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DEPTH
AND
DESIRE
EVABRM-IN
St. John's College
Annapolis, Friday, August 31, 1990
�DEPTH AND DESIRE
Eva Brann
Annapolis, Friday, August 31, 1990
li5l y an old tradition the first lecture •)f the year is dedicated to
lQJ the new members of our college, to the freshman students and
the freshman tutors. It is a chance to tell you something about the
shape and the spirit of the Program that pverns St. John's College-
and not only to tell you but perhaps even to show you.
I think I am right in this spirit when I begin by examining
the class-name I just called you by: freshmen. A freshman, my
etymological dictionaries tell me, is a person "not tainted, sullied or
worn," a still-fresh human being, where "fresh" means, so the
dictionary points out, both "frisky" and "impertinent." Later on in the
year you will learn a weighty Greek word applicable to persons of
frisky impertinence. They are said to have thymos, spiritedness or
plain spunk, a characteristic necessary for serious learning. This
spirited frame of mind is perfectly compatible with being shy and
secretly a little scared. In fact, to my mind, it is a sign of quality in
newcomers to be anxious for their own diJnity in the way that shows
itself in spirited shyness. It is our business, the business of the
faculty and of the more responsible upper class students, to help your
spiritedness to become serious, to emerge from the shyness-- whether
it be of the quiet or the boisterous sort, to help you channel your
energy into a steady desire for learning and to direct your boldness
toward the discovery of depth and, moreover, to help you without
leaving you tainted, sullied, and worn out. I keep saying "help,"
because although great changes are bound to take place in you in
these next years-- do but behold the seniors: unsullied, untainted,
unworn and transfigured-- we none of us know who should get the
most credit besides yourself:
the Program, our teaching, your
friendships or just plain time passing.
At any rate, the spirit of the college is invested in
seriousness, a certain kind of seriousness-- not dead seriousness but
live seriousness, you might say. This seriousness shows itself on
many occasions: in deep or heated conversations in the noon sun or
at midnight, in marathons of effort and in the oblivion of sleep, in
devoted daily preparation and in glorious goofing-off, in the
1
�BRANN
DEPTH AND DESIRE
willingness to try on opinions and in the need to come to conclusions.
What does your school do to induce this very particular kind of
seriousness?
When you chose to come to St. John's you were, perhaps,
attracted by the fact that the mode of teaching normal in higher
education is quite abnormal here. I mean lectures. Only one lecture
a week is an integral part of the Program, on Fridays at 8:15 P.M.
Now the chief thing about a lecture is that it is prepared ahead of
time. For instance, I began working on this lecture in March. A
lecture Ol!ght to be the temporarily final word, the best a speaker has
to give you at the moment. It should not matter whether the surface
of the speech is brilliant or drab, as long as it is a deliberate and
well-prepared opening of the speaker's heart and mind to the
listeners. As such it carries authority. These authoritative occasions
are obviously important to the life of the school.
Yet our normal way is not the prepared lecture but the
focused conversation which is effervescent rather than prepared,
provisional rather than authoritative, and participatory rather than
reactive. Your tutors will not tell you but ask you; they will not
demonstrate acquired knowledge, but the activity of learning. One
reason why the teaching of new tutors-- and some of your classes will
be taught by newcomers-- is often most memorable to freshmen is
that their learning is genuinely original and keeps sympathetic pace
with yours. There is an irresistible but false local etymology of the
word tutor as "one who toots," perhaps his own horn. What the word
tutor really signifies is a person who guards and watches learning.
We are deliberately not called professors because we profess no
special expertise.
Since you will not be told things, you will have to speak
yourselves. What will you speak about? The Program wiH ask you
to focus your conversation on certain texts-- they might be books or
scores or paintings. These texts have been selected over the years by
us because they have the living seriousness I am trying to speak
about. To my mind texts, like people, are serious when they have a
surface that arouses the desire to know them and the depth to fulfill
that desire. Here then, is my announced theme for tonight: the
depth that calls forth desire.
To delineate that depth I must once again distinguish our
kind of conversation, the kind associated with such texts, from the
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�BRANN
DEPTH AND DESIRE
kind of fellowship to be found in other places. All over this country,
and wherever the conditions for some human happiness exist, there
are people who know all there is to know about some field that they
till with a single-minded love. This is the blessed race of buffs,
aficionados and those rare professionals who have had the grace to
remain amateurs at heart. They study history or race stock cars or
do biology or fly hot-air balloons. My own favorite fanatic is the
young son of a graduate of St. John's. This boy is persistently in love
with fish, with the hooks, flies, sinkers, leaders, reels and rods for
catching them, with the books for studying them, with the aquaria,
ponds, lakes and oceans for observing them. When I first met him
he looked up at me shyly and asked if I knew what an ichthyologist
was. Since I knew some Greek I knew the etymology of the word
and could tell him that it is a person who can give an account of fish,
so he was satisfied with me. This boy may have his troubles but he
is also acquainted with bliss.
This kind of concentrated bliss we cannot deliver to you,
except perhaps in limited extracurricular ways. Instead we, or rather
the Program, will drive you through centuries of time and diversities
of opinion, while depriving you of the freedom and the serenity to till
and to master a well-defined field of your own choosing. You will
study Greek and invest hours in mem01 izing paradigms, but your
tutorial is not a Greek class-- it is a language tutorial in which Greek
is studied only partly for its own virtues, and partly as a striking and,
for you, a novel example of human speecl1 and its possibilities. You
will study Euclid and demonstrate rna 11y prepositions, yet your
tutorial is not intended to make you geometers but to allow you to
think about the activity of mathematics. In short, you will be asked
to read many books carefully and to stcdy many matters in some
detail only to find them passing away, becoming mere examples in
the conversation. And these fugitive texts will almost all bear their
excellence, their worthiness to be studied exhaustively, on their face,
for we try to pick the ideal examples. This procedure is practically
guaranteed to keep you off-balance, even to drive you a little crazy,
since you will not often have the satisfaction of dwelling on anything
and of mastering it. How do we dare do this to you?
Here is a strange but unavoidable fact: Those who plow
with devotion and pleasure and increasing mastery some bounded
plot on the globe of knowledge often undergo a professional
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�BRANN
DEPTI-I AND DESIRE
deformation. They lose first the will and then the ability to go deep.
