71).
The power and the beauty that Emerson demands from vital religion are missing from most modern Christianity.
What does Emerson recommend to repair this situation?
I confess, all attempts to project and establish a Cultus
with new rites and forms, seem to me vain. Faith
makes us, and not we it, and faith makes its own
forms. All attempts to contrive a system are as cold
as the new worship introduced by the French to the
goddess of Reason—to-day, pasteboard and filigree,
and ending to-morrow in madness and murder. Rather
let the breath of new life be breathed by you through
the forms already existing. For if once you are alive,
you shall find they shall become plastic and new. The
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remedy to their deformity is first, soul, and second,
soul, and evermore, soul (RE 77–78).
Emerson thus does not advocate the creation of “new rites and
forms” but the spiritual reinvigoration of those forms already at
hand. As for the current generation of preachers, they must stride
forward in a spirit of fierce independence from all traditional authority, maintain the most rigid personal integrity and virtue, and
be open to the sublime wonder and limitless potential in man—
which is the true gospel of Christ, and is as alive today as ever (RE
75–78). Emerson’s views were so unorthodox that many of the faculty members at Harvard publicly denounced the speech. He was
not invited back to speak at his alma mater for some thirty years.
Two features of Emerson’s heterodox Unitarianism are particularly significant in the context of the questions we are pursuing.
First, his absolute reliance on his own judgment exemplifies the
practice he recommends to everyone: the individual alone is the
sole judge in matters of religious doctrine and form. What the individual determines to be satisfactory is necessarily so, and that
judgment is sufficient in itself. Second, Jesus’s fundamental message, according to Emerson, fully supports transcendentalism (and,
we maintain, pantheism): we are to find and worship the god within
all of us.
What sort of religious reform could proceed from Emerson’s
appeals? He may have wanted spiritual revival within the Church,
but achieving that revival on his terms would require the rejection
of so many aspects of traditional, orthodox Christianity that one
wonders just what sort of “church” would remain. All things considered, Emerson’s iconoclastic Unitarian Christianity imparts a
unique flavor to his pantheistic spiritualism, but since it remains
pantheism at bottom, it still promotes the dangerous effects that
Tocqueville feared.
The Individual as Supreme Lawgiver
The foregoing discussion has concentrated on the first aspect of
the Tocquevillian critique of Emerson’s spiritualism—how its generality and simplicity flatters the democratic intellect. We must
now ask about the second aspect: What effect does Emerson’s spir-
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itualism have on individuality and the capacity of individuals to
remain free? We approach this question by examining Emerson’s
teaching about the source of individual actions and judgments—
especially moral and ethical judgments.
Throughout his writings, Emerson insists that the transcendentalist is a self-legislating individual: there is no law or commandment that is unconditionally binding upon him. And there is no
institution—no government, no church, no society—that is worthy
of his respect and allegiance unless, as is said in “The Transcendentalist,” it “reiterates the law of his mind” (RE 83). The transcendentalist’s conduct is not governed by deliberation or experience,
but by intuition, spontaneity, and trusting one’s instincts—even, it
seems, when one can give no rational account of them. Only spontaneous action—which is receptive to and motivated by the
prompting of the divine voice within—is genuinely obedient to
God. By becoming the channel through which the divine makes itself manifest, we shed all gross vanity and pretension while simultaneously solidifying and strengthening our own character.
A little consideration of what takes place around us
every day would show us that a higher law than that of
our will regulates events; that our painful labors are unnecessary and fruitless; that only in our easy, simple,
spontaneous action are we strong, and by contenting
ourselves with obedience we become divine. Belief and
love—a believing love will relieve us of a vast load of
care. O my brothers, God exists. There is a soul at the
centre of nature and over the will of every man, so that
none of us can wrong the universe. It has so infused its
strong enchantment into nature that we prosper when
we accept its advice, and when we struggle to wound
its creatures our hands are glued to our sides, or they
beat our own breasts. The whole course of things goes
to teach us faith. We need only obey. There is guidance
for each of us, and by lowly listening we shall hear the
right word. Why need you choose so painfully your
place and occupation and associates and modes of action and of entertainment? Certainly there is a possible
right for you that precludes the need of balance and
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wilful election. For you there is a reality, a fit place and
congenial duties. Place yourself in the middle of the
stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom
it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth,
to right and a perfect contentment. Then you put all
gainsayers in the wrong. Then you are the world, the
measure of right, of truth, of beauty (RE 176).
By keeping our soul open to the ebb and flow of the Over-Soul,
we will be made privy to the truth; we will become genuinely
moral by attentively listening to the poetry of our own heart, which
is itself a reflection of the poetry of the universe and its animating
spirit. Emerson replaces the ancient injunction “know thyself” with
“trust thyself,” because the latter contains or is the means to the
former (RE 133).
Emerson’s celebration of individual intuition, integrity, and
spontaneity is stated perhaps nowhere more succinctly and powerfully than in his most famous and inspirational essay, “Self-Reliance” (1841). Like Moses, Plato, and Milton, we must learn to
heed the flash of genius when it ignites within us, trusting, almost
child-like, that God has a purpose in our work and that divinity
does not traffic in counterfeit forms. But if God urges us to listen
to our heart, society does not, and the more we become accustomed
to the ways of the world, the more our native light of genius grows
dim (RE 132–34). Two problems arise from this tension between
God and society: conformity and consistency. Regarding conformity, he considers it nearly impossible to resist:
[T]he discontent of the multitude [is] more formidable
than that of the senate and the college. It is easy enough
for a firm man who knows the world to brook the rage
of the cultivated classes. Their rage is decorous and prudent, for they are timid, as being very vulnerable themselves. But when to their feminine rage the indignation
of the people is added, when the ignorant and the poor
are aroused, when the unintelligent brute force that lies
at the bottom of society is made to growl and mow, it
needs the habit of magnanimity and religion to treat it
godlike as a trifle of no concernment (RE 137–38).
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Regarding consistency, Emerson downplays its importance, and
argues that sincerity, over the long run, will exhibit its own logic
and integrity: “Your genuine action will explain itself and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing” (RE 139).
Emerson highlights these two problems because they, more
than anything else, undermine the self-trust necessary to act spontaneously or instinctively. Self-trust is the source of all spontaneous
and ingenious action.
The magnetism which all original action exerts is explained when we inquire the reason of self-trust. Who
is the Trustee? What is the aboriginal Self, on which a
universal reliance may be grounded? . . . The inquiry
leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of
virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct.
We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all
later teachings are tuitions. In that deep force, the last
fact behind which analysis cannot go, all things find
their common origin. For the sense of being which in
calm hours rises, we know not how, in the soul, is not
diverse from things, from space, from light, from time,
from man, but one with them and proceeds obviously
from the same source whence their life and being also
proceed. We first share the life by which things exist
and afterwards see them as appearances in nature and
forget that we have shared their cause. Here is the fountain of action and of thought. Here are the lungs of that
inspiration which giveth man wisdom and which cannot
be denied without impiety and atheism (RE 141–42).
To those who might argue that overstressing individual self-reliance
in this way could well have injurious effects on society’s necessarily
collaborative structures—such as government and the family—and
could delude a person into committing atrocities in the name of “intuition” and “spontaneity,” Emerson’s response in this essay is unaccommodating: So be it.
I remember an answer which when quite young I was
prompted to make to a valued adviser who was wont
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to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the
church. On my saying, “What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within?”
my friend suggested—“But these impulses may be
from below, not from above.” I replied, “They do not
seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil’s child, I
will live then from the Devil.” No law can be sacred to
me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names
very readily transferable to that or this; the only right
is what is after my constitution; the only wrong what
is against it. A man is to carry himself in the presence
of all opposition as if every thing were titular and
ephemeral but he (RE 135).
Emerson holds that we must give expression to the unique incarnation of the divine within us. We must not continue to be the predictable herd animals that we are at present: conformity—not
self-reliance—is the real threat to a vibrant political and civic life.
Indeed, ignoring the divine voice within us, since it is the sacred
source of all life and wisdom, is true atheism and impiety. Self-reliance thus turns out to be God-reliance—if by “God” is meant the
divine voice within as you interpret it (RE 141–45).
It is here, with all probability, that Tocqueville would find the
most dangerous implications of Emerson’s spiritualism: he forthrightly rejects any moral guidance that comes from without and demands that individuals judge for themselves. Of course, it is
precisely this celebration of individual autonomy that causes many
to classify Emerson as a staunch “individualist”—not in Tocqueville’s derogatory sense as applied to someone withdrawn into
himself, but in the complimentary sense of someone who, opposing
mass opinion and fashionable trends, stakes out his own ground.
Emerson is certainly aware, as we have seen, of the force exerted
on the individual by majority opinion. But he does not believe, as
Tocqueville does, that individuals left to be their own moral legislators and lawgivers become atomized and isolated in society, leaving them more susceptible to the tyrannizing and homogenizing
effects of public opinion. To Emerson’s mind, individuals must rely
on themselves rather than on traditional sources of authority if they
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are going to be genuinely moral and have the strength to withstand
mass opinion.
Notwithstanding Emerson’s contagious optimism, one question persists throughout his discussion of the individual as judge
and executor of his own laws: How does one distinguish between
inspiration and madness? Even if we are all part of a greater whole,
what standard can be employed to determine whether someone has
correctly “received” and spontaneously acted upon the moral law?
Why could someone not simply claim that his subjective experience points to an entirely different philosophical system than
Emerson’s? How would Emerson refute such a claim?
In the first place, Emerson suggests that everyone knows the
truth of what he is saying in the depths of his own heart. If we
would be honest with ourselves, if we would return to our better
thoughts and listen intently to the sublime whisperings of the soul,
we would understand as he understands, and act authentically as
he acts authentically.
If you are true, but not in the same truth with me, cleave
to your companions; I will seek my own. I do this not
selfishly but humbly and truly. It is alike your interest,
and mine, and all men’s, however long we have dwelt
in lies, to live in truth. Does this sound harsh to-day?
You will soon love what is dictated by your nature as
well as mine, and if we follow the truth it will bring us
out safe at last.—But so may you give these friends
pain. Yes, but I cannot sell my liberty and my power,
to save their sensibility. Besides, all persons have their
moments of reason, when they look out into the region
of absolute truth; then will they justify me and do the
same thing (RE 146).
In the second place, Emerson refers several times to a moral sense
or sentiment in all men which commands and forbids actions, and
which is rooted in or is coextensive with the Divine Mind. But while
Emerson acknowledges the existence of a conscience, it neither
seems to be in command, nor are its laws capable of articulation. For
Emerson, the moral universe is accessible by all of us subjectively,
but it cannot be formulated into any sort of objective ethical code:
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The sentiment of virtue is a reverence and delight in the
presence of certain divine laws. It perceives that this
homely game of life we play, covers, under what seem
foolish details, principles that astonish. The child amidst
his baubles is learning the action of light, motion, gravity, muscular force; and in the game of human life, love,
fear, justice, appetite, man, and God, interact. These
laws refuse to be adequately stated. They will not be
written out on paper, or spoken by the tongue. They
elude our persevering thought; yet we read them hourly
in each other’s faces, in each other’s actions, in our own
remorse. The moral traits which are all globed into
every virtuous act and thought—in speech we must
sever, and describe or suggest by painful enumeration
of many particulars (RE 64).
And finally, in the third place, Emerson claims that spontaneous
action is so compelling that its example almost compels imitation:
by being law unto oneself, one becomes a universal legislator.
A healthy soul stands united with the Just and the True,
as the magnet arranges itself with the pole, so that he
stands to all beholders like a transparent object betwixt
them and the sun, and whoso journeys towards the sun,
journeys towards that person. He is thus the medium
of the highest influence to all who are not on the same
level. Thus men of character are the conscience of the
society to which they belong (RE 331).
If this is true, however, it is hard to square with Emerson’s insistence on autonomy. How can individuals be true to themselves by
following someone else’s law? If the law were universal, then it
would make sense to follow the example of a virtuous person. But
this contradicts Emerson’s belief in the individual divine voice that
speaks to each person uniquely.
By having us be our own lawgivers, by asserting that “[o]ur
spontaneous action is always the best” (RE 264), is Emerson not
unwittingly advocating indulgence in our worst passions? In the
essay called “Circles,” he tries to defend himself against this
charge:
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And thus, O circular philosopher, I hear some reader
exclaim, you have arrived at a fine Pyrrhonism, at an
equivalence and indifferency of all actions, and would
fain teach us that if we are true, forsooth, our crimes
may be lively stones out of which we shall construct
the temple of the true God!
I am not careful to justify myself. . . . But lest I
should mislead any when I have my own head and
obey my whims, let me remind the reader that I am
only an experimenter. Do not set the least value on
what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if
I pretended to settle any thing as true or false. I unsettle
all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane;
I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at
my back (RE 260).
This very convenient disavowal of setting an example sidesteps
the effect of Emerson’s teaching on others; he does not want to
take responsibility for the behavior that might be unleashed or justified by his doctrine of self-legislation. Not everyone’s spontaneous impulses and private intuitions would lead to the sort of
fortunate and moderate choices that Emerson seems to make.
If we return now to Tocqueville’s democratic man seeking
moral guidance in an egalitarian society, we see that Emerson has
nothing to offer him. The evaporation of human individuality in
the Over-Soul, the directionless invocation to look to one’s own
inner divinity, and the refusal to take responsibility for one’s example in the world all leave democratic man in the lurch. It is no
wonder that he turns to public opinion for moral guidance.
The Ambiguity of Politics
One way to temper the debilitating effects of majority opinion, in
particular, and the spiritual trajectory of the principle of equality,
in general, is through political activity. Over and over again, Tocqueville shows us how civic engagement at the local level can help
to cure the ills to which democracy is prone. In respect to the particular issues of this essay, civic participation and institutions help
to prevent our slide into individualism. We are unable to withdraw
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into our own world of family and friends when we must take part
in various community activities. Civic engagement also tempers
our rage for general ideas: when we are practically engaged, we
see the necessary limitations of such ideas. Emerson, however, in
many ways discourages political activity—and perhaps necessarily
so. The rapturous inner life of the transcendentalist likely makes
all political activity seem paltry and pale.
In “The Transcendentalist,” Emerson observes that these individuals are both solitary and lonely. They are solitary because nothing that society can offer appeals to them: whether it is popular
entertainment or commercial competition, they see most of what
excites society as little more than drudgery and thoroughly degrading in comparison to their talents. They are lonely because the
human fellowship they seek is so acute and fervent that few persons could satisfy or endure the demands of such a relationship:
tolerating neither frivolity nor hypocrisy, they are seen by most
persons as rude, shallow, or simply ridiculous (RE 87–90). But if
Emerson’s transcendentalist is indifferent toward such things as
the accumulation of riches and wealth, so too is he indifferent toward politics in almost all its manifestations. From the great political debates of the day to the building of empires to the prospect
of rule, the transcendentalist finds little in this petty arena to tempt
him from his solitude.
But their solitary and fastidious manners not only withdraw them from the conversation, but from the labors
of the world; they are not good citizens, not good members of society; unwillingly they bear their part of the
public and private burdens; they do not willingly share
in the public charities, in the public religious rites, in
the enterprises of education, of missions foreign and domestic, in the abolition of the slave-trade, or in the temperance society. They do not even like to vote. . . .
What you call your fundamental institutions, your
great and holy causes, seem to them great abuses, and,
when nearly seen, paltry matters (RE 90).
Emerson does not deny that there are great and holy causes—albeit
far fewer than most imagine—but by the time a potentially worth-
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33
while cause reaches the political arena, it has been prepackaged and
predigested for public consumption. Since the transcendentalist attitude is a blanket critique of political life, Emerson rightly concludes
that this outlook will strike society as threatening. The disdainful
aloofness from the world of those who hold such beliefs, together
with their willingness to abjure the public burdens that make community possible, seem like a direct accusation of society; and society
will not remain indifferent, but will retaliate against this challenge to
what it holds dear. But despite the fact that society treats these individuals as outcasts, and despite the fact they seem to perform no useful occupation, Emerson insists that they are the moral touchstones
by which to judge whether “the points of our spiritual compass” are
true. Society therefore has an interest in them and a duty to “behold
them with what charity it can” (RE 95).
To the extent that Emerson hopes to improve American society,
he directs his appeals for moral reform at the individual and not the
group: there is little or no salvation through political activity unless
the individual himself has first been spiritually transformed. In the
essay “New England Reformers” (1844), he points out two problems
in attempting the former before or without the latter. First, all political reforms tend to be partial:
I conceive this gradual casting off of material aids, and
the indication of growing trust in the private self-supplied powers of the individual, to be the affirmative
principle of the recent philosophy, and that it is feeling
its own profound truth and is reaching forward at this
very hour to the happiest conclusions. I readily concede
that in this, as in every period of intellectual activity,
there has been a noise of denial and protest; much was
to be resisted, much was to be got rid of by those who
were reared in the old, before they could begin to affirm and to construct. Many a reformer perishes in his
removal of rubbish; and that makes the offensiveness
of the class. They are partial; they are not equal to the
work they pretend. They lose their way; in the assault
on the kingdom of darkness they expend all their energy on some accidental evil, and lose their sanity and
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power of benefit. It is of little moment that one or two
or twenty errors of our social system be corrected, but
of much that the man be in his senses (RE 406–7).
In another way the right will be vindicated. In the midst
of abuses, in the heart of cities, in the aisles of false
churches, alike in one place and in another—wherever,
namely, a just and heroic soul finds itself, there it will
do what is next at hand, and by the new quality of character it shall put forth it shall abrogate that old condition, law, or school in which it stands, before the law
of its own mind (RE 408).
Emerson here disparages piecemeal efforts at social change as futile or misguided given the enormity of the task. By contrast, “a
just and heroic soul” will be able to abolish the old condition
through the force of his character and actions in the here and now.
Second, reformers overestimate the power of associations or
numbers. Groups are no better or worse than the individuals who
make them up, and unhealthy individuals make unhealthy groups:
indeed, the more united and efficacious a group is politically, the
more it will require its members to compromise their unique individuality, forcing out those of superior talent (RE 407–10).
These new associations are composed of men and
women of superior talents and sentiments; yet it may
easily be questioned whether such a community will
draw, except in its beginnings, the able and the good;
whether those who have energy will not prefer their
chance of superiority and power in the world, to the
humble certainties of the association; whether such a
retreat does not promise to become an asylum to those
who have tried and failed, rather than a field to the
strong; and whether the members will not necessarily
be fractions of men, because each finds that he cannot
enter it without some compromise. Friendship and association are very fine things, and a grand phalanx of
the best of the human race, banded for some catholic
object; yes, excellent; but remember that no society can
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35
ever be so large as one man. He, in his friendship, in
his natural and momentary associations, doubles or
multiplies himself; but in the hour in which he mortgages himself to two or ten or twenty, he dwarfs himself below the stature of one (RE 408–9).
Thus, Emerson’s aim is not political but private, an attempt to
unify our presently disharmonious souls. “The problem of restoring
to the world original and eternal beauty is solved by the redemption
of the soul” (RE 38). “This revolution is to be wrought by the gradual domestication of the idea of Culture. The main enterprise of
the world for splendor, for extent, is the upbuilding of a man” (RE
55–56). How this domestication will occur without radical political
changes (e.g., in the education system [cf. RE 410–11]) is not clear.
In sum, it would seem that Emerson’s rapturous spiritualism casts
a long shadow over politics and political activity: civic engagement
is neither an Aristotelian fulfillment of our nature nor a Tocquevillean means to maintain its health.
A Corrective to Democratic Historians
In conclusion, it is necessary to point out that there is at least one
area where Emerson’s philosophy is in harmony with Tocqueville’s,
namely, in his deep appreciation for the power of great individuals
and individual action. In his essay on Abraham Lincoln and the
Emancipation Proclamation, or in his address commemorating the
anniversary of the end of slavery in the British West Indies, one
does not read about immutable and unseen forces propelling men
ahead on the unstoppable current of history. In this respect, at least,
Emerson’s celebration of the individual is the same as Tocqueville’s.
Nonetheless, this celebration of individual initiative and independence is coupled with yet another potentially worrisome aspect
of Emerson’s writings. Just as he conceives the individual as the
standard in judging the rectitude of an action and the worth of an
institution, so too he conceives of the new American nation as a
standard in judging its own needs. America must emancipate itself
from the tyrannizing effects of a slavish veneration of the “mind
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of the Past” (RE 46)—especially Europe’s aristocratic past—in all
its incarnations: history, philosophy, art, architecture, and literature.
Although this call for originality can already be seen in the opening
paragraph of Emerson’s first book Nature (1836), perhaps the most
stirring expression of this sentiment is his Harvard Phi Beta Kappa
address, “The American Scholar” (1837), which Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes called “our intellectual Declaration of Independence”
(RE 3, 846). The moment some form of the past is declared perfect
or inviolate, then the present generation will atrophy and cease
thinking and creating—it will become a satellite of the past rather
than its own solar system. The genius of an age is lost when it passively accepts the dogmas of the past and does not actively seize
upon and articulate its own creative principles: “The English dramatic poets have Shakspearized [sic] now for two hundred years”
(RE 47). Indeed, we must not subordinate our own thinking to the
thinking found in books:
Undoubtedly there is a right way of reading, so it be
sternly subordinated. Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar’s
idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is
too precious to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of
their readings. But when the intervals of darkness
come, as come they must—when the sun is hid and the
stars withdraw their shining—we repair to the lamps
which were kindled by their ray, to guide our steps to
the East again, where the dawn is. We hear, that we
may speak (RE 48).
Books should be used to guide the scholar back to the light of his
own inspirations.
Emerson is not rejecting the past outright. His frequent praise
of past philosophers and authors and poets demonstrates this. Instead, he wants to challenge what he calls the backward—that is,
conservative—tendency of all institutions to defend some ancient
authority and to use this as an excuse for not moving forward.
The soul active sees absolute truth and utters truth, or
creates. In this action it is genius; not the privilege of
here and there a favorite, but the sound estate of every
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | FROST
man. In its essence it is progressive. The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop
with some past utterance of genius. This is good, say
they—let us hold by this. They pin me down. They
look backward and not forward. But genius looks forward: the eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his
hindhead: man hopes: genius creates (RE 47).
37
The past must come alive for the present and speak to its concerns
and circumstances. If it fails to do this, then it need not be studied
and must not be revered. Discard the relics of the past or reanimate
them—if Greece or Rome or Constantinople or Paris or London
do not speak to us, we need not worry: someone or something else
will (RE 115–17, 120, 130–31, 140, 150–51, 272–73).
Emerson sees some encouraging signs of intellectual liberation
in the growing prevalence of “the near, the low, the common” as a
new subject of literature (RE 57). He saw that contemporary writers and artists were beginning to expand the range of their interest
beyond traditional high subjects to include the more mundane:
The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the
philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life,
are the topics of the time. It is a great stride. It is a
sign—is it not?—of new vigor when the extremities are
made active, when currents of warm life run into the
hands and the feet. I ask not for the great, the remote,
the romantic; what is doing in Italy or Arabia; what is
Greek art, or Provencal minstrelsy; I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the
low. Give me insight into to-day, and you may have the
antique and future worlds. What would we really know
the meaning of? The meal in the firkin; the milk in the
pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the
glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body;
show me the ultimate reason of these matters; show me
the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of nature; let me see every trifle bristling with the
polarity that ranges it instantly on an eternal law; and
the shop, the plough, and the ledger referred to the like
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cause by which light undulates and poets sing; and the
world lies no longer a dull miscellany and lumberroom, but has form and order; there is no trifle, there
is no puzzle, but one design unites and animates the
farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench (RE 57–58).
Because the lowest objects are bursting with the same sublime soul
as the highest, they can be made the focal point of a literary and
spiritual renaissance appropriate for this new era and new nation.
At the end of the day, Emerson applauds the fact that the same
egalitarian political movements, which both raised the “lowest
class in the state” and gave new dignity and respect to the “individual,” are now fostering an appropriate egalitarian literature (RE
43, 57–58). Emerson here reveals what Matthew Arnold calls his
remarkable “persistent optimism” (RE 846) in the potential of each
and every individual to become a fully realized human being: he
repeatedly affirms that all men have “sublime thoughts” (RE 76);
that all possess a “native nobleness” (RE 242); that all are wise;
that all are latent prophets; that all have the potential greatness of
George Washington and Julius Caesar; that all carry within a
“miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal
History” (RE 267). Even genius is less a matter of innate ability
and more a matter of art and arrangement, and of giving free reign
to the divine, which is in all of us (RE 411ff.). As Henry David
Thoreau rightly said in his journals about his friend: “In his world
every man would be a poet, Love would reign, Beauty would take
place, Man and Nature would harmonize” (RE 847). We are left to
wonder, however, whether Emerson’s suspicions of the past, coupled with his new emphasis on “the near, the low, the common” in
literature will, over time, help to sustain his celebration of genuine
human greatness, or eventually undermine and distort it in a predictable but unhealthy democratic fashion.
NOTES
1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. and trans. Harvey
C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2000), 425–26, hereafter cited in the text as DA, followed by volume,
part, chapter, and page number. In general, I have used this translation
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | FROST
39
throughout, although I have checked it against the French original for accuracy. See also the four-volume, bilingual, historical-critical edition of
the same, ed. Eduardo Nolla, trans. James T. Schleifer (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2010).
2. References to Emerson’s works are from The Essential Writings of
Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: Modern Library,
2000), hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as RE. All emphasized
words in quotes are contained in the original. For details on his life and
times, readers may consult with profit Gay Wilson Allen, Waldo Emerson:
A Biography (New York: Viking Press, 1981).
3. Emerson was ordained as the Unitarian pastor of the Second Church
of Boston in 1829. In June 1832, his grave reservations concerning the
sacrament of communion reached a crescendo, and he asked the Church
if he might stop administering it in its present form. After considering his
petition, the members of the Church were unable to grant it. Because
Emerson would “do nothing which I cannot do with my whole heart” (RE
109), he judged it best to resign as pastor, and he stated his reasons for
doing so to the congregation in the sermon we are about to discuss. Although Emerson continued to give sermons to various churches throughout his life, his service at the Second Church was his first and last
appointment as a permanent pastor.
4. Emerson also suggests the likely cause of this error. It was only natural
that a soul as “great and rich” as Jesus’s, falling among a “simple” people,
was bound to overwhelm them. They were thus not able to see that Jesus’s
true message was that they needed to discover and make manifest the gift
of God in their own soul and not that Jesus was the son of God Himself
(RE 69). Given the simplicity of the “primitive Church,” Emerson is very
hesitant to adopt any of its doctrines or practices. The early Christians
not only refused to shed their “Jewish prejudices” but they were rarely
enlightened by the example of Christ himself. Emerson thus concludes
that “[o]n every other subject succeeding times have learned to form a
judgment more in accordance with the spirit of Christianity than was the
practice of the early ages” (RE 105).
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40
“At the Very Center of the Plenitude”:1
Goethe’s Grand Attempt to Overcome the 18th Century;2
Or,
How Freshman Laboratory Saved Goethe
From the General Sickness of his Age
We have failed to restore to the human spirit
its ancient right to come face to face with nature.
—Goethe3
Nature has become the fundamental word
that designates essential relations . . . to beings.
—Heidegger4
Goethe teaches courage . . . that the disadvantages
of any epoch exist only to the fainthearted.
—Emerson5
1. Incidental Thoughts, Fruitful Life
To everyone: Welcome! To our freshman in particular: a special
Welcome!
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: We know him first as a poet and
playwright—seniors will read his Faust next week. Yet there is another Goethe that is less well known but who, from his own point
of view, is of equal, if not greater consequence,6 the Goethe who
spent his life studying nature—botany, zoology, geology, meteorology, theory of color—and is known, in this regard, for his work
in morphology. I would like to speak about this lesser known
Goethe tonight.
There are two subtitles to this evening’s lecture “At the Very
Center of the Plenitude.” The first is given to it by Friedrich Nietzsche, the second, my own curious invention. The first is “Goethe’s
Grand Attempt to Overcome the 18th Century.” As we will see,
from Nietzsche’s perspective Goethe was a philosophical thinker
of the highest order who inherited, as we all do, ideas from previDavid Lawrence Levine is a tutor and former Dean at St. John’s College in Santa
Fe, New Mexico. This lecture was originally presented as the annual Dean’s
Lecture to open the thirty-seventh academic year at the Santa Fe campus.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | LEVINE
41
ous generations and thinkers, ideas that he thought were ill conceived and needed to be rethought. Thanks to these ideas, we had
become, according to Goethe, “blind with seeing eyes.”7
Similarly the second subtitle, “How Freshman Laboratory
Saved Goethe from the General Sickness of his Age.” This clearly
reflects our unique studies here at St. John’s. Here too we see
something of greater moment than we might first have seen. Here
we will have a chance to see that his life’s work studying nature—
as seen in the paper that we read in freshman laboratory—has a far
greater significance than just “science,” great though this is in its
own right.8 For Goethe the study of nature was the necessary antidote to a growing tendency—“sickness” he called it—that needed
to be countered for the sake of our lives and health.
Goethe’s thinking, though philosophical, is not systematic, and
that means there’s no one place where his deepest thinking is to be
found. Just the opposite, his profoundest thought is to be discovered throughout his works, and not just in his major works, but
minor ones too, often just jottings here and there, on slips of paper,
in the margins of books, the corners of newspapers, in brief letters,
in short wherever occasion found a suitable surface for pen and
ink to secure for a time his emergent thoughts. These were often
then collected into “maxims and reflections,” sometimes inserted
as the thinking of one of the characters of his novels, sometimes
collected under his own name.
These occasional thoughts will provide much of the material
for tonight’s talk. But incidental thoughts are not necessarily insignificant thoughts.9 Not unlike flotsam and jetsam, thoughts appear throughout our day. Are these daily musings ‘distractions of
the moment’ or ‘disclosures of moment’? Such irrepressible
thoughtfulness and imagination gives added dimension to the thin
linearity of time. A day punctuated by the wondrous, sparked by
light, is not just another day. Daily discovery is meat not spice,
nourishment, not just flavoring. And its joy is invigorating. The
mundane is thereby transformed. Thinking happens.
One such collection of thoughts is a book of selected conversations by his secretary Johann Peter Eckermann, a man of no
small talent, who took it upon himself to record for posterity per-
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sonal conversations he had with his world famous employer during
the last nine years of his life. These are intermittently and imperfectly recorded, often self-conscious, sometimes seem contrived,
and are frequently without a definite outcome. There we find observations about passing acquaintances, deliberations about the
wine list for the evening dinner, plans for journeys to be taken, personal estimates about famous and not so famous authors and statesmen, latter-year reflections and regrets about his youthful writings,
plans for the reconstruction of the local theater that had burned
down, conversations with his patron the Grand Duke of Weimar,
observations about his wife and children, expressions of hope and
disappointment about friends, frustrations about works of his that
had been overlooked or were under appreciated. But throughout
the rich array, there emerge as well recurrent themes and persistent
questions of consequence.
The same author mentioned above, Nietzsche, says the following: “Apart from Goethe’s [own] writings, and in particular
Goethe’s conversations with Eckermann, the best German book
there is, what is there really of German prose literature that it would
be worthwhile to read over and over again?”10 “The best German
book there is,” worth “reading over and over again”? Hardly on
the face of it.
Though perhaps prone to hyperbole and “philosophizing with
a hammer,” Nietzsche was not prone to misrepresentation. What
could he mean by such exaggerated praise? Perhaps what is remarkable is not the book per se, but what is portrayed therein? Perhaps what is notable is not its ultimate literary value—the book is
not on our program—but the attempt to record a life that is in no
way ordinary? Indeed, even through Eckermann’s eyes we glimpse
new possibilities for a human life that aspires to what is extraordinary, a fullness of possibility rarely seen. We glimpse a paradigm
of a fully engaged, ever creative, wholesome fecundity. In short,
we see philosophy as a way of being in the world, not as a book
bound between leather covers.
2. “Everything Nowadays is Ultra”
In 1825, late in life, Goethe wrote a letter to his friend, the composer Zelter, in which he reflected on the character of life as it had
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | LEVINE
43
come to be lived in their lifetime:
Everything nowadays is ultra, [he writes] everything is
being transcended continually in thought as well as in action. No one knows himself any longer; no one can grasp
the element in which he lives and works or the materials
that he handles. Pure simplicity is out of the question; of
simplifiers we have enough. Young people are stirred up
much too early in life and then carried away in the whirl
of the times. Wealth and rapidity are what the world admires. . . . Railways, quick mails, steamships, and every
possible kind of rapid communication are what the educated world seeks but it only over-educates itself and
thereby persists in its mediocrity. It is, moreover, the result of universalization that a mediocre culture [then] becomes [the] common [culture].
He then adds ruefully: “We and perhaps a few others will be the
last of an epoch that will not soon return.”11
According to Goethe, a radical transformation of our way of
being has taken place: 1) a change in the character of human thought
and action, 2) a change in our knowledge of ourselves, 3) a change
in our sense of place, and finally, 4) a change in the character and
efficacy of education.
“Everything nowadays is ultra”: As early as the beginning of
the nineteenth century, what was coming to characterize human
life—and thereby change the face and depth of human experience—was the speed (die Voloziferishe) at which life was lived, a
hitherto unheard of, dizzying and disorienting pace such that young
people—but not only—could only be caught up in “the whirl of
the times.” “Being caught up” means living some other life than
one’s own, being inauthentic.
“Railways, quick mails, steamships”: Ever faster communication changes the lived dimensions of life: time quickens, distance
collapses. There is no delay between an event and its hearing. “It’s
as if we were right there.” A leisurely walk is replaced by a carriage
ride, thereafter by a train ride, then a jet plane, and now by . . . a
transporter (or at least in our imaginations). The wait for “news”
from the pony express, a telegram, a phone call, a pager continues
to shrink. Our e-mail pings or our blackberry vibrates: we hear about
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an event “as it happens” no matter the distance. Life, in short, is lived
in fast forward. Goethe asks “Who can possibly keep up with the
demands of an exorbitant present and that at maximum speed?”12
This matter of life’s ever accelerating pace in not a philosophically indifferent one for Goethe. “The greatest misfortune [Unheil]
of our time,” he says elsewhere, “which let’s no thing come to
fruition, is that one moment consumes the next.”13 While the speeding up of things may assist us in “keeping informed” and “staying
in touch,” it also subtracts from other essential dimensions once
thought definitive of human life. It makes certain things more difficult, if not impossible, specifically those things that take time, for
example, those that require slow assimilation and acclimation,
above all human learning and experience. It takes time away from
thoughtful reflection and other possibilities of human carefulness.
For time and leisure (skolē) are the proper gestational home of reflection, philosophy and human care.
We hear too that our thought processes are affected: “everything is transcended in thought [as well as in action].” We have
somehow been made to think differently. We live at a new level of
abstraction, beyond the immediate, simple, obvious, primary
world, such that we no longer even understand “the element in
which we live.” What could this mean?
And most curious of all, Goethe says “No one knows himself
any longer.” How is this even possible? Elsewhere he says: “Learning fails to bring advancement now that the world is caught up in
such a rapid turnover; by the time you have managed to take due
note of everything, you have lost your self.”14 Are we not always
the same no matter our circumstances?
Education too is thereby affected. It is suggested that we might
even become “over-educated,” mis-educated, that education itself
has become, somehow, distorted. He reflects: “For almost a century
now the humanities have no longer influenced the minds of men
engaged in them.”15 Rather than distinction, we have mediocrity;
rather than a high culture, we have an ordinary one. What then of
the rewards of “perspective,” “balance” and “excellence” once
thought the outcome of an ennobling education?
The “whirl of the times” has only accelerated many, many fold
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since 1825. The author could not possibly have envisioned the pace
at which we live our lives today. To be sure, on first hearing, one
might be inclined to take the above observations as the grumbling
of a man seeing the world pass him by (empty biographism). We
might, however, also take this as notice to think better about the
character of our lives in our ultra-ultra world.
3. “The General Sickness of the Age”
Life is our lot rather than reflection.
—Goethe16
Goethe’s exclamation that “nowadays . . . no one knows himself
any longer” clearly needs further consideration. How could this
be? Don’t we know ourselves?
Throughout the modern disciplines—the physical sciences,
history, even poetry and literature—was a growing trend, evident
to Goethe, to what he called “subjectivity.” Juniors and seniors will
remember, in the Discourse on Method, Descartes’s identification
of the “ego” as the primordial truth about which we alone can be
immediately “certain.” The immediate evidence of this self-intuition then provides the standard of truth for all else, now thought
true only if “clearly and distinctly” conceivable to us. Odd though
this may sound, this new self-certainty leads to our world being
reconceived as “the external world,” about which we can now have
only a small measure of certainty and that of its radically stripped
down mathematical qualities. To be sure, this made a “modern science” of such a world possible, yet it gave us a new definition and
sense of self that was problematic.17 This excessively polarized and
reduced view of the ego as “subject”—understood as standing
“over against”18 some bare objective world—is what Goethe meant
by “subjectivity:” polarized, withdrawn, exiled to its own interior
world, and thereby alienated from any sense of world in which it
could feel itself integrated or at home.19
For Goethe the consequences of this influential (nay, fateful)
redefinition of self are nowhere better seen than in his own vocation, poetry. We have all heard the caricature of the modern “romantic” poet: a suffering recluse, retreating to his Paris garret,
whose only truth is his inner pain. But for Goethe there is, unfor-
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tunately, an element of truth to be found therein: He observes: “All
the poets [today] write as if they were ill and the whole world were
a lazaretto [leper colony]. They all speak of the woe and misery of
this earth and the joy of a hereafter: all are discontented. . . . This,”
he adds, “is a real abuse of poetry.”20 “I attach no value to [such]
poems.”21
From Goethe’s perspective, “whoever descends deep down
into himself will always realize he is only half a being,”22 and being
half will discover there limited resources for creativity. “A subjective nature has soon talked out his little internal material and is at
last ruined by mannerism [that is, excessive affectation],”23 he
notes regretfully. “Such people look at once within; they are so occupied by what is revolving in themselves, [that] they are like a
man in passion, who passes his dearest friends on the street without
seeing them.”24 With reduced openness to the world around them,
they have become “blind with seeing eyes.” This excessive onesidedness, and consequent risk of self-absorption, Goethe named
“the general sickness of the present age [heutigen Zeit],”25 and led
Doctor von Goethe to his famous diagnosis: “What is Classical is
healthy; what is Romantic is sick.”26 Sick? Unhealthy, unproductive, foundationless, and ultimately untruthful. We lose our fullest
selves.
Goethe thus found himself standing at the point of the divide
where, for all our efforts to think about each separately, subject
and object were being ever more pulled apart. This experiential
breach was of fundamental concern because, when either is overpolarized—when the soul is diminished as an isolated, worldless
ego (psyche), res cogitans or when the world is diminished as external, even foreign, barren res extensa—both subject and object
are diminished for want of their natural correlate. If I may indulge
in a somewhat dramatic image: like a man standing between two
horses pulling him apart, Goethe found that—for the sake of
health27—he had everything he could handle to keep himself and
the world whole.28
Goethe himself thus resisted being “caught up in his time;”
he was not a “romantic.” As he said, “my tendencies were opposed
to those of my time, which were wholly subjective; while in my
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objective efforts, I stood alone to my disadvantage.”29 His “objective efforts”? How could he resist the subjective tendency?
4. “The Element in which we Live”
In all natural things there is something wonderful. . . .
So we should approach the inquiry . . . without aversion,
knowing that in all of them there is something
natural and beautiful.
—Aristotle30
Surprising though it may seem to some, the answer is nature. Thus
it is apt that the Goethe we first meet is not the poet but the Goethe
who spent his whole life researching “the element in which we
live,” that is researching into nature. It is this “objective” involvement that saved him from the excesses of his—and our—time, not
to mention giving him “the most wonderful moments of his life.”31
So, what is nature?—OK, a simpler question.—What is a
plant? Which grammatical form best names its being, a noun or a
verb (or a gerund, a verbal noun)? By plant do we intend a static
state or an activity alive with change, something that has grown or
some process of growth?32 Clearly we need to name both—form
that is also in the process of self-formation. “Growth is the point
of life.”33
For us here in the Southwest, sumac, oak, aspen, pinõn, mallow and mullen are different kinds of plants. The principle at work
is the same throughout the stages of the life cycle of a mallow, for
instance, from seedling to flowering, fructifying plant. Hence we
name it one thing—a mallow—despite all these various stages and
differing formal manifestations.34
But it is not only this individual plant that is before us, so is
the species “mallow,” and even further so is the kingdom “plant,”
and these, as Goethe will insist, not as abstract concepts in the mind
but somehow in the living instance itself. Thus Goethe sought to
account for plant life as such, despite the dizzying fact that they
take infinitely many and wondrously different shapes. Sumac,
aspen, mallow are in “inner essence” still “plants.”35 What is
needed in this view is to identify the unifying principle at work
(not “underlying”) in each and every form at whatever stage of
growth and complexity they might be. But how to do so? And how
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to find a language that captures this universally active principle of
forms forming themselves?
To do so Goethe had to depart radically from his contemporaries and from their analytical approach. But in so doing this departure brings him closer to us. We can see this at the outset of the
Metamorphosis of Plants that we read in freshman laboratory,
where he appeals, not to results of the latest scientific journals, but
to our own untutored experience. He begins: “Anyone who has paid
a little attention to plant growth. . . .”36 This means that we, ordinary human beings, still have access to a realm of primary significance, one not to be diminished as “pre-scientific,” if what is
meant thereby is “pre-insightful.” Rather we, you and me, have
deep access into what is before us.37
Indeed he is critical that, with all our education and learning,
we may on the contrary be closing ourselves off from this primary
level of our experience. He often referred to a passage in one of
his early plays to illustrate this eclipse of experience by theory:
[A]s it is said in my Goetz von Berlichingen, that the
son, from pure learning, does not know the father, so
in science do we find people who can neither see nor
hear, through sheer learning and hypothesis. Such people look at once within; they are so [pre-] occupied by
what is revolving in themselves, that they are like a
man in passion, who passes his dearest friends in the
street without seeing them. [Rather] the observation of
nature requires a certain purity of mind that cannot be
disturbed or preoccupied by anything. . . . It is just because we carry about with us a great apparatus of philosophy and hypothesis, that we spoil all.38
“Like a man in passion”: Ideas, no less than passions, can take hold
of our minds, preventing us from seeing what might otherwise be
evident and thereby preventing us from attending to our primary
experience.39 So overwhelming are our present-day theoretical preoccupations that—in one of his most shocking statements of all—
Goethe claims that we no longer even concern ourselves with
nature. “That nature, which is our [modern] concern, isn’t nature
any longer,” he says.40 Extraordinary!
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What has been lost, in Goethe’s view, is a sense of the wholeness of wholes and the interrelatedness and integration of all things,
in short, Nature (capital N). This loss is the necessary consequence
of any approach wherein wholes are but “by-products”41 of uncoordinated, underlying, isolated forces and elements (“matter in the
void”). Looking at things in terms of their parts—elements, simples, particles, atoms—analytical ways of thinking stumble in the
face of the Humpty Dumpty problem: how to put the whole back
together again.42 If we begin with parts, we end up with reconstituted conglomerates, aggregates, bunches, but the wholeness of
things, the integral reality, remains a secondary phenomenon, a
mystery, if not an accident.43 Here too we’ve become “blind with
seeing eyes.”
Juniors are soon to read and seniors will remember Descartes’s
famous experiment with the wax at the end of Meditations II. There
Descartes places a piece of fresh bees wax near a burning candle,
whereupon it melts and loses its original color and smell, texture
and shape (i.e. primary as well as secondary qualities), that is loses
all its original properties but res extensa, mere extension (though
this changes too). This experimental method is designed to bring
us to see what is “elemental” (if not fundamental). Descartes then
proceeds to claim that by “an act of intuition of reason” he—and
we—would know this transmogrified, charred lump in front of us
to be the same thing as before his infernal experiment. He asks,
who would not so conclude thus? (Aristotle, for one) Well . . . if
that were a plant, and not an amorphous hunk of bees wax, who
would concur with Descartes that what remains is the same as what
was put to the flame?44
The analytical flame dissociates or separates what originally
was together. It “kills.” So this method.45 The disfigured, deracinated, blackened carcass of the plant is anything but, the living
whole, nowhere to be found. The mass of matter lying before
Descartes is “the same” only if life and death are not different, and
if form is not an active principle but a derivative by-product. With
this “lethal generality”46 we lose—and lose sight of—“the spirit of
the whole,” as Goethe would say. For this reason, he claimed as
well that the modern approach—subjectively predisposed to take
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the objects of our experience in such a reduced way—loses its
claim to “objectivity.”47
The question for Goethe—and for us—is whether and how we
can recover the whole. Is it still possible to begin elsewhere, think
differently such that the whole is retained along with its manifold
parts? Can we yet begin where we naturally begin, with what is
“first for us” (Aristotle), with integral wholes?
5. Our Ancient Right
The spirit of the actual is the true ideal.
No one who is observant will ever
find nature dead or silent.
—Goethe48
Goethe thus sought “another way,” in order, as he said, “to restore
to the human spirit, its ancient right to come face to face with nature.” 49
He asks: “What does all our communion with nature amount
to . . . if we busy ourselves with analyzing only single portions,
and do not feel the breath of the spirit that dictates the role of
every part and restrains or sanctions all excess through an immanent law?”50 Thus “phenomena once and for all must be removed
from the gloomy empirical-mechanical-dogmatic [torture] chamber [Marterkammer],” he said, “and [be] submitted [rather] to the
jury of [common human understanding].”51 But how are we to do
this, to return to “common human understanding”?
Since apparently we can live in more than one world, Goethe
makes his bid—“naively” yet knowingly52—to reclaim nature as
our home-world. “If we are to rescue ourselves from the boundless multiplicity, atomization and complexity of the modern natural sciences,” he says, “and get back to the realm of simplicity,
we must always consider [this] question: how would Plato [or
any non-modern] have reacted to nature, fundamentally one
unity as it still is, how would he have viewed what may now appear to us as its greater complexity?”53 We need to remove what
“now” stands in the way.54 We need somehow to shuck off our
modern predisposition to see all things as artificially reconstituted55 and see our world, rather, as one might whose vision was
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not so refracted. But how?
Mindful that “the first stages of a discovery leave their mark
on the course of knowledge,”56 Goethe first seeks to reorient us.
To begin with, “anyone who has paid a little attention” has to acknowledge that our primary and original experience of things is
otherwise than we’ve been brought to conceive. “In nature,” he
said, “we never see anything isolated: everything is in connection
with something.”57 Any account, then, of our experience must
begin here with the unity and interrelatedness of all things.
Herein lays Goethe’s unified field theory: “I abide by what is
simple and comprehensive,” he says.58 (This he also calls his
“stubborn realism.”59)
As we heard, a certain kind of undisturbed purity of mind—
clarity, breadth of survey, attention to manifest differences—is
the pre-requisite to any genuine openness. In the garden, along a
path, in the laboratory, we need first to see the things themselves,
to recognize the ways and means that the plant [or whatever our
object] uses,”60 “to follow it carefully through all its transitions,”61 in short, “to follow as carefully as possible in the footsteps of nature.”62 “In the process,” he says, “we become familiar
with certain requisite conditions for what is manifesting itself.
From this point of view everything gradually falls into place
under higher principles and laws revealed not to reason through
words and hypotheses, but to our intuitive perception [Anschauung] through phenomena.63” In this way, our relationship to
things is not at first “speculative,” but what Goethe calls “practical,” that is grounded in the concrete experience of individuals
and the real.64 (Here have we a model of openness and extreme
care that will serve us well, not only in the laboratory, but
throughout our work at the college.)
Given this, given observation that is undertaken with a “truly
sympathetic interest,”65 a remarkable transformation can then
begin. We can be moved to insight. In an often quoted passage
from the Introduction to his Outline of a Theory of Color, Goethe
addresses this process of natural ideation. He writes:
An extremely odd demand is often set forth but never
met . . . that [bare] empirical data should be presented
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without any theoretical context. . . . This demand is
odd because it is useless to simply look at something.
Every act of looking [naturally] turns into observation, every act of observation into reflection, every act
of reflection into the making of associations: thus it is
that we theorize every time we look carefully at the
world. The ability to do this with clarity of mind, with
self-knowledge, in a free way, and (if I may venture
to put it so [he adds]) with irony, is a skill we need in
order to avoid the pitfalls of [modern scientific] abstraction.66
Nature converses with us. Like any organic transition, thought is
the natural and continuous outgrowth of its prior condition, the
fruit of concrete experience. As such we are naturally led to a
higher integration through “the practical and self-distilling
processes of common human understanding.”67 “We theorize every
time we look carefully at the world.”
When we are able to survey an object in every detail,
grasp it carefully and reproduce it in our mind’s eye [he
reflects, then] we can say we have an intuitive perception [Anschauung] of it in the truest and highest sense.
We can [rightfully] say it belongs to us.... And thus the
particular leads to the general [as well as] the general
to the particular. The two combine their effect in every
observation, in every discourse.68
As much as we take the lead in inquiry, then so too are we led
by what we are inquiring into. Experience is bi-directional. Subject-object; object-subject. True sympathetic observation results
in the recapitulation in our summary imagination of the originating principle. The object becomes for us as it is in itself. In this
way the object “belongs” to us as much as we, in communion, belong with it. Our natural correlation is thereby reestablished, the
Cartesian subjective reduction of experience is offset, if not reversed, and a kind of renewed originality is returned to human experience, widening and opening our purview69, whereby we might
be thought once again to come “face to face” with nature. Our ancient right is thereby restored.
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6. The Original World
. . . the sublime tranquility which surrounds us
when we stand in the solitude and silence of nature,
vast and eloquent.
—Goethe70
A living thing cannot be measured
by something external to itself.
—Goethe71
This reunion of observer and world—we should say union—is possible because of a unique human faculty—one out-rightly denied72
or at least overlooked by other modern thinkers—but to which
Goethe again and again returns our attention. As we read: “When
we are able to survey an object in every detail, grasp it carefully
and reproduce it in the mind’s eye, we can say we have an intuitive
perception of it in the truest and highest sense.” This capacity for
concrete, summary “intuition,” intuitive perception, Anschauung,
is our faculty for experiential wholes wherein the actively unifying
principles at work in the world manifest themselves. Deny it and
we have no wholes. They are not deduced, inferred, or synthesized.
We do not have to go beyond or behind73 the phenomena to see
these at work. These are made known to us at the level of our primary experience. We “see” them.
There’s a famous story: At a meeting of the Society for Scientific Research in Jena there was a “fortunate encounter” between
Goethe and the poet Friedrich Schiller—whose poetry at the time
Goethe thought too romantic, too subjective. Goethe sought to explain to him his own attempt to articulate such a principle whereby
the natural plenitude of plant life might be accounted for. His
“idea” was, he admits, “the strangest creature in the world,”74
wherein the whole range of plant formation might be seen as
“stemming” or “derived” from an aboriginal form that was in this
regard the formal progenitor of the whole kingdom. Goethe named
this the Urpflanze,75 the original or originary plant.76
Schiller’s first response to this suggestion reflected his philosophical background, in particular his indebtedness to Kant. “This
is not an observation from experience,” he said, “This is an idea.”77
Schiller could not see what Goethe claimed he saw. He was disin-
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clined—as we may be—to grant that this was anything but a “regulative idea” constructed by reason to help it organize its experience, not a principle at work in the world organizing the
phenomenal array of plant forms. It was merely an idea, merely
“subjective.” For him and for Kant, it couldn’t be anything more,
as in their view phenomena are themselves constituted by consciousness and are thus not things in themselves.
Convinced, rather, that he had identified the objective generative source of all plant forms, Goethe replied: “Then I may rejoice
that I have ideas without knowing it, and can even see them with
my own eyes!” For Goethe, perception and reason, as moments of
a natural process, are not disparate faculties, but continuous. Thus
this, and all other Ur-phenomena, immanent and at work throughout our experience, are real and hence must be available to us on
the primary level of common human understanding.78 He wonders:
“Why should it not also hold true in the intellectual area that
through an intuitive perception of eternally creative nature we may
become worthy of participating spiritually in its creative process?”
He thus insisted that he could see with his eyes something to which
others seem to have become blind.79 (Despite this fundamental difference, the two became close friends.)
But more needs to be said about this “strangest” of all creatures
that holds, in Goethe’s words, “the secret of the creation and organization of plants” (or any family of phenomena). As we mentioned earlier, Goethe’s interests were vast and not restricted to
botany; he also did research in osteology or bone formation. Indeed
it was Goethe who discovered the role of the intermaxillary bone,
the missing link that allowed zoologists to connect man and ape
anatomically. In a passage from his work On Morphology, we see
most clearly the point of origination of his thinking concerning Urphenomena:
The distinction between man and animal long eluded
discovery. Ultimately it was believed that the definitive
difference between ape and man lay in the placement
of the ape’s four incisors in a bone clearly and physically separate from other bones. [Goethe provides the
link.] . . . Meanwhile I had devoted my full energies to
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the study of osteology, for in the skeleton the unmistakable character of every form is preserved conclusively and for all time. 80
55
The developmental history of an organism is not past; rather the
history of successive generational transformations is preserved
and encapsulated in the fullness of any present form. Just as osteogeny can now be seen to recapitulate phylogeny, so more generally can any such morphological account. This “pregnancy”81
of the present form allows of a new kind of thinking to uncover
the Ur-principle at work, a reverse thinking that “traces the phenomena [back] to their [empirical] origins.”82 (This is the first
methodological principle of the new science of morphology83).
In another context he reflects on this Ur-principle, now also
called an “archetype”: “an anatomical archetype will be suggested here, a general picture containing the forms of all animals
as potential, one which will guide us to an orderly description
of each animal.”84 The Ur-principle is thus a kind of omni-potential in conversation with its environment and out of which the
whole polymorphic metamorphosis issues. “All is leaf.” As such
these are not ideas in the usual sense of Plato or Kant, neither
separate nor abstract. Rather they are like ideas in enabling us to
give an account of the unifying principles at the origin of the
plenitude. They are like ideas, as well, in that they might serve
as a kind of “formula” providing a way to generate new forms—
if only in imagination.85 The “derivation”86 is not of hypothetical
but real possibilities. Though they are more like the eidos in Aristotle, an active principle embodying the manifold fruitfulness
of nature, here however “the secret of the creation and organization” of the family of forms. (He sometimes called it entelechy.87)
Thus whatever the family of phenomena—botany, osteology, geology, meteorology, color—Ur-phenomena emerge. We
come to see the unifying principle, the spirit “that dictates the
role of every part and restrains or sanctions all excess through
immanent law.” From this “empirical summit,88” all things can
be seen as unified. Thus we have order out of chaos,89 integration where we might otherwise have discontinuity. The plenitude is comprehended.
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Therefore when you pick up Goethe’s Metamorphosis of
Plants to read, or any of his other writings on nature, do not close
yourselves off when hearing its foreign language, rather attempt
to hear its new voice and direction for the understanding of nature, “the element in which we live.” Whether, indeed, Goethe
has bequeathed us a fruitful path by means of which our ancient
right might be restored or whether it is but a false portal, is for
each of us to determine for ourselves.
7. Against Self-knowledge
Everything that liberates our mind
without at the same time imparting
self-control is pernicious.
—Goethe90
Where are we, then, in the midst of all this? Is there a lesson to be
learned about ourselves from this “other way of studying nature”?
As we’ve seen there are two unities that are reestablished by
Goethe’s way of thinking: there’s the unity of wholes that had been
fragmented, and the unity of observer and world that had been
alienated. Let us think more about the latter.
This unity of observer and world means that, like any organism, man cannot be known, nor know himself, apart from his
world—his environment— which sustains him and of which he is
an integral part. Given the polarized, inauthentic, and diminished
sense of self that is the consequence of the divorce of the “ego”
from its world in modern thought, it is understandable, then, that
to Goethe “no one knows himself any longer.” This led him to his
famous—if at first shocking—remark concerning the Delphic oracle: “I must admit,” he said, “that I have long been suspicious of
the great and important sounding task: ‘know-thyself.’ This has always seemed to me a deception practiced by a secret order of
priests who wished to confuse humanity with impossible demands,
to divert attention from activity in the outer world to some false
inner speculation.”91 Self-knowledge—or what we take to be
such—can be misleading, indeed disabling.
But how can we make it truthful . . . and enabling? As we
would expect, for Goethe the success of our efforts to know ourselves depends on the degree to which we are willing to extend
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ourselves beyond ourselves. “Man is by all his senses and efforts
directed to externals—to the world around him ,92” he stresses, and
thus “the human being knows himself only insofar as he knows the
world; he perceives the world only in himself and himself only in
the world.”93 This brings to mind his earlier observation: “Whoever
descends deep down into himself will always realize he is only half
a being;” this thought was then completed with “let him find . . . a
world . . . and he will become whole.”94 In short, that we might be
drawn out of our overly self-polarized existence, we need to
reestablish ourselves once again as worldly beings, fully engaged
with and in our natural correlate “the outer world.”
Thus he answers the question “How can we learn self-knowledge?” in this way: “Never by taking thought but rather by action.”95
This reply should not surprise us, for it was our history that our very
attempts to think about ourselves and the world brought us to this
unnatural polarization. Thus it is “activity in the outer world” alone
that is necessary to restore a balanced polarity and healthy equilibrium. We see this in Goethe’s own “objective activity”:
Without my attempts in natural science, I should never
have learned to know mankind [including himself] as
it is. In nothing else can we so closely approach pure
contemplation and thought, so closely observe errors
of the sense and of the understanding, the weak and
strong points of character. All is more or less pliant
and wavering . . . but nature understands no jesting; she
is always true, always serious; always severe . . . the
errors and faults are always those of man. The man incapable of appreciating her, she despises; and only to
the apt, the pure and the true, does she resign herself
and reveal her secrets.96
Here we see Goethe learning lessons from nature that once were
thought the fruit of introspection and the study of the human sciences. The book of nature, as other texts, can serve as an occasion
for self-reflection. “The apt, the pure, and the true” learn about
themselves and other human beings as they self-critically open
themselves up to new fields and methods. The earlier passage, “For
almost a century now the humanities have no longer influenced the
minds of men engaged in them;” comes to mind. It is followed by:
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“it is a real piece of good fortune that nature intervened, drew the
essence of the humanities to itself and opened to us the way to a
true humanitarianism from its side.”97 The study of nature can thus
be a liberating study, freeing us from the burden of blinding conceptions and enabling us to return to our original worldliness
wherein we, once again, can open ourselves to our fullest possibilities. In this way, the study of nature is properly a liberal art.
8. The Grand Attempt
Where do we meet an original nature?
Where is the man with strength to be true,
and to show himself as he is?
—Goethe98
Finally, certain questions emerged earlier about our modern way
of life. How are we, given the “demands of an exorbitant present,”
not to get “caught up” in the whirl of our times and to reclaim a
sense of productive leisure? For Goethe the answer is . . . nature,
whose rhythms, it was once thought, could not be accelerated, and
through our study of which intimations of timeless self-sameness
might prove a refuge and shape our own being in the world. How
are we to regain a footing “where everything is in flux of continual
change”? Here too, the answer for Goethe is nature, our home
world, whose inherent lawfulness, as evidenced in the unities of
life forms, can thus provide a secure base upon which to take our
next steps. How are we to know ourselves more completely? Nature is especially needed here to offset our tendency to over selfinvolvement and to return us to our original fullness of being. And
how are we to educate ourselves more truthfully? Since modern
education only brought us, in Goethe’s view, to become “blind with
seeing eyes,” he sought in nature a complement—not to mention
an antidote—whose truthfulness would bring us “to see with seeing eyes” that fullness of view, perspective and measure that is the
proper fruit of serious study. Our question: can our own sustained
reflection on these questions, beginning with freshman laboratory,
lead to lessons such as these as well?
By way of conclusion I would like to quote Nietzsche one last
time. Toward the end of his life (1889), he himself tried to capture
in one of his aphorisms “the European event” that was Goethe.
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This distillation lives up to his well-known boast that he “wrote
whole books in one sentence,”99 though in this case he is somewhat
more loquacious, for it took him a whole paragraph to epitomize
this extraordinary life:
Goethe—not a German event but a European one: a
grand attempt to overcome the eighteenth century
through a return to nature, through a going-up to the
naturalness of the Renaissance, a kind of self-overcoming on the part of that century.—He bore within him its
strongest instincts: sentimentality, nature-idolatry, the
anti-historical, the idealistic, the unreal and revolutionary. . . . He called to his aid history, the natural sciences,
antiquity, likewise Spinoza, above all practical activity;
he surrounded himself with nothing but closed horizons; he did not sever himself from life, [rather] he
placed himself within it [that is, “at the very center of
the plenitude”]; nothing could discourage him and he
took as much as possible upon himself, above himself,
within himself. What he aspired to was totality; he
strove against separation of reason, sensuality, feeling,
will (—preached in the most horrible scholasticism by
Kant, the antipode of Goethe); he disciplined himself
to the whole, he created himself. . . . Goethe was, in an
epoch disposed to the unreal, a convinced realist; . . .
Goethe conceived of a strong, highly cultured human
being, skilled in all physical accomplishments, who,
keeping himself in check and having reverence for
himself, dares to allow himself the whole compass and
wealth of naturalness, [one] who is strong enough for
this freedom. . . . A spirit thus emancipated stands in
the midst of the universe with a joyful and trusting fatalism, in the faith that only what is separate and individual may be rejected, that in the totality everything
is redeemed and affirmed—he no longer denies. . . .
But such a faith is the highest of all possible faiths: I
have baptized it with the name . . . Dionysus.—100
Those who’ve read more widely in Nietzsche will recognize this
last act of baptism as extraordinary: there is no higher, nor deeper,
nor more original mode of being for Nietzsche than this aboriginal
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and creative life force that he identifies in the person of Goethe:
1) this rare independence from it’s times, 2) this extraordinary, if
circumspect, positivity, 3) this unlimited and deep interest in all
things, 4) this secure groundedness in practical, concrete reality,
5) this insistence on our original, primary experience, 6) this noble
distance from suffering, 7) this incomparable sense of measure,
and of course 8) this Olympian courage. If not Dionysus, then what
name or word would be appropriate?
Goethe and Nietzsche saw that we moderns have a hard choice
before us: between disaffection and engagement, between cynicism101 and wonder. Goethe somehow was able to affirm life, to
say YES!102
So we ask you tonight to consider this figure, how he might
move you to “discipline yourselves to the whole” and summon the
natural fecundity of your inherence.
And we ask you tonight “to place yourselves within life,” to
seek out what is primary and original and, daring to speak the language of discovery, to speak “poetically.103”
And we ask you tonight to “make time” for thoughtfulness,
that you transform the mundane with the joys of daily discovery,
that your life be rich and your days not ordinary ones.
One last comment: Eckermann observed that even until
Goethe’s last days (that is, into his eighty-third year), he was continually learning. May this be so for you as well.
Thank you.
NOTES
1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, #337; also
#664 (hereafter MR). Given as the annual Friday night “Dean’s Lecture”
to open the thirty-seventh academic year at St. John’s College, Santa Fe.
See MR #864. This talk is a further development of work begun in 1986
(see Levine, “The Political Philosophy of Nature, A Preface to Goethe’s
Human Sciences,” (hereafter Political Philosophy) Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 11 [1986]: 163-178). It was Thomas McDonald who introduced me to the work of Eric Heller and Karl Löwith, and all three
who introduced me to the depth of Goethe’s thinking; my debt to them
continues. For the ambiguity and greatness of Goethe’s “grand attempt,”
see Johann Peter Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe, trans. John Ox-
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enford, (London: E. P. Dent, 1951 [1850]) (hereafter ECK), October 20,
1828.
2. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, Or How to Philosophize with a Hammer, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Hammondworth: Penguin, 1968 [1889])
(hereafter TI), 102.
3. “Analysis and Synthesis” (hereafter AS), in Goethe, Scientific Studies,
(hereafter SS), ed. and trans. Douglas Miller, Vol. 12 of Goethe: The Collected Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 48. The publication of this collection of Goethe’s disparate scientific works has
provided a new occasion for further reflection about his “grand attempt.”
4. Martin Heidegger, “On the Essence and Concept of Phusis in Aristotle’s Physics B, 1,” in Pathmarks (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998) (hereafter Phusis), 183.
5. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Goethe; or, the Writer,” in Representative Men
(New York: Marsilio, 1995 [1850]), 195.
6. ECK January 4, 1824, May 2, 1824, February 18 and 19, 1829.
7. ECK February 26, 1824.
8. ECK March 1, 1830.
9. Outline of a Theory of Color (hereafter OTC), in SS, #743; see also
note 21.
10. Nietzsche, “The Wanderer and His Shadow,” in Human all too
Human, A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdate (Cambridge:
University of Cambridge Press, 1986) Vol. II, Part II, #109, 336.
11. Letter to Zelter, June 7, 1825; in Löwith, Karl, “The Historical Background of European Nihilism,” “The Fate of Progress,” Nature, History,
and Existentialism, and Other Essays in the Philosophy of History
(Evanston, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1966) 4, 156-7; From Hegel
to Nietzsche, the Revolution in Nineteenth Century Thought, (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1964), 27-8, 177-181 (hereafter HN); also
MR #480.
12. MR #474.
13. MR #479.
14. MR #770.
15. HN, 226.
16. “The Enterprise Justified,” in On Morphology, SS, 61.
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17. The ego or modern self is doubtful of all but bare existence, where
even the externality, the worldness of the world, is in question.
18. For an interesting reflection on the problem of the subject-object polarity, see Heidegger, Phusis, 188.
19. A modern irony: man is least at home in a world of his own conception.
20. ECK September 24, 1827.
21. ECK September 18, 1823. By contrast, all of Goethe’s poetry was insistently “occasional,” that is objectively motivated: “The world is so
great and rich, and life so full of variety, that you can never want for occasions for poems. But they must be occasioned [poems] [Gelegenheitsgedichte]: that is to say, reality [Wirklichkeit] must give both impulse and
material. A particular event becomes universal and poetic by the very circumstance that it is treated by a poet. All my poems are occasioned
poems, suggested by real life, and having therein a firm foundation.” A
radically different orientation and tone is apparent here. See also January
29, 1826 and MR ##337, 393, 119.
22. MR #935.
23. ECK January 29, 1826: also MR #1119.
24. ECK May18.24.
25. ECK January 29, 1826.
26. MR #1031; ECK May 2.1829.
27 .A comparison with Nietzsche is appropriate here.
28. ECK March, 14, 1830; also December 21, 1831; and “Significant
Help Given by an Ingenious Turn of Phrase” (hereafter ITP), in SS, 39.
29. ECK April 14, 1824; also “The Content Prefaced,” (hereafter CP) in
On Morphology, SS, 67, and HN, 6-7.
30. On the Parts of Animals, I.v. 645a16, 19-27.
31. Fortunate Encounter (hereafter FE), SS, 18.
32. “The Germans,” Goethe notes, “have a word for the complex of existence present in the physical organism, Gestalt [or structured form] . . .
[whereby] an interrelated whole is identified, defined, and fixed in character. But if we look at all these Gestalten [all these forms], especially organic ones, we will discover that nothing in them is permanent, nothing is
at rest or defined—everything is in flux of continual motion. This is why
the Germans frequently and fittingly make use of [another] word Bildung
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[formation] to describe [both] the end product and what is in process of
production as well.” “The Purpose Set Forth,” in On Morphology, SS, 63.
33. ITP, 40.
34. CP,. 69; also Eric Heller, “Goethe and the Idea of Scientific Truth,” in
The Disinherited Mind (hereafter Heller) (New York: Meridian, 1959), 10.
35. Metamorphosis of Plants (hereafter MoP), in SS, 60, 67.
36. MoP, 76.
37. OTC #743.
38. ECK May 18, 1824; also January 17, 1830.
39. This is the “modern cave.” We may not be disposed at first to include
the philosophers among the “opinion makers” parading above and behind
the chained onlookers in Plato’s cave (Republic VII). But they are wordsmiths and as such we are indebted to them for our language and lenses
as well; see also Hegel, “Preface,” Phenomenology of Spirit, trans, A. V.
Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), #33, 19-20: “In modern
time the individual finds the abstract ready made . . . . Hence the task
nowadays consists . . . in freeing determinate thoughts from their fixity
so as to give actuality to the universal and impart to it spiritual life.”
40. MR #1364.
41. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, II.
42. “These attempts at division also produce many adverse effects when
carried to an extreme. To be sure, what is alive can be dissected into its
component parts, but from these parts it will be impossible to restore it
and bring it back to life.” See “The Purpose Set Forth,” in SS, 63. The
natural plenitude is now compounded exponentially by the analytical dissolution or decomposition of wholes; cp. Heidegger’s characterization
that the original “atomic bomb” is to be found here in our modern analytical disassociation or explosion of all things into bits, parts and particles. See Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” in Poety, Language, Thought,
trans. Albert Hofstader (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 168.
43. And thus the diminished reality of those who think that a home is
bricks and mortar, and humans their chemical makeup.
44. Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, II, AT, 19-34. How
someone could even think this is worth further thought.
45. A science that had given up trying to explain our experience was simply incomprehensible—not to mention infuriating—to one so firmly
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rooted in the actual (“at the very center of the plenitude”). “The Extent to
Which the Idea ‘Beauty Is Perfection in Combination with Freedom’ May
be Applied to Living Organisms,” in SS, 22; also ECK September 2, 1830;
see also Goethe’s longstanding debate with the Newtonian school and their
tendency to substitute secondary for primary phenomena; OTC ##176,
718.
46. “The Enterprise Justified,” in On Morphology, SS, 61.
47. In this regard one might want to compare Goethe’s and Nietzsche’s
respective attempts to “stave off the nihilistic consequences of modern
science” See David Lawrence Levine, “A World of Worldless Truths, An
Invitation to Philosophy” (hereafter Worldless Truths)in The Envisioned
Life: Essays in Honor of Eva Brann (Philadelphia: Paul Dry, 2008), 163.
48. OTC #158.
49. AS, 48.
50. ECK September 2, 1830; also Heller, 16.
51. MR #430: gemeine Menschen verstand (not “common sense”); cf.
“Empirical Observation and Science,” (hereafter EOS) SS, 25.
52. “Naively”: see Levine, Political Philosophy, 163-78.
53. MR #664; also ECK January 29, 1826: “People always talk of the
study of the ancients; but what does that mean, except that it says, turn
your attention to the real world.”; see also OTC #358. Yet as we shall see
Goethe is not an ancient but seeks to carve out a middle position between
ancient and modern science. While there is deep agreement with Aristotle
about our experience of nature in terms of wholes, there is disagreement
about what is eternal. In making form eternal, Aristotle, he said, was
prone to “precipitousness.” By contrast, for him it is the process, not the
form, which abides. “Everything is in flux of continual motion.”
54. “There is no worse mistake in physics or any science than to treat secondary things as basic and . . . to seek an explanation for the basic things
in secondary ones” (OTC #718). It’s as if we were “to enter a palace by
the side door” and thereafter base our description of the whole on our
first, one-sided impression. See “General Observation” (hereafter GO),
SS, 42 and OTC, 160); also, #177, 716 and its application to the “grievous” Newtonian error at #176.
55. See Heidegger, Phusis: “The act of self-unfolding emergence is inherently a going-back-into-itself. This kind of becoming present is phusis.
But it must not be thought of as a kind of built-in ‘motor’ that drives something, nor as an ‘organizer’ on hand somewhere, directing the thing.
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Nonetheless, we might be tempted to fall back on the notion that phuseidetermined being could be a kind that makes themselves. So easily and
spontaneously does this idea suggest itself that it has become normative
for the interpretation of living nature in particular, a living being has been
understood as an ‘organism.’ No doubt a good deal of time has yet to pass
before we learn to see that the idea of ‘organism’ and of the ‘organic’ is a
purely modern, mechanistic teleological concept, according to which
‘growing things’ are interpreted as artifacts that make themselves. Even
the word and concept ‘plant’ takes what grows as something ‘planted,’
something sown and cultivated” (195), and “But is not phusis then misunderstood as some sort of self-making artifact? Or is this not a misunderstanding at all but the only possible interpretation of phusis, namely,
as a kind of techne? This almost seems to be the case, because modern
metaphysics, in the impressive terms of . . . Kant, conceives of ‘nature’ as
a ‘technique’ such that this ‘technique’ that constitutes the essence of nature provides the metaphysical ground for the possibility, or even the necessity, of subjecting and mastering nature through machine technology”
(220).
56. GO, 42.
57. ECK May 12, 1825; also AS, 48.
58. ECK April 11, 1827.
59. FE p. 20.
60. “The Influence of Modern Philosophy,” (hereafter IMP) in SS, 28.
61. MoP #77.
62. MoP #84.
63. OTC #175.
64. EOS, 25.
65. OTC #665. There are times when Goethe seems to anticipate Husserl’s
phenomenological approach, in particular in “The Experiment as Mediator Between Object and Subject” [hereafter EMOS], in SS, 16, and IALO,
22, where the rigor and thoroughness of something like “eidetic variation”
seems to be proposed. The question is living form: “We cannot find
enough points of view nor develop ourselves enough organs of perception
to avoid killing it when we analyze it,” that is, multiple adumbrations
may give us a kind of whole but at the risk of rendering the outcome a
‘mental composition’ (as in Kant). It would be interesting to see how
Husserl and Heidegger treat life in its original vitality. See also OTC #166.
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66. “Preface,” OTC,. 159. We’ve taken the liberty to add the specification
“modern scientific” to abstraction. Throughout his OTC Goethe addresses the problems of scientific cognition and its tendency to excessive
abstraction (##310, 716, 754, and p. 162). For Goethe, as for Hegel, this
tendency is consequential and reckless. See note 52.
67. EOS, 25.
68. “Polarity,” in SS, 155; OTC #175; Letter to Herder, May 17, 1778 (in
Heller, 10).
69. OTC #732 (“expanded empiricism”).
70. “On Granite,” in SS, 132.
71. “A Study Based on Spinoza,” in SS, 8.
72. Despite Kant’s denial of such a human faculty in his Critique of Teleological Judgment, Goethe found a window of opportunity. He wrote that
Kant had “a roguishly ironic way of working: at times he seemed determined to put the narrowest limit on our ability to know things, and at
times, with a casual gesture, he pointed beyond the limits he himself had
set.” The passage in Kant that Goethe alludes to reads thus: “We can . . .
think [of a kind of] understanding which [unlike our discursive one
is] . . . intuitive, [and] proceeds from the synthetical-universal (the intuition of the whole as such) to the particular, i.e. from the whole to the
parts. . . . It is here not at all requisite to prove that such an intellectus archetypus is possible, but only that we are led to the idea of it—which too
contains no contradiction—in contrast to our discursive understanding,
which has need of images (intellectus ectypus) and to the contingency of
its constitution.” However, Goethe then drew the opposite conclusion:
“Why should it not also hold true in the intellectual area that through an
intuitive perception of eternally creative nature we may become worthy
of participating spiritually in its creative process?” he wonders. “Impelled
from the start by an inner need, I had striven unconsciously and incessantly toward primal image and prototype, and had even succeeded in
building up a method of representing it which conformed to nature. Thus
there was nothing further to prevent me from boldly embarking on this
‘adventure of reason’ (as the sage of Konigsberg himself called it).”
“Judgment through Intuitive Perception” (hereafter JIP), in SS, 31-2; also
EMOS, 11-17. Cf. Kant’s “aesthetic normal idea” in Critique of Aesthetic
Judgment, §17.
73. OTC #177; if we deny this faculty of intuitive perception we have no
real wholes.
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74. Letter to Herder, May 17, 1787: “I am very close to discovering the
secret of the creation and organization of plants. . . . The crucial point
from which everything else must needs spring. . . . The Urpflanze is to
be the strangest creature in the world. . . . After this model [visual formula] it will be possible to invent plants ad infinitum, which will all be
consistent...would possess an inner truth and necessity. And the same law
will be applicable to everything alive” (Heller, 10). Also OTC #175, “Polarity,” in SS, 155.
75. Urpflanze is often translated as “symbolic plant.” While this rendering
might be helpful if we keep a strictly Goethean notion of symbol in mind
(as in MR #314), this translation more often misdirects us if it suggests
to the reader either a mental abstraction or a literary device. Rather it
seeks to embody the manifold fruitfulness of nature “in potential” (“Outline for a General Introduction to Comparative Anatomy, Commencing
with Osteology” (hereafter GICA), in SS, 118).
76. “All is leaf.” MoP #119; OTC #120.
77. FE, 20; ECK November 14, 1823.
78. Letters to Schiller, February 10, 14, 1787 (in Heller, 20).
79. Hegel too—who otherwise was well disposed to Goethe’s project, indeed helped Goethe see how it fit into the larger scheme of the development of ideas—Hegel too nevertheless failed to see the Urpflanze as
anything but an abstracted archetype (See Hegel, The Letters, trans. Clark
Butler and Christiane Seiler [Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
1984], 681-711; HN, 11).
80. CP, 68-9. And we read in the Metamorphosis of Plants of the calyx
that it “betrays its composite origins in its more or less deep incisions or
divisions.”
81. ITP, 41.
82. OTC, 166. This may sound like ‘deconstruction,’ yet we would have
to consider whether it represents a true break with analytical thinking, as
Goethe seeks to do here.
83. CP, 69. Just as it led to his “discovering” the Ur-principle of the plant
kingdom, so Goethe is led in his other studies to “postulate” one for the
mammal family: “In the process I was soon obliged to postulate a prototype against which all mammals could be compared as to points of agreement and divergence. As I had earlier sought out the archetypal plant I
now aspired to find the archetypal animal; in essence the concept or idea
of the animal.”
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
85. Letter to Herder, May 17, 1787; OTC #175; “Polarity,” 155.
86. ITP, 41 (“ . . . my whole method relies on derivation”).
87. Aristotle’s eidos is not subject to metamorphosis. On the other side,
in Darwin the metamorphosis of form is not an unfolding of immanent
form but the haphazard “evolution of species” and creative adaptation on
the part of active wholes becomes “random selection.” See note 51. My
thanks to John Cornell for his helping me think this through.
88. OTC, #720.
89. OTC, #109.
90. MR #504.
91. ITP, 39. Also “If we take the significant dictum ‘know thyself’ and
consider it, we mustn’t interpret it from an ascetical standpoint. It does
not by any means signify the kind of self-knowledge advocated by our
modern hypochondriacs, humorists, and ‘Heautotimorumenoi’ [self-torturers], but quite simply means: pay some attention to yourself, watch
what you are doing so that you come to realize where you stand vis-à-vis
your fellows and the world in general. This needs no psychological selftorture; any capable person knows and appreciates this. It is good advice
and of the greatest practical advantage to everyone (MR, #657).” He objects only to those isolating tendencies of the subjective sciences and psychologies that are heir to the fateful alienation, if not divorce, of the ego
from the world.
92. ECK April 10, 1829.
93. ITP, 39.
94. MR #935; the whole passage reads “let him find a girl or a world, no
matter which, and he will become whole.” This is typical (see Eric Heller,
“Goethe in Marienbad,” in The Poet’s Self and The Poem, (London:
Athione Press, 1976).
95. MR #442 (“Try to do your duty and you’ll soon discover what you’re
like.”); also ##770, 935; ECK January 29, 1826.
96. ECK February 13, 1829.
97. HN, 226; also ECK October 18, 1827: In a conversation with Hegel
about the potential for modern sophistry of the “dialectic disease,”
Goethe says: “Let us only hope that these intellectual arts and dexterities
are not frequently misused, and employed to make the false true and
the true false. . . . The study of nature preserves me from such a disease.
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For here we have to deal with the infinitely and eternally true, which
throws off as incapable everyone who does not proceed purely and honestly with the treatment and observation of his subject. I am also certain
that many a dialectic disease would find a wholesome remedy in the
study of nature.”
98. ECK January 2, 1824; also March 12, 1828.
99. TI, #51.
100. Ibid., #49; cf. MR #864.
101. ECK January 2, 1824; letter to Zelter, June 18, 1831 (in HN, 27).
102. See also ECK January 24, 1825, October 12, 1825; February 1, 1827;
October 18, 1827; February 12, 1827; MR ##191 and 1121. See Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, passim. This affirmation is what Nietzsche found most admirable, indeed he was envious of this, for it was not
available to him. See “Afterword: Goethe and Nietzsche,” in Levine,
Worldless Truths, 163-65.
103. “A More Intense Chemical Activity in Primordial Matter,” SS, 137.
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Special Section:
Justice
Editor’s Note
In November of 2012, O. Carter Snead, Professor of Law at Notre
Dame Law School and Director of the Notre Dame Center for
Ethics and Culture, invited five tutors from St. John’s College in
Annapolis to speak at the Center’s thirteenth annual fall conference
entitled The Crowning Glory of the Virtures: Exploring the Many
Facets of Justice.
The following five papers were delivered on a panel session,
together with a sixth: “The Relevance of Lay Views on Punishment
to Criminal Justice” by Christopher Slobogin, Professor of Law
and Psychiatry at Vanderbilt Law School. A greatly expanded version of the paper was published the following month: Christopher
Slobogin and Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein, “Putting Desert in its
Place,” 65 Stanford Law Review 77 (January 2013). The article can
be accessed online at the following URL:
http://www.stanfordlawreview.org/sites/default/files/
Slobogin-65-Stan-L-Rev-77.pdf
�SPECIAL SECTION: JUSTICE
The Actual Intention of Plato’s
Dialogues on Justice and Statesmanship
Eva Brann
71
Cicero famously said of Socrates that he was the one who brought
philosophy down from heaven to earth. This must be some other
Socrates than the one of the Platonic dialogues, perhaps
Xenophon’s of the Memorabilia. After all, even the comic Socrates
of Aristophanes’s Clouds is a meteorologist, a watcher of the heavens, though he does it hoisted up in a basket, butt up. Of course,
he is a sky watcher, since that is where the vaporous and loquacious
Clouds—Aristophanes’s comic version of the Forms—are to be
found. Perhaps it would have been more accurate to say that
Socrates connected earthly matters, such as politics, to the invisible
heavens, the realm of the forms.
There are three Platonic dialogues overtly and extendedly concerned with politics. The first, the second longest of all the dialogues, is the Republic, in Greek Politeia. It bears the subtitle,
added in antiquity, “On the Just.” The second is the Statesman, in
Greek Politikos; its ancient subtitle was “On Kingship.” And the
third, the Laws, Nomoi in Greek, subtitled “On Legislation,” is by
far the longest.
In the Republic Socrates is both narrator and main interlocutor.
In the Statesman he is the originating occasion of the dialogue but
not a participant. He sits it out as an auditor, perhaps at times somewhat skeptical; the leading speaker is a visitor, or stranger, from
Elea, Parmenides’s hometown. Finally, the Laws don’t even take
place in Athens but in Crete, and Socrates doesn’t appear at all,
though there is an anonymous visitor, a stranger from Athens. Who
doubts that the Laws is a work of practical politics, in fact the
mother of constitutions? As the Athenian says: “Our logos . . . is
of cities, and frameworks and law-giving” (678a). Perhaps we
might even say that the farther Socrates is from a dialogue the more
it is merely earthly.
When I speak, in my title for this brief talk, about “The Actual
Intention” of the first two of these dialogues, I imply that in them
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all is not as it seems. Here is Rousseau’s opinion of the Republic,
taken from the first book of his Émile: “Those who judge books
merely by their titles take this for a treatise on politics, but it is the
finest treatise on education ever written.” And, indeed, the central
books of the ten that comprise the Republic are taken up with the
ontology, the philosophical framework, that must underlie education, and with the ensuing education itself. To be sure, the education discussed is that of the philosopher kings who will found and
maintain that best Politeia, the civic framework with which the Republic is concerned (473c).
And yet again, neither this civic framework for the best city,
which will be superintended by the philosopher kings, nor its justice is actually the intended topic of the Republic. For recall that
this city is devised as a model writ large of the soul (368d), a model
from which we can conveniently read off the nature of individual,
internal justice. The book we call the Republic rests on are two
tremendous assumptions: One is that political frameworks—not
only the best but even more strikingly the worst—are analogous
to, enlarged projections of, the soul. And the other, even prior one,
is that the soul ought to be our first topic of inquiry, and it is only
on the way to it that we discover political ideals: Psychology absolutely precedes Politics; Souls make States.
Thus it would be a fair argument to say that the particular political justice which is generally understood to be the peculiar contribution of the Republic is, in fact, a civic construction meant in
the first instance to incorporate a notion appropriate to internal,
psychic justice. For the three castes of the best city are delineated
in such a way that the famous definition of justice as “doing one’s
own business,” which falls out from the community’s constitution,
is applicable to the soul as Socrates conceives it. In other words,
the just city is built from the first to be an enlarged soul.
Let me outline how Socrates makes it work. These castes are
functionally defined, each by its own specific task within the city.
Moreover, they form a hierarchy of command and responsibility
such that any one caste’s transgression is in fact rebellion, factional
strife. Such internal dissension is, however, nearly the worst fate—
as any Greek knew or should have learned in the course of the
�SPECIAL SECTION: JUSTICE | BRANN
73
Peloponnesian War (Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, 2.82)—
that could befall a political community, because it is the prelude to
tyranny. To reiterate: for Socrates, the maladjusted and dysfunctional soul is the antecedent cause of political evil.
It is to me an unresolved problem whether Socrates was in politics the anti-egalitarian he is sometimes accused of having been.
In his demeanor, and what matters more, his conversations, he
seems as populist as possible, not much impressed by smart young
aristocrats about to go to the bad, like Critias, Charmides and Alcibiades; moreover, in the Republic he says of a democracy that
it’s “handy for searching out a politeia” (577d)—which happens
to be what he himself is doing right then, down in the city’s most
democratic district, its harbor. The solution to the problem depends
on how we look at the kallipolis, the “fair city” that he’s found or
made: Is it and its justice a serious political proposal, on a par in
earnestness with Aristotle’s Politics in antiquity or Locke’s, Montesquieu’s, and Rousseau’s works at the beginning of modernity?
In view of the motive for the constitution of Socrates’s city, that is
a reasonable question.
To lend my exposition some specificity let me give you the
briefest reminder of the model city, both as best and as paradigmatic for the soul—and let me once more anticipate the result: The
human soul too will be a hierarchy of functional parts, and it too
will sport the virtues displayed by the city, now operating in individual human beings much as they did in the community.
At the bottom of the city’s castes, then, are the craftsmen and
tradesmen whose business it is to perform their particular work
well and profitably, and to attend just to those assignments and no
other. Beyond that, they are pretty free and prosperous, and thus
satisfied. They are without a specific caste virtue other than competence, for they are driven by appetite rather than character. But
they are the class for the particular operation of the most encompassing virtue, justice. Justice is the virtue of the part and the
whole, of each part doing its own thing and thereby preserving the
integrity of the whole. (Temperance is another non-specific virtue,
that of agreeableness in the sense that each caste is accepting of its
position in the hierarchy.)
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The middle caste consists of the warriors who guard the city,
and it is the training ground of kings. This caste is defined by their
spiritedness, and it is the locus of honor, the source of a soldier’s
satisfaction through danger. These warriors do have a particular
virtue, courage.
The ruling caste is comprised of the philosopher kings, whose
virtue is wisdom and in whom the intellectual part, thoughtfulness,
dominates. Their satisfaction is the highest; their happiness is subject to interruption by the duties of governing. This hardship is,
however, alleviated by their affection for the young they teach—
and by a more selfish fact: that the city is essentially set up to protect philosophizing, one of quite a few signs that all is not as it
seems in this Republic.
There are certainly some other odd, even bizarre, aspects to be
observed in this political device. Its strict hierarchy of command
is inverted in respect to prosperity; the lowest caste, the craftsmen
and merchants are the rich ones, the warriors are allowed no
wealth. At the end of the books on the construction and the deconstruction of this city, we’re told outright that it is “a model laid up
in heaven” for anyone to look at who “wishes to found himself;
he’ll practice its politics only and no other” (592b; italics mine).
In other words, we really have all along been participating in soulconstruction rather than city-construction. But oddest is the notion
that the governors of this “fair city,” the philosopher kings, don’t
want to rule it—indeed, this reluctance is a criterion of fitness.
In fact, the education is set up so as to cancel political ambition—indeed, to capture the love of future kings for another realm,
to alienate them from the earthly city. For they are to have a carefully graduated program of learning, elevating them beyond the
world of appearances into the world of forms, the world of pure
trans-earthly being. That’s why Cicero’s dictum that I began
with—about Socrates bringing philosophy down for the heavens
to the earth—sounds so, well, inept.
In particular, the study that is the capstone of the education,
that levers the learner into this world of being and drags him out
of the terrestrial slime, is dialectic (531 ff.), of which more in a
moment. Now for Socrates—to the astonishment and disgust of a
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practical statesman like Jefferson, who waded contemptuously
through the “whimsies” and “nonsense” of the Republic (to Adams,
July 15, 1814) – the study of supra-worldly forms, of beings, is the
proper foundation for government. This is especially the case insofar as statesmanship is concerned with the virtues of justice, temperance, courage, and wisdom. For obviously, to properly locate
these in the city, in the civic community, it is necessary to know
them. But to know them is not a matter of empirical research but
of dialectical (that is, ontological) inquiry, a matter of the study of
beings as beings, the study of Being itself. So the education does,
after all, have a political purpose—if we agree that ethics, the inculcation and preservation of virtue, is the end of the polis and its
politikoi, the civic community and its statesmen. I do not think any
contemporary citizen, attached to our Madisonian tradition, can
really agree—nor wholly disagree—and that is one of the many
reasons why the Republic is indispensable to political inquiry. For
it raises the question of justice in this original way: Is justice in the
sense of the Republic, as the proper adjustment of the faculties of
the soul—in particular the ready subordination of the lower parts
to reason—the condition for political unity and civic peace? From
this question falls out a whole slew of problems: Can we commit
ourselves to a psychology of faculties such as those involved in
the Socratic psychic constitution? And if so, is the adjustment of
the functions and their subordination to reason a persuasive analysis of psychological soundness? And if so, does it follow that the
adjustment is a political—or even a social—task? And if so, can a
democracy produce government wise enough to accomplish these
psychic adjustments, to induce virtue?
Before going on to the Statesman, I want to return to Rousseau:
Is the real business of the Republic indeed education, rather than
politics? Socrates never says so explicitly, nor can he, since the
program there presented is not just an education for leadership
loosely speaking, but very specifically the education of kings—
and, as Socrates makes very clear, of queens (540c). It is an education very specifically geared to the Republic’s polis—although
it will, amazingly, become the general model of higher, liberal education, lasting until the middle of the last century.
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Nevertheless, I think Rousseau is right. Indeed, some aspects
of this “fair city” have been politically and socially realized: the
equality of men and women and (to some extent) the community
of marriage partners and children. But by and large it has remained,
blessedly, “a pattern laid up in heaven,” for it has its repulsive aspects. Its educational program, on the other hand, has, as I said,
cast loose and become viable even in a democracy, because what
is nowadays called its elitism is not an intellectually integral part
of this kind of learning. In fact, the college where my two translation partners and I teach, St. John’s College, is a remarkably close
incarnation of it, and it revels in its intellectual egalitarianism. That
is one more element in an argument that political justice is not the
actually intended topic of the Republic.
So now to the dialogue called The Statesman, a conversation
to which Socrates only listens. Here, at one point, things become
startlingly explicit. Near the very middle of the conversation the
stranger makes an announcement under the form of a rhetorical
question asked in that throwaway tone that alerts the reader of dialogues to a crucial turn. It concerns the ostensible search for the
true statesman. “Has it been proposed,” he asks, “for the sake of
this man himself rather than for our becoming more dialectical
about all things” (285d)? And the answer is: plainly for learning
to think dialectically. We thought we were learning about governing well; it turns out we are involved in a logical training exercise
using a universally applicable technique—dialectic, the expertise
of dividing and collecting subjects by terms.
Socrates is, once more, not a participant in this conversation,
and this dialectic is not quite his dialectic. His dialectic was a way
by which apt students, through being questioned cleverly and answering carefully, had their opinions, their mere assumptions
about the way things are, demolished and then reconstituted, so
that they might be led up into a solid knowledge of the true
sources of these things. It was, in short, an ascending way of learning. The stranger’s dialectic is a method that works the other way
around. From a tacitly assumed overview of the whole, the accomplished dialectician makes divisions (diaireseis). When he has
arrived at what will in later time (when this method has turned
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into the technique of classification) be called the “lowest species,”
he goes back up, making a collection of terms. These add up to a
definition. Many of our students begin by thinking that that is
what Socrates does when he philosophizes—he makes definitions.
Of course a collection of terms is not what Socrates looks for
when he asks, say, the question, “What is justice?”—but it is a
preparation for an answer.
Is definition-making, however, what the Elean Stranger believes to be the profitable end product of the dialectic for which
the statesman is only an example? No, nothing so unsubtle, as I’ll
try to show in a minute.
Not that this more subtle use of division is likely to have satisfied the auditing Socrates. We three translators of the Statesman
express this sense of his skepticism by our assignment of the last
speech of the dialogue. Someone says: “Most beautifully . . .
you’ve completed for us the kingly man, stranger, and the statesman.” Now the stranger’s interlocutor in the Statesman is a young
man who is also called Socrates. There is some question among
scholars whether the older or the younger Socrates speaks this valedictory line. We thought our Socrates, the older one, couldn’t have
thought it, and so he didn’t say it.
Here is what the stranger does with the dialectical art of division. First, the whole dialogue is a composition of divisions. To
see its handsome design, that of a tapestry, it is helpful to work
through its dialectical episodes and the way they are sewn together,
like the pieces of a figured robe. The beauties of this dialogue are
not imaginatively visual but logically structural; this text is a texture. But this cloaklike characteristic is not just a stylistic formalism. It signals that this new dialectic is a craft that produces
practical results. Its physical exemplification, and the great
metaphor of the dialogue, is weaving, cloak-making in particular.
And making intertwined, protective, enveloping compositions
turns out to be the royal art, the discerning and composing craft of
the statesman. This is no transcendentally derived wisdom, but a
technical expertise. For the subject of the Statesman, as contrasted
with the Republic, is unambiguously political; it is concerned with
human herds. However, from the vantage point of the king of
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crowds, of herds, the internal relations disposing the soul of an individual human being, which are the concern of the Republic, recede; they lie below the royal oversight. And with that distance
diminishes the interest in justice, which was, after all, the right relation of the soul’s parts. So justice is indeed no big concern of the
statesman, be it of the man or of the dialogue named after him.
So the statesman, who is, thus, not a philosopher king but an
expert ruler, sees each soul from afar as displaying one permanent
characteristic. My colleague Peter Kalkavage will point out the exceedingly interesting consequences for statesmanship of what he
discerns and what, again as a consequence, true statesmanship must
be. It is, its royal denomination notwithstanding, an expertise much
closer, I think, to our idea of politics than the philosophical rule of
the Republic.
Then what happens to the stranger’s startling claim, with
which I began my remarks on the Statesman? How can the dialogue’s real purpose be an exercise in dialectic when it will be
shown to be so precise and practical a doctrine about managing
multitudes?
Well, the Statesman is neatly reflexive. It is, one might say, a
self-reentrant dialogue. For by relentless dialectical division the
stranger establishes the precise location of the statesman in the
whole economy of crafts and sciences, materials and products,
regimes and rulers, virtues and vices. And in the course of doing
that, he is indeed also giving a lesson in the method of division to
young Socrates. It may even be that his teaching actually has more
effect on a finer young man who is also present, a second silent
listener, one of old Socrates’s two favorite partners in inquiry,
namely Theaetetus (the other being Glaucon in the Republic).
Then here’s the denouement: The art of dialectic, the ability
to distinguish perspicaciously the parts of any subject, an art for
which weaving is a very precise figure, is the true statesman’s expertise. Statesmanship, then, is the craft of setting up a civic
framework, a loom upon which the citizens of various temperaments, here the warp and woof, are interwoven into a cloaklike
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texture, which represents at once the body politic and its protective cover, as if to say that a well-interlaced citizenry will wrap
itself in its own constitution for security.
On this conclusion old Socrates may, after all, have smiled.
For among the Greeks weaving is always a women’s art, and that
women might match men as rulers is a teaching of his Republic.
So ends the Statesman, a dialogue that sets forth a doctrine of governing which requires an expertise for which participation in the
dialogue is itself the training.
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Reflections on Justice in Fyodor
Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov
Chester Burke
The last book of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov is entitled
“A Judicial Error” because Dmitri Karamazov, the eldest Karamazov brother, is incorrectly found guilty of murdering his father Fyodor. Nearly all the spectators in the packed courtroom are stunned
by the verdict, despite the fact that most of them had assumed that
Dmitri had indeed committed the murder. Only his brother
Alyosha, his recently captivated love Grushenka, and his other
brother Ivan are certain of Dmitri’s evidence—Alyosha, because
of the innocence on Dmitri’s face when he said he hadn’t done the
deed; Grushenka, because “Dmitri isn’t the sort of man who would
lie” (683);* and Ivan, despite his loathing of Dmitri, because he
visits Fyodor’s illegitimate son Smerdyakov the night before the
trial and forces him to confess to the murder. Later that night,
Smerkdyakov commits suicide. Ivan’s testimony becomes worthless when, suffering from brain fever, he goes mad on the witness
stand, claiming that the only witness to this stunning revelation is
the Devil.
The first chapter of this final book is entitled “The Fatal Day.”
In the paragraph that concludes the previous chapter, Alyosha says
to himself, “Yes, with Smerdyakov dead, no one will believe Ivan’s
testimony; but he will go and testify . . . God will win!” (655) Having heard these three powerful words, “God will win,” the reader
is thrown into the human drama, that is, the trial. How can the truth
emerge from such a gigantic public spectacle, in which every one
of the participants has entered with his private opinions and passions? Dostoevsky characterizes the spectators, standing “in a
closely packed lump, shoulder to shoulder” (657), as having been
* Page references are to Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov,
trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Farrar, Strauss
& Giroux, 2002).
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enflamed by impatience. The women favor Dmitri’s acquittal and
the men, many of whom have been personally insulted by Dmitri,
wish to see him punished. The prosecutor, Ippolit Kirillovich, trembles at having to oppose a famous Petersburg defense attorney,
whom he feels has overshadowed him since their younger days in
Petersburg. He believes that everything is at stake in this trial, both
for himself and for Russia. Fetyukovich, the famous defense attorney, exudes an air of confidence. The reader may feel a little uneasy
when Dostoevsky describes his eyes as small and inexpressive:
“his physiognomy had something sharply birdlike about it, which
was striking” (660-61). The material evidence with which the
reader is so familiar, wrenched from its living context, is on display
in the middle of the courtroom.
The prosecutor, known for (and sometimes ridiculed for) his
passion for psychology, puts together an account that seems to
make sense of all the facts, even though the defense attorney, having digested the situation with astonishing rapidity, is able to discredit many of the witnesses. Readers take delight in this passage,
because they have previous knowledge of these witnesses and the
ugliness of their souls. The prosecutor tells the compelling story
of Dmitri finishing “a poem” (717) that culminates in the murder
of his father, the stealing of 3,000 rubles, and running off madly to
find his lover Grushenka, only to relinquish her to a man who
abused her as a young girl. The defense attorney then accuses the
prosecutor of writing his own novel, of being a psychological poet
whose psychology is two-pronged and therefore equally capable
of proving a given statement of fact and its opposite. He masterfully shows that only the totality of the facts— and not a single
one of them in isolation—speak against his client.
Though he claims to demonstrate the limitations of psychology, the defense attorney is in fact a far better psychologist than
the prosecutor. He argues persuasively that there was no money,
no robbery, and no murder—at least no murder committed by
Dmitri. Seeing far deeper into Smerdyakov’s soul than most, the
defense attorney gives good reasons why Smerdyakov could have
killed his natural father.
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Only the reader has the privilege of having witnessed Dmitri,
filled with loathing in front of his hateful father, pulling out a brass
pestle from his pocket—and then not using it. Why didn’t Dmitri
kill his father? “God was watching over me then,” Dmitri used to
say afterwards. This is another reference to a divine intervention
that seems to have no place in a court of justice. (Recall Alyosha’s
“God will win!”) Due to Fetyukovich’s skill in destroying each
part of the whole accusation, there is, however, a reasonable chance
that Dmitri will either be released or at worst given minimal punishment. But in the chapter entitled “A Sudden Catastrophe,”
Dmitri’s spurned lover Katya, ready to sacrifice her honor for his
brother Ivan, who has just been carried out of the court suffering
an attack of brain fever, comes forward with a letter from Dmitri
that she has been withholding. She presumably intends to use the
letter to save Dmitri, despite the fact that he has stolen 3,000 rubles
from her—the entirety of which she thinks he has spent in a single
drunken binge with her rival Grushenka that night before the murder. In this letter, written just two days before the murder, Dmitri
says that he will get hold of the money he has stolen from her, even
if he has to rob and kill his father to do so. The reader knows that
Katya asked Dmitri to send these 3,000 rubles to a relative in
Moscow, though she fully believed at the time that he would spend
the entire sum on Gurschenka. Two other facts must be remembered: 1) before the events of the novel, Dmitri lent Katya 5,000
rubles to cover up a financial indiscretion committed by her father;
2) Dmitri (who did not in fact steal the 3,000 rubles from his father)
spent only half of Katya’s 3,000 rubles during his wild night with
Grushenka. He retained the rest in a packet tied around his chest,
uncertain whether to return the unspent half to Katya (thus removing half of his disgrace), or to keep it for the opportunity of running
off with Grushenka.
It is only natural that the reader should be confused by the intricate adding and subtracting of monetary sums. Dostoevsky, always in need of money himself, deftly uses sums of money to show
how human beings struggle to regulate equality, honor, pride, and
justice among themselves.
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But back to the letter. This suddenly revealed document, an
apparent blueprint of the murder, gives “mathematical significance” (619) to the prosecutor’s case. And though the words
“mathematical significance” are a clear signal to readers of Dostoevsky that whatever is certain in this way is certainly not true, it
is equally certain that a jury will be very unlikely to yield a verdict
of not guilty in the face of such evidence.
Aware of the difficulty of achieving a verdict of not guilty, and
despite having just produced his own “demonstration” that there
was no money, robbery, or murder, Fetyukovich (whose name in
Russian suggests the words “jerk, drip, sourpuss”) addresses the
jury, changing his tone and his approach: “I have it in my heart to
speak out something more to you, for I also sense a great struggle
in your hearts and minds. . . Forgive my speaking of your hearts
and minds, gentlemen of the jury, but I want to be truthful and sincere to the end.” “I do not renounce one iota of what I have just
said, but suppose I did, suppose for a moment that I, too, agreed
with the prosecution that my unfortunate client stained his hands
with his father’s blood” (741).
This begins the second part of Fetyukovich’s summary to the
jury. Dostoevsky entitles the chapter “An Adulterer of Thought,”
without any comment on this astonishing title. Since the corpse of
a father is the only fact in the case that could speak against his
client, Fetyukovich tries to show that Fyodor was not at all a father.
He masterfully summarizes the most poignant scenes in the novel
in order to paint Fyodor in the worst possible light. He shows why
it would have been completely natural for Dmitri to have beaten
and killed his father (who is in truth not a father) with the fatal pestle (which the reader knows was not even the real murder weapon)
without intention or premeditation. “Such a murder is not a murder.
Such a murder is not a parricide, either. Such a murder can be considered parricide only out of prejudice” (747). The attorney then
invokes a passage from the gospel according to Matthew, and compares Dmitri’s plight to that of Christ. The most terrible punishment, but the only one by which Dmitri’s soul will be saved, would
be for the jury to overwhelm him with mercy. Only then would
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Dmitiri— horrified by his deed—which, according to the defense
attorney’s earlier argument, Dmitri had not done)—realize that he
was guilty before all people.
Fetyukovich “adulterates thought” by fabricating a dangerous
novel (“novel upon novel,” shouts the prosecutor [748]), a concoction that is all the more wicked because it is a false image of Father
Zosima’s teaching. And, more important, it is the opposite of what
Dostoevsky has spent his whole life attempting to articulate. Only
the prosecutor, “breathless, inarticulate, confused” and “shaking
with emotion” (748), has the courage to respond. Of course his response will receive no sympathy from the mass of spectators, especially the mothers and fathers, who have amazingly enough
become enraptured by the words of the adulterer. Though the prosecutor is vain and beaten down by a failed life, though his superficial psychology prevents him from understanding the motives
and actions of the human beings right in front of him, he knows
with certainty that one cannot kill and not kill at the same time,
that one cannot praise and immortalize a man who murders his father, and that a false image of Christ and religion have been fabricated by his talented competitor. The reader is easily irritated by
the just response of this pathetic man (the prosecutor will himself
die soon after the trial) to a powerful and dangerous speech that is
arguing for a new understanding of human justice, one that includes a notion of mercy which could only be found in God or in
the heart of an individual human being.
I have pointed out that Dmitri, the prosecutor, and the defense
attorney have all been accused of acting out novels. By his subtle
but powerful use of chapter titles, Dostoevsky himself takes the
harshest stance toward the defense attorney. The Russian word for
“adulterer” (or “fornicator”) is a variation of the word for “lover.”
Fetyukovich, who claims to be able to feel “invisible threads that
bind the defense attorney and the jury together,” whom everyone,
including himself, expects to pull off some kind of miracle by proving Dmitri innocent when he is guilty, ends up by “proving” Dmitri
guilty when in truth he is innocent. His call to regenerate not only
Dmitri but also Russia herself is met with rapture and enthusiastic
weeping among the spectators, and the reader too is likely to be
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sympathetic. When he pleads with the jury to show mercy to
Dmitri even if he did kill his father, he shows himself not to be a
seeker of truth but to be unjust—indeed, an adulterer of thought.
He is unjust because he portrays Christ as an enlightened and compassionate liberal rather than the Son of God, who died in order to
save human beings from the power of sin.
We can detest Fyodor Karamazov in the depths of our souls.
We can pity the children that he brought into the world. We can
wish that he were dead and wonder why such a man is alive. But
we cannot excuse the man who killed him. That man, Smerdyakov,
hangs himself from a nail on his wall with a brief note saying that
he alone is responsible for his own death. This extreme isolation
is what Dostoevsky sees as the dreadful future of a world that denies God. Instead of hanging an icon or image of God on the wall,
we will end up destroying ourselves. Dostoevsky the novelist, committed to real justice and truth, cannot allow the jury to be won
over by this adultery of thought, even though what results is a momentary injustice in a court of law. By entitling the next chapter
“Our Peasants Stood Up for Themselves,” he shows that he is
pleased that the peasants (who comprise half of the jury) are not
seduced by this highest and ultimately most dangerous form of seduction. Though their verdict was incorrect, the peasants understood a deeper truth and rightly stood up for it. Their hearts rejected
false novels.
But the real novel ends several months after Dmitri receives
his sentence. It ends with the burial of a ten-year old schoolboy,
Ilyusha. Dmitri had gravely insulted Ilyusha’s father, a retired and
drunken officer known as the Captain, by dragging him out of a
tavern and across town, pulling him by his wispy beard. Desperate
to provide for his family—his wife and older daughter are crippled
and ill—the Captain was employed by Fyodor, assisting him in
shady financial dealings. One of them was to buy up Dmitri’s
promissory notes so as to bring him to financial disgrace. Seeing
his father publicly humiliated, the young Ilyusha begged Dmitri to
forgive his father, “rushing up to everyone asking them to defend
him, but everyone laughed” (192). When Ilyusha’s schoolmates
heard about the incident they teased him mercilessly. The next day
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he angrily threw stones at them, but he himself received a great
blow to the chest. He came down with a fever, and died two days
after Dmitri was sentenced for the murder he did not commit.
Given Dostoevsky’s masterful juxtaposition of scenes and
events, it would be easy to connect Dmitri’s punishment with the
death of this young boy. As the proud and angry Katya says to
Alyosha, “Dmitri committed a rash and unjust act, a very ugly act”
(193). She commissions Alyosha to give a large sum of money to
the Captain in recompense for this act. The attempt at justice (in
truth Katya, herself recently injured by Dmitri, considers herself a
fellow sufferer) does not work at first. The Captain initially takes
the money, imagining a way out of abject poverty for himself and
his miserable family. But suddenly, shaking and tearful, flings
down the money at Alyosha’s feet. He will eventually take not only
this money, but much more from the generous, though proud,
Katya. But his son will nonetheless die and the doctors will not be
able to cure his family.
It was not unlikely that the previously consumptive Ilyushka’s
life would have been short. But that is not the point. All of us are
continually doing harm to our fellow human beings. While it does
not seem possible that any system of justice could regulate the
damages, we humans are always trafficking amongst one another,
exchanging goods and money in an attempt to achieve some kind
of fairness.
“Each of us is guilty in everything before everyone, and I most
of all” (289). This puzzling statement, lying powerfully in the
background of the novel, is said repeatedly by Father Zosima
throughout the novel. I have tried to show that Fetyukovich’s version is a dangerous adulteration of this claim. Dmitri, Ivan,
Smerdyakov, and even Alyosha can be held responsible for the
death of their father. Yet only one human being killed Fyodor and
it is the responsibility of the legal system to find and punish that
human being. Dmitri had previously thrown his father to the floor
and brutally kicked him, suspecting that Fyodor was hiding
Grushenka from him. Though drunk, he had written the damning
letter. Ivan had tacitly given Smerdyakov permission to kill Fyodor
by leaving town on the day of the murder; even worse, he had spent
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much of the night before his departure listening for sounds in the
house, unconsciously anticipating and desiring that someone would
come and kill his dreadful father. Alyosha, distracted by the death
of his hero Zosima, and overwhelmed with grief by the dishonor
of Zosima’s rotting corpse, had forgotten to keep in contact with
Dmitri. But Smerdyakov, having spent his entire life serving a family whose members he despised—except for Ivan, whose respect
he craved—understood the character of these Karamazovs, at least
in its baser aspects. He was able to set up a scenario in which it
would be possible for him to kill Fyodor, who trusted him, and
then steal the 3,000 rubles for which Dmitri had claimed he would
risk all. With this money, Smerdyakov imagined that he could start
a new life. And only Ivan could get Smerdyakov to confess—Ivan,
who, though he hated bitterly both his father Fyodor and his
brother Dmitri, had a conscience deeper than he himself knew.
During their conversation about the murder, Smerdyakov comes
to understand the emptiness and dishonesty of Ivan’s thoughts,
though he understands nothing of Ivan’s heart. And in that understanding about his former idol, he gives up on life, which had never
offered him anything but pain and misery. Smerdyakov—far cleverer and wiser than even the most observant reader could suspect—
sees that Ivan is more like his father than any of the brothers.
The chain of responsibility is endless. Grushenka says in
court, “It all happened because of me” (682)—claiming responsibility both for Fyodor’s and Dmitri’s falling in love with her.
Shortly thereafter, she says of Katerina, who had tried to charm
her out of loving Dmitri, “She is the cause of everything” (683).
And at the time of Dmitri’s arrest, Grushenka, hearing that Dmitri
had supposedly killed his father, had cried, “I am the guilty one,
first and foremost, I am the guilty one!” (457)
But everyone gets the problem of justice wrong, precisely because it is impossible to see clearly into the heart of another
human being. Father Zosima immediately understands the danger
looming before the Karamazov family in the first chapters of the
novel. That is why he bows before Dmitri and encourages Alyosha
to look after him. But Zosima cannot control the outcomes stemming from human nature. He can only preach “active love”—a
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difficult and profound concept derserving of another talk—and he
can pray.
While I do not claim that the following is a solution to the
problem of human justice, I’d like to end this talk with a quotation
from Father Zosima:
If it were not for Christ’s Church, indeed there would
be no restraint on the criminal in his evildoing and no
punishment for it later, real punishment, that is, not a
mechanical one . . . , which only chafes the heart in most
cases, but a real punishment, the only frightening and
appeasing punishment which lies in the acknowledgement of one’s own conscience (64).
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Peaceniks and Warmongers:
The Disunity of Virtue
in Plato’s Statesman
Peter Kalkavage
89
I want to begin by saying how my theme is related to justice. Plato
and Aristotle often connect justice with wholeness. And it is wholeness—the whole of virtue and the whole of a political community—that is very much at issue, and at risk, in Plato’s Statesman.
Perhaps at risk as well is the wholeness of logos or discourse.
Plato’s mysterious stranger from Elea delights in division. In
the Sophist he uses the method of dividing genera or kinds to pin
down the elusive professor of wisdom. In the Statesman he uses
this same method, with some modifications, to show the genuine
statesman and king “naked and alone by himself” (304a). But the
stranger isn’t all about logic. Like Socrates, he enjoys images of
all sorts and regularly avails himself of their curious power to illuminate. In the Statesman, soon after the great myth about reversed
becoming, the stranger announces the need for paradigms in inquiry.
He tells young Socrates that they would do well in their search if
they came up with a paradigm that would, in its small and humble
way, help to reveal the magisterial form, the eidos, of the true king
(277d).
This paradigm, as we soon hear, is weaving (279b). Politics is
the master-art that weaves together all the other arts in the city and
bends them to its high purpose. But it is not until late in the dialogue, almost at the end, that the precise meaning of the paradigm
is explained. The true statesman, we discover, knows how to interweave courageous and moderate types of souls. To use the language of the paradigm, he combines the warp or hard woollen
threads, which resemble courageous natures, with the woof or soft
threads, which resemble moderate natures. Properly combined,
these human threads produce “the web of statesmanly action”
(311B). This web is the wisely constituted polis—the beautiful end
of politics conceived as a productive art.
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But the path to this beautiful end requires an account that the
stranger calls “somewhat astonishing”—astonishing because it
proceeds from the view that virtue is not a happy unity, in which
different portions of virtue are “friendly” to one another, as the
many say and as Socrates suggests in other dialogues. On the contrary, virtue has within it, and seems even to be defined by, a war
between courage and moderation. The stranger is unsparing in his
formulation. The two virtues, he says, “have a deep-seated enmity
toward one another and maintain an oppositional faction in many
of the things that are” (306b). The stranger, we must note, does not
ask Socrates’ question: What is virtue? Instead, he posits an opposition between two forms of virtue. This opposition, more than anything else in the dialogue, defines the political art.
To illustrate his point, the stranger urges young Socrates to consider the two forms (eidē) that come to light when we praise things
for their beauty—various doings and makings, whether of bodies
or of souls (306c). We praise things that manifest “keenness and
swiftness.” These can be the things themselves or their images—
the swift movement of a runner, for example, or a vase painting
depicting such a runner. The name for what underlies such praise
is andreia, “courage” or “manliness.” This is the form we are admiring when we praise the keen and the swift.
But we also praise what the stranger calls “the gentle form of
generation.” We praise as beautiful those actions and thoughts that
are quiet, modulated, slow, and careful. The name for this form is
orderliness or composure, kosmiotēs (307b) It refers to moderation
as the virtue of keeping things measured and undisturbed. We think
of things like a smooth transition in a piece of music or a soothing
tone of voice. To sum up, we are thoroughly contradictory in our
praise of beauty. We praise as beautiful those things that have a
manly look, and we also praise the look that is opposed to manliness. Furthermore, we blame as ugly both what is opposed to manliness and what is opposed to the opposite of manliness, that is,
what is opposed to moderation. We do all this, we should note, not
because we are inept but because beauty itself is self-opposed.
Shifting now from things that display opposed virtues to the
very natures of courage and moderation, the stranger refers to these
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as “looks [ideas] destined . . . to be split apart in hostile faction.”
He then turns to the people who have these natures in their souls,
not by choice or upbringing but by nature (307b-c). Faction is here
described as a feud between warring families. Members of each
family judge the beautiful and the good solely in terms of their
family virtue, and hate members of the other family simply because
they are in the other family. This love of Same and hate of Other
blinds each family to the common, if problematic, eidos of virtue
that both families share. Each family, by virtue of its virtue, is blind
to the virtue and beauty of the other. As a consequence, members
of neither family really know their own virtue, since they do not
know why and in what manner their characteristic virtue is beautiful and good. Because of this blindness and the mutual hate it engenders, the two families, though they live in cities, may be said
to occupy, in Hobbes’s phrase, a pre-political “state of nature” with
respect to virtue.
As if this situation weren’t bad enough, the stranger goes on to
say that the family feud between noble types is child’s play compared with the disease that is “the most hateful of all for cities”
(307d). It is here that the stranger shows why the two forms of
virtue, and the two opposed types of soul, constitute the central
problem of politics. Indeed, he demonstrates the urgent need of the
political art in the Reign of Zeus, the era in which the world has
been abandoned by its divine shepherd and guide.
The stranger gives a devastating portrait of what happens to
cities that fall prey to the ethos of peace at any cost. He refers, paradoxically, to the eros for composure (307e)—the only appearance
of this word in the dialogue—as if to say: “Look at these people,
young Socrates. To themselves they seem all calm and reserved,
but in fact they have a disordered desire for order. Why, they are
as crazy as a man in love!” Perhaps there is also the suggestion
that eros, for the stranger, is to be associated with what is soft or
tender rather than with the sort of tough love that Diotima describes
in the Symposium (203c-e). In any case, because of their unmeasured love of order, these people slip unwittingly into an unwarlike
condition and raise their children to be similarly unwarlike. The
condition spreads through the city like an infection and becomes
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more virulent with each generation. Since unmixed moderation
cannot accommodate itself to the aggression of an enemy, cannot
rouse citizens to display a decisive and manly spirit when this is
needed, the city eventually loses its freedom and becomes enslaved.
The very same result awaits the macho city that wants war at
any cost and is driven by thymos, spiritedness, rather than eros.
The rage for courage leads citizens and rulers to be constantly tensing up their cities for opportunities to display what they wrongly
take to be the whole of virtue. Before too long, the city that idolizes
courage eventually picks a fight with the wrong adversary, an
enemy it can’t vanquish, and so is vanquished in turn. Like the
peace-loving city, the war-driven city ends in destruction and slavery (308a).
Now we normally think of faction, stasis, as the strife between
two parties within a single city. But the stranger’s view in the present context is very different. The political problem par excellence
is, for him, not violent heterogeneity (for example, champions of
oligarchy vs. champions of democracy) but virtuous homogeneity,
the idolatry of one of two opposed virtues, either courage or moderation. To be sure, there is faction in its usual sense within the
form of virtue. This is the eidetic situation, known only to the
philosophic statesman. But the real-life political problem occurs
when the two naturally opposed virtues are not simultaneously
present. Hence, as the stranger sees it, the devastating political outcome of the principle “likes attract and opposites repel” is enacted
on the stage of inter-polis relations, when a city suffers destruction
at the hands of another city rather than from internal discord. The
stranger is surely not unaware of the evils of faction in this latter
sense—the horrors, for example, that Thucydides describes in the
case of Corcyra (Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War,
3.82). But for the stranger this is not the central political problem,
which has its source in the eidetic opposition between the beautifully tough and the beautifully gentle that pervades “many of the
things that are.” The problem is not vice, or human nature simply,
or intense disagreement over which regime is best, but virtue,
which is by nature turned against itself.
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We might try to make sense of the stranger’s unsettling account
by citing Aristotle’s distinction between natural and ethical virtue,
the latter being guided by the intellectual virtue of phronēsis or
practical wisdom, which allows the virtuous individual to avoid
excess and deficiency by perceiving the mean (Nichomachean
Ethics, 6.13). This is helpful to an extent, but it takes the sting out
of the stranger’s insight into why virtue is a problem. The stranger
would no doubt agree with Aristotle’s opinion that virtuous dispositions, when left to themselves, are dangerous, and that they
need practical wisdom in order to be reliable virtues. But far more
important to the stranger is the primordial dyad of courage and
moderation—the dyad that defines the task of the political art.
That task is not how to interweave a multiplicity of virtues in order
to make them one but how to unite two naturally opposed virtues
so that they may complement rather than repel one another and
contribute their distinctive powers to the political web. These are
toughness and flexibility, quickness and caution, forcefulness and
grace.
It is tempting to say that the problem of politics, for the stranger,
is that of knowing how to interweave the male and the female
forms of ethical beauty. It is true that each virtue, by the stranger’s
account, must apply to both men and women. How else could one
trait come to dominate a city’s population through marriage and
procreation? Nevertheless, the manliness of courage strongly suggests as its correlate the femininity of moderation. If we admit this
sexual distinction in the case of the two virtues, it becomes interesting, to say the least, that the paradigm for political wisdom in
the dialogue is the feminine art of weaving. This may be Plato’s
way of showing that, of the two opposed virtues, moderation, as
the love of order and peace, is closer than courage to justice and
wisdom. It may also show Plato’s philosophic preference for
music over gymnastic, since weaving engages in deft material harmonization. In good statesmanship, as in philosophy, grace trumps
force to become the greatest force of all. This is true even for our
tough-minded, methodically rigorous stranger, who tells young
Socrates that the statesman and good lawgiver knows how to instil
right opinions in others “by the muse of kingship” (309d).
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The stranger proceeds to outline the education and nurture that
will generate the needful thing—the artful synthesis of virtuous
opposites in a coherent political whole. This whole, this web, in
order to be beautiful, requires beautiful threads that have been previously prepared by means of a subsidiary art. Statesmanship, like
all compositional art, is elitist: only the best materials will do. And
so, there must be an artful way to determine who is fit for an ethical-political education, and who is not. This consists in observing
children at play in order to see which ones show signs of a virtuous
disposition, whether of courage or moderation. The stranger lays
special emphasis on those who prove to be uneducable. He describes them as “violently driven off course by a bad nature into
godlessness and arrogance and injustice” (308E-309A). The political art, here seen in its harsh and decisive aspect, casts them out
“by punishing them with death penalties and exiles and the greatest
dishonors.” And those who “wallow in ignorance and much baseness” are put into the class of slaves.
The stranger at this point explicitly connects the union of manly
and moderate natures with the intertwining of warp and woof
(309b), in effect closing the paradigm-web he began to weave earlier in the dialogue. The city, in order to be a durable garment suited
to the protection of all those it embraces, needs both kinds of
human threads: the hard and the soft. This unity of opposites requires a two-tiered system of civic education that produces two
sorts of “bonds”—one higher, one lower. The higher bond is said
to be divine, since it applies to the part of the soul that is “eternalborn,” the part that thinks and holds opinions. The lower, human
bond is marriage, which applies to what the stranger calls “the animal-born part,” that is, the part of the soul that has to do with bodily desire. The bonds are produced successively: first the higher,
then the lower. Once the higher bond of right opinion is in place,
the stranger asserts, the lower one isn’t difficult to bring about
(310a). This optimism presupposes that the divine bond is strong
enough to overcome the greatest of all human drives—the erotic
attraction that human beings have for one another and that connects
them, as we hear in the Symposium, with the striving for immortality (207a).
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The higher tier of the educational process aims at inculcating
“genuinely true and also steadfast opinions about beautiful and just
and good things” (309c). These opinions are implanted in both
types of noble individuals. In other words, the inculcation of “one
opinion about what’s beautiful and just and good” supersedes the
idolatry of a single virtue and overcomes the natural impulse to
welcome one’s like and shun one’s unlike. Moderate and courageous individuals will share the opinion that it is good for the city
that they mingle, and bad if they don’t. In other words, they will
learn to respect, if not love, a virtue higher than either courage or
moderation—the virtue of justice. They will believe that they and
their respective virtues are threads that must be woven together to
form the political web.
I note in passing that the education the stranger describes is
based entirely on the cultivation of habits and right opinion. There
is no philosophic education for guardians, no turning of the soul
from becoming to being, as there is in the Republic. The stranger’s
version of a city in speech may be the work of a philosophic statesman, but it does not appear that this statesman, though possessing
kingly science, is in fact a king in this city.
The stranger dwells on how the higher sort of education, which
aims at the divine bond, tempers the excess in the two opposed
virtues. If a manly individual takes hold of true opinions about
what is good and beautiful and just, he will “grow tame and in this
way be most willing to commune with just things.” Without these
opinions, he will degenerate into a beast (309e). Similarly, the
order-loving individual who holds these same true opinions will
become “genuinely moderate and intelligent,” and the one who
doesn’t will rightly be called simpleminded or foolish. The establishment of these true opinions takes place through laws and customs that apply only to those naturally suited for an ethical
education. This education, the stranger asserts, is the “drug” prescribed by the ever-vigilant art of politics. It is the antidote for onesided virtue.
At last we reach the stranger’s account of marriage, the “human
bond” implanted by the political art. This bond, though lower than
the other, is crucial, since the city’s continuance and well-being
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depend on procreation through sexual union. We should recall that
it is not courage and moderation per se that bring about political
downfall but rather the gradual build-up and concentration of a single virtue through sexual generation over the course of time. As
the stranger approaches his culminating definition, he gets down
to the nitty-gritty of why people marry. He dismisses those who
marry for wealth or power and focuses on those whose care is family and children. These are the people who marry, or who arrange
the marriages of their sons and daughters, for the serious (if wrong)
reason that they always choose partners who are of their own family when it comes to virtue and eschew members of the opposite
family.
The political art counteracts this error, goes against nature, by
compelling members of each “family” to overcome their natural
repugnance for the other and to marry against type. This will prevent the spread of a single trait by producing hybrids that combine
both virtuous types. The stranger does not say what home life will
be like for married opposites, nor does he care. The only thing that
matters, from a political standpoint, is that the virtues are mixed
rather than kept separate. Of course, genesis in the Reign of Zeus
is unpredictable: there will always be children whose nature reduplicates that of, say, a courageous mother rather than a moderate
father. And so, the political art must exercise perpetual vigilance
and continually oversee marriage and sexual union. The war on
nature must go on.
The needful union of opposed virtues must be enforced at the
highest level of the city—that of the rulers. The stranger acknowledges that it is possible for one individual to have both virtues
(311a). The monarchic city must choose this sort of individual as
its supervisor. If more than one ruler is required—if the city is aristocratic—then the ruling class must have both kinds of virtuous individuals. The reason is that moderate rulers are cautious, just, and
conservative, but they lack, the stranger says, the needful acuity
and vigor, which would be supplied by the courageous among the
ruling class. The stranger ends his “astonishing account” of virtue
on a negative note: “And it’s impossible for all things having to do
with cities to turn out beautifully in private and in public when
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these characters [courage and moderation] aren’t present as a pair”
(311b).
Only one thing remains: the final definition of the web that is
produced by the true statesman’s knowledge. Will this web, as the
stranger glowingly describes it, ever be woven in deed as it is in
speech? From the stranger’s perspective, it does not matter. The
goal was to define statesmanship solely in terms of the statesman’s
knowledge or science, apart from whether he actually rules,
founds, reforms, or advises (259b).
What, then, does the statesman know? Not, it seems, how to
lead individuals to virtue, but how to temper the virtue they already
have by nature. The statesman’s wisdom is the wisdom of defence.
That is why the stranger tends to dwell more on bad things to be
avoided and feared than on good things to be sought and aspired
to. Politics is a defensive art. It is embodied in the web that ends
the dialogue. Strange to say, when we finally find the statesman
“naked and alone,” he turns out to be a maker of garments, which
earlier in the dialogue were placed in the class of defences (279c280a). He is the maker of the web that is both the body politic and
the political cloak that defends the otherwise naked city from its
enemies, the virtuous from their monomania and wrong marriages,
and all its inhabitants from exposure and need. Perhaps most of
all, the political web protects the city from the ravages and uncertainties of time. A good garment is one that wears well. It must
protect us from seasonal extremes. The same is true of the political
garment, which must defend the city not only during the winter of
war and its discontents but also during the summer of peace, prosperity, and inattention.
In Plato’s Statesman, politics appears in its true light only when
it is seen in the context of the stranger’s cosmic myth about the
Reign of Kronos and the Reign of Zeus. The myth compels us to
judge the tension-riddled, endangered life we have now by contrasting it with an earlier peaceful life that ended in disappearance
rather than old age and death, that had no sex or sexual desire, and
that needed neither politics nor clothes. The myth discloses what
is most needful for beleaguered humanity in this our Reign of
Zeus—the era that depends on the god-like statesman and shepherd
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because it can no longer depend on a kindly nature and a caretaking
god.
I suspect that the world for the stranger is, like virtue, fundamentally incoherent. Strictly speaking, there is no kosmos, no permanent world-order that grounds the inherent goodness of the
virtues. Instead there are two opposed cosmic eras, two opposed directions of becoming, and two opposed forms of human life and
human nature. In the Reign of Zeus—that is, in the realm of politics—the “condition of ancient disharmony,” the tendency toward
degenerateness that is woven into the very constitution of the world
on account of its bodily being, asserts itself (273c). That is why we
need the Promethean powers of method and art—to make order
where there is no order. In the Statesman—one of Plato’s fascinating experiments in post-Socratic philosophy—Plato tempts us to
consider the grounds and implications of this modern-sounding
world-view.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES
Raskolnikov’s Redemption
Nicholas Maistrellis
99
The narrative of Crime and Punishment is very straightforward.
An impoverished university student named Raskolnikov plans and
commits a murder. The murder accidently turns into a double
murder. There follows a sequence of incidents and conversations
that reveal the turmoil this act causes in the soul of the criminal.
Through two conversations with a young prostitute named Sonya
the murderer finally confesses his crime, first to her and then to
the authorities. Finally there is an epilogue in which we are told
that Raskolnikov is sentenced to a period of imprisonment in
Siberia. Sonya follows him to Siberia. Remarkable things happen
to him there.
Of all the four great novels of Dostoevsky–Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov—it is only
in this one that Dostoevsky creates a sustained dialectic with the interior life of one and only one character. Crime, on the other hand,
is a theme in all the novels, but it’s only in this one that Dostoevsky
focuses single-mindedly on unfolding the nature of crime, together
with its causes and effects in the human soul. This makes it particularly relevant to the theme of this conference. However, Dostoevsky is not as interested in criminal justice as he is in the effects
of crime, first on the soul of the criminal, and finally, on the whole
human community. This doesn’t mean that he ignores justice. In
fact, the question of Raskolnikov’s debt to society occupies a large
part of the book, especially in the interrogation of Raskolnikov by
Porfiry Petrovitch, the investigating detective who suspects very
early in the book that Raskolnikov is the murderer, and in the conversations with Sonya, the prostitute who befriends Raskolnikov.
Considerations of justice are a dialectical moment in the unfolding
of crime, and not the highest moment. By “dialectical moment” I
mean that the claims of justice are gathered up and form part of the
transformation of the redeemed criminal. These dialectical moments
cannot be the highest moment of the transformation.
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Now, the claims of justice could be said to be satisfied when
the criminal is punished. But Dostoevsky is not interested in punishment as retribution. He thinks it is ineffective. He is interested
in punishment only in so far as the demand for it arises in the criminal himself, and results in his redemption. The highest moment
is when the criminal acknowledges his crime and asks for forgiveness from the whole human community. Thus, Dostoevsky’s treatment is “psychological,” if it is clear that by psychology one does
not mean a putative science of the soul, but an attempt to get to
know another human being. In his notebooks on Crime and Punishment Dostoevsky makes the extraordinary claim that it is the
crime itself that makes Raskolnikov a moral being. “His moral development begins from the crime itself; the possibility of such
questions arises which would not have existed previously.”1 It is
impossible in a short paper to do more than give a sketch of this
theme, and even this sketch will focus on only a few incidents.
Let me begin with Dostoevsky’s account of crime. The commission of a crime, for him, is a sign that the criminal has separated
himself from his fellow human beings. It is not the crime that separates the criminal, but some transformation in his soul which
causes him to focus his attention entirely on himself. Such transformations are hard to discern. Often, even those closest to the
criminal are puzzled about what is going on. Even the criminal
himself is not fully aware of what is moving him. He becomes surprised at his own behavior. I think this is Dostoevsky’s reason for
believing that ordinary punishment is useless in reforming the
criminal. Since the criminal has separated himself from society, he
feels that the power of society is arbitrary and that the freedom he
has given himself precisely by his separation from his fellows
makes retribution merely another act of violence equivalent to his
own. He both resents the power of society and despises it. Redemption cannot come from actions done to the criminal; it has to
arise in his own soul.
The whole novel takes place over the span of two weeks, and
the crime occurs at the end of Part I, about three days into the action. In the days leading up to the crime, Raskolnikov has stopped
going out. He has stopped seeing his friend Razhumikin, and has
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stopped communicating with his mother and sister. He has also
stopped tutoring students. He has no income. He hasn’t paid his
rent for a long time. He spends most of his time sleeping in his
room—a horrible garret. He eats only when Natashya, the caretaker, brings him something. He is withdrawing from the world.
On the very first page of the novel, the narrator says, “He was so
immersed in himself, and had isolated himself so much from everyone that he was afraid not only of meeting his landlady, but of meeting anyone at all.”2 Very soon, however, we are introduced to an
ambiguity in Raskolnikov. At the beginning of the second chapter
of Part I, we are told that he “was not used to crowds. . . . But now
something suddenly drew him to people.”3 This is the first indication of the doubleness in Raskolnikov’s soul. He separates himself
from others, but he cannot do it with his whole soul. Later we will
learn that it is this doubleness that makes redemption possible.
The sequence of events in Part I leading up to the murder is
very important to Dostoevsky’s dialectic, so I will take some time
going over them. On the first day, Raskolnikov wakes up, goes out,
and almost immediately visits the pawnbroker, Alyona Ivanovna,
whom he is planning to murder. He pretends he wants to pawn
something. Dostoevsky carefully reveals to us Alyona’s poisonous,
grasping character. This visit is a rehearsal of the murder, so the
murder is committed twice in his soul. He assures himself of the
rightness of what he is planning by reminding himself of Alyona’s
wickedness. By this he shows the conventional side of his character, which he despises. He then decides that he wants to be with
people, and decides to go to the tavern. There he enters into conversation with Marmeladov, a civil servant and a drunkard who is
deliberately destroying his own life and his family’s life. Raskolnikov helps bring him home and meets his consumptive wife and
hungry children. Marmeladov is the father of Sonya, the fourteenyear-old prostitute with whom Raskolnikov falls in love. When he
departs, Raskolnikov leaves behind, without saying anything, most
of his money. The narrator makes it clear that Raskolnikov’s own
generosity at this moment is unintelligible to him. He returns home
and goes to sleep.
The next morning, he is given a letter from his mother that re-
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counts in great detail her numerous trials, including the decision
by his sister to marry someone despicable in order to escape
poverty. While reading the letter, the narrator tells us, his face was
wet with tears, but when he finishes, “it was pale, twisted convulsively, and a heavy bilious, spiteful smile wandered over his lips.”4
Raskolnikov returns to wandering around town, and he encounters a drunk girl whose disheveled clothing had clearly been
thrown on her by those who had made use of her before turning
her out on the street. She is being followed by a middle-aged, welldressed man whose intentions are obvious. Raskolnikov’s first impulse is to help her. He yells at the man, and calls to a nearby police
officer for assistance. He gives the officer some money for a taxi
to bring the girl home when they find where she lives. The narrator
then tells us, “At that moment it was as if something stung Raskolnikov, as if he had been turned about in an instant.” He immediately says to the police officer, “Forget it! What do you care? Leave
her alone. Let him have fun. . . . What is it to you?”5 Raskolnikov
now identifies with the presumed violator.
He then continues his frantic pilgrimage through St. Petersburg, and finally collapses in complete exhaustion under some
bushes, where he falls asleep. He dreams a terrible dream: He is a
boy walking with his father and they witness a peasant beating his
horse to death, accompanied by cheers from the crowd. He tries to
stop the peasant, but he cannot. He asks his father to explain, but
he only replies that it is none of their business. When Raskolnikov
wakes up, he exclaims, “Thank God it was only a dream!” followed almost immediately by “God! But can it be, can it be that I
will really take an axe and hit her on the head and smash her skull
. . . slip in the sticky warm blood, break the lock, steal, and tremble,
and hide, all covered with blood . . . with the axe . . . Lord, can it
be?”6 He has now identified himself not with the helpless witness
of the slaughter but with both the murderer and the victim, and he
is horrified. He continues walking and inadvertently discovers by
means of an overheard conversation that Alyona’s sister Lizaveta
will not be in their apartment at a certain time on the next day. He
takes this as a kind of presentiment, and the narrator tells us, “He
was not reasoning about anything, and was totally unable to reason;
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but suddenly felt with his whole being that he no longer had any
freedom either of mind or of will, and that everything had been
suddenly and finally decided.”7
On the next day, the third day, he kills Alyona with an ax. Unfortunately, Lizaveta comes home unexpectedly, and he has to kill
her too. He hurriedly and inexpertly steals some things and returns
to his apartment. He falls asleep again. He sleeps for a very long
time.
This is the account of Raskolnikov’s actions before, during,
and after the crime. The main thing I want to point out is Raskolnikov’s extraordinary ambivalence: he affirms the crime and yet is
horrified by it. He rejects human contact and yet seeks it. He weeps
for his mother and sister, yet he is filled with spite, and so on. He
cannot affirm anything in himself whole-heartedly.
Dostoevsky has structured the crime quite deliberately. In the
first place, he makes Alyona an unsympathetic victim. She is
greedy and selfish, and looks it. He does not want our confrontation
with the issue of crime to be sentimentalized by feelings of pity
for the victim. On the other hand, Lizaveta is a sympathetic character. We find that, although simple-minded, she is kind. In fact,
she is friendly with Sonya. Raskolnikov murders her purely for the
sake of concealment. So the disunity in Raskolnikov is mirrored
in the victims. Also, it is essential to the narrative that there is no
evidence against Raskolnikov. Through an improbable series of
circumstances, and in spite of his own blunders, Raskolnikov escapes undetected from a building filled with people, and manages
to hide what he stole before he is searched. Dostoevsky makes it
clear that all this is purely by chance, and even in spite of Raskolnikov doing things that could make it more likely that he would
be suspected. Dostoevsky has, in fact, constructed something like
a controlled experiment in which all variables except for the feelings and reactions of the criminal are controlled. If Raskolnikov is
to be found out, it would have to be by some action of his own.
We are ready now to consider the crime from Raskolnikov’s
point of view. He initially gives two reasons for the crime: first, he
needs the money to advance his career; second, he needs the money
to help his mother and sister. He understands both to be humani-
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tarian reasons. He is a very able man, and if he could advance his
career, he could do valuable work for mankind. He is a very able
man, and if he could advance his career, he could help his mother
and sister—and especially, he could prevent the unfortunate marriage of his sister, which she is clearly undertaking for financial
reasons. Contrasted with this is the fact that Alyona is a terrible
person, who not only has done nothing good for anyone but, in
fact, has done untold harm. Her death would be a blessing. Underlying these reasons is the idea that for the sake of humanity higher
human beings can transgress ordinary moral and civil laws. In fact,
Raskolnikov accepts the idea that great men do this all the time.
His recurrent example is Napoleon. In fact, Raskolnikov apparently
wrote an essay, which had been published, on this theme. Dostoevsky does not give his readers the opportunity to read it.
Up to this point in Raskolnikov’s internal dialectic, he considers himself a great man like Napoleon or Isaac Newton, a superior
person who needs to sacrifice ordinary conventions for some
higher good. But the conduct of the crime continually speaks
against this. The theft was botched because he didn’t take the time
to find the large cache of money in the apartment. He hides and
keeps the money and jewels he did manage to steal, ostensibly because it would be too dangerous to spend the money or sell the
jewels, but it is clear that its presence horrifies Raskolnikov because it reminds him of what he did. It becomes increasingly clear
that the reasons given for the crime do not come close to revealing
what is in his soul, or what he thinks is in his soul. This comes out
most decisively in what he says to Sonya during their second conversation:
“I tormented myself for so many days: would Napoleon
have gone ahead or not? It means I must already have
felt clearly that I was not Napoleon . . . . I endured all,
all the torment of this babble, Sonya, and I longed to
shake it all off my back: I wanted to kill without casuistry, Sonya, to kill for myself, for myself alone. I
didn’t want to lie about it even to myself! It was not to
help my mother that I killed—nonsense! I did not kill
so that, having acquired means and power, I could become a benefactor of mankind. Nonsense! I simply
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killed—killed for myself alone—and whether I would
later become anyone’s benefactor, or would spend my
life like a spider, catching everyone in my web and
sucking the life-sap out of everyone, should at that moment have made no difference to me! . . . And it was
not the money above all that I wanted when I killed,
Sonya; not the money so much as something else. . . .
I know all this now. . . . Understand me: perhaps, continuing on that same path, I would never again repeat
that murder. There was something else I wanted to
know; something else was nudging my arm. I wanted
to find out then, and find out quickly, whether I was a
louse like all the rest, or a man? Would I be able to step
over or not! Would I dare to reach down and take, or not?
Am I a trembling creature, or do I have the right—”
“To kill? The right to kill?” Sonya clasped her hands.8
105
What did Raskolnikov mean here when he says that he committed the crime entirely for himself?
The question of freedom was very important to Dostoevsky,
and especially the claim that the only way for a human being to affirm his freedom is through the commission of a crime for its own
sake. It is present in one way or another in all four of his major
works. Think, for example, of Nikolai Stavrogin in Demons. Dostoevsky takes this idea very seriously, and, in fact, affirms its truth
in some way. It is freedom that Raskolnikov is seeking, First, he is
seeking freedom from the bounds of social conventions, and also,
most importantly, from what he considers his own sentimental tendencies. This is why he has to separate himself off from other
human beings, why this separation is the source of crime. I do not
believe that Dostoevsky is saying that all criminals have motives
exactly like those of Raskolnikov, but I do think that some separation from mankind is at work in all criminals. Dostoevsky is particularly interested in exploring what happens when someone tries
to do this deliberately. After he commits the murder, Raskolnikov
is still torn, but now the stakes are much higher than before. Now
he has to see if he has the fortitude to affirm his crime, not as a
project, but as his deed. This affirmation would be the sign that
he was in fact a superior being, a free man, and not an ordinary
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criminal. But he discovers very quickly that he cannot affirm his
crime as he wishes. Sentimental regrets plague him. He becomes
ill, and experiences an almost overwhelming desire to confess. It
is this desire to confess which that exposes him to the interest of
the police. He now begins to feel regret for what he has done, but
this is not the regret the reader might expect. He does not regret
that he has done something wrong; he regrets that he cannot wholeheartedly affirm his crime. Of course, there is a part of him that
does regret the crime profoundly, that knows that he has done a
terrible thing; but it takes the the entire rest of the book for Raskolnikov to acknowledge that this other part is truly himself, and not
internalized convention. The doubleness we have seen in Raskolnikov’s behavior is now revealed as a doubleness within himself.
Through our own ambivalence, which is revealed to us as we read,
Dostoevsky shows us that this doubleness is not peculiar to Raskolnikov, but is true of us as well.
The novel proper ends with Raskolnikov’s confession, once to
Sonya, and once to the police. He has two conversations with
Sonya: the first is a rehearsal of his confession; the second is his
actual confession. This behavior mirrors the commission of the
murder. The confession to the police also has a doubleness about
it. He goes to the police station to confess, but at the last moment
runs out of the station. When he sees Sonya looking at him from
the street, he returns to the police station and confesses. The novel
ends with Raskolnikov’s confession, but the motive for it ambiguous. Is Raskolnikov finally filled with true remorse and the desire
for repentance, or is he confessing because he has failed to live up
to his own view of the murder and himself? Is he simply acknowledging his failure to affirm his crime? The novel inclines us to the
latter account, but it is hard to be sure.
In the Epilogue (which, by the way, does not appear at all in
Dostoevsky’s notebooks), we are told the Raskolnikov was sentenced to eight years hard labor in Siberia. Dostoevsky makes it
clear that both spirits in Raskolnikov are still at war during his imprisonment. The narrator tells us that Raskolnikov was suffering
not from remorse at the crime he committed, but from “wounded
pride” at the fact that he had to confess in order to find “some peace
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for himself.”9 But this was not repentance. “He did not repent of
his crime.”10 By the end of the Epilogue, however, he does repent.
How does this happen? I only have time here to give a bare sketch
of this transformation.
The first and most fundamental element of the change is his
love for Sonya. This love began almost from the moment he first
met her. This love was not intelligible to him. In fact, it annoys
him, and he tries to get rid of it, but it is clear, whether he likes it
or not, that she is what ties him to life itself. In Siberia, she becomes indispensible to him.
A second element in the change arises after an extraordinary
experience he undergoes while in Siberia. He discovers that all his
fellow prisoners, who have had much harder lives than he, love
life. “He looked at his fellow convicts and was amazed at how they,
too, all loved life, how they valued it! It precisely seemed to him
that in prison they loved and valued it even more, cherished it even
more than in freedom.”11 This experience, combined with his realization of the depth of Sonya’s love, brought about his transformation. Retributive punishment did nothing to heal his soul; but the
experience of living with dangerous, desperate men who nevertheless loved life made him whole again. This experience makes him
realize the meaning of the murders he committed: they were acts
against life itself, and thus against all human beings. In some
wholly mysterious way, this experience allows him to discover the
love of life in himself.
Let me end with a brief epilogue: a story of retribution and
penance related by my friend and colleague, Howard Zeiderman,
in an essay about the educational work he has been doing the last
fifteen years with prisoners at the maximum security prison in Jessup, Maryland. A group of prisoners were discussing a drawing as
a text:
The text was a drawing by Kathe Kolwitz, Prisoners
Listening to Music. The three prisoners depicted are
skeletal, with hollow eyes—and all seemingly gripped
by something. The session was not going very well and
I regretted trying to use a text that connected too
vividly with their situation. A number of the younger
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members were clearly repulsed by the drawing. When
I asked why a few who spoke often were silent, Larry
answered. “It’s scary looking at them. I don’t want that
to be me.” As he finished, another prisoner, Craig, a
man almost seventy years old who first served time
more than fifty years before, laughed. “You don’t understand nothing. They’re not dying. They’re gettin’
past their hungers. It’s the music that makes them
pure—like angels. Listen—when I was young down
south we had a chaplain. Every day he would play
music for us. Old music, beautiful. At first we couldn’t
listen to it. We never heard nothing like it. Sometimes
a song would last a long time, no words. But then we
started to love it. We would listen like in the picture,
and we’d remember things. And we’d cry. Sometimes
you could hear ten men cry. And sometimes the priest
would cry too. We were all together in it. But then he
retired and a new chaplain came. He was different. He
wanted us to see the doctors and counselors, the case
workers. They would ask us questions about ourselves
and make us go to classes, programs. They were working on us and the music ended. It was different. It was
them against us.” Correction, as Craig sensed, is entirely different from penance.12
NOTES
Fyodr Dostoevsky, The Notebooks for Crime and Punishment (Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 1967), 64.