To be sure, specialists are often said to know their subjects "in
depth," but that is not the depth I mean. Let me illustrate with an
example I have a special affection for. I began my academic life as
an archaeologist, and the first thing archaeologists do is to dig deep
past the present surface of the earth, or rather they scrape it away
layer by layer. But with every stratum they scrape away they find
themselves at a new surface, the surface of a former age. They poke
into time-- a magical enough activity--but they do not pretend to
pierce the nature of things. For example, there would come up from
the depths of a well-shaft an ancient pot. I would catalogue it by
naming its form, say: kotvle, a kind of cup; by giving its dimensions:
H. 0.108 m.; diam. 0.135 m; by describing its proportions: deep
bodied, narrow-footed; by interpreting the picture painted on it: a
rabbit-- this is the pot-painter being funny-- jumping a tracking
hound from behind; by conjecturing about the provenance and the
stylistic influences: made in Attica under Corinthian influence; and
by assigning a date: third quarter of the seventh century B.C.
Was I required to consider what I meant by dimensions,
proportions, styles, images, funniness, influences, places? Not a bit-
that would have meant time out and profitless distraction from my
business, which was to know all about the looks and appearances of
the pottery of Athens in early times. What this Program of ours
offers you is exactly that time out, and that splendid distraction.
People will say of you, when you have graduated, that you have
4
�BRANN
DEPTH AND DESIRE
acquired a broad background. But your education will have been
broad only in a very incidental and sketchy way-- certainly not in the
fashion of a close-knit tapestry that is a continuous texture of
interwoven warp and woof. Many of the books you are about to read
do tie into one another. Sometimes a book written by an ancient
Greek will (I am not being funny) talk back to one written by a
modern American, or the opposite-- the strands that connect these
books seem to run back and forth and sideways through time. But
some books will stand, at least as we read them, in splendid isolation,
and all in all the texts we study do not add up to a texture of
knowledge: There is no major called "Great Books." How could
there be competence in a tradition whose moving impulse is to
undercut every wisdom in favor of a yet deeper one? There is not
even agreement whether this tradition of ours advances or
degenerates with time, whether its authors are all talking about the
same thing, though in a different way, or in apparently similar ways
about quite incomparable things.
Here is what the books do seem to me to have in common:
They intend to go into the depths of things. All the authors, even
those subtly self-contradictory ones who claim that there are no
depths but only surfaces, are deep in the way I mean. This desire for
depth, then, is what will hold your studies here together. There is a
word for this effort, to which it is my privilege to introduce you
tonight. The word is philosophy. The term is put together from two
Greek words, philos, an adjective used of someone who feels friendly,
even passionate love, and sophia, which means wisdom or deep
knowledge.
When I say that your school is devoted to philosophy, the
love of deep knowledge, I mean that all our authors want to draw you
deep into their matter, whether by words, symbols, notes or visual
shapes. Incidentally, in a few weeks a lecturer, a tutor from Santa
Fe, will come and contradict me; he has told me that he will say that
what we do needn't bear the name of philosophy at all.
Let that be a subject for future discussion, and let me come
to the heart of my lecture tonight. It is ;he question what depth is
and how is possible. I think we are all inclined to suppose that
literal, actual depth belongs to bodies and space and that people or
texts are deep only by analogy, metaphor .cally speaking.
I want to propose that here, as Sl often in philosophy, it is
5
�BRANN
DEPTH AND DESIRE
really the other way around: it is the body that is deep merely
metaphorically, as a matter of speaking, while the soul and its
expression alone are deep in the primary sense.
Certainly the depth of a body or a space is elusive. If a body
has a perfectly hard and impenetrable surface, its depth must be
forever beyond our experience-- a kind of hard, inaccessible
nothingness. On the other hand, let the physical body have a hollow
in it-- such caves are powerful allegories of depth and you will in the
next four years come across some famous holes: the grotto of
Calypso, the underground chamber in Plato's Republic, Don
Quixote's cavern of Montesinos. Now ask yourself: Where actually
is the depth? The containing boundaries of the hollow are all faces
of the body, and no matter how deep you seem to be inside the body,
you are still on its surface, just as I argued before about
archaeological excavations.
Now consider matterless bodies, geometric solids. Euclid
says in Book XI that a solid has length, breadth, and depth, but he
gives us no way to tell which is which:
it depends on your
perspective-- in fact all three dimensions are lengths delineating the
surfaces that he says are the extremity of the solid. What is inside
that solid, what its inwardness or true depth is, he does not feel
obliged to say. These are questions you might want to raise in your
mathematics tutorials: Can one get inside a geometric solid? How?
Bodies, I am suggesting, are either too hard or too involuted
or too featureless or too empty to have true depth. Only divine or
human beings and the texts they produce-- texts made of words,
notes, paint, stones, what have you-- can be literally deep or
profound. For I attribute depth or profundity to that which is of a
truly different order from the surface that covers and hides it. And
it must be the inside and foundation of just that surface, so that we
can gain entrance to it through that particular outside and through no
other. Every depth must be sought through its own proper surface
which it both denies or negates and supplies with significance: the
surface that hides its own depth is never superficial.
Human beings seem to me the most obvious example of such
depth. All human beings have a surface, namely the face and figure
they present. I personally think that in real life almost all people
also have an inside, their soul, their depth. But there are some
famous novels in which characters are described who are nothing but
6
�BRANN
DEPTI-1 AND DESIRE
empty shells. Against their impenetrable surface those whom they
attract by the insidiously unflawed beauty peculiar to facades that
hide nothing break themselves, or if they tear through, they fall into
nothingness.
However, these are fictions, and actual human beings have
by the very fact of their humanity an inner sanctum. We begin by
noting, casually, their face, their demeanor. As our interest awakens
we proceed to read more carefully, to watch their appearance
ardently for what it signifies. If we are lucky, they may open up to
us, as we do to them. If we go about it right, this interpretative
process need never come to an end, for the human inside, or to give
it, once again, its proper name, the soul, is a true mystery. By a true
mystery I mean a profundity whose bottom we can never seem to
plumb though we have a persistent faith }n its actuality. I think that
for us human beings only depths and mysteries induce viable desire.
For love entirely without longing is not possible among human
beings. Many a failure of love follows on the-- usually false-
opinion that we have exhausted the other person's inside, that there
is no further promise of depth.