1
Fyodr Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans. Richard Pevear and
Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage, 1993), 3.
2
Ibid., 11.
Ibid., 39.
5
Ibid., 49.
6
Ibid., 59.
7
Ibid., 62.
8
Ibid., 419
9
Ibid., 543.
3
4
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10
11
Ibid., 544.
Ibid., 545.
109
Howard Zeiderman, “Caged Explorers: The Hunger for Control,” The
St. John’s Review 53.2 (2012): 157.
12
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Justice in Plato’s Statesman
Eric Salem
Ordinary politicians love to talk about justice, and to go on—and
on—about all the just things they have done, are doing, or mean to
do in the future. We see it all the time—just turn on the television,
especially in an election year. But what about the genuine article,
the true politikos, the statesman who possesses genuine political
science and who practices or could practice the genuine political
art? What role does justice play in such a man’s thinking and doing
and speaking?
A selective glance at our tradition suggests that justice plays a
very large role indeed. Consider, for instance, our own founding
documents—certainly works of statesmanship of a very high order.
The Constitution bluntly proclaims in its preamble that one of its
purposes is to “establish justice.” And the Declaration declares,
among other things, that governments exist for the sake of justice—that “governments are instituted among men to secure” the
rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Or consider the
Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle’s prolegomena to the Politics: his
treatment of justice is longer by far than his treatment of any other
virtue, and second in length only to his two-book treatment of
friendship—a topic that, for Aristotle, is itself deeply intertwined
with matters of justice and political life. Or to move a little closer
to our chosen topic, consider the Republic, Plato’s most famous
book about political affairs: all of Book I is devoted to justice, and
the inquiry into the goodness of justice that begins in Book II is
based on the assumption that an investigation of a well-constituted
city is bound to come across justice—because well-ordered cities,
like well-ordered souls, always contain it. In other words, all of
these texts suggest that a fairly deep connection exists between
politics and justice, and between thinking about justice and thinking about politics.
Suppose, then, we turn as novice readers to Plato’s Statesman,
which purports to be an inquiry into the nature of the statesman,
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the politikos, and the nature of his art or science, politikē. Given
the sketch we have just seen, we might expect the dialogue to contain a series of acute reflections on the relation between justice and
the true science of politics. We might even expect the Stranger
from Elea to take up again the question that Socrates had wanted
to pursue further at the end of Book I of the Republic, the “Socratic” question, “What is justice?” In fact we get nothing of the
sort. We get a strange, vast myth about the cosmos; we get an extended—some might say over-extended—account of weaving and
its attendant arts; we learn that men as herd-animals closely resemble pigs, on the one hand, and chickens, on the other. But we hear
next to nothing about justice.
To begin with, there is no extended discussion of justice in the
Statesman—no discussion of what it is or whether it’s good or bad
or anything else. As a matter of fact, justice-words, that is, words
cognate with Greek word for justice, turn up only about thirty times
in the entire dialogue. (In the Republic such words turn up more
than two hundred times in Book I alone.) What’s more, only about
half those appearances have the moral and political connotations
that we ordinarily associate with the word “justice.” In fact the
Greek word for justice, dikaiosunē, the word that is so central to
Socrates’s inquiry in the Republic and Aristotle’s inquiry in the
Ethics, does not appear in the Statesman at all. The word injustice
does turn up, once, but it refers, not to a tendency in citizens that
needs to be corrected, but to a disqualification for citizenship altogether. As for the remaining cases in the dialogue where justicewords are used with moral or political meaning, most are
disappointingly conventional, while the most interesting or promising phrases appear to come out of nowhere.
What are we to make of this peculiar state of affairs? Does
the relative rarity of justice-words in the dialogue point to a deep
divergence between the Stranger’s approach to politics and human
affairs and the approach of Socrates? Do considerations of justice
simply not play a major role in his thinking about politics? Do his
interests lie elsewhere? Or, on the contrary, is the Stranger’s thinking about politics shaped by a distinct conception of justice, but
one that leads him to employ the language of justice sparingly?
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In the end I want to suggest that the Stranger’s thinking about
politics is in fact profoundly shaped by a certain conception of justice—a peculiar one, to be sure, but perhaps no more peculiar than
the one Socrates lays out in the Republic, and perhaps not so very
different from it either. But I mean to approach this conclusion in
a rather roundabout way, by first considering seriously the possibility that the Stranger is just not very interested in justice and that
his lack of interest is reflected in his thinking about the science of
politics. My hope is that this indirect approach will force out into
the light what is distinctive about his understanding.
If the Stranger is not interested in justice, what is he interested
in? Almost any page of the Statesman—or the Sophist—gives us
the answer: the arts and sciences, including his own science or art
of division. In the Phaedrus, Socrates calls himself a lover of collections and divisions, and elsewhere in the dialogues he makes
constant use of analogies with the arts. But the Stranger goes much
further: he seems to see the whole human world as an interconnected array of always-multiplying arts, the sorting out of which
into their more or less natural divisions is one of the philosopher’s
prime tasks. Angling and sophistry, louse-catching and generalship,
doctoring and potion-making—all these arts and at least fifty more
make their appearance somewhere in the Sophist or Statesman.
The Stranger’s myth, his cosmic vision, helps us to understand
this remarkable proliferation of arts and the Stranger’s acute interest
in them. During the age of Saturn, we enjoyed a carefree life under
the care of the gods. With no regimes and no families, we lived on
the fruits that sprang spontaneously from trees and bushes, talked
with the animals, slept naked on the grass and woke up every
morning feeling just a little bit . . . younger. But that time is long
past. This is the age of Zeus. The world has grown harsh, the gods
have withdrawn, and we grow old. We have been left to our own
devices, and those devices, the first fruits of our new-age thinking,
are the arts. Men need food; the arts of agriculture and herding and
hunting (including the art of angling) must be developed. Men need
shelter from winter cold and summer sun, from the animals that no
longer like us and from . . . other men. The arts of wall-making and
house-building, shoe-making and armor-crafting, rug-making and
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wool-working must come on the scene. This list could go on: along
with needs arise desires. Every need or desire demands a new art,
and every new art demands a new sub-array of subordinate arts to
provide materials to be worked up and tools to work with.
Atop this dizzying array of arts is a kind of art of arts, an überart, if you will. For man the artisan is also man the herd animal,
and the human herd, like all herds, needs to be tended and managed. This art or science of herd management as applied to the
human herd is . . . statesmanship. Its task is neither simple nor easy.
It must rule over the other arts and sciences, deciding which ones
are to be learned and to what degree. To retain its purity of purpose,
it must keep itself separate from the arts most akin to itself, the arts
of persuasion and generalship and judging. Under certain circumstances it must engage in lawmaking. But its most difficult task
has to do with the noblest natures under its sway. Just as nature left
to itself, and permeated by the Other, seems to give rise to deception, and thus to sophistry (including the sophistry that masquerades as statesmanship), so too, human nature left to itself seems to
give rise to two distinct and opposed temperaments: courageous
natures and moderate natures. Left to themselves, these natures
tend to separate from each other and, in the end, degenerate into
self-destructive factions. To combat this most dangerous of threats,
the statesman must become a master weaver, a webmaster of the
spirit and of the body too; he must find ways to knit together the
lives of the city’s noblest natures. For only thus can the city become
and remain a self-bound, self-sufficient whole.
This would seem to be a good time to ask what place, if any,
justice has in this picture of politics and political life. The obvious
answer seems to be: a place that is important, but rather small and
decidedly subordinate. Human herd management would seem to
differ from other forms of herd management in this: all herding involves giving commands, but members of the human herd, especially in the age of Zeus, seem to need explicit commands or
prescriptions, explicit rules, to govern their communal life. These
rules, which allow men in cities to get along with one another, constitute justice. Now from the point of view of citizens, especially
artisan citizens going about their daily, commerce-driven lives,
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such rules—we call them laws—might seem to be the most important manifestation of the political art. But they are in fact only an
imperfect and secondary manifestation of that art, in part because
they are riddled with imprecision, and in part because, as we have
already seen, the first business and real work of the political art
lies in the weaving together of courage and moderation. It would
be a mistake, according to this account, to think of justice as a
virtue, just as it would be a mistake to think of justice as something
high, a criterion that the political art has to look up to as it goes
about its business. Justice is nothing high or deep or fancy; it is
nothing but the set of rules, invented by the statesman, that allow
us to lead reasonably decent lives in an unfriendly world.
Is this account of justice in the Statesman adequate? Does it,
as we say, do justice to the Stranger’s view of justice? There are
certainly a number of passages in the dialogue that lend credence
to it. For instance, at one point the Stranger makes it very clear that
the power of the judge is separate from, and sub-ordinate to, the
art of the statesman. Then he asks if the judge
has any power more far-reaching than, in matters
pertaining to contracts, that of discerning the
things ordained as both just and unjust by keeping
in sight whatever is laid down as lawful and which
it received from a law-giver king (305b).
It looks here as if justice is simply identical to the legal, as it
is defined by the law-giving king—that is, the statesman. This language of contracts also turns up a bit earlier, in the course of the
Stranger’s critique of law and its lack of precision, when he speaks
of those who “supervise the herds with respect to the just and their
contracts with each other” (294e). Once again justice seems to be
equated with the contractual obligations defined by the law—and
the baseness involved in dealing with matters of justice, its distance
from real statesmanly activity, is underscored by the re-introduction of the language of “herds.” The text of the Statesman also
lends support to the thought that justice is not a virtue: there is no
place in the dialogue where the Stranger states or even implies that
it is the statesman’s task to instill justice or anything resembling
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justice in the souls of his citizens. The closest we get is the suggestion very near the end of the dialogue that moderate natures
tend to be more just than courageous ones, but this does not seem
to be a matter of education, and in any case, “just” in this context
seems to mean “cautious and therefore inclined to follow the law.”
The meaning of “just” here is perfectly compatible with passages
that identify the just with the legal; it simply means “law-abiding.”
Are we to conclude, then, that justice has no meaning in the
Statesman other than a set of rules laid down by the statesman in
his law-making capacity, and then turned over to a subordinate
power? We might have to reach this conclusion were it not for a
handful of odd passages where the Stranger seems to be pointing
us in a different direction. Let me briefly go over three of them. In
the first, the Stranger argues that rulers in “the correct regime” can
do anything, including banishing and even killing inhabitants, “so
long as they make it better from worse and preserve it as far as
they’re able by using science and the just” (293d). In the second,
which comes just as he is beginning his critique of law, the Stranger
notes that law “could never, by having comprehended what’s most
excellent and most just, command what’s best” (294a-b). And in
the third, the Stranger claims that:
there is no error for thoughtful rulers, whatever
they do, so long as they guard one great thing, and,
by at all times distributing to those in the city
what’s most just with intellect and art, both are
able to preserve them and make better men from
worse as much as possible (297a-b).
These passages share several features in common. In all of
them, the just is linked to, and subordinated to, the good —either
the good of the citizens or the good of the city. In addition, the just
is paired with, or at least linked to, thought in some form—science
in the first passage, comprehension in the second, and intellect and
art in the third. Finally—and most important for the issue we are
considering—in all three passages the just in these passages simply cannot be identified with what is lawful or what is defined
by the law. In the first passage, the just seems to function as a
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criterion or standard at least co-equal with science; according to
the second, the just cannot be comprehended by law; and in the
third, the just arises directly from intellect and art, without the
mediation of law. Clearly then, justice or “the just” has more than
one meaning in the Statesman and in the Stranger’s mind. But exactly what does it mean in this second set of passages? For instance, what does it mean in the peculiar phrase “science and the
just”? We can’t look to the immediate context of the phrase for an
answer. In all three passages the language of justice seems to come
out of nowhere.
To answer this question we need to take a step back. I mentioned earlier that there are a number of places in the Statesman
where the language of justice is used with a meaning that is nonmoral and non-political. Let me add that, with one exception,
which I’ll get to later, every appearance of this language before the
“science and the just” passage falls into this category. Now in all
of these earlier appearances, “just” and “justly” have a specific
meaning and specific range: they are used to characterize speech
or thought; and they refer to correctness or precision or aptness of
thought or speech, as when we say, in English—as I did a little
while ago—that we want to do justice to someone’s thought or that
someone has gotten something “just right.” Now it is “precisely”
this meaning of justice that I think we must import, and are meant
to import, into the passages in question. The intellectual quality
that the Stranger prizes most in his own science of division—the
ability to divide well, to find a “part” that is also a “form” (262b263b)—is also the quality that defines or gives meaning to justice.
Thus when the Stranger says that rulers in the “correct regime”
must employ “science and the just,” “the just” is not being introduced here as an extraneous criterion that comes out of nowhere.
It rather refers to the exactness or precision of application that is
implicit in the very notion of science—in this case, the science of
statesmanship. Or again, when the Stranger faults the law for failing to comprehend what’s most excellent and most just, he is simply faulting the law’s characteristic lack of precision: because laws
are necessarily universal, they cannot help but miss what is best
here and now and must be inexact in their attainment of it. It should
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come as no surprise, then, that the Stranger keeps referring to the
“correct” or “most correct regime” where we would probably say
“best regime”—the best regime is, for him, “precisely” the regime
in which precision or correctness is the ruling principle.
There is another way to formulate this thought in the language
of the dialogue. At the very center of the Statesman there is an extended discussion of the art of measurement, and at the very center
of that discussion, the Stranger introduces, without much explanation, the phrase “the precise itself.” Why? It turns out that the very
existence of statesmanship—in fact the very existence of all the arts
that generate something—rests on the existence of something called
due measure. All the arts aim to achieve or produce some good.
Sometimes they miss the mark: they fall short of or exceed their
aims. But when they bring about the goods they aim at, they attain
what the Stranger calls “due measure.” At such moments, when
they get things just right, when they arrive at due measure, the precise itself is present. But what holds for the other arts holds for
statesmanship as well. Whenever the statesman, aiming at the
preservation or improvement of his city or its citizens, brings about
this good, he attains due measure, and in attaining due measure,
he participates in the precise itself. But if I am right in thinking
that, in at least a select number of passages in the dialogue, the just
coincides with what is correct or precise, then at such a moment
the statesman can also be said to have achieved justice. To achieve
the good is to achieve justice.
This brings me to my final point. I want to bring what I have
just said to bear on the most important activity of statesmanship:
the weaving together of courage and moderation. I mentioned a little while ago that there is one passage early on in the dialogue
where the language of justice is not used to refer to precision of
thought. It occurs in the myth. Interestingly enough, precision is
also mentioned but here refers to precision in the movement of the
cosmos. The claim is that when the cosmos is first allowed to move
on its own, it moves with precision, but over time, because of the
bodily aspect of the cosmos, it gradually winds down. Everything
beautiful in the cosmos comes from its composer, while everything
“harsh and unjust” has its source in this “fellow nursling of
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primeval nature” (273b-d). Of course this is a myth and we have
to be careful about what we extract from it. Still, I cannot help but
think that the Stranger is here positing something like a primal
principle of disorder, a principle that is always at war with beauty,
with precision of movement, with the very notion of a cosmos, that
is, an ordered whole. That he associates this principle with harshness and injustice suggests that this principle is at work in the
human world as well: the city is an attempt to found something
like a human cosmos in the face of primal disorder, primal imprecision, primal injustice. The ordinary arts that ground ordinary life
within cities are one aspect of this cosmos-formation. Each is an
attempt to bring forth due measure within some specific context;
each is an attempt to wrestle with its material’s resistance to being
given proper form. But the greatest of such attempts is the effort
of the statesman to bring forth due measure in and through his
weaving together of courage and moderation. Justice in the primary
sense, then, is not to be found in law-making or judging in accordance with law. Nor is it to be found in the accomplishing of this
or that good thing for the city. It is found right here, in the overcoming of primal injustice, primal resistance to having a city at all.
We might think of it this way: In the Sophist, the Stranger suggests
that being is not rest, or motion, or some third thing. He suggests
instead that being is the belonging together of rest and motion. But
within the sphere of politics, courage corresponds to motion and
rest to moderation. Where, then, and what is justice? It is not something present in the soul of the courageous man, nor something
present in the soul of the moderate man. Nor is it some third thing
hovering over the two. Instead, justice in the primary sense is present whenever the statesman, by thinking precisely and achieving
due measure, keeps the primal dyad from falling asunder; it is there
both in and as the belonging together, the being woven together,
of courage and moderation.
�REVIEWS
Getting to Know Kierkegaard Better
119
A Review of Richard McCombs’s The Paradoxical
Rationality of Søren Kierkegaard. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2013. 244 pages, $36.00.
James Carey
On first looking into Kierkegaard, the student who has already read
around in the history of philosophy or has limited his studies primarily to twentieth century philosophy, whether analytic or “continental,” is likely to find himself puzzled at several levels. He may
have heard that Kierkegaard is both a Christian and an existentialist, even a founder of existentialism, and he might be interested to
find out how one man can be both of these things at once. Or,
doubting that one man could be both these things at once without
being confused, he might be inclined to shrug him off. But then he
may also have heard that Heidegger was profoundly influenced by
Kierkegaard and that Wittgenstein declared him to be a “saint.” So
he sets out to get a better sense of who Kierke-gaard is and what
he is aiming at. After reading the first few pages of, say, Fear and
Trembling, he comes quickly to recognize that he is in the presence
of an original and incisive thinker. But he also encounters obscure
arguments and formulations that seem more colorful than illuminating. And sooner or later he runs up against assertions about the
relation of Socrates to Christianity that seem naïve at best, perverse
at worse. He begins to suspect that Kierkegaard, for all his undeniable brilliance, is in full control of neither his intellect nor his
imagination. After reading a relatively accessible book such as
Philosophical Fragments he might turn to Concluding Unscientific
Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (the latter book four times
the length of what it is advertised as a “postscript” to) in hopes of
finding a resolution to some of the perplexities in which the former
James Carey is a tutor and former Dean at St. John’s College in Santa Fe,
New Mexico.
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work left him. Instead, he finds himself by turns beguiled and exasperated by an art of writing that is both concentrated and ironic.
He is not sure whether he is being led towards the truth or being
manipulated. And if he has not done so sooner, he begins to wonder
exactly what Kierkegaard intends by presenting some of his books,
but then not all them, under pseudonyms, and in particular why one
book is presented as written by Climacus and another by anti-Climacus. Can all Kierkegaard’s books be understood as expressing
his own thoughts? Can any of them be understood as expressing
his own thoughts? Not knowing how to find an answer to these
and related questions, the student may decide at this point to postpone engaging with the full sweep of Kierkegaard’s project until
later on, more or less indefinitely later on.
Needless to say, not all who have struggled with Kierke-gaard
at some stage of their studies fit the above profile. But some—I
suspect quite a few—do fit it. After reading through one or two of
Kierkegaard’s books and probing around in a few others, they will
profit immensely by stepping back from his oeuvre and reading
Richard McCombs’s The Paradoxical Rationality of Søren Kierkegaard. Those who have read a larger number of Kierkegaard’s
books will profit immensely as well. I for one can say that there is
a not a single question I have asked myself about Kierkegaard over
the years that McCombs’s carefully argued and beautifully written
book does not answer, clearly, comprehensively, and convincingly.
The title of McCombs’s book expresses his general intention,
which is to show that Kierkegaard is a rational thinker and that he
employs paradox in the service of reason. What Kierkegaard calls
“subjectivity” McCombs calls “paradoxical rationality.” The
provocative conclusion of McCombs’s study is that paradoxical
rationality reaches its perfection not in knowledge, either theoretical or practical, but in faith. In this review I will highlight only a
few of the observations that McCombs makes en route to this conclusion.
In Chapter 1, McCombs considers evidence in favor of the
view the Kierkegaard is an irrationalist and then evidence in favor
of the view that he is a rationalist. He argues, persuasively, that the
preponderance of evidence is in favor of the latter view. When
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Kierkegaard directly or through one of his pseudonymous authors
affirms what he calls a contradiction, he means not a flat-our logical absurdity but rather “a tension or an unresolved opposition”
(13).1 And, as Kierkegaard sees it, “when the believer has faith,
the absurd is not absurd—faith transforms it” (22). Kierkegaard’s
Climacus calls the Incarnation a contradiction. But, as McCombs
points out, to show that such a thing is an irresolvable logical contradiction “one would need a thorough understanding of the
essence of God and of temporal, finite human existence” (13).
Kierkegaard is aware that this understanding is not at our disposal.
The appearance of irrationality is only feigned by Kierkegaard. It
is a pretense in the service of a pedagogical aim. “The human
model for Kierkegaard’s incognito of irrationalism is Socrates. If
Socrates ironically feigned ignorance in the service of knowledge,
Kierkegaard ‘goes further’ and ironically feigns irrationality in the
service of reason” (2). He “creates Climacus specifically to address
and appeal to philosophical readers . . . in order to find such readers
‘where they are’ and to lead them to subjectivity” (5). Where philosophical readers “are” is not simply in their thinking but in their
existing. There is, it should go without saying, more to existing
than thinking.
Near the conclusion of this chapter, McCombs offers a perceptive analysis of the limitations of Johannes de Silentio, the pseudonymous author of Fear and Trembling. This author attempts to
show to philosophical readers who regard faith as a demotic substitute for knowledge, or as a station that gets aufgehoben on the
way to absolute knowing, that genuine faith, as exemplified by
Abraham, is in fact rare, awesome in the exact sense of the word,
and more difficult to achieve than any knowledge we humans can
attain or pretend to. But Kierkegaard also subtly leads his readers
to see that Johannes de Silentio can, or rather will, only admire
faith. He will not attempt it. Faith is a task—a task that Silentio
evades (24). Faith is, moreover, not merely a task but “a difficult,
dangerous, strenuous, and painful duty, and human beings will do
virtually anything to evade such a duty” (30). In Fear and Trembling, “Kierkegaard first tries to get readers to admire the greatness
of faith, and then breaks the distressing news to them that the faith
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that they admire is an absolute duty.” Kierkegaard has “constructed
Fear and Trembling so ingeniously that interpretation of it unexpectedly and disconcertingly turns into self-examination” (31).
In Chapter 2, McCombs argues that subjectivity or paradoxical
rationality is, like all rationality, consistency. It is consistency not
just of thought, however, but of the whole person. “To be subjective means consistently to relate oneself, the subject of thinking,
to what one thinks. It is to think about life and action, most of all
about one’s own life and action, and to strive to feel, will, and act
consistently with one’s thoughts” (35). Not everyone who prides
himself on the consistency of his thinking aims at this more comprehensive consistency. For example, a person who holds in his
thinking that everything is determined—whether by the will of
God, physical mechanism, or the apparent good—and that the future is thereby fixed, nonetheless deliberates and acts, as all human
beings must, on the assumption that the future is not fixed and that
how it turns out depends in some measure on one’s choices. Such
a person is not wholly rational no matter how impressively his theory holds together qua theory merely.2 His speculative thinking,
however consistent it may be in itself, is inconsistent with his practical thinking. Kierkegaard’s subjectivity is not so much the opposite of objectivity, an inner and private domain as distinct from an
outer and public one, as it is the whole of rationality. Subjectivity
comprehends objectivity as a part, assigning it its altogether legitimate, though limited, role within a properly integrated life of reason. Subjectivity, for Kierkegaard, is integrity.
It is “Kierkegaard’s belief that thinking is unavoidably interested.”(37). Objective thinkers frequently claim to be disinterested.
But they are wrong. For objectivity is not without an interest: speculative reason (which could be called, somewhat misleadingly, objective reason) is interested in the true, just as practical reason
(which could be called, also somewhat misleadingly, subjective
reason) is interested in the good. Pursuit of the true and pursuit of
the good are two pursuits of one and the same reason.3 As McCombs later points out, interest derives from interesse, literally,
“to be in between” (155). Human reason is in between the temporal
and the eternal. It moves teleologically from the temporal toward
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the eternal, as it moves teleologically from the conditioned toward
the unconditioned and from the finite toward the infinite.
Subjective thinkers have a better appreciation of the wholeness
of reason, its teleological orientation toward both truth and goodness, than do objective thinkers. Kierkegaard suspects that many
who take pride in their commitment to objectivity use the search
for knowledge “as a way to delay or to evade ethical action” (45).
He also thinks that, “because the human will is free, the rationality
of human beings—his own included—is always precarious” (75).
This is true of speculative reason no of less than of practical reason.
McCombs speaks of the “shaky foundations” of logic and its “liability to perversion” (60). In my view, logic per se—certainly its
indemonstrable but self-evident first principles, such as the principle of non-contradiction—is sound.4 But logical principles and
rules of inference, unimpeachable in themselves, can be used to
deduce questionable conclusions from questionable premises. In
that way logic can assist one in rationalizing the satisfaction of certain desires that, unlike the desire for integrity in thought and action, are not intrinsic to reason and are often at odds with the telē
of reason. “When these desires are threatened by the strenuous requirements of ethics, they fight back with astonishing cunning and
sagacity, by co-opting the powers of logic for specious reasoning
and self-deception” (60). And So McCombs rightly recommends
“rectifying [not logic itself but] one’s use of logic” (65).
In Chapter 3, McCombs distinguishes between traditional negative theology, which he understands to be primarily theoretical,
and the negative theology of Climacus, which he understands to
be primarily practical. “Climacus thinks that if anything has priority in salvation it is or would be love and not knowledge” (87).5
This chapter contains helpful accounts of the Kierkegaardian conceptions of resignation and guilt-consciousness, and of
Kierkegaard’s arresting formulation that “to need God is a human
being’s highest perfection” (88-89; on resignation see also 106).
Of course, from the perspective of Christianity all human beings
need God. The perfection of humanity consists then not in the need,
simply, but in the recognition of the need and the follow-through
on what it ultimately entails: “reverence, awe, adoration, worship,
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or as Johannes de Silentio calls it, ‘fear and trembling’” (88-89).
We naturally desire perfect happiness; but for Kierkegaard perfect
happiness is “the good that is attained by absolutely venturing
everything” (95), for it is “essentially uncertain” (98). McCombs
concludes this chapter with a reflection on how Kierkegaard understands the relation between the good and one’s own good. There
is no “tension” between them: “one most truly loves the good by
loving one’s own good in the right way” (99).6
In Chapter 4, McCombs shows what Kierkegaard means by
simplicity. It is “translating one’s understanding . . . immediately
into action” (101). Just as McCombs discloses limitations, which
Kierkegaard intends his readers to recognize, in Johannes de Silentio’s admiration, absent imitation, of faith, so he discloses limitations in Climacus’s conception of “hidden inwardness.” Climacus
recognizes that there is something wrong with flaunting one’s efforts at becoming a Christian. But, McCombs notes, “going out of
one’s way to look ‘just like everyone else’” while “being very different from most people in one’s heart” can stand in the way of
“witnessing the truth and thus risking suffering and persecution”
(112; cf. 117-118; 124). In Chapter 5, McCombs continues the critique of Climacus he initiated in Chapter 4, with the focus now on
the limitations of indirect communication and its need to be complemented by direct communication. By expressing himself so
obliquely and paradoxically, Climacus runs the risk of detaining
the reader in the process of interpretation so that he fails to undertake the practical tasks that it is Climacus’s main intention to urge
him toward. McCombs intends this chapter as a criticism of Climacus, not necessarily of Kierkegaard. But because “Kierkegaard
never explicitly addresses some of the vices or weaknesses of indirect communication” (115), McCombs concedes that perhaps
Kierkegaard “is not adequately aware of its pitfalls and shortcomings” (117). As the chapter progresses, criticisms of Kierkegaard
himself come to replace criticisms of his pseudonymous author.
Though Kierkegaard recognizes that his position is one of faith and
not knowledge, his employment of indirect communication does
not allow much room for serious confrontation with thoughtful criticisms of Christianity. McCombs goes so far as to express a con-
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cern that if Kierkegaard not only does not know where the full truth
about Christianity lies—and no believer can claim to know—but
is actually wrong about where the full truth lies, he “bears responsibility for risking the ruination of many lives” (131). More direct,
and less indirect, communication would go a long way toward reducing this risk. It would leave the reader greater freedom to make
a responsible decision for or against faith, being more cognizant
of both the case for and the case against, in light of the very little
that we humans are actually capable of knowing beyond the
shadow of a doubt.
In the first five chapters of his book McCombs occasionally
speaks to some of the initially mystifying albeit intriguing things
that Kierkegaard says about Socrates. In Chapter 6 and 7, and also
in part of Chapter 8, he treats Kierkegaard’s interpretation of “the
figure of Socrates” thematically. McCombs makes, I think, as wellinformed and cogent a case as can be made for the coherence of
Kierkegaard’s understanding of Socrates.
In Chapter 6, McCombs shows how and why Kierkegaard
presents Socrates as embodying “climacean capacity,” which is the
capacity “to be a climber over boundaries and a transgressor of
limits” (134).7 “[T]he climacean capacity is a power of synthesizing an eternal, infinite, universal, and absolute ideal with or in the
temporal, finite, particular, and relative aspects of oneself and one’s
everyday life, which is to say that the climacean capacity is a capacity for subjectivity” (154). “Human beings seem to be finite,
temporal, particular, and conditioned animals. And yet they also
seem to be able to conceive, however inadequately, the infinite,
the eternal, and the unconditioned.” (157).8 As Kierkegaard sees
it, “Socratic ignorance is an essential component of faith and Christianity” (135). According to the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, the Philosophical Fragments misrepresents Socrates “as an
objective thinker, whereas he was really a subjective thinker”
(139). Climacus recognizes that “if one could not discover one’s
incapacity before God, then neither could one exist as a being who
attempts to live in time according to an eternal ideal” (147). “[T]he
god is ‘present just as soon as the uncertainty of everything is
thought infinitely’” (151).
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Whereas in Chapter 6 McCombs focuses on Kierke-gaard’s
understanding of Socrates’s ascent, in Chapter 7 he focuses on
Kierkegaard’s understanding of Socrates’s downfall. Kierkegaard
finds this downfall expressed in a striking passage from the Phaedrus. There Socrates confesses that he does not know himself.9
And so he investigates himself rather than other things in order to
find out whether he happens to be a monster (thērion) more multiply-twisted and lustful (epitethymenon) than Typhon or a gentler
and simpler animal having by nature a share in a certain divine and
non-arrogant (atyphon) allotment.10 As Kierkegaard interprets this
passage from the Phaedrus, “‘he who believed that he knew himself’ becomes so perplexed that he cannot decide between utterly
opposite self-interpretations.” This is the “downfall of the understanding.” Kierkegaard, through Climacus, suggests that Socrates
actually willed this downfall (162-163).
On first hearing, this suggestion sounds like Kierkegaardian
hyperbole. But, if the will is the appetite of reason,11 then human
reason is naturally propelled by its own appetite toward truth, including, paradoxically, the truth that human reason is not capable
of answering all the questions it naturally proposes to itself.12 In
the case at hand, Socrates’s will propels his reason toward selfknowledge; but the knowledge he attains is that he does not have
complete self-knowledge. It is in this way that Socrates wills the
downfall of his understanding. The will moves reason to the discovery and acknowledgment of its natural limits. This is not a merely
negative development, however. For “to will the downfall of reason
is to transform and perfect reason” (163). As McCombs writes in
an earlier chapter, “[T]he power of reason comes to light in the act
of becoming aware of its weakness” (69).
This transformation and perfection is not of theoretical reason
alone, but of practical reason as well (cf. 211).13 The standard interpretation of the downfall of reason is that it results in “an openness or receptivity to a divine revelation of truths that exceed the
capacity of natural reason” (164). McCombs thinks that this interpretation is correct as far as it goes. But he thinks that it does not
go far enough, for it places stress only on the theoretical consequences of the downfall. As McCombs argues, it has practical con-
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sequences as well. “The thing that falls in the downfall of the understanding is the whole human capacity to achieve the highest
human end—an eternal happiness, which includes not only joy, but
wisdom and goodness as well. Consequently, the downfall is a disavowal of the pretentions that one can become good, wise, and joyful on one’s own, a rejection of the determination to rely only on
oneself in striving for one’s highest end” (165).
The disavowal of these pretensions results indeed in an openness to revelation. According to Christianity, there is a revelation
of truths regarding action: how to become truly good through repentance, on the one hand, and through cultivating love of God
and neighbor, on the other. And there is a revelation of truths regarding being as well: that God is a Trinity of persons, without the
slightest compromise to his unity but as its perfection through the
unqualified love that unites the three persons, and that one of these
persons became incarnate in order to save us from sin and call us
toward fuller and fuller participation, through love, in the divine
nature.14 “[O]ne accepts revelation not in order to become a better
philosopher but in order to become a better person” (165).
It should be noted that Socrates’s qualification in the Phaedrus
that he does not “yet” know himself implies that he has not simply
given up on the possibility of attaining complete self-knowledge.15
Furthermore, any openness to revelation that he might have arrived
at is, in the absence of actual revelation, an openness only to the
possibility of revelation.16 But until and unless Socrates does attain
complete self-knowledge, he cannot definitively know whether all
so-called choice is merely a case of being determined by the apparent good, more precisely by the apparent best;17 or whether, instead, man is capable of radically free choice and
self-determination, including the abuse of radically free choice and
self-determination that is sin. The crucial issue, then, is whether
Socrates has any inkling of sin. Though “Climacus claims that neither Socrates nor anyone else can be aware of sin without revelation” he nonetheless “portrays Socrates as suspecting his sinful
condition” and “as suspecting that he is misrelated to the divine
owing to Typhonic arrogance” (167-168; cf. 175). Plato surely expects the reader of the Phaedrus to remember that Typhon was, as
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McCombs says, “an arrogant, violent, and defiant enemy of the
gods.” Moreover, with his hundred heads, he was “presumably not
even friendly to himself” (167). A monster like Typhon cannot be
happy.
We noted earlier that the interest of reason lies in its being between the temporal and the eternal, and that it moves teleologically
from the temporal toward the eternal. According to Kierkegaard, it
cannot reach its ultimate telos without supernatural assistance. This
assistance becomes available only when the eternal, at its own initiative, becomes temporal “in the fullness of time.” In what Christians
believe to be the historical event of the Incarnation, a synthesis of
the eternal and the temporal is achieved in deed and not just in
thought. The Incarnation is for Kierkegaard the paradox (146); it is
the absolute paradox (219).
Assuming both (1) that neither complete self-knowledge nor
complete knowledge of the whole and its ground is humanly possible, and (2) that one has heard the Gospel of Christ, Kierkegaard
thinks that only two responses to what one has heard are possible:
faith, which is not knowledge,18 and offense, which is not doubt. Offense is “a delusion of rational autonomy”—deluded because human
reason has limits and thus is not “self-sufficient.” Offense is “unhappy self-assertion”—unhappy because one asserts oneself on the
basis of what one knows, deep down, is insufficient knowledge of
oneself. In the human being there are “two elements in tension with
one another: a desire for happiness and a desire for autonomy or selfsufficiency.” These elements are incompatible, and “one or the other
of them must fall. Faith . . . is the downfall of the desire for self-assertion, while offense is the downfall of the desire for happiness”
(176-177).
In Chapter 8, McCombs further explores the consequences of
Kierkegaard’s conviction that there are no “public demonstrations of
the answers to certain crucial questions: Is there a personal God who
created and maintains the world? Does a human being have an immortal soul? Is there a best life for human beings?” (184) If by “public demonstrations” Kierkegaard means rationally accessible
demonstrations, it can be countered that there are such demonstrations, pro and contra, on these and related matters, particularly in
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medieval theology and in the reaction of modern philosophy against
medieval theology. There has indeed never been universal acceptance
of either theological or anti-theological arguments. But then there
has also never been universal acceptance, not even by the greatest
minds, of many philosophical arguments, such as, for example, the
divergent arguments regarding the scope of human knowledge (think
of Hume and Hegel), the relation of acts of thought to the objects of
thought (think of Plato and Husserl), the relationship between the
good and the pleasant (think of Kant and Mill), and the authority of
reason (think of Aristotle and Heidegger). It is likely that there is no
“public demonstration” on these matters because the public is insufficiently perceptive to follow the arguments. In considering a disagreement between great philosophers, say, the disagreement
between Locke and Leibniz on how much our knowledge arises from
the senses, one has to consider the possibility that one of the two
thinkers penetrated closer to the root of the matter than did the other.
It seems improbable that there will ever be universal acceptance of
most philosophical and theological demonstrations. But that does not
mean that these demonstrations are not rationally accessible.
That theological and philosophical demonstrations are so controverted might not be due solely to different capacities for clear
thinking. McCombs highlights Kierkegaard’s conviction that character cannot be easily separated from the quest for knowledge.
“[D]esires, fears, emotions, actions, and habits have an influence
on what and how a person thinks, or on what a person can see,
understand, know, or become aware of. In other words, some desires, habits, emotions, and actions are conducive to truth, and
some are inimical to it” (192). McCombs illustrates this claim by
referring to the limitations of Meno and Ivan Karamazov. “[T]he
deep thinker must be a spiritual knight with the strength and
courage to think terrible thoughts that others cannot endure to
think” (193). One terrible thought, of course, is that, even if there
is a first cause or ground of our finite existence, it takes no interest
in us and how we live our lives. But an equally terrible thought is
that we have deceived ourselves into thinking that we know this
to be true when we do not, and cannot, know any such thing. Both
terrible thoughts have to be explored.
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McCombs writes, “It is hard to believe that a person who
often lies to himself about his own actions and qualities, about the
actions and qualities of other people, and about his social and personal relations to other people will be honest when he tries to answer the most important philosophical questions” (194; cf. 65).
The examined life does not consist exclusively, or even primarily,
in the reading and discussion of philosophical texts. Most of all it
requires ongoing self-examination, including especially the examination of conscience that is needed to check the self-deception
that is at the root of sin, including the sin of vanity, especially intellectual vanity (cf. 215). McCombs recognizes that not all intellectual endeavors are equally compromised by corrupt character.
Corrupt character has little effect on “cognition of scientific, mathematical, and linguistic truths.” But corrupt character can pervert
“cognition of human nature and the best life for human beings”
(202). Anyone who is attempting to live a wholly rational life,
whether he is a believer or a nonbeliever, stands under an obligation of ongoing and unrelenting self-scrutiny.
On Kierkegaard’s understanding of the close connection between theory and practice, McCombs writes, “Seeing for oneself
requires acting for oneself…by one’s own self-activity, at one’s
own risk, and on one’s own responsibility. In short, autopsy requires autopraxy” (198). One gains humility, and thereby overcomes doubt through “the bitter method of trying to imitate Christ
and failing” (215). Humility is notoriously misunderstood, and
caricatured as well. McCombs corrects the common misunderstanding: “a meek and beaten-down milksop does not have the audacity to believe. . . . Honestly admitting one’s utter weakness
before God takes the greatest human strength. . . . [O]nly heroes
of the spirit have the audacity to believe . . . what pride cannot
tolerate and therefore willfully ignores: namely, a supreme being
to whom humans ought utterly to subordinate themselves” (215).
In humility, self-transcendence overcomes irrational egoism and
self-importance.
Kierkegaard’s project, like Pascal’s and Dostoyevsky’s, is obviously based on the assumption that the existence of the Biblical
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God cannot be definitively disproven. But some philosophers have
advanced arguments, not subjective but objective arguments,
aimed at definitively disproving the existence of God, especially
as one who freely reveals himself. So a non-Kierkegaardian, but
not anti-Kierkegaardian, task remains for the theologian. First to
examine these arguments dispassionately to assess their cogency;
and then, if they are found to be less than absolutely compelling,
to expose their limitations. For if a man thinks—let us assume,
thinks altogether innocently—that the concept of Christ as true
God and true man, both together, is a logical contradiction, then
exhorting him to imitate Christ is pointless. There is still a lot left
for the theologian to do at the level of objectivity.
McCombs ends his book by raising a question that some readers will have already asked themselves: has Kierkegaard merely
conscripted Socrates into his project? McCombs answers in the
negative. “[T]here are many passages in Plato’s dialogues in
which Socrates professes ignorance, self-blame, suspicions of his
own monstrosity, repentance, and in which he warns against a
self-justifying egoism that undermines truth and justice. Together
these passages seem to constitute a solid basis for a responsible
interpretation of Socrates as a thinker who willed the downfall of
his own understanding because he suspected something very like
sin” (218). McCombs supports this answer with references to the
telling texts. One might object that he has cherry picked the passages that support the Kierkegaardian interpretation of Socrates.
But all interpretations of Plato that aim at taking the dialogic form
of his teaching seriously have to come to terms with everything
that is said and happens in the dialogues, including occasional observations of Socrates’s that do not fit with preconceived notions
of what Platonism is supposed to be. The passages that McCombs
cites in support of Kierkegaard’s Socrates are not more salutary
and comforting than passages one might cite in support of someone else’s Socrates. On the contrary, they are among the most startling and disconcerting passages to be found in the entire Platonic
corpus. It is the singular, though by no means the sole, merit of
McCombs’s study that it forces many of us, just when we thought
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that we, with the assistance of our teachers and our friends, might
have finally gotten a relatively firm grasp of what Socrates is up
to, to take a fresh look at the enigmatic figure through whom Plato
presents his teaching.
NOTES
1. Unless otherwise noted, numbers in parentheses after quotations refer
to the pagination of The Paradoxical Rationality of Søren Kierkegaard,
even where the sentence quoted is Kierkegaard’s and not McCombs’s.
2. Determinism cannot be known, definitively and beyond the shadow of
a doubt, to be true. As David Hume has shown, the proposition, “Every
event has a cause,” is not an analytic judgment. It follows a fortiori that
the proposition, “Every event has a cause outside itself,” which is the thesis of determinism, is not an analytic judgment. It can be denied without
contradiction. The thesis of determinism is not self-evident; and any attempt to demonstrate it begs the question.
3. This is also the view of thinkers as different as Thomas Aquinas and
Kant.
4. Cf. Aristotle, Posterior Analytics 71b20-35; 72a26-31; 72b19-2;
90b19-100b18; Metaphysics 1005b6-1006a10; 1011a7-13.
5. Kierkegaard seems here to be close to Gregory of Nyssa, who understands the supernatural end of man to consist not simply in a reposeful
intellectual vision of God, but in infinite and yet unimpeded progress,
progress in love especially. Gregory interprets the claim that we are called
to become partakers of the divine nature (koinōnoi theias physeōs—2
Peter 1: 3-4) to imply theosis, i.e., becoming more and more like God.
This goal, perfect love, can be infinitely approached by man, starting even
in this life, but never attained once and for all, even in the next life. Perhaps surprisingly, Kant similarly understands immortality of the soul to
consist in infinite progress. See Critique of Practical Reason Part 2, Bk.
2, Ch. 2, iv.
6. McCombs draws attention (199) to a remarkable statement made by
the Athenian Stranger in Plato’s Laws: “Truly the cause of all errors
(aition . . . tōn pantōn hamartēmatōn) is in every case excessive friendship for oneself ” (731e3-5). If Plato is expressing his own thought here,
it is not easy to see how he could have held, as some seem to think he
held, that the good is essentially one’s own good, understood narrowly
as one’s own sweet pleasure.
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7. As McCombs notes (173), it is likely that Kierkegaard selected the
pseudonym “Johannes Climacus” (Greek, Iōannēs tēs klimakos, literally,
“John of the Ladder,” the name given to a twelfth century Christian monk
and saint, who wrote The Ladder of Divine Ascent) with an eye on the
“ladder of love” described in the Symposium.
8. Whatever share irrational animals have in the eternal, there is no reason
to think that they conceive of the eternal, much less concern themselves
about it.
9. Phaedrus 229e8.
10. Ibid., 229a3-a8. McCombs notes that the name Typhon can be translated “puffed up” (167). On the difficulty of complete self-knowledge,
consider the qualifier eis dynamin at Philebus 63c3.
11. Aristotle, De Anima 432b5-8 and 433a8-31; Thomas Aquinas Super
Sent., lib. 2 d. 30 q. 1 art. 3, ad 4. Summa Theologiae 1-2 q. 6, introd.; q.
8 art. 1, co.; q. 56 art. 5, ad 1; ibid., 3 q. 19 art. 2, co.; Kant, Critique of
Practical Reason, Book 1, Ch. 1, Theorem 3, Remark 1.
12. See the first sentence of the “First Preface” of Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason.
13. Here Kierkegaard parts ways with Kant. Consider the qualification
in the sentence cited in the previous note: “in one [!] species of its cognition.”
14. Cf. note 5 above.
15. See pō at 229e8 and eti at 230a1.
16. An inability to refute, and hence a consequent openness to, even the
bare possibility of revelation would situate the philosopher qua philosopher in an untenable position, at least according to Leo Strauss: Natural
Right and History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1953). 75.
Cf. “Reason and Revelation” (appended to Heinrich Meier’s study, Leo
Strauss and the Theological-Problem, trans. Marcus Brainard [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006] 150, 176-177; “Progress or
Return” (in Leo Strauss, Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity,
ed. Kenneth Hart Green [Albany: State University of New York Press,
1997], 117, 131. On this crucial point, however much they otherwise differ, Strauss and Kierkegaard are in essential agreement: opposition to
faith cannot consistently be based on an act of faith, or on anything resembling faith.
17. Gorgias 466e2; Meno 77d8-e3.
18. John 20:29.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Plato’s Political Polyphony
A Book Review of Plato: Statesman. Translated by
Eva Brann, Peter Kalkavage, and Eric Salem. Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing, 2012. vii + 166 pp.
$10.95.
Gregory Recco
Continuing the work begun in their previous two translations of
Plato,* Eva Brann, Peter Kalkavage, and Eric Salem have now
translated Plato’s Statesman. In addition to the translation, the volume includes an introduction, a glossary, an interpretive essay, and
two appendices. The introduction situates the dialogue in the context of Plato’s works, both dramatically and conceptually, announcing its main themes and connecting it with other
works—particularly its immediate dramatic predecessor, the
Sophist, and its thematic siblings, the Republic and the Laws. The
translation contains footnotes that provide pertinent literary or cultural background, references to other dialogues, and pointers to the
attached glossary when particularly important words or ideas first
appear. The glossary, like those in the earlier translations, is organized into meaning-clusters, groups of related or associated words
that together make up one important conceptual unit of the dialogue. The selection and discussion of these words, then, constitutes a work of interpretation—or at least the preparation of
material for such a work—and gives the translators a natural opportunity to discuss the rationale behind their English renderings
of important Greek terms. After the glossary comes a substantial
essay on the whole of Statesman, a thoughtful recapitulation and
reflection that presents a systematic and thorough survey of questions raised in the dialogue. Finally, the appendices: the first
*Plato: Phaedo (Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing, 1998) and Plato:
Timaeus (Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing, 2001).
Gregory Recco is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland.
�REVIEWS | RECCO
135
graphically presents an overview in word and image of the practice of weaving which forms the dialogue’s most densely intertwined “paradigm,” or model, of the work of statesmanship; the
second unravels and graphically portrays the various heuristic
“divisions” by which the Stranger investigated questions of definition in the Sophist and here seeks the politikos, or statesman.
The translation is of very high quality—a fact that will likely
not surprise readers of the team’s previous two efforts. To describe
its excellence I must make some preparatory remarks about what
a translation is, who Plato is, and how Plato ought to be translated.
And I must discuss the particularities (or rather peculiarities) of
the Statesman.
The art of translation possesses, in a particularly pronounced
degree, a feature that characterizes all arts: What directs the activity
of artists is not their own wishes and ideas, but the necessities of
the work to be done. Becoming the practitioner of an art involves
a kind of surrender to something alien, namely, the determinacies
of the product and the conditions of its production. In translation,
this relinquishment of authority is especially evident in the very
nature of the work, which consists of transplanting a thought that
belongs to someone else from its native home into the foreign soil
of another language while keeping it intact and alive. Because the
translator does not create the being of that which he translates, his
excellence consists in his ability to let the thought of another shine
forth unimpeded and unaltered.
Plato’s thought poses special challenges to the prospective
translator, because the dialogue form in which it predominantly
resides gives it a uniquely amorphous character unparalleled anywhere else in Western literature. Because of their polyphonic conversational style, the dialogues of Plato give no authoritative
indication of how they are to be interpreted, no explicit endorsement of some message, so that it is quite difficult to say just what
Plato’s thought actually is. Without some definite notion of how
to deal with this difficulty, the choices and judgments that the
translator must make run the risk of being severally ad hoc and,
taken together, inconsistent. But in the dialogues themselves Plato
is completely silent about this difficulty. Faced with this apparent
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
authorial dereliction, it is tempting to conclude with a kind of misplaced strictness that the phrase “Plato’s thought” signifies but
does not refer, as Heraclitus nearly says of the oracle at Delphi.
But this is the counsel of despair, and it leaves out the third leg of
Heraclitus’s saying: the oracle, who does not speak, but gives sign,
does not conceal. Something similar must be said of Plato. Even
cursory comparison of the dialogues uncovers themes that recur
with some frequency. Longer acquaintance reveals how generous
Plato can be to the careful reader, who discovers that the cracks
in the surface form a pattern, so to speak. The latter point deserves
fuller and more literal articulation, both on its own terms and because it is so often overlooked—which leads to bad interpretation
and consequently to bad translation.
Many of the dialogues take on the outward form of a “Socratic”
conversation, with one dialectically more experienced person taking the lead and questioning another in what seems to be a more or
less directed way, so that the latter gradually takes on views suggested by the former. But the inner truth of the dialogues is that
they are documents bearing witness to the event of thinking, paradoxically more akin to Thucydides’s record of a great event than
to Hippocrates’s scientific investigation of the causes of sickness
and health. The dialogues are not treatises of Socratic dogma thinly
disguised as conversations, but more or less dramatized presentations of what it looks like to think. I say “dramatized” because, as
I hinted above, that is where Plato’s artistry lies: this is his real
work, which is also something like the work of a translator.
Plato’s art is to show us the event of thinking, by dramatically
portraying what it looks like when it happens among human beings, in both its grandeur and its modesty. To say that thinking is
such and such, or has such and such characteristics, is perhaps a
fairly idle and undemanding pursuit, but to show it—that is, to
make manifest through a single instance the structure of intelligibility that informs it and gives it life—is an accomplishment of an
exceedingly high order. Somehow the dialogue must both be a conversation and exhibit “conversationality.” Not surprisingly, the investigation of how conversing ought to take place in order to get
at truth is one of those recurring themes that give the dialogues of
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137
Plato their distinctive mark. But the exhibition of thinking as such
occurs in several other, less immediate, ways. To note just one,
briefly, let me point out the structure of errancy and return, or wandering and recapitulation.
In the Statesman, as in the Sophist and so many other dialogues, the tentative answers given to the guiding questions are
forever turning up inadequate, coming unmoored as they are jostled by fresh contenders that look no less promising, even if they,
too, ultimately fall apart. This is especially evident in the bewildering multiplicity of “definitions” that fail, by the very fact of
their being multiple, to hem in or pin down the sort of men being
sought in these two dialogues. The various ways in which the dialogues can acquaint us with perplexity, and thus make us feel
thought’s errancy, are probably familiar to many readers. No less
important, however, is a dimension of thought that tends to belong
less to the one questioned than to the one doing the questioning:
to put a name to it, the dimension of redemption, of making up for
what has gone wrong by noticing how it has gone wrong. The dialogues are chock-full of bad arguments, wrong turns, and dead
ends. But these errors never just lie there. They stand out, and and
were made to stand out by their author. Plato calls on us to respond
more adequately than Socrates’s interlocutors and to consider how
an attentive and active questioner might help things move forward
from there. Giving us the opportunity to become better at thinking
is a great gift that is squandered by dogmatic interpretations (and
the translations founded on them), for they can see only the degree
to which the things said in the dialogues do not form a very compelling body of theory, even as they tantalizingly hint at one.
Brann, Kalkavage, and Salem understand quite well both this difficulty and other difficulties related to Plato’s portrayal of the
drama of thinking; their understanding guides their choices and
contributes greatly to the excellence of their translations.
In general, Plato’s artistry exists on the level of style, in the
nuances of diction and register, metaphor and allusion, that reveal
the character behind the thought, and give us something further to
think about when the resources of the argument turn out to be insufficient to answer all our questions. In the case of Socrates, this
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
is well known and acknowledged, though less so for his interlocutors: it is a commonplace to mock their “dialogue” as merely a series
of more or less undifferentiated assents. The characters in Plato who
are generally considered to be well drawn are usually the ones who
disagree, and they are considered better drawn the more vehemently they disagree with Socrates (like Callicles and Thrasymachus). The Statesman has neither of these advantages: its main
speaker is the somewhat opaque Stranger from Elea, and its main
respondent is the somewhat colorless Young Socrates. Not a very
promising circumstance for the translation that seeks to reveal a
Plato who is a master of style. It is the particular excellence of this
translation that it is able to show us a Plato who is at work in his
accustomed ways even in these changed circumstances.
The translation is above all else trustworthy. If a word or
phrase jars (such as Socrates’s having “mixed it up” with Theaetetus on the previous day [258a]), consulting the Greek reassures
(perhaps he is meant to sound relatively informal compared with
the Stranger or perhaps he wants to recall the Stranger’s mixing of
the eidē). Words whose polysemy is troublesome are rendered consistently, in a neutral and readable way that has no axe to grind.
Instead of translating most replies as “Yes, Socrates,” the translators make the responses both differentiated and differentiable, an
absolutely invaluable aid to the close reader who is keeping watch
over the fitness of the interlocutor’s responses. The Stranger’s
humor, which verges, it is no exaggeration to say, on aridity, appears in all its understated, deadpan glory. Picture the face of a very
serious old man intoning these words: “The king at least is manifest
to us as one who pastures a certain horn-shorn herd” (265d). Even
when the syntax becomes tortuous, the translation remains not only
readable, but even speakable. What is perhaps most impressive is
that the translation’s readability does not come at the cost of overly
interpretive (or inventive) construal. Heidegger said approvingly
of Kant that he left obscure what is in itself obscure. In this rendering of the Statesman, it should be said that what is puzzling in
the original remains so in translation, but because of what is said,
not because of any obscurity in how it is said. The translation’s
simultaneous readability and faithfulness (in the fullest sense of
�REVIEWS | RECCO
139
that word), coupled with its generous and thoughtful supplementary materials, strongly recommend its use for classroom study by
serious students, with or without some knowledge of the Greek. It
should also be of interest to, and useable by, any sort of serious
reader at all. In contrast to the translators’ earlier editions of the
Phaedo and the Sophist, this one clearly distinguishes the functions
of the Introduction and the Essay, placing the latter, appropriately,
after the dialogue itself. The “Essay” pithily and unpretentiously
raises questions that cut to the very heart of the dialogue, questions
about the nature and possibility of rational politics, and questions
about the very identity of philosophy. No mere “student edition,”
this; the Plato scholar, too, will find much here that advances serious thinking.
�
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Pastille, William
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Hunt, Frank
Sachs, Joe
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Zuckerman, Elliott
Arnaiz, Deziree
Sachs, Joe
Frost, Bryan-Paul
Levine, David
Burke, Chester
Kalkavage, Peter
Maistrellis, Nicholas
Salem, Eric
Carey, James
Recco, Gregory
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The St. John’s Review
Volume 54, Number 2 (Spring 2013)
Editor
William Pastille
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
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��Contents
Essays & Lectures
Unbecoming Conduct in the Reign of Tiberius ....................1
According to Tacitus
David Appleby
Dionysus: The Therapeutic Mask .......................................35
Richard B. Carter
Fields, Particles, and Being .................................................57
Dylan Casey
Miracles and Belief .............................................................89
Joseph Cohen
The Question of Questions ...............................................115
Michael W. Grenke
Review
The Rehabilitation of Spiritedness ....................................135
Book Review of Gary Borjesson’s Willing Dogs
and Reluctant Masters: On Friendship and Dogs.
Eva Brann
��1
ESSAYS & LECTURES
Unbecoming Conduct in the
Reign of Tiberius According to
Tacitus
David Appleby
Besides, there is a great difference between doing what one does not approve of
and feigning approval of what one does:
the one is the part of a weak man, but the
other belongs only to the habits of a valet.
—De Tocqueville1
1. INTRODUCTION
One of the few positive characteristics Tacitus attributed to
Tiberius was an interest in public moderation: the proper, the
decorous, and the fitting. A memorable example occurs in 22
AD, a year of peace abroad but anxiety in Rome about possible measures to curb rampant luxury. Aware of the princeps’
old fashioned frugality, and in view of widespread neglect of
the existing sumptuary law, the senate simply referred the
matter to Tiberius. He had often remarked in private that attempting to limit these excessive appetites might not be worth
the indecency (indecorum) of trying and failing, or succeeding through coercive measures and bringing great men into
dishonor and ill-repute (ignominiam et infamiam). He answered the senate in a letter decrying shameful luxury: vast
houses and domestic retinues, rich furnishings and ornament,
foppish attire for men, exotic gems for women, over-the-top
banquets. All were symptoms of an illness of the soul, one
that harms the state even as it ruins great families. “May decency (pudor) change us for the better—the poor because they
must; the wealthy because they have had enough.”2
The Annales make it clear that self-interest, ambition, and
David Appleby is a tutor at Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula,
California.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
vice led Tiberius to present himself as an enemy of unbecoming conduct. By contrast, Tacitus’s own concern for decorum
was deep and sincere. The obligation to speak and behave
with dignity and seemliness, with the attendant imperative to
avoid unbecoming conduct, was a principle of his moral and
social world-view. I shall argue that one of his greatest objections to the new regime under the Caesars was that it created a climate in which members of the senatorial order,
Roman society’s natural leaders, were induced to behave in
disreputable ways. When the public arena in Rome became
a sort of theater in which great men routinely presented themselves in ways that were false, unworthy, and ridiculous, not
only individuals and their families were disgraced, but the
whole class was placed in an unflattering light. In Tacitus’s
judgment, this was one of the most unforgiveable effects of
the tyranny.
Why did Tacitus take such an interest in seemliness? Two
main reasons present themselves, the first more obvious than
the second. In the first place, Tacitus was keenly aware of
style and its effect upon readers. As we shall see, an important
aspect of decorous speech and behavior was paying attention
to how others perceive one’s words, gestures, and facial expression. Educated Romans knew that identifying what is
seemly involves anticipating how one’s interlocutors will perceive one’s words and appearance. As annalist, historian, biographer and ethnographer, Tacitus represented reality in a
highly personal and even idiosyncratic manner. But his words
seem always to have been chosen for their likely impact upon
readers. He created the effects that he sought through vivid
description, asymmetrical construction, oblique narration,
and epigrammatic brevity, disposing readers not only to behold the spectacle in a certain light, but to judge along with
the author. Anticipated impact upon his reader seems to dictate word choice, sentence structure, and narrative strategy.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | APPLEBY
3
What he described—wars and mutinies, plots and murders,
above all the gloomy sense of impending dread under the
Julio-Claudians—is memorable in large part because of the
way he described it.3
His arresting style tends to obscure the second reason for
his interest in seemliness, namely his practical experience as
magistrate and orator. The son of a senatorial family in southern Gaul or northern Italy, Tacitus belonged to a privileged
social order whose members felt entitled to honor their ancestors by exercising authority and generally playing the
leading roles in affairs of state. Along with this came an obligation to present oneself in word, gesture, and deed in conformity with one’s social standing. With this innate sense of
duty and appropriateness, he began an official career under
Vespasian (r. 69-79), continued it during the difficult reign of
Domitian (r. 81-96), and in 97 became consul under Nerva
(r. 96-98). Under Trajan (r. 98-117), Tacitus delivered an important funeral oration, joined his friend Pliny the younger
in a high profile prosecution, and served as proconsular governor of Asia. He was known as an impressive speaker, and
around the year 100 he published a treatise on style and various sorts of oratory. In short, as man of action no less than
as man of letters, Tacitus was attuned to appearance and how
one is perceived.
2 DECORUM
Before investigating seemliness in the Annales, it is worth
considering the idea in the tradition within which Tacitus
worked and in the pages of one of his distinguished Roman
predecessors. The noun decorum refers in the first place to
the beauty or pleasing appearance of a thing or person; it applies secondarily to non-visual beauty, elegance, charm, and
distinction; and then it opens onto other things that are appropriate, seemly, and fitting in ways that attract honor and
approval. Like to prepon, its Greek counterpart, decorum is
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
hard to render consistently with one word in English because
of its range of aesthetic, histrionic, forensic, and moral meanings. In the rhetorical tradition to prepon had been a principle
since Aristotle and Theophrastus, and by the time of Quintilian (d. ca.100) decorum applied to invention, style, arrangement, and delivery. Quintilian owed an immediate debt to
Cicero (106-43 BC) whose remark in De oratore that “by action the body talks, so it is all the more necessary to make it
agree with the thought”4 bears some relation to the subject at
hand.
Cicero’s expansive account of decorum as a moral concept in Book I of his De officiis helps us to approach the intellectual milieu of the Annales; for Tacitus, while not himself
a Ciceronian, still wrote for, and belonged to, a class that understood itself as embodying the urbanity and standards of
conduct that Cicero assumed as normative.5 The discussion
of what is honorable that occurs in Book I of De officiis includes a consideration of the four cardinal virtues as the
source of all moral goodness, and hence the source of all that
is honorable.6 Decorum and the duties it entails spring from
the broader virtue of moderation.7
Decorum consists in thinking, saying, and doing what one
should, and in appearing to be as morally well ordered as one
is. Since the decorous is neither deficient nor excessive, it reflects moderation, and this is understood not only with respect to particular objects or actions, but as the overall
balance, order, and harmony of the soul, and as the beauty of
the life of one who enjoys such moral equilibrium. Cicero
presents decorum as the outward manifestation of the soul’s
integrity, the moral analogue of physical beauty.8 Decorum
is thus the perceptible aspect of moral goodness; every act of
moral rectitude, whether in thought, word, or deed, reveals
some element of propriety. Just as the beauty of the body reflects bodily health, decorum reflects moral virtue.9
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | APPLEBY
5
Cicero also emphasizes the social aspect of decorum: the
good person’s speech, actions, and appearance make his
moral virtue discernible to others; and the good person has
modesty (verecundia)—that is, he shows consideration for
the sensibilities of others. Much of the discussion of decorum
in De officiis aims at instilling in the reader a greater awareness of the impression he makes upon others. Cicero explains
that playwrights have just this aspect of decorum in mind
when they craft words and actions to express the qualities of
a particular role (persona).10 The audience knows the characters in the play only by what it can infer from their words,
expressions, gestures, and deeds. As a sort of playwright outside the theater, nature assigns us the parts (personae) of consistency, moderation, and self-control, but also teaches us to
have respect for others and to attend to how we appear to
them. Once again comparing decorum to physical beauty,
Cicero says that just as the order and symmetry of the limbs
of a body attract the eye and please the viewer, decorum,
which illuminates the whole life, is an order, consistency, and
moderation of every word and deed that attracts the approval
of the people among whom we live.11
According to Cicero, the duties associated with propriety
are rooted in nature. This means, in the first instance, submitting the appetites to the control of reason, especially in
one’s pastimes, joking, and pleasures. One thereby avoids the
vulgarity and sensuality of an uncontrolled, irrational, or bestial life, and instead lives with the self-control and steadiness
appropriate to man’s rational nature.12 These are fundamental
matters of decency, but are not the only duties associated with
propriety.
Specifying these other duties is hard, not only because
propriety is assessed with respect to circumstance, occasion,
and context, but because it is also inextricably linked to one’s
personality and character. Cicero explains that nature clothes
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
each of us in two roles (personae), one common and universal, the other individual and proper to each. Our common
human role provides us with our dignity as rational beings,
our moral goodness, and thus our decorum; we must use our
rationality to control our appetites and observe at least minimal standards of decency and consideration.13
The particular role that nature has assigned each one of
us accounts for the other duties associated with propriety.
Just as one person differs from another in bodily size and
physical constitution, so too we find diversity of manner,
temperament, and aptitude. While harmless in themselves,
these differences have to be taken into account when determining what is fitting and proper for each person. Cicero explains that, within the limits set by universal human nature,
the gentleman will attend carefully to his own particular nature in order to determine what is proper and seemly: “nos
studia nostra nostrae naturae regula metiamur.”14
On the other hand, just as nothing is so becoming as to
find the way of life suited to one’s own nature and then to
follow it in a steadfast and consistent way, the inconsistency
of a moral lightweight is highly indecorous.15
Decorum of the sort Cicero described stayed on the minds
of educated Romans during the principate. Lucius Annaeus
Seneca (d. 65), for example, pictured the happy life of the
self-consistent man in terms reminiscent of Cicero’s account.16 Again, the correspondence of the younger Pliny
shows that in its general outline Cicero’s view of decorum
was still influential during the lifetime of Tacitus. Although
these letters adhere to a different formality than that of the
philosophical manual or discourse that Cicero and Seneca
had written, the elements of upper-class seemliness nevertheless appear frequently.17
3 PRINCEPS AS TONE-SETTER
Like Cicero, Tacitus was aware of decorum and its social di-
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | APPLEBY
7
mension, and like him Tacitus accepted it as a principle of
civilized conduct. But as moralist and political philosopher,
Cicero concerned himself with action as it should be, with
theory more than practice. As historian, Tacitus reported how
people actually behaved, which in many cases fell far short
of the norms and ideals of the theorist. Perhaps there had once
been a time when prominent citizens had conformed to standards of decency and comportment rooted in nature and discovered by reason. What Tacitus saw in his own generation,
and what he could learn of the reign of Tiberius, however,
was that the princeps himself more and more became the
axial pole of decorum; that is, the place that Cicero had attributed to nature and reason in determining the criteria of
decorous behavior, Tacitus found, in practice, had been taken
over by the princeps himself. This is not to say that Tacitus
knew nothing of nature as norm, or of reason as the guide to
understanding nature. Indeed, as we shall see, the men he
praised had moral strength and good character consistent
with, if not explicitly related to, natural law. But for many
prominent Romans the preponderance of the first citizen
eclipsed any view of a natural standard. For them it seemed
more expedient to conform themselves to his perspective and
his way of doing things than to an abstract ideal of natural
virtue. The reason they used to determine their behavior was
the prudence involved in first trying to discern the expectations of the princeps and then attuning themselves accordingly.
The princeps came to set the standard of decorous behavior because of the character of the regime. Force and political
inequality lay at the root of the principate, but its day-to-day
aspect was the tone set by the princeps himself. Augustus
himself had established the pattern of effective autocracy tacitly juxtaposed with republican institutions and the semblance
of liberty for the senatorial elite. He took the lead in matters
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of public behavior, holding or declining certain magistracies
and official posts, nominating friends as candidates for others. Sometimes setting the tone meant giving direct advice
and instructions, but more often it involved modeling this or
that behavior, enacting or showing how things were to be
done. The poetry of Virgil and the histories of Livy reflect
the classicizing and patriotic outlook of Augustus and his circle. So do buildings and statues like the Ara Pacis and the
Augustus of Prima Porta.18 Even Augustus’s epitaph, which
he composed for himself, has a calm tone, evokes a sense of
its author’s modesty, and presents an image of strength in
service of the common good.19
Noble Romans accommodated themselves as best they
could to the example or standard of the first man. As Tacitus
puts it, “with political equality gone, everyone looked to the
commands of the princeps.”20 They did this for various reasons. Tacitus is aware that people often unconsciously emulate their superiors, and sometimes this urge to get into line
(amor aemulandi) is more effective than the threat of punishment in promoting conformity of mores and behavior.21
Other people realized that the new social and political order
presented opportunities for advancement or enrichment to
those who could adapt properly. But apprehension and outright fear were more important incentives to conformity. Augustus had dealt harshly with his opponents in the civil war
and afterwards, and from the outset it was evident that
Tiberius was not a man to cross if one could avoid it.
But how was one to avoid crossing him? Conformity was
bound to be difficult insofar as the standard to which people
sought to conform kept shifting. A mutable standard of propriety was to some extent endemic to the new regime. Always
in the principate there was disparity between appearance and
reality, between the appearance of liberty of a republic restored by the first citizen and the fact of one man’s hege-
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mony.22 The norm of behavior always tended to oscillate between the image of liberty and the reality of domination, because such oscillation reflected the nature of the regime itself.
A princeps whose public character was affable, fair, and
steady might minimize this oscillation and thereby make it
easier for others to attune themselves. He would moderate
his own speech and behavior in ways the leading men could
decipher and respond to with as much dignity as the circumstances of the autocracy would allow. But a weaker princeps
might not.
Whether Tacitus judged Augustus to be a better ruler, less
tyrannous than Tiberius, is not clear. There are signs that he
viewed the regime’s founder with irony and skepticism.23 But
at least Augustus had presented a consistent figure and a
steady face. This made it possible to live with the new order
and its master. According to Tacitus, life was more difficult
under Tiberius because of the dissonance between his public
mask and his real thoughts and intentions.
Tacitus’s censure and disapproval of Tiberius are open,
though at first somewhat muted, for he mentions that the
tyranny emerged in stages, as the man’s character gradually
showed itself. Before the death of Tiberius’s son Drusus in
23, business had been conducted in the senate, where there
was still some free discussion. The princeps himself had discouraged flattery, and tried to make sure that offices and magistracies went only to those whose birth, merit, and distinction
made them worthy. Taxes and provincial administration were
handled equitably. After 23, with Drusus out of the way, Sejanus, Tiberius’s sinister lieutenant, gained greater influence,
with the consequence that moderate policies were dropped,
and Tiberius eventually withdrew from the city.24 Another
turning point came in 29 at the death of the Augusta,
Tiberius’s mother. Livia, who had been a match for her
smooth and voluble second husband, Augustus, was also
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equal to the secretiveness and dissimulation of her son. She
had exercised a moderating influence upon Tiberius and Sejanus, but once she was dead, they openly took action against
those they perceived to be enemies of the government.25
The depth of Tiberius’s corruption may have become
more apparent over the years, but all along he had been hard
to deal with because he was cryptic and obscure, cruel and
vindictive. Even before he assumed overall power, he was
secretive and prone to dissemble. When Augustus grew old
and ill, speculation as to his successor quickly brought
Tiberius into consideration. He had the maturity and the military experience necessary to rule but suffered from the congenital arrogance of the Claudian family, and “many signs of
a cruel character broke out, try though he might to control
them.” His time spent on Rhodes, which was called retirement but was in fact exile, had been filled with anger, deceit,
and hidden passions.26
The first notable deed of Tiberius’s principate was one of
violence and deception. He ordered the murder of Postumus
Agrippa, grandson of Augustus and possible rival for
supreme power, and then pretended his father had commanded it.27
In his treatment of the senate and the magistrates Tiberius
was also hard to read. Immediately after the death of Augustus, he acted “as though the republic still existed and as
though he was doubtful about taking up command: even the
edict by which he summoned the senators to assemble was
issued in virtue of the tribunician power that he had accepted
from Augustus. The words of the edict were few and very
modest.”28 But in sharp contrast to the edict and his apparent
concern for republicanism were his actions. He had armed
guards at the court, soldiers in the forum, soldiers in the senate house; he sent letters to the army as a veteran leader
would, and never showed hesitation except when he spoke
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in the senate.29 Tacitus reports that the main cause of
Tiberius’s fear was the thought that his nephew, Germanicus,
who commanded a large army and was extremely popular at
home, might prefer to have rule instead of just waiting for it.
Also, Tiberius wanted to make it seem that he had been called
and chosen by the state rather than forced on it through his
mother’s ambition in getting Augustus to adopt him. Tacitus
adds that it later became known that Tiberius pretended to
hesitate in order to ferret out the intentions of the senators,
carefully remembering what he took to be their expressions
of hostility so that he could eventually exact revenge.30
At times it seemed that Tiberius was reserved and cryptic
because he suspected treachery. Certainly he had enemies,
some open, others camouflaged. Germanicus, Agrippina, and
their supporters he considered rivals, and mistrusted.31 Augustus was said to have given Tiberius a list of men to
watch.32 In public or private, he was capable of receiving insult with apparent equanimity, but he did not forget a slight,
storing up his anger even over a period of years.33 Sejanus
knew Tiberius’s suspicious and credulous (suspicionum et
credendi temeritas) character, and after the princeps’ withdrawal to the island of Caprae in 28 he supplied information
carefully selected to arouse and channel it.34 People even
wondered about the quality of the relationship between
Tiberius and his mother, which looked amicable on the surface but which included unmistakable indications of bitterness.35
Misdirection was a tactic for Tiberius, as, for instance, in
16 when he showed favor and friendship to Marcus Scribonius Libo Drusus, who had been denounced privately for treasonous plotting. In private conversation with Libo, “Tiberius
could have halted all his words and deeds, but he preferred
to know them.”36 But in the sequel the utility of concealment
was less apparent. Once Libo came to trial before the Senate,
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he directed supplications to Tiberius who listened with a
blank expression, and Tiberius read out the charges and
names of the accusers in a moderate tone of voice that
seemed neither to minimize nor exaggerate the charges.37
At other times, shame caused Tiberius to avoid the public
gaze. Tacitus reports that Tiberius’s son Drusus led a life of
frivolity—theater and arena by day, banquets by night—pursuing the pleasures often sought by young men. His father,
by contrast, kept to himself and led a joyless life of dark
watchfulness and malevolent undertakings.38 Tacitus suspects
that Tiberius withdrew permanently from Rome in 26 not
only because of the influence of Sejanus and an aversion to
his mother, but to lead his vicious and licentious life in secret.39
Quite aside from their utility, however, opacity and concealment seemed to suit Tiberius. He prized dissimulation as
his own greatest virtue, clinging to it all his life.40 He projected his personal preference for secrecy onto the divine
when in 15 he rejected a proposal to open the Sibylline books
to seek guidance in responding to recent destructive flooding
of the Tiber.41 He habitually mingled jest and earnestness,42
and routinely spoke in euphemisms.43 Only shock or crisis
provoked outbursts of frankness, and these could be dangerous, as when anger toward personal enemies caused lapses
in his prudent moderation.44 Even when advanced age and
illness brought him close to death, Tiberius pretended (simulans) to be healthy, and Tacitus remarks that dissimulation
(dissimulatio) was the last power to leave him.45
Although the speeches of Tiberius often carried a double
meaning,46 sometimes they were simply inscrutable. After the
funeral of Augustus, his address to the senate was so uncertain and ambiguous that his intended meaning was impossible
to understand.47 Again, in 20, at the trial for treason, magic,
and adultery of Lepida from the illustrious gens Aemilia,
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Tiberius “mixed signs of anger and clemency,” and intervened in the proceedings in ways that some considered nonautocratic, but others saw as prejudicial to the defendant.
Lepida was condemned and exiled.48
Doubt often enshrouded the real thoughts and feelings of
Tiberius, but it must have been apparent to all that he was
watching. The more they looked to him for clues of his expectations, the more they were aware of being under scrutiny.
He and his friends and informers attended to their words and
actions, their gestures and appearances.
He watched the senators carefully, twisting their words
and facial expressions into criminal significance, and storing
them away in his memory, as was mentioned earlier.49 Even
at a distance Tiberius was informed not only about the actions
of important men, but about their appearance and comportment. While Germanicus toured Egypt, word reached
Tiberius of the manner of his dress and behavior, that it was
disagreeably informal and Hellenic, comparable to that of
Scipio Africanus while he was in Sicily.50 Thus, finding themselves under scrutiny, those around him sought to make sense
of Tiberius’s thoughts and desires so as to conform themselves to his expectations.
4. VARIETIES OF CONFORMITY
People who came into contact with Tiberius behaved in ways
that reflected not only the opacity of the princeps but also
their own fear, ambition, corruption, and sometimes even
moral strength. That is, in most—but not all—cases their
words and comportment mirrored not a Ciceronian standard
of nature and reason but their more or less accurate reading
of how best to save themselves, or how best to profit in the
prevailing climate. Here I shall survey the main varieties of
conformity as Tacitus presents them.
Those who were most like Tiberius accommodated themselves best to him. Men like the astrologer Thrasyllus51 un-
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derstood him, and so were able to conform their behavior to
his expectations. It is no accident that the two people Tacitus
presents as most successfully attuning themselves to him
were the villainous Lucius Aelius Sejanus and Gaius Julius
Caesar Germanicus. Sejanus was an equestrian whom
Tiberius appointed commander of the Praetorian Guard and
then came to depend upon to carry out his policies in the Senate, especially after retiring to the island of Capreae. To Sejanus alone Tiberius disclosed his secret designs in an
unguarded way. Decent outwardly, inwardly Sejanus was
consumed with lust for power.52 He hounded the adherents
of Agrippina in a series of treason trials, but his hope to marry
into the imperial family came to nothing, and he was eventually purged for aiming at the principate itself. Ominously, it
was Gaius, or Caligula as he was called, the grandson and
terrible successor of Tiberius, who came to mirror the mood
and even the words of Tiberius more closely than any other
person Tacitus mentions.53 His reign began with the murder
of Tiberius.
Those who were not like Tiberius, or less like him, found
life challenging. Most conformed in more or less indecorous
and shameful ways. Some went beyond disgrace to the active
commission of crimes. Some refused to conform and usually
perished before their time. A few managed to serve and lead
public careers worthy of their ancestors almost as though the
free republic still existed. All experienced a public discourse
that was “narrow and slippery under a princeps who feared
liberty but hated flattery.”54
From the outset many dishonored themselves by composing their appearance and words in false, and therefore indecorous, ways. When the news arrived in Rome that Augustus
was dead and Tiberius in charge, “consuls, senators, and
knights rushed headlong into servitude; the more noble were
also more false and hasty, with expression carefully arranged
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to appear neither happy at the death of the princeps nor sad
at the accession, they mingled tears and joy, lament and flattery.”55
People tried to read the meaning behind Tiberius’s words,
and then to articulate responses that mirrored well enough—
but not too clearly—what the listener thought Tiberius was
getting at. The results were always dishonorable, sometimes
absurd, and occasionally dangerous.
In 14, after the funeral of Augustus, Tiberius ostentatiously refused the leading role. The senators, who were
afraid to show that they saw he wanted to be asked and to be
persuaded to accept power, poured out tearful prayers to him,
reaching toward the gods, the statue of Augustus, Tiberius’s
knees. Declining to bear the whole burden of government,
Tiberius expressed a willingness to accept whatever part was
entrusted to him. Gaius Asinius Gallus then made the mistake
of asking what part of the government Tiberius wished to be
given. Tiberius registered his annoyance with a dark look and
protracted silence, but then reiterated his preference to be excused altogether, and said he refused to pick and choose. Gallus tried to smooth over his blunder, saying that he had only
tried to get Tiberius to acknowledge that rule could not really
be divided at all. This and further flattery failed to allay
Tiberius’s irritation with Gallus, who was also the object of
hostility for having married Tiberius’s ex-wife, Vipsania.56
Flattery took the form of undeserved civil or military honors.57 An ironic example occurred in 29 when, seeking a remedy in flattery (remedium adulationis) for the fear generated
by the wave of treason trials, the senators voted to erect altars
to Mercy and Friendship, the latter flanked by statues of
Tiberius and Sejanus.58
Flattery often shaped elections, as in the year 21, when
Tiberius recommended two men to the senate for consideration as governor of Africa, one a distinguished noble, the
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other the uncle of Sejanus. It was assumed that the latter was
the approved candidate. While both men begged to be excused, Sejanus’s uncle was less convincing, and a chorus of
flatterers urged him to accept.59
Flattery also led men beyond disgrace into active wrongdoing. In the year 22, the new consul, Decimus Haterius
Agrippa, proposed death as the fitting punishment for the
equestrian author of scurrilous verses about Tiberius’s son,
Drusus. Marcus Aemilius Lepidus countered by proposing a
lesser sentence better proportioned to the offense. All but one
of the senators, Gaius Rubellius Blandus, supported Haterius,
and the equestrian was immediately put to death. Tiberius rebuked the senate, but with enough ambiguity not to preclude
similar punishments in future. Lepidus and Blandus had been
unable to prevent shameful adulation from becoming outright
injustice.60
Although at first it seemed a means of attaining safety,
flattery quickly became equivocal, for in an environment of
corrupt mores, express servility could be dangerous by its
presence as well as its absence.61 This fact may have intensified the search for new strategies to protect the frightened,
and new strategies of advancement for the ambitious.
Servitude rapidly assumed the colors of liberty. In the
year 14, when Marcus Valerius Messalla Messallinus proposed in the senate that the oath of allegiance to the new princeps be repeated annually, Tiberius asked him to
acknowledge that he had not put him up to that proposal.
Messalla said that when it came to public business, he would
express his own thoughts, no matter who took offense. The
historian’s terse judgment is that this was the only sort of flattery left.62
Again, in 22, Lucius Ennius, an equestrian, found himself
before the senate charged with treason for melting down a
silver statue of the princeps. In response to Tiberius’s inter-
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cession on behalf of the accused, Gaius Ateius Capito made
a show of independence, urging that the senate’s power of
judgment ought not be diminished, and pointing out that the
offense had serious public implications, even if Tiberius was
willing to overlook the injury to himself personally. Tacitus
remarks that Capito’s behavior was all the more infamous because, as a civil and religious jurist of note, he dishonored
these arts as well as himself.63
Shameful displays of independence became competitive.
In 16, the senators Gaius Asinius Gallus and Cnaeus Calpurnius Piso disagreed over whether the senate should conduct
business during the absence of Tiberius. Piso claimed the
“speciem libertatis” by asserting that it would be worthy of
the republic that senators and equestrians could continue their
official work even in the absence of the princeps. Gallus answered that nothing would be more illustrious or worthy of
the Roman people than to do business only in the presence
and under the eyes of Caesar. Tiberius listened in silence to
these undignified invocations of the dignity of the state. No
action was taken.64
Unbecoming conduct grew worse. Just as the treacherous
path of public discourse led great men to competitive adulatory assertions of liberty, so too did compliance and obsequiousness gradually degenerate into wickedness, as
members of the aristocracy turned informer.65
A remarkable instance occurred in 16, when Firmius
Catus, a senator eager for advancement, and Lucius Fulcinius
Trio, a well-known prosecutor who hoped to increase his notoriety, brought Marcus Scribonius Libo Drusus to trial for
conspiracy against the princeps. The charges were trumped
up; Libo’s consultations of astrologers and necromancers
were inept and pathetic, not threatening. But Trio presented
the matter as “res magna et atrox,” and by the time the case
came before the senate, Catus and Trio had been joined by
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Fonteius Agrippa and Gaius Vibius Serenus. Libo anticipated
the guilty verdict by taking his own life. His property went
as reward to the accusers, along with the rank of extraordinary praetor to those of the senatorial order.66
Libo’s posthumous condemnation triggered a flurry of
sycophantic proposals and resolutions in the senate. Tacitus
omits nothing: Cotta Messalinus moved that the image of
Libo be barred from the funeral processions of his descendants; Cnaeus Cornelius Lentulus proposed that no Scribonianus should bear the cognomen of Drusus; Lucius
Pomponius Flaccus suggested that days be set aside for public thanksgiving; Lucius Munatius Plancus, Gaius Asinius
Gallus, Marcus Papius Mutilus and Lucius Apronius voted
thank-offerings to Jupiter, Mars, and Concord, and they
moved that 13 September—the date of Libo’s death—should
be a public holiday. Two astrologers were executed, and the
senate ordered that the rest be expelled from Italy. The historian’s explicit purpose in cataloguing all this is to make
known how early the public disgrace began.67
Some of the doings of spies, informers and accusers were
ludicrously outrageous. In 28, four senators hoping for advancement sought to please Sejanus by prosecuting an illustrious equestrian friend of Germanicus, Titius Sabinus,
ostensibly on charges of treason, but really because of the enmity between Sejanus and Agrippina, the widow of Germanicus. Tacitus records the names of the four, and explains how
one of them, Latinius Latiaris, lured Sabinus into his confidence and induced him to complain about Sejanus and
Tiberius. To strengthen their case, the others hid between the
roof and the ceiling with their ears pressed to holes and cracks
while Latiaris conversed with Sabinus in the room below
about recent hardships. Then in a letter to Tiberius, the four
detailed their findings as well as their disgraceful (dedecus)
ploy.
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This was material better suited to the comedian or satirist
than to the historian, but the unfortunate truth was that the
main actors were among the most prominent members of the
senatorial order. Sabinus was immediately condemned and
put to death. Tacitus reports this event’s chilling effect upon
public life: fear emptied the roads and squares; conversation
ceased even among friends; people eyed the very walls and
ceiling with suspicion; it was assumed that Tiberius was tightening the noose on Agrippina and her son.68
Since they were entitled to claim a part of the property of
those condemned for treason, accusers had strong incentive
to file charges. The grotesque results went beyond injustice to
impiety, as son accused father and brother sister.69 The senate
was filled with informers; friends turned against one another;
no place, public or private, was safe for open conversation. It
was like a plague in the city.70
Those foolish or honest enough to speak their minds were
at risk, as Agrippina discovered. After the poisoning of
Drusus, son of Tiberius, there was widespread but secret rejoicing at the prospect of one of Germanicus’s sons eventually succeeding Tiberius. While the senate and people
“concealed their joy with expressions of sorrow,” Agrippina,
widow of Germanicus, concealed her hope less effectively,
and thereby brought down a quicker ruin, when Sejanus, who
had planned the murder of Drusus and had imperial ambitions
for himself, was able to point to Agrippina’s hope and her
popularity in order to intensify Livia’s animosity toward the
sons of Germanicus.71 It seems likely that the brutal Sejanus
would have targeted these boys whether or not their mother
had disguised her thoughts more effectively. But according
to the historian her failures to dissemble and conceal her true
thoughts at least hastened (adceleravere) their destruction.
Another example of the high cost of open expression is
the outspoken and independent-minded Lucius Calpurnius
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Piso. He openly registered his disgust with the corruption and
aggressive tactics of prosecutors, and was bold enough to
bring charges against a protégée of Livia. Although he announced his withdrawal from public affairs and resolved to
leave the city, he apparently did not leave, and a few years
later was charged with treason. Piso’s timely death, whether
by suicide or natural causes, prevented the case from coming
to court.72
In the year 25, the historian Aulus Cremutius Cordus
faced the senate charged with treason for praising the assassins of Julius Caesar in his own Annales. Because his accusers were minions of Sejanus, and judging by the grim
expression (trux vultus) of Tiberius, the outcome of the case
was not in doubt. Knowing that death was near, Cremutius
defended himself with dignity, calmly adducing examples
from the Roman tradition of legitimate free expression. Cremutius was allowed to starve himself to death. The senate
voted to have his books burned.73
Because Tacitus’s Annales contain many examples of the
danger of openness and candor, we suspect irony when he reports candor going unpunished. In the wake of Sejanus’s fall,
the backlash that engulfed his associates prompted most people to pretend they had not been his friends. But the equestrian Marcus Terentius was unapologetic. He had been the
friend of Sejanus, who was himself the friend of Caesar; it
was more fitting for an equestrian to obey than to challenge
the policies of his superiors; and his friendship with Sejanus
had ended when Tiberius’s did. Terentius escaped punishment. His accusers suffered exile or execution. Tacitus cannot
have missed the irony that the only person saved by telling
the truth in a brave speech (constantia orationis) was an associate of Sejanus.74
Although he admired their refusal to accommodate themselves to the expectations and tone set by the autocrat, Tacitus
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did not give his highest praise to those who courted death
through outspoken opposition. Whether what bothered Tacitus about these men was the jarring quality of their extreme
dissonance or their failure to benefit the state in a more sustained way, he did not say. But it is clear that he reserved his
highest admiration for those who managed to have dignified
and honorable public careers despite the princeps. Doing so
under Tiberius was very difficult—but not impossible.
Marcus Aemilius Lepidus was praised as dignified and
wise because he so often managed to reduce the harm done
by flatterers, and because he possessed enough moderation
to stay on working terms with Tiberius. His case even led
Tacitus to wonder whether fate and chance of birth control
men’s destinies, or whether their own decisions allow some
men to find a safe course between dangerous insubordination
and ugly servility.75 In 17, Marcus Furius Camillus, the proconsular governor of Africa, revived his family’s ancient reputation for military glory (decus militiae) by defeating the
Numidian leader Tacfarinus. Tiberius praised him in the senate, and he was voted an honorary triumph which he lived to
enjoy, Tacitus comments, because of his modest behavior.76
We read of some others who also lived in a manner worthy
of their great family and died peacefully.77
In the Annales, references to distinguished men in the
reign of Tiberius who managed to avoid the extremes of base
conformity and perilous honesty but still have careers of public service are few and not presented in much detail. To see
clearly portrayed the career and record of the sort of man Tacitus most admired, one may turn to his own father-in-law,
Gnaeus Julius Agricola (40-93), about whom Tacitus composed a Vita.78
The son of a senator from Gallia Narbonensis (the modern Provence), he had an impressive administrative and military career. His extensive military campaigns in Britain
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occurred during the reign of the tyrannical Domitian (81-96),
and Tacitus admired his ability to distinguish himself on behalf of the state without incurring the lethal wrath of the princeps.79 When confronting the notoriously hot-headed
Domitian in person, Agricola softened him with his prudence
and moderation, and refrained from seeking renown and a
swift end by open defiance and the useless assertion of liberty.80 “Let those who habitually admire disobedience know
that even under bad rulers there are great men, and that a decent regard for authority, if backed by hard work and military
toughness, is even more praiseworthy than the death-seeking
perilous course, of no use to the state, through which some
became famous.”81 In short, Tacitus praised Agricola for his
noble public service under difficult circumstances. Avoiding
both craven compliance and ostentatious martyrdom, Agricola played his part with a seemliness worthy of his forebears. He might have lived longer but could not have lived
better.82
5. CONCLUSION
With few exceptions, then, the Tiberian books of the Annales
are as somber as the reign they chronicle. Tacitus was aware
of this, and expressed regret over the tedious character of the
ills he catalogued,83 and in general over the narrow and inglorious scope of his project (in arto et ingloriosus labor).84
The times he chronicled were infected and dirty with servility
(infecta et adulatione sordida). But the historian had a moral
purpose, to record the virtue of those who had measured up,
and the disgrace of those who had fallen so short of the dignity of their family and order. The wicked might be deterred
by the certainty of posthumous infamy.85 Even when the
books of historians are burned, it is folly to imagine that the
power of today can snuff out the memory of the future. Quite
the reverse, for repressed thought grows in prestige, and conquerors, together with those who behave as brutally as con-
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querors, only achieve dishonor (dedecus) for themselves and
renown for their victims.86
Besides its moral aim, Tacitus mentioned one other value
of the work. Admitting that the dossier of minor events centered on the princeps makes tedious reading, Tacitus insisted
that such a history is useful for examining “matters that seem
trivial at first glance, from which the movements of great
things often arise.”87 Here, the modern reader might anticipate a reference to patterns of group behavior that set in motion impersonal and potentially disruptive social forces.
Persistent dishonorable behavior of the leading men might
bring their entire order into disrepute. In turn, questions about
the possible disjunction between reality and appearance in
the leading order could easily provoke tremors of doubt about
social hierarchy. In such a scenario, decorum would be not
only a matter of the self-respect of a few score senators, it
would also ultimately be linked to something elemental and
tectonic in Roman society itself. Whether Tacitus thought
along these lines is not clear. But he wrote that, since the balanced and mixed form of government is seldom found in
practice, and is short-lived even when it is found, the prudent
man will familiarize himself with the leading actors in whatever form of government happens to prevail currently: the
rule of the best men, of the many, or, as in Tacitus’s time, of
the autocrat. For most people, the best way to learn how to
behave effectively and honorably is to study the experience
of others.88
Half a century ago Ronald Syme remarked that as “a form
of government the principate was essentially equivocal, and
the nobilitas was called to play a false role therein, forfeiting
power but ostensibly retaining honour and prestige.”89 False
the part might have been, but at least under a morally and
psychologically steady princeps one could play it with some
dignity. As de Tocqueville saw, weakness might compel one
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to play a false part, but one who feigns approval of that false
part is truly base. Under Tiberius, however, the quest for security or advancement led men to guess at, and conform to,
his desires and expectations. They gradually attuned themselves to a standard far removed from any persona nature
might assign or reason discern. It was Tacitus’s somber genius to recognize that the danger of such attunement was that
a man might become the person he pretended to be, thereby
confirming the contemptuous judgment of Tiberius himself
that the senators were “men fit to be slaves.”90
NOTES
1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America,, trans. Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000),
246. For their helpful comments on drafts of this essay, I am grateful to
Bob Haynie, John Goyette, and Meghan Parker. I dedicate the article to
Mark Morford, my teacher and friend.
2. Cornelii Taciti Annalium ab excessu divi Augusti libri, ed. C. D. Fisher
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1906), 119-120. (Hereafter abbreviated
Annales.) For comments on Tacitus’s views within the context of Roman
thought about luxury, see Christopher Berry, The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical Investigation (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994), 67-70. See also Annales, 92-95 for Tiberius’s statement
about decorous and moderate public mourning.
3. As Ronald Syme put it, “men and dynasties pass, but style abides.”
Ronald Syme, Tacitus, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958),
Vol. 2, 624. Still worthwhile for understanding Tacitus’s literary strategies
are Einar Löfstedt, “On the Style of Tacitus,” Journal of Roman Studies
38 (1948): 1-8, and Uwe Rademacher, Die Bildkunst des Tacitus
(Hildesheim: Olms Verlag, 1975). Francesca Santoro L’Hoir, Tragedy,
Rhetoric, and the Historiography of Tacitus’ Annales (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006) draws attention to the influence of Greek
drama upon Tacitus.
4. Cicero, De oratore, trans. E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library, Vol. 349 (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1942), 178: “Est
enim actio quasi sermo corporis, quo magis menti congruens esse debet.”
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5. That Tacitus wrote for “elite males of senatorial and equestrian status,”
is demonstrated in S. H. Rutledge, “Trajan and Tacitus’ Audience: Reader
Reception of Annals 1-2,” Ramus 27.1 (1998): 141.
6. Cicero’s view of decorum occupies a place within a longer moral tradition that reached back at least as far as Panaetius of Rhodes (second
century BC), whose own treatise, On Duty, was a main source for Cicero’s De officiis. See the editorial introduction to Cicero: On Duties, ed.
M. T. Griffin and E. M. Atkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press),
xix-xxi.
7. Cicero, De officiis, Loeb Classical Library, Vol. 30 (Boston: Harvard
University Press, 1913), 182.
8. Cicero, De officiis, 14-16.
9. Cicero, De officiis, 98.
10. Cicero, De officiis, 97; see also Cicero, De oratore, Loeb Classical
Library, Vol. 348 (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1942), 378, for another example of the convergence of theatrical and oratorical decorum.
11. Cicero, De officiis, 100.
12. Cicero, De officiis, 102-108. Still illuminating for a discussion of Cicero’s place within the history of doctrines of natural law is Felix Flückiger, Geschichte des Naturrechtes: Altertum und Frühmittelalter (Zurich:
Evangelischer Verlag, 1954), 221-238.
13. Cicero, De officiis, 108.
14. “We may judge our activities by the measure of our own nature.” Cicero, De officiis, 112. In connection with discerning what is right for oneself, Cicero mentions two more personae that we must play, one imposed
by chance or circumstance, the other a matter of our own choice. See De
officiis, 116-118; and for discussion see Christopher Gill, “Personhood
and Personality: The Four-Personae Theory in Cicero, De Officiis 1,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 6 (1988): 169-199.
15. Cicero, De officiis, 122 and 126-128.
16. Seneca, Letter 120 in Epistola, trans. Richard M. Gummere, Loeb
Classical Library, Vol. 77 (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1925), 386
and 388. On this passage within a larger context see Christopher Gill, The
Structured Self in Hellenistic and Roman Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 163. See also Seneca, De constantia sapientis, Loeb
Classical Library, Vol. 214 (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1928), 102
and 104.
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17. Pliny praises those who manifest constantia, dignitas, verecundia, or
decor in word, deed and appearance; his disapproval attaches to their opposites. For a careful study of the letters see Stanley Hoffer, The Anxieties
of Pliny the Younger (Atlanta, Georgia: Scholars Press, 1999).
18. See Paul Zanker, The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988).
19. See Res gestae divi Augusti: The Achievements of the Divine Augustus, ed. P. A. Brunt and J. M. Moore (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1967), 34-36.
20. Tacitus, Annales, 3: “omnes exuta aequalitate iussa principis aspectare.”
21. Tacitus, Annales, 121: “obsequium inde in principem et aemulandi
amor validior quam poena ex legibus et metus.”
22. Two examples from the reign of Tiberius should suffice to illustrate
a characteristic that Tacitus attributes to the regime as a whole. When
Tiberius speaks of free elections open to men of talent, Tacitus (Annales,
47) comments: “speciosa verbis, re inania aut subdola, quantoque maiore
libertatis imagine tegebantur, tanto eruptura ad infensius servitium”
(“things attractive in speech, but in fact meaningless or deceptive, and
the more they were represented in the figure of freedom, the more they
were preparing to break out into more dangerous subjection”). In a different context, Tacitus remarks (Annales, 122): “Sed Tiberius, vim principatus sibi firmans, imaginem antiquitatis senatui praebebat postulata
provinciarum ad disquisitionem patrum mittendo.” (“But Tiberius, while
establishing the power of the principate in himself, was keeping up the
image of the old senate by sending the demands of the provinces to be
dealt with by the senators.”)
23. For evidence and discussion see Syme, Tacitus, Vol. 1, 397-416.
24. Tacitus, Annales, 135-136. Note the turning point that occurs with the
words “Tiberio mutati in deterius principatus initium ille annus attulit”
(“that year brought for Tiberius the beginning of the principate’s change
for the worse”) and “donec morte Drusi verterentur” (“until things
changed with the death of Drusus”).
25. Tacitus, Annales, 177: “Ceterum ex eo praerupta iam et urgens dominatio” (“But from that point on there was precipitate and acute despotism”). For another statement of the gradual disclosure of Tiberius’s real
character, see Annales, 211.
26. Tacitus, Annales, 3: “sed vetere atque insita Claudiae familiae super-
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bia, multaque indicia saevitiae, quamquam premantur, erumpere. . . ; ne
iis quidem annis quibus Rhodi specie secessus exul egerit aliud quam
iram et simulationem et secretas libidines meditatum” (“but the old and
innate arrogance of the Claudian family, together with many indications
of cruelness, although repressed, burst forth. . . ; not even during the years
he passed in exile on Rhodes under the cover of retirement was he meditating anything but anger and dissimulation and concealed lust”). Even
Augustus acknowledged objectionable irregularities in Tiberius’s deportment, dress, and habits; see Annales, 8: “Etenim Augustus paucis ante
annis, cum Tiberio tribuniciam potestatem a patribus rursum postularet,
quamquam honora oratione, quaedam de habitu cultuque et institutis eius
ieceret quae velut excusando exprobraret.” (“Even Augustus a few years
earlier, when he was once again requesting from the senators the tribunician power for Tiberius, although speaking approvingly, let fall certain
indications about his attitude, dress, and manners of which he disapproved, even though he was excusing them.”)
27. Tacitus, Annales, 4: “Nihil de ea re Tiberius apud senatum disseruit:
patris iussa simulabat.” (“Tiberius discussed nothing of this with the senate: he pretended it was the father’s command.”) Again, for the murder
of Sempronius Graccus in 14 Tiberius tried to shift blame from himself
onto the proconsul of Africa. See Annales, 31: “Quidam non Roma eos
milites, sed ab L. Asprenate pro consule Africae missos tradidere auctore
Tiberio, qui famam caedis posse in Asprenatem verti frustra speraverat.”
(“Some have said that these soldiers were not sent from Rome, but by L.
Asprenas, proconsul of Africa, at the urging of Tiberius, who had hoped
in vain that the blame for the murder could be pinned on Asprenas.”)
28. Tacitus, Annales, 5: “. . . tamquam vetere re publica et ambiguus imperandi: ne edictum quidem, quo patres in curiam vocabat, nisi tribuniciae
potestatis praescriptione posuit sub Augusto acceptae. Verba edicti fuere
pauca et sensu permodesto.”
29. Tacitus, Annales, 5: “nusquam cunctabundus nisi cum in senatu loqueretur” (“never hesitant except when he was speaking in the senate”).
30. Tacitus, Annales, 5: “Postea cognitum est ad introspiciendas etiam
procerum voluntates inductam dubitationem: nam verba vultus in crimen
detorquens recondebat.” (“Afterwards it was recognized that the hesitation was also put on in order to observe the intentions of the leaders: for,
twisting a look, he would store up insults.”)
31. For example, Tacitus, Annales, 36 and 40-41.
32. Tacitus, Annales, 10.
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33. Tacitus, Annales, 144, in relation to the slight of Lucius Calpurnius
Piso, several years earlier: “Quae in praesens Tiberius civiliter habuit:
sed in animo revolvente iras, etiam si impetus offensionis languerat,
memoria valebat.” (“And at the time, Tiberius took these things courteously: but in his mind, which ruminated over resentments, the memory
was intense, even if its initial force had dissipated.”)
34. Tacitus, Annales, 170.
35. Tacitus, Annales, 125.
36. Tacitus, Annales, 60: “Atque interim Libonem ornat praetura, convictibus adhibet, non vultu alienatus, non verbis commotior (adeo iram
condiderat); cunctaque eius dicta factaque, cum prohibere posset, scire
malebat.” (“And meanwhile he granted Libo the praetorship, invited him
often to parties, neither unfriendly in his appearance nor excited in speech
[so completely he had concealed his anger]; and Tiberius could have
halted all his words and deeds, but he preferred to know them.”)
37. Tacitus, Annales, 60: “Mox libellos et auctores recitat Caesar ita moderans ne lenire neve asperare criminia videretur.” (“Next Caesar read out
the complaints and the accusors, controlling himself so that he seemed
neither to soften nor harshen the charges.”)
38. Tacitus, Annales, 112: “Solus et nullis voluptatibus avocatus maestam
vigilantiam et malas curas exerceret.” (“Alone and withdrawn from all
pleasures he was engaged in gloomy vigilance and wicked plans.”)
39. Tacitus, Annales, 165 and 170.
40. Annales, 173: “Nullam aeque Tiberius, ut rebatur, ex virtutibus suis
quam dissimulationem diligebat: eo aegrius accepit recludi quae premeret.” (“Tiberius, so he thought, liked none of his virtues as much as
dissimulation: all the more angrily, then, he took the disclosing of the
things he concealed.”)
41. Tacitus, Annales, 44: “Renuit Tiberius, perinde divina humanaque
obtegens.” (“Tiberius refused, thus keeping hidden both things divine and
things human.”)
42. Tacitus, Annales, 181: “Tiberius tamen, ludibria seriis permiscere solitus.” (“Tiberius, however, customarily mixed jests with serious matters.”)
43. Tacitus, Annales, 143: “Proprium id Tiberio fuit scelera nuper reperta
priscis verbis obtegere.” (“It was characteristic of Tiberius to cover over
recently invented crimes with long venerated formulas.”)
44. Tacitus, Annales, 15: “Haec audita quamquam abstrusum et tristissima
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quaeque maxime occultantem Tiberium perpulere.” (“These things coming to his attention impressed him deeply, although he remained reserved
and kept secret everything that was very sorrowful.”); see also Annales,
44, where Tiberius gets angry enough to break his customary taciturnity,
and Annales, 128: “prudens moderandi, si propria ira non impelleretur”
(“skilled at observing moderation, if his own anger was not incited”).
45. Tacitus, Annales, 208: “in patientia firmitudinem simulans” (“in suffering simulating good health”) and 210: “Iam Tiberium corpus, iam
vires, nondum dissimulatio deserebat.” (Now his body was forsaking
Tiberius, now his strength, but not yet the power of dissimulation.”)
46. Tacitus, Annales, 30: “magis in speciem verbis adornata quam ut penitus sentire crederetur” (“more embellished with words for show than so
that he might be believed to feel it in his inmost heart”).
47. Tacitus, Annales, 9: “Plus in oratione tali dignitatis quam fidei erat;
Tiberioque etiam in rebus quas non occuleret, seu natura sive adsuetudine,
suspensa semper et obscura verba: tunc vero nitenti ut sensus suos penitus
abderet, in incertum et ambiguum magis implicabantur.” (“There was
more grandeur in this sort of speech than credibility; either by nature or
by custom, halting and unintelligible language was Tiberius’s style even
in things he was not trying to hide: but then, when he was striving to conceal his meaning entirely, it got even more wrapped up in uncertainty and
obscurity.”)
48. Tacitus, Annales,103: “Haud facile quis dispexerit illa in cognitione
mentem principis: adeo vertit ac miscuit irae et clementiae signa.” (“It
was not easy for anyone to discern the mind of the princeps at this trial:
so much did he interchange and mingle the signs of anger and clemency.”)
Also “Quod alii civile rebantur . . . quidam ad saevitiam trahebant.”
(“What some thought considerate . . . others took for cruelty.”)
49. See note 30.
50. Tacitus, Annales, 78: “Tiberius cultu habituque eius lenibus verbis
perstricto . . . increpuit.” (“Tiberius remonstrated a bit in mild terms about
his bearing and attire.”)
51. Tacitus, Annales, 192. Although Tiberius believed Thrasyllus was a
true oracle, Tacitus presents his real skill as that of reading Tiberius.
52. Tacitus, Annales, 132: “Mox Tiberium variis artibus devinxit adeo ut
obscurum adversum alios sibi uni incautum intectumque efficeret.”
(“Soon he subdued Tiberius by various means, so much so that he made
him—so covert toward others—open and sincere with himself alone.”)
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Also, “palam compositus pudor, intus summa apiscendi libido” (“outwardly all propriety, inwardly the greatest lust for acquisition”).
53. Tacitus, Annales, 192: “Qualem diem Tiberius induisset, pari habitu,
haud multum distantibus verbis.” (“Whatever humor Tiberius put on, his
attitude was the same, and his speech not very different”). See also Annales, 207 for the observation that Gaius had learned dissimulation
through contact with Tiberius.
54. Tacitus, Annales, 91: “Angusta et lubrica oratio sub principe qui libertatem metuebat adulationem oderat.”
55. Tacitus, Annales, 5: “Ruere in servitium consules, patres, eques.
quanto quis inlustrior, tanto magis falsi ac festinantes, vultuque composito
ne laeti excessu principis neu tristiores primordio, lacrimas gaudium,
questus adulationem miscebant.” For another example of false mourning,
see the public response to the death of Tiberius’s son, Drusus, in the year
23, Annales, 138-139: “Senatus populusque habitum ac voces dolentum
simulatione magis quam libens induebat, domumque Germanici revirescere occulti laetabantur.” (“The senate and the people put on the attitude and the tone of mourners insincerely rather than willingly, and they
rejoiced secretly that the house of Germanicus was reviving.”)
56. Tacitus, Annales, 9-10.
57. Tacitus, Annales, 116: “Dolabella Cornelius dum antire ceteros parat
absurdam in adulationem progressus.” (“Dolabella Cornelius, while trying to outdo the others, went forward with a ludicrous bit of flattery.”)
Quintius Haterius gained infamy in 22 (Annales, 122) through a “most
disgustingly servile” proposal that the senate’s resolution honoring
Drusus should be recorded in gold letters. The same Haterius had narrowly escaped death in 14 (Annales, 10) when, shamefully groveling, he
accidentally tackled Tiberius. In 34 (Annales, 195), the senate voted
thanks to Tiberius for allowing Agrippina to die in exile instead of having
her strangled.
58. Tacitus, Annales, 175.
59. Tacitus, Annales, 111.
60. Tacitus, Annales, 117-118.
61. Tacitus, Annales, 142: “[adulatio], quae moribus corruptis perinde anceps, si nulla et ubi nimia est” (“flattery, which, when mores have been
ruined, is just as dangerous when there is none and when there is too
much”).
62. Tacitus, Annales, 8: “Ea sola species adulandi supererat.”
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63. Tacitus, Annales, 128-129.
64. Tacitus, Annales, 64. Tacitus presents Cnaeus Calpurnius Piso as
standing up to Tiberius at Annales, 44, not so much because of republican
sentiments as from a sense of his own worthiness to rule. That insubordination ran in the family; see Annales, 69. As for Gallus, Tacitus records
another public disagreement with Tiberius that, perhaps inadvertently,
penetrated to the very heart of rule (Annales, 64): “Eam sententiam altius
penetrare et arcana imperii temptari.” (“This motion penetrated more
deeply and made an attempt at the secrets of the imperium.”) Tiberius,
however, managed to turn this to his own advantage.
65. Tacitus, Annales, 126: “Paulatim dehinc ab indecoris ad infesta transgrediebantur.” (“After this they gradually passed over from shameful
deeds to outrageous ones.”)
66. Tacitus, Annales, 60-61.
67. Tacitus, Annales, 62: “Quorum auctoritates adulationesque rettuli ut
sciretur vetus id in re publica malum.” (“I have reported the motions and
the flatteries of these men so that this old evil in the state might be recognized.”)
68. Tacitus, Annales, 171-173.
69. Tacitus, Annales, 147 and 149. See also Annales, 149, where it
emerges that even the property of those who anticipate a guilty verdict
by suicide is subject to confiscation and division among the accusers.
Also at Annales, 170, there is an accusation within an extended family.
70. Tacitus, Annales, 184.
71. Tacitus, Annales, 138-139; see note 55 above, which comments on
the hypocrisy of the many. The rest of this chapter discusses Sejanus’s
effort to magnify Livia’s hatred. In another instance during the year 32,
Tacitus records that a mother was condemned and executed for weeping
for her executed son (Annales, 186).
72. Tacitus, Annales, 144.
73. Tacitus, Annales, 151-152.
74. Tacitus, Annales, 185-186.
75. Tacitus, Annales, 143-144: “Hunc ego Lepidum temporibus illis
gravem et sapientem virum fuisse comperior: nam pleraque ab saevis adulationibus aliorum in melius flexit. neque tamen temperamenti egebat,
cum aequabili auctoritate et gratia apud Tiberium viguerit. unde dubitare
cogor fato et sorte nascendi, ut cetera, ita principium inclinatio in hos,
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offensio in illos, an sit aliquid in nostris consiliis liceatque inter abruptum
contumaciam et deforme obsequium pergere iter ambitione ac periculis
vacuum.” (“I am convinced that this Lepidus was a serious and wise man
for those times: for he turned very many things arising from the cruel flatteries of others to better effect. Nor did he lack moderation, since he retained steady influence and esteem with Tiberius. Hence I am compelled
to doubt whether, as with other things, the favor of leading men toward
some and their disfavor toward others is from the fate and chance of birth,
or whether it is something within our own purvue, and one has the freedom to pursue a course between severe autonomy and base servility that
is also free from dangers.”). His obituary in the year 34 (see Annales,
196), praises his moderation and wisdom, presenting him as a worthy
member of a family rich in good citizens (“genus fecundum bonorum
civium”).
76. Tacitus, Annales, 74: “Quod Camillo ob modestiam vitae impune
fuit.” (“And this was safe for Camillus because of his unassuming conduct in life.”)
77. Tacitus, Annales, 167, mentions Marcus Asinius Agrippa, a man
“claris maioribus quam vetustis vitaque non degener” (“with distinguished rather than ancient ancestors, and not ignoble in his way of life”),
who died in 27.
78. Tacitus, Cornelii Taciti de vita Iulii Agricolae liber (hereafter abbreviated as De vita Agricolae), ed. M. Winterbottom and R.M. Ogilvie, in
Cornelii Taciti Opera Minora (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975).
79. Tacitus, De vita Agricolae, 29: “Ceterum uti militare nomen, grave
inter otiosos, aliis virtutibus temperaret, tranquillitatem atque otium penitus hausit, cultu modicus, sermone facilis, uno aut altero amicorum comitatus, adeo ut plerique, quibus magnos viros per ambitionem aestimare
mos est, viso aspectoque Agricola quaererent famam, pauci interpretarentur.” (“Moreover, to moderate his military renown—which is imposing
for civilians—with other virtues, he yielded completely to tranquility and
leisure, dressing simply, conversing affably, accompanied by just one or
two friends, so much so that most people, whose custom is to judge great
men by their ostentation, having seen Agricola and scrutinized him, would
wonder about his good repute, but few could comprehend it.”)
80. Tacitus, De vita Agricolae, 30: “Domitiani vero natura praeceps in
iram, et quo obscurior, eo inrevocabilior, moderatione tamen prudentiaque
Agricolae leniebatur, quia non contumacia neque inani iactatione libertatis
famam fatumque provocabat.” (“Now Domitian’s nature was inclined to
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anger—and the more disguised, the more implacable—nevertheless it
was mollified by the guidance and judgment of Agricola, because he did
not provoke public opinion or fate by arrogance and empty displays of
personal liberty.”)
81. Tacitus, De vita Agricolae, 30: “Sciant, quibus moris est inlicita mirari, posse etiam sub malis principibus magnos viros esse, obsequiumque
ac modestiam, si industria ac vigor adsint, eo laudis excedere, quo
plerique per abrupta, sed in nullum rei publicae usum ambitiosa morte
inclaruerunt.”
82. Tacitus, De vita Agricolae, 31: “Et ipse quidem, quamquam medio in
spatio integrae aetatis ereptus, quantum ad gloriam, longissimum aevum
peregit. Quippe et vera bona, quae in virtutibus sita sunt, impleverat, et
consulari ac triumphalibus ornamentis praedito quid aliud adstruere fortuna poterat?” (“And he indeed, although snatched away at the midpoint
of a complete life, he completed the longest possible course of life in regard to honor. Since, in fact, he had acquired the real goods which depend
on virtues, what else could fortune add to someone who had received the
distinctions of the consulship and several military triumphs?”)
83. Tacitus, Annales, 185.
84. Tacitus, Annales, 149-150.
85. Tacitus, Annales, 126.
86. Tacitus, Annales, 152: “Quo magis socordiam eorum inridere libet
qui praesenti potentia credunt extingui posse etiam sequentis aevi memoriam. nam contra punitis ingeniis gliscit auctoritas, neque aliud externi
reges aut qui eadem saevitia usi sunt nisi dedecus sibi atque illis gloriam
peperere.” (“One is disposed to laugh all the more at the folly of those
who believe that, using their present power, they can extinguish the memory of the following generation. For on the contrary, when natural superiority is penalized, its influence flares up, and foreign kings or those who
have acted with the same sort of cruelty have generated nothing but dishonor for themselves and renown for the others.”)
87. Tacitus, Annales, 150: “illa primo aspectu levia ex quis magnarum
saepe rerum motus oriuntur.”
88. Tacitus, Annales,150.
89. Syme, Tacitus, Vol. 2, 573.
90. Tacitus, Annales, 126: “homines ad servitutem paratos.”
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35
Dionysus: The Therapeutic Mask
Richard B. Carter
Part I
Myths in General and
the Myth of Dionysus in Particular
One of the best accounts of the essence of myth occurs in
Jacob Klein’s unpublished explanation of Aristotle’s concept
of coming-to-be, or generation. In relation to Nature’s great
cycles—the seasons, birth and death, and the like—Klein
writes:
The old myths tell this story over and over again. In fact,
genesis is the very soul of any myth. To understand the
world, the story of its genesis has to be told. To understand the gods, the study of their genesis has to be told.
Cosmogony and Theogony are the primary subjects of
any myth. To understand properly any event in human
life, or character of a people or a city, this event and this
character has always to be related, it seems, to its mythical origins. To tell the myth of something means to tell
how this something came to be. An enterprise of this kind
does not make much sense unless one relates everything
ultimately to beginnings, which make any genesis possible. These are precisely the mythical origins. They contain, of necessity, these two elements: the Male and the
Female. And however distant the sobriety of Aristotle is
from the exuberance of those ancient tales, still the same
aspect of the world as a chain or as cycles of generation
dominates his thought.1
In accordance with Klein’s account, I intend to uncover the
thing itself of which the myths tell the origins, keeping in
Richard Burnett Carter is now retired from over forty years of teaching
as a professor of philosophy. He has written on Descartes’s invention of
mechanistic medicine, and has recently published several novels as well
as a book explaining key terms in the language of Zen.
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mind that the Greek word for the plot of any story or play
was the word mythos.
The principal mythical roles of Dionysus are these:2 He
is the patron deity of the theater and the god of drunken revel.
He is also the god of manic possession of women, who under
his influence, butchered baby animals and their own infants
while suckling the young of deer and lions, wore poisonous
snakes around their waists under their clothing to prevent
men from raping them while they lay senseless in the wake
of their mad mountain revels. He was also known as dendrites—tree-like—and indeed we find representations of him
as a post with a mask tied to it. In a different key, one ancient
source tells us that Dionysus was identical with Hades, claiming that Dionysus is both the god of the dead and the god in
whose honor processions of drunken revelers carry huge
leather phalluses and sing filthy songs.3
Comparing the various collections of myths, we find
eight distinct elements that describe the conception, birth,
death, resurrection, and subsequent deeds of Dionysus.
1. He was the child of Zeus and the mortal Semele,
a princess of the royal house of Thebes. Semele
was destroyed when she looked at Zeus in his full
glory, and, as she was being consumed in the
flames, Zeus rescued the fetus from his mother’s
womb and inserted it into his own leg, where the
child was nurtured and came to term. According
to this myth, Dionysus is thus twice-born—once
from the womb of his mortal mother, Semele, and
again from the leg of his divine father, Zeus.
2. After Dionysus was born the second time,
Zeus’s jealous wife, Hera, set Titans upon the newborn babe, who tore it into countless fragments.
The pieces were subsequently gathered together,
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reassembled, and resuscitated by the Titan, Rhea,
the mother of the newer gods.
3. Dionysus was then reared on Mt. Nysa by
nymphs, among whom were three of special note:
Erato, Bromie, and Bacche. He cultivated wine
there, and then he subsequently traveled around
the world teaching people how to plant vines and
make wine. When people opposed his missionary
efforts, his punishments were ghastly—for instance, he flayed some alive. For a period during
these travels he was driven mad by the ever-jealous Hera, but he then regained his sanity.
4. Known as Bromius after the nymph Bromie
who raised him on Mount Nysa, he led a large
band of women through Asia and around the
Mediterranean basin spreading vine-culture, winemaking, and wine-drinking. His attendants then
were called Bacchae after his nurse-nymph, Bacche. Lycurgus, the king of Edonia, resisted the
proselytizing of Dionysus. They fought, and the
king drove Dionysus into the sea. Lycurgus then
killed many of the Bacchae with an ox-goad. The
vengeful Dionysus drove Lycurgus mad, so that he
mistook his son for a grapevine, killed him with a
pruning knife, and then pruned off his ears and
nose. Lycurgus himself was later torn apart by wild
horses.
5. Dionysus eventually made his way to his
mother’s city, Thebes. There, King Pentheus, his
uncle, rejected him. For this insult, he was torn
limb from limb by the Bacchae. His head was
ripped from his body his own mother, Agave, who
had joined with nearly all the Theban women in
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following Dionysus into the mountains.
6. When women rejected the worship of Dionysus,
their punishment was to be driven into delirium,
so that they would tear their own nursing children
limb from limb. Sometimes they would even devour the dismembered corpses, not recognizing the
parts as belonging to their own infants.
7. One myth tells us that Dionysus married Ariadne of Crete after she had been abandoned by
Theseus of Athens.
8. Other women who rejected his worship seem to
have been punished by being made to kill and devour their own babies; but, when they repented,
and when their menfolk and their kings accepted
Dionysian worship, these women joined his joyful
band of singers and dancers who continued to rend
asunder fully grown lions and oxen and deer in the
mountains where they held their revels. They are
sometimes pictured as suckling the young of all
these animals, and even the young of poisonous
snakes.
This is enough to show that Dionysus is something of a
protean figure. From the evidence of the myths, Dionysus
was the god of wine and the god of the dead, of spring growth
and of magic possession. He acquired other characteristics
after the main myths had been created. For instance, he seems
to have become the god of theater by association with the
satyrs who worshipped him, and who were also thought to
be the originators of play-acting. Homer imputes diametrically opposed qualities to Dionysus, calling him both “raging” (mainomenoio, Iliad 6.132) and “joy of mortals”
(charma brotoisin, 14.325). Dionysus had his own oracle at
Delphi, who was considered just as important as the oracle
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39
of Apollo. Indeed, the Dionysian oracle may have been the
original oracle of Delphi: Plutarch, himself a priest at Delphi,
says that the oracle speaks mainomonoi stomati, with raging
mouth, and this reference to Homer’s “raging” may indicate
that Dionysus is the divine power behind the oracle’s pronouncements.
If we recall Klein’s notion that myths are always about
beginnings, this almost bewildering list of different attributes
accruing to Dionysus forces us to ask, With the genesis of
what in particular—that is, with the very first “pre-historic
beginnings” of what—are the myths of Dionysus concerned?
Modern attempts to address such questions are characteristically anthropological in nature. Ultimately, this viewpoint
will not be sufficient to help us understand the originary significance of Dionysus. To show this, let me begin the investigation by explaining some of the things that Dionysus did
not represent.
Part II
What Dionysus was not
In his Dionysus: Myth and Cult,4 Walter Otto critiques what
seem to be the two principal schools of interpreting ancient
myths in relatively modern times: the anthropological school
and the philological school. The first group uses the methodologies developed by academic anthropology starting in the
late nineteenth century. The second group is comprised of literary analysts who are also classics scholars. We can gain
some insight into what Dionysus is not by listening to Otto’s
criticism. Discussing one of the leaders of the philological
school, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorf,5 Otto says:
His attacks on the views and methods of the “anthropologists” were so sharp and, indeed, frequently so bitterly
scornful that we had the right to expect to find in his own
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presentation an entirely different answer to the basic
questions involved. But we were disappointed. It became
clear that the philological school, for which he could
speak as a legitimate representative, actually agrees completely—in all its crucial points—with its opponents.
Both apply the biological concept of evolution in exactly
the same way.6
Otto then goes on to explain what he means by the expression, “the biological concept of evolution.”
Just as biology thought it was justified in believing that
a line of constant development leads from the lowest to
the highest organisms, so these two schools also place
so-called “simple” concepts at the beginning of an evolution of religious thought out of which are to grow,
through gradual change, the forms which the great deities
assume at their peak. To be sure, in the course of time biology itself had to become a little more modest and had
to acknowledge sudden new creations where it had formerly seen only continuous processes. Yet this is not the
crucial objection to the methods used in our study of religion. When biology talked of evolution, it always put
an organism at the beginning—an organism which still
had to have, in every instance, no matter how simple it
was thought to be, the main characteristic of an organism: it had to be a self-established whole. Only that
which is alive is capable of developing. But in the dialectic advanced by the study of religion, evolution does not
proceed from a simple form of life to a more complex
and higher form but from the Lifeless to the Alive. For
the elements of faith which this study considers primal
are nothing but conceptual systems from which life is
completely lacking.7
Otto then gives a striking example of the character of the sort
of thinking he is criticizing, in which the analysts attempt to
base a vital religious belief on an empty concept:
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In origin, the god Hermes is supposed to have been nothing more than a protector, and the stone pillars and heaps
of stones in front of farm houses point to his presence.
But all the features which define his character—the paradox of his guiding and his leading astray, the sudden
giving and taking away, the wisdom and cunning, the
spirit of propitious love, the witchery of twilight, the
weirdness of night and death—this diverse whole, which
is inexhaustible and yet nowhere denies the unity of its
being, is supposed to be only a complex of ideas which
had gradually developed from the way of life of the worshippers, from their wishes and inclinations, ideas enriched by the love of story telling.
For the primal and solely true belief, there is left, according to Wilamowitz, only the thought of a protecting
and helping god, in short, the idea of an X which lends
assistance but which has no other properties except, perhaps, the power necessary for help.
At the beginning of the process called evolution
there is, then, a mere Nothingness, and the concept of
evolution has consequently lost its meaning. For, a god
like the one assumed here has no real substance, and that
which has no essence is nothing. . . . That which should
be respected as the most sacred object of belief turns out
to be “not there” the first time it is tested, and the objection which Wilamowitz himself raised against Usener’s8
theory—“no man prays to a concept”—applies to Wilamowitz’s theory as well. . . .
As for the “Vegetation Deity,” the “Death God,” and
similar generalities into which we now like to dissipate
living deities as if we had in them the primal concepts of
religious consciousness—these too are nothing but lifeless ideas. How could they ever have fulfilled the demands of devotion, lifted up the spirit, elicited the
powerful forms of cultus? No life proceeds from a concept, and if the great forms of the gods, which could motivate the creative spirit of a culture of highest genius,
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are to be understood historically, then there would be no
more unproductive application imaginable than this.9
One final quotation from Otto reveals the reason why the
philological and anthropological approaches are insufficient
for understanding the essence of a god or for entering the
realm in which such a being has its life:
[O]ur fragmented, mechanistic thinking knows nothing
of such realms of Being, nothing of their unity. How,
then, could it understand their divinity? It examines belief in deity with an astounding naiveté, dissipating its
forms only to place them together again artificially to fit
the pattern of a historical process. . . . That it is suspiciously like our dynamic way of thought is a serious
charge against it.10
In short, human begins are not so constructed, nor have they
ever been so constructed, that they could worship anything
like the pallid verbal constructs described as deities by the
anthropological school and the philological school. The
essence of Dionysus is not an empty concept.
Part III
What Dionysus might have been to
some of his ancient followers
The evolutionary, synthetic approaches used by modern
physics and biology does not and cannot explain the belief
in deities who are almost always characterized by a large
number of mutually contradictory powers. Otto insists that it
is precisely the inability of an evolutionary view of religion
to construct a deity with numerous conflicting powers that
most strongly justifies rejecting the evolutionary accounts of
the anthropological and philological schools of interpreting
religion. How could the same primary concept, such as a
power signified by a pile of rocks on the roadside, grow into
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43
a great god by the gradual addition of powers that were mutually contradictory to one another? On what grounds could
a people choose to relate contradictory elements in order to
construct a synthetic whole? To Otto, the most outstanding
evidence that the ancients believed in gods as truly existing
substances of some sort—rather than as unconsciously synthesized psychological projections of fears and hopes—was
precisely that one and the same deity did have so many conflicting powers. The Hermes of the ancients did not grow into
Hermes gradually. On the contrary, there first had to be a belief in a single, truly existent deity. Only an existing deity
could be the ground a diverse collection of mutually conflicting attributes. Hermes was not built up out of his many different qualities; rather, he was the vessel into which the
attributes could be poured, the container that could hold a
true mixture of the attributes within its substantial unity.
But what are we to think about these different, often contradictory, powers and attributes? Are they merely different
facets of one and the same god, as though the divinity were
a gem that revealed different colors depending of the angle
of the incident light? Is Dionysus the baby-killer merely another manifestation of the same Dionysus who is also the
giver of joy to mortals? If so, it would seem to follow that
the ultimate meaning of baby-killer is identical to the ultimate
meaning of giver of joy to mortals. And this would seem to
mean that Dionysus was conceived by his most fervent
votaries as being both of these identically in his inmost
essence. In the context of psychological anthropology, the
consequence of these considerations would imply that the
human psyche is constructed in such a way that it takes deep
delight in the most ghastly of butcheries; that the horrifying
rituals of child-murder answer a deep need in the human soul;
and that this need is at root identical with the tender love of
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a mother for her child.
But is this true? Are nurturing and destroying really only
“symbolic” expressions of a single underlying unity? If so,
then the absence or presence of such manifestations are must
be merely different modes of expression, different symbolic
representations of an essence in which there is no fundamental distinction. In this view, however, the issue of whether one
mode of expression or another comes to the fore becomes
merely a cultural and historical matter, not a psychological
or anthropological one, since the structure of the psyche is
not reflected in the mode of expression. The appearance of
different symbols is purely relative to time and place.
Moreover, this view of symbolic expression does not address the question, Does every in the psyche have its own
particular expression? Or are we to think that one and the
same thing in the psyche can have distinctly different symbolic expressions? If so, we find ourselves committed to an
anthropology in which all the expressions of inner drives or
impulses would be theoretically reducible to a single drive
or impulse.
Inasmuch as Otto appears to hold this view of symbolic
relativism—for he never even raises this rather obvious problem—it seems that he may have agreed fundamentally with
the cultural anthropologists he attacked so forcefully.
In any case, the approaches of the philologists and the anthropologists are insufficient for us. Let us begin, instead, by
approaching the myths directly. Since drunkenness is deeply
associated with the cult of Dionysus, we will begin our own
analysis of this question by asking about the relationship between drinking and the worship of Dionysus.
Part IV
Dionysus and drunkenness
Different levels of intoxication give rise to different degrees
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45
of visual impairment. The sober person sees things clearly.
Moderate inebriation leads to distorted vision. In this condition, a person sees just what he sees when sober, but with all
sorts of errors, such as double vision and shaky vision. Extreme intoxication, however, induces delusions. In this condition, a person sees things that are not there, experiences
hallucinations, and falls into delirium. Delirium, the result of
extreme drunkenness, was Dionysus’s punishment for the
women who refused to worship him. His proper votaries,
however, were only moderately drunk, and in this state, liberated a bit from the strictures of sobriety, they were lighthearted and joyful.
It might seem at first glance that moderate drunkenness
is a mean between sobriety and delirium, but this is not the
case. Delirium withdraws a person entirely from the world
of shared experience that characterizes sobriety and moderate
intoxication. Hence, moderate drunkenness is not a mean between the two extremes: on the contrary, it groups itself together with its cousin sobriety. Nevertheless, we tend place
people into one of three categories in relation to their state of
inebriation: the sober, the moderately drunk, and the delirious.
Now what if we ask, How drunk must a worshipper of
Dionysus be in order to perceive one and the same god as
being both a baby-killer and a bringer of joy to mortals? Attitudes toward this question would differ depending on the
category of the person hearing it. The sober, for whom the
contradiction is anathema, would think that only a delirious
person could imagine such blasphemies. The delirious, for
whom the contradiction is not a difficulty, would think that
only a blind person could raise such a doubt. And the moderately drunk—who have loosened the bonds of sobriety
enough to entertain the question but, not being delirious, have
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not settled the matter—would be regarded negatively by both
the other groups. The sober person regards even the moderately drunk person as addled for not keeping the distinctions
clear, whereas the delirious person regards him as cloddish
for breaking up an obvious unity. Thus, the moderately drunk
seem to be opposed in different ways to the other two groups.
To the moderately drunk, on the other hand, both of the other
groups appear to be delirious: the sober because in their literalness they can make nothing of anything; the delirious because in their associative fugue they make anything of
nothing at all. Both extremes are mistaken in not making the
right things of the right things.
The attitude of the moderately drunk, therefore, is open
to the possibility of transformation, to the possibility that distinctions might become unities or vice versa. Hence the importance in the cult of Dionysus of the image of the serpent,
which remains what it is although it continually sheds its own
form. But does this idea come too close to imputing to the
votaries of Dionysus the empty abstraction of the philologists
and anthropologists, namely, the idea that Dionysus is the single, constant entity underlying the many symbolic manifestations he throws off, just as the snake is the single, constant
entity underlying the many skins it throws off?
Part V
The Masks of Dionysus
Fortunately, another Dionysus steps forward to block this line
of thought. Dionysus of the theater was surely a master of
images, and so he certainly knew what any child dressing up
in costume knows—that the essence of an image is to present
itself as just what it is not. The serpent’s shed skins need not
be interpreted as different manifestations thrown off by a single, constant entity; they could instead be the remnants of
what the serpent is not. Of course, this would mean that each
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47
skin showed the serpent as what it was not even while the
serpent was wearing it. Or, translating this idea into the realm
of theater, the different aspects of Dionysus, each one an
image left behind after a transformation, are just so many
masks, just so many presentations of what he is not. If this is
the case, then one of the central teachings of the cult of
Dionysus must be this: To unmask is not to know.
Dionysus’s different masks, then, cannot be merely disguises. They cannot be coverings worn by a single, self-same
being of false fronts intended to hide the identity of a single,
self-same being from onlookers. And yet, isn’t that what
masks are? Perhaps not. Perhaps we need to think more radically about the concept of a mask.
Masks are essentially superficial. They belong in the
realm of externalities, of surfaces, of things-as-they-present
themselves. Curiously enough, this makes them similar to
solid bodies, which likewise manifest themselves to us as “all
surface.” If we carve away the surface of a wooden block,
for instance, we reveal a new solid that presents itself to us
in a new way. But the new solid was not “contained by” the
original one, except perhaps in a metaphorical sense. This
point may be easier to grasp by means of a negative example.
A box with another box fitting snugly inside it is not a solid.
That is why there is room in it for the second box. Solids, on
the contrary, do not have space for containment within them,
and thus they cannot contain other solids. Nor do they contain
some sort of originary object that remains the same through
every alteration of surface. Each solid has only one surface,
each surface is the surface of only one solid, and two different
solids have two different surfaces. Similarly, each mask, because of its essential superficiality, cannot mask another
mask, let alone some originary object that remains the same
through every change of mask.
The multiple masks of Dionysus, then, cannot be thought
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of as containing one another; they are not a set of nested
boxes in which the outermost box conceals those within.
Each mask presents itself as a distinctly different thing with
an identity of its own, just as the carved wooden block presents itself as distinctly different from the block from which
it was carved. Nor do his masks contain some originary being
that remains the same through transformations of the masks,
any more than solids contain originary objects. Consequently,
the masks of Dionysus are not disguises: nothing is concealed
within them, neither other masks nor an originary being. So
trying to penetrate his masks in order to unmask a wearer is
clearly a pointless task. It may not be quite so clear at this
point that this task is also perilous.
Part VI
Masks, Shame, Orgies, and Horror
If we continue to view a mask as a sort of disguise, we continue to think of it as a sort of magic shield of invisibility, a
ring of Gyges. Wearing a mask as a disguise seems to be a
way of hiding one’s identity, of concealing what one really
is with a surface that presents what one really is not. The
wearer of a disguise seems unaccountable for his actions, and
hence free to do things that he would be ashamed to acknowledge in his own person. But since, as we have seen, a mask
is not in fact a disguise, we should expect that the attempt to
hide one’s identity with a mask should fail, should show itself
as impossible in some way. And so it does: the unaccountable
masked person is not at all the same as the unmasked person.
The one does things that the other will not do. The one has
shame, the other does not. It is simply a mistake to think that
the masked person is somehow identical with the unmasked
one. Looking aside from this error for the time being, however, we can see that the notion of a mask understood as a
disguise raises the issue of shame, and this brings us to another central aspect of Dionysus and of his cult: the orgy.
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The word orgy comes from the Greek orgia, which is related to the word ergon, a deed, a task, or something accomplished. In classical usage, an orgy is not a celebration of
wildly licentious sexual abandon—this meaning appears in
English only in the seventeenth century—but rather an enjoined task, specifically of a religious character. It refers to
religious rites such as the rites of Demeter, of Orpheus, and,
most frequently, the rites of Dionysus. An orgiastic act, then,
is like that part of a religious service in which every word
and gesture of the officiating priest is ordained by preset ritual—as opposed to, say, a sermon, in which the officiating
minister can speak in his own name.
Another example of an orgiastic act in classical times was
the presentation of a play by actors, in which the speeches
had been ordained by the play’s author and—as we know was
the case with the actors of Dionysus’s theater—the masks
worn by the actors were ordained by tradition. The orgies of
the cult-worshippers of Dionysus dramatize—that is, act out
in prescribed word and deed—the great myths of the deity.
The drama is portrayed by masked actors who are precisely
what their masks show them to be, and who can be so because all their speeches and actions are prescribed to be exactly the speeches and actions belonging to the mask.
Conversely, at the same time, the actors’ masks are precisely
the surfaces appropriate to them in their character as worshippers of Dionysus in the orgiastic performance. And this
relationship is very strict: thus, no single actor presents two
different characters with the same mask or the same character
with two different masks. (If the latter should happen, as with
Oedipus before and after he blinds himself, it indicates that
the character has changed radically.)
These characteristics of orgiastic performance teach us
about the nature of Dionysus, the god of play-acting. His
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manifestations, on the one hand, as the god of baby-killing
and, on the other hand, as the god who brings joy to mortals
must not be understood as two different masks of the selfsame deity. The dreadful mask of the baby-killer, the amiable
mask of the joy-giver—these indicate simply that masks
exist. They do not reveal any persisting entity behind the
masks. Moreover, the plays that embody the orgiastic tradition tell us that our insistence on trying to unmask the nonexistent entity behind the mask is not just pointless, but
dangerous. And indeed, that is what we should expect, since
all attempts to put mistaken beliefs into practice can only
meet with tragic consequences. In the plays, the raving characters represent those who try to unmask others. Agave—
who claimed that Semele had become pregnant with
Dionysus by a mortal rather than by Zeus—attempted to unmask Semele as a liar. Pentheus—who was certain that the
rites of Dionysus were wild, unsanctioned, and licentious
rather than prescribed religious performances—tried to unmask Dionysus himself. Their delirium is a symptom, as we
saw earlier, that they have left the realm of shared experience.
The proper votaries of Dionysus do not rave; madness belongs to those who are outside communal awareness, and
thus outside of the celebration—as Euripides saw so clearly.
And the punishment for the attempt to unmask is terrible:
first, it leads to raving, since the person making the attempt
is trying the impossible, namely, to make something out of
nothing by reducing two different masks to expressions of
one nonexistent entity; second the raving leads to self-destruction as the person tries to act on the basis of delusion.
Thus Agave is led to dismember her own son and Pentheus
is compelled to dive headlong into the bevy of Bacchae who
will tear him apart. The attempt to unmask comes to grief,
because unmasking is impossible.
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This is what the myths of Dionysus are trying to tell us:
We human beings are masked. The baby-killer is a mask just
as much as the nurse or mother is a mask. If the nurse or
mother mask is transformed into the baby-killer mask, this is
not because the bloodier mask is another version of the more
pleasing one, and certainly not because it is the true being
concealed by the pleasing mask. On the contrary, the bloody
mask is the consequence of trying to unmask at all. The attempt to unmask is the cause of the bloody mask that is found
“underneath” the pleasant mask. The lesson of the dreadful
myths of Dionysus is that, as we tear off our masks, each successive mask will be a bloodier, more horrifying result of the
attempt to tear off the previous mask. On this view, Otto was
right inasmuch as he thought that the various contradictory
aspects of Dionysus point toward a sort of unity, but he was
wrong in believing this unity to be a substance of some kind.
The masks of Dionysus point toward a unity in the sense that
they show us the self-same process repeating itself in the successively more horrifying masks that come into being from
each previous attempt to unmask.
We can relate this insight to our daily lives in this way:
In contemporary terms, we describe the attempt to unmask
in various ways—to “find ourselves,” to “act on our true feelings,” to “be our authentic selves,” and so on. The myths of
Dionysus teach us, however, that we are masked actors in an
orgiastic performance. The grief we suffer for rejecting this
insight, and for trying to unmask ourselves in spite of it, is
that we flay our own faces in the attempt to unmask ourselves. By tearing off our mask, we rend the flesh, leaving a
bloody layer of pulp that had previously been protected by
the mask. The original face, the mask, was not disguising the
horror that appears after removal; the horror comes into existence only as a result of the attempt to unmask.
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Part VII
The therapeutic mask
In what we have said up to this point, there are some indications that moderate drunkenness, with its openness to transformation, might be preferable to the anti-Dionysian
literalness of absolute sobriety and the anti-Dionysian madness of delirium. What does this tell us about everyday existence? What might be the analogue of moderate drunkenness
in our daily lives? What would it mean to live in such a way
that we are neither utterly sober nor intoxicated to the point
of delusion? Here we will benefit from two other aspects of
the deity we are studying: Dionysus as the god of marvels
and Dionysus as the god of the dead.
As the patron of theater, Dionysus is the god of the marvelous, the miraculous, and the wonderful. He is in the first
instance, then, the patron of comedy, the genre in which a
marvelous turn of events—such as the appearance of a deus
ex machina or an unexpected savior or a startling revelation—brings about a change from imminent bad fortune to
good fortune. This last consideration also shows the link between comedy and tragedy: if the marvel does not occur, imminent bad fortune comes to pass. And this too is wonderful
in a different way: we wonder why the marvel did not occur,
why the bad fortune was not averted, why the suffering had
to be. Dionysus is in the second instance, then, also the patron
of tragedy.
For the moment, we are going to set aside Dionysus as
the patron of comedy and tragedy to investigate yet another
side of the god. As we saw very early on, Dionysus was also
identified with Hades, the god of the dead, and was worshipped by drunken revelers carrying leather phalluses while
singing lewd songs. The connections among the ghosts of the
dead, leather phalluses, and filthy songs will reveal one more
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aspect of Dionysus to us, which will, in combination with
Dionysus’s role as the god of theater, teach us the final lesson
that can be drawn from the myths of Dionysus.
We begin by asking, What do the leather phalluses and
filthy songs have to do with the worship of the god of the
dead?
We know from many sources that in Athens in early
spring, during the month Anthesterion, a three-day festival
of flowers included two days of Dionysian merry-making followed by a third day, called the Chutroi, the feast of pots, a
festival of the dead at the end of which ghosts were exhorted
to leave the city.11 But, during this very somber third day,
comedies—represented in parade as outsized phalluses and
dirty songs—were presented. It appears that the Athenians
regarded theater performance as suitable either for entertaining the benevolent ghosts, or for distracting the malevolent
ghosts, who walked abroad during the festival. In either case,
Dionysus the god of theater was the appropriate deity for laying ghosts to rest. Dionysus thus begins to come to light as
the god of rest, as the deity who blesses leisure. And this is
not very surprising. After all, are not drinking and theater
both acts of leisure? Perhaps the most all-encompassing of
Dionysus’s aspects is that he is the god of leisure.
But leisure presupposes trust. No one can rest comfortably without trusting in a multitude of protective guardians
and helpers, from family members to neighbors to policemen
to public service providers to soldiers. When we are made to
question this trust—when one of these protective figures violates our trust—our sense of complacency is disturbed, and
our ability to experience leisure evaporates. Violation of trust
is, therefore, the supreme sin. It undermines the faith that humans need to feel safe in their own lives. Perhaps this is why
Dante, in the Divine Comedy, places Brutus, Cassius, and
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Judas—exemplars of treachery—in the gnashing jaws of
Satan himself—also a traitor—at the heart of Hell, which is
the Christian version of Hades. If violation of trust is the destruction of faith and the leisure that depends on it, Dionysus
the god of leisure must be opposed in all ways to treachery.
He must be the guardian of guardianship and of all forms of
protective care. Indeed, the female worshippers of Dionysus
were called by the honorific title tithēnai, that is, nurses. The
worship of Dionysus involves nurture and guardianship,
without which leisure is impossible.
As we said, theater is also a leisure activity. Hence we
should also expect it to relate in some way to nurture and
guardianship. This relationship is found in the realm of sight:
theater cultivates and civilizes vision for sake of increasing
trust, and thus securing leisure. The epitome of self-involved
vision is solitary dreaming. In our dreams we are drawn into
a self-contained world into which intrude only phantoms
from our shared, waking life. Theater borrows these intruders, as it were, and introduces them to the companions of our
shared life for their approval or disapproval. Theater civilizes
our dreams by teaching us to distinguish between things that
belong only to our solitary reverie and those that belong to
our shared life with others. In doing so, it transforms our selfcontained consciousness into shared, civil consciousness.
This civil consciousness is conscience. Conscienceless
theater is anti-theater. Conscienceless theater tries to undo
the transformation of our dreams by tearing off what seems
to be their civil mask, and recklessly presenting our solitary
consciousness to the prying eyes of strangers. Conscienceless, unmasking, theater is pornographic theater. It demands
of its spectators that they publicly unmask and share all their
dreams—the more private the better. But we have seen the
consequences of the attempt to unmask, and those conse-
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quences can be expected to occur if unmasking theater is not
checked: waking life will become a nightmare. Dionysus the
god of theater reminds us that conscience, the mask of consciousness, is also its nurturer and its guardian.
Dionysus is, therefore, the guardian deity of civilized
consciousness. His dual realm is the underworld of solitary
dreaming together with the portion of it that can be seen in
civil consciousness. Human beings see the light of day only
when they are masked. It is only as masked that we humans
see the true light of day. Unmasked, we live in nightmare.
Without our masks, we are as insubstantial as dreams; we are
phantoms whose thinness is proved by the fact that they cannot withstand the light of day. Ultimately, then, the mask of
Dionysus is the mask of conscience, the mask that allows
some of our dreaming visions to be seen communally in the
light of day. Dionysus, finally, is the god of that which is
properly visible, the god of the properly shared, the god of
civility.
NOTES
1. Unfortunately, the source of this quotation—most probably one of
Klein’s many lectures delivered at St. John’s College—is not known.
2. The stories of the Greek Gods are described in exhaustive detail in
Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, 2 vols. (New York: Penguin, 1960).
3. Heraclitus, Fragment 15. See Heraclitus, Fragments: A Text and Translation with a Commentary (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981),
17.
4. Walter Otto, Dionysos: Mythos und Kultus (Klostermann: Frankfurt
am Main, 1933). References in these notes will be to the English translation by Robert B. Palmer, Dionysus: Myth and Cult (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965).
5. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorf (1848-1931) was an expert on the
literature of ancient Greece. He championed the notion that surviving an-
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cient manuscripts, besides being objects of literary history, could also be
mined for biographical, political, and general historical information.
6. Otto, Dionysus, 8.
7. Otto, Dionysus, 8-9.
8. Hermann Usener (1834-1905) was a philologist and historian of religion, and a teacher of Wilamowitz. The statement made here seems to be
Wilamowitz’s version of something Usener used to say, not a quotation
from a publication.
9. Otto, Dionysus, 9-11.
10. Otto, Dionysus, 11.
11. See, for instance, Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 2.15,
and Aristophanes, Acharnians, 1076.