It is not only in respect to living human beings that depth
calls forth desire. This college would not be the close human
community that it is if you did not get to know some human beings
deeply-- which is called friendship. But such love is only the essential
by-product (to coin a contradictory phrase) of our philosophical
Program, a program that encourages the love of certain para-human
beings. These para-human beings are the expressions of the human
soul, our texts, as well as the things they talk about.
Let me take a moment to ask wl>ether this particular desire
for depth I keep referring to is common among human beings or
even natural. I say it is absolutely natural and very common. You
will see what I mean when I tell you what I think is the nature of
desire. Desire seems to me to be a kind of negative form or a
shaped emptiness in the soul, a place in the spirit expecting to be
filled, a kind of psychic envelope waiting to be stuffed with its proper
contents.
Now take a long leap and ask yourself what a question is.
A question is a negative form or shaped emptiness in the mind, a
place in thought waiting to be filled, a psychic envelope ready to be
supplied with its proper message. Questions therefore have the same
7
�BRANN
DEPTII AND DESIRE
structure as desires. In fact questions are a subspecies of desire: a
question is desire directed upon wisdom or knowledge. Therefore I
might go so far as to say that this school teaches the shaping of
desire-- because here we practice asking deep questions. Now I think
that very many, probably all, human beings would like to ask such
questions if they only knew how. That is why the desire for depth is
both common and natural.
What we most often, or at least most programmatically, ask
questions about are those texts I have been mentioning. As I have
intimated, such a text, particularly a text of words, is a curious kind
of being, neither a living soul nor a mere rigid thing. What a book
might be, such that it could have genuine depth, is a question that
should arise over and over in the tutorials and the seminars. That
books do have depth is shown by the fact that they induce questions,
the directed desire to open them up. I want to end by giving a
sample of a deep text and a demonstration of the beginning of a
reading, a mere knock at its gate, so to speak.
The text is a saying by Heraclitus. Heraclitus flourished
about 500 B.C. He was early among those who inquired into the
nature of things, and he had a contemporary antagonist, Parmenides.
You will see from your sheets that Heraclitus said that it is wise to
agree that "All things are one. • Parmenides said things that, on the
face of it, seem similar, but whether he meant the same thing as
Heraclitus, or something opposite or something incomparable-- that
is a matter of ever-live debate.
In any case, Heraclitus and
Parmenides together embody the great principle of our tradition that
I mentioned before; you might call it the "the principle of responsive
differentiation." However, I shall not try to talk about Heraclitus's
actual wisdom tonight-- that along with the previous questions: "What
is philosophy?," "What is a solid?," "What is a cave?," "What is a
book?," I leave to future discussion. I shall attend only to the
preliminaries with which Heraclitus surrounds his wisdom.
Heraclitus's book is largely lost, though as far as we know it
was not a treatise but a book of sayings. Even in ancient times it
had a reputation for depth; the tragedian Euripides said of it that it
required a Delian diver-- the divers from the island Delos (which
means the "Manifest" or "Clear") were evidently famous for diving
deep and bringing things to light.
8
�DEPTH AND DESIRE
BRANN
The sayi�g I have chosen goes:
OVK IIJOU &:ua TOU Aoyou aKQU aaVTas
611oAoydv aoq�ov AaTw lv 1rav-Ta dva&
Transliterated it reads
ouk emou alia tou logou akousantas
homologein sophon estin ben panta einai.
On the surface this saying is in Greek and needs to be
translated. Since I have argued that surfaces are, like traditional
Japanese packaging, an integral part of the contents, they must be
carefully and patiently undone. Now to put Heraclitus's Greek into
English is, up to a certain point, not hard. Your Greek manual will
tell you about the "accusative absolute" and about various infinitives,
and your Greek dictionaries will give you the meaning of "listening,"
of "wise" (which you are already familiar with in philosophy), and of
"agree."
"Logos" is one of the
But then you look up logos.
tremendous words of our tradition, to which it is, once again, my
privilege to introduce you. Without even looking it up, I can give
you the following meanings: Word and speech, saying and story, tally
and tale, ratio and relation, account and explanation (that was the
meaning which occurred in the word "ichthyologist"), argument and
discussion, reason and reasoning, collection and gathering, the word
of God and the son of God. As you learn Greek you will see what
it is about the root-meaning of logos that makes this great scope of
significance possible.
But how are you to choose?
You are
caught in a vicious circle: Unless you know what Heraclitus means
by logos you cannot choose the right English translation, and unless
you discover the right English word you cannot know what he means
by his saying. However, sensible people find ways to scramble
themselves out of this bind.
Try a meaning that makes good
immediate sense: choose "reasoning."
Listening not to me but to my reasoning,
it is wise to agree that all things are one.
This yields a saying that is particularly pertinent to us, since
9
�BRANN
DEPTII AND DESIRE
it might be posted over every seminar door. For though we must
look into each other's faces, we must not get stuck on personalities.
Each seminar member has a right to say: "Never mind me, answer
my argument." Heraclitus is introducing a great notion into the
Western world here: Not who says it matters but what is said.
But there is more signifying surface to the saying. Listen to
its sound and notice that in the second line the word homologein
sounds like logos. "Agree" is a good first meaning but it does not
preserve the similarity of sound. Homologein literally means "to say
the same." Let me try that, and for "my reasoning" I will substitute
"the Saying."
If you listen not to me but to the Saying,
it is wise to say the same: that all things are one.
Now what sense does that make? What Saying? Whose saying other
than Heraclitus's own? Suppose the translation did make sense, then
Heraclitus is saying that there is a saying that can be heard beyond
his own, a speech to which we must listen, a speaking that it would
be the part of wisdom to echo in what we say. What impersonal
speech could that be? Heraclitus in fact tells us not what the logos
is, but what it says, for he bids us to say the same: "All things are
one." What if this saying, of which no human being is the author,
where a power whose saying and doing were one and the same?
What if its speech were an act? Let me play with a third, somewhat
strange, version:
Once you have listened not to me but to the Gathering,
it is wise similarly to gather all things into one.
Here logos is translated as gathering or collection. It is the power
that gathers everything in the world into a unified whole, the
organizing power we are invited to imitate by giving a comprehensive
account of the universe in speech. The logos speaks primally; our
logos becomes deep by imitating it.