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Fields and Particles and Being
Dylan Casey
1 Introduction
Particles and fields, broadly speaking, describe two basic accounts of what the world is made of. The particle is the quintessential ball, grain of sand, or individual. It contains the
notion of individuation—the very criterion of distinguishing
this from that. The field is an expanse, a continuous entity
that occupies space, has shape, contour, and variation, but
these qualities are always reflected back onto the field itself.
The rolling, wheat-covered hills comprise a field. These two
options correspond to two claims about the world in general:
that it is discrete, like particles, or continuous, like fields. As
with all good arguments, there are respectable proponents
on both sides, each offering a little twist on the common
theme.
For example, Lucretius, on the face of it, is a particle
guy. Accordingly, he writes:
All nature, then, as it is in itself, consists of two things;
for there are bodies and the void in which they are located
and through which they move in different directions.1
The world is full of a variety of fundamental particles zipping around in an otherwise empty container, colliding with
one another making all that we see. I should mention that
there is the possibility of intrinsic self-motion—the
swerve—of these particles (or at least one of them) in addition to the motion imparted by collisions, but that would lead
to a different lecture.
Dylan Casey is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis. This lecture
was originally delivered on 22 April 2011 as part of Mr. Casey’s tenure
as the National Endowment for the Humanities Chair in Modern
Thought. It has been modified slightly for publication.
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Newton, more or less, is also a particle guy. For him, light
is corpuscular—a view that might be considered prescient
given the photonic understanding of light that appeared over
two centuries following his work. The action-at-a-distance
interpretation of his gravitational theory also implies a particle
view of the world in which each particle acts on the others,
not just through collision, but also directly and instantaneously. In the end, action at a distance is a refinement of the
Lucretian world of colliding particles to account for remote
actions like magnetism and gravity.
I should note that Newton had grave misgivings about action at a distance:
That one body may act upon another at a distance through
a vacuum without the mediation of anything else, by and
through which their action and force may be conveyed
from one another, is to me so great an absurdity that, I believe, no man who has in philosophic matters a competent
faculty of thinking could ever fall into it.2
Roughly in the field camp, Descartes gives us the plenum.
He insists that the world be full and continuous. There are no
essential entities, but rather amorphous extension combined
with swirling vortices. Descartes expected the world to be a
self-contained whole—motion and extension together—
though he might have conceded that the ball needs to start
rolling at some point.
Also standing in the field camp, in his own way, is Leibniz. His world is full as well, but his monads are discrete, essential entities colliding in a motion ultimately governed from
the outside by God. While agreeing with Descartes about the
necessary fullness of the world, Leibniz takes issue with
Descartes’s inability to account for individuation. The monads go some way toward keeping the notion of individual entities in a full world.
Obviously, the preceding accounts are just sketches of the
ideas of the authors. And I do not intend to give the impres-
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sion that all particle views and all field views are the same.
They’re not. But all particle views emphasize certain features
and address certain questions in common, as do all field
views. For the particle guys, the emphasis is on distinction
and difference. Their ultimate standpoint is that there must
be, somewhere, essential differences that are ineradicable,
maybe even eternal. There is something naturally attractive
about this view. One of the manifest features of the world is
the distinction between this and that. The individuation that
underlies the simple act of counting presumes boundaries between things as a precondition for counting them. Furthermore, we break up individual things into smaller individuals
all the time, and many of them have natural boundaries. Like
a ball or a grain of sand, such things maintain their integrity
over time. Extrapolating to smaller pieces and to elementary
particles is a straightforward exercise of the intellect: the
smallest things ought to embody (or even exemplify) the distinctions that are manifest to us everyday.
If individuation is a common feature of particle views,
then the void is a common problem. The void seems to be
an amorphous nothing that functions as a container for
everything that exists—and, of course, speaking of nothing
is difficult. Similarly, the genuine separation of individual
entities that characterizes particle theories gives rise to the
problem of action at a distance. There are certainly phenomena, like magnetism, in which it is difficult to explain how
separated individuals interact with one another when action
between those individuals isn’t easily attributable to simple
collision. If you dispense with the void, you are left asking
what fills it up.
For the field guys like Descartes and Leibniz, the emphasis is on wholeness and continuity—on the fullness and completeness of the universe. This emphasis on oneness doesn’t
seem incidental. Rather, it seems fundamental to scientific
activity to assume a whole with respect to which measure-
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ments are made. For measuring to work at all, one needs a
whole. Once the whole is assumed, however, the problem of
distinction and identity is ever-present. One is left wondering
about the cause of differences between individuals, or questioning whether such differences aren’t necessarily illusions.
This is particularly true of Leibniz. By filling the universe
with monads, he creates the appearance of individuality that
is characteristic of the particle view. Since the monads fill the
world, it seems that it might be possible to sidestep the void.
But in the end, the monads form a whole in which their independence is utterly illusory. Rather, each monad is a mirror
of the whole universe through its internal connection with
everything else in the universe.
Here is an image of a physical system that highlights
these problems and tensions: two conducting spheres, each
hanging from a string, each holding some net negative
charge. Since like charges repel and the two spheres are relatively close to one another, they push each other away. We
can tell this is happening because the strings from which the
spheres hang are neither parallel nor plumb, but angled away
from each other. If we push on one of the spheres, we see the
other move away, and if we move one sphere around, the
other moves as well. Now this is not an everyday sort of observation. We don’t usually have charged spheres hanging
around near us. But, it isn’t difficult to arrange and, nowadays, isn’t likely to surprise many people. It’s so easy, in fact,
that we do very similar demonstrations in our Junior Laboratory classes with pith balls hanging from threads. An initial
account of this phenomenon might go like this: charges exert
electromagnetic force on each other and, since the charges
are confined to the spheres, that force overcomes the uniform
downward tendency of the spheres due to gravitation. The
relative angle of the strings reflects the net force acting on
the spheres.
This system of hanging charged bodies incorporates the
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most important questions about fields and particles, about
wholes and parts, about the continuous and the discrete. What
is happening between these spheres? This is, in short, the
field question. Second, how do I understand these spheres
themselves? This is, in short, the particle question.
2 Classical Fields
Although Descartes and Leibniz laid the foundations for field
theory with their emphasis on continuity and the fullness of
the universe, it was the work of Michael Faraday that marked
the beginning of our modern notion of the field. During his
research into the nature of electricity and magnetism, he
coined the term field to refer to the interstitial action between
charged parts of matter and between magnetized parts of matter. In his experiments he had located and measured charges,
confirmed the discreteness of charge, and demonstrated that
changing magnetic forces induce electric currents in nearby
wires. These electric and magnetic forces could penetrate
matter and persist in a vacuum. The effects of charges on one
another, as well as the effects of magnetism and electromagnetic induction, seemed like instances of action at a distance,
and all of them could be described by contemporary mathematical formulations.
Faraday didn’t buy it. For him, something had to travel
between the charges and between the magnetic poles. Ultimately, the world had to be full, and action couldn’t happen
without touching. Although one might call this a metaphysical predisposition on Faraday’s part, he nevertheless searched
tirelessly for the smoking gun that would reveal the presence
of a field as the medium through which separated pieces of
charged matter could touch. First of all, he considered the
time required for electrical action to occur as evidence of the
presence of a field. Using a very long wire, he could measure
how long it took for electricity to travel through a circuit. The
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fact that such action was measurably non-instantaneous revealed that there was a moment when the action of one
charged particle was “emitted” but not yet felt by another
charge. If the whole long electrical interaction takes any time
at all, the smallest communication of action must also take
time. At some moment, therefore, the action was somewhere
in between the two charges.
For Faraday, this amounted to direct evidence against an
action-at-a-distance account of electrical and magnetic force.
The action between the charges must be contained within a
field, within a continuous entity that was not confined by a
particle of matter. The action of one charge on another had
to occur through time and through space, of course, but it
needn’t itself be particle-like in nature. By hypothesizing the
existence of the field, Faraday imagined a new type of substance in the world.
In holding this view, Faraday put himself at odds with a
well established camp of believers in action at a distance who
denied the necessity of a continuity of action from here to
there. In their minds, each bit of charge acted directly on
every other bit of charge. This notion was similar to Newton's
account of gravity, in which each bit of matter exerted an instantaneous gravitational pull on every other bit of matter,
with the strength of that force decreasing as the square of the
distance between the bits.
(As an aside—and this probably reveals my own disposition on the subject—I would note that the sensitivity to distance in action-at-a-distance theories is puzzling at the outset,
if action is supposed to take place entirely between one particle and another. How do the particles sense the distance between them in order to regulate the force? Even if the
information took no time to propagate, which creates a new
problem concerning instantaneous transmission of anything,
this sort of action at a distance still requires a radical sensitivity of each part to the global arrangement. It cannot be the
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case that the action is determined by only the two bits in
which we happen to be interested; each part must know
where every other part is within a larger context. In a funny
way, action at a distance presumes a radical wholeness of all
things due to the instantaneous activity of the putative parts
upon each other.)
Faraday’s field idea reaches fruition in James Clerk
Maxwell’s reformulation that is eventually embodied in his
equations for the electromagnetic field. Maxwell adds mathematical clarity and refinement to Faraday’s initial notions
of the field. Among his greatest clarifications was rendering
Faraday’s field as a mathematical quantity whose value depends upon spatial locations. This is how the field is continuous: it has a value at all points in space. Temperature is a
good and typical example of a field. Each point in the room
has a temperature and the mathematical function in three spatial directions that describes the temperature is called the temperature field.
Maxwell’s account of electromagnetism invokes electrical and magnetic fields that persist throughout all space. If
we return to our two hanging charged spheres, Maxwell
would say that there is an electrostatic field—electrostatic
because we don’t have to account for any magnetism in this
system—between the two spheres and that the field is described by a field strength at each point between the spheres.
It’s worth noting that the mathematical form of an electrostatic field is richer and more complicated than a temperature
field. For instance, the electrostatic field is represented mathematically at each point in between the spheres by three components corresponding to the field strength in each of three
spatial directions. And each of those components depends on
three coordinates of position as well. That makes it what is
called a vector field, but it’s still a field, which is to say, an
extended whole in between two things. (The simpler temperature field would be called a scalar field, since each point is
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represented by a number and not a vector.)
Following Maxwell, we can refine the system of our
hanging spheres in this way: The spheres are aggregates of
charge and the force between them is the action of a connecting electromagnetic field. Each charge is the source of an
electromagnetic field that pushes the other. In this way of seeing things, the world consists of particles floating on an ether
sea in which the motions of the particles touch off waves of
force that act on other particles.
This, in large part, is the ontology of classical fields: there
are, on the one hand, particles that are sources and recipients
of disturbance, and, on the other hand, fields which communicate the disturbance between the sources. And one of the
most amazing aspects of Maxwell’s theory is the consequence that these disturbances become the manifestation of
light. Light itself is revealed as electromagnetic action born
out of the motion of charges.
This unifying character of the field, its ability to communicate action between charges, was a wonder to Maxwell.
Here is just a taste of his enthusiasm from his article “On Action at a Distance”:
The vast interplanetary and interstellar regions will no
longer be regarded as waste places in the universe, which
the Creator has not seen fit to fill with the symbols of the
manifold order of His kingdom. We shall find them to be
already full of this wonderful medium; so full, that no
human power can remove it from the smallest portion of
space, or produce the slightest flaw in its infinite continuity. It extends unbroken from star to star; and when a
molecule of hydrogen vibrates in the dog-star, the
medium receives the impulses of these vibrations; and
after carrying them in its immense bosom for three years,
delivers them in due course, regular order, and full tale
into the spectroscope of Mr. Huggins, at Tulse Hill.3
Now stipulating a field as a new kind of entity that acts
as the mediator of action between particles doesn’t settle the
discreteness/continuity problem. What is a field anyway? Is
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it like water connecting one shore to another in such a way
that the waves from a dropped stone lap upon the other side,
dislodging stones there? This is exactly the sort of image that
comes to mind when we think about point charges moving
in the continuous field that propagates vibrations at the speed
of light. If this is the case, then what is the field made of?
Does it have parts, as water surely does? Is it composed of
particles? If it is, what holds those particles together? Some
of these questions arise from the very notion of extension. It
is difficult to see how any extended thing can exist without
being made up of “sub-things.” Any successful account of
things will need to address these questions about extension
and its sub-structure.
On the other hand, what is a particle? Where are its
boundaries? How is it distinguished from the force field of
which it is the source? Where would one cross from charge
to field? These questions of crossing and transformation from
one thing to another are at the root of discreteness, difference,
and individuality. Looking for an elementary particle is looking for a fundamental “this” that is clearly distinguishable
from some different “that.”
Behind all these questions lurk the nagging problems I
mentioned at the outset: the problems associated with the attempt to come to terms with the distinctions between continuity and discreteness. A satisfying understanding of fields
and particles ought to reveal some resolution of the tensions
between these two accounts of world. To obviate the need for
the void, we need a full universe. To articulate identity, we
need ways of isolating individuals from the whole while
maintaining connections so that we still have a whole.
Maxwell’s field theory is looks like marbles and goo: the particles—the marbles—are point sources of mass and charge;
the field—the goo—sticks all the particles together, communicating their separate actions to one another.
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3 Quantum Field Theory
While Faraday and Maxwell pioneered the notion of the field,
its ultimate expression is found in modern quantum field theory, which represents our best current account of the structure
of all matter. This account is called the Standard Model. If
the name evokes for you a simultaneous sense of elevation
and dreariness, you feel much the same way as most particle
physicists, for whom the Standard Model is both a triumph
and an affliction.
In the Standard Model, the world contains elementary
particles like electrons, neutrinos, and up quarks, which interact with one another by means of four forces: the electromagnetic force, which holds together everything from atoms
to asteroids, and is the mediator of all chemical interactions;
the strong force, which holds together the nuclei of atoms;
the weak force, which doesn’t hold together anything, but mediates some forms of radioactive decay; and the gravitational
force, which holds together planets, stars, solar systems,
galaxies, and so on. Gravitation doesn’t really fit in the Standard Model very well right now. This is regarded as an acceptable dilemma, because particle physicists still need jobs
in this struggling economy.
The Standard Model contains sub-theories associated
with each of the forces. The part dealing only with electromagnetism is called QED, an acronym for “quantum electrodynamics.” The part dealing with the strong force is called
QCD, for “quantum chromodynamics.” The part dealing with
the weak force is an extension of QED called the “electroweak” theory. All of these are quantum field theories and
anytime you hear or read things like “quark,” “lepton,”
“QED,” “W and Z Boson,” or “Higgs Boson” you’ve wandered into the land of quantum field theory.
It is completely uncontroversial that quantum field theories are the most successful accounts ever devised about the
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structure of the world. By “successful” I simply mean that
they are the most precise accounts verified by experiment.
Calculations of phenomena based on the Standard Model
agree more closely with our best measurements than any
other physical theories that we have. The best example of this
is the value of something called “the fine-structure constant,”
which is a number that characterizes the strength of electromagnetic interactions. The quantum-theoretical value of this
number agrees with the physical measurement to 10 decimal
places—better than one part in one billion. As an experimentalist, I would like to point out that it is a pretty wicked measurement that has an uncertainty of one part in a billion!
Now, quantum field theory is kind of a crazy thing to try
to cover in my remaining time. To do so succinctly, I would
have to present you with some challenging, but extremely
beautiful mathematics. But rather than try your patience in
that way, I’ll attempt to describe as much of the theory as I
can in plain English. I’ve provided a short annotated bibliography for those of you who would like to study some of the
details in more depth.
For now, I’m going to try to present some of the salient
points of quantum field theory and talk a bit about what it requires us to think about the world. So let’s begin with this
question: What do we buy when we buy a quantum field theory?
3.1 Relativity and Quantum Mechanics
First and foremost, quantum field theory is a complete synthesis of special relativity and quantum mechanics that attempts to account for the physics of the entire universe.
Because it incorporates special relativity, quantum field theory is “relativistically invariant,” which means that all the results of all calculations remain unchanged under a Lorentz
transformation. This tells us that two identical experiments
will get the same results even if one lab was here on earth
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while the other was hurtling through space at nearly the speed
of light. A physicist would say “all the physics in two systems
is the same regardless of the relative speed between them.” For
our purposes, there are two salient consequences of this fact:
1. All positions and times are determined relative
to each other. There is no absolute now and then,
no absolute here and there. And there is no simultaneity.
2. Mass and motion are aspects of the same
thing—energy. Mass and motion can be converted
into each other and, together, they embody the
total energy of the system. Energy rules.
Quantum field theories also encapsulate all of the ideas
of quantum mechanics. Maxwell’s account of a world of
charges communicating motion through vibrations in a field
fails miserably in its attempts to account for the structure of
the atom. Quantum mechanics solves those problems, but it
entails certain consequences. For one thing, fundamental
quantities like energy and angular momentum are discrete,
which means that they come in little units that are the smallest
amounts possible; or, as the physicists say, these properties
are quantized. For another thing, certain quantities, like position and momentum, don’t admit of being determined simultaneously. (This is the famous Heisenberg Uncertainty
Principle). Third, the fundamental quantity in a quantum mechanical system is called a “state,” which has a configuration
that depends upon how it is selected. And fourth, all predictions are made in terms of likelihoods and probabilities—not
because we are making estimates about large numbers of objects like, for example, the number of molecules in a container of gas, but because nothing in the quantum world is
determinate. Probability is intrinsic and goes all the way
down to the states, which are themselves sums of a number
of possibilities.
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3.2 The Lagrangian and Minimization
In any serious discussion about quantum field theory you’ll
very quickly run into the term “Lagrangian.” Joseph Louis
Lagrange was an eighteenth-century mathematician who developed the calculus of variations, in which differential equations are solved by taking into account the possible
constraints on the internal parameters to determine a global
solution. In physics, the term “Lagrangian” refers to a mathematical relation describing the dynamics of a system. First,
you write an equation that describes the internal dynamics of
the system fully, and then you integrate it over the whole time
during which the system is in motion, thus producing an expression for the total action of the system. If you then minimize that expression (that is, find the least possible action
that the system could possibly have used to get from its starting state to its ending state), you produce a differential equation expressing that least possible action terms of the
Lagrangian. Classical mechanics and electrodynamics can be
formulated in terms of minimizing action in cases for which
the Lagrangian can be identified as the difference between
the system’s kinetic energy and its potential energy.
As an example, consider the path of a projectile under the
influence of gravity—a potato, perhaps, launched from a potato cannon. Such a contraption looks pretty much like a cannon made of PVC pipe. To load it, the potato is pushed down
the muzzle to the edge of the firing chamber. Propulsion is
provided by igniting aerosol hair spray in the combustion
chamber using a sparking device. (I, myself, through trial and
error, have found that Aquanet® provides the biggest kick
per dose by far.) The kinetic energy of the potato is given by
its mass and speed, the latter of which depends upon position
and time. The potential energy of the potato is given by its
mass, the constant force of gravity, and its height, which also
depends upon position and time. The Lagrangian function
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would be the difference between the function for kinetic energy and the function for potential energy. Now, in principle
there are many possible paths between the starting point and
the landing point for the potato, each with its own action. For
instance, it could travel in a parabola. Or, it could fly up for
a while and do a few loop-the-loops before landing. Each of
these paths has an associated action given by adding up the
difference between the kinetic energy and the potential energy at all the points along the path. In the end, the path corresponding to the physical path—the path actually traced out
by the potato—is the one with the least total action.
One can perform a similar calculation in classical electrodynamics considering the motion and configuration of
charged spheres or even of electrons. Considering their total
kinetic and potential energies, the principle of least action
stipulates that their configurations and motions will always
be such that the action is minimized. All of the dynamics of
the system is contained in the Lagrangian, and all calculations
regarding the system would ultimately go back to that Lagrangian. Minimizing the action allows us to pick out which
arrangement of dynamics will be followed by actual physical
objects.
In quantum field theory, there are two important twists
on this classical principle. First, the Lagrangian is not in any
simple way the difference between the kinetic energy and the
potential energy; it is mathematically much more complicated
than that. Second, the dependent quantities are field configurations, not paths. In classical formulations the minimization
of the action is obtained by considering different paths
through spacetime, as in my potato example. In quantum field
theory, the minimization is obtained by considering different
field arrangements.
I don't have time to say more about least action here. But
I do want to emphasize that the Lagrangian is the key to the
physics of any system. For instance, when physicists speak
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of invariances under transformation (as they do in regard to
special relativity), they are implicitly saying, “the Lagrangian
doesn’t change under that transformation.” This amounts to
the claim that the Lagrangian contains all possible information about the system. In other words, the Lagrangian “holds
all the physics.”
3.3 Quantum Fields
So, as a structural matter, when you buy quantum field theory,
you are buying quantum mechanics, special relativity, and
least-action principles formulated in terms of a Lagrangian
function. Now for the fields. In quantum field theory, all of
the fundamental entities are space-permeating fields which
are themselves physically manifest as discrete quanta. These
fields is not made of anything else. They are their own entities, just as the fields of Maxwell and Faraday were their own
entities. The quanta of these fields are the so-called elementary particles, but the fields are prior to, and necessary for,
the existence of the particles. The particles are resonances,
modes of the field. Crudely put, the particles are vibrations.
All quantum mechanical entities are vibrations.
You can never touch a quantum field per se—it becomes
manifest only when there is a discrete interaction. Bumping
up against a quantum field means bumping up against a quantum of that field. Now there are two classes of fields—matter
fields and interaction fields, the latter also known as force
fields. A good example of an interaction field is the electromagnetic field, whose quanta are photons of light. A good example of a matter field is an electron field, whose quanta
are—you guessed it—electrons. A less familiar example of
an interaction field would be the strong nuclear field, whose
quanta are gluons (eight of them) that connect to quark fields
whose quanta are up and down quarks.
The earlier image of the two charged spheres can be refined a bit to reflect these fields. In Maxwell’s case, each
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sphere is a bundle of charge and the force that angles the support strings is communicated by the electromagnetic field
joining the charges. In the electron field, for instance, each
sphere is rendered as an individual electron, itself a quantum
of an electron field, and the electromagnetic force between
the two electrons is rendered as a photon, the quantum of the
electromagnetic field. The angle of the strings represents the
exchange of photons between the electrons.
Now, this is a bit of a conundrum, and you may well feel
like I’ve pulled a fast one. It’s quantum field theory, after all,
not quantum particle theory. How exactly did this particlerabbit get pulled out of that field-hat? The short answer (and
really the long answer too) is that the particles and fields
come together. In a quantum field, the quanta, the particles,
are the manifestation of the fields. There is no getting around
this stipulation in quantum field theory. The particles arise
out of the quantization of the field. The field holds all the
possibilities—that is to say, all the energy—for the particles.
The particles are the manifestation of the field. In this
way quantum field theory makes a choice that Maxwell’s
field theory does not. Maxwell’s theory has point sources that
are distinct from fields—charges that are independent of the
forces between them. In quantum field theory there is no distinction of this sort between source and force. Both are rooted
in continuous fields which become manifest as particles.
There are a few features of quantum fields that are worth
emphasizing:
1. The particle types associated with each field are
the same everywhere. All electrons, for instance,
are the same, because they are all quanta of the
same field.
2. The field endures, but particles can come and
go, transforming one into the other. There are constraints to the transformations, but, as a general
rule, “anything that can happen, will happen.” As
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in ordinary quantum mechanics, probabilities for
transformations can be assigned, but any given
transformation is undetermined. I can tell you the
possible final states for the decay of a muon and
on average how long it will take to decay, but I
can't tell you when it will happen. No one can.
The available possibilities for transformation
increase dramatically with increased energy. As a
typical example: colliding a high-speed (and therefore high-energy) electron and positron, one might
easily end up with showers of particles containing
ten pi mesons, a proton, and an antiproton.4 Together, those particles weigh thirty-thousand times
more than the original electron and positron. So
mass is not conserved, but rearranged with the
available energy. This is a direct consequence of
special relativity.
Such a collision is also a genuine transformation. The particles that resulted from the collision
of the electron and the positron just mentioned
were not hidden inside the electron and the
positron, just waiting to be unleashed by the force
of the collision. The electron and positron disappear and the available energy in the fields becomes manifest as the particles of the final state. I
also can’t tell you which final state particles will
appear in a given collision any more than I can tell
you when a muon will decay. The best I can do is
outline the possibilities.
A corollary is that impossible transformations
don’t happen. For all experimental purposes, the
muon is a heavy electron—all of its quantum numbers are the same as an electron, except that it’s
two hundred times heavier. And, it spontaneously
decays into an electron plus some other particles.
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The electron never decays. It is the end of the line.
The only account of this I know is that there is no
where for the electron to go, because there is no
smaller package in which energy prefers to manifest itself.
3. The quanta don’t constitute the field. The field
is not made up of quanta. The electromagnetic
field does not contain photons. It is not a bag of
marbles, nor a stack of blocks. The field has its
own motions, its own resonances, and these are
photons of various energies. Physicists use the
analogy of the vibrating string to try to explain this
fact: Just as a vibrating string has its overlapping
series of normal modes, the up quark, the down
quark, and the Z boson are all resonances in an underlying, undulating field.
4. For quantum fields, all interactions are pointlike, occurring at a specific point in space-time and
involving specific combinations of field quanta. In
other words, all interactions are discrete. Every interaction is broken down into individual interactions between individual quanta. And these quanta
are manifestations of the energy present in the underlying continuous field.
4 Interactions and Local Symmetry
So, what’s the big picture? We have a world filled with fields,
all of which are manifest only by particles, all interacting with
one another. But what does “interaction” mean? How are
these fields/particles related to their interactions? Considering
this brings us to the notion of invariance, the notion that despite the appearance of change, things stay the same. Physicists apply invariances by insisting that “the physics” of a
system doesn’t change under certain transformations. The use
of invariances (and the related notion of conservation) has a
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long history in physics, and in the sciences generally. One
might consider the story of physics as the search for the true
invariances within the world.
This is the idea that Huygens leverages in “Motions of
Colliding Bodies,” which we read here at St. John’s in the
Junior Laboratory. In that work, Huygens considers two balls
colliding with one another, and he works out the general kinematics of hard collisions. Here is the beginning of the proof
of his first proposition. (I’ve made minor edits that obviate
the mathematical proportions and variables):
Figure from Proposition 1 of Huygens’s
Motion of Colliding Bodies
Imagine that a boat near a bank is carried along by the
current, so close to the bank that a passenger standing in
it can stretch out his hand to a friend standing on the
bank. Let the passenger hold in his hands . . . two equal
bodies . . . suspended on strings, and . . . by bringing together his two hands with equal motions, understood in
relation to himself and the boat, until they touch, he thus
makes the two balls collide with equal speeds. The balls,
therefore, must necessarily rebound from their mutual
contact with equal speeds . . . in relation to the passenger
and the boat. Moreover, suppose that in the same time
the boat is carried to the left with . . . the same speed with
which the left hand . . . was carried toward the right. It is
therefore clear that the passengers [left] hand has remained motionless in relation to the bank and to his
friend, but that [his right hand], in relation to the same
friend was moved with [double the] speed. . . . Therefore,
if the friend on the bank is supposed to have grasped,
with his own [right hand], the passengers [left hand], together with the end of the string which supports [one
ball], but with his other [left hand] the passengers [right
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hand], which holds the string from which [the other ball]
hangs, it is apparent that while the passenger makes [the
two] balls strike one another with a speed equal in relation to himself and the boat, the friend on the bank, in
the same time, shoved [one ball against the other ball,
one at rest and the other with a speed double that of the
boat] in relation to the bank and to himself. And it is evident, however, that as for the passenger, who, as was
said, makes the two balls move, it makes no difference
that his friend on the bank has taken his hands and the
ends of the strings, since he only accompanies their
movement and doesn’t hinder them at all. For the same
reason, the friend on the bank who makes [one ball]
move toward the [motionless ball] is not disturbed at all
by the fact that the passenger has joined hands with him.5
Huygens determines the laws of collision by requiring
that the collision itself remain the same, even if it may seem
different to different viewers. Even though different viewers
would obtain different results for the speeds and directions
of the colliding bodies, Huygens presumes that all such views
would be ultimately commensurable, and that they could be
transformed into one another if we know the parameters of
the transformation. Indeed, this difference is plain, since the
passenger on the boat moves his arms at the same speed,
while his friend on the shore keeps one arm still and the other
rushes along at twice the speed of the boat. The leverage
Huygens has in this analysis is the presumption that the collision for the passenger and the collision for his shore-bound
friend are one and the same; indeed, it certainly seems that
there is only one collision, not two. Huygens reinforces our
presumption about this by having them touch hands in such
a way that the hands are in the same place, with the same motion, but neither pair disturbs the other. The difference in relative speed between the observers—that is, between the
passenger and his friend on the shore—cannot make a genuine difference to the physical laws involved, because then
there would be two collisions rather than one. Any distinction
between the two observers must be accounted for by a trans-
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formation that may render the component details different,
but must leave the collision alone. Huygens’s assumption of
invariance preserves the identity of the collision as a single
event, and this identity consists of a single interaction in a
particular place at a particular time.
The sort of leverage Huygens employs is very powerful
and is used over and over in physics. As an intellectual activity, it presumes that, in some articulable way, the world is
unchanging and that distinctions are variations that fill up that
unchanging whole. This is sensible and reasonable. In fact,
it is rational in an explicit way. The shapes of the parts and
the distinctions among them are measured with respect to the
whole. Physics articulates difference by means of ratio, that
is, by means of comparison. One might well say that the root
activity of all physics is the art of comparison: the physicist
hunts for invariances in order to articulate distinctions that
make a genuine difference.
There are many sorts of invariances in physics. For instance, there is invariance with respect to translations in location or time. The criterion of such an invariance is that the
equation describing the dynamics of the system, namely, the
Lagrangian, is unchanged after some transformation. If we
say, to give an example, “the physics of this system is invariant with respect to translations in location,” we mean that if
any increment is added to the variable for location in the Lagrangian, when we work out the algebra, the new Lagrangian
simplifies back into the original one.
Now this kind of invariance has a very special consequence. If a Lagrangian has an invariance, there is an associated conserved quantity and vice versa. In other words, if the
physics has an invariance something is conserved, and if
something is conserved there is an invariance. So space-translation invariance (invariance with respect to increments in
spatial locations, also called space-translation symmetry) implies conservation of momentum. Time-translation invariance
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(invariance with respect to increments in time, also called
time-translation symmetry) implies conservation of energy.6
The reverse is also true: momentum conservation implies
space-translation symmetry and energy conservation implies
time-translation symmetry. Conservation principles turn out,
therefore, to indicate symmetries in the physical world. Momentum conservation points at a fundamental homogeneity
in the universe: here and there aren’t different from the perspective of physical laws. Similarly, energy conservation indicates the same thing about time: now and then aren’t
different from the standpoint of physical laws.
These symmetries are not restricted to kinematical quantities, like momentum, associated with the motion of physical
objects. They can also be associate with the state functions
of quantum field objects; that is to say, there can be internal
symmetries in the different quantum fields and in the particular quanta that belong to them. One such internal symmetry
is called phase symmetry. In quantum mechanics, all the
states of any system have an associated phase, because the
mathematical descriptions of the states are very complex
wave functions, and every wave has a phase. Now phase isn’t
a very complicated idea; it’s just the marker of a repeating
motion. Imagine sitting in a boat on a lake as a wave passes
underneath, lifting and lowering the boat (and you with it)
over and over. If you were next to a dock, you might go from
looking at the barnacles under the dock while the boat is in
the wave’s trough to looking over and across the dock at your
neighbor’s yacht while the boat is riding at the wave’s crest.
And you would repeat this up-and-down trip with every complete cycle of the wave beneath your boat. This repeated upand-down motion is circular in nature: you go up a certain
height from trough to crest, then down again through the
same distance, then up again, and so on. You could even track
your relative position on the wave by marking out your position on the up and down cycle on the face of a clock, so that
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one turn around the clock corresponds to one cycle of upand-down motion. Assigning your highest point above the
dock to the twelve-o’clock mark, you’d descend to dock level
at quarter past, bottom out at half past, ascend to dock level
again at quarter to, and return to your highest point again
when the hand returns to noon. (Notice that you can choose
any point in the up-and-down motion to be the start of the
phase. You can assign the twelve-o’clock mark to the lowest
point of the motion, or to the point that is level with the dock
if you wish. Your boat will always be back at the same place
when the hand goes all the way around.) These points on the
clock, as well as all those in between, mark your phase,
which is the clock position that corresponds to your height at
any moment within one cycle of the wave’s motion.
Now consider your neighbor’s yacht on the other side of
the dock. Assuming that the wave lifts your boat first, travels
under the dock, and then lifts your neighbor’s boat, his boat
will also rise and fall. And depending on the phase of each
boat—that is, depending on the location of each boat in the
wave’s cycle—the relative motion of the two boats will be
different. If the boats are in phase, then both of them will go
up and down together. If the boats are completely out of
phase, and your boat will be at its highest point when your
neighbor’s is at its lowest point.
Quantum states are a bit like these boats, each moving up
and down, each having its own phase, akin to a hand sweeping around the face of a clock. (As a technical matter, this
phase is part of the complex number-value of a quantum mechanical wave function.) And, just as the starting point of the
phase doesn’t matter for the boats, it also doesn’t matter for
the quantum state. No measurement can reveal the absolute
value of the phase. In the end, only differences in phase between systems can ever be revealed experimentally. This is
akin to being able to know only the difference in the relative
heights of your boat and your neighbor’s, but not being able
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to know his height or your height absolutely. (Presumably,
this means that there is no reference point analogous to “sea
level” in the world of quantum fields. On the other hand, we
could be wrong in thinking that “sea level” is a useful reference point.)
Now, let’s consider some possible symmetries associated
with phase. One possibility would be to demand that physics
doesn’t change if all the phases in the whole universe are
modified by the same amount. This amounts to saying that
the results of my experiments won’t change if every internal
clock is modified by the same amount. Imagine moving all
the start times for all the clocks by the same amount. (This
is done mathematically by multiplying every state by the
same value.) Such a property would be a global symmetry
that reflected a global invariance. Global symmetry (or
global invariance; we will use the terms interchangeably,
since one implies the other) is good because it establishes a
closed system. For instance, it would be very nice if charge
were globally invariant: that would mean that charge is conserved, and that would be reflected in no net change of
charge in the universe at all. Conversely, global invariance
is bad because the closed system that it establishes is necessarily the entire universe, not just the one point in the universe where an interaction occurs. Global invariance
over-constrains the physics by tying the activity of the system at any given point to the activities happening at all other
points; it implies that every point in the universe is instantaneously sensitive to all the others. The problem with global
invariance is that the arbitrariness of the phase for each state
isn’t preserved; that is, it doesn’t allow me to arbitrarily decide where to start my phase clock. Under global invariance,
I am able to set the clock arbitrarily for one state, but doing
so fixes the phase for all other states—instantaneously,
everywhere. This is just the kind of action at a distance to
which Faraday objected, because it makes the entire the uni-
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verse one gigantic causal connection.
A better alternative, which neither violates special relativity nor implies action at a distance, is local invariance or
local symmetry. Mathematically, this means that the physics
doesn’t change if states are modified depending on their position in space-time. On the one hand, local invariance is an
even stronger restriction than global invariance, because we
are requiring the physics to be the same regardless of location—something that global invariance does not require. On
the other hand, local invariance liberates states from the
tyranny of the whole universe, subjecting them instead to the
less all-encompassing tyranny of their space-time locations.
Being tied to conservation, invariance is a whole-defining
or system-defining feature. Conserving momentum and energy, for instance, is a fundamental criterion for having a
closed system at all. A ball rolling across a table slows down
and stops due to friction. Such a system is non-conservative—the momentum at the beginning is not equal to the momentum at the end. Friction is like a sinkhole into which
flows all the energy and momentum of the ball. In the end,
non-conservative systems leak. The most basic ambition of
fundamental physics is an account of the world with no leaking. Any description of a fundamental system will need to
exhibit global invariance as a precondition for being satisfactory, but it’s really too coarse a requirement because it forces
us to look at the whole universe every time we want to look
at an interaction. Local invariance actually does more for us,
because it implies integrity in the parts that make up the
whole, and it requires a whole system at each space-time
point.
Now you don’t get local symmetry requirements for nothing; there are consequences to be met. To illustrate them,
consider a single free electron. Such a particle would be one
quantum of an electron field. It would be characterized by
having a particular momentum and energy. As a quantum
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state, this electron can have any phase at all—the hand on the
clock can be at any location. Now, stipulating global phase
invariance implies that the charge of this electron is conserved in the universe. And since my system has only one
charge, my physics will be constrained always to have a total
of one net charge in the universe. Now, if you go through the
mathematics, you'll find that the Lagrangian for the free election, which determines its physics, won’t be invariant under
a local phase transformation—that is, the physics won’t exhibit local symmetry. However, you can make the system be
locally invariant by adding two terms to the Lagrangian, one
term that corresponds to the electromagnetic field and its
quantum, the photon, and another term that corresponds to
the point coupling between the two fields. The upshot is that
making phase locally invariant requires that there be both
electrons and photons—and consequently both electron fields
and electromagnetic fields—in the world, together with all
their mutual interactions.
This sort of local phase symmetry is the underlying feature of all the quantum field theories comprising the Standard
Model. Indeed, each force is associated directly with an underlying local symmetry that individuates both the quanta of
the matter fields and the quanta of the force fields and joins
them in a local interaction. Local symmetry operates much
like Huygens’s assumption that there is a single collision to
which the parts can be related: the interactions among field
quanta become the primary source of connection and unification. So the electron and photon always and only come together as a single interaction called a vertex. This example
belongs to the theory of quantum electrodynamics—the oldest of the quantum field theories. The other parts of the Standard Model include different interactions. QCD has
quark-gluon vertices, electroweak theory has neutrino-W
boson vertices. Each kind of vertex is characteristic of the
type of interaction.
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This move from global to local invariance makes quantum field theories philosophically satisfying in a way that
older physical theories are not. As I’ve said, part of the problem with global invariance is that it smacks of action at a distance and feels like an imposed constraint. Such an invariance
amounts to a box for the activity inside, a box that is affected
in no way by the motions inside it. In this containerized
world, the problems of relating parts and wholes never come
up. Generating these boxes in order to gain leverage on understanding physical systems has long been a feature of fundamental physics. On the other hand, part of the intellectual
trajectory of fundamental physics has been to search immediately for ways to remove external constraints once they
have been characterized. This describes the reductionist activity of physics, epitomized by looking for new particles beneath the peeled-back skin of the current crop of fundamental
particles. First there were molecules, then atoms, then electrons and nuclei, then protons and neutrons, and now there
are quarks—and we’re just waiting for the next step down in
size.
Here lies the central difficulty of any kind of foundationalism: as we uncover the foundations we also experience the
disquieting realization that the foundations must rest on
something else. The solution to this problem, both physically
and philosophically, is to sort out a whole that is internally
constrained so as to allow individuation; to show how the internal characteristics serve to constrain the thing as a thing.
This is the effect of local invariance. In this sort of foundation, there can be fundamental things that are not marble-like
particles, but intrinsically active quantum mechanical states.
Furthermore, any account of the fundamental things that
includes individuation must also account for the way a connection is made to the rest of the world. Locally symmetric
quantum field theories provide an example of an account in
which the part maintains integrity while also being inextri-
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cably embedded within the whole. The solution in quantum
field theory is that the individual parts must interact with one
another in forming a dynamic whole. We see in quantum field
theory the ontological reflection of the necessary characteristics of self-constraint: internal variability and the fundamental coexistence of things unified by their interactions.
Indeed, in the end, the truly fundamental thing may in fact
be the interaction.
The structure of quantum field theories with local invariance provides individuation through local symmetry requirements, but requires interactions between localities if we are
to preserve the invariances essential to wholeness. The invariances are conditions of intelligibility and conditions of
individuation; there is no distinction possible without wholeness. Wholeness without distinction is possible, though completely amorphous. Individuation, however, isn’t possible
without appealing to something within which the individual
lies. Quantum field theories incorporate this relation into their
very structure through local invariance.7
5 Things, fundamental and otherwise
Are electrons and electron fields fundamental entities? Is one
properly prior to the other? There are at least two ways to answer this question: an answer from within the account and answer from outside the account.
Let’s try to answer from within the account first. The activity of science is generally very pragmatic, and the starting
point is to assume the essential integrity of the objects at the
scale under consideration. Thus, the fact that all the atoms and
molecules in the baseball are constantly in motion does not
bear on considering the baseball a thing that has its own properties—its own weight, shape, and so on. At this scale of examination, the baseball is the integral thing, the individuated
thing, to which we pay attention. Why? The individuation of
the baseball is, among other things, manifest by invariances
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of its motion with respect to other things in the world. For the
physicist (and the baseball player), the baseball’s collective
motion individuates it. The physicist considers it a whole by
ignoring the possibility that there may be tiny pieces flying
off of it or being absorbed into it. If we looked at a larger scale,
say the motion of the earth, we would ignore the motion of
the baseball. Similarly, if we looked on a smaller scale, say
the motion of an electron around a hydrogen atom attached to
one of the organic molecules in the leather of the baseball, we
would ignore the motion of the whole ball. This notion of
scale and relative individuation is natural in physics, and is
part of the pragmatic nature of the activity. And when I say
that we ignore some of the motions, I don’t mean to imply that
we are choosing to make some sort of approximation for the
sake of convenience. I mean to say that ignoring such motions
is the same as looking for the invariances that are the signs of
actual things.
So answering the question What is fundamental? from
within quantum field theory yields this result: the fields and
the quanta are certainly elementary, and priority is given to
the fields, even though it is only as quanta that fields ever
manifest themselves.
Now let’s try to answer the question from outside of the
account. Here we have to wonder whether the inside answer
can’t be undermined by seeing the situation from a wider perspective. One way to adopt that perspective would be to revise
the question slightly: Are fields and particles really fundamental—as in “at the bottom of things”—or will the unitary electron of today’s physicists become a composite like a water
molecule for tomorrow’s physicists?
To the extent that electrons are simply smaller that water
molecules and are constituents in making, say, a hydrogen
atom, it is natural to consider electrons elementary in comparison to hydrogen atoms. In some ways, it’s the same as saying
that hydrogen atoms have electrons inside them, therefore
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electrons must be more elementary than hydrogen atoms. On
the other hand, the deep result of local symmetry in quantum
field theory is that the constituents and their interactions are
naturally and irrevocably coexistent as a condition for having
a coherent whole. Such a whole is now a coherent activity of
parts with internal invariances characteristic of those parts.
This criterion applies to water molecules, baseballs, and oak
trees as much as it does to electrons and photons, and this
makes us wonder whether the electron is really fundamental
in relation to the water molecule. The elementary bit of water
doesn’t naturally seem to be an electron, but rather a water
molecule. The action of the water arises out of the interactions
of its constituent parts, each of which has its own activity—
which is to say, a proper activity bound up with certain invariances. Furthermore, the characteristic sizes and distances of
interactions within liquid water are given by the water molecule, not by the electrons that make up that molecule. Indeed,
it isn’t at all clear that the integrity of the electron and the
water molecule—the feature by which I individuate them
from each other and call them different things—isn’t essentially the same. Each is a zone of stability surrounding amorphous activity. Distinction itself, particleness, arises out of this
amorphous activity in the form of stability of activity characterized by an insensitivity to internal activity.
The question of whether the electron has substructure in
the way that an atom has substructure is, as my undergraduate
advisor in physics said to me years ago, “a research project.”
For now, the electron is a best candidate for a fundamental or
elementary particle. But it cannot be regarded as a building
block, as something subsisting by itself that can be stacked
with others like it to construct something larger, like a brick.
On the contrary, quantum field theory tells us that electrons
are parts of a self-constrained world in which their individual
existence always arises out of, and within, a whole. There is
no “fundamental particle” apart from a “fundamental field.”
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NOTES
1. Lucretius, De rerum natura, Book I, lines 419-421.
2. Isaac Newton, letter to Richard Bently, 25 February 1693.
3. James Clerk Maxwell, “On Action at a Distance,” in The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell, ed. W. D. Niven, 2 vols. (Cambridge: At
the University Press, 1890), Vol. 2, 322.
4. This particular numerical example is borrowed from the beginning of
Frank Wilczek, The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification
of Forces (New York: Basic Books, 2010).
5. The entire text is available online here:
http://www.princeton.edu/~hos/mike/texts/huygens/impact/huyimpct.html
6. This deep result is called Noether’s Theorem after the prolific German
mathematician Amalie Emmy Noether (1882-1935).
7. For the experts: I know that I’ve left out renormalization and that it
bears on the question of individuation. There is only so much I can fit
into such a small space.
Appendix:
Annotated Bibliography for Further Reading
I. J. R. Aitchison. “Nothing’s Plenty: The Vacuum in Quantum Field Theory.” Contemporary Physics 26 (1985): 333-391. A fine, detailed discussion of the vacuum in quantum field theory.
P. W. Anderson. “More is Different.” Science 177 (1972): 393-396. A famous article arguing that fundamental structure doesn’t correspond to
scale.
Sunny Auyang. How is Quantum Field Theory Possible? London: Oxford
University Press, 1995. A serious philosophical encounter with quantum
field theory.
William Berkson. Fields of Force: The Development of a World View
from Faraday to Einstein. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974. A
history of the idea of the field, focussing on classical fields, with an attention to philosophical ideas.
I. J. R. Aitchison and A. J. G Hey. Gauge Theories in Particle Physics: A
Practical Introduction. Boca Raton, Florida: CRC Press, 2012. A firstrate graduate-level quantum field theory text, focussed on the Standard
Model.
Robert B. Laughlin and David Pines. “The Theory of Everything.” Pro-
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ceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 97 (2000): 27-32. In line
with P. W. Anderson’s article and containing many physical examples.
Bruce Schumm. Deep Down Things: The Breathtaking Beauty of Particle
Physics. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. A
thoughtful, detailed presentation of the Standard Model, emphasizing
symmetry issues.
Steven Weinberg. “The Search for Unity: Notes for a History of Quantum
Field Theory.” Daedalus 106.4 (1977):17-35. A excellent overview of the
problems and solutions in QFT, set in a historical progression.
Steven Weinberg. “Newtonianism, Reductionism, and the Art of Congressional Testimony.” Nature, 330 (1987):433-437. A discussion of what
is meant by “fundamental physics.”
Frank Wilczek. The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification
of Forces. New York: Basic Books, 2010. A popular science book, wellwritten, that emphasizes mass and QCD.
The articles by Anderson, Laughlin and Pines, and Weinberg’s “Newtonianism” are all included in the recent collection Emergence: Contemporary Readings in Philosophy and Science, ed. Mark A. Bedau and Paul
Humphreys. Boston: MIT Press, 2008.
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Miracles and Belief
Joseph Cohen
Is belief in miracles compatible with
a scientific understanding of the world?1
The idea for this lecture grew out of a philosophy tutorial in
which the assignment for one meeting was to read and discuss two philosophic arguments on the topic of miracles.
They were the chapter entitled “Miracles” in Baruch Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise (1687) and the chapter
entitled “Of Miracles” in David Hume’s Enquiry Concerning
Human Understanding (1748).
I asked the class to consider whether the arguments of
Spinoza and Hume constituted a refutation of the possibility
of miracles, and if so, in what way such a refutation might
affect a belief in divine providence, or religious belief in general.
The students found these questions provocative and challenging, but were also troubled and perplexed by them. Why
should the presumed impossibility of miracles occasion such
difficulties? I propose this suggestion.
Let us assume as an appropriate and accurate starting
point that miracles are understood to be: (1) phenomena
which are contrary to and cannot be explained by the established laws of nature; and (2) caused by the intentional acts
of a Divine Agent.
Since the existence of miracles implies the existence of a
God who is their cause, an argument against the possibility
Joseph Cohen is a Tutor Emeritus at St. John’s College in Annapolis,
Maryland. This lecture was first delivered at St. John’s College in
Santa Fe, New Mexico on June 30, 2010. It has been revised slightly
for publication.
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of miracles further implies either the non-existence of this
God, or the absence in God of the attribute of providential
care and concern for particular individuals or peoples. It is
only by virtue of possessing this attribute that God would be
presumed to produce the intentional acts called miracles.
Therefore, to the extent that an argument against miracles is
persuasive, this would diminish the degree of certainty of a
belief in the existence of such a God or in God’s providential
care and concern.
Among the students who said they found persuasive and
worthy of acceptance the two philosophic arguments against
miracles, some volunteered that although they agreed that the
arguments were persuasive, they did not want to or were not
able to relinquish their belief in a providential God. Their
feelings and their faith committed them to this belief. Their
position seemed to be either that there was no real inconsistency in holding these apparently opposed convictions, or that
the inconsistency didn’t bother them.
The aim of this lecture is to explore further these questions and various responses to them. It has two parts: Part I:
Spinoza and Hume, and Part II: C. S. Lewis and Francis
Collins.
Part I: Spinoza and Hume
Spinoza
To place Spinoza’s discussion of miracles (Chapter 6) in the
context of the larger aims of his Treatise, it will be useful to
comment briefly on what precedes that discussion.
The peculiarly hyphenated title, Theological-Political
Treatise, makes us wonder what the connection of theology
and politics might be. On the title page, there is a subtitle that
summarizes Spinoza’s overall aim:
Containing some dissertations by which it is shown not
only that the freedom of philosophizing can be granted
while saving piety and the peace of the republic, but that it
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cannot be removed unless along with that very piety and
peace of the republic.
The Treatise is thus presented as a work of political philosophy, whose aim is to show how freedom, piety and peace
are necessarily interconnected within the framework of that
form of political organization known as a republic. Its argument as a whole can be divided into two parts, the theological
and the political. In order to achieve the aims of the political
part, Spinoza must first confront and overcome the claims of
the theologians and of the sacred texts from which they claim
their authority.
In the Preface, Spinoza reveals his motive for writing, describes and denounces the pervasive evils produced by superstition and prejudice, and sketches the main themes and plan
of organization of the Treatise.
The first sentence of the Preface, and hence of the Treatise,
declares:
If human beings could rule all their affairs with certain
counsel, or if fortune were always favorable to them, they
would not be bound by any superstition.2
With this, Spinoza launches a direct and sustained attack
against superstition, exposing its causes and tracing its pernicious effects. Superstition has its roots in fear (or dread)
and ignorance, joined with immoderate desires for the goods
of fortune and the incapacity of human beings to control either the turns of fortune or their own desires for her favors.
Being ignorant of the operation and order of Nature and fearful of supernatural powers, the people or their rulers place
their trust in those who claim to be able to interpret, and possibly to control, the course of events, whether determined by
fortune, or natural causes, or the will of the gods. Thus they
seek guidance from seers or prophets. In this way, superstition becomes associated with prophecy and religion.
Spinoza initially uses the examples of Alexander the
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Great and, closer to his own time, the empire of the Moslem
Turks, to highlight the pervasive and pernicious effects of
superstition. He then shifts the scene to the religious and political world dominated by Christianity. He declares he had
often wondered that those “who boast that they profess the
Christian religion—that is, love, gladness, peace, continence,
and faith toward all” should engage in such bitter hatred and
persecution of others. He finds “the cause of this evil” to be
the abuses arising from the admixture of religious belief and
political ambition, namely, the political abuse of religion and
the religious abuse of politics.
The Church has become an entrenched ecclesiastical and
political institution concerned with accumulation of honors,
privileges, and power, and “faith is now nothing else but
credulity and prejudice.” Reason is despised as being by nature corrupt, and the free judgment of each person to discern
the true and the false is impeded. Spinoza attacks this unholy
theological-political admixture, which makes it “seem as
though [it has] been intentionally devised for extinguishing
the light of understanding.” He therefore resolved “to examine Scripture anew in a full and free spirit,” contriving a
method of interpretation which would “admit nothing as its
teaching which was not taught by it very clearly.”3
As indicated in the Preface, the plan of organization of
the Treatise is keyed to a series of questions that guide the
course of argument of the following twenty chapters. The
questions pertaining to the chapter on miracles ask “whether
miracles happen contrary to the order of nature, and whether
they teach God’s existence and providence more certainly
and more clearly than do the things we understand clearly
and distinctly through their first causes.”4
How do human beings come to know “first causes”? Is
there more than one source available by means of which
knowledge can be acquired? In Chapter 1 (Prophesy) and
Chapter 2 (Prophets), Spinoza begins to explicate his account
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of natural knowledge as grounded in reason and experience,
in contrast to knowledge claimed through prophecy or revelation as grounded in imagination and faith.
Chapter 1 begins as follows:
Prophecy, or Revelation, is certain knowledge (certa cognitio) of some matter revealed by God to human beings. A
Prophet, moreover, is one who interprets the revealed things
of God to those who are unable to have the certain knowledge of the matters revealed by God, and so can only embrace the matters being revealed by mere faith.5 (Emphasis
added.)
Drawing on this definition, Spinoza then claims, “it follows that natural knowledge can be called Prophecy (cognitionem naturalem prophetiam vocari posse). For the things
we know by the natural light depend solely on knowledge of
God and of his eternal decrees.”6 (Emphasis added.)
What then, for Spinoza, is “natural knowledge”? How is
it distinct from the “certain knowledge” which prophets may
claim for themselves? And how does knowledge obtained by
the natural light differ from the certain knowledge revealed
by the prophetic light?
He begins to answer these questions in remarks that take
the form of an argument.7
1. “[N]atural knowledge is common to all human
beings—for it depends on foundations common to
all human beings.”
2. However, this kind of knowledge “is not well regarded by the vulgar [the multitudes], who are always panting after what is rare and alien to their
nature . . . ; when they speak of prophetic knowledge, they want this [natural] knowledge excluded.”
3. Nevertheless natural knowledge “can be called
divine (divina vocari potest), as can any other
knowledge, whatever it may be . . . . Yet in respect
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of the certainty that natural knowledge (cognitionem naturalem) involves and the source from
which it is derived (namely, God),” it is in no way
inferior to prophetic knowledge (cognitione
prophetica).
4. “Yet though natural science (scientia) is divine,
its propagators still cannot be called Prophets.” For
what the teachers of natural science impart to others can be grasped by them, not by faith alone, but
with a certainty and entitlement equal to that of the
teachers.
5. “[S]ince our mind . . . has the power to form
some notions explaining the nature of things and
teach the conduct of life, we can deservedly state
that the mind’s nature . . . is the first cause of divine
revelation.”
6. “[T]he idea and nature of God dictates everything we clearly and distinctly understand, not in
words but in a far more excellent mode, which best
agrees with the nature of the mind—as anyone
who has tasted the certainty of understanding has
without a doubt experienced within himself.”
These six steps lead to Spinoza’s powerful conclusion:
7. “For everything is done through God’s power.
Indeed, since Nature’s power is nothing but God’s
power itself, it is certain that we do not understand
God’s power to the extent that we are ignorant of
natural causes.”8
In this last statement, Spinoza reveals his deepest and
most comprehensive insight, namely, the fundamental unity
of God and Nature. Although the phrase “God or Nature” is
explicitly used in the preface to Part IV of Spinoza’s Ethics,
the application of this insight runs through the Treatise and
forms the constant backdrop for its unfolding argument.9
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It is often debated whether Spinoza’s use of the phrase
“God or Nature” is to be understood as a deification of Nature
or as a naturalization of God. In either case, the term “supernatural” is drained of its meaning. For Spinoza the understanding and explanation of the phenomena of the world must
be attained through the acquisition of natural knowledge
alone. It is from this perspective that Spinoza’s philosophic
position can be called Naturalism, in opposition to the theological point of view called Supernaturalism.10
Spinoza fully develops his naturalistic position in the
Ethics. Its central teaching is that Man is necessarily a part
of Nature, that striving (conatus)11 is the essence of Man, and
that our supreme good and highest happiness can be attained
by means of striving toward what he calls “the intellectual
love of God.” In the light of what will be discussed later,
Spinoza’s account of the active emotion (or affect) of intellectual love can be construed as among the “spiritual rewards” experienced by those who seek to understand the
mind of God through understanding the system of Nature.
In Chapter 3 of the Treatise Spinoza employs this “God
or Nature” point of view when he restates the idea of God’s
providence in terms of God’s direction, God’s external and
internal help, God’s choosing, and fortune. He writes:
By God’s direction, I understand the fixed and unchangeable order of nature, or the chaining together of natural
things. For . . . the universal laws of nature, in accordance
with which everything comes to be and is determined, are
nothing but God’s eternal decrees, which always involve
eternal truth and necessity. Accordingly, whether we say
that everything comes to be in accordance with the laws
of nature, or that everything is ordered on the basis of
God’s decree and direction, we are saying the same thing.12
Turning now to Spinoza’s analysis of miracles in Chapter
6, we see that the heart of the opposition between revealed
and natural knowledge comes to light in the questions con-
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cerning what miracles are and whether they are possible.13
He begins his discussion by stating “the opinions and
prejudices of the vulgar [i.e., the many] concerning nature
and miracles.” He notes that the vulgar call divine any knowledge that surpasses their understanding, especially works of
nature whose causes are unknown. These works of nature, of
whose causes they are ignorant, are also called works of God
or miracles. They believe that God’s existence, power, and
providence are most clearly established if they imagine that
God is the direct cause when something happens in nature
which is contrary to their opinion of how nature works. This
is because they assume that God and nature are two distinct
powers, and that if one of these powers is responsible for an
event, the power of the other must be excluded or suspended.
So that “partly out of devotion and partly out of a desire to
oppose those who cultivate natural science, they desire not
to know the causes of things, and they think that those who
seek to understand these so-called natural events deny God’s
existence, or at least God’s providence.”14 Thus, in the vulgar
view, a miracle is a providential act intended for human benefit to achieve a result that would be contrary to the ordinary
operations and power of nature.
Drawing on conclusions earlier established: (a) that the
power of nature is the same as the power of God; (b) that the
actions of God are eternal, necessary, and immutable; and (c)
that God’s will is identical with God’s intellect, Spinoza argues that miracles are not possible within nature.
Nor can miracles be understood as supernatural events
directly referred to God’s providential intervention in nature’s
established processes, for such an intervention by God would
contradict the principle that God acts from the necessity of
His own nature.
Moreover, since nature’s power is nothing but God’s
power, and God is understood to be infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, so also is nature’s power. Whatever may be the
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limits of nature’s power is the necessary consequence of its
own laws. On this account, there is no way to distinguish the
natural from the supernatural; there is no conceptual space
outside of Nature in which a supernatural Divine Agent, intending to produce a miraculous intervention, could act.
Spinoza’s argument can be summarized as follows. If
God is a supernatural agent distinct from nature, and has created and established the laws of nature, then a contradiction
would arise if God, acting from the necessity of His own nature, could act both according to and contrary to the laws of
nature. If God’s fixed and unchangeable order of nature is
suspended to accomplish a supernatural purpose, which is
what the vulgar call a miracle, then the processes of nature
are not fixed and unchangeable, and everything is subject to
doubt, including God’s fixed nature and existence.
Thus contrary to the vulgar view that miracles most
clearly affirm the existence and power of God, Spinoza argues that the incoherence of their view undermines the conclusion they wish to establish; it is rather this vulgar view
which leads to atheism.15 If, on the contrary, God is identical
with nature, then there are not two distinct and opposed principles; miracles, therefore, could not be supernatural events,
the cause of which is outside of and contrary to nature and
reason.
Further, if one nevertheless believes or supposes that
there is a transcendent supernatural God distinct from the system of nature, and that such a God is utterly mysterious, hidden and unknowable, the consequence of this supposition is
that human beings would not be able to distinguish the ordinary acts of nature from the so-called supernatural acts which
are the cause of miracles. Neither the principle of causality
nor any of the categories or aspects of human rationality
could be supposed to apply to such an utterly unknowable
Being.
Spinoza therefore understands and defines a miracle to
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be nothing else but an event whose natural cause cannot be
explained by the person who narrates it or who believes the
event to be supernatural and surpasses human understanding.
The designation of an event as a miracle is merely a way of
saying that we are ignorant of its cause, which, though
presently unknown, may not be unknowable.
Spinoza’s overall philosophical conclusions, the answer
to the questions posed in the Preface, are: (a) God’s existence
and providence cannot be known through miracles, but these
conclusions are far better established and understood from
the principle of the fixed and unchangeable order of nature;
and (b) the very idea of a miracle “whether contrary to nature
or above nature is a mere absurdity.”16
Hume17
In Section X of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding,
“Of Miracles,” Hume is not directly concerned with the metaphysical question, Do miracles exist or are they conceivable
within the order of Nature as a whole? Rather, he is concerned with the epistemological question, How can one know
or prove that a particular event is a genuine miracle, and not
merely the effect of excessive imagination, superstition, or
wishful thinking?
Necessarily involved in this epistemological question are
certain assumptions about the nature of belief and about what
it is reasonable for a person to believe. These assumptions
involve the meaning and use of such concepts as evidence,
proof, fact, probability and truth. In short, what is ultimately
at issue in any discussion about the possibility of miracles is
the concept of “rational belief.”
In pursuing the inquiry into miracles, Hume wastes no
time searching for a definition. It is already at hand. A miracle, he says “is a violation of the laws of Nature,” to which
he adds that “as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very
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nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined. . . . Nothing is esteemed a
miracle, if it ever happen in the common course of Nature. It
is no miracle that a man, seemingly in good health, should
die on a sudden. . . . But it is a miracle that a dead man should
come to life; because that has never been observed in any age
or country. There must therefore be a uniform experience
against every miraculous event, otherwise the event would
not merit that appellation. And as a uniform experience
amounts to a proof, there is here a direct and full proof, from
the nature of the fact, against the existence of any miracle;
nor can such a proof be destroyed, or the miracle rendered
credible, but by an opposite proof which is superior.”18
In a footnote to this paragraph, Hume refines and restates
his definition: “a miracle may be accurately defined, a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the
Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent.” How
does this condition, that the cause of the miracle be attributed
to “a particular volition of the Deity,” affect our ability to
know that the alleged miracle is genuine? The answer is provided in Part 2 of this Section where he states:
Though the Being to whom the miracle is ascribed, be in
this case, Almighty, it does not upon that account, become
a bit more probable; since it is impossible for us to know
the attributes or actions of such a Being, otherwise than
from the experience which we have of his productions in
the course of nature.19
Thus Hume’s “direct and full proof” against the possibility of miracles is based on the well founded assumption of,
and the belief in, the regularity and uniformity of nature and
of its laws. This belief, in turn, is grounded in his philosophical analysis of human experience: he believes that we generate ideas and, within limits, acquire knowledge of nature
by means of a sustained application of the methods of the experimental sciences.
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In this same Section, Hume then proceeds to undermine
any and all claims of reported miracles, even those whose
pedigree is historically recent and bears the testimony of a
large number of highly placed political and ecclesiastical figures. Having previously supposed that the testimony in favor
of a miracle “may possibly amount to an entire proof,” he
then retracts this supposition: “[I]t is easy to shew that we
have been a great deal too liberal in our concession and that
there never was a miraculous event established on so full an
evidence.”20
To support this conclusion he offers a range of evidence
based on experience and well established principles of human
nature. He mentions such phenomena as self-delusion, a desire to deceive others, and the tendency of people to accept
as fact what is “utterly absurd and miraculous.” The cause of
this, he says, is that “the passion of surprise and wonder, arising from miracles, being an agreeable emotion,” gives rise to
pleasurable affects. Hume is especially harsh in condemning
those cases in which “the spirit of religion joins itself to
the love of wonder.” In these circumstances, “human testimony . . . loses all pretensions to authority.” Citing various
examples of “the strong propensity of mankind to the extraordinary and marvelous,” he asks rhetorically whether it
is not such passions which “incline the generality of
mankind to believe and report, with the greatest vehemence
and assurance, all religious miracles.”21
Although Hume has labored to undermine all rational
belief in the possibility of miracles and in the veracity of
those who testify to them, what finally is the purpose of his
labors? He states that “the method of reasoning here delivered . . . may serve to confound those dangerous friends or
disguised enemies to the Christian religion, who have undertaken to defend it by the principles of human reason.”
He believes, it seems, that it is a deep disservice to the
Christian religion to defend it on those principles. To elim-
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inate the desire or the need to defend Christianity on rational
grounds, he then asserts: “Our most holy religion is founded
on Faith; and it is a sure method of exposing it to put it to
such a trial as it is, by no means, fitted to endure.”22
In what is surely one of the most striking passages in the
book, Hume ends his essay on miracles by commenting:
Upon the whole, we may conclude, that the Christian religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even
at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person
without one. Mere reason is insufficient to convince us of
its veracity: and whoever is moved by Faith to assent to it,
is conscious of a continuous miracle in his own person,
which subverts all the principles of his understanding, and
gives him a determination to believe what is most contrary
to custom and experience.23
Given Hume’s disbelief in all claims of reported miracles,
we may wonder: How can this concluding statement be construed to serve the interests of the Christian religion, or to be
a defense of the Christian faith?
Part II: C. S. Lewis and Francis Collins
C. S. Lewis
The arguments of both Spinoza and Hume against the possibility of miracles assumed a certain perspective regarding the
knowledge of nature’s processes and the existence of its laws.
This perspective has often been called naturalism. This means
that explanations of all phenomena must be sought within the
scope of natural knowledge as grounded in reason and experience, without recourse or appeal to explanations in terms
of supernatural causes or agents. The knowledge thus obtained by adhering to the principles and methods of the sciences yields conclusions, in the form of provisional laws of
nature, which are open to being tested, confirmed or disconfirmed, and corrected.
The alternative to this naturalistic perspective can be
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called supernaturalism.
These are exactly the pair of terms used by C. S. Lewis
in his book Miracles: A Preliminary Study.24 Lewis’s aims
are to confront the reader with the choice between naturalism
and supernaturalism, to show the limitations of the former
and the superiority of the latter, and to lead the reader to adopt
the particular form of supernaturalism supplied by Christianity.
Regarding naturalism, he concedes that “if Naturalism
is true, then we do know in advance that miracles are impossible: nothing can come into Nature from the outside because there is nothing outside to come in, Nature being
everything.”25
Therefore, in order to provide an affirmative answer to
the question of whether miracles can occur—that is, in order
to show that miracles are indeed possible—Lewis says that
he must first settle what he calls “the philosophical question.”26 Since the philosophical question at issue here is
whether miracles can occur, and since miracles are not possible if naturalism is true, he must either show that naturalism
is not true or he must argue that the opposite perspective—
supernaturalism—is true.
However, according to Lewis, an argument attempting to
show the possibility of miracles cannot be based on experience or history or the examination of biblical texts. This is
so because the evidence obtained from each of these sources
“depends on the philosophical views which we have been
holding before we even began to look at the evidence. The
philosophical question must therefore come first.”27 Lewis’s
general argument seems to be directed, initially at least,
against those who reject the possibility of miracles because
“we know in advance what results they will find for they have
begun by begging the question.”28
Does Lewis himself think he can settle this “philosophical
question” without any begging of the question? To avoid this
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result, he would have to confront and overcome the position
of those who accept the principles of naturalism as broadly
interpreted and applied. In particular he would have to show
that it is impossible for naturalism to fulfill its claim to provide
the best and fullest explanation of the whole range of phenomena constituting human experience. Let us see whether he succeeds in this undertaking.
Although different chapters of this book present various
aspects of his position, his overall argument in behalf of the
truth of supernaturalism seems to depend on at least the following premises or assumptions:
1. Nature is not the whole of reality. Rather it is
merely a partial reality embedded within a higher supernatural reality which constitutes a total reality.
Lewis agrees that “all reality must be interrelated and
consistent.”29 To find the grounds of this interconnection between the partial and the total reality, one must
go back to their common origin, the Creator God.
With this supernatural assumption of a Creator God,
plus the premise that this God might wish to intervene
in or interrupt the order of Nature, miracles can
occur.30
2. The system of Nature can only be partial. What it
essentially lacks is the spiritual element contained in
the Christian and Jewish doctrines which “have always been statements about spiritual reality.”31 What
these doctrines mean is that “in addition to the physical or psychophysical universe known to the sciences,
there exists an uncreated and unconditional reality
which causes the universe to be, [and] this reality has
a positive structure or constitution.”32 To distinguish
the Christian from the Jewish understanding of the
meaning of spiritual reality, he adds that this reality is
described “though doubtless not completely, . . . in the
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doctrine of the Trinity; and that this reality, at a definite point in time, entered the universe we know by
becoming one of its own creatures.”33
3. In order to tell the story of Christianity, supernaturalism is necessary because it is the realm in which
miracles find their being. In the Christian religion,
“the Miracles, or at least some Miracles, are more
closely bound up with the fabric of belief than in any
other.”34 Further, miracles, after all, are “precisely
those chapters in the great story [of Christianity] on
which the plot turns. Death and resurrection are what
the story is about.”35
4. To tell the Christian story, Lewis must also tell the
story of mankind. But from what perspective should
this story be told? To tell the story of Man is to give
an account of Man’s nature. Nature and human nature
are complex things, and as Lewis himself points out,
“the kind of analysis which you make of any complex
thing depends on the purpose you have in view.”36
Since his purpose is to give an affirmative answer to
the question whether miracles are possible, the story
of mankind must be told from the supernatural perspective.
When we are considering Man as evidence for the fact that
this spatio-temporal Nature is not the only thing in existence, the important distinction is between that part of Man
which belongs to this spatio-temporal Nature and that which
does not. . . . These two parts of a man may rightly be called
natural and supernatural. . . . [T]his “Super-Natural” part is
itself a created being—a thing called into existence by the
Absolute Being and given by Him a certain character or
“nature.”37
Thus, in order to argue for the truth of his Christian supernaturalism, Lewis assumes the very perspective according
to which the concept of Nature is arbitrarily narrowed and
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excluded from any connection to the moral or rational development of human beings. He thereby renders the naturalist
perspective incapable of explaining the most basic features
of human nature. Indeed, in the chapter entitled “Nature and
Supernature,” he separates Reason from man’s nature and asserts that “rational thought is not part of the system of Nature.”38 He then adds that “human minds are not the only
supernatural entities that exist. They do not come from
nowhere. Each has come into Nature from Supernature: each
has its tap-root in an eternal, self-existent, rational Being,
whom we call God. Each is an offshoot, or spearhead, or incursion of that Supernatural reality into Nature.”39
In short, from the supernaturalist perspective, the existence of each human being having the capacity to reason is
itself a miracle.
Lewis himself has emphatically asserted the elementary
logical point that “a proof which sets out by assuming the thing
you have to prove is rubbish.”40 Does he think he has somehow
avoided an enormous begging of the question?
Francis Collins
One strongly affected reader of C. S. Lewis is Francis Collins,
who is currently the Director of the National Institutes of Health
and previously the head of the Human Genome Project.
In his book, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents
Evidence for Belief,41 Collins’s primary aim is to provide “the
possibility of a richly satisfying harmony between the scientific and spiritual world views.”42 That these world views are
often said to be in opposition is expressed by such phrases as
“the ‘battle’ between science and religion”43 and “the conflicts between science and faith.”44
Note that, in presenting their opposition in these terms,
Collins consistently and freely substitutes the words “religion” and “faith” for the word “spiritual,” thus treating these
three terms as equivalent when set in opposition to “science.”
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In the introduction to his book, Collins poses the question
whether “the scientific and spiritual world views are antithetical.” His own answer to this question is:
No. Not for me. Quite the contrary. For me, the experience
of sequencing the human genome, and uncovering this
most remarkable of all texts, was both a stunning scientific
achievement and an occasion of worship.45
From this answer we see that at least in his own heart and
mind the dichotomy of “science” on one side, and “religion,”
“faith” and “the spiritual world” on the other is only apparent.
But when he further says: “Science’s domain is to explore
nature, God’s domain is in the spiritual world, a world not
possible to explore with the tools and language of science,”46
the antithesis appears to harden. We now have on one side of
the dichotomy Science and Nature, and on the other side Religion, Faith, Spirit, and God. Since in his own terms each
side occupies a separate and distinct “domain,” it is not immediately evident how these two sides can come together.
On the religious or spiritual side, the book is the personal
story of Collins’s journey from atheism to wholehearted acceptance of the fundamental tenets of the Christian religion,
with its mysteries and its miracles, all centering on the person
of Jesus Christ: his Virgin Birth, his Divinity, his Death and
Resurrection.
On the side of science and nature, he discusses with elegance and insight, and with similarly wholehearted acceptance, the scientific view of the understanding of the natural
world. He writes:
Science is the only legitimate way to investigate the natural
world. Whether probing the structure of the atom, the nature of the cosmos, or the DNA sequence of the human
genome, the scientific method is the only reliable way to
seek out the truth of natural events. Yes, experiments can
fail spectacularly, interpretations of experiments can be
misguided, and science can make mistakes. But the nature
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of science is self-correcting. No major fallacy can long persist in the face of a progressive increase in knowledge.47
So the question continues: does Collins see and treat the
two world views as essentially separate, distinct and antithetical, or is their opposition only apparent and capable of being
harmonized?