I think by now the text has begun to draw us through its
surface into its depth. You can see that it demands of you the playful
seriousness I mentioned at the beginning, a seriousness that calls out
all your capacity for careful attention to surface detail as well as your
willingness to dive into the depths.
io
�BRANN
DEPTH AND DESIRE
Here I shall stop. But although I am ending, I am not
finished-- and neither, of course, are you. If you have in fact listened
not only to me but also to my argument, and if you are possessed by
the proper freshman spirit, now is your moment, the part of the
Friday night lecture that is the true St. John's:
the time for
questions.
11
�A NOTE ABOUT THE
TEXT
This lecture was written and
edited in WordPerfect 5.1.
All headings, subheadings,
and body text are set in
Times Roman. Typesetting,
editing, and printing were
done at the St. John's Print
Shop.
�
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
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Depth and desire
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Typescript of a lecture delivered on August 31, 1990 by Eva Brann as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
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Brann, Eva T. H.
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St. John's College
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1990-08-31
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pdf
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English
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text
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Bib # 57332
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Taken from the St. John's Review, Volume XXIX, Number 3, 1989-90. It was originally the opening lecture of the 1990-91 academic year at St. John's College, Annapolis.
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Annapolis, MD
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<a title="Audio recording" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/326">Audio recording</a>
Deans
Friday night lecture
St. John's Review
Tutors
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70c0abb04928b34d112ac40b1c8175d8
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Photographic Archive—Annapolis
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<p>The Greenfield Library photographic archive houses over 5,000 photographs. The photographs in the collection document the history, academic, and community life of St. John’s College. The Library’s mission is to organize and preserve these unique visual materials, and to provide access to this collection. </p>
To learn more about our photographic use policy or to obtain high resolution images, please see the <strong><a title="Photographic Archive Use Policy" href="http://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/libraries/greenfield-library/policies/#photographicarchivepolicy" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Library’s Photographic Archive Use Policy</a></strong>.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Photographic Archives" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=7">Items in the Photographic Archive—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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Annapolis, MD
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Liberty Tree, St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland
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1 photographic print : color
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Music and the Idea of a World: On Plato and Schopenhauer
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Kalkavage, Peter
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St. John's College
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2015-11-06
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on November 6, 2015, by Peter Kalkavage as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
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Music
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 1788-1860. Welt als Wille und Vorstellung.
Plato. Timaeus
Friday night lecture
Tutors
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The Problem of Absolute Knowing
St. John’s College, Annapolis – June 17, 2015
Abraham Jacob Greenstine
We have to admire Hegel’s confidence: on October 13th, 1806, as Napoleon rides into Jena,
and the day before a decisive defeat of the Prussian army, Hegel is finishing his Phenomenology of
Spirit. i The book’s final chapter, less than twenty pages, is called ‘Absolute Knowing’. Here we
have an unsalaried professor, in his thirties, abandoning his own place to the ransacking of the
French army, staying with one of his student’s parents, yet claiming to have solved the problems
of critical philosophy, to have established the authority of science, and to have achieved wisdom
itself. At minimum, Hegel is bold.
If we ourselves are bold enough to pursue philosophy, Hegel’s claim of absolute knowing
should provoke us. Here we are, striving for wisdom, and along comes Hegel purporting to have
it. When encountering Hegel, we must at least consider whether his claim is genuine, or
whether he is rather just a modern day sophist, pretending to something he doesn’t have. (An
aside: even if we count philosophy less central than, say, art or religion, Hegel’s audacity should
still shock us. In the Science of Logic he claims to be expounding the eternal essence of God before
creation (SoL 29), and in his lectures on aesthetics he is reported to say that art “is and remains a
thing of the past.” For tonight I will mostly focus on the philosophic problems.) ii
In 1967 Gilles Deleuze proposes that the model for the seeker of truth is not the scholar
asking ‘what is it?’ questions, but rather is the jealous lover. Not τὸ τί ἐστι, but instead who is
it, how often, when, how, how many, where? The thinker is not one of simple leisure and
wonder, but rather is incited by the force of ill-will. iii
1
�In this case, at least, I think Deleuze is right. I am jealous of Hegel, and encountering his
writings has provoked me both earlier and now. From the first I needed to know the truth of
Hegel’s system, whether I could rely on his method or not. I don’t just want to know what
absolute knowing is. I also need to know how do I reach absolute knowing? How is this book, the
Phenomenology, supposed to get me to this point? Is this book the only way to reach absolute
knowing, and does it guarantee it? Why is it ‘phenomenology’ the leads to Science? Who knows
absolutely? How does one know ‘absolutely’, where and when can I find such knowing, for how long
can one ‘absolutely know’, who are the ‘false claimants’, the sophists who propose a mere image
of wisdom, how can I tell the difference between wisdom and its image, and if I do finally achieve
absolute knowing, what do I do with it?
Hegel tells us that we can neither simply summarize his philosophy, nor can we just
jump to its end. “Impatience demands the impossible, to wit, the attainment of the end without
the means” (§29). iv Instead, philosophy requires the force of necessity: every step must have its
reason, and we lose the necessity and reason when we summarize a philosophy or try to simply
list its conclusions. We can contrast this with axiomatic mathematics: while the deductions of
mathematics also have the force of necessity, our proposed axioms and postulates are only
hypothetical, and there is no absolute procedure for reaching conclusions.
Philosophical
necessity must, for Hegel, be stronger than this: not only must our conclusions follow from our
premises, but they must somehow be implicitly present in the premises. Moreover, the premises
of philosophy must be absolutely necessary, rather than merely hypothetical or presupposed.
Since these requirements are lacking for mathematics, the truth of a mathematical theorem does
not depend on the validity of its proof: a mathematical theorem is either true or false, and a good
proof merely demonstrates the truth already present. Not so with a philosophic truth: for Hegel, a
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�truth can only be comprehended as such insofar as it is a result of its deduction. Thus there are no
philosophic theorems: the truth of a principle can only be realized in the coming-to-be of that
very principle. Without being understood in the necessity of its genesis, philosophic truth will
only ever be contingent, inadequate, and incomplete.
Hence my attempt tonight is doomed to fail. In principle, I cannot adequately review the
Phenomenology as a whole, nor can I give a true rigorous account of the last chapter and figure of
the work, Absolute Knowing. Nevertheless, despite himself, Hegel time and again feels the need
to preface his texts, to summarize the arguments, to add contingent asides or ‘extraphilosophical’ remarks, and to propound what look like philosophic theorems [for example,
“Reason is purposive activity” (§22), “The true is the whole” (§20), “everything turns on grasping
and expressing the true, not only as substance, but equally as subject” (§18)]. Thus we find a
curious split (and not always a neat one) inside of Hegel’s Phenomenology between the central
argument or deduction (the phenomenology ‘proper’, necessary according to Hegel’s philosophic
standards), and the contingent asides, remarks, or summaries (occasionally marked off with the
phrase “in-itself, or for-us”).