Although Collins undoubtedly has a great love of science
and has attained a high level of achievement and satisfaction
through the understanding of natural phenomena, that way of
pursuing the truth is insufficient. For him “science is not the
only way of knowing. The spiritual world view provides another way of finding truth.”48 But Collins also thinks that
“each person must carry out his or her own search for spiritual truth.”49 What he desires for himself is a “way of seeking
fellowship with God,” of being able “to communicate with
Him.”50 What Collins also desires are answers to the questions that cannot be answered by science, the “eternal questions of human existence.” These are questions such as: Why
did the universe come into being? and What is the meaning
of human existence?51
But since these kinds of questions cannot be answered by
science, one must go beyond science, go beyond the natural
world and into the realm of supernaturalism and the transcendence of a creator God. Or as Collins puts it:
As seekers, we may well discover from science many interesting answers to the question “How does life work?” What
we cannot discover through science alone are the answers
to the questions “Why is there life anyway?” and “Why am
I here?”52
Collins finally finds the answer to such questions, including the question of the possibility of miracles, in the language
of the Christian Bible, in the texts of the four gospels, the
central figure of which is Jesus, the Christ. These texts revealed to him “the actual account of His life, . . . the eyewit-
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ness nature of the narratives, and the enormity of Christ’s
claims and their consequences.”53 He writes:
[I]f Christ really was the Son of God, as He explicitly
claimed, then surely . . . He could suspend the laws of nature
if He needed to do so to achieve a more important purpose.54
In attempting to understand God’s purpose, Collins wrestled with impenetrable theological conundrums, and again
found answers in the writings of C.S. Lewis. Through these
writings, Collins was persuaded of spiritual truths the logic
of which had previously seemed “like utter nonsense.”55 But
now that he has become “a believer in God,”56 this logic
seems to him compelling.
Although Collins’s Language of God is wonderfully clear
in explaining much of the reasoning and evidence supporting
the scientific conclusions of cosmology and biology (as in
Chapter 3, “The Origins of the Universe,” Chapter 4, “Life
on Earth: Of Microbes and Man,” and Chapter 5, “Deciphering God’s Instruction Book: The Lessons of the Human
Genome”), I find his language about “truth” to be at the least
fuzzy and puzzling.
On the one hand Collins speaks of faith as a “search for
absolute truth,”57 and says that “each person must carry out
his or her own search for spiritual truth.”58 Yet he praises the
truth-gathering methods of science as “the only reliable way
to seek out the truth of natural events” and asserts that “the
nature of science is self-correcting.”59 So at least some claims
regarding scientific truth, and the beliefs based on those
claims, are thereby discovered to have been false. But if each
person’s search for spiritual truth is a search for what most
satisfies his or her longing for fellowship with the Divine, by
what shared criteria can these private beliefs and spiritual
truths be judged to be either true or false? Is the search for
spiritual truth self-correcting in the same way and in the same
sense as the search for scientific truth?
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Perhaps what is called spiritual truth is a genuinely private matter, involving each person’s sense of the divine and
of what constitutes an adequate relationship to the divine. No
doubt such private thoughts and feelings are full of meaning
which can be shared with other like-minded persons. It is evident, however, that not everyone needs a belief in miracles
to achieve their sense of fellowship with the Divine. We have
already noted the example of Spinoza, and we would certainly have to include other philosophers or scientists or seekers after truth who find their spiritual satisfaction within the
horizons of a naturalistic world view without having to posit
another level of reality called “supernatural.”
Collins says that science and faith “fortify each other like
two unshakable pillars, holding up a building called Truth.”60
But there are good reasons to think that (1) the logical ground
on which each of these pillars stands is essentially different,
and (2) the paths toward scientific truth and spiritual truth,
as well as the human capacities required to pursue these, are
not the same.
Should we not conclude, therefore, that there is not one
but two very different buildings called Truth, the foundations
of which are laid in two separate realms in the landscape of
the human mind? If, as Collins himself describes, there are
two distinct world views, the scientific and the religious, and
if each relies on its own conception and criteria regarding the
truth, how is it possible, as he urges, to “seek to reclaim the
solid ground of an intellectually and spiritually satisfying
synthesis of all great truths?”61 (Emphasis in the original.)
Recalling for a moment the theological-political theme,
perhaps Collins’s desire for harmony can be understood in
light of his role as a preeminent scientist who heads a national
government agency. In this role one can understand that his
goal is to bridge the deep divisions in this country concerning
major biomedical issues such as stem cell research, cloning,
and the search for genetic cures to a wide spectrum of dis-
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eases, issues which often are polarized along both religious
and political lines. It is this goal which is reflected in his
“Final Word”:
It is time to call a truce in the escalating war between science
and spirit. The war was never really necessary. Like so many
earthly wars, this one has been initiated and intensified by
extremists on both sides, sounding alarms that predict imminent ruin unless the other side is vanquished. Science is
not threatened by God; it is enhanced. God is most certainly
not threatened by science; He made it all possible.62
In response to Collins’s “final word” on this problem, let
us pose instead two “final questions.” First, how is it possible
to harmonize the truth claims of religious believers and the
truth claims of the scientific community without equivocating
on the meaning of the term “truth”? And second, if a truth
claim, in general, is understood to require a correspondence
between what is said or thought and some assumed objective
reality—call this the requirement of corresponding to reality—then how is it possible to establish with certitude that
this requirement has been met?
NOTES
1. This question is a narrowly formulated aspect of the larger perennial
question of the relation of reason to faith. Three relatively recent books
which argue for the compatibility of this relationship are: C.F. Delaney,
ed., Rationality and Religious Belief (Notre Dame, Indiana: University
of Notre Dame Press, 1979); Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff,
eds., Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God (Notre Dame, Indiana: University Notre Dame Press, 1983); and Joshua L Golding, Rationality and Religious Theism (Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing,
2003).
2. Preface, Paragraph 1, Sentence 1. In the following notes, all references
to the Theological-Political Treatise (referred to as TTP from its Latin
title Tractatus Theologico-Politicus) will be to Spinoza’s Theologico-
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Political Treatise, trans. Martin Yaffe (Newburyport, Mass.: Focus Philosophical Library, 2004). Citations to the text will be in accordance with
Yaffe’s system of citations explained on p. viii of that edition. For example, in a subsequent footnote, TTP, 1.1.1-2 refers to Chapter 1, Paragraph 1, Sentences 1 and 2. “P” preceding Arabic numerals refers to the
Preface.
3. Partial summary of Spinoza, TTP, P.1.1 to P.5.l.
4. Spinoza, TTP, P.5.6.
5. Spinoza, TTP, 1.1.1-2.
6. Spinoza, TTP, 1.2.1-2.
7. The following statements numbered 1-6 summarize Spinoza’s sentences from TTP, 1.2.3 to 1.4.1. Statement number 7 quotes from TTP,
1.22.6.
8. In Chapter 2, Spinoza further distinguishes the certainty obtained
through the natural light versus the certainty obtained through the
prophetic light, finding the difference to be based on the prophets’ more
vivid power of imagining. He argues that “since simple imagination does
not of its own nature involve certainty, as every clear and distinct idea
does . . . it follows that by itself prophecy cannot involve certainty.” (TTP,
2.3.1). What is required to obtain the certainty of clear and distinct ideas
upon which natural knowledge is based is nothing other than the power
of reasoning itself.
9. Earlier in the Ethics (Part I, Proposition 29) Spinoza had introduced
the distinction between the active and passive expressions of Nature’s allcomprehensive dynamic system: natura naturans and natura naturata,
translated as Nature naturing and Nature natured.
10. As we will see below, these are the terms of the dichotomy proposed
by C. S. Lewis.
11. Conatus, translated as “striving” or “endeavor,” is Spinoza’s general
term, which includes as aspects “will,” “appetite,” and “desire.” See,
Ethics, Part III, Proposition 9, Scholium.
12. Spinoza, TTP, 3.3.1- 3.
13. Spinoza says that his treatment of this subject is explicitly philosophical; that is, his conclusions about miracles are drawn solely from the
principles of nature and reason. This procedure contrasts with earlier
chapters that treat of prophecy and prophets, which are theological matters, where he drew his conclusions from the text of Scripture alone.
14. Spinoza, TTP, 6.1.90-91.
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15. Ibid., 6.1.34.
16. Ibid., 6.1.31, 35.
17. References will be to sections, parts and page numbers in David Hume,
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Anthony Flew
(Chicago: Open Court, 1988). It is noteworthy that both Spinoza and
Hume—proponents of the philosophic point of view called Naturalism—
also share a common ground of political principle. Each quotes and adopts
the political ideal stated by Tacitus: “to be able to think what we please
and say what we think” (Histories, I.1). For Spinoza, see TTP, P 5.18, and
the content and title of Chapter 20: “It is shown that in a Free Republic
each is permitted both to think what he wants and to say what he thinks.”
For Hume, see A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an attempt to introduce
the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Maral Subjects, in which the
quotation from Tacitus serves as the epigraph both for Book I, “Of the Understanding,” and for Book II, “Of the Passions.”
18. Hume, Enquiry, X.l, p.148.
19. Ibid., X.2, p.164.
20. Ibid., X.2, p.150.
21. Ibid., X.2, pp. 151-52.
22. Ibid., X.2, p. 165.
23. Ibid., X.2, p. 166.
24. C. S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study (New York: HarperCollins, 2001). Lewis is also the author of many popular works of fiction
such as The Screwtape Letters (1942), The Lion, the Witch, and the
Wardrobe (1950), and The Chronicles of Narnia (seven volumes between
1950 and 1956). The greatest influence on Lewis’s fiction seems to have
been the Scottish author George MacDonald, a preacher and Christian
apologist, who was a prolific writer of novels, short stories, and fairy
tales. When Lewis was sixteen, he chanced upon MacDonald’s most famous novel Phantastes and was enchanted by his prodigious imagination.
The book was Lewis’s favorite, and he returned to it often throughout his
life. See Michael White, C. S. Lewis: A Life (New York: Carroll and Graf,
2004), 103-104.
25. Lewis, Miracles, 14-15.
26. Ibid., 2.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., 4.
29. Ibid., 96.
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30. Ibid., 96-98.
31. Ibid., 124.
32. Ibid., 125.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid., 108.
35. Ibid., 157.
36. Ibid., 275.
37. Ibid., 276.
38. Ibid., 41.
39. Ibid., 43.
40. Ibid., 18.
41. Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (New York: Free Press, 2006). Francis Collins is connected to St. John's College by virtue of being the godson of Robert Bart,
a long time tutor both in Annapolis and Santa Fe and also Dean of the College in Santa Fe. Collins was one of the speakers at the memorial service
for Robert Bart held in McDowell Hall in Annapolis, February 3, 2001.
In a personal communication, Collins wrote: “As I recall, I spoke about
the remarkable role he played in my own education. He was my godfather,
and no godfather ever took that role more seriously—he gave me many
precious gifts as I was growing up, all of which had artistic, religious, or
intellectual significance and led to deep conversations. . . . I also remember
him assisting me with a particularly thorny calculus problem, and marveling that this sophisticated professor of humanities was also awfully
good at integrating by parts. Such was the St. John’s way!"
42. Collins, The Language of God, 6.
43. Ibid., 4. See also 272: “The current battles between the scientific and
spiritual worldviews need to be resolved.”
44. Ibid., 84.
45. Ibid., 3.
46. Ibid., 6.
47. Ibid., 228.
48. Ibid., 229.
49. Ibid., 225.
50. Ibid., 220.
51. Ibid., 6.
52. Ibid., 88.
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53. Ibid., 221.
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid., 223.
56. Ibid., 118.
57. Ibid., 227. See also 271: “Given the uncertain ethical grounding of
the postmodernist era, which discounts the existence of absolute truth,
ethics grounded on specific principles of faith can provide a certain foundational strength that may otherwise be lacking.”
58. Ibid., 221.
59. Ibid., 228.
60. Ibid., 210.
61. Ibid., 234.
62. Ibid., 233. For readers wanting to pursue a comprehensive critique of
Collins’s book, see George Cunningham, Decoding the Language of God:
Can a Scientist Really be a Believer? A Geneticist Responds to Francis
Collins (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2010). For readers
wanting to pursue further the topic of Truth, see the recent collections of
essays in Simon Blackburn and Keith Simmonds, eds. Truth, Oxford
Readings in Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), and
Kurt Pritzl, ed., Truth: Studies of a Robust Presence, Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2010).
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The Question of Questions
Michael W. Grenke
What is involved in really asking a question? What is the
most important question a human being can ask? Tonight I
want to try to consider, along with you, these two questions
in the challenging and connected manner in which Martin
Heidegger presents them, especially in his Introduction to
Metaphysics.
If we try to rise to Heidegger’s challenge of really asking
these questions, then we face serious obstacles in our ordinary modes of living, thinking, and talking to one another.
Heidegger characterizes us “modern” human beings as people “who scarcely respond, and then for the most part emptily,
to the simplicity of the essential” (IM, 98).* But is not the essential that which is sought in all real questioning? And can
a minimal and mostly empty response be what is appropriate
to the object of real questioning? Later in his argument, when
considering the standards of discourse exemplified in contemporary books and newspapers, Heidegger laments “the
paralysis of all passion for questioning that has long been
with us. The consequence of this paralysis is that all standards
and perspectives have been confused and that most men have
ceased to know where and between what the crucial decisions
must be made” (IM, 143).
Lest we too readily exempt ourselves and our community
*Key to citations: IM = Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959). BT = Being and Time,
trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: HarperCollins,
2008). Page numbers for Being and Time are keyed to the seventh German
edition, noted marginally in the English translation. In some instances
translations have been altered slightly for the sake of accuracy.
Michael Grenke is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis. This lecture was originally delivered on 7 November 2008.
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from these criticisms as though they are leveled only at “modern” men, not those who study great books, and only at the
discourse found in books and periodicals that we do not allow
ourselves to read here, we should consider what Heidegger
calls “idle talk” in Being and Time. “Idle talk” is discourse
that seeks to tone down the stakes of conversation and to keep
the responses of the interlocutors within well-prescribed and
familiar bounds. Instead of containing and conveying a “primary relationship-of-Being towards the being talked about”
(BT, 168)—a relationship of the kind that might deeply excite
or disturb the speaker and the listener, a relationship that
might move a human being as much as the thing in question
can move a human being—idle talk just passes words around
in the fashion of gossip. The worst part is that it pretends to
be real discourse, and in this pretending it hinders attempts
at real discourse. Surrounded by such discourse that says very
little while pretending to say all there is to say, the average
understanding “will never be able to decide what has been
drawn from primordial sources with a struggle and how much
is just gossip” (BT, 169). Heidegger finds this idle talk that
belongs to everyday average human life to be almost everywhere and to dominate almost everything about human discourse, both spoken and written. We should not pat ourselves
too readily or casually on the back and blindly assume that
this idle discourse goes on only outside our community or
only on the weekends and never in our classrooms. Idle talk
“discourages any new questioning and any confrontation”
(BT, 169). But might not all real questioning be, in a way,
new and confrontational?
In order to try to get free from the realm of idle talk and
really to ask questions, to question questions—die Fragen
fragen, as the Germans say—we must try to situate ourselves
in a realm of thinking and discourse that is not saturated with
the sense, the assurance, that whatever is to come next will
be comfortably like that which has already come before. Per-
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haps we can start to get a feeling for this in a slight observation of a feature of the text of the Introduction to Metaphysics
that might tend to frustrate us with Heidegger, or even make
us distrust him. The book asks a question in its very first paragraph, and it makes explicit the difficulty of really asking that
question. A large portion of the discussion on the pages that
follow is devoted to a discussion of that question and its asking. Nine pages in, Heidegger proclaims, “We have not even
begun to ask the question itself” (IM, 9). If the reader’s patience has not worn thin after nine pages, it may be getting
frayed at twenty-nine pages in, where Heidegger says, “We
still know far too little about the process of questioning, and
what we do know is far too crude” (IM, 29). In a way, the
saga of really asking a question goes on throughout the entire
book, all the way to the very end, where Heidegger suggests
that real questioning may be a matter that takes a whole lifetime.
I am not calling attention to these matters to complain
about the way Heidegger seems to avoid or defer satisfaction
of the desires he has aroused in his readers. The more generous and fruitful way to look at this, regardless of its accuracy,
is to think that Heidegger is really making a high demand
upon himself and upon his intended readers. He is not settling
back into the easy and comforting conviction that he already
knows how really to ask questions and that he already is asking real questions.
What would it take for us to follow Heidegger’s example?
In thinking about Heidegger’s challenge, I have been trying
to ask myself whether I have ever been involved in real questioning myself, and I have been continually struck by how
hard it is to make that a real question. Can you ask yourself
in a real way, in way that does not presuppose an answer, in
a way that does not let you shrug off, turn away from, or deny
the question, whether in our classes—and especially in those
most avowedly devoted to questions, our seminars—whether
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any real questioning has been going on? I do not ask this
question to satisfy any savage and lingering resentment you
might have over a seminar gone wrong; rather I mean it to
stir concern in you about your own questioning.
The Question of Questions
Now that you are stirred up, let us turn to a more detailed
look at what Heidegger has to say about questions. A brief
glimpse at Being and Time might help lay some groundwork.
In the second section of the book, Heidegger begins the task
of trying to “formulate”—or rather reformulate—the question
of Being, the question that is the leading question of the
whole work, and the question that Heidegger presents as the
question that is first in rank. The reformulation of the question is undertaken explicitly to “revive” the question, to make
it a matter of living concern again. In order to reformulate
this question, Heidegger tries to “explain briefly what belongs to any question whatsoever” (BT, 5). The following
scheme of three elements emerges: “Any question, as a question about something, has that which is asked about. But
every question about something is somehow a questioning of
something. So in addition to what is asked about, a question
has that which is interrogated. . . . Furthermore, in what is
asked about there lies also that which is to be found out by
the asking; this is what is really intended: with this the question reaches its goal” (BT, 5).
In fitting his leading question into the scheme that belongs to any questioning, Heidegger announces that Being is
what is asked about, even though Being is not a being, which
is to say Being is not a thing like other things. He then announces that the meaning of Being is what is to be found out
by the asking. And then he turns to the middle element of his
scheme—“that which is interrogated.” Since Being is the
Being of beings, the interrogation is to be directed at beings
themselves. Perhaps because many beings would seem to be
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rather unresponsive to interrogation, Heidegger notes, “When
we come to what is to be interrogated, the question of Being
requires that the right way of access to beings shall have been
obtained and secured in advance” (BT, 6). Method matters,
even if the motto of Heidegger’s phenomenal approach is “To
the beings themselves!” “Thus to work out the question of
Being adequately, we must make one being—the questioning
one—transparent in its own Being. The very asking of this
question is one being’s mode of Being; and as such it gets its
essential character from what is inquired about—namely,
Being. This being which each of us himself is and which includes questioning as one of the possibilities of its Being, we
shall denote by the term ‘Dasein’” (BT, 7). Dasein, “Being
there,” is Heidegger’s technical term for the kind of being
that is human being. Because human beings have a special
relationship to Being, because they are beings that ask the
question of Being, the rest of Heidegger’s Being and Time
occupies itself with an analysis of the structure of human
being.
In the Author’s Preface to the seventh edition, Heidegger
admits to the unfinished character of Being and Time. He admits that a promised second “half” of the book has not been
delivered, and he says that the first half, which is the book as
he has left it to us, would have to be newly presented if the
question were to be carried further. Heidegger then suggests
that in order to shed some light on this the reader should look
at his Introduction to Metaphysics, published in the same year
as the seventh edition of Being and Time.
The beginning of Introduction to Metaphysics focuses attention on the fundamental question of metaphysics and on
the difficulty of asking it.
Individuals and peoples ask a good many questions in the
course of their historical passage through time. They examine, explore, and test a good many things before they
run into the question “Why are there beings rather than
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nothing?” Many men never encounter this question, if by
encounter we mean not merely to hear and read about it
as an interrogative formulation but to ask the question,
that it, to bring it about, to raise it, to feel oneself in the
state of being compelled to this question (IM, 1).
Although this is a somewhat different question than the
leading question of Being and Time (IM,18-19), both are put
forth as the fundamental question and as the question that is
first in rank. Also because Heidegger asserts that the second
clause of the question, “rather than nothing,” is not superfluous, and because it reveals that the scope of the question aims
at the ground of beings (IM, 24), it is very close to being the
question of being. Does what Heidegger says here at the beginning of Introduction to Metaphysics serve, then, to help
us understand what he means in Being and Time when he
calls human being the being that asks the question of Being?
Also, what does this initial statement tell us about really
asking this (or any) question? What does it mean to “encounter” a question if it does not mean to hear it or to read
it? Heidegger’s gloss here on asking the question is that it involves bringing a question about, placing or “putting” the
question, and finding oneself in the state of feeling the necessity for the question. This suggests that the asking of a
question is very different from becoming aware of a question
or from “finding” a question. The relationship of the questioner to the question is more intimate and more essential than
the relationship of an uninterested, passive observer to an observed object. With respect to the fundamental question, Heidegger goes so far as to say “if this question is asked and if
the act of questioning is really carried out, the content and
the object of the question react inevitably on the act of questioning” (IM, 5). What is this reacting? Is it similar to what
Heidegger means when he says in Being and Time that the
being that asks the question of Being “gets its essential character from what is inquired about—namely Being”? Heideg-
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ger extends this thought here in Introduction to Metaphysics
in the context of its fundamental question—“this question
‘why,’ this question as to the being as such in its entirety, goes
beyond mere playing with words, provided we possess sufficient intellectual energy to make the question actually recoil
into its ‘why,’ for it will not do so of its own accord” (IM, 5).
Really asking this question means making the question
recoil into its why. This questioning of the question searches
for the grounds of the questioning itself. It asks “Why the
why?” And in so doing, it turns its attention toward the being
that questions. This “privileged question ‘why’ has its ground
in a leap through which man thrusts away all the previous security, whether real or imagined, of his life. The question is
asked only in this leap; it is the leap; without it there is no
asking” (IM, 6).
If this leap, without which there is no asking, involves
thrusting away all the previous security of life, it may be objectively impossible to determine when such a leap has been
made. “Let us be clear about this from the start: it can never
be objectively determined whether anyone, whether we, really ask this question, that is, whether we make the leap, or
never get beyond a verbal formula” (IM, 6). This might seem
to mean we can never know whether a question has really
been asked. But the sentence that follows this statement
seems to point to history as the obstacle to our objective determination. “In a historical setting that does not recognize
questioning as a fundamental human force, the question immediately loses its rank” (IM, 6).
The paragraph that immediately follows would seem to
be an example of such a historical setting. In that paragraph,
Heidegger considers those who hold the Bible to be divine
revelation and truth. For those believers, there would seem
to be a clear and immediate answer to the question “Why are
there beings rather than nothing?” They have this answer before the question is even asked. Heidegger says that such be-
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lievers cannot really ask the question. “One who holds to
such faith can in a way participate in the asking of our question, but he cannot really question without ceasing to be a believer and taking all the consequences of such a step. He will
only be able to act ‘as if’” (IM, 7). Thus Heidegger seems to
point to a situation in which he feels confident that the question is not really being asked. This is because he thinks he
can recognize a “historical setting” where questioning is not
recognized “as a fundamental human force”; rather, “[f]rom
the standpoint of faith our question is ‘foolishness’” (IM, 7).
Heidegger goes on to identify philosophy with this foolishness. He then says “Really to ask the question signifies a
daring attempt to fathom this unfathomable question by disclosing what it summons us to ask, to push our questioning
to the very end. Where such an attempt occurs there is philosophy” (IM, 8). Is Heidegger going so far as to suggest that
where there is no philosophy there is no real questioning?
Would that in turn lead so far as to suggest that where there
is faith there is no real questioning of anything? Does the
need for philosophy constitute some part of the obstacle to
the objective determination of whether a leap into real questioning has been made? For the historical is not the objective,
the historical is subject to “its own law,” not the universal
law. And Heidegger conceives of philosophy as historical, so
that “there is no way of determining once and for all what the
task of philosophy is” (IM, 8).
What I have presented so far has followed, with some
principle of selection, what Heidegger has to say about really
asking questions in the beginning pages of Introduction to
Metaphysics, up to page nine. You will recall that on page
nine Heidegger announces that, “We have not even begun to
ask the question itself.” What still stands in the way of our
really asking a question (or the question)? What needs to be
seen, done, or suffered?
The question of questions dies down in the text for about
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ten pages. Then it is resumed explicitly with a series of statements that might seem unnecessary. First Heidegger tells us
that “questions and particularly fundamental questions do not
just occur like stones and water. Questions are not found
ready-made like shoes and clothes and books. Questions are,
and are only as they are actually asked” (IM, 19). Heidegger
seems to fear that we might not yet be thinking properly about
questions. He feels the need to tell us questions are, that is
they have some kind of being. And he feels the need to point
out that questions do not have the kind of being that we might
tend to ascribe either to natural beings (stones, water) or to
artificial beings (shoes, clothes, books). This difference is
amplified when Heidegger claims, “A leading into the asking
of the fundamental questions is consequently not a going to
something that lies and stands somewhere; no, this leading
must first awaken and create the questioning” (IM, 19).
What kind of being, then, should we think that questions
have? Heidegger seems to think we might be tempted to think
that questions have the kind of being belonging to a particular
kind of sentence—the kind that ends with a question mark.
So next he tells the reader, “To state the interrogative sentence, even in a tone of questioning, is not yet to question.
To repeat the interrogative sentence several times in succession does not necessarily breathe life into the questioning”
(IM, 20). Is the task, then, to breathe life into our interrogative
statements? What can that mean? Heidegger makes it clear
that this is not a rhetorical move that can be accomplished
through repetition or through variation in tone.
Heidegger next considers the experience of listening to a
question. He points to a way in which one could mistake a
question to be a mere assertion about the questioning state of
the speaker. But if that is how you hear my question, then
“you do not join me in questioning, nor do you question yourself. No sign of a questioning attitude or state of mind is
awakened.” This consideration of what is involved in hearing
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a question as a question seems to reveal for Heidegger the
questioning state of mind. “Such a state of mind consists in
willing to know. Willing—that is no mere wishing or striving.
Those who wish to know also seem to question, but they do
not go beyond the stating of questions; they stop precisely
where the question begins. To question is to will to know. He
who wills, he who puts his whole existence into a will, is resolved. Resolve does not shift about; it does not shirk, but
acts from out of the moment and never stops” (IM, 20-21).
So a question is not a sentence uttered in the right tone,
but a sentence uttered with the right (rather extreme) attitude
or state of mind? It turns out that Heidegger also cuts off this
notion that a question is a certain kind of sentence uttered
with a certain kind of attitude. “So much the less will the interrogative sentence, even if it is uttered in an authentically
questioning tone and even if the listener joins in the questioning, exhaustively reproduce the question. The questioning,
which is still enclosed, wrapped up in words, remains to be
unwrapped. The questioning attitude must clarify and secure
itself in the process, it must be consolidated by training” (IM,
22).
In the case just described, the questioning done by the
speaker and shared in by the listener is not to be found wholly
in the sentence uttered or in the tone in which it is uttered.
The questioning would seem separable from the words; perhaps the questioning could be carried out with other words,
or even without words. The questioning attitude seems not to
be a thing of the moment, nor something finished and static.
This attitude needs clarifying, securing, and consolidating.
By what process or training might a questioning attitude be
properly developed? That attitude is characterized by a resolved will to know. What that will aims to know is the truth.
Under Heidegger’s analysis of the meaning of the word truth,
truth is “unconcealment.” This is to be distinguished from
thinking of truth as correspondence. And late in Introduction
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to Metaphysics, Heidegger asserts, “Unconcealment occurs
only when it is achieved by work” (IM, 191). Heidegger gives
many examples of intellectual work on the intervening
pages—especially in his laborious excursions into the primordial etymologies of important terms in Western thought—
and one might profitably attempt to consider much of what
he does in Introduction to Metaphysics as an attempt to begin
training a questioning attitude.
The Question of Questions
Let us turn now to look at Heidegger’s claims as to which
question is the most important question a human being can
ask. “Important” is my term. Sometimes Heidegger says
“fundamental,” or “first,” or “first in rank,” or “worthiest.”
We can try to discipline our conception of the most important
question by keeping in mind our observations regarding really asking a question—that questioning extends beyond specific verbal formulae and that a questioning attitude requires
work and training,. The most important question is not an object sitting somewhere. I cannot sell you a map with which
you can locate it in order to wonder at it. The most important
question is not a sentence written on a page in some rare
book, available to be read by anyone who can afford to purchase the book. I give you the most important question now
as Heidegger expresses it as a sentence. But to hear it properly, we must not get too caught up in its wrappings.
“The question ‘Why are there beings rather than nothing?’ is first in rank for us first because it is the most farreaching, second because it is the deepest, and finally because
it is the most fundamental of all questions” (IM, 2). Heidegger explains that this question is the most far reaching, the
widest, because it “confines itself to no particular being” and
thus “takes in everything” (IM, 2). The question is the deepest
because it “aims at the ground of what is insofar as it is” (IM,
3). It “penetrates to the ‘underlying’ realms and indeed to the
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very last of them, to the limit” (IM, 3). This question is the
most fundamental question because “it breaks open the
ground for all authentic questions and thus is at the origin of
all of them” (IM, 6).
From the standpoint of really asking questions, the asking
of this question stands out as special. “For through this questioning the being as a whole is for the first time opened up as
such with a view to its possible ground, and in the act of questioning it is kept open” (IM, 4). This statement about the fundamentality of this question—that it opens up a ground of
possibility and keeps that possibility open—might also be
taken as a statement about what it means really to ask this
question. Does really asking a question always involve asking
fundamental questions? This might explain Heidegger’s big
claim that “Our question is the question of all authentic questions, i.e., of all self-questioning questions, and whether consciously or not it is necessarily implicit in every question. No
questioning and accordingly no single scientific ‘problem’
can be fully intelligible if it does not include, i.e., ask, the
question of all questions” (IM, 6).
Pretty quickly, however, Heidegger finds an obstacle to
his pursuit of this question of questions and to his claims
about its importance. Heidegger finds he must confront a long
intellectual tradition that has found Being “unfindable, almost
like nothing” (IM, 35). Heidegger cites Nietzsche’s claim that
the highest concepts, “like Being,” are the “last cloudy smoke
of evaporating reality” (IM, 35). as both the final expression
and the culmination of this tradition, which holds being to be
an error, a mere word, empty of meaning. Heidegger feels the
need to confront Nietzsche, and through him the tradition,
because if Nietzsche is right, “the only possible consequence
would be to abandon the question” (IM, 35).
In order to respond to Nietzsche’s claim, Heidegger sets
out to show that the word being does have meaning. Heidegger gives a series of examples of ways we mean being when
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we use the word “is.”
We say “God is.” “The earth is.” “The lecture is in the
auditorium.” This man is from Swabia.” “The cup is of
silver.” “The peasant is to the fields.” “The book is
mine.” “He is of death.” “Red is the port side.” “There is
famine in Russia.” “The enemy is in retreat.” “The plant
louse is in the vineyard.” “The dog is in the garden.”
“Over all the summits, there is rest” (IM, 89).
Heidegger observes that in each of these cases the word “is”
is meant differently.
“God is”; i.e., he is really present. “The earth is”; i.e., we
experience and believe it to be permanently there. “The
lecture is in the auditorium”; i.e., it takes place. “The
man is from Swabia”; i.e., he comes from there. “The cup
is of silver”; i.e., it is made of . . . . “The peasant is to the
fields”; he has gone to the fields and is staying there.
“The book is mine”; i.e., it belongs to me. “He is of
death”; i.e., he succumbed to death. “Red is the port
side”; i.e., it stands for port. “The dog is in the garden”;
i.e., he is running around in the garden. “Over all the
summits, there is rest”; that is to say??? (IM, 90).
(There is no account given of the famine, the retreat, or
the infestation.) Heidegger gets a bit confused by the last example and tries out a number of meanings, without being satisfied by any of his own suggestions. This occurs perhaps,
Heidegger suggests, because the last example is a bit of poetry written by Goethe in pencil on a window frame. Be that
as it may, what Heidegger claims to have shown with these
examples is that “the ‘is’ in our discourse manifests a rich diversity of meanings” (IM, 91). This rich diversity is possible
because the word “being” is empty in the sense of being indeterminate enough to encompass all the various meanings
Heidegger presents in all his examples. But the word “being”
is not empty in the sense that what is meant in each particular
example is quite determinate and distinct (except perhaps for
the case of the quotation from Goethe). So Heidegger claims
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this evidence proves that being is not an empty word. “If
being thus represents what is most unique and determinate,
the word “being” cannot be empty . . . . There is no such thing
as an empty word; at most a word is worn out, though still
filled with meaning” (IM, 79).
In replying to Nietzsche, Heidegger has been moved to
consider the kind of understanding of being to which human
beings already and always lay claim whenever they use the
word “is,” or any of its other inflectional forms. Heidegger
finds in this usage a word that is at once unique and determinate and indeterminate. Might this revelation about the ways
in which the word “being” is meant not suggest that being is
a realm uniquely suited to a questioning unwrapped from
words and a questioning attitude in need of development?
Questioning is the authentic and proper and only way of
appreciating that which, by its supreme rank, holds our
existence in its power. Hence no question is more worthy
of being asked than the question of our understanding of
being, unless it be the question of being itself. The more
authentic our questioning, the more immediately and
steadfastly we dwell on the most questionable of all questions—namely, the circumstance that we understand
being quite indefinitely and yet with supreme definiteness (IM, 83).
Is there a kind of fit between the mode of being that belongs
to human beings, the questioning beings, and the determinate
indeterminacy with which being manifests itself? Is the
human relation to being more than the merely “happy” accident that we happen to ask the question of being? As the questioning being, is human being a fit mirror for being itself? I
find it suggestive that Heidegger notes in passing in Being
and Time that “the idea of Being in general is just as far from
being ‘simple’ as is the Being of Dasein” (BT, 196).
Human Being and Questioning
I feel like I have been holding my usual critical judgment in
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abeyance in much of what I have said so far. I have done this
in order to try to think Heidegger’s thought as genuinely as I
can on its own terms. That entails the abandonment of much
of our traditional sense of evidentiary criteria. For Heidegger
claims to be thinking about and writing about matters that are
more fundamental than our traditional notions of truth as correspondence, and more fundamental than our idea of argument as a progression of inferences that follow one another
according to the rules of logic. As Heidegger suggests, “Perhaps the whole body of logic . . . is grounded in a very definite answer to the question about the being” (IM, 25).
But still, isn’t Heidegger wrong about Nietzsche? Isn’t
he misstating the main point of Nietzsche’s claim? When Heidegger cites Nietzsche as saying that the highest concepts,
including Being, are “last cloudy smoke of evaporating reality,” Heidegger is referring to a passage in section 4 of Twilight of the Idols, called “Reason in Philosophy.” Being is not
mentioned in section 4, but is discussed in the following section as a concept that is derived by means of abstraction from
the concept of the I involved in willing. In section 4, the highest concepts are not said to be empty, rather they are said to
be emptiest. Therefore Heidegger’s overcoming of Nietzsche
by means of proving that being is not an empty word is no
real overcoming at all. Moreover, Heidegger’s treatment of
this passage seems to be silent about Nietzsche’s main point,
which is that the so-called highest concepts are actually the
last concepts, not the first; they are derivative concepts, not
first things. To address Nietzsche’s real point, Heidegger
would have to try to show that Being is available to human
beings in some primary—I am tempted to say “direct”—experience and that this primary experience contains the kind
of rich diversity that, as Heidegger demonstrates, belongs to
our use of the word “being.” I do not think Heidegger tries
to show this by means of argument, although at times he
seems to claim that it is the case; it may be, in fact, that Hei-
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degger would claim that such a primary experience of being
could never be shown in argument.
How would Heidegger respond, then, to the claim that he
got Nietzsche wrong? One possible type of response might
be found in a passage where Heidegger raises the complaint
on the reader’s behalf that Heidegger himself is misreading
Parmenides. Heidegger admits that “our interpretation of the
fragment must appear to be an arbitrary distortion. We are accused of reading into it things that an ‘exact interpretation’
can never determine. This is true” (IM, 176). Heidegger does
not leave the matter at a rather matter-of-fact “Very well, you
caught me.” Instead, he turns the complaint about his own
inaccuracy, his own making things up, into an opportunity to
transform the criteria of truth. He asks, “Which interpretation
is the true one, the one which simply takes over a perspective
into which it has fallen, because this perspective, this line of
sight, presents itself as familiar and self-evident; or the interpretation which questions the customary perspective from top
to bottom, because conceivably—and indeed actually—this
line of sight does not lead to what is in need of being seen”
(IM, 176).
Whether we should find this a slippery and discreditable
evasion of intellectual integrity, or an example of a very serious way to maintain intellectual integrity, or something in
between, I shall leave for you to ponder. Rather than trying
to resolve the matter, I will instead point out the way in which
Heidegger’s response to the question of the intrusion of his
own creativity into his interpretations of the texts connects
to the way in which he thinks about really asking questions.
Immediately after suggesting that his creative interpretation
has a right to be considered “true” interpretation, Heidegger
directly connects true interpretation to questioning—“to give
up the familiar and go back to an interpretation that is also a
questioning is a leap. In order to leap one has to take a proper
run. It is the run that decides everything; for it implies that
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we ourselves really ask the questions and in these questions
first create perspectives” (IM, 176).
But how does really asking questions “create” and how
are “we ourselves” really involved? In Being and Time, Heidegger presents the kind of being of human beings that he
calls Dasein as always having its own “there.” One might say
crudely that a human being is its own “there” and makes its
own “there” but also makes a “there” for other kinds of beings. Heidegger suggests in one early passage of Introduction
to Metaphysics that the way a human being both is itself and
is a “there” is transformed by real questioning. “In this questioning we seem to belong entirely to ourselves. Yet it is this
questioning that moves us into the open, provided that in
questioning it transform itself (which all true questioning
does), and cast a new space over everything and into everything” (IM, 29-30). The human “there” is not some kind of
cloud of spatiality and temporality that follows each of us
around as we go about our day, like the personal clouds of
gloom one sometimes sees in comic strips. Rather, Heidegger
presents the human “there” as the projection of a human
being’s own self onto the given possibilities of a particular
historical circumstance. Usually this projection of self is not
a human being’s genuine self, but the projection of a universal, non-individuated self that belongs to the kind of average
way of being human that gives rise to “idle talk.” But it looks
like Heidegger wants to suggest that when questions are really asked, the questioner projects a self that is really his own.
The projection of one’s own self involves a more intense
set of possibilities of relating to beings than the projection of
just “someone.” Heidegger locates the most intense human
relations to beings in what he calls the primordial. In a way,
Heidegger seems to use the intensity of human affective relations to beings as the measuring stick of the primordiality
of those relations. Intensity seems to become the measure of
the truth. This would seem to lead philosophers to seek the
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intensity found in the primordial. Thus Heidegger claims,
“The ultimate business of philosophy is to preserve the force
of the most elemental words in which Dasein expresses itself” (BT, 220). Note here that Heidegger does not say
philosophers try to “find” the force of the most elemental
words, rather they try to “preserve” that force.
Why is philosophy, which, as we saw earlier, is associated
with really asking questions, also burdened with the task of
preserving the force of primordial modes of expression? For
Heidegger, it is because every human experience, however
seemingly inactive, is some kind of human doing, that is, a
projection onto a possibility. It is possibilities that emerge
into the truth as unconcealment; but whatever force or power
is available in such possibilities is only available in the form
of some human action, and this very action depletes the possibility’s original intensity. “A beginning can never directly
preserve its full momentum; the only possible way to preserve its force is to repeat, to draw once again more deeply
than ever from its source. And it is only by thoughtful repetition that we can deal appropriately with the beginning and
the breakdown of truth” (IM, 191). The repetition of a possibility is always an act, and in order to access again the original affective intensity of that possibility, the “repetition”
cannot be exactly the same act. Remember, real questioning
is not to be achieved through the repetition of an interrogative
sentence.
This idea about the nature of the repetition of possibilities, then, is the defense of Heidegger’s creative, “inexact”
interpretations. This idea also seems to guide his sense of
what is involved in really asking questions. “Men can retain
basic truths of such magnitude only by raising them constantly to a still more original unfolding; not merely by applying them and invoking their authority” (IM, 145). It is
perhaps a corollary of this idea that “in principle, philosoph-
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ical questions are never dealt with as though we might someday cast them aside” (IM, 42).
These considerations may also help us to understand the
rather cryptic statement that very nearly ends Introduction to
Metaphysics: “To know how to question means to know how
to wait, even a whole lifetime” (IM, 206). Waiting is not just
sitting there. Waiting has to be a dynamic passivity. Waiting
must mean a creative holding-open of the humanly affective
and ontologically revelatory potential in possibilities. Questioning, then, becomes repeating those possibilities again and
again, each time differently.
*****
Whatever we might now think of Heidegger as I have presented him—whether we think he is an untrustworthy interpreter, whether we think he fails to give us sufficient
argumentative proof, whether we think he lacks sobriety and
has a dangerous proclivity toward the extreme, whether we
think what we know about his biography says all that need
be said—must we not agree that his thinking about questions
helps us to think about questions? If we can agree on that
much, then I want to pose one last question: Does what Heidegger shows us make us want really to ask questions?
We do not have to ask the fundamental question. We do
not have to ask any question in a real manner. Nothing urgent
or practical pushes us to it. “To be sure, the things in the
world, the beings, are in no way affected by our asking of the
question ‘Why are there beings rather than nothing?’ Whether
we ask it or not, the planets move in their orbits, the sap of
life flows through plant and animal” (IM, 5). But if the other
things that we always find alongside us in the world do not
make us want really to ask questions, what does? Has Heidegger managed somehow to convey to us a questioning attitude? And if we do find ourselves wanting really to ask
questions, can we ask ourselves why we want to do so?
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The Rehabilitation of
Spiritedness
Gary Borjesson, Willing Dogs and Reluctant Masters: On Friendship and Dogs. Philadelphia: Paul
Dry Books, 2012, x + 251 pages. $14.95.
Book Review by Eva Brann
This book is a delight to read and a profit to ponder. It is a dog
story, a human story, a lesson book (for dog owners), and a philosophical meditation (for anyone). It is learned, but lightly so, and
it has a powerful thesis gently imparted.
I loved it, but my credentials for reviewing it are even better
than that: I don't like dogs. They slobber, shed and speak not a word
of English—none of which facts is denied in this account of friendship between dogs and humans. (In my defense: among the alogoi,
the wordless, I do feel friendly toward dolphins, who luckily live
in another element, and toward babies, who are both incarnations
of potential rationality and cute—for which the animal ethologist’s
term is “care-soliciting.”) Moreover, I have no idea whether Gary
Borjesson’s fundamental claim is true: that real—not in-a-mannerof-speaking—friendship between dog and human is possible. My
old friend Ray Coppinger, a dog evolutionist and breeder (he found
the Jack Russell terrier that inhabits the Assistant Dean’s office at
St. John’s College in Annapolis), whose expertise figures in this
book, thinks otherwise. He once said to me that attributing friendly
feelings rather than self-serving instincts to dogs is pure “anthropomorphizing.” So I’m starting out severely objective in several
respects.
Yet I’m captivated by the author’s account of his life with the
two dogs who are the principals in this story, Kestra and Aktis. His
claims rest on acutely attuned and prolonged observation of his
own dogs, and, peripherally, other people’s dogs. This affectionate
attention is at once trust- and doubt-inspiring. It makes an enchant-
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ing story, but it might also be self-confirming, producing the illusions of mutual love. For example, his dogs often smile at him,
though I’ve read that animals with fangs don’t smile, that the evolutionary origin of the human smile is the wolfish snarl. So I’m
one of the author’s acknowledged dog-skeptics—or rather, one half
of me is. With the other half, I’m totally persuaded that the friendship view is the better hypothesis for dog, man, and world.
For not only is it a more coherent and a more friendly universe
if the friendship hypothesis proves out, but it is also a more interesting world, since this position rests on postulates that modulate
some current reductionist dogmas concerning beast and man, both
in themselves and together. There are thought-provoking lessons
here both for intra-species and inter-species relations.
Gary Borjesson’s philosophical reading continually underwrites and illuminates his meditations. Sometimes it’s almost as if
this dog-and-man tale came into its own as a corroboration of Aristotle’s, Plato’s, and Hegel’s insights into animate nature—especially Aristotle’s. Thus the epigraph to the second chapter, on the
spirit of friendship, is part of a passage taken from Aristotle’s Politics. Let me quote the whole, which I’ve always found puzzling,
but which becomes very satisfactorily clear in this book:
Spirit (thumos) is what makes friendliness. For it is the very
power of the soul by which we feel friendship. And here’s the
sign: Spirit, when it feels slighted, is roused more against intimates and friends than strangers (Politics, 1327b40-41).
And Aristotle mentions the Guardians, Plato’s warriors in the
Republic, who are friendly to those they know and savage to those
they don’t know, and whose nature Socrates compares—here’s
serendipity!—to that of a noble young dog (Republic, 375a-376b).
Spirit, spiritedness, passionate temperament, as a middle and
mediating aspect of the human soul, is a Socratic discovery. Sometimes it is obedient to reason, sometimes it in turn masters lust;
these latter are respectively the highest and lowest parts of our soul.
Why should spirit be the enabler of friendship? It is a working
postulate of Borjesson’s book that Aristotle is simply right: spiritedness is the condition of friendship. The argumentation is of the
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best sort, the sort that starts in a variety of quarters, but from which
all roads lead to Athens: The high road, however, connecting spiritedness to friendship, is the desire to be recognized, attended to,
praised, and the corresponding recoil is the shame of being misconstrued, ignored, or disrespected.
By the intra-species hypothesis, dogs have spirit; it might even
count as an oblique proof that some dogs have a lot and others but
little, and even the latter have a sense of injury. One of the pleasures of this book is the interweaving of dog anecdotes and human
reflection, and the principal subjects of the often poignant stories—
never shaggy—are Gary Borjesson’s own two dogs. Kestra is
sweet-tempered, a little passive, and, for all her lovableness, a little
unkeen, but even she has an acute sense of her trust in her master
being betrayed.
If, then, people and dogs have common ground of a higher
order than animal needs, it must be in the territory of the spirit. For
the author is far from committing the philosophical solecism of attributing reason to dogs. Spirit, however, is, just as Aristotle says,
where friendship is at home. Now among us humans, this capability of the spirit is both an accomplishment and a work in progress,
and so it is if one of the friends is a dog.
This book is full of observations about friendship—discerningly borrowed and observantly original; it is a credible descendant
of those wonders of human perspicacity, Aristotle’s books on
friendship (Nicomachean Ethics, Books 8-9). One of those borrowed observations is that “the point of being friends is to charm
each other”; I love that, because I once long ago phrased it similarly to myself, sailing the Aegean with a friend: “The motor of
friendship is mutual delight.” It doesn’t have Aristotle’s gravity,
but he would not repudiate it. Applied to dogs, it does, however,
imply that what Aristotle considers the highest kind of friendship—
that of beings of intellect in increasingly deep, mutually satisfying
conversation—is not a necessary option (and indeed not available)
to a dog/man pair of friends.
And that indefeasible fact means that friendship as a work in
progress takes on a very different shape for this inter-species pair.
Here the work of friendship is obedience training, where man is
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master, dog subject! As the title of the book declares, dogs, the
good ones, are willing. Not that they are called good because they
like to obey, but they obey because they are good. They have in
them that which can listen—“obey,” from Latin ob-audire, means
“to listen and really to hear.” That is just what Socrates thinks of
spiritedness: It is pride able to listen to reason. They are, one might
say, a-rationally rational. They understand, and so they accept the
superiority of their masters.
Here is where Gary Borjesson’s book becomes topical and
controversial. The second part of his title is “Reluctant Masters.”
He analyzes out this component of our modernity: the reluctance
to act with authority, to accept the charge of mastery, be it in childrearing or dog-training. The result of this abashment—often moralizing—in the face of asserting the control of superior reason is
spoilage: spoiled children, ruined dogs. The book is full of funny
and sad examples; some are reports of outrage expressed by spectators watching the book’s author at work being a master.
One result of the failure of rational mastery is loss of dignity
on both sides, and with it, of equality. For, at its best, friendship is
mutual and so a relation of peers. Some of the most poignant passages of the book are about mutuality, the balanced equality of dog
and human in the territory of spiritedness. Indeed, in the controlled
competition that characterizes the play between these two spirited
animals from different species, the dog often wins—to the man’s
delight. The result of mastery accepted is an equality at once properly delimited and invaluable.
Aristotle, one last time, says that happiness is the soul fulfillingly at work in accordance with its own goodness (Nichomachean
Ethics, 1098a13-16). The willing master of this book really means
to train his dog to happiness. He (or she—the author’s favorite dog
trainer is Vicki Hearne) teaches the young dog to obey, first as parents habituate a child, by gentle and consistent compulsion, even
fear. That training produces the inner control that in us is called
self-determination, freedom. Within these bounds the dog has
scope to fulfill his dog-nature as a competitive pursuer and predator
of minor wild life and as a cooperative playfellow of humans and
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dogs. The descriptions of these play-episodes induce sympathetic
joy.
I’ll now take it on faith, the writer’s faith, that dogs, domesticated wolves, may be happy under—no, may be made happy by—
human mastery. But that humans, uncircumventably the masters
of domesticated nature, can be exhilaratingly happy, and also better, more thoughtful, and more just in their friendly companionship
with dogs—that’s proven beyond doubt by this lovely book.
�
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Pastille, William
Brann, Eva T.H.
Hunt, Frank
Sachs, Joe
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Zuckerman, Elliott
Arnaiz, Deziree
Sachs, Joe
Appleby, David
Carter, Richard B.
Casey, Dylan
Cohen, Joseph
Grenke, Michael W.
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The St. John’s Review
Volume 54, Number 1 (Fall 2012)
Editor
William Pastille
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Deziree Arnaiz
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson, President;
Pamela Kraus, Dean. All manuscripts are subject to blind review.
Address correspondence to The St. John’s Review, St. John’s College, P.O. Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 21404-2800.
©2012 St. John’s College. All rights reserved. Reproduction in
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ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing
The St. John’s Communications Office
Current and back issues of The St. John’s Review are available online at
www.stjohnscollege.edu/news/pubs/review.shtml.
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
�Contents
Essays & Lectures
The Dispassionate Study of the Passions ..............................1
Eva Brann
On Biblical Style .................................................................17
Tod Linafelt
What is the Surface Area of a Hedgehog?...........................45
Barry Mazur
Some Reflections on Darwin and C. S. Peirce ....................87
Curtis Wilson and Chaninah Maschler
Poem
The Laws of Physics .........................................................124
Marlene Benjamin
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
�ESSAYS & LECTURES
1
The Dispassionate Study
of the Passions
Eva Brann
Plato’s dialogue Gorgias ends with a long speech culminating
in a rousing cry by an aroused Socrates. He is speaking to
Gorgias’s student Callicles about his swaggering opinionatedness and their common uneducatedness. The words he uses
are neanieusthai, ‟to act like a youth,” to behave like a kid,
and apaideusia, ‟lack of teaching,” ignorance. And then he
concludes with a condemnation of Callicles’s whole ‟way of
life”—tropos tou biou—‟to which you summon me, believing in it”—hōi su pisteuōn eme parakaleis. esti gar oudenos
axios, ō Kallikleis—‟For it is worth nothing, Callicles!” My
fine 1922 edition of the Gorgias by the classicist Otto Apelt
rightly translates the address O Kallikleis, jingling in the Gorgian manner with parakaleis, as ‟My Callicles,” for there is
a curious, straining intimacy in Socrates’s peroration.1 The
rest is silence. It is a favorite question of mine to ask our
freshmen at St. John’s College, who all read this dialogue,
what happened that night at home, when Callicles was, perhaps, by himself.
Now some of you may have heard of the late Seth Bemardete, a student of Leo Strauss and a brilliant classicist at
New York University. In our youth we traveled together, and
Seth once imparted to me the following wild conjecture.
‟Plato,” it was said, was a nickname given to him because
of his broad shoulders.2 His real name was Aristocles: Callicles, Aristocles—he of noble fame, he of good fame; kalos
Eva Brann is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis. This lecture was
presented to the graduate students of the School of Philosophy at the
Catholic University of America on March 30, 2012.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
k’agathos was the Greek way of denominating what Chaucer
calls ‟a verray parfit gentil knicht,” a good and noble knight,
a perfect gentleman.3 So Plato represents himself in this dialogue as a noble yet rudely unregenerate youth in his moment
before conversion, a conversion accomplished by a usually
imperturbable Socrates impassioned to speak, for once, extendedly and hotly.
Do I believe this clever combination of clues? Not really.
Plato was, after all, of good family and a writer of tragedies
before Socrates captivated him, and the swaggering surly
youth Callicles has little of the high-bred, suave poet about
him, a poet who was, moreover, probably already philosophically involved when he met Socrates.4
Nonetheless, this anecdote about a conjecture seems to
me thought-provoking. Here, for once, Plato permits us to
see the spectacle of rational Socrates in a passion, un-ironic,
touched to the quick—surely this is not a mere mean anger
at being dissed by a Gorgiastic know-it-all.
Many of you are already teachers, though perhaps young
in comparison to Plato (b. 427 B.C.E.) when he wrote the
Gorgias (c. 387 B.C.E.). He was probably forty, and his
Socrates (b. 470) was probably about the same age at the dramatic date of this dialogue (shortly after 429, the year of Pericles’s death, which is mentioned as a recent event in 503c).
You will have experienced the unbalancing sense that the
stakes are high and souls are to be pierced and that passion,
or an exhibition of it, is in order. It is, to be sure, a wonderful
question about the nature of passion whether deliberate
demonstrativeness or disciplined reticence, either in the
speaker or the listener, does more to nourish it or to dampen
it, and how spontaneity and artfulness play into the effect.
But we do know that Aristotle believed Socrates’s display in
the Gorgias was effective. He tells of a Corinthian farmer
who was inspired by his reading of the dialogue to leave his
vineyard to its own devices, to join the Platonic circle, and
henceforth to make his soul the ‟seedbed,” that is, the seminar, of Plato’s philosophy.5
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
3
The Gorgias is, therefore, a good reference for beginning
to talk about the affects as an object of study. Not merely because it documents, so to speak, that people concerned with
the soul have in fact plenty of temperament—be it sober
Socrates or meek Jesus (e.g., Matt. 21:12, Jesus wreaking
havoc in the temple)—and that they don’t leave their affect
at the entrance to their inquiries or preachings. I don’t, of
course, mean the little negative furies that Socrates calls
‟eristic,” the eruptions of the contentious desire to win arguments, but I’m thinking of a large positive passion.
So this is where I zero in on my particular problem for
this talk. I have read my way through a tiny fraction of the
huge mass of contemporary writing on the emotions. I’ve
come away with the cumulative—documentable—impression that there is a thoroughgoing misapprehension about a
putative pagan rationalism and a supposed Western tradition
for which it is held responsible and which breaks out with insidious virulence in the Enlightenment. This view owes
something, I suppose, to Nietzsche’s brilliantly skewed portrait of the ‟despotic logician,” Socrates, the monster with
the ‟one, great Cyclopean eye,” in whom “the lovely madness of artistic enthusiasm never glowed.”6 The attribution of
monocular Cyclopeanism—i.e., vision without depth, carrying with it the charge of despotic sobriety—implies thought
unravished by beauty. All this imputed to a man who thought
that our soul contained a world that we could recover by
going within,7 and believed that true poetry requires a
Dionysiac frenzy inspired by the Muses, one cognate in kind
to the philosophical longing for beauty!8 All this ascribed to
a man who, attending a drinking party, bathed for once and
wearing shoes, slyly paints a verbal picture of Eros that is in
fact a self-portrait—Socrates looking at himself from a distance and recognizing the unwashed and unshod god!9
So much for the picture of Socrates the rationalist. And
something similar holds for Aristotle the intellectualist. His
great work, the founding book of institutionalizable philosophy (since it pre-sets the problems to be solved in Meta-
�4
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
physics III), begins with an appetite, a root passion, which,
in the form of the desire to know, is humanly universal and
culminates in a passionate portrait of the ultimate object of
appetition. This ultimate object is a divinity that attracts,
without returning, love—an object that satisfies, that fulfills,
by its mere actuality, by its unadulterated energeia (Metaphysics II; XII.7), as in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94:
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
unmoved . . .
except that the pure energeia of the divinity is the very opposite of the practically complete inertia of those unaffectable
human objects of attraction, these beautiful but hyletic lumps
of mere resistance that the speaker of the poem is excoriating.
Would it be too much to claim that this is the difference
between the philosophical Greeks and the God-regarding Hebrews, more significant than Homer’s anthropomorphic polytheism, which is in any case more characteristic of the poets
and the people than of the philosophers? I mean the lack of
reciprocity between adoring human and worshipped divinity:
The Socratic forms are great powers (Sophist 247e), but even
when they come on the comic stage in visible shape—which
they do in Aristophanes’s Clouds where they appear as
wordily nebulous beings, as shaped mists—they don’t do a
thing for their summoning worshipper, Socrates. In fact they
abandon him to possible suffocation in his thinkaterion—the
play leaves this uncomic outcome open—and exit satisfied
with their ‟temperate” performance (Clouds 269, 1509). The
Aristotelian divinity, Nous, is similarly unresponsive, an object of uninvolved attraction. The God of the Jews, on the
other hand, is beneficently or banefully involved with his
people, and when a certain Jewish sect grows into a great religion, He becomes caring outreach itself, namely, Love (e.g.,
Exodus 20:1-6, I John 4:8, 16).
Why am I dwelling first on the pagans and on the Chris-
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
5
tians in talking to you about the study of the passions, when
the contemporary writers on the emotions simply drown out
these earlier voices by their volume? It’s not that I have much
faith in the explanatory power of chronology or in those longitudinal studies by which a genetic history is attributed to
ideas, and which tend to develop more arcane information
than illuminating depth. I can think of a half-dozen reasons
for my distrust, which there is no time to set out at the
podium, though we might talk about the implied historicism
of such studies in the next few days. Moreover, it is probably
less necessary at a Catholic university than at any other to try
to induce respect for the tradition. There is, however, a particular way in which I think that emotion studies should begin
with, or pick up at some point, the great ancient and medieval
works—of the latter, above all, Thomas’s ‟Treatise on the
Passions,” which he placed in the very center of the Summa
Theologiae, for this monk knew—God knows how—everything about human passion.
I think these pre-modern works should be studied for their
shock value, for the news they contain for us. Such a reading,
a reading that places them not in the bygone superseded past
but in a recalcitrantly unfashionable present, requires a difficult and never quite achievable art, one that graduate students
should certainly be eager to acquire: first, the art of summing
up, with some credibility, what a philosopher is really and at
bottom about (I don’t mean ‟all about,” a hand-waving locution, but the compact gist of his intention); and second, the
art of discerning how the particular part on which you mean
to focus is, or fails to be, properly derivative from that central
intention. Then, opposing gist to gist and consequence to consequence, there will emerge a coherent and discussable
schema both of the general notions that preoccupy the
denizens of modernity willy-nilly and of the sophisticated
twists that studious scholars and trendy intellectual elites
have given them. Approached in this way, emotion studies
seem to me as necessary to our self-understanding as any subject can be—necessary to us as human beings with a contem-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
porary affectivity.
So now let me give you some, perhaps vulnerably sweeping, observations about more recent emotional studies, particularly in English-speaking lands. The groundbreaking
works for us were English; I will name Errol Bedford (1956)10
and Anthony Kenny (1963).11 But the American father of this
field is Robert Solomon with his book The Passions (1976).12
The Solomonic beginning and its consequences are full
of oddities. (I am avoiding the harsher term ‟self-contradictions.”) The thesis of the book is ‟to return the passions to
the central and defining role,” snatched from them by
Socrates, and ‟to limit the pretensions of ‘objectivity’ and
self-demeaning reason that have exclusively ruled Western
philosophy, religion, and science” since his days.13
Well, I guess we’ve read different works of Western philosophy. But now comes a surprise. How will this salvation
from two and a half millennia of despotic rationalism be
achieved? We must recognize that ‟an emotion is a judgment.”14 Of course, this dictum runs into difficulties concerning the meaning of non-rational judgments. Indeed, Solomon
eventually accepted that his claim is actually a cognitive theory. As such, he says rightly, it has ‟become the touch-stone
of all philosophical theorizing about emotions.” He could, in
any case, hardly escape this cognitivist denomination, since
it turns out that we become responsible for our emotions by
adopting this very theory of cognitive emotion. For as the
theory works its way into our unconscious volitions, it will
become true, and our emotions will indeed be as much in our
control as our judgments;15 so control is what it’s—after all—
about.
The Stoics are the moderns among the ancients. Their
cognitive theories, the first truly representational theories, are
more future-fraught than any others in antiquity that I know
of; they dominate modernity until Heidegger’s Being and
Time. The Stoics are hard to study, because the deepest of
them, belonging to the so-called Early Stoa, exist only in
fragments. But we have an extended text on Stoic passion
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
7
theory, the third and fourth books Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations. Some of you, who have read the work, will recognize
that the modern dictum ‟an emotion is a judgment” is pure
Neostoicism. Neostoicism has, in fact, dominated modern
emotion studies. One major work in this vein is Martha Nussbaum’s Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions
(2001).16
But how strange! The Stoics meant to reduce emotions
to mistakes, to diseases, to pathologies, of judgment. An emotion is a false appraisal, a perturbed opinion about what matters: an ‟upheaval of thought.” It is a deep and complex
theory underwritten by the Stoics’ fearless physicalism, their
notion of a material substratum, the pneuma, on whose
ground the psychic capacities can morph into one another.
But there is no question that, taken summarily, rationality
trumps affect. How odd, then, that modem theories so largely
save the emotions from rationalism by rationalizing them.
And I’ll list associated oddities.
First is the pervasive fear for the emotions, the sense that
we moderns have suppressed and demeaned them, that they
need saving. What teacher of the young (as scholars by and
large are) or observers of the world (as some of them may
be) could possibly think that that was what was troubling the
nations, cities, neighborhoods!
Second is a curtailed sense of thought in the West. I think
I’ve given some prime examples of the interpenetration of
thought and affect, even of the primacy of appetition in the
human soul in antiquity. When the ancients fight the passions
it is because they are so alive, experientially alive, to the
meaning of the word pathos, ‟suffering,” and the effect of its
licensed reign, its invited tyranny. It is really, I think, a modern idea of emotion that is at work here, among our contemporaries, one which pits its softness against hard reason.
Inherited Enlightenment terminology indeed conveys this
sense that our passions are attenuated, all but quelled by reason. The pivotal figure here is Hume. In his Treatise of
Human Nature, the term ‟passion” begins to be displaced by
�8
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
‟emotion.” He uses both, mostly interchangeably. But emotion is the word of the future. Solomon’s book is entitled The
Passions, but the key word inside is ‟emotions.” Your own
conference called for papers on ‟Emotion.”
‟Emotion” derives from e-movere, Latin for ‟to move
out.” The significance of this substitution of emotion for passion is powerful. Ancient pathos, passion, was an affect emanating from an object; the object elicited the responsive
affect, from the outside in. Modern emotion comes from inside out; it emphasizes expression; subject prevails over object. It is the Romantic worm eating its way out of the
Enlightened apple.
At the same time, the non-affective, the rational part of
the subject becomes mere reason. Hume, famously, says:
‟Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of passions, and
can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey
them.”17 He can say that because Humean and enlightened
reason is not deeply affective, not driven by love, and so its
relation to emotion may indeed be one of subservience, standoff, or finally, enmity. I need hardly add that with this transformation of the appetitive, longing, loving, intellect into
manipulative, instrumental, willful rationality, philosophy
loses its proper meaning and becomes a profession. My brush
here is broad, but, I think, it has some good overlap with the
case. So my second oddity is the severely foreshortened view
of the capabilities of passionate thought.
Now a third curious notion, the oddest one of all: the unreflective launching of an enterprise which is, on the face of
it, like embarking on a destroyer with the idea of going swimming. The vessel of war displaces, cleaves, churns up the element, but, absent a shipwreck, the sailor stays dry. So the
student of emotion banishes perturbations, analyzes wholes,
whips up terminology, and, unless melancholy seizes him,
sails high and dry over the billowing depths of feeling, with
much solid bulkhead keeping him from immersion in the element to be apprehended. This not very elegant simile is just
a way of expressing my surprise at the fact that emotion stud-
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
9
ies tend to precipitate themselves into a dispassionate subject
without much thought about how such a subject can come to
be—about how emotion can be subjected to thought without
being denatured in the process.
Here, incidentally, lies, it seems to me, the best reason
why cognitive scientists, and those philosophers who like to
be on solid ground, are by and large physicalists and might
well regard the Stoics as their avatars.18 What matter-and-itsmotions has in its favor in emotion studies is that in this spatial form the different motions of the mind appear not to
occlude each other; spatio-temporal events, laid our in extension and sequence, have patency. However, since cognitive
brain studies, including the emotion research, depend on prior
conceptualization and introspective protocols, it is hard to
think of them as independent of a philosophical phenomenology.
Therefore, in the unavoidable preparatory philosophical
exploration, the perplexity of thinking about feeling remains
a vexing one, the more so since it appears to me to be a variant of the greatest quandary, now and always: How is thinking about any form of our consciousness even conceivable?
How is it—or is it, indeed—that thought about awareness
does not collapse into a union, as does ‟thinking of thinking,”
the noēsis noēseōs of the Nous?19 How can we know that
thought about itself or its fellow internalities does not transform its object out of its true being?
Just this latter eventuality makes emotion studies problematic. Study does have its own affect, one of the most interesting in the list of feelings, namely, interest itself. The
word—from interesse, ‟to be in the midst of”—signifies what
student parlance calls ‟being into it.”20
To study is to bring to bear received learning and native
analytic and combinatory capacities on a determinate object.
If study is of a high quality, it is preceded and accompanied
by its opposite, leisure—free time for meditating or musing,
during which original questions rise up and take shape. But
the business itself focuses on problems such as Aristotle first
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
10
set for himself and left for his successors. Nowadays it’s the
dissertation advisor’s job. Now all the questions become formulated as demands for reasoning, and under reasoning all
things turn to reason—as under studious production all thinking turns to footnoted paper-writing.
It is indeed curious that this fact is not more of a perplexity to students of the emotions. Yet on second thought, it is
perhaps not so surprising that emotion studies seem so desiccated—perhaps they are not really more so than serious
scholarship ever must be. Robert Browning has his lovingly
respectful students sing at the “Grammarian’s Funeral”:
Learned we found him.
Yea, but we found him bald, too, eyes like lead,
Accents uncertain:
‟Time to taste life,” another would have said,
‟Up with the curtain!”
This man said rather, ‟Actual life comes next?
Patience a moment!
Grant I have mastered learning’s crabbed text,
Still there’s the comment.”
Here is the picture of interest raised to the pitch of passion. There is a sort of pure, dry, professional love (Browning’s grammarian’s passion was for Greek syntax, the
particles in particular) that can capture the loving admiration
of students. I know this from my own student days. But I
doubt that it suits philosophy, and, in particular, philosophizing about the emotions. Here another poem expresses our
condition more aptly: Wordsworth’s ‟The Tables Turned.” It
begins:
Up! up! my Friend and quit your books;
and this is its seventh verse:
Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
11
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—
We murder to dissect.
To be sure, there are now less intrusive ways of getting
inside Nature. Yet the conceptualizing of feeling will ever
and always be an abstraction in the basic sense—a removal,
a drawing away, from life. And in respect to the affects, this
sort of abstraction is doubly dubious. For in ordinary abstraction, the concept incarnate in concrete things is, by a specifically human cognitive operation, separated off from them.
But it is simply a premature, a prejudicial notion that the affects ‟stand under” (to use Kantian diction) abstractable concepts in the same way as do things.
It might follow that to view as problematic the dispassionate, studious study of the affects—be they impositions
from without or stirrings from within—is a sine qua non for
beginning rightly. I think it does follow.
There are early bonuses. I’ll give you in turn a suspicion,
a conjecture, and a figure. The suspicion is that we really are
partite beings, so that our affective and our thinking capacities are terminally distinct, structurally and dynamically heterogeneous. The conjecture is that it is this very disjunction
in their being which makes possible their conjunction in
thought and action, their effective complementarity. Here I’ve
written a sentence that I don’t even quite understand as I’m
reading it to you, and yet I have some faith in it. Finally, my
figure is that our affective capacities lie deeper in our nature
than our reflective powers.
To be sure, neuroscientists also say that certain brain
structures expressly subserving the emotions are located
deeper within the brain and appeared early in evolutionary
history, but that is not dispositive: What is biologically primitive might, after all, not be humanly primary. What I mean,
rather, is that affectivity has a certain abysmal, incomprehensible character that makes it feel—I don’t know how else to
put it—submersed; affects touch us (‟to feel” is related to the
Latin palpare, to pat) in intimate, that is, ‟innermost” regions,
�12
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
while articulable thought-activity intends, ‟stretches toward,”
emerges, towards comprehension of objects. We might be
constitutionally bipolar, extended between emotional depth
and thoughtful height. Perhaps an original question might be
formulated from this figure. It is something we could discuss
later, if you like.
Wordsworth’s lines imply that the murderous dissection
is performed on a lovely, living object. I must tell you that
emotion studies sometimes—too often—read as if they were
carried out on a latex-injected corpse that suffers every cut
with supine springiness. This is, as I’ve tried to show, a partly
inevitable result of making affectivity a ‟subject,” a thing
lying still under thought, literally ‟thrown under” its wheels.
Nonetheless, I feel tempted, by way of an ending, to say
how I think we can mitigate the dilemma, for if we can’t think
about our feelings, we’ll come apart. I’ll try to be practical.
First, then, you can’t study emotions at even the kindliest
advisor’s prompting. They are a subject that requires experiential urgency, some pressure for the relief of confusion. In
brief, you not only have to be a feeling being—as are we
all—but also a being enticingly oppressed by the enigma of
emotionality, the arcanum of affectivity. Some topics are well
approached in the brisk spirit of pleasurable problem-solving.
Not this one, I think.
Second, listen to what Socrates says in the Apology. He
does not say, as is often reported, that ‟the unexamined life
is not worth living.” What he really says is, I think, something
stronger: that such a life is ‟not livable for a human being,”
ou biōtos anthrōpōi (38a), is not a possible life, not a lived
life. That is what the -tos ending of biōtos signifies: ‟livable
or lived.” He means, I think, that experiences, passions
among them, that are not internally re-viewed, introspectively
re-lived, are in effect unlived—an unexamined experience is
not yours. A nice corroborating illustration comes in Thomas
Mann’s Magic Mountain, whose hero—meant to be a paradigm of simple humanity—engages in an introspective discipline he calls regieren, “ruling, regulating,”—in short,
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
13
digesting, appropriating his affects and images.21 For as experimental emotion research requires protocols drawn from inner
experience, so conceptual emotion studies cannot do without
introspection. And unlike egocentric self-analysis, which is a
spontaneous sport, disciplined self-inspection is an art learned
by practice. So now I seem to have contravened everything I’ve
just said, which was that feeling is choked by thinking.
Here, then, is my last attempt at being practical about our
problem as students: how to keep feeling before ourselves while
bringing thought to bear on it. Or, more learnedly put: how to
turn what is, regarded in itself, the most subjective element of
our being, perhaps our very subjectivity itself, into an object. (I
will get myself into a word muddle here, unless I remind you
that before the eighteenth century “subject” meant just what we
now call “object”—for example, the being that arouses passion,
and we still use it in this way, as in “the subject to be studied.”
But by means of an inversion that is only partial, “subject” is
now used for the host of the emotion rather than for its object,
and “subjective” signifies a feature of emotional affect.)
Deliverance from the quandary of objectifying the essentially subjective seems to me to come from our great representational faculty, the imagination. Mental images are summoned
by feeling, arouse feeling and are, famously, affect-fraught, feeling-laden. There are those who deny that we have analogue images before an inner eye, but they are in retreat. The cognitive
scientist Stephen Kosslyn (the prime defender of mental analogue images),22 lay persons in general, and most students of
the imagination are convinced by their own inner experience of
imaginative vision and its affectivity—and what claim could
possibly override such personal, one might say, eye-witness
knowledge? (I might add here that the very latest neuroscience
seems, though incidentally, to clinch the argument for mental
visuality; mental images are directly machine-retrievable.23)
These affect-laden sights can indeed be held in mind, and
thinking can turn to them, play over them, study them. So, it
seems to me, emotion studies require an imaginative life. Here
is a practical consequence: Your profession requires you to read
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scholarly articles, but your mission needs you to read works of
fiction, particularly novels. For these not only stock your minds
with visualizable scenes of passion on which to dwell while you
think, they also school you in the adequately expressive diction
with which to articulate what you discovered. For, my fellow
students, if you speak of feeling either in flabbily pretentious or
technically formalizing diction, your papers will be worth—
well, next to nothing.
NOTES
1. Platons Dialog Gorgias, ed. Otto Apelt (Leipzig: F. Meiner, 1922),
166. This is the very end of the dialogue, at 527e.
2. Debra Nails, The People of Plato (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002), 243.
3. Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, Middle-English edition, Prologue, l. 72 (New York: Penguin Classics, 2005), 5.
4. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Book III, Chapter 5, “Plato,” trans. R. D. Hicks, Loeb Classical Library 184 (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1925).
5. This anecdote is found in a fragment from Themistius in the so-called
Akademie-Ausgabe of Aristotle’s works edited for the Prussian Academy
of Sciences by Immanuel Bekker (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1870), 1484b. The
fragment is translated in The Works of Aristotle, ed. W. D. Ross, Vol. 12
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), 24. The story is translated in its original
context in Robert J. Penella, The Private Orations of Themistius (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 122.
6. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, section 14: “das eine große
Zyklopenauge des Sokrates . . . in dem nie der holde Wahnsinn künstlerischer Begeisterung geglüht hat.”
7. Plato, Meno, 81c.
8. Plato, Phaedrus, 245a, 249d.
9. Plato, Symposium 203d.
10. Errol Bedford, “Emotions,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,
LVII (1956-57), 281-304.
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11. Anthony Kenny, Action, Emotion, and Will (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1963).
12. Robert Solomon, The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life
(New York: Doubleday, 1976).
13. Solomon, The Passions, xiv.
14. Ibid., 185.
15. Ibid., 188ff.
16. Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
17. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), 2.3.3. Emphasis
added.
18. See, for example, Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (New York: Harcourt, 2003), 275.
19. Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book XII, Chapter 9.
20. See Silvan Tomkins, Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, 4 vols. (New
York: Springer, 2008), Volume I, Chapter 10, “Interest–Excitement,” 185202.
21. In Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, Chapter 6, “Of the City of
God and of Evil Deliverance.”
22. See, for example, Stephen Kosslyn, Image and Brain: The Resolution
of the Imagery Debate (Boston: MIT Press, 1996).
23. Francisco Pereira et al., “Generating text from functional brain images,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 5 (August, 2011): Article 72.
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On Biblical Style
Tod Linafelt
The western tradition has not focused much attention on the
literary style of the Bible. Although it is true that the classical
literary critic Longinus (or “Pseudo-Longinus”), writing in
the first century C.E., makes a brief but famous reference to
the opening lines of Genesis in his treatise On the Sublime,1
the context for the reference is his treatment of “greatness of
thought” rather than any strictly literary qualities. More typical of pre-modern literary attitudes toward the Bible is Augustine’s judgment that biblical literature exhibits “the lowest
of linguistic style” (humillimum genus loquendi), and had
seemed to him, before his conversion, “unworthy of comparison with the majesty of Cicero.”2 Of course, readers have
not traditionally gone to the Bible in search of literary artfulness but rather for its religious value—that is, primarily as a
source for theology or for ethics. For Augustine, as for so
many religious readers after him, the Bible’s theological
truths and ethical teachings won out over its literary art or
lack thereof.3 But the fact is that the Bible—and my concern
here is more particularly with the Hebrew Bible or Christian
Old Testament—presents to the reader distinctly literary narrative and poetic works that both demand and reward expressly literary attention. Not only can we speak about the
literary style of the Bible, then, but we can and ought to speak
more precisely about its narrative style or poetic style, since
biblical narrative and biblical poetry each work with a very
different set of conventions and techniques—with different
Tod Linafelt is professor of biblical literature in the Theology Department
at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.
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literary toolkits, we might say. Reading the Bible “as literature,” then, means more than just close reading, as it is often
understood. It also means becoming familiar with and attending to the distinctive and specific workings of narrative texts
and poetic texts. It seems clear that the ancient authors were
very much aware of the differing conventions and possibilities associated with narrative and with poetry, respectively,
and that their audiences would have responded differently to
these two primary literary forms. The better we understand
these forms, the better readers we will be.
I. ANCIENT HEBREW NARRATIVE
One must admit that Augustine was not entirely wrong. It is
hard to deny that from a certain angle the Bible is among the
most “unliterary” works of literature that we have. Working
as it does with a very limited vocabulary and often repeating
a word several times rather than resorting to synonyms, biblical Hebrew narrative exhibits a style that can seem simple,
even primitive, in comparison with the classics of world literature. (Things are very different with biblical poetry, as we
will see below.) Its syntax too seems rudimentary to modern
ears, linking clause after clause with a simple “and” (what
the linguists call parataxis) that reveals little about their syntactical relation, instead of using complex sentences with subordinate clauses (hypotaxis). Notice, for example, the dogged
repetition of “face” and the run-on syntax in the following
very literal translation of Genesis 32:21 (where Jacob is sending ahead of him a very large gift to his estranged brother
Esau, in hopes that Esau will be placated over Jacob’s earlier
stealing of his blessing): “For he said, ‘Let me cover his face
with the gift that goes before my face and after I look upon
his face perhaps he will lift up my face.’” Although modern
translations tend to obscure these features, even in translation
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one is bound to notice the paucity of metaphorical description, the brevity of dialogue, the lack of reference to the interior lives of characters, the limited use of figural
perspective, and not least the jarring concreteness with which
God is sometimes imagined to be involved in human history.
Many of these features are elements of biblical literature’s
economy of style, or essential terseness. We may compare,
for example, Homer’s use of sometimes startling metaphors
in describing a scene with the practice of biblical authors (all
of whom are essentially anonymous), who by and large avoid
such elaborate figurative language. Contrast this description
in the Iliad (16.480-85, Fagles’ translation) of the death of a
single, obscure Trojan charioteer:
Patroclus rising beside him stabbed his right jawbone,
ramming the spearhead square between his teeth so hard
he hooked him by that spearhead over the chariot-rail,
hoisted, dragged the Trojan out as an angler perched
on a jutting rock ledge drags some fish from the sea,
some noble catch, with line and glittering bronze hook4
with the blunt recounting in Genesis 34 of the massacre of
an entire city by two of Jacob’s sons: “Simeon and Levi,
Dinah’s brothers, took their swords and came against the city
unawares, and killed all the males. They killed Hamor and
his son Shechem with the sword” (Gen 34:25-6). This brief
passage is typical of the tendency in biblical narrative to
avoid description of any sort, metaphorical or otherwise. The
principle applies, with some exceptions of course, not only
to physical description—so that we are rarely told what either
objects or people look like—but also, and more importantly,
to the inner lives, thoughts, and motivations of characters in
the narratives. It would be a mistake, however, to take this
economy of style as an indicator of the Bible’s essential sim-
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plicity or primitiveness as a work of literature. In fact, it is
primarily this terseness that lends biblical narrative its distinctive complexity as literature.
In beginning to think about the workings of biblical
narrative one could do no better than to read Erich Auerbach’s
“Odysseus’ Scar,” the opening chapter of his book Mimesis,
in which he compares biblical narrative style with Homeric
epic style.5 Auerbach offers the first and best modern articulation of how the austere terseness of biblical narrative is not
just the absence of style but is in fact a distinctive and profound literary mode in its own right. Auerbach describes Homeric style as being “of the foreground,” whereas biblical
narratives are by contrast “fraught with background.” In other
words, in the Iliad and the Odyssey both objects and persons
tend to be fully described and illuminated, with essential attributes and aspects—from physical descriptions to the
thoughts and motivations of characters—there in the foreground for the reader to apprehend. But with biblical narrative such details are, for the most part, kept in the background
and are not directly available to the reader. So, as noted
above, we are very rarely given physical descriptions of either objects or people in the biblical narrative.6 What do
Adam and Eve look like? We do not know. Abraham? Sarah?
Moses? We do not know. As Auerbach puts it in his comments on Genesis 22, where God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, it is unthinkable that the servants, the
landscape, the implements of sacrifice should be described
or praised, as one might expect in Homer: “they are servingmen, ass, wood, and knife, and nothing else, without an epithet.”7 Occasionally a certain quality is ascribed to some
person or object: we are told that Eve perceives that the tree
of knowledge is “a delight to the eyes” (Gen. 3:6), and likewise we are told that Joseph is “handsome and good-looking”
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(Gen. 39:6). But as a rule such minimal notations are given
only when necessary to introduce some element that is important to the development of the plot. In the present cases
the attractiveness of the tree of knowledge leads, of course,
to the eating of its fruit (But what kind of fruit? We are not
told, the long tradition of the apple notwithstanding), and
Joseph’s attractiveness leads, in the next verse, to the sexual
aggression of Potiphar’s wife, and thus indirectly to Joseph’s
imprisonment. And even here one notices that we are not told
what it is that makes the fruit lovely to look at or what exactly
makes Joseph so beautiful.
Beyond a lack of physical description in the biblical stories, descriptions of personal qualities are also largely absent.
That is, characterization is rarely explicit, but rather must be
teased out of the narrative based on what characters do and
say (on action and dialogue, in other words, rather than on
direct evaluation by the narrator). The presentation of Esau
and Jacob in Genesis 25 illustrates this nicely. We are told
that Esau is “a man skilled in hunting, a man of the field” (v.
27), but the essential characterization of Esau as impulsive
and unreflective, indeed almost animal-like, is conveyed by
action and dialogue. Thus, coming in from the field to discover that his brother Jacob has prepared a stew, Esau inarticulately blurts out, “Let me eat some of that red, red stuff,
for I am famished” (v. 30). Robert Alter notes that Esau “cannot even come up with the ordinary Hebrew word for stew
(nazid) and instead points to the bubbling pot impatiently as
(literally) ‘this red red.’”8 And then, after agreeing to trade
his birthright to Jacob in exchange for some of the stew,
Esau’s impetuous, action-oriented character is suggested by
the “rapid-fire chain of verbs”: “and he ate and he drank and
he rose and he went off.”9 The character of Esau is starkly
contrasted in the story with the character of Jacob. If Esau is
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all instinct and action, Jacob is all calculation and deliberateness. The stew is prepared and waiting for the return of Esau
from the field, and one cannot fail to notice the businesslike
manner in which Jacob first suggests, and then demands formal confirmation of, the trading of the birthright: “And Jacob
said, ‘Sell now your birthright to me.’ And Esau said, ‘Look,
I am at the point of death, so why do I need a birthright?’ And
Jacob said, ‘Swear to me now’” (vv. 31-33). These initial
thumbnail characterizations of Esau and Jacob will be
fleshed-out further two chapters later, in Genesis 27, where
the blind Isaac is deceived into bestowing his blessing on
Jacob rather than the intended son Esau. The elaborate ruse
carried out by Jacob with the invaluable help of his mother
Rebekah, in which he impersonates Esau, confirms his calculating ambition even as it adds outright deceit to his resume
of character traits. Jacob will become a consummate trickster
as the story proceeds—though he will also, as an elderly man,
be tricked by his own sons (ch. 37)—but he is never actually
described by the narrator as tricky or deceptive, in the way
that Odysseus is described repeatedly in terms of his resourcefulness or Achilles in terms of his rage, for example,
but instead has his character revealed by what he says and
what he does. Esau, for his part, will play a lesser role in the
narrative that follows, although his reappearance in Chapter
33 is striking and in some ways unexpected, but both his inarticulateness and his utter lack of calculation are revealed by
his response upon hearing that Jacob has stolen his blessing:
“he cried out with an exceedingly great and bitter cry and he
said to his father, ‘Bless me, me also, Father’” (v. 34); and
again, a few verses later, “‘Do you have but one blessing my
father? Bless me, me also, Father.’ And Esau lifted up his
voice and wept” (v. 38). By not directly revealing the qualities of character of the actors in the narrative, the narrator
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puts the onus of interpretation on the readers, who must work
out on their own—albeit with hints given—what they think
of these characters. To repeat, this is not the absence of characterization, but is a certain mode of characterization, and in
fact a fairly complex mode at that.
We may best see the complexity of this mode of characterization, and indeed of the Bible’s economy of style more
generally, when it comes to the inner lives of the characters.
Readers are often used to having access in one form or another to the thoughts, feeling, and motivations of the characters about whom they read. Again, Auerbach on Homer:
“With the utmost fullness, with an orderliness which even
passion does not disturb, Homer’s personages vent their inmost hearts in speech; what they do not say to others, they
speak in their own minds, so that the reader is informed of it.
Much that is terrible takes place in the Homeric poems, but
it seldom takes place wordlessly.”10 And so, for instance, the
tragic death of Hector at the hands of Achilles near the end
of the Iliad (in book 22) has devoted to it, in the Greek, fourteen lines of lament by Hector’s father, seven lines by his
mother, and fully forty lines by his wife Andromache. We
may compare this with the brief notations of grief in biblical
narrative. On the death of Sarah: “And Sarah died at KiriathArba (that is, Hebron) in the land of Canaan, and Abraham
went in to mourn for Sarah and to weep for her” (Gen. 23:2).
On the death of Moses: “And the Israelites wept for Moses
in the plains of Moab thirty days; then the period of mourning
for Moses was ended” (Deut. 34:8). One might object that
since both Sarah and Moses had lived long and fruitful lives
their deaths lack the tragedy of noble Hector being cut down
in his prime over the affairs of his less-than-noble brother
Paris, so that their deaths inspire less intense expressions of
mourning. But even with more obviously tragic deaths we
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see in biblical narrative the restraint of the narrator, who acknowledges the grief of the survivors but refrains from allowing them full expression of it. We noted above, for
example, Jacob’s response to what he takes to be evidence of
the death of his young, beloved son Joseph: “A vicious beast
has devoured him, Joseph torn to shreds!” (Gen. 37:33). In a
scene that seems intended to characterize Jacob as an extravagant mourner, the narrator goes on to describe Jacob as rending his clothes and donning sackcloth and refusing to be
comforted by his other children: “‘No, I shall go down to
Sheol to my son, mourning.’ Thus his father bewailed him”
(37:35). Yet even here the few scant lines in Hebrew do not
come close to matching the sixty lines of direct lament over
the death of Hector, not to mention the extended scene in
Book 24 of the Iliad where Hector’s father Priam goes to the
tent of Achilles to beg for the return of his son’s much-abused
corpse.
Consider also the notoriously ambiguous story in Leviticus 10 of the burning Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron.
The reader is told that the two young priests brought “strange
fire” or “alien fire” (‘esh zara) before the Lord, “and fire
came out from before the Lord and consumed them, and they
died before the Lord” (10:2). Moses very quickly offers a sort
of cryptic theodicy, cast in verse form, in the face of the
shocking event: “This is what the Lord spoke, saying,
‘Through those near me I will show myself holy / and before
all the people I will be glorified’” (10:3). No more laconic
response could be imagined, both to the death of the young
men and to Moses’ extemporaneous theologizing, than that
attributed to Aaron: “And Aaron was silent.” Surely we are
to imagine Aaron’s grief as real and deep—indeed, a few
verses later Moses forbids Aaron and his other sons to go
through the public rituals of mourning while they are conse-
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crated for service in the temple (10:6-7)—and yet all we are
given is his silence. Unless one imagines this silence to indicate a complacent assent to what has just been witnessed, the
narrator gives us, to borrow from Auerbach again, “a glimpse
of unplumbed depths.” It is, in short, a silence that is “fraught
with background,” a silence that demands interpretation on
the part of the reader. Is Aaron feeling pure shock? Overwhelming sadness? Anger at God? Confusion or despair? Is
his silence a rejection of Moses’ statement of God’s intent?
And if so, on what basis? The fact is that we are given no access whatsoever into the inner life of Aaron, and because we
do not know what he is thinking we also do not know what
motivates his silence.
It is with regard to this latter issue, the question of character motivation, that we may see the importance of recognizing the distinctively terse mode of biblical narration. As I
noted above in considering the story of Jacob and Esau, the
narrator reveals very little about the inner lives of characters,
instead reporting mainly action and dialogue, what the characters do and what they say. If we are given little or no access
to the thoughts and feelings of the characters about whom we
read, then it follows that the motivation behind what they do
and say is also largely obscure. The importance of this obscurity of motivation can scarcely be overstated for any literary reading biblical narrative, since it more than anything
else is what gives the literature its profound complexity as it
forces the reader to negotiate the many possible ways of
imagining the characters’ inner lives. Let me try to justify this
claim with reference to the literature itself.
A classic example of the ambiguity of character motivation in the Bible may be seen in Genesis 22. In a story that
has never failed to engage the imagination of interpreters ancient and modern, God commands Abraham to take his son
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Isaac and sacrifice him as a burnt offering. Although a few
chapters earlier we have seen Abraham challenge the justness
of God’s decision to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, here
Abraham says nothing in response. Instead, there is the narrator’s terse report: “So Abraham rose early in the morning,
saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him,
and his son Isaac; he cut the wood for the burnt offering, and
set out and went to the place in the distance that God had
shown him” (vv. 3-4). Abraham’s silent obedience here is
often taken to be motivated by an untroubled and unquestioning faith in God, which, depending on one’s perspective, may
be seen positively as an expression of ultimate piety, or negatively as an expression of unfeeling religious fanaticism. But
both interpretations fail to recognize the fundamental literary
convention of the refusal of access to the inner lives of characters. The fact that we are not told of Abraham’s inner, emotional response to the demand that he slaughter his son does
not mean that he has no inner, emotional response. Surely we
are to imagine that he does, but rather than describing it for
us or allowing Abraham to give voice to it the narrator leaves
us guessing as to what that response might be and thus also
as to his motivation for his actions. Now, it is possible to fill
that gap left by the narrator with an inner calm that reflects
absolute faith, but it is equally possible to imagine that Abraham is feeling anger, disbelief, and even disgust. (With God
for demanding the slaughter? With himself for not protesting?) And however one fills the gap of Abraham’s inner life
initially, surely it is complicated by Isaac’s calling out to him
in v. 7, “Father!” and by the plaintive question that follows,
“The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for a
burnt offering?” It is precisely because we do not know what
Abraham is thinking or feeling that his brief response to
Isaac’s question (“God will see to the lamb for the offering
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my son,” v. 8) takes on a deeply ironic double meaning. On
the one hand, it may be read as a ruse, if not an outright lie,
to deflect any suspicions that may be dawning on the son; on
the other hand, it may be read as a straightforward statement
of faith that a sheep will indeed be provided. It may even be
the case here that the author makes use of the ambiguities of
Hebrew’s seemingly rudimentary syntax in order to signal
the potential irony to the attentive reader. For there is no
punctuation in the Hebrew text and one may also construe
the syntax to mean: “God will see to the lamb for the offering:
namely, my son.”
To go back to Abraham’s initial response to Isaac, we
may see how what at first instance looks like wooden repetition may in fact be a subtly modulated use of a key word or
theme. When God first calls out to Abraham to begin the
episode, Abraham’s response is “Here I am”; when Isaac calls
in the middle of the episode, on the way to the place of sacrifice, Abraham’s response is, once again, “Here I am, my
son”; and when, at the climactic moment when the knife is
raised over the boy, the angel of Lord calls out “Abraham,
Abraham!” (22:11) his response is again “Here I am.” In each
case the single Hebrew word hinneni, “here I am” or “behold
me,” is repeated by Abraham. To substitute a synonym for
the sake of variety, as for example the JPS Tanakh does in
translating the second occurrence as “Yes, my son,” is to lose
a concrete expression of what is certainly a central theme for
the story, namely the anguished tension between the demands
of God and the ethical demands of another human being
(Abraham’s own child no less!). Surely every ethical impulse
demands that Abraham not kill his son, and yet precisely this
is what God demands that he do. He responds “Here I am”
to both God and Isaac, and yet he cannot be fully “there,”
fully present, to both equally. It is only with the third, very
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late, repetition of “Here I am” that the tension is resolved and
Abraham is no longer caught between these opposing demands on his loyalty. One might say that Abraham’s threefold
response provides the underlying armature for the story,
marking in a classically Aristotelian way the beginning, the
middle, and the end. Although the single word hinneni is literally repeated each time, it acquires a new depth of meaning—and certainly a new tone—with each repetition. And to
the end of the story it remains the case that we are never quite
sure what Abraham is thinking as he first travels in silence,
then responds to his son, then binds and raises the knife, and
finally sacrifices the ram instead.
If we do not know what motivates Abraham in Genesis
22, it is also the case that we do not know what motivates
Isaac to make his enquiry as to the whereabouts of the sheep
or what he is thinking as his father binds him and lays him
on the makeshift altar. But by this point we are not surprised
by this fact, since we have begun to see that the biblical authors make use of this convention in order to allow for depth
of character and depth of meaning. It is perhaps somewhat
more surprising to note that this convention applies to God
too, who is, after all, a character in these narratives as well,
and so the literary art of biblical narrative has distinct theological implications. What motivates God to demand the sacrifice of Isaac? The narrator refuses to tell us, though for any
reader, religious or not, this must certainly be a compelling
question. We are told that “God tested Abraham” (22:1); but
this does not give us an answer to our question. The sense of
the word “test” (Hebrew nissah) is something like “trial” or
“ordeal,” and so God decides to put Abraham through an ordeal, presumably to test his mettle. (A comparison with the
opening chapters of Job is apt.) But why, and to what end? Is
it to find out how strong Abraham is under pressure? To see
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whether he values his son more than he values God? Does
God genuinely learn something new about Abraham, about
humanity, or about God’s self through this test? (“Now I know
that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me
your son, your only son” [22:12].) Without knowing what
motivates God or what God is thinking as the knife is raised,
we cannot finally even know whether Abraham has passed
or failed the test. Most readers assume that he has passed, but
a few have dared to suggest that God wanted not blind obedience from Abraham but bold resistance—after all, such resistance was honored when Abraham argued on behalf of
Sodom and Gomorrah—and that in failing to argue with God,
Abraham failed to show the strength of character that God
hoped to see.11 This reading may seem to go against the grain
of the narrative, especially in light of 22:16-17: “By myself
have I sworn, said the LORD, for because you have done this
thing, and have not withheld your son, your only son: That
in blessing I will bless you, and in multiplying I will multiply
your seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is
on the sea shore.” But the fact that such a reading is nonetheless possible—if only just—witnesses to the profound but
productive ambiguity of Hebrew literary style, which exploits
to great effect its distinctive economy of style.
There is very much more that could be said about the literary art of Hebrew narrative, especially about the patterns
or structures that authors and editors have used to construct
both individual stories and larger blocks of material, but before moving to consider poetry, I want to point out one final
way in which the literary and the theological are bound together. I mentioned at the beginning of this essay the jarring
concreteness with which God is sometimes imagined in the
Bible as active in the world: God walks in the garden of Eden
and enjoys the evening breeze; God shows up at the tent of
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Sarah and Abraham to promise them offspring; God destroys
Pharaoh’s army at the Red Sea; God inscribes with God’s
own hand the tablets of the covenant at Sinai; and in the final,
poignant scene of the Torah at the end of Deuteronomy, God
buries Moses after allowing him a vision of the promised land
that he is not finally to enter. But if the Hebrew literary imagination is relentlessly concrete in its workings, including its
imaginings of God, it does not follow that it is without craft
or nuance. In fact, divine agency and human agency are almost always imagined in these narratives as being inextricably but ambiguously bound together in such a way that
neither agency is autonomous or effective in and of itself.12
And so, God announces to Rebekah in Genesis 25 that the
elder of her twins (Esau) will serve the younger (Jacob); but
two chapters later, when the time has come to deliver the
blessing to the proper son, God has apparently left the matter
to Rebekah to work out, which she does with great effectiveness (see ch. 27). In Genesis 50, Joseph may declare to his
brothers, who had sold him into slavery thirteen chapters and
many years earlier, that “Even though you intended to do
harm to me, God intended it for good”; but the story also suggests that it is largely his own wits and talent, rather than any
supernatural intervention, that allows him to survive and
prosper in Egypt.
Even in the Exodus story, where God’s salvific power
seems more tangible than anywhere in the Bible, the divine
plan requires human agents for implementation. And so, after
a flurry of first-person active verbs by which the Lord resolves to liberate Israel from slavery (“I have seen . . . , I have
heard . . . , I have come down to rescue . . . , I will bring them
up [3:7-8]), God shifts unexpectedly to the second person,
saying to Moses, “And now, go and I will send you to
Pharaoh, and you will bring my people the Israelites out of
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Egypt” (3:10). Moses quite naturally responds, “Who am I,
that I should go to Pharaoh and that I should bring out the Israelites from Egypt?” God’s answer is telling with regard to
the interdependence of divine and human agency: “I will be
with you” (v. 12). Who is it that liberates Israel—God or
Moses? It is both. But even that answer is too simple, since
the liberation of Israel requires not only the cooperation of
God and Moses but of Israel as well. Thus, Moses dutifully
announces to the enslaved Israelites God’s plan to liberate
them, which is again stated in a surge of first-person verbs:
“I will take you out . . . , I will rescue you from bondage . . . ,
I will take you . . . , I will be your God . . . , I will bring you
to the land I promised” (Ex. 6:6-8). The response? “They did
not heed Moses because their spirits had been crushed by
cruel slavery.” The point would seem to be a sociological one:
that the people cannot be liberated before they are ready, and
after generations of bondage and hard labor it will take more
than promises to get them ready. Only after seeing the very
real power of Pharaoh broken by repeated plagues are the Israelites able to summon the energy to come out of Egypt.
Pharoah himself is also a locus for this fundamental tension—in this case it is paradoxical—between divine sovereignty and human agency. On the one hand, God claims
responsibility for “hardening” Pharaoh’s heart so that he refuses to allow Israel to leave (Ex. 7:3; 14:4); but on the other
hand, Pharaoh is said by the narrator to have hardened his
own heart (8:11, 28). At other times a passive voice is used,
so that Pharaoh’s heart “was hardened” or “became hard”
(7:14; 8:15; 9:4)—thereby leaving the agency behind the
hardening unclear. This shifting of agency allows the narrative to retain a sense of God’s sovereign activity in history,
while at the same time affirming the moral culpability of
Pharaoh, whose repeated failure to fulfill his promise of free-
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ing the Israelites represents rather realistically the psychology
of a tyrant. Logically, we readers may want to know, Which
was it? Did God harden Pharaoh’s heart, or did Pharaoh
harden his own heart? But the story refuses to settle the question, giving us a “both/and” that reflects a pronounced trend
in biblical narrative to render not only the inner lives of both
humans and God, but also creation and history itself, as unfathomably complex and finally unresolvable mysteries.
II. ANCIENT HEBREW POETRY
“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off,”
Emily Dickinson once wrote, “I know that is poetry.”13 Dickinson was, of course, somewhat more than averagely tuned
in to the effects of poetry. In truth, poetry—even great poetry—often fails to take the top of one’s head off, and even
sometimes goes unrecognized as poetry. There is no more
striking example of this than the Bible, which contains a distinctive body of poetry that has been, for two thousand years,
only rarely and inconsistently represented on the page in the
form of verse rather than prose. Though some passages are
lined out in the ancient and medieval manuscript traditions,
these include not only ones that we would now recognize as
poetry but also lists of names that are clearly not poetry (in
the same way that the phonebook is not poetry just because
it is lined out). And printed Bibles from Guttenberg on, until
the twentieth century, represent most of the poetic sections
of the Bible as blocks of text indistinguishable from prose.
The question of whether biblical poetry even exists has
been around since ancient times, and it has been exacerbated
by the fact that our primary models for what counts as poetry
are drawn from the highly metrical verse found in classical
literature. Already in the first century C.E., Jewish intellectuals like Philo and Josephus, feeling the need to defend their
cultural heritage in terms of Greek and Roman ideals, went
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looking for iambs and hexameters in the Torah. And they
were followed in this task by later Christian writers such as
Origen (in the early third century) and Jerome (in the fourth
and fifth centuries), who also assumed that if poetry existed
in the Bible then it must exist in metrical form. The search
for meter in biblical literature has been revived on occasion
in the modern period as well, but it has never amounted to
much, for the simple fact that ancient Hebrew verse is not
metrical. This lack of conformity to classical standards—as
well as to virtually all poetry in the West until the nineteenth
century—has no doubt been a major factor in the tradition’s
lack of appreciation for biblical poetry, but so has the Bible’s
status as religious literature. Attention to literary form has
been a low priority for interpreters of the Bible, eager as they
have been to move to the content or the meaning of any given
passage. There has been very little allowance in biblical interpretation for the possibility that, as Wallace Stevens puts
it, “poetry is the subject of the poem.”14
A major breakthrough in understanding biblical poetry
came with Robert Lowth’s Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of
the Hebrews, first delivered in association with Lowth’s chair
in poetry at Oxford and then published in 1753. Lowth’s most
lasting contribution, for good and ill, was his identification
of parallelismus membrorum, or parallelism of lines, as the
primary structuring principle of ancient Hebrew verse.
“Things for the most part shall answer to things, and words
to words,” Lowth writes, “as if fitted to each other by a kind
of rule or measure.”15 From Psalm 114, for example:
The mountains skipped like rams,
the hills like lambs.
Or from the Song of Songs:
Love is strong as death,
jealousy harsh as the grave.
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Notice how “mountains” matches “hills,” and how “rams”
matches “lambs.” And notice the strict parallelism of
“love//jealousy,” “strong//harsh,” and “death//grave.” Lowth
admitted that many lines of biblical poetry did not display
the same equivalence of terms that we see here, but nonetheless the recognition that lineation was based on the matching
of two or three short lines in a couplet or triplet form, which
did not depend on meter, opened the way for more sustained
attention to such poetry as poetry, rather than just repetitioussounding prose.
For 200 years after Lowth nearly all attention to biblical
verse was on this phenomenon of parallelism, and most especially semantic parallelism (or parallelism of meaning),
which too often was reduced to the idea that the second or
third line in a couplet or a triplet simply restates the basic
idea from the first line. But recent scholarship has shown that
the relationship between lines is more intricate and more interesting than this. Adele Berlin, Michael O’Connor, F. W.
Dobbs-Allsopp and others have shown that that parallelism
involves not only semantic features but also grammatical,
syntactical, and phonological patterns (generally not apparent
in translation), and that there are complex syntactical constraints that underlie the ancient Hebrew poetic line, which
are not in the end reducible to “parallelism.”16 Moreover,
Robert Alter and James Kugel have shown that even when
the relationship between lines looks to be semantically parallel at first glance, there is often a subtle dynamism in which
the second line moves beyond the language or imagery in the
first by making it more concrete, more specific, more intense,
or more emotionally heightened.17 Thus, in the matched lines
quoted above from the Song of Songs: jealousy is a more specific emotion associated with love; harsh heightens and intensifies the connotation of strong; and the grave serves as a
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concrete symbol of death.
Beyond the question of line structure, however, the cluster of other features that typify biblical verse has mostly been
overlooked by scholarship of recent decades. But one can get
a much richer sense of the distinctive workings of biblical
poetic style by recognizing these features—features that can
be seen more clearly when compared with the workings of
biblical prose narrative. As we saw above, ancient Hebrew
authors developed a prose style that was especially suited for
narrative (or storytelling) and that prefigured in important respects the style and techniques of both modern novelistic fiction and history-writing. Virtually all other long narratives in
the ancient world—from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the Babylonian Enuma Elish to the Canaanite epics to the Iliad and
the Odyssey—take the form of verse, reflecting the oral origins of the epic genre. By casting their stories in the form of
prose, biblical authors pioneered a “writerly” form of narrative that did not depend on the rhythms of oral poetry and
that allowed for the development of a genuine third-person
narrator, whose voice could be distinguished from the direct
discourse attributed to characters within the narrative. It also
allowed for a depth-of-consciousness and an opaqueness in
its literary characters, so that, as we saw above, readers are
seldom told what characters are thinking or feeling at any
given moment, even though it is often vitally important to
characterization and to plot development.
Stylistically, however, biblical poetry works very differently. There are in the first place the formal differences that
mark the poetry as verse (instead of prose): not only lineation,
but also a compressed syntax that tends to drop particles and
pronouns in order to achieve the conciseness of the poetic
line. (Unfortunately, such syntactical structures are mostly
invisible in translation.) And biblical poetry is, to borrow
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Terry Eagleton’s vague but appropriate characterization of
poetry in general, much more “verbally inventive” than biblical prose narrative.18 The terse, straightforward style of biblical narrative means that it tends to avoid elevated diction or
figurative language. But the poetry is filled with figurative
language, from the mostly conventional imagery found in the
psalms, for example, to the more inventive imagination of
the book of Job, to the double entendres of the Song of Songs.
Thus, the troubled fate of the psalmist is, often as not, imagined in terms of “the pit” that threatens to swallow or “the
flood” that threatens to overwhelm; and God is imagined as
a “rock,” a “fortress,” or a “shield.” As the suffering Job
imagines blotting out the day of his birth, he both personifies
and eroticizes it, imagining night longing for day which, in
his counterfactual curse, never arrives:
Let the stars of its dawn be dark;
let it long for light in vain,
and never behold the eyelids of morning. (Job 3:9)
Later, Job imagines God’s enmity toward him in terms of the
ancient grudge between God-as-creator and the chaotic force
of the personified Sea:
Am I the Sea, or the Dragon,
that you set a guard over me? (7:12)
Answering Job, thirty chapters later, God returns to this
image, but redefines and re-personifies the chaotic Sea not
as an enemy combatant but as an infant to be nurtured:
Who is it that contained the Sea
as it emerged bursting from the womb?—
when I clothed it in clouds,
and swaddled it with darkness. (38:8-9)
The Song of Songs, erotic poetry set in the alternating voices
of two young lovers, prefers a lush, bodily-based array of
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metaphors. For example, the male voice proclaims:
Your breasts are like two fawns,
twins of a gazelle,
that feed among the lilies. (4:5)
Or this, from the female voice:
Like an apple tree found in the forest
is my beloved among the youths;
I delight to sit in his shade,
and his fruit is sweet to my taste. (2:3)
If line structure and other formal markers are enough to
establish the presence of verse in the Bible, they still do not
tell us much about its use or function. Again, a comparison
with biblical prose is instructive, since one of the most striking features of biblical poetry is that it is relentlessly nonnarrative. Once ancient Hebrew culture had developed the
flexible prose form that gets used for recounting stories, both
long (e.g., Genesis, 1 and 2 Samuel) and short (e.g., the books
of Ruth and Esther), it seems that verse was reserved for more
specialized, highly rhetorical uses. For example, the prophets
are most often represented as casting their messages in poetic
form. Note the parallelism and figurative language in, for example, Amos’ well-known cri de coeur,
Let justice roll down like the waters,
and righteousness like a mighty stream. (5:24)
This familiar parallel structure is combined with hyperbole
and a striking visual imagination (both very much lacking in
biblical narrative, though common in the ancient epic tradition)19 in the prophet Isaiah’s utopian vision of the future:
The wolf shall live with the lamb,
and the leopard shall lie down with the kid. (11:6)
Verse also seems to have been the preferred form in ancient
Hebrew, as in so many languages, for the aphorism—the
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pithy and often didactic observation on the nature of the
world—which, like poetry more generally, aims for a maximum of meaning in a minimum of words. The book of
Proverbs is filled with such aphorisms in verse form, such as,
A soft answer turns away wrath;
a harsh word increases anger. (15:1)
For more skeptical versions of such aphorisms, one can turn
to the book of Ecclesiastes, as in
All streams run to the sea,
but the sea is never filled . . .
The eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear filled with hearing. (1:7)
or
With much wisdom comes much grief;
to increase knowledge is to increase sorrow. (1:18)
But one of the most interesting uses of biblical verse is
as an early form of what will later go by the name of “lyric
poetry,” that intensely subjective, non-narrative and non-dramatic form that has dominated modern poetry at least since
Wordsworth. This early form of lyric foregrounds two final
characteristics of biblical poetry, both of which further distinguish it from biblical prose narrative. First, biblical poetry
is invariably presented as direct discourse, the first-person
voice of a speaking subject (a precursor of the modern “lyric
I”). Again, ancient Hebrew narrative separates the third-person narrator from the dialogue spoken by characters, which
is grammatically marked (by expressive forms and deictics,
to use the technical terms) as direct discourse, whereas the
narrator’s voice is not.20 Biblical poetry is also marked in this
way; it is, in other words, always presented as if it were dialogue. So, for example, the biblical narrator will never be represented as speaking in poetry, but characters can be, as in
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the deathbed blessing of Jacob near the end of the book of
Genesis or the Song of Deborah in the book of Judges.
The second way that biblical lyric poetry distinguishes itself from narrative is in its willingness to give access to the
inner lives of its speakers. If biblical narrative trades in
opaqueness of characterization, biblical poetry fairly revels
in the exposure of subjectivity. When biblical authors wanted
to convey feeling or thought, they resorted to verse form. Obvious examples of this formal preference include poetic
books like the Psalms and the Song of Songs, where the expression of passion, whether despairing or joyful, is common.
We find also in narrative contexts briefer poetic insets that
serve to express or intensify emotion. Take, for example,
Jacob’s reaction to the bloodied robe of Joseph, which as
Alter has pointed out is rendered as a perfect couplet of Hebrew poetry: hayya ra’ah ‘akhalathu / tarof toraf yosef (“A
vicious beast has devoured him, / torn, torn is Joseph!”).21
The book of Job serves as an example on a much larger scale.
It begins in the narrative mode and gives precious little insight into Job’s thoughts or feelings. But when the story
moves to Job’s anguished death wish (“Blot out the day of
my birth, / and the night that announced, ‘A man-child is conceived’”), narrative gives way to the passionate but finely
modulated poetic form of chapter 3, followed by many chapters in verse containing Job’s impassioned defense of his integrity.22
T. S. Eliot’s pronouncement that “when we are considering poetry we must consider it primarily as poetry and not
another thing” might seem like a truism, but it’s a sentiment
that sometimes needs repeating.23 This is especially true when
it comes to considering the poetry of the Bible, which has so
often been treated precisely as “another thing”—traditionally
as theology or as ethics, but more recently, under the guise
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of literary criticism, as narrative. By the latter, I mean that
even in recent “literary approaches” to the Bible, critics often
look for things like plot or characterization in biblical poetry,
categories more appropriate to narrative texts. But biblical
poetry is, in both the simplest and the most complicated ways,
poetry. To consider a biblical poem as poetry is to pay attention to its line structure, to its status as direct discourse, to
the sort of speaking voice it presents, to its diction and imagery, and to its willingness to express inner thought and
emotion as biblical narrative rarely does. It is, in other words,
to attend not only to what the poem means but also to how it
means.
NOTES
1. Longinus, On Sublimity, trans. D. A. Russell, in Ancient Literary Criticism: The Principal Texts in New Translations, ed. D. A. Russell and M.
Winterbottom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 470: “Similarly,
the lawgiver of the Jews, no ordinary man—for he understood and expressed God’s power in accordance with its worth—writes at the beginning of his Laws: ‘God said’—now what?—‘Let there be light,’ and there
was light; ‘Let there be earth,’ and there was earth.”
2. Confessions, VI.v and III.v, respectively.
3. So for example, C. S. Lewis, The Literary Impact of the Authorized
Version (London: The Athlone Press, 1950), 4: “There is a certain sense
in which ‘the Bible as literature’ does not exist. It is a collection of books
so widely different in period, kind, language, and aesthetic value, that no
common criticism can be passed on them. In uniting these heterogeneous
texts the Church was not guided by literary principles, and the literary
critic might regard their inclusion between the same boards as a theological and historical accident irrelevant to his own branch of study.” It is
not as clear as Lewis suggests that literary principles played no role in
the formation of the biblical canon; but even if one conceded the point
that does not mean that literary qualities are absent from the Bible, as this
essay endeavors to show.
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4. Homer, Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1991), 426.
5. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western
Literature (trans. Willard R. Trask; Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1953), 3-23.
6. This contrasts with non-narrative cultic or liturgical prose texts where,
for example, we are given quite detailed descriptions of the tabernacle
and its furnishings; see, e.g., Exodus 25-27.
7. Ibid., 9.
8. Robert Alter, Genesis: Translation and Commentary (New York: W.
W. Norton, 1996), 129.
9. Ibid., 131-32.
10. Auerbach, Mimesis, 6.
11. Elie Wiesel, Messengers of God: Biblical Portraits and Legends (New
York: Summit, 1976), 93-94; Danna Fewell and David Gunn, Gender,
Power, and Promise: The Subject of the Bible’s First Story (Nashville:
Abingdon Press, 1993), 52-54.
12. In a related vein, see Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New
York: Basic, 1981), 33-34, who writes of the dialectic between “God’s
will” and “human freedom.” For Alter, the “refractory nature” of human
freedom is imagined primarily as working against God’s will, whereas to
my mind that is not always the case.
13. Emily Dickinson, Letter 342a (to Thomas Wentworth Higginson), in
Selected Letters (ed. Thomas H. Johnson; Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1985), 208.
14. Wallace Stevens, The Man with the Blue Guitar and Other Poems
(New York: Knopf, 1937), 22.
15. Robert Lowth, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, translated from the Latin by G. Gregory (London: Thomas Tegg, 1839), 205.
16. M. O’Connor, Hebrew Verse Structure (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1980); Adele Berlin, The Dynamics of Biblical Parallelism
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985); F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp,
“Poetry, Hebrew,” New Interpreters Dictionary of the Bible, vol. 4
(Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2006).
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17. James Kugel, The Idea of Biblical Poetry: Parallelism and its History
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981); Robert Alter, The Art
of Biblical Poetry (New York: Basic, 1985).
18. Terry Eagleton, How to Read a Poem (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 25.
19. This visual quality is what Aristotle might refer to as enargeia (Poetics
1455a; Rhetoric 1410b) or “vividness.” So also Demetrius, On Style, 209220. On enargeia in classical poetry, see Egbert J. Bakker, “Mimesis as
Performance: Rereading Auerbach’s First Chapter,” Poetics Today 20:1
(1993), 11-26, who ties it to the nature of orally performed epic; also Andrew Ford, Homer: The Poetry of the Past (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1993). On vividness in epic poetry more generally, see Suzanne
Fleischman, Tense and Narrativity: From Medieval Performance to Modern Fiction (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990); and in classical
history writing Andrew D. Walker, “Enargeia and the Spectator in Greek
Historiography,” Transactions of the American Philological Associaton
123 (1993): 353-377. This quality of vividness, present also in biblical
Hebrew poetry, is largely absent in biblical Hebrew narrative.
20. On this phenomenon, see Robert Kawashima, Biblical Narrative and
the Death of the Rhapsode (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2004), ch. 3.
21. Alter, Genesis, 215.
22. Chapters 1 and 2 and then 42:7-17 of the book of Job take the form
of prose narrative, but the long central section of the book in 3:1-42:6 is
in verse form. Modern scholarship has mostly taken this as an indication
of different authors (though recent years have seen a rethinking of this),
without recognizing that the shift in literary form can be understood as
motivated by the differing literary resources offered by Hebrew prose and
Hebrew poetry. By convention, verse form allows the necessary access
to Job’s inner life in a way that prose does not, and it also allows for the
sometimes extravagant figurative language that we find in the poetic section of the book.
23. T. S. Eliot, Preface to the second edition of The Sacred Wood: Essays
on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1928), viii.
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45
What is the Surface Area
of a Hedgehog?
Barry Mazur
Well, I don’t know the answer to the question of the title and
no hedgehog will be harmed, or even mentioned again, until
the very end of my lecture.
Eva Brann suggested tonight’s lecture might address the
question, What is area? I’m delighted to do this, and I’m delighted to be here, and to be among people—you, the St.
John’s community—with whom it will be such a pleasure to
contemplate this question.
In this lecture I’ll discuss the concepts of
• area—how it is familiar to us, and how when we
push it to the limit we get some surprises;
• length—since, at least at first impression it is a
more primitive “prior” concept— seemingly simpler than area;
• proportion—crucial to the understanding of both
length and area;
• invariance—as a way of characterizing length and
area;
• quadrature—as a crucial “format” for expressing
profound area relationships in geometry.
And I’ll conclude by alluding to Archimedes’ wonderful “mechanical method” in which he transmutes the problem of
computing area into the problem of computing something
akin to weight1 and thereby achieves the quadrature of the
Prof. Barry Mazur is the Gerhard Gade University Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University. This was the annual Steiner Lecture, delivered on Friday 30 September 2011 at St. John’s College in Annapolis.
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parabola. This offers us a glimpse of the power of analogy,
and the use of the thought-experiment as already practiced in
ancient mathematics.2 It also gives us the opportunity to touch
in passing on broader issues in mathematical thought such as
analogy, heuristic, paradox, invariance, and something I’ll
call characterization (a version of axiomatization).
1. AREA AS FAMILIAR
We all know what the word area signifies. It often refers to a
territorial cordon, as in restricted area or hard-hat area or
even area studies. It sometimes comes as a number, but always with a unit attached, such as square miles, square feet,
square inches, acres, or if it’s a bed area you’re interested in,
you can ask for it to be King-size or Queen-size, or a size of
lesser nobility.
Fig. 1
If you want to approximate the area of the enclosed shape in
Fig. 1 on a grid with a mesh of one-foot by one-foot squares,
you might count the number of one-square-foot patches that
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47
comprise a union of squares that completely cover the figure
(in the above case it is 81) and count the number of onesquare-foot patches that the figure covers completely (in the
above case it is 39). Then you know that the area of the figure
in units of square feet is squeezed between these two numbers; that is, the area is smaller than the first number (or equal
to it), and bigger than the second. In the above case, we
would have
81 square feet ≥ area of figure ≥ 39 square feet.
If you want a better estimate, do the same thing with oneinch by one-inch squares.
If any of us were asked to calculate the square-footage of
this auditorium we’d come up with some figure or other, confident that we could refine it to any degree accuracy required.
And you may be painfully aware of the area of your dorm
room. So, what else is there to say?
Fig. 2
2. HOW GOOD ARE YOU AT COMPARING AREAS?
I’m not very good. Here’s an example. The area of the two
shaded triangles in Fig. 2 are equal.
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I know this thanks to Proposition 37 of Book I of Euclid’s
Elements. All of you either know that proposition now, or will
after your freshman year. This is the proposition that says that
triangles with the same base and height have the same area.
Proposition 37 of Book I will be a recurring theme in my lecture; it is a marvelous piece of mathematics that demonstrates
many things, including the maxim that to be profound and to
be elementary are not mutually exclusive virtues.
But if I simply compared those figures visually—without
either explicitly remembering or somehow “internalizing”
Euclid’s proposition—I would probably grossly underestimate (if that’s a possible phrase) the area of the spiky triangle
in comparison with the seemingly fat one. In a sense, then,
Euclid’s proposition–embedded in my central nervous system
as it is—has improved (a tiny bit, not much) my ability to
make off-the-cuff judgments and rough comparisons. Our native intuition, combined with a data bank of geometric experiences, determines our effectiveness in making judgments
about all sorts of attributes belonging to objects that we see.
I’m guessing that our eyeball comparisons are more reliable
in relation to straight-line lengths than in relation to curved
lengths,3 and much more reliable than our ability to estimate
area and volume, given the variety of possible configurations.
In teaching Euclid’s Elements, one often emphasizes “logical
thinking” as the great benefit that students take away from
learning geometry. But I also see a type of pre-logical—if I
can call it that—or intuition-enriching benefit as well. This
is hard to pinpoint, but it comes out as a general sharpening
of faculties in regard to thinking about, guessing about, negotiating, comparing, and relating geometric objects.
Such a benefit is very different from the other valuable
reward just mentioned—that is, being able to actually argue
the proof of Proposition 37 of Book I by making the elegant
construction shown in Fig. 3.
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Fig. 3
To continue our review of how good our intuitions are, let’s
pass to a slightly deeper basic geometric comparison authored by Archimedes that astonishes me now just as it must
have astonished Archimedes’ contemporaries. We will get
into this in more depth later on,4 but consider the following
striking way of recreating the area of any circle: the area of
any circle is equal to the area of a right-angle triangle defined
by the property that the two of its sides making the right angle
have lengths equal to the radius of the circle, and to the length
of the circumference of the circle, respectively. (Fig. 4)
Fig. 4
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Here, as in the previous example, I “see” it not visually (if
this can be said), but only with the help of my memory of its
proof. (I will say more about this below).
Let us push a bit further. The two examples we’ve just
reviewed are examples of nicely enclosed, finite figures. We
are even poorer in intuition when faced with planar figures
(no matter how smooth and simple their boundaries seem to
be) that “asymptote” off to infinity. It may be quite difficult,
even if given long chunks of such a shape, to extrapolate and
guess by eyeball alone whether it extends out to a figure with
infinite area or finite area.
For example, consider Fig. 5, which was drawn as accurately as possible. I wonder whether you can guess if the area
bounded by the blue curve or the pink curve has finite area.
My point is that there’s no reason why you should be able to
do it no matter what talents of visual acuity you may possess.
Fig. 5
But, just in case you are wondering, if you continued tracing the curved regions ad infinitum in the manner smoothly
begun by the sketch—meaning that the pink curve is the
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graph of the function y = 1/x and the blue curve is the graph
of the function y = 1/x2—then the (infinite) red-bounded region happens to have infinite area while the (infinite) bluebounded region has finite area. As a side issue, many calculus
students are amazed to find that if you “construct” an infinite
“trumpet” by rotating the red curve of the above figure
around the x-axis, then its surface area is infinite, even though
the volume it subsumes is finite. To put it in colloquial, but
misleading, terms: you can fill this trumpet with a finite
amount of paint, but you need an infinite amount of paint to
paint it.
This phenomenon illuminates much, especially for people
who know calculus, and could be the subject of a question
following the lecture. But I won’t dwell on this; I mention it
as a hint that there are things to dwell on here.
3. PUSHING TO THE LIMIT
You might wonder what is to be gained by asking questions
about infinite area versus finite area, or by considering the
concept of area in various extreme contexts. Mathematics
often does that sort of thing: it is a useful strategy to examine
a concept when it is brought to its limit, in the hope that the
strains inflicted on the concept will reveal important facets
of it that would be hidden in less stressful situations. If you
push a concept to its extreme border, you may see things that
would otherwise be overlooked if you remain in the comfortable zones. For example, you can learn what its precise borders are. Some of the most beautiful mathematics—and the
deepest—has emerged by seeking the extremes.
The issue we have just addressed, areas of infinitely extended regions, can be broadened, for it raises the question:
exactly how many subsets of the plane deserve to have a
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well-defined area? Do all subsets have a reasonable notion
of area?
4. AREA AS PARADOXICAL
To get the blood circulating, let’s contemplate something that
is evidently impossible: Can you
(1) take a square S in the Euclidean plane, cut it (say,
with a scissors) into four pieces A, B, C, D of equal
area—so no two of these pieces overlap, and the four of
them cover the square?
In standard notation:5
S = A ! B ! C ! D;
(2) and now can you throw away two of the pieces (say
C and D) and move the other two (A and B) around by
Euclidean motions to get congruent shapes Aʹ, Bʹ in the
plane so that these two pieces cover the exact same
square again, i.e.,
S = Aʹ ! Bʹ ?
The answer, of course, is No, you can’t do this. Certainly not
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if the concept of area has the properties that we expect to
have. By “properties” I’m referring to these two self-evident
axioms:
(1) the area of a union of non-overlapping figures is
the sum of the areas of each of the figures; and
(2) the area of a figure is preserved under Euclidean
motion.
For if you could do this, then our two formulas for S displayed above will give contradictory answers to the question,
What is the area of S?
With this in mind, consider the following strange fact
about spherical rather than Euclidean geometry. Let S be the
surface of a ball (that is, what mathematicians call the twodimensional sphere). There is a way of separating S into four
sets A, B, C, D, no two of which overlap, such that each of
these sets are—in an evident sense—congruent to any of the
others. (This means that, for example, there is a way of rotating the sphere that brings A precisely to the position that
B occupied (before that rotation)—and similarly, there are
ways of rotating the sphere to bring A to B and to C and to
D. Nevertheless, you can throw two of them away (say, C
and D) and find a way of rotating the sphere so that A is
brought to a set A′ and a (different) way of rotating the sphere
so that B is sent to a set B′ and these maneuvers have the
strange property that A′ and B′ together cover the sphere; i.e.,
S = A′ ! B′.
This is called the Banach-Tarski Paradox. Despite first appearances this is not actually a paradox although there is indeed a subtlety lurking in the way in which I worded things.6
It is merely a para-dox, that is: something contrary to expected
opinion.
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I brought this apparent paradox up not to confuse you but
rather to point out, at the very outset, that
• even though area is a concept we tend to feel perfectly
at home with, to get closer to its essence is to appreciate more keenly its complexity, and so
• in our discussion about area we had better start from
the very beginning, by noting that
• despite its reputation for having what are called
“proper foundations,” mathematics doesn’t seem to
have a “beginning.”
5. LENGTH IN EVERYDAY LIFE
Nevertheless, let’s begin with something seemingly a bit simpler than area: plain old lengths of straight line-segments. I
say “seemingly” because as often happens in mathematics,
the simpler-seeming concept (in this case, length) contains,
in a more visible form, lots of the essential aspects of its complicated companions (e.g., area and volume).
We all know what is meant when someone says “a ten
foot pole.” This is a relative statement, comparing the pole
to some foot-long ruler, and claiming that we can lay ten
copies of our measuring device onto the pole, covering it
completely with no overspill or overlap. Usually, of course,
the speaker of this phrase has something on his mind other
than this length-measuring thought-experiment.
In slight contrast, when we are told that the circumference
of this cup is eight inches long and we want to verify this directly, we must set aside our rigid, calibrated, ruler and use
something like a tape-measure, wrapping it around the rim
of the cup.7 Of course, there is also a well-known indirect
way of verifying this measurement which starts by using our
rigid ruler to calculate the diameter of the cup—but this indirection already involves a certain amount of mathematical
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experience with π.
In even greater contrast, when we are told that the star
cluster NGC 1929 within the Large Magellanic Cloud (a
satellite galaxy of our own Milky Way shown in Fig. 68) is
179, 000 light-years away from us, other measuring devices
are required, and—given relativistic issues—what distance
means is already a subtle business.
Fig. 6
6. EQUALITY [OF LENGTH] IN EUCLID
The concept length occurs—in a somewhat cryptic form—
early in the Elements. It appears as mēkos in the definition of
line (Def. 2):
A line is breadthless length.
The concept reappears as diastēma (translated often as distance but meaning, more specifically, interval or gap) as
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something of a surprise. Euclid slips it into the discussion in
Book I in the definition of circle (Def. 15), which is described
as—and I’ll put it in modern vocabulary—a figure bounded
by a curve the points of which are equidistant from a given
point.
Thanks to this definition and the ability we have—given
to us by Postulate 3—of drawing a circle with any center and
any radius, we can begin to construct many line segments
that, in Euclid’s terms, are “equal” (meaning, are of equal
length). Even better, we are supplied with tools for establishing equality. Euclid wastes no time making use of these tools:
the very first proposition (Proposition 1 of Book I, see Fig.
79) goes straight to the task of constructing, on any line segment, an equilateral triangle, that is, a triangle in which all
three sides are “equal.” And we’re off and running, at least
as far as understanding equality of length goes.
On the facing page you see it in its full glory, ending with
a triumphant hoper edei poiēsai—i.e., “as was to be constructed.”
When later mathematics takes on the issue of length,
things proceed quite differently from the way Euclid proceeded. Modern mathematics throws a spotlight on transformations in a way that ancient mathematics did not.
Nowadays, as we introduce a new concept or new type of
structure, often—at the same time—we make explicit the
types of transformations or mappings between exemplars of
this structure that we are willing to consider (or rather, that
we are willing to allow). These allowed transformations are
the ones that respect the inner coherence of the structure we
are studying. In Euclidean geometry, the allowed transformations are the mappings of the Euclidean plane onto itself
that preserve the notion of congruence. They consist of rotations about points in the plane, translations, and also those
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transformations that can be viewed as the composition of a
“flip,” (that is, a symmetry about some straight line) with a
translation or rotation. In one of the modern formats, the concept of Euclidean length and the collection of the allowed
transformations of Euclidean geometry are yoked concepts,
working in tandem:
• The allowed transformations are precisely those transformations that preserve length of all line-segments,
while
• two line-segments have equal length if and only if
there are allowed transformations bringing any one
of them onto the other.
In effect, these notions—“length between points in Euclidean geometry” and “the transformations that preserve Euclidean geometry”—are yoked, chicken-and-egg style, in that
each can be used to begin the discussion and characterize
(that is, explicitly determine) the other. Think of it this way:
We could invoke each of these concepts to provide the vocabulary for a system of axioms in a geometry, and the other
concept would then be one of the many features of that geometry. You can have length as your basic concept and stipulate
the transformations that preserve your geometry to be those
that preserve length, or you may start with the stipulation of
transformations of your geometry and derive length as one
of its invariants—in effect, deriving the entire geometry from
its group of symmetries. (The second viewpoint represents a
celebrated shift of emphasis, known as the Erlangen Program.) But there is also an important difference of mood between “axiomatization,” which sets up a theory starting from
one direction or the other, and presenting things in a balanced
way, where each concept “characterizes” the other.
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7. PROPORTIONS
Length is, at bottom, a relative concept: that is to say, “length
compared to what?” is a bona fide question. What are the
units? Inches? Feet? Miles?10 That is, when we deal with
length, we are dealing—unavoidably—with a proportion.11
This puts us in the mood of Euclid’s Book V, a work that
deals exclusively with proportions among magnitudes.
Say we are interested in the length of our ten-foot pole P.
We compare it to our one-foot ruler F, we might emphasize
the proportional aspect of length by recording the answer
symbolically this way:
(*) P : F “=” 10 : 1
I’ve put quotation-marks around the equality sign to emphasize that it is indeed a serious abbreviation of thought, turning
what began as an analogy (P is to F as 10 is to 1) into an
equality (the relationship that P has to F is the relationship
that 10 has to 1)—turning an as into a straight is. This is a
curious transition. The older notation for equality sign in quotation marks is a double-colon,
(**) P : F :: 10 : 1,
capturing equally well, I believe, the “as” aspect of the relationship. That a proportion of lengths is interpretable as a
proportion of numbers may well be self-evident, but that it is
an interpretation is worth bearing in mind.
The legacy of the Pythagoreans offers us yet another interpretation for the versatile notion of a proportion of lengths:
As the length is to the length,
So the heard tone is to the heard tone.
After this discussion it is safe to remove the quotation
marks in formula (*) displayed above, and write
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P/F = 10/1.
We thereby see arithmetic in geometry (that is, by going from
left to right in the above equation). In other words, we have
an “arithmetic” (of proportions of straight line segments) that
mirrors “ordinary” arithmetic (of ratios of numbers). For example, you can add proportions of lengths of line segments:
A· − − − − − − ·B· − − − − − − − − − − − − − − ·C
D· − − − − − − ·E
AB/DE + BC/DE = AC/DE
and multiply proportions of lengths of line segments:
A· − − − − − − ·B
C· − − − − − − − − − − − − − − ·D
E· − − − − − − − − − − − − − − − − − − − − ·F
AB/CD × CD/EF = AB/EF
and we have a natural interpretation of inequalities between
these proportions. These behave formally “just like fractions,”
as the notation indicates, and we have a veritable algebra of
geometrical proportions.
8. COMMON MEASURES, AND UNCOMMON MEASURES
All this makes perfect, and natural, sense and conforms to
the most elementary basic ideas we have about arithmetic as
long as we treat proportions of lengths that “admit a common
measure.”
That is, imagine that you are given two intervals,
A· − − − − − − ·B
C· − − − − − − − − − − − − ·D
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and you know that there is a certain unit measure, say given
by another interval EF,
E· − − ·F
such that AB and CD are measured by (whole) number multiples of EF. For example, say AB is seventeen EFs long and
CD is four hundred ninety one EFs long; so we may write:
AB/EF = 17/1 and CD/EF = 491/1.
We then say that EF is a common measure for the line segments AB and CD. And, in this particular case, we then comfortably write
AB/CD = 17/491.
But the fun, as I think you all know, is already there at
the very outset of geometry for one of the most fundamental
of geometric proportions—that between the diagonal and the
side of a square
the diagonal AC / the side AB
—was shown to have no common measure,12 and nevertheless
the proportion AC/AB (alias √2/1) was still regarded as a genuine object of study, with the consequence that it forced us—
by the analogy between proportions of lengths and proportions
of numbers—to extend our very idea of what it means to be a
number. It is worth thinking about what it means for geometry
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to guide us in our evolving concept of number.
For all this is a beginning of one of the great analogies,
arithmetic ↔ geometry,
in which each profoundly influences the other. This type of
thinking goes against a view held by Aristotle (a view often
referred to as purity), namely:
We cannot, in demonstrating, pass from one genus to another.
We cannot, for instance, prove geometrical truths by arithmetic.13
9. THE UBIQUITY OF “ANALOGY” IN MATHEMATICAL THOUGHT
In the previous section we have been working through the
idea that straight line segments stand in relation to each other
“just as” numerical quantities stand in relation to each other;
that is, we are now faced with—as we’ve mentioned—one
of the primordial analogies between geometry and arithmetic.
That this “just as” relation is an analogy and not a direct
equality takes some convincing. A curious phenomenon occurs with many mathematical analogies once they get embedded in our thought. If A is seen to be analogous to
something else, B, there is the impetus to think of A and B
as, somehow, special cases of, or aspects of, a single more
encompassing C; and somehow to rethink the analogy as
equality. This switch is a form, but not the only form, of abstraction that is indigenous to mathematical sensibility. Versatile switching of viewpoints is one of the reasons for the
power of a mathematical frame of thought. This replacement
of a pair of analogous contexts for a single encompassing
context occurs so often that people with experience in mathematics have this type of thought engrained in them as second
nature.14
As I mentioned, replacing the two parts of an analogy by
a common generalized concept is powerful and occurs often
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in mathematics, but in other contexts of thought it might seem
a strange thing to do. One rarely does this kind of generalizing with analogies and metaphors that occur in literature:
when thinking about the metaphorical comparison in
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
do we conceive of a more general entity that encompasses
“thee” and “summer’s day” as instances?
10. LENGTH AND STRAIGHT LINE SEGMENTS
You may have noticed that, although I’ve gone on at some
length, I never defined straight line segment. Now, you can
postpone talking about straight line segments if you phrase
things in terms of distance. That is, for any two points P and
Q on the Euclidean plane, if you have a notion of the distance
between P and Q—denote it by dist(P, Q)—you can pick out
the points on the straight line segment between P and Q as
precisely those points X such that
dist(P, Q) = dist(P, X) + dist(X, Q).
But the ancients seem not to have defined straight line segment this way. Euclid’s definition (Def. 4 of Book I) is elegantly enigmatic:
A straight line is a line which lies evenly with the points on itself.
This is reminiscent of Plato’s definition of a straight line segment as “whatever has its middle in front of its end” (Parmenides 137e). Here, Plato seems to be taking his straight
line segment up to his eye to view it as you would look
through a telescope, noting that the only thing he sees is its
endpoint. In effect, a straight line is a line of sight.15 A much
later take on the matter defines a straight line segment with
endpoints P and Q as the unique curve joining P and Q such
that among all curves joining P and Q it is the one having
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the shortest length.16 But to make sense of this you must
know, at the very least, what it means for a curve to have a
length. Hence . . .
11. LENGTHS OF SMOOTH CURVES
Nowhere in Euclid’s Elements is the length of a curve that is
not a straight line, or polygonal, segment discussed. The first
nonpolygonal curve whose length was considered (in the
texts that I know) is the circumference (called the perimeter)
of a circle, as studied in Archimedes’s The measurement of
the circle.17 And there the length of the circumference of a
circle enters the mathematical discussion in the context of the
elegant statement about area18 that we have already briefly
discussed in Section 2.
Here it is as Proposition 1 of Archimedes text:
Proposition 1: Every circle is equal to a right-angled
triangle, whose radius [R] is equal to one of the [sides]
around the right angle while the perimeter [i.e., circumference T of the circle] is equal to the base [of the
triangle].
This is proved by approximating the circle by a regular polygon with a large number of sides, and arguing appropriately.
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This is an amazing theorem, of course, but the more specific
reason I’m mentioning it is that it exemplifies the general rule
that the computation of the length of any curvy curve depends—perhaps very indirectly—on relating it to the length
of approximating polygons. This is (quite directly) Archimedes’s method here. He makes use of a result about polygons analogous to Proposition 1, where the polygons in
question will be made to approximate the circle. For a slightly
more extensive sketch of Archimedes’s argument, see the Appendix, Section 20 below.
12.
LENGTHS
OF
CRINKLY CURVES
It has been said that there
is no way to measure the
length of the coastline of
Scotland.
It is just too crinkly,
and the length you find
yourself computing depends on how fine a grid
of measurements you
make—the result getting
longer and longer as the
measurements
grow
finer. Mathematicians
can easily model such an
effect, the most famous
construction being something called the Koch snowflake.
This is a closed curve obtained by taking the limit of an infinite sequence of crinkle-operations. Start with an equilateral
triangle and on an interval one-third the size of each side construct a small equilateral triangle. Here are the first few stages:
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At each stage you are faced with a longer curve, and in the
limit, you have seemingly contained a curve within a finite
region that is so crinkly so as to have—in effect—infinite
length.
13. WHAT IS AREA?
We’ll be interested primarily in the areas of figures in the Euclidean plane. Given our discussion of length it won’t be a
surprise to learn that we will be dealing, again, with proportions; in this case, the proportion of (the area of) one figure
to (the area of) another. Nor will it be much of a surprise to
find that just as straight line segments played a fundamental
role in all discussions of length, so too polygonal figures will
play such a role in our treatment of area.
Euclid is again very helpful here. The first time he discusses area, it is—in his vocabulary— parallelogramatic
area: Proposition 34 of Book I tells us that the diagonal of a
parallelogram bisects the (area of) the parallelogram. He fol-
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lows this up with the propositions (including the beautiful
Proposition 37 I’ve alluded to already) stating that two triangles with the same base and height have the same area, as do
two parallelograms with the same base and height.
And once we have these tools, we are in good shape to
deal with areas of polygonal figures. We can even go further,
as we saw in Section 11 above with Archimedes’s proof that
transforms the area of a circle into the area of a triangle by
means of polygonal figures. (As I’ve said, we will discuss
more in the Appendix, Section 20 below.)
14. AREA AS AN “INVARIANT”
Here is an exercise: make a (short) list of “axioms” that (you
guess) characterizes the concept of ratios of areas for a large
class of (plane) figures. You’ll surely include a number of
basic properties of the intuitive concept of area as hinted at
in section 4 above. But let me start the game by insisting that
one of your axioms be this:
Axiom of Invariance under Euclidean motions:
If A, B are a pair of plane figures for which you
have defined the ratio
area of A / area of B
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(or, for short, A/B) and if A′ is the image of the
figure A under a Euclidean transformation, then
we have the equality:
area of A / area of B = area of A′ / area of B
This is worth thinking about, but this is just a start, and
note that in your personal “theory of area,” part of the chore
is to make precise exactly what class of figures you are going
to be assigning a well-defined area. This might be a bit of
fodder for discussion following the lecture. This exercise was
solved elegantly and in somewhat astounding generality before World War II by the Hungarian mathematician Alfréd
Haar.
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15. SHEARS AND SIMILARITIES
Given a well-working “theory of area,” certain properties will
follow as consequences. For example, here are two basic features—two further invariance properties for the concept of
area.
(1) Shears
By a horizontal shear transformation let’s mean a transformation of the Euclidean plane to itself that keeps every
horizontal line in place, but moves it by a translation that is
dependent on the “height” of that line above the x-axis. That
is, for any point (x, y) in the plane it keeps the y-coordinate
fixed but allows the x coordinate to change by a rule:
x ↦ x + F(y)
where F(y) is some civilized (e.g., continuous) function of y.
This type of motion of the plane keeps all lines parallel to the
x-axis intact, but translates them by different amounts depending on their height. By a general shear transformation
let’s mean an analogous transformation, but with respect to
lines parallel to any fixed line: the line needn’t be the x-axis.
The area of figures is preserved by shears!
Now we’ve actually seen examples of this in our previous discussion: think of Proposition 37 of Book I of Euclid’s Elements. One way of revisiting the content of Proposition 37 is
to note that any two triangles with the same base and same
height can be brought one to another by a shear.
The three-dimensional version of this (where the question
is about volume rather than area) is sometimes referred to as
Cavalieri’s Principle, and is illustrated, for example, by the
following picture, where Cavalieri’s Principle would state
that the two stacks of coins on the next page occupy the same
volume.
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(2) The behavior of area under similarity transformations.
If
• A and A′ are in the class of figures for which you have defined the ratio
area of A / area of A′
and if
• P, Q are points in the figure A with P′, Q′ the corresponding
points in the similar figure A′,
then the square of the ratio
length of PQ / length of P′Q′
is equal to the ratio
area of A / area of A′
This square relation tells us that we are dealing with a twodimensional concept.19
Dimensionality as a concept opens up a host of marvelous
questions to explore, not the least of which is the grand idea,
initially due to Hausdorff, that the full range of possible geometric figures admits a continuous gamut of dimensions—
not just dimensions 0, 1, 2, 3, . . .
That such strange figures possessing non-whole-number
dimensions may have some bearing on questions in the nat-
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ural sciences, economics, and finance—let alone pure mathematics—is the energy behind Benoît Mandelbrot’s wellknown fractals.20
16. I NVARIANCE
AS FEATURE ;
I NVARIANCE
AS CHARAC -
TERIZATION
I have been alluding to the invariance properties of length
and of area. Here is a summary and comparison.
Euclidean Length and the collection of Euclidean motions
suit each other’s needs perfectly:
• The (Euclidean) concept of length is invariant under the
Euclidean motions (i.e., translation, rotations, symmetries
about straight lines, and compositions of these). That is,
these transformations preserve Euclidean distance.
• Any distance relation between points that satisfies certain
natural axioms and that is invariant under any Euclidean
motion is (after appropriate rescaling of its values) equal
to the (Euclidean) concept of length.
• Moreover, any transformation that preserves length between any two points in the plane is a Euclidean motion.
In contrast to length, the invariance properties of (Euclidean) concept of area is stranger:
• The (Euclidean) concept of area is invariant under Euclidean motions, of course— but it is also invariant under
a much greater collection of transformations. For example, any of the shear transformations we have discussed
in the previous section (Section 15) preserves area.
• But as for characterizing this concept by invariance properties, things go the other way: area is characterized (up
to a mere change of scale) by its invariance under translations alone—that’s all the invariance you need invoke
to pinpoint this concept!
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It is quite fitting, then, that Euclid inserts his Proposition
37 in Book I, very early in his discussion of area: the proposition is, of course, a critical tool in establishing the simplest
arguments regarding area—but from a modern perspective,
it also points to one of the deep properties of the concept visà-vis invariance: there is a huge collection of transformations—far more of them than just Euclidean motions—that
preserve area.
17. CLASSICAL QUADRATURE PROBLEMS
The phrase quadrature of . . . loosely refers to the problem
of finding the area of . . . , which usually means expressing—
as some simple numerical ratio—the proportion of the area
of one figure to another figure.21 First, here is a simple example related to Euclid’s Proposition 37 in Book I of the Elements that we discussed earlier, and whose proof can be
found by putting together propositions in Book I of Euclid’s
Elements:22
Proposition: Let P be a parallelogram and T a triangle, such
that P and T have the same base and the same height. Then
P : T = 2 : 1.
This proposition follows the format of what I’ll call a
“Classical Quadrature Problem,” which I want to mean to be
a statement that the proportion of areas (or lengths, or volumes) of two geometric figures, all described entirely in clear
general geometric terms,23 is equal to a specific numerical
ratio.
There are quite a number of classical problems that fit
this mold, that is, problems expressing the proportion of the
areas of two figures, or volumes of two solids (described in
general terms) in terms of specific rational numbers. For example, Proposition 10 of Book XII of Euclid’s Elements tell
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us that
the ratio of the volume of a cone to a cylinder
that have the same base and the same height
is 1 : 3.
This “1 : 3” reoccurs as the ratio of the volume of a conical solid built on any base to the cylindrical solid built on
the same base, and of the same height. The earliest text I
know that “explains” the “1 : 3” in this more general context
is Arithmetica Infinitorum by John Wallis, who did his work
before the full-fledged invention of Calculus; for the people
who know Calculus, this is an exercise.24
As with much of Archimedes’s work there are stories that
surround it. In one of his treatises,25 Archimedes showed that
the ratio of the volume of a sphere to that of
the cylinder that circumscribes it is 2 : 3.
and according to legend, this being his favorite result, he had
it engraved as a sculpture for his tomb.
The most intriguing, and thorny, of the ratios of elementary areas or volumes are the proportion relating the area of
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a circle to that of the square that circumscribes it, and the proportion relating the volume of a sphere to that of the volume
of the cube that circumscribes it. The story of the many attempts to understand these ratios leads us in interesting directions. For example, Hippocrates of Chios in his attempt to
square the circle studied classical quadrature problems relating the areas of lunes (which are figures consisting of the
outer portion of a small circle when superimposed on a larger
one, as in the figure below26)
to areas of triangles constructed in relation to those lunes. He
proves, for example, that the area of the lune (defined as the
region between E and F in the figure above) is equal to the
area of the triangle ABO. His results, however, go significantly beyond this.27
18. WEIGHING AREA
A famous example of a classical quadrature problem is
Archimedes’s “Quadrature of the parabola” and this is dealt
with in not one, but two of his treatises in quite different
ways:
• Propositions 14-16 of The quadrature of the parabola, and
• Proposition 1 of The Method.
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The aim is to “find” the area of a segment of a parabola
bounded by a chord.