This talk, then, while not measuring up to the stringent
requirements of Hegelian science, nonetheless accords with the style of the Hegelian aside, a
contingent reflection on philosophic necessity.
The problem, then, is absolute knowing. Tonight, I will raise this problem from two
directions. The first is through a review of the larger project of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.
Not only is such a review helpful for getting us all on the same page, I shall contend that the
guiding problem of the Phenomenology is the problem of the appearance of science, or the spiritual shape
of science, that is, of absolute knowing. The second direction will be an interrogation of absolute
3
�knowing itself. Here I will return to the questions of who, when, how, etc. and examine some of
Hegel’s claims about absolute knowing at the end of the Phenomenology.
Part I: An Introduction to an Introduction
Many readers of Hegel’s Phenomenology find the text to be full of valuable resources for all
sorts of problems and questions. Yet too many of them miss the goal of the text. For all of
Hegel’s supposed obscurity, he is clear on the purpose of the Phenomenology: it is “the way to
science” (§88), the “coming-to-be of science as such or of knowledge” (§27), the deduction of pure
science, or absolute knowing (SoL 29). Hegel even says “To help bring philosophy closer to the
form of science, to the goal where it can lay aside the title ‘love of knowing’ and be actual
knowing—that is what I have set myself to do” (§5). In the age of revolutions and pamphlets, I
propose that the Phenomenology of Spirit, mammoth of a work that it is, can be seen as Hegel’s
pamphlet – philosophical science is possible, here is how!
At this point, there are three major lingering questions. (1) What does Hegel mean by
science? (2) Why do we need a ‘way’ into science, can’t we just start doing science? And (3),
how is phenomenology, in particular, going to accomplish this goal?
Our first question, what does Hegel mean by science, is perhaps best left aside for now.
Certainly he is not simply referring to the ‘laboratory’ sciences. The answers Hegel might give to
this question are somewhat cryptic: science is the unity of thinking and being, science is the
unity of theoretical and practical cognition, science is the absolute idea, the self-movement of
the concept, or the method of methods. And Hegel would remind us that all of these answers
are fundamentally insufficient when separated from the labor of science itself. For now, I merely
wish to maintain that we can link together science, on the one hand, and knowing, on the other,
4
�as Hegel himself does in some of the aforementioned quotes. This connection between science
and knowledge is nothing new: the Greek term ἐπιστήμη and the Latin scientia can each mean
either knowledge or science, depending on the situation, and in our present context knowledge
translates the German Wissen while science translates Wissenschaft. More concretely, I propose
that science is the result of knowing; I will return to this later.
Yet why do we need a pathway to science at all? If science is our goal, then why don’t we
just start by doing science? One reason we have already seen: for Hegel science must meet the
standard of absolute necessity. Such a necessity is foreign to our daily lives, and demands a
different sort of consideration than that to which we are accustomed.
Further, recalling Socrates’ claims in the Republic, for Hegel true knowledge must be unhypothetical and without presupposition. Many thinkers have tried to find a self-evident
principle, an immediate truth from which we can go forward to achieve knowledge. Yet for
Hegel every supposedly self-evident principle must, in truth, rely on some presupposition or
other, precisely insofar as it is an isolated principle. Any single statement (or concept, or
argument) considered on its own proves to contain some implicit presupposition or other, and
ultimately implies, for Hegel, its own contradiction. We thus need a pathway to science insofar
as science itself requires a seemingly paradoxical beginning.
Finally, and perhaps most crucially for the text of the Phenomenology, due to the nature of
consciousness we naturally find ourselves opposed to some sort of object. Within a given
consciousness a division is made between what belongs to that consciousness, or the ‘self’ of
that consciousness, and what is other than, or outside of, or the object of, that same
consciousness. This split can take a number of shapes: my observing mind and the data that I
observe, my passions and the laws imposed upon them, my inner worthlessness and the divine
5
�other, and so on. Without reducing consciousness to a single form, we find again and again that
it divides itself along the lines of self and other. Such a division, for Hegel, is in tension with the
project of science, insofar as it proposes an object outside of or other than the limits of our
comprehension.
Science, as the unity of thinking and being, must work against our
consciousness’ natural tendency to set itself against its object.
To recap: for Hegel, science requires necessary deductions, a starting point which is
presuppositionless without being reduced to a principle, and the rejection of all divisions
between self and other. If the Phenomenology is to show us science is possible, then it needs to
both show why these are requirements for science and how we can meet such requirements. In
truth, Hegel hopes to do even more: not only is science possible, he thinks, but rather it is
necessary, given our nature. Thus the Phenomenology is not a bare appeal to the ‘fact’ or appearance
of science: rather, it engages in the work of deducing the necessity of absolute knowing, and
demonstrating the inadequacy of other spiritual forms.
A pathway to science is, indeed, necessary for us to reach the point of properly beginning
our scientific system. Yet here is an impasse: if we need an introduction to show that science is
necessary, presuppositionless, and undivided from its object, then our introduction itself must
meet these same requirements. If not, then our science will rely on the contingency of our
pathway and the presuppositions carried with it. Thus “the way to science is itself already
science” (§88): the Phenomenology is not only an introduction to science and a demonstration of its
necessity, but it is also the first part of the system of science.
This brings us to our third question: why is phenomenology in particular the proper
introduction to science?
Moreover, how does phenomenology meet the aforementioned
requirements of science (i.e. be necessary, without presupposition, and unified with its object)?
6
�Hegel is looking to establish the necessity of the appearance of science in our world.
Phenomenology, then, is going to be an account of appearances, up to and including that of
science. Still, there are a number of ways in which things can be said to really or truly appear,
and this often relies on various commitments or attitudes we have towards the world. Thus the
ancient skeptic only concedes the force of appearances which demand his or her passive assent;
the Baconian scientist, though, counts as true and certain data anything which can be recorded
as an observation. If Hegel were to simply propose a definitive essential schema of appearance,
the Phenomenology would not meet up to its scientific standards: it would not carry the force of
necessity against those who have a different model of appearances, it would rely on unjustified
presuppositions about the nature of appearances, and it would create a division between
‘Hegelian’ appearance and other sorts of appearances (e.g. the skeptic’s appearances).