We know, of course, that this means finding a proportion
between the red area of the above kind of figure and the area
of some other figure.
This problem is especially illuminating in that Archimedes
offers two approaches to it. The method in The quadrature of
the parabola is via exhaustion, i.e., approximation by polygons—which is a method similar to the one we have already
seen in the Measurement of the circle. This actually does
prove what he wants. But the more curious method is the one
that he himself refers to as a mechanical method—a mode of
reasoning to which he does not give the full authority of
proof: it’s an example of a heuristic28—perhaps the first example of such a not-quite-a-proof of which we have any
record.
A major tool Archimedes uses in this heuristic is his famous “law of the lever,”29 which proclaims that if weights W
and w are placed on the plank that is the lever, at opposite
sides of the fulcrum but at distances D and d from the fulcrum
respectively, then the lever will balance if and only if
D·w=d·W
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“Now what in the world does this have to do with area?” you
might ask. The answer is that Archimedes is engaged here in
an ingenious thought-experiment, where the rules of the game
are dictated by some basic physical truths, and the link to
area (he will also treat volume problems this way as well) is
by a profound analogy. In the figure below, imagine the point
K as the fulcrum of a lever. The plank of the lever is the line
segment HK. Archimedes will construct a triangle FAC deployed onto the plank as shown, and will be weighing (yes,
weighing) the parabolic segment P by weighing in a laminar
manner each line in the parabolic segment parallel to the diameter of the parabola against corresponding lines in the triangle FAC placed at an appropriate distance (at H) on the
other side of the fulcrum. Archimedes is thinking that you
can view the parabolic segment and triangle as swept through
by a continuum of line segments, and the area of these figures
is somehow distributed as slivers dependent on the varying
lengths of these line segments. So he uses his “law of the
lever” to find the balance, thereby concluding his heuristic
argument.
We can discuss this at greater length after the lecture if
you like, but here—a bit more slowly—is a recap of what
I’ve just said, broken up into the steps that Archimedes uses.
In the figure below, which is taken from one of the diagrams for Proposition 1 in the traditional text for The Method,
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the chord is AC and the parabolic arc we are to study is the
curve bounded by A and C. We are interested in the area of
the parabolic segment—let us call it P. Specifically, P is that
region bounded by that chord AC and the parabolic segment
that joins with it. For this task, the figure will give us all the
constructions necessary.
(1) The lever and fulcrum: We are going to weigh things
and balance thing so we need some apparatus. Don’t
mind that it is on a slant; but the straight line through C
and K is going to be our lever, and K will be our fulcrum.
(2) The tangent line: We draw the line CF through C tangent to our parabolic arc at C (I’ll say what F is in a
moment).
(3) Let D be the bisector of AC and construct a straight line
through D parallel to the diameter of the parabola. (Para-
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bolas do have well defined “diameters.” In simple English,
if we draw the full parabola, rather than the piece of it as
occurs in the above figure, the diameter is that straight
line piercing the parabola around which the parabola is
symmetric: in other words, flipping about the diameter
preserves the parabola.) This straight line will intersect
CF at a point that we’ll call E, and the parabolic arc at a
point B. So we can call the line ED.
(4) The basic triangle: Draw the lines AB and BC to form
the basic triangle ABC (which I’ll also call T).
(5) Note that T sits neatly in the parabolic segment P.
Clearly the area of P is bigger than that of T, but how
much bigger? The upshot of this proposition, after
Archimedes finishes proving it, is that we get an exact relationship, namely, P : T :: 4 : 3.
(6) Laminating by lines parallel to the diameter: The line
ED is parallel to the diameter. In the figure above, you
find a couple of other labeled lines parallel to the diameter: MO, and FA. What Archimedes wants to do is to think
of the family of all lines that are parallel to the diameter
and how they slice the figure as they sweep across it.
(Think of them as forming a moving family). We will
refer to any member of that family (and there are finitely
many of them!) as a laminar slice. In a moment we will
be slicing two figures by the lines of this family.
(7) The big triangle: This is FAC, built with edges the line
FA parallel to the diameter and the chord AC. Simple
geometry shows that FAC : T = 4. So, thinking of the formula above, we want to prove that P : FAC = 1 : 3.
(8) Weighing slices on the balance beam: Archimedes
hangs the big triangle FAC from its center of gravity, W,
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on the balance bar HK, as indicated in the figure. He then
considers laminar slices of it, comparing them to laminar
slices (by the same line parallel to the diameter) of the
parabolic segment ABC. He proves that to put each laminar slice of the big triangle FAC in equilibrium with the
corresponding slice of the parabolic segment ABC you
have to “hang” the laminar slice of the parabolic segment
ABC at the point H on the other side of the fulcrum. This
uses, of course, his law of the lever.
(9) Weighing the figures themselves: He then says that he
has hung the parabolic segment at point H and the big triangle at point W and, again, the law of the lever gives the
proportions of their areas.
There is a great amount of geometry that one can learn
by considering this result. First, note that we do indeed have
here an example of what I described as a “classical quadrature
problem” in that (a) we specified each of our figures merely
by generic prescriptions (take any parabolic, and cut it with
any chord, etc.), and (b) we asserted that the proportions of
these figures are given by a fixed rational ratio (4:3). That
alone deserves thought.
You might wonder: how many other interesting generic
geometric proportions can one come up with that have a fixed
rational ratio? Or, perhaps, a fixed ratio involving, say,
surds?30
What is gripping here is how we, using Calculus, could
immediately convert into a genuine theorem what Archimedes
does with his “method,” and how a dyed-in-the-wool Euclidean could also come to terms with this by offering an appropriate menu of axioms and common notions. Each of these
revisions of Archimedes’s work—via Calculus, or via appropriate axioms—would have the effect of reframing
Archimedes’s mechanical analogy by encompassing it with
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something non-analogical that has, perhaps, the authority to
explain more. And yet for me, the lesson offered by The
Method lies—to return to the issue of purity I mentioned previously in Section 7 above—in the unconstrained impurity
of the ideas behind it. The Method works on the strength of a
correctly guiding, but nevertheless difficult to justify, analogy
combining previously disparate intuitions that had originated
in somewhat different domains—the experience one has with
a certain weighing apparatus and the intuition one has via Euclidean geometry.
This type of thinking (working with profound analogies
and relating them to, or turning them into, equalities) is today,
as it was in Archimedes’s time, the source of much of the
most powerful mathematics.
19. HEDGEHOGS AGAIN
We have largely talked about areas of figures in the plane,
except for our excursion in the spherical geometry with the
Banach-Tarsky Paradox. This deserves more discussion,
which I hope will happen in the upcoming conversation period.
20. APPENDIX: SKETCH OF A PROOF OF ARCHIMEDES’ MEASUREMENT OF THE CIRCLE.
To describe Archimedes’s argument succinctly, we need some
vocabulary. Define the radius of a regular polygon to be the
length of a line interval that is obtained by dropping a perpendicular to any side of the polygon from the center N of
the regular polygon. Define the perimeter (or circumference)
of a polygon to be the length of its perimeter, i.e., the sum of
the lengths of the sides of the polygon. If the polygon is a
regular M-gon, then the circumference is M times the length
of any side.
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Here is “my” version of Proposition 1 for regular polygons,31 which is analogous to Archimedes’s Proposition 1 for
circles:
Archimedes’s Proposition 1 adapted to regular
polygons: The area subsumed by a regular polygon
is equal to the area subsumed by a right-angled triangle for which the two right-angle sides are of lengths
equal to the radius and the circumference (respectively) of the polygon.
In contrast to the actual Proposition 1 of the Measurement of
the Circle, this “polygon-version” of Archimedes’s Proposition 1 is now nicely within the scope of Euclidean vocabulary; its proof is within the scope of Euclid as well.
Some comments:
(1) Both this “polygon-version” and Archimedes’s Proposition 1 deal with a right-angled triangle whose base is
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the circumference and whose height is the radius of the
figure to which this triangle is being compared. One
could rephrase these propositions by omitting the requirement that the triangle be right-angled.
(2) A visual proof of this polygonal proposition can be
effected simply by cutting and “straightening out to a
line” the perimeter of the polygon, and then arguing that
this paper-doll figure has the same area as the triangle
displayed below.32 (In the figure below we illustrate this
with a 3-gon, otherwise known as a triangle, which produces, when cut-and straightened-out, the three triangles
in a line labeled A,B,C. Each of these triangles have the
same area as the three triangles that make up the large triangle in the lower figure, which has as base the perimeter
and as height the radius.) This relies only the fact that the
area of a triangle depends only on its base and height.
NOTES
1. Since you read Archimedes’s On the equilibrium of planes in Freshman
Laboratory, this may not come as a complete surprise.
2. I am grateful to Paul Van Koughnett who drew most of the figures, and
to Paul Dry for helpful and incisive comments about early drafts of these
notes.
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3. Straight-limbed geometry;
In her arts’ ingeny
Our wits were sharp and keen.
From “Mark Antony,” a poem by John Cleveland (1613-1658). See The
Best Poems of the English language: From Chaucer through Robert
Frost, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 154-55.
4. A sketch of its proof is in the Appendix, Section 20 below.
5. The ∪ (“cup”) notation means “union.” That is, if X and Y are sets, then
X ∪ Y is the set whose members are either members of X or members of
Y or members of both X and Y.
6. For people who are familiar with group theory, a fairly complete description of what is going can be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach–Tarski_paradox.
7. A delightful book that discusses calculations of this sort, and of more
theoretical sorts, is John Bryant and Chris Sangwin, How Round is Your
Circle? Where Engineering and Mathematics Meet, (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2011.)
8. The composite image in Fig. 6 was created by the Chandra X-ray Observatory. The X-ray component was produced by NASA/CXC/U.Mich./
S.Oey; the Infrared component by NASA/JPL, and the optical component
by ESO/WFI/2.2-m.
9. Fig. 7 is drawn from Euclid’s Element of Geometry, an edition of the
Greek text with new English translation by Richard Fitzpatrick (Austin:
Richard Fitzpatrick, 2007), 8.
10. Two cowboys:
A: “My ranch is so big I can ride Old Paint from morning to night
and still not cover it.”
B: “I know exactly how you feel. My horse is like that too!”
11. This issue is taken up by Kant from a slant perspective. (That’s typical
for Kant.) In Book I, Sections 25 and 26 of The Critique of Judgment, in
discussing what he calls the mathematical sublime, he points out that in
comprehending in our imagination a specific magnitude (say, this pole is
ten feet long) one is engaging in two acts, of different natures: there is
the mathematical one of counting a number of feet (and comprehending
that act of counting) and then there is the essentially aesthetic one of comprehending—or internalizing in some way or other—what a foot is. From
Kant’s perspective, then, considering a proportion, per se, is an act that
extracts the purely mathematical aspect of “comprehension of a magni-
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tude” from the underlying, and otherwise unavoidable, aesthetic aspect:
comprehending the unit. Of course, it is the latter that interests him.
12. At least if we insist that both intervals be measured by a whole number
of multiples of the chosen “common measure.”
13. Aristotle, Posterior Analytics 75a29-75b12.
14. Here is an important example of this that originated over a century
ago, and is everywhere to be seen in modern mathematics: numbers are
analogous to functions. There are whole branches of mathematics
where these concepts are treated as not merely analogous, but as particular exemplars of a larger encompassing concept.
15. See, for example, the marvelous essay on this subject in Euclid: The
Thirteen Books of the Elements, ed. Thomas Heath, 3 vols. (Mineola, New
York: Dover Publications, 1956), 165-69.
16. This property distinguishes straight line segments as geodesics in
modern terminology.
17. For source material, various translations, commentary, and more related texts, please go to:
http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k53966
(which is on the “Teaching” page of my web site).
18. That the ratio of the area of a circle to the length of its circumference
is a simple expression in terms of its radius is what is behind the beauty
of Proposition 1. This is a phenomenon that proliferates in higher dimensions; e.g., the ratio of the volume of a sphere to its surface area is, similarly, a simple expression in terms of its radius. This is worth pondering.
19. But neither of the above “invariance properties” need be, nor should
be, included as axioms, for they will follow from your list of axioms (if
you’ve formulated them correctly).
20. See Benoît Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1982).
21. Quadrature is the basic topic in the oldest existent Greek text, that of
Hippocrates of Chios.
22. Or better, by doing it yourself.
23. This is admittedly a bit vague, but I hope the examples convey the
kind of problem I’m referring to.
24. Hint: ∫ x2 dx = ⅓ x3 when evaluated over the interval 0 to x.
25. On the Sphere and Cylinder I.
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26. This figure can be found online at:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e0/Lune.svg
27. I think that there are truly interesting (entirely mathematical, not historical) issues that lurk in this, and it is one of my plans to understand it
in depth.
28. This is especially fitting since it comes from the pen of the celebrated
shouter of “Eureka,” which derives from the same root.
29. There is an extensive earlier tradition of discussion about equilibrium
and disequilibrium on a balance, and on the action of levers of all sorts.
For example, this observation from Part Seven of Aristotle’s On the motion of animals: “A small change occurring at the center makes great and
numerous changes at the circumference, just as by shifting the rudder a
hair’s breadth you get a wide deviation at the prow.” I want to thank Jean
de Groot for conversations about this; I look forward to her forthcoming
commentary on Aristotle’s Mechanics.
There is also, to be sure, an extensive later tradition on this topic—
notably, Ernst Mach’s marvelous critique of the “law” itself, in the Introduction and first few chapters of his wonderful book The Science of
Mechanics (Chicago and London: Open Court, 1919.)
30. That is, square roots. This is not an idle question.
31. I say “my” version because, even though it is—in my opinion—implicitly invoked in Archimedes’s text, it isn’t dwelt on.
32. I’m thankful to Jim Carlson for this suggestion.
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Some Reflections on Darwin
and C.S. Peirce
Curtis Wilson and Chaninah Maschler
Introduction
On a Saturday morning in the mid-1950s, I attended a St.
John’s faculty seminar on a selected reading from Darwin’s
Origin of Species. What chiefly remains in memory is an
overall impression: the discussion was halting and desultory,
failing to get airborne. In those days the available edition of
the Origin was the sixth and last (1872); compared with the
first edition of 1859, it suffers from excessive backing and
filling, Darwin’s attempts to answer his critics. Yet, even had
our text been from the sprightlier first edition, I doubt our
discussion would have got off the ground. After one spell of
silence a senior tutor spoke up to ask: Isn’t it [Darwin’s theory]
just a hypothesis? The implication, I thought, was: Can’t we
just ignore the whole idea?
The short answer to that second question is: we can’t, because Darwin’s theory is the grand working hypothesis (yes,
it’s a hypothesis!) of biologists everywhere, and as aspirant
generalists at St. John’s, we need to seek out its meaning. The
search can be exhilarating as well as disquieting.
Major features of Darwin’s theory are contained in his
phrase “descent with modification through natural selection.”
The descent of present-day organisms from organisms of preCurtis Wilson was a long-time tutor, and twice Dean, at St. John’s College
in Annapolis. Sadly, he passed away on 24 August 2012, shortly after this
article was completed. Chanina Maschler is tutor emerita at St. John’s
College in Annapolis. The Introduction, in the form of first-person reminiscences, was written by Mr. Wilson. Part 1 is by Ms. Maschler. The last
three parts were worked out by the two authors jointly.
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ceding generations is obvious; Darwin requires us to keep
this fact in focus. The offspring inherit traits from their parents, but some variation occurs. Since far more offspring are
produced than can survive and reproduce, the variants best
suited to surviving and reproducing are the ones that win out.
Relative to a given environment, the surviving form will be
better adapted than the forms that failed. Darwin saw this
process as leading to diversification of kinds, or speciation,
as indicated by the title of his book, On the Origin of Species.1
Darwin opened his first notebook on “Transmutation of
Species” in July, 1837. In a sustained effort of thought from
1837 to 1844, he constructed the theory. The empirical evidence consisted chiefly of the biological specimens that he
had observed and collected during his tour as naturalist
aboard H.M.S. Beagle, from Dec. 27, 1831 to Oct. 2, 1836.
(This voyage was sent out to chart the coasts of South America and determine longitudes round the globe; taking along a
naturalist was an after-thought of the captain’s.)
At the beginning of the Beagle voyage, Darwin was a few
weeks short of his twenty-third birthday. So far in his life he
had had no clear goal. Enrolled in medical school at age sixteen in Edinburgh, he dropped out, unable to endure seeing
patients in pain. His father (a physician, skeptical in religion)
then sent him to Cambridge with the idea that he might fit
himself out to become a country parson, but young Darwin
found the course of study uninteresting. He completed the
A.B. degree, but later acknowledged that his time at Cambridge was mostly wasted. A chance by-product of it was a
friendship with John S. Henslow, the professor of botany.
Henslow it was who arranged Darwin’s being offered the post
of naturalist on the Beagle. Darwin’s father flatly rejected the
idea at first, but Josiah Wedgewood, young Darwin’s maternal uncle, persuaded him to change his mind.
In hindsight, we can say that young Darwin was ad-
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mirably suited to his new post. From boyhood he had been a
persistent collector of a variety of objects, from stamps to
beetles. As a naturalist he would prove to have an unstoppable drive toward theoretical understanding, seeking to connect the dots between his numerous observations. The voyage
of the Beagle, proceeding first to the coasts of South America
and the nearby islands, could not have been more aptly
planned to yield observations supporting the theory that he
would develop. The observations were chiefly of three types.2
Fossils from South America were found to be closely related
to living fauna of that continent, rather than to contemporaneous fossils from elsewhere. Animals of the different climatic zones of South America were related to each other
rather than to animals of the same climatic zones on other
continents. Faunas of nearby islands (Falkland, Galapagos)
were closely related to those of the nearest mainland; and on
different islands of the same island group were closely related. These observations could be accounted for on Darwin’s
theory; on the opposing theory of fixed species they remained
unintelligible.
But why the uproar over Darwin’s Origin, and why does
it still today produce uneasiness? It is not merely that it appears contrary to the creation story in Genesis. As John
Dewey put it in 1910:3
That the publication of the Origin of Species marked an
epoch in the development of the natural sciences is well
known to the layman. That the combination of the very
words origin and species embodied an intellectual revolt
and introduced a new intellectual temper is easily overlooked by the expert. The conceptions that had reigned in
the philosophy of nature and knowledge for two thousand
years, the conceptions that had become the familiar furniture of the mind, rested on the assumption of the superiority of the fixed and final; they rested upon treating change
and origin as signs of defect and unreality. In laying hands
upon the sacred ark of absolute permanency, in treating the
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forms that had been regarded as types of fixity and perfection as originating and passing away, the Origin of Species
introduced a mode of thinking that in the end was bound
to transform the logic of knowledge, and hence the treatment of morals, politics, and religion.
More recently Ernst Mayr has characterized Darwin’s
new way of thinking as “population thinking,” and the mode
of thinking prevalent earlier as “typological thinking”:
Typological thinking, no doubt, had its roots in the earliest
efforts of primitive man to classify the bewildering diversity of nature into categories. The eidos of Plato is the formal philosophical codification of this form of thinking.
According to it, there are a limited number of fixed, unchangeable “ideas” underlying the observed variability,
with the eidos (idea) being the only thing that is fixed and
real, while the observed variability has no more reality than
the shadows of an object on a cave wall. . . .
The assumptions of population thinking are diametrically
opposed to those of the typologist. The populationist
stresses the uniqueness of everything in the organic world.
What is true for the human species—that no two individuals are alike—is equally true for all other species of animals and plants. . . . All organisms and organic phenomena
are composed of unique features and can be described collectively only in statistical terms. Individuals, or any kind
of organic entities, form populations, of which we can determine the arithmetic mean and the statistics of variation.
Averages are merely statistical abstractions, only the individuals of which the populations are composed have reality. The ultimate conclusions of the population thinker and
of the typologist are precisely the opposite. For the typologist, the type (eidos) is real and the variation an illusion,
while for the populationist, the type (average) is an abstraction and only the variation is real. No two ways of looking
at nature could be more different.4
Mayr’s abruptly nominalist “take” on the nature of
species is not required by Darwin’s theory, nor do all biolo-
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91
gists espouse it.5 One thing the theory does require is a new
attention to individual differences. Species may result from
processes that are fundamentally statistical, and yet be real.
For young Darwin, gentleman naturalist, noting individual
differences came naturally. His curiosity about connections
may also have been natural to him, but he developed it into a
powerful drive toward unifying theory.
Before coming to St. John’s in 1948, I had taken undergraduate courses in zoology and embryology in which Darwin’s theory was referred to; I accepted the theory as established. An
occasion for reading Darwin’s Origin had not arisen. On becoming a St. John’s tutor, I immersed myself chiefly in problems of the laboratory on the side of physical science, to
which my interests inclined me and for which my more recent
graduate studies in the history of science to some degree prepared me.
In multiple ways, during my early years at St. John’s, I
took my cue from Jacob Klein. My admiration for him was
unbounded. I respected him for his scholarly knowledge,
shrewdness, and sharp discernment. It was he who drew the
College community out of its 1948-49 leadership crisis and
communal slough of despond in the wake of Barr’s and
Buchanan’s departure, and he did so single-handedly and
spiritedly. During his deanship (1949-1958), he gave the College a new lease on life, a new stability, and an incentive to
move forward: testing, selecting, and improving the Program.
Our debt to him is incalculable.
As dean, Mr. Klein in the opening lecture each year undertook to address the question of what we were doing here,
what liberal education was. It was with trepidation, he told
us, that he addressed this question. Typically, his lecture took
a Platonic turn, as when he described the metastrophē, or turning round, of the prisoner in the cave of Plato’s Republic. The
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former prisoner had to be brought to recognize that the shadows he had previously taken for truth were in fact only images of conventional images. Getting at the truth was a matter
of penetrating beyond that scrim of images.
During the academic year 1954-55 I was co-leader with
Mr. Klein (“Jasha” as we tutors called him) of a senior seminar. On one evening the assignment was from Darwin’s Origin—this was perhaps the only place in the program where
Darwin’s theory was addressed in those days. I recall nothing
of the discussion, but at its end Jasha asked the students: Did
they consider Darwin’s book important to their lives? One
after another they replied with a decisive “No!”—a flood of
denial.
Though failing to lodge a protest, I thought the indifference to Darwin a mistake, and I was disappointed by Jasha’s
standoffishness with respect to it. My opinion was reinforced
in conversations I had at the time with Allen Clark, a Ford
Foundation intern at the College in the years 1954-56.6 Clark
had done graduate studies at Harvard on American pragmatism, reading widely in the writings of C.S. Peirce, William
James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and the Harvard-educated
Spanish émigré George Santayana. He was especially attracted to the writings of Peirce, who had been both a working scientist and a close student of philosophy, and had set
himself to making philosophical sense of natural science.
Peirce had embraced Darwin’s theory and interpreted it.
Attempting to catch up with Clark in philosophy, I began
reading such writings of Peirce as were readily available.
These were two collections of essays, the earliest assembled
by Morris R. Cohen under the title Chance, Love, and Logic,
and a later one due to Justus Buchler, The Philosophy of
Peirce. There were also the six volumes of The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, published by Harvard Uni-
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93
versity Press in 1931-35 under the editorship of Hartshorne
and Weiss, but these were formidable, leaving the inquirer
puzzled as to where to get a leg up or a handhold.
My enthusiasm for Peirce was challenged one summer
evening in the later 1950s. During an informal discussion of
a Peirce essay at Jasha’s home, Jasha took exception to
Peirce’s “Monism,” the doctrine that the world is made of a
single stuff. Jasha saw this doctrine as contradicted by the intentionality of human thought. What was that?
The doctrine had been put forward by the Austrian
philosopher Franz Brentano in 1874.7 According to Brentano,
to think is to think of or about something. Analogously, to
fear or hope entails that there are objects (Jasha sometimes
called them “targets”) of these modes of consciousness. Their
objects need not be existents in the empirical world. I can
think of a unicorn, or imagine riding like Harry Potter on a
broom stick, or fear an imagined bogeyman in a closet.
Brentano therefore spoke of “intentional inexistence,” meaning that such an object is somehow contained in the thought
(cogitatio à la Descartes!) of which it is the object. Brentano
sought to make Intentionality definitive of the mental. He
concluded that mind, because of its intentionality, is irreducible to the physical.
Edmund Husserl, one of Jasha’s teachers, had been a student of Brentano. For Husserl, Brentano’s idea of intentionality became the basis of a new science which he called
Phenomenology. Husserl followed Brentano in treating intentionality as coextensive with the mental, and in asserting
the impossibility of a naturalistic explanation of intentional
acts. Jasha’s rejection of Peirce’s Monism, I am guessing,
stemmed from his acceptance, at least in part, of Husserlian
philosophy.8
Jasha may have been unaware that what he regarded as
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Peirce’s Ontological Monism was an application of the
maxim Do not block the road of inquiry. Dualism, as Peirce
saw it, drew a line in the sand; naturalistic explanations were
guaranteed to be impossible beyond this line. The line in the
sand inevitably becomes a dare.
But I was still far in those days from understanding how
the various parts of Peirce’s thinking held together—or failed
to. A major difficulty with the Cohen and Buchler collections
and with The Collected Papers was that they did not present
Peirce’s papers in their order of composition. The editors did
not sufficiently appreciate that Peirce’s ideas developed over
time. Throughout his life, Peirce’s thought (like science as he
understood it) was a work in progress.9 When he died in 1914
he had not completed any single major work. During his last
active decade, however, he succeeded in resolving certain
major difficulties in his earlier philosophizing. A chronological edition of his work—published papers, lectures, and unpublished notes and correspondence—has now been
undertaken by Indiana University Press. Of these post-1950
developments I was made aware only recently. And their full
import did not dawn on me until encountering a book by the
Chairman of the Board of Advisers to the Peirce Edition Project, Thomas Short. It is Peirce’s Theory of Signs.10
Parts 1 and 2 of our essay provide an account of Peirce’s
pragmatism and of his progress from Kantian idealism to scientific realism. In Parts 3 and 4, with the help of Short’s
analysis, we shall indicate how Peirce accounts naturalistically for the emergence of intentionality and conscious purposefulness in the course of evolution.
Part 1. Peirce and Pragmatism
Peirce is the man through whom the word “pragmatism” enters upon the world scene as a philosophic term. According
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to his own recollection,11 confirmed by the report of his friend
William James,12 this happened in the early 1870s, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, amongst a group of young Harvard
men, who used to meet for philosophical discussion. Later in
the 1870s the opinions Peirce had defended viva voce were
issued in print in two articles, “The Fixation of Belief” (1877)
and “How to Make our Ideas Clear” (1878).13 The first of
these two essays prefigured what Peirce would in the course
of a life-time come to say about science as an enterprise of
ongoing inquiry rather than a collection of upshots of investigation.14 The second was sent into the world, as the title indicates, as advice on how to go about gaining greater
intellectual control over one’s ideas than is furnished by the
ability correctly to apply, or even verbally to define them.
The advice runs as follows: “Consider what effects, which
might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the
object of our conceptions to have. Then our conception of
these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.”
Note that the first person plural is out front. Also, that conceiving remains irreducible!
Peirce never became a full-time professor. Not even at
Johns Hopkins, where John Dewey was briefly a student in
his logic class. But just about every major American author
in professional philosophy—William James, Josiah Royce,
John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, C.I. Lewis, Wilfrid Sellars—acknowledges being profoundly indebted to Peirce’s
teachings, pragmatism being one of these.
Pragmatism is, in itself, no doctrine of metaphysics, no attempt to determine any truth of things. It is merely a
method of ascertaining the meanings of hard words and of
abstract concepts. All pragmatists of whatsoever stripe will
cordially assent to that statement. As to the ulterior and indirect effects of practicing the pragmatistic method, that
is quite another affair.15
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Some of the Cambridge friends whom Peirce initially
persuaded to try bringing a laboratory scientist’s “let’s try it
and see” approach to bear on the study of “hard words,” particularly those used in metaphysics, suggested that he call
what he was offering “practicism” or “practicalism.” No,
Peirce responded, he had learned philosophy from Kant, and
in Kant the terms praktisch and pragmatisch were “as far
apart as the poles.”16 Praktisch belongs to the region of
thought where no mind of the experimentalist type can make
sure of solid ground under his feet. Pragmatisch expresses a
relation to some definite human purpose. “Now quite the
most striking feature of the new theory [is] its recognition of
an inseparable connection between rational cognition and
human purpose.”17
Here are two more statements of what pragmatism
amounts to:
I understand pragmatism to be a method of ascertaining the
meanings, not of all ideas, but only of what I call “intellectual concepts,” that is to say, of those upon the structure of
which arguments concerning objective fact may hinge. Had
the light which, as things are, excites in us the sensation of
blue, always excited the sense of red, and vice versa, however great a difference that might have made in our feelings,
it could have made none in the force of any argument. In
this respect, the qualities of hard and soft strikingly contrast
with those of red and blue. . . . My pragmatism, having
nothing to do with qualities of feeling, permits me to hold
that the predication of such a quality is just what it seems,
and has nothing to do with anything else. . . . Intellectual
concepts, however, the only sign-burdens that are properly
denominated “concepts”—essentially carry some implication concerning the general behavior either of some conscious being or of some inanimate object, and so convey
more, not merely than any feeling, but more too than any
existential fact, namely, the “would-acts” of habitual behavior; and no agglomeration of actual happenings can ever
completely fill up the meaning of a “would be.”18
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Again,
Pragmaticism19 consists in holding that the purport of any
concept is its conceived bearing upon our conduct. How,
then, does the Past bear upon conduct? The answer is selfevident: whenever we set out to do anything, we “go upon,”
we base our conduct on facts already known, and for these
we can only draw upon our memory. It is true that we may
institute a new investigation for the purpose; but its discoveries will only become applicable to conduct after they
have been made and reduced to a memorial maxim. In
short, the Past is the sole storehouse of all our knowledge.
When we say that we know that some state of things exists,
we mean that it used to exist, whether just long enough for
the news to reach the brain and be retransmitted to tongue
or pen or longer ago. . . . How does the Future bear upon
conduct? The answer is that future facts are the only facts
that we can, in a measure, control. . . . What is the bearing
of the Present instant upon conduct? . . . There is no time
in the Present for any inference at all, least of all for inference concerning that very instant. Consequently the present object must be an external object, if there be any
objective reference in it. The attitude of the present is either
conative or perceptive.20
Part 2. Peirce’s Transition from an Initial Idealism
to Scientific Realism
As Peirce has told us, he learned philosophy from Kant. Yet
from the start there was one Kantian doctrine he could not
stomach: the doctrine of “things-in-themselves” (Dinge an
sich) somehow standing behind the objects we meet with in
experience—inaccessible beings of which, Kant says, we
must always remain ignorant. In papers of the late 1860s,
Peirce insisted that all of our cognitions are signs, and that
each sign refers to a previous sign:
At any moment we are in possession of certain information, that is, of cognitions which have been logically de-
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rived by induction and hypothesis from previous cognitions which are less general, less distinct, and of which we
have a less lively consciousness. These in their turn have
been derived from others still less general, less distinct,
and less vivid; and so on back to the ideal first, which is
quite singular and quite out of consciousness. The ideal
first is the particular thing-in-itself. It does not exist as
such.21
According to Peirce at this stage, all thoughts are of one
or another degree of generality, each referring to an earlier
thought, and none immediately to its object. Only if a cognition were immediately of its object, could it be certain, hence
an intuition. Our lack of intuition, as thus argued by Peirce,
was his initial ground for rejecting Descartes’ Cogito, ergo
sum. The real, as Peirce conceived it at this time, was an ideal
limit to a series of thoughts, a limit to be reached in the future:
The real . . . is that which, sooner or later, information and
reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore
independent of the vagaries of me and you. Thus, the very
origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits.22
Peirce here conceived all conceiving as in an infinite sequence of thoughts, stretching backward toward the non-existent
thing-in-itself (an external limit) and forward toward the real, to
be achieved at some future time (a limit located within the
thought sequence). A consequence was that any individual, considered as an “it” other than the universals true of it, is unreal.
With this consequence of his late-1860s theory of knowledge, Peirce was uncomfortable. If the aim is to get outside one’s
head and find a purchase on reality, it is indeed disastrous.23
Peirce at last found a way out in his “The Fixation of
Belief” of 1877:
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To satisfy our doubts . . . it is necessary that a method
should be found by which our beliefs may be caused by
nothing human, but by some external permanency—by
something on which our thinking has no effect. Such is the
method of science. Its fundamental hypothesis . . . is this:
There are real things, whose characters are entirely independent of our opinions about them; those realities affect
our senses according to regular law. . . .24
In “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (1878), Peirce combined the hypothesis of real things on which our thinking has
no effect with his earlier notion of indefinite progress toward
human knowledge of the real:
Different minds may set out with the most antagonistic
views, but the progress of investigation carries them by a
force outside of themselves to one and the same conclusion. . . . The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed
to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth,
and the object represented in this opinion is the real.25
In the years 1879-1884, Peirce was a part-time lecturer
in logic at the Johns Hopkins University, and he and his students O.H. Mitchell and Christine Ladd-Franklin (independently of Frege in Germany) introduced quantifiers into
predicate logic and the logic of relations. Thus the familiar
universal and particular propositions of Aristotelian logic,
“All S is P,” “Some S is P,” come to be replaced by
(x)(Sx ⊃ Px) [read: For all x, if x is S, then x is P], and
(Ǝ x) (Sx·Px) [read: There is an x such that x is S and x is P],
where we have used a notation now standard. Note that the
“x” denotes an individual in whatever universe of discourse,
fictional or real, we have entered upon, without any presumption that the essence of this individual is known to us. In relational logic, which is needed for mathematics, indices are
crucial for representing dyadic, triadic, n-adic relations, e.g.,
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Rxy (read: x bears the relation R to y). All our thinking, according to Peirce in the 1880s and later, is laced with indexical elements, tying discourse to the world we’re in. The
index asserts nothing; it only says “There!” Like such words
as “here,” “now,” “this,” it directs the mind to the object denoted.
The discovery of the nature and indispensability of indices led to a vast extension of Peirce’s understanding of
signs and significance (the science of semeiotic he was seeking to build). An index is anything that compels or channels
attention in a particular direction. The act of attention responding to an index does not have to be a component of a
thought. For instance a driver, on seeing a stoplight go red,
may brake automatically without thinking; he thus interprets
the red light as a command. Therefore the effect of a sign, in
triggering an interpretation, need not be a thought; it can be
an action or a feeling. The extension of semeiotic to nonhuman interpreters is now in the offing, as will become apparent
in Part 4 below.
At the same time, Peirce has burst out of the closed-in
idealism of his earlier theory of knowledge. The result is what
we may call Scientific Realism.
Part 3. Anisotropic Processes
Just twelve years after the first copies of Origin of Species
landed in the U.S.A., Peirce wrote:
Mr. Darwin proposed to apply the statistical method to biology. The same thing had been done in a widely different
branch of science, the theory of gases. Though unable to
say what the movements of any particular molecule of a
gas would be on a certain hypothesis regarding the constitution of this class of bodies, Clausius and Maxwell [had
been able, eight years before the publication of Darwin’s
immortal work], by the application of the doctrine of prob-
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abilities, to predict that in the long run such and such a proportion of the molecules would, under the given circumstances, acquire such and such velocities; that there would
take place, every second, such and such a number of collisions, etc.; and from these propositions [they] were able
to deduce certain properties of gases, especially in regard
to their heat relations. In like manner, Darwin, while unable to say what the operation of variation and natural selection in any individual case will be, demonstrates that in
the long run they will adapt animals to their circumstances.26
Thus Peirce took explanation in both statistical mechanics
and Darwinian natural selection to be statistical. He meant,
Short argues, irreducibly statistical, and not mechanistic.27
Analyzed logically, a mechanistic explanation starts from a
particular disposition of certain bodies at some time, and by
applying general laws of mechanics, gravitation, chemistry,
electromagnetism, or other general theory, derives the particular disposition of these bodies at a later time. “Particular”
here is opposed to “general.” The explanations of Celestial
Mechanics are of this kind. The celestial mechanician, starting from the positions and velocities of the bodies in the solar
system at one instant, and assuming gravitational theory,
computes the positions and velocities of these bodies at a later
instant. If we should propose to ourselves a similar calculation for molecules of a gas confined in a container, we would
find it impracticable. The number of molecules is too large
(in a cubic centimeter of gas at one atmosphere of pressure
and 0°C. that number is about 2.7 × 1019, or 27 quintillion).
Ascertaining the positions and velocities of all these molecules at a specified “initial” instant is humanly impossible.
Moreover, the motions are not governed by a single law like
gravitation, but involve collisions of the molecules with each
other and the walls of the container; these introduce discontinuities that are difficult to take into account.
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But the crucial conclusion is this: even if such a computation were possible, it would not yield the conclusion for
which statistical mechanics argues. Statistical mechanics
seeks to establish that notably non-uniform distributions of
molecules in the gas will in time be replaced by a more uniform distribution, with reduction in the spread of velocities
amongst the molecules. The statistical argument invokes
probability.
How to understand probability in this context is by no
means settled, and we shall give only a rough indication of
the type of solution that is believed necessary.28 Consider a
system of n molecules of gas contained in a volume V. Let V
be divided into a large number m of equal cells, m being less
than n (if n is in quintillions, m could be in the millions or
billions). If the molecules were distributed with perfect uniformity throughout V, then each cell would contain n/m molecules. This distribution is a particular microstate—an
extremely special one, hence unlikely. We would expect that,
in most imaginable distributions, the numbers of molecules
in different cells would be different. To take this likelihood
into account, consider microstates in which the number of
molecules in all cells falls within the range n/m ± e, where e
is much less than n/m. Let the class of all microstates thus
characterized be called C, and let the complementary class,
or class of all microstates in which the number of molecules
in some cells falls outside the range n/m ± e, be called Cʹ′.
In the work of the earlier theorists, distinguishable microstates compatible with the overall energy of the gas were
assigned equal probabilities, since no reason presented itself
for assigning different probabilities to different microstates.
Later theorists sought grounds other than “equal ignorance”
for assigning probabilities to microstates. Whatever the mode
of assigning probabilities, the outcome must show the gas
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progressing from less uniform to more uniform distributions,
both spatially and with respect to the spread of velocities. For
that is the empirical result: a quantity of gas under high pressure, when let into an evacuated chamber, spreads out
through the chamber and is soon more homogeneously distributed, with a uniform temperature and pressure lower than
the original temperature and pressure.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics extends this kind
of reasoning to all natural systems. It says that in any closed
system the processes have a direction: they progress toward
greater homogeneity and reduced capacity to do mechanical
work.29 For processes that are directional in time, Short uses
the term anisotropic (a-privative + iso, “equal” + tropos, “direction”). Anisotropic processes are defined by the type toward which they progress. We shall see that there are
anisotropic processes other than those that instantiate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. All such processes, however,
differ from mechanical processes, which proceed from a particular configuration to a particular configuration.
Whether the universe is a closed system we do not know,
but everywhere in the observable world we see the effects of
the Second Law, the “degradation of energy.” Nevertheless,
we also see that new forms of order, though improbable,
sometimes emerge. They are produced in open systems that
absorb energy from, and discard unused matter and energy
to, the environment. Ilya Prigogine has described such forms
of order, calling them “dissipative systems.”30 Locally, in the
newly created form, the second law appears to be violated,
but if account is taken of the exhausted fuel and other waste
materials ejected to the environment, the second law is found
to hold. Higher forms of order come to be at the expense of
a decrease in order elsewhere, an increase in homogeneity
and a lessened capacity to produce novelty.
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The first coming-to-be of living forms in the universe presumably occurred in the manner of Prigogine’s “dissipative
systems.” Such is the hypothesis generally accepted by scientists today. Living systems differ from the cases studied by
Prigogine in their greater complexity and in having the capacity to self-replicate. In 1953 the graduate student S.L.
Miller under the guidance of H.C. Urey circulated a mixture
of methane, ammonia, water vapor, and hydrogen through a
liquid water solution, and elsewhere in the apparatus continuously passed an electrical discharge through the vaporous
mixture. After several days the water solution changed color,
and was found to contain a mixture of amino acids, the essential constituents of proteins. Since then, most if not all of
the essential building-blocks of proteins, carbohydrates, and
nucleic acids have been produced under conditions similar to
those obtaining when the Earth was young (the atmosphere
needs to be free of oxidizing agents such as oxygen). The sequences of conditions and chemical pathways by which these
building-blocks may have been assembled into a living cell
remain matters of speculation.
Darwin’s evolutionary theory, taking the existence of living things as given, goes on to show how, chiefly but not
solely by means of natural selection,31 biological evolution
can occur. Our little word “can” here goes to signal what
Nicholas Maistrellis calls “the highly theoretical, and even
speculative character” of Origin chapter 4, dedicated to expounding that and how Natural Selection “works.”
We should not expect a series of examples of natural selection designed to win us over to his theory on purely empirical grounds. Even if Darwin had wanted to proceed in
that way, he could not have done so, for such examples do
not exist—or at least were not known to Darwin. . . . Notice
that all the examples of natural selection in this chapter are,
as Darwin repeatedly acknowledges, imaginary ones.32
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Contemporary readers of Darwin have sometimes become so blasé about the shocking idea that order may emerge
out of disorder that they don’t notice how subtle, complex,
and distributed the over-all argument of Origin is. We have
found C. Kenneth Waters’ “The arguments in the Origin of
Species,” along with the other essays included in Part 1: Darwin’s Theorizing of The Cambridge Companion to Darwin,
particularly conducive to waking us up.
Peirce wrote, in A Guess at the Riddle (1887):
Whether the part played by natural selection and the survival of the fittest in the production of species be large or
small, there remains little doubt that the Darwinian theory
indicates a real cause, which tends to adapt animal and
vegetable forms to their environment. A remarkable feature
of it is that it shows how merely fortuitous variations of
individuals together with merely fortuitous mishaps to
them would, under the action of heredity, result, not in
mere irregularity, nor even in statistical constancy, but in
indefinite progress toward a better adaptation of means to
ends.33
A little later in this same manuscript Peirce sums up the basic
idea of Darwinian selection as follows:
There are just three factors in the process of natural selection; to wit: 1st, the principle of individual variation or
sporting; 2nd, the principle of hereditary transmission . . . ;
and 3rd, the principle of elimination of unfavorable characters.34
Darwin and Peirce lacked the benefit of a workable theory of inheritance. Nothing like our genetics was available
to them. We today single out genetic make-up as the causally
significant locale of “sporting,” And Peirce’s phrase, “elimination of unfavorable characters,” is replaced in more recent
neo-Darwinian formulations by the phrase “relative reproductive success,” meaning, the having of more numerous off-
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spring. The process is statistical: If one variant of a species
has more numerous offspring than do others, and if in addition these offspring survive to reproduce, the original variant,
possessed of one or more genetic alleles (alternative forms
of a gene), is more successful in propagating its genome to
later generations.
The hypothesis of Natural Selection confers little in the
way of predictive power. Its chief value is to provide a posthoc explanation of what has occurred. For example, visual
acuity is crucial to the survival of both predators and prey.
Evidently predators are better off with eyes in the front of
their heads as they pursue prey, and potential prey are better
off with eyes on the sides of their heads to detect predators
coming from any quarter. Another example: Flowers evolved
as a device by which plants induce animals to transport their
pollen (hence sperm) to the egg cells. The evolutionarily
older plants had been pollinated by the wind. The more attractive the plants were to an insect, the more frequently they
would be visited and the more seeds they would produce.
Any chance variation that made the visits more frequent or
made pollination more efficient offered immediate advantages.35
We can only guess at the detailed processes by which such
adaptations have been brought about. What Darwin gives us
is a heuristic for research, not a set of biological laws.36 Partly
on this account, because Darwinian explanation does not fit
the model of explanation in mechanics, it has taken a long
time before philosophers of science became willing to award
a comparable degree of intellectual dignity to Darwinian as
to Galilean and Newtonian science. The books listed in the
Bibliography appended to Maistrellis’s Selections help overcome the physics envy that stands in the way of appreciating
Darwin. Particularly helpful have been Sober’s persevering
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efforts to clarify and show the interconnections amongst the
fundamental concepts of Fitness, Function, Adaptation, and
Selection, while steadily reminding us of the ineliminably
probabilistic character of most of the theorizing of modern
evolutionary biology.
One of Sober’s helps into the saddle is his distinction between selection for and selection of:
Selection-for is a causal concept. To say that there is selection for trait T in a population means that having T
causes organisms to survive and reproduce better (so having the alternative(s) to T that are present in the population
causes organisms to survive and reproduce worse). In contrast, to say that there is selection of trait T just means that
individuals with T have a higher average fitness than do
individuals who lack T.37
Here is an illustration of the contrasting terms being put to
use:
Worms improve the soil, but that does not mean that their
digestive systems are adaptations for soil improvement;
rather, the worm gut evolved to help individual worms survive and reproduce. The benefit that the ecosystem receives is a fortuitous benefit—a useful side-effect
unrelated to what caused the trait to evolve. The gut’s ability to extract nutrition for individual worms is what the gut
is an adaptation for.38
To balance our earlier quotation from Maistrellis stressing
the not strictly empirically encountered character of Darwin’s
examples in his chapter about natural selection-at-work, notice that Sober feels quite comfortable about urging against
the philosopher Jerry Fodor, a critic of Darwinism, that “biologists often think they have excellent evidence for saying
that agricultural pests experienced selection for DDT resistance, [or] that there has been selection for dark coloration in
moths.”39
Short adopts Sober’s selection of/selection for contrast
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and, integrating it with Peircian ideas of explanation by final
causes, adapts it to new uses. The context is as follows. He
asks us to distinguish four kinds of physical process:
Mechanical processes that proceed from one particular
configuration to another and are reversible.
The processes described by statistical dynamics, which
are anisotropic and result in an increase in entropy and disorder.
The non-equilibrium processes studied by Prigogine,
which are also anisotropic, but produce open systems that
have increased order and diminished entropy. The dissipative structures can sustain themselves in the given environment for a time. Living things, we assume, are of this
kind—complex open systems that metabolize and have an
apparatus for replicating themselves.
With living things, a third sort of anisotropic process
comes into play: Natural Selection, the selection of characteristics for types of effect that conduce to reproductive
success.40
Given living things and their struggle for existence, given
heritable variability, given phenotypic features that in a given
state-of-its-world enhance a creature’s relative chance of producing fertile offspring, a new kind of directional process
comes into being, natural selection. And with it, the possibility of purpose comes on the scene.
Not that anything is a purpose or has a purpose in biological evolution before the actual occurrence of a mutation
that happens to be selectively retained because of some advantage that it confers. Only at that time, that is, when a
feature is selected for its effect, does the effect, say visual
acuity, become a purpose. There was no purpose “visual
acuity” or “adaptedness” or “survival” hanging around
waiting for an opportunity. But once eyes with adjustable
lenses become a feature of mammals, then it would only
be mechanicalist prejudice that could keep us from saying
that eyes exist for the purpose of seeing.41
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Sober’s polar terms selection of/selection for are perhaps
worked harder and a little differently than they were previously:
It is because lenses and focusing increase visual acuity that
genetic mutations resulting in lenses and focusing were retained in subsequent generations; in fact, that happened in
independent lines of animal evolution. The selection in
those cases was for the visual acuity and of concrete structures (or the genes that determine them) that improved visual acuity in specific ways. . . . The of/for distinction is
relative to the level of analysis, but the object of ‘for’ is always an abstract type and the object of ‘of ’ is always
something genetic or genetically determined, hence concrete. . . . As the type selected-for is essential to explanation
by natural selection, such explanation is like anisotropic
explanation in statistical mechanics [in that] both explain
actual phenomena by the types they exemplify. Hence it is
not mechanistic. . . . It is qua adaptation—hence in that aspect—that [an adaptive feature, say S] is explained by natural selection. S could also be explained, had we knowledge
enough, as a product of a complicated series of mechanical
events. But, then, S’s enhancing reproductive success
would seem a surprising coincidence, a bit of biological
luck. S’s being an adaptation would not be explained.42
The “aptness” of organisms is one of the facts of life
that the Darwinian program of explanation seeks to account
for. Having had some success in this explanatory endeavor,
we easily forget that there is no guarantee that evolution
will bring about an increase in complexity or intelligence
or other quality that we admire. Overstatement here, Short
warns us, is common, and disastrous.43 Notice too that natural selection was not itself selected, and therefore does not
have a purpose. It just occurs.
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Part 4. The Emergence of Intentionality and
Conscious Purposes
Cleverly joining Peircean reasoning to the more recent formulations of neo-Darwinian theory, Short’s Theory sketches
a narrative that strives to make intelligible the eventual emergence of the possibility of deliberately produced tools and
self-controlled action out of advantageous anatomy and biologically useful animal behavior. Here one must go slow and
notice that it is as the world comes to hold new kinds of entity
that new kinds of explanation become applicable.44 Short is
not reducing biological explanation to chemical explanation.
Nor will he assimilate human discourse to animal signaling.45
The last three chapters of his book are given over to exploring the implications of applying Peirce’s ideas of sign-action
(= semeiosis) to distinctively human language, thought, and
life. But unless we work from the bottom up, there is no explaining of emergents.
“Working from the bottom up” means for Short that he
must develop so general an account of Peirce’s semiotic triad
Sign-Object-Interpretant that it will be applicable both to
infra-human sign-interpretation—end-directed animal responses to stimuli—and, duly amplified, to distinctively
human life and thought. For Short, this behaviorist interlude
is in the service of Peirce’s Synechism:46 If successful in his
defense of Peirce’s ways, he will have warded off both Cartesian dualism and Reductionism.47
Among social animals, group behavior is determined by
mechanisms that cause one individual to respond to another.
A forager bee, for instance, having located nectar, returns to
the hive and there exhibits what look like dances. The bees
in the hive react to these dances as signaling the direction and
distance in which the nectar will be found. Ethologists have
instructed us that there is an immense variety of animal be-
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haviors that operate as though they were intended as communicative signs. By what criteria one determines the intendedness
of a bird- or monkey-cry the emission of which tends to result
in fellow-birds or fellow-monkeys reacting with behavior that
makes sense for the creatures in question (e.g., escaping in
an appropriate way from a certain kind of predator, or overcoming reluctance to approach more closely) has been a topic
for ethological investigation. But every parent is familiar with
the fact that infant wailing and screaming is not, in the earlier
phases of its life, an expression of the infant’s intention to
rouse its protectors. Yet when the infant is a little older its
jealous brother may justly complain: “She is not crying for a
reason. She’s crying for a purpose!”
We have deliberately introduced the word “intend” in its
ordinary sense before returning to the topic of intentionality
in Brentano’s scholastic and technical sense. (Unhappiness
about the lack of a non-dualist treatment of Intentionality was
what initially motivated our exploration of Short’s book on
Peirce’s semeiotics.) Unlike many semioticians, Short follows in Peirce’s footsteps by beginning with interpretive behavior, not with the sending of signs.48 This permits him to
take off from responses. For instance:
The deer does not flee the sudden noise that startled it, but
a predator; for it is to evade a predator that the deer flees.
The instinct to flee is based on an experienced correlation
of sudden noises to predators; the correlation is weak, but,
unless the deer is near starvation, it is better for it to risk
losing a meal than to risk being one. If no predator is there,
the deer’s flight is a mistake, albeit justified. Mistaken or
not, the flight interprets the noise as a sign of a predator.
A response is not merely an effect if it can be mistaken. It
ranks as an interpretation.
In what manner and measure this idea of mistake is available to infra-human animals is a hard question. When the dog
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that was, in some human observer’s estimation, “barking up
the wrong tree,” corrects itself and, redirecting its bark to the
neighboring tree, glimpses the spot where the cat in fact now
is, does the dog think to itself, “Now I’ve got it right”? Consider two other examples of interpretive responses, both reported by the ethologist Niko Tinbergen: male sticklebacks,
during the breeding season, tend to adopt a “threat posture”
toward potential rivals.
When the opponent does not flee . . . the owner of the territory . . . points its head down and, standing vertically in
the water, makes some jerky movements as if it were going
to bore its snout into the sand. Often it erects one or both
ventral fins.49
Tinbergen’s Plate I is a photo of a Stickleback exhibiting this
posture to its own reflection in a mirror! We know this fish is
making a mistake. Does he?
Lorenz reports . . . an incident which demonstrates the
power of [some varieties of Cichlid] to distinguish between
food and their young. Many Cichlids carry the young back,
at dusk, to a kind of bedroom, a pit they have dug in the
bottom. Once Lorenz, together with some of his students,
watched a male collecting its young for this purpose. When
it had just snapped up a young one, it eyed a particularly
tempting little worm. It stopped, looked at the worm for
several seconds, and seemed to hesitate. Then, after these
seconds of “hard thinking,” it spat out the young, took up
the worm and swallowed it, and then picked up its young
one again and carried it home. The observers could not
help applauding.50
The antelope that fled from a lion that wasn’t there, the stickleback that threatened a rival that wasn’t there, did they interpret something heard, something seen, as to-be-run-from,
to-be-ousted? Their behaviors, while in error in the particular
cases, were appropriate. And this holds true whether or not
these individual animals “knew what they were doing.”
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113
Something like this is, we take it, what Short meant when he
wrote: 51
The purposefulness of interpretation accounts for the significance of that which is interpretable. In particular, as
that which has a purpose may fail of its purpose, the purposefulness of interpretations accounts for the possibility
that what is signified is not. Because what is signified
might not be, significance exemplifies Brentano’s idea of
intentionality, which he defined as having an “inexistent
object,” i.e., an object that is an object independently of its
existing. Brentano asserted that intentionality is unique to
human mentality, but the argument of [Short’s] book is that
sign-interpretation occurs independently of conscious
thought and, hence, that Peirce’s semeiotic applies to phenomena well beyond human mentality. Thus it provides for
a naturalistic explanation of the mind. But that is possible
only if purposefulness can occur without consciousness.
Peirce’s doctrine of final causation c. 1902 provides a defense of that assumption. For it identifies causation with
selection for types of possible outcome, regardless of
whether that selection is conscious. And it does so consistently with modern physics and biology.52
But the question that arose when we considered the dog
that eventually managed to bark at the cat is still with us: The
dog, in our judgment and in fact, “corrected itself.” And we
know that learning, in the sense of an individual’s behavior
being shaped “for the better” by its experience, is a constituent of the lives of very many (all?) animals. But did the
dog know that it corrected itself? Consider Lorenz’s much applauded Cichlid father, which had its worm and its baby too.
Mustn’t it have had some sort of “inner representation” of the
alternative courses of conduct between which it chose?
We seem at last to have reached the question of when and
how conscious purpose, planning, and self-control emerge.
Short’s entire book, not just the chapter bearing the name
“Semeiosis and the Mental,” is in pursuit of it. Given that
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Peirce regarded thought to be internalized discourse, and that
an individual’s power of discourse is a skill that could not
have been acquired had that individual’s “instinct to acquire
the art” (as Darwin put it) not been activated in the course of
apprenticeship to speakers, Short and Peirce are clearly right
that “the capacity to think for oneself and to act in despite of
society is . . . social in origin.” He adds: “Individual autonomy and varied personality are further examples of the irreducibility of new realities to their preconditions.”53 Among
such “new realities” are not only new means to accomplish
existing purposes but also new purposes.
Because Short, under Peirce’s tutelage, is wholehearted
about accepting the Reality of purpose and purposiveness and
is unembarrassed about following Darwin in naturalizing
man, his investigation of how purpose can and has become
“emancipated” from biology has real content.54
Conclusion
We have seen that, according to Peirce, both statistical mechanics and Darwinian natural selection entail anisotropic
processes, defined by the type of result they lead to. The
“population thinking” that Darwin and later biologists introduced into biology was aimed at accounting for the emergence of biological types or species. The new thinking
differed from the typological thinking of pre-Darwinian times
in that the types or species arose in time.
Among the virtues of Short’s presentation of Peirce is that
he gives a sufficiently detailed description of Peirce’s Categories (in Ch.3) for readers to be supplied with opportunity
to become persuaded that Peirce’s trinitarian categorial
scheme accommodates Individuals and Kinds as mutually irreducible. Here is, however, not the place to exhibit or argue
the point.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | WILSON AND MASCHLER
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Why was the reception of Darwin at St. John’s so lukewarm in earlier days? The theoretical physicist’s impatience
with fussy descriptive details such as are dwelt on in Origin
(and must be by natural historians) was probably a contributing factor; and one that would have been exacerbated if the
assigned selection from Origin was pedagogically haphazard.
But vague apprehensions about the moral and philosophical
import of Darwin’s theory may have contributed more heavily to avoiding serious intellectual engagement with it.
Darwin himself anticipated this reaction. He explains (in
the Introduction to Descent of Man) that it was in order not
to stand in the way of the reading public’s making fair trial
of his general views that he allowed himself just one tiny
paragraph, on the final pages of Origin, that makes direct
mention of man:
In the distant future . . . psychology will be based on a new
foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown
on the origin of man and his history.
Twelve years later, in Descent of Man, the scope of Darwin’s intellectual ambition is made manifest. In Ch.3 he takes
on Kant:
“Duty . . . whence thy original?” . . . As far as I know, no
one has approached [this great question] exclusively from
the side of natural history.
So “approaching it,” Darwin writes:
The following proposition seems to me in a high degree
probable—namely, that any animal whatever, endowed
with well-marked social instincts, would inevitably acquire
a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well developed, or nearly as well developed, as in man.55
His plan is to show how, granted the rest of our mental at-
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tributes and the world’s make-up, the human species does
better with than it would without morality. Otherwise morality (sense of duty, conscience) and the instruments for its acquisition and maintenance could not have become “selected.”
But isn’t there something topsy-turvy about an explanation that subordinates, as means, something better, namely a
creature competent to have a sense of duty, to an end less
good, namely, mere comparative fitness for producing fertile
offspring? The complaint, we urge, limps, because it fails to
register that when something is fruitful and multiplies or fails
to, it is as a creature possessed of certain attributes that it
does so. Darwin freely ascribes sociability, intelligence, and
emotions (sympathy, jealousy, ennui, curiosity, courage, maternal affection, and so forth) to, for instance, domestic animals.56 Nevertheless, he reserves morality for human beings:
As we cannot distinguish between motives, we rank all actions of a certain class as moral, when they are performed
by a moral being. A moral being is one who is capable of
comparing his past or future actions or motives, and of approving or disapproving of them. We have no reason to suppose that any of the lower animals have this capacity;
therefore when a monkey faces danger to rescue its comrade, or takes charge of an orphan monkey, we do not call
its conduct moral. . . . It cannot be maintained that the social
instincts are ordinarily stronger in man than, . . . for instance, the instinct of self-preservation, hunger, lust. . . .
Why, then, does man regret . . . and why does he further
feel he ought to regret his conduct? . . . Man, from the activity of his mental faculties, cannot avoid reflection. . . .
Whilst the mother bird is feeding or brooding over her
nestlings, the maternal instinct is probably stronger than the
migratory; but . . . at last, at a moment when her young ones
are not in sight, she takes flight and deserts them. When arrived at the end of her long journey, and the migratory instinct ceases to act, what an agony of remorse each bird
would feel if, being endowed with great mental activity, she
could not prevent the image continually passing before her
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | WILSON AND MASCHLER
117
mind of her young ones perishing in the bleak north from
cold and hunger. At the moment of action, man will no
doubt be apt to follow the stronger impulse. . . . But after
their gratification, when past and weaker impressions are
contrasted with the ever enduring social instincts, retribution will surely come. Man will then feel dissatisfied with
himself, and will resolve with more or less force to act differently for the future. This is conscience; for conscience
looks backwards and judges past actions, inducing that kind
of dissatisfaction which, if weak, we call regret, and if severe remorse.57
Darwin seems to have come upon Aristotle late in life and
recognized a soul-mate in him. He would, we believe, have
been in delighted agreement upon reading Aristotle’s observation in History of Animals, Book 1, 488b24, that we are the
only creatures capable of deliberating (bouleutikon):
Many animals have the power of memory, and can be
trained, but the only one that can recall past events at will
(dunatai anamimnēskesthai) is man.
Where are we then? Conscience, says Darwin in the
opening sentence of Descent of Man, Ch.3, is the chief mark
of distinction of the human race. Conscience cannot come
into existence or operate without the power of recollection.
The power of recollection (though no texts come to mind
where anyone of our three authors says this expressly) depends upon the power to learn and employ not just a communicative medium but an articulate language.58 Beings of
this sort, Peirce the logician will come to argue ever more
strenuously as he ages, are capable of acting not just in a motivated way, but in accordance with an ideal:
Every action has a motive; but an ideal only belongs to a
line of conduct which is deliberate. To say that conduct is
deliberate implies that each action, or each important action, is reviewed by the actor and that his judgment is
passed upon it, as to whether he wishes his future conduct
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118
to be like that or not. His ideal is the kind of conduct which
attracts him upon review. His self-criticism followed by a
more or less conscious resolution that in its turn excites a
determination of his habit, will, with the aid of sequelae,
modify a future action; but it will not generally be a moving
cause to action.59
Permit us to conclude with an anecdote. A recent movie
presented a small group of adults with the situation of a male
high-school teacher accepting seduction by one of his beautiful girl-students. Ever intent on discussing la difference, one
of the men in the group of movie watchers asked “Do you
blame the teacher?” “Yes,” was the answer, “because although it may indeed be true that it is harder for young men
than for young women to resist sexual arousal, the teacher
knowingly entered upon a profession that he could foresee
would present him with such situations as he was now in. He
should, taking advantage of the human power of imagination,
have rehearsed inwardly how he would act if the world presented him with an opportunity that he should turn down.”60
With Peirce’s help, and instructed by Short, we hope to
have shown in this essay that nothing in Darwin interferes
with acknowledging the emergence of organisms competent
to entertain and criticize ideals. This is the kind of organism
we human beings are.
NOTES
1. According to Ernst Mayr in his One Long Argument: Charles Darwin
and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1991), what later authors think and speak of
as “Darwin’s Theory” is a combination of four or five strands—evolution
as such, common descent, multiplication of species, gradualism, and natural selection.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | WILSON AND MASCHLER
119
2. See Ernst Mayr’s Introduction to Charles Darwin, On the Origin of
Species: A Facsimile of the First Edition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1972), xii.
3. John Dewey, The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy (New York:
Henry Holt, 1910).
4. Ernst Mayr in Evolution and Anthropology (Washington: Anthropological Society of Washington, 1959), 2; also given in Mayr’s Introduction to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species: A Facsimile, xix-xx.
5. See Elliott Sober, “Evolution, population thinking, and essentialism,”
Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology, ed. Elliott Sober, (Boston:
MIT Press, 2001).
6. In the seminar described at the beginning of this essay, Clark was the
sole participant to speak up in defense of Darwin’s theory.
7. In his book Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt (Leipzig:
Duncker und Humblot, 1874).
8. Jasha spoke with admiration of Husserl’s repeated efforts to start all
over again from the beginning, in formulating the archai of philosophy.
Husserl’s notion of sedimentation in the sciences—our tendency to take
earlier achievements for granted—was a theme that Jasha took up in his
studies of the origins of algebra and of the work of Galileo. Seeking to
understand Jasha’s Husserlian antecedents, I read a good deal of Husserl
during the years I was reading Peirce. A lecture I gave in September, 1959,
was based on Husserl’s Erfahrung und Urteil.
9. The importance of this fact was first established by Murray Murphey,
in The Development of Peirce’s Philosophy, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1961.)
10. Thomas L. Short, Peirce’s Theory of Signs (Cambridge: Cambridge Universty Press, 2007). I was introduced to this book by Chaninah Maschler.
11. The Essential Peirce, edited by the Peirce Edition Project, 2 Vols.
(Bloomingdale, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1998), Vol. 2, 400. In
further references to this publication will be abbreviated to EP.
12. Ibid., 516.
13. These articles are reprinted in EP, Vol. 1, 109-123, 124-141.
14. Thomas L. Short, in a forthcoming second book about Peirce, gives
a detailed defense of this Peircean understanding of the sciences.
15. EP, Vol. 2, 400. Italics added.
16. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, “Of the Canon of Pure
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Reason,” A800 = B828 ff. Kant there explains, “By the practical I mean
everything that is possible through freedom.”
17. EP, Vol. 2, 333.
18. Ibid., 401.
19. Peirce eventually (as here) made the name of the -ism ugly, “to keep
it safe from being kidnapped.” Consider what Peirce writes about how his
thinking does or doesn’t differ from that of William James, EP, Vol. 2, 421.
20. EP, Vol. 2, 358f. For a lucid brief description of Peirce’s later “subjunctive” version of pragmatism, one which acknowledges that “modern
science . . . is practice engaged in for the sake of theory,” see Short,
Peirce’s Theory of Signs, 173, second paragraph.
21. EP, Vol. 1, 52.
22. Ibid.
23. For other difficulties with his theory in the 1860s, see Short, Peirce’s
Theory of Signs, ch. 2.
24. EP, Vol. 1, 120.
25. EP, Vol. 1, 138-139.
26. EP, Vol. 1, “The Fixation of Belief,” 111; for the square bracketed
emendations, see ibid., 377.
27. Cf. EP, Vol. 1, 289f.
28. See Paul Ehrenfest and Tatyana Ehrenfest, The Conceptual Foundations of the Statistical Approach in Mechanics (New York: Dover, 1958.)
29. Cf. EP, Vol. 1, 221.
30. Ilya Prigogine, From Being to Becoming (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1980). See also Stuart A. Kauffman, “Antichaos and Adaptation,”
in Scientific American, August 1991, 78-84.
31. See the concluding sentence of the potent last paragraph of Darwin’s
Introduction to On the Origin of Species. Gould and Lewontin, in their
famous protest against unrestrained Adaptationism (“The Spandrels of
San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptionist
Programme,” in Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology, ed. Elliott
Sober, [Boston: MIT Press, 2001]), cite this sentence and add an approving reference to George. J. Romanes’s essay “The Darwinism of Darwin,
and of the Post-Darwinian Schools” (in The Monist 6:1 [1895], 1-27).
Romanes would join Gould and Lewontin when they write: “We should
cherish [Darwin’s] consistent attitude of pluralism in attempting to ex-
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | WILSON AND MASCHLER
121
plain Nature’s complexity” (82).
32. Selections from Darwin’s The Origin of Species: The Shape of the Argument, ed., Nicholas Maistrellis (Santa Fe: Green Lion Press, 2009), 43.
33. EP, Vol 1, 200. For a correction of this overly cheerful scenario of inevitable progress see, e.g., Elliott Sober, “Selection-for: What Fodor and
Piattelli-Palmarini Got Wrong,” 11. This essay is available on the internet
at the following URL:
http://philosophy.wisc.edu/sober/Fodor%20and%20Piatelli-Palermini%20april%209%202010.pdf
34. EP, Vol. 1, 272. Cf. Darwin, On the Origin of Species: A Facsimile,
127.
35. Helena Curtis, Biology (New York: Worth, 1979).
36. Equally important, perhaps, is the inspiration of Darwin’s intellectual
attitude—omni-observant, persevering, sober—to which Maistrellis calls
attention.
37. Elliott Sober, The Nature of Selection: Evolutionary Theory in Philosophical Focus (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984).
38. The example stems from Williams via Elliott Sober and David Sloan
Wilson, “Adaptation and Natural Selection Revisited,” in the Journal of
Evolutionary Biology 24 (February 2011), 462-8. In this article, the authors are “revisiting” George C. Williams’s book on adaptation in order
to make sure the world knows that the book was a landmark in the development of evolutionary theory.
39. Elliott Sober, “Fodor’s Bubbe Meise Against Darwinism,” in Mind and
Language 23 (February 2008), 43. (Bubbe meise is Yiddish for “old wives’
tale.”) This article is also available on the internet at the following URL:
http://philosophy.wisc.edu/sober/fodor's%20bubbe%20meise%20published.pdf
40. When Herbert Spencer attempted to explain evolution on mechanical
principles, Peirce countered that the endeavor was illogical. See EP, Vol.
1, 289. Among Peirce’s arguments was this: the law of conservation of
energy implies that all operations governed by mechanical laws are reversible. Whence follows the corollary that growth is not explicable by
those laws, even though they are not violated in the process of growth.
41. Private communication from Thomas Short, March 19, 2012.
42. Short, Peirce’s Theory of Signs, 130. Italics in last sentence added.
43. Ibid., 145
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44. Ibid., 144-145.
45. As Allen Clark wrote in a manuscript never published (“The Contributions of Charles S. Peirce to Value Theory,” 4), “No philosopher . . .
would be less inclined than Peirce to minimize the tremendous importance of the transformation that occurs when inquiry [or any other adaptive behavior] rises from the unconscious to the conscious level. For it is
at this second stage that man transcends the animal faculty of merely responding to naturally given signs, those perceptual clues furnished by nature; he begins to make signs, and to respond to signs of his own making,
and thus learns to provoke his own responses.”
46. “Synechism is Peirce’s doctrine that human mentality is continuous
with the rest of nature,” writes Thomas Short in his exchange with the
critics of his book, “Response,” in Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce
Society 43 (Fall 2007), 666.
47. Ibid. Dewey’s essay of 1896, “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology” (Psychological Review 3 [July, 1896], 357-370) is offered in the
same, perhaps Hegel-inspired, spirit of synechism. (This article is available on the internet at the following URL:
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Dewey/reflex.htm.) But a more instructive
comparison would be between Thomas Short’s account of Peirce and the
life-long work of James J. Gibson, for instance, The Senses Considered
as Perceptual Systems (Boston: Houghton Miffin, 1966) and The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin,
1979.).
48. See Short, Peirce’s Theory of Signs, 156f.
49. Niko Tinbergen, Social Behavior of Animals, Methuen’s Monographs
on Biological Subjects, Vol. 1 (New York: Taylor and Francis, 1953), 9.
50. Ibid., 45. The following anecdote of Darwin’s in his chapter comparing the mental powers of lower animals with human mental powers seems
to be to the same effect: “Mr. Colquhoun winged two wild ducks, which
fell on the opposite sides of a stream; his retriever tried to bring over both
at once, but could not succeed; she then, though never before known to
ruffle a feather, deliberately killed one, brought over the other, and returned for the dead bird.” Charles Darwin, Descent of Man (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1981), 48.
51. Further clarifying remarks on Intentionality are given by Short in
Peirce’s Theory of Signs, 174-177.
52. Elliott Sober, “Fodor’s Bubbe Meise Against Darwinism,” 669.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | WILSON AND MASCHLER
123
53. Short, Peirce’s Theory of Signs, 147.
54. Ibid., 148.
55. Darwin, Descent of Man, 71.
56. See Charles Darwin’s 1872 book Expression of the Emotions in Man
and Animals, ed. Paul Ekman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
57. Darwin, Descent of Man, Ch.3, 88-91.
58. Ibid., Ch.2, 54.
59. EP, Vol. 2, 377. Survey the Index to EP, Vol. 2 under “self-control.”
60. The answer is inspired by Peirce’s report of his childhood memory of
his younger brother’s having prepped himself in imagination for preventing the spread of a small fire. See EP, Vol. 2, 413.
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
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The Laws of Physics
Marlene Benjamin
In Memoriam
People say that the Laws of Physics
Are immutable,
Beyond the reach of hopes and dreams,
Immune to wishes,
And entirely indifferent to desire.
They say that the Laws of Physics
Are as solid in their abstractness as the materials
Whose movements they describe,
Whose broad encompassing axioms
Place with near precision all heavenly bodies,
All rocks and debris,
All breathing creatures—even us,
With all our singularity—
Within the vastness of this complicated
And wholly relational world,
Measuring all places with a confidence
In basic principles (as if some genius had bestowed upon
them personality)
The rest of us admire but so rarely can attain.
There is beauty in the Laws of Physics,
The beauty and elegance of those simple Euclidean equations
I struggled over long ago,
The amazing loveliness of a singularly striking accomplishment.
Marlene Benjamin is Associate Professor Emerita at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts, and now lives in California. She is currently working on a
book entitled The Catastrophic Self: Philosophy, Memoir, and Medical Trauma.
�POEM
125
And yet this question haunts us:
Why should we not believe as Greeks believed?
Why should we not believe
That what we now call myths are really legends,
Embellished, we agree, yet legends nonetheless . . .
Why should we not have the confidence with which the
Greeks were blessed,
And take some tales of ordinary people, whose lives were touched
By strange and unexpected happenings, as legends of our own,
So that the Laws of Physics or Biology
Or of all the Natural Philosophies
Were not, as we believe, constraining,
But rather showed us ourselves as god-like,
Whose dreams inscribe upon the world what pleases us,
Able, like Athena, come full blown out of Zeus’s head
To enact the Laws of Physics to suit ourselves?
Then would you come walking back
To family and friends,
But especially, most especially, to wife and daughter;
All your molecules and atoms shaped perfectly again
Into your singularly recognizable form,
Striding purposefully and with that grin of yours
And, as on any ordinary day,
There would you be,
Arriving home,
Whole and un-bloodied,
Back into the life you should be living still.
�
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Pastille, William
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Hunt, Frank
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Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Zuckerman, Elliott
Arnaiz, Deziree
Sachs, Joe
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St. John's Review
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