We might be tempted to go to the other extreme: if we cannot impose a single schema on
appearances, perhaps our Phenomenology should embrace the style of a narrative or biography, or
maybe a review of different real, historical positions. However these methods cannot work,
either: at the very least, such biographical or historical accounts are filled with contingencies,
and thus inadequate for the purpose of introducing science.
Neither a schematic nor a biographical/historical account, the Phenomenology is a science
of the shapes of appearances, their essential features, together with the various personae,
experiences, activities, objects, and commitments entailed in these various shapes. It takes up
the forms of appearance as they present themselves, without fetishizing their chance
idiosyncrasies or imposing an alien structure upon them.
So, then, the Phenomenology examines the shapes of appearances and shows the necessity
of the appearance of science. Its investigation is interior to the different shapes of appearances
7
�themselves: Hegel examines each shape based on its own internal criteria, whether these are
implicit or explicit, active or passive, concerning the object or regarding the subject. This gives
phenomenology its scientific rigor, each stage of the project containing its own immanent
necessity, immediacy, and unity. And what is it that Hegel finds, when he examines the various
shapes of appearances? Speaking generally, it is that within each shape of appearances (other
than, perhaps, absolute knowing) there is a tension within that shape itself. For example, let us
consider the Baconian scientific observers: they are committed to their observational reports as
the true data appearances, as what counts as real in their world. Yet their own activity is at
odds with this commitment: they treat their observations as a pure natural given, as simply
objective, but ignore their own role in the composition of observations. This leads to problems
of which these observers are aware, but cannot adequately resolve: e.g. how can we distinguish
between biased and unbiased observational reports? Yet this ignorance of the self is constitutive
of the observer’s appearances: the self cannot be observed like a hot-spring or a skeletal
structure, and upon realizing this problematic element, this inner tension, any observers who
are genuinely truth-seeking must change the way they approach appearances, they must
abandon simple observation and modify their commitments, objects, actions, or some other
factor. Thus through phenomenology we see a tension interior to this ‘observing’ shape of
appearances, plus the immanent motion that takes place when that tension or contradiction
resolves itself.
The Phenomenology of Spirit is consequently the movement through the various shapes and
stages of appearances. While it may not be necessary that every peculiar and idiosyncratic
possible shape of appearance be investigated in the Phenomenology, the project still should be
mostly exhaustive in the types it considers. If ‘appearance’ is what phenomenology investigates
8
�in its broadest terms, the two most general ways in which appearance takes place for us are
those of consciousness and spirit.
Consciousness is the domain where I immediately grasp both myself and any external
objects. It is appearance at the level of the first-person-singular: e.g. objects are given to my
senses, or laws are imposed on me. Consciousness, to quote GM Hopkins, “Deals out that being
indoors each one dwells / Selves – goes itself; myself it speak and spells.” v
For Hegel,
consciousness begins with the certainty of what is immediately given, whether that is an object
outside of it (in simple consciousness), its own self (in self-consciousness), or knowledge of
itself as an agent in the world (in what Hegel calls reason). This immediate certainty proves to
be inadequate, requiring a more substantial conception of what there is (so, for example, we
move from immediate certainty in our senses to a more nuanced understanding of the world as
the consequence of invisible forces; or we move from the certainty of our own absolute authority
to the truth of a more complex relation we have to an authority outside ourselves).
Ultimately, consciousness can never be adequate to itself. Consciousness wants the final
say over everything, wants to become identical with its object, yet it is always resisted by a
larger world, which conditions it. When we recognize this, the certainty of consciousness’ selfassured individuality turns into the truth of what Hegel calls spirit.
Spirit is what
consciousness aspires to be: spirit is its own world. Spirit is identical with what is other than it:
it has objects, but these are a part of its spiritual domain. Spirit, then, is appearance at the level
of the first-person-plural: e.g. objects matter only insofar as they are useful to us, or we must act
only of our own free will, etc. Consciousness has not disappeared (any more than the singular
would ‘disappear’ in the plural): we cannot have spirit without consciousness, no more than we
could have a community without individuals. Yet by making spirit the primary object of
9
�phenomenology we acknowledge that there are limits to any analysis of an individual
consciousness: consciousness takes itself as self-sufficient, but in truth its ground is the social
world of spirit. We can think of Hopkins, again: “I say more: the just man justices […] Lovely in
limbs, and lovely in eyes not his” here, we can see that we have gone beyond the “myself” that
consciousness “speaks and spells”, and onto justice, a social virtue, which is reflected through
others (and indeed, for Hopkins, through God).
Like consciousness, spirit too has different shapes which can be examined and evaluated.
While the movement of consciousness was from certainty to truth, spirit moves from truth to
certainty: beginning as substantial, unalterable truth (as with the eternal laws of the family and
gods, or the unequivocal identification of God with light), spirit develops a self-certainty by
incorporating and inscribing this truth within the consciousness of individuals who make it up
(as with Spirit as the self-legislating and autonomy of individuals, or the community that must
reconcile itself with the death of God). For Hegel, this takes place in three stages. The first is
spirit as such, the social world we inhabit. Next is religion, which is spirit’s comprehension of
itself in what Hegel calls ‘picture-thinking’. Finally, spirit’s last stage is absolute knowing,
which is Spirit certain of itself as the truth, where picture-thinking becomes genuine cognition.
In this way Hegel’s Phenomenology purports to bring us to absolute knowing. Indeed, the
goal of the book, to show the necessity of the appearance of science, is nothing more than to
bring us to this final stage. Absolute knowing is spirit’s free thinking of itself and its world, a
thinking by means of what Hegel calls the concept, the “pure element of spirit’s existence”
(§805). The exposition of this thinking and the concept is nothing else but science, which is
constrained by nothing but the necessity of its content. Science is then the result of absolute
10
�knowing: “Spirit, therefore, having won the concept, displays its existence and movement in this
ether of its life and is science” (§805).
Part II: The Time of Absolute Knowing
Even if, by this point, I have given an accurate sketch of how the Phenomenology is meant
to bring its readers to absolute knowing, there is still so much we don’t know about this stage. I
wish, then, to interrogate absolute knowing itself, as to who it is, how it works, and what it
does. The most pivotal question though, for tonight at least, is that of when: when can I find
absolute knowing, can it be localized to a particular time? Is there absolute knowing before
Hegel? Before the French revolution? Before Christianity? Further, can we simply rely on
absolute knowing to be there in perpetuum? Or perhaps the possibility of absolute knowing has
past, and we cannot or should not return to it today.
These questions are not purely phenomenological, but instead concern the relation
between a phenomenological shape and actual history.
Hegel is clear that all figures of
consciousness or spirit must first have a real existence before they can be comprehended
phenomenologically: “nothing is known that is not in experience” (§802). In other words, Hegelian
knowledge is neither projective nor prophetic: we can only comprehend what was and is
(although it does seem that for Hegel knowledge is ‘retrojective’, that is, capable of thinking the
present back into the past, as implicitly and necessarily there all along). This holds just as much
for absolute knowing: “as regards the existence of this concept, science does not appear in time
and in the actual world before spirit has attained to this consciousness about itself” (§800).
Absolute knowing can, then, be localized in time, and we may rightfully ask: when does
science appear? When is absolute knowing? There is evidence that the answer to this question
11
�is actually quite specific: “until spirit has completed itself in itself, until it has completed itself as
world-spirit, it cannot reach its consummation as self-conscious spirit” (§802), or “As spirit that
knows what it is, it does not exist before, and nowhere at all, till after the completion of its work
of compelling its imperfect ‘shape’ to procure for its consciousness the ‘shape’ of its essence”
(§800). That is to say, absolute knowing requires the stages that come before it, it comprehends
them and recapitulates them. Again and again Hegel considers absolute knowing in light of the
various shapes of appearance that precede it. Yet some of these stages have their existentialhistorical reality in just less than the twenty years before Hegel’s Phenomenology: the most
obvious case is the spiritual shape of ‘Absolute Freedom and Terror’, whose historical correlate
is the revolutionary period in France. Thus Kojève, for example, vi dates absolute knowing to
Hegel himself: Hegel is not merely demonstrating the reality of Science, he is inventing it.
Is it really the case that the birthdate of science and absolute knowing is the night before
the battle of Jena, as Napoleon enters the city and Hegel completes his project? If so, when we
ask who knows absolutely, it is Hegel, first of all.
Yet there is a problem with this answer. If we consider a post-Phenomenology text of
Hegel’s science, such as the Science of Logic, it clearly and explicitly relies on material from a
tradition of thought and philosophy stretching at least as far back as Parmenides. For example,
when discussing the philosophy of Spinoza, Hegel says “Such a standpoint … is not to be
regarded as just an opinion, an individual’s subjective, arbitrary way of representing and
thinking, and an aberration of speculation; on the contrary, speculation necessarily runs into it,
and, to this extent, the system is perfectly true” (SoL 511). How can we make sense of this: how
can Spinoza develop a true, necessary, system of speculative thought, while historically living
before the French revolution? We might wish to appeal to Hegel’s claim that absolute knowing
12
�has existed in an undeveloped, implicit state in earlier historical periods (§801). But this is not
an adequate answer, insofar as Spinoza’s system is far from implicit and undeveloped, but rather
was written out, published, criticized, defended, and debated.
Spinoza’s Ethics is not a
testament to a hidden presence of absolute knowing, a ruse of reason behind the back of history,
but rather is an explicit scientific approach to the way things are.
I contend, then, that there is a sense of absolute knowing which is not restricted to a
post-revolutionary existence. Such absolute knowing, rather, exists at any point where spirit
has both raised itself out of its immediate social world, and broken with religious picturethinking, instead thinking of itself and of its world in their own terms. Absolute knowing is a
break with previous spiritual shapes. It is a latent possibility of spirit, not only in its historical
culmination, but at any point in its existence. [We might think of the relation between absolute
knowing and spirit as analogous to that of reason and consciousness: reason is not a simple
historical result of object-consciousness and self-consciousness, but rather is its inner truth
which can be realized at many times and places.] Spirit, as “Pure self-recognition in absolute
otherness … is the ground and soil of science or knowledge in general” (26). Thus if the germ of
science is the unity of thinking and being, the overcoming of the division between spirit and its
object, then absolute knowing has a historical reality stretching back at least to the Greeks.
We have, then, two different senses of absolute knowing: the first as precisely localized
in Germany, in the culmination of the Phenomenology, with the advent of the Hegelian system of
Science, while the second can be found through our history in the guise of philosophy and the
sciences in general, namely in any case where we take up our object in thought. Can we
reconcile these senses, or is absolute knowing merely equivocal?
13
�To answer this, we must ask how absolute knowing knows itself.
All the earlier
movements of the Phenomenology somehow find their place in this culminating stage, to the point
where it can be hard to keep track of how everything is supposed to work together. For our
purposes, though, we will to only need to sketch out the movement of self-knowledge itself,
which has three components. In absolute knowing, spirit knows itself as the identity between
itself and its other. For Hegel, such an identity is only possible insofar as the self and other are
genuinely different, and this difference is superseded and transformed. In absolute knowing,
this all happens at once. In its first component, spirit knows “not only itself but the also the
negative of itself, or its limit”: the absolute other, outside of it, namely the “free contingent
happening” of nature, of an external time and space (§807). Simultaneously, spirit, entered into
existence, recognizes itself in its otherness, transforms what is other than it to a moment of
itself, and recollects itself in the contingencies of time: this is spirit’s self-knowledge as what
Hegel calls comprehended history (§806, §808). Such a history is the play of contingencies and
necessities, the shape of spirit which loses itself in externality to find itself again. Finally, with
the immediate identity of spirit and its other achieved, self-knowledge is identical to science
itself. Science, as both comprehended and comprehending, is a perfect activity wherein time is
annulled (§801). Other-against-self, other-as-becoming-self, and other-as-self: time, history,
eternity. In one movement Spirit knows itself through these three temporalities.
By seeing how absolute knowing lives in time, we can start to reconcile our two different
when’s (the one being located at Hegel in particular and the other extending across the history of
philosophy). While science is the accomplishment and result of absolute knowing, the finished
achievement of grasping the other-as-same, absolute knowing is not restricted to this scientific
endeavor, to the pure, timeless system of thought. The accomplishment of science is, rather, a
14
�result of real, historical transformation of the other into the self. While spirit is always capable
of producing science, of reaching absolute knowing, at the same time science always has a
spiritual history.
Further, the unity of self and other can be established more or less
comprehensively, and as such science itself can be more or less comprehensive. This point is
worth restating: science, the timeless and necessary articulation of what is, the home of eternal
verity, is somehow conditioned by the contingent history of spirit. (As an aside: our other
temporality – natural time – has dropped from our discussion. I propose that in fact, while the
content and even form of science can change given spirit’s history, spirit always has the same
immediate relationship to nature: that of other, limit, and death.)
Returning, now, to our ambiguity. Yes, in the Napoleonic wars absolute knowing and
science break from what has come before, and we can rightfully say that Hegel, or the spiritual
community of which Hegel is a part, discovers this speculative system of science. Further, this
figure of absolute knowing and the science which results is, indeed, dependent on its history, on
reformation Christianity, on Kant’s critical philosophy, on the French revolution, and on
Napoleon’s conquests. Nevertheless, this historical moment does not mark the advent of either
absolute knowing or science as such. Absolute knowing “plays in ten thousand places”:
whenever Spirit arrives at the unity of thinking and being, wherever it casts away the form of
time and dares to think the truth as such. Plato’s διαλεκτική, Aristotle’s θεωρία, Spinoza’s
scientia intuitiva, Kant’s transcendental cognition: all are shapes of absolute knowing. And which
new shapes, whose new science, and what new eternal truths might we find in these two
hundred years after Hegel?
Conclusion: The Force of Hegel’s Thought
15
�Turning back, we are faced, it seems, with a tension. In the first part of my talk, I
presented the Phenomenology as a deduction of the necessity of science, which itself is the
necessary, presuppositionless, and unified system of thought. Yet in the second part I concluded
that the real existence of absolute knowing, and with it science, depends on spirit’s history,
which itself contains an ineliminable element of chance. Hence the problem of absolute
knowing – how we reach it, when we find it – has carried us to a new problem, that of necessity
and contingency. This is not a question of understanding ‘where’ each modality applies (for
example, heavenly necessity and mundane contingency, or transcendental necessity and
empirical contingency). Rather, the problem is how to think through the contingent becoming
of necessity. How can chance events give rise to necessity? Only by addressing this can we
reconcile the necessity of science with its dependence on spirit’s history.
Finally, I want to conclude with a reflection on the challenge Hegel poses for us. I began
my talk by pointing out Hegel’s confidence in claiming to achieve absolute knowing. If
philosophy calls to us, I suggested, then even more so will the wisdom absolute knowing
purports to have achieved. By the end of the talk, I tried to close some of this distance between
Hegel’s absolute knowing and earlier philosophies. If history is a gallery of shapes of spirit, I
tried to show that we can consider the history of philosophy as the gallery of shapes of absolute
knowing. With this assertion, though, perhaps Hegel’s achievement seems diminished, and the
force of his text undermined. Before ending tonight, I want to dissuade you of this impression.
Hegel’s writings present a speculative thinking that forces us to reimagine what thought can be.
He dares to think being, the infinite, the absolute, but also externality, negativity, and
contradiction. He refuses to accept any presupposition, any limitation, any edification, as a
replacement for the labor of thought. Yes, Hegelian science can be seen as a philosophy among
16
�many, but it is also a challenge to all others, an expectation that any thought and any philosophy,
whatever it be, think itself to and past its own limit. Not bad for a professor who needs to crash
at his student’s parent’s house.
Pinkard, Terry P. Hegel: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. 227-229.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The Science of Logic. Trans. George Di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Trans. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon, 1975. 10.
iii Deleuze, Gilles. Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953-1974. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2004. In particular, the 1967
lecture and discussion “Method of Dramatization”. Also related “The Image of Thought” from Difference and
Repetition.
iv Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. Arnold V. Miller. Oxford: Clarendon, 1977. Quotes
may have with minor modifications, and citation is of paragraph numbers.
v From “As Kingfishers Catch Fire”, Gerard Manley Hopkins.
vi Kojève, Alexandre. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. Raymond Queneau.
New York: Basic, 1969.
i
ii
17
�
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The Problem of Absolute Knowing
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Typescript of a lecture delivered on June 17, 2015 by Abraham Greenstine as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series. <br /><br />Greenstine's lecture looks at the possibility and problems of "Absolute Knowing" in Hegel's <em>Phenomonology of Spirit</em>. In particular, he asks the listener to reconsider the achievements Hegel claims to have made and, despite those limitations, the imaginative triumph of Hegel's thought of what "Absolute Knowing" could be.
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Greenstine, Abraham Jacob
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2015-06-17
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A signed permission form has been received stating, "To whom it may concern: I, Abraham Jacob Greenstine, grant my permission to the St. John's College Library to record my 06/17/15 Wednesday evening lecture entitled 'The Problem of Absolute Knowing', for the purpose of archival preservation, library circulation, and online hosting. I will also provide the library with a hard copy of the typescript for circulation and archival preservation."
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Annapolis, MD
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Phenomenology
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770-1831. Phänomenologie des Geistes.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770-1831. Absolute Wissen
Philosophy
Graduate Institute
Summer lecture series
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Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 1
“Everyone Sees How You Appear; Few Touch What You Are”:
Machiavelli on Human Nature
How do the writings of Niccolò Machiavelli appear to us today? There is no small risk
that, whenever we crack the spines of The Prince or the Discourses on Livy, we will find these
books to be boring. Full of historical details, full of admittedly colorful and even shocking
anecdotes, they nonetheless appear to teach us only what we already know: the maxims of
amoral, or immoral, prudence, that ‘the end justifies the means,’ or that ‘might makes right.’ To
say that we already know such things does not mean that we believe them, of course. Perhaps in
extreme circumstances, with lives at stake, we might grant that it is necessary to be
Machiavellian; but who really expects to find himself in extreme circumstances? Most of the
time, among family, friends, and fellow citizens, we try to be good, to do what is right. We
might grant, while smothering a yawn, that we sometimes need to be Machiavellians. But we
would not say that we are Machiavellians.
And yet Machiavelli’s books are not just full of striking maxims about how we should
live, like “men should either be caressed or eliminated” [P 3:10].1 They are also full of striking
claims about how we do live, claims that Machiavelli offers in support of these maxims. “[M]en
should either be caressed or eliminated, because they avenge themselves for slight offenses but
cannot do so for grave ones” [P 3:10] – because, that is, only death can stop a human being from
seeking revenge, even for a slight injury. Behind or beneath the Machiavellian maxims about
how we should live, there appears to be a Machiavellian account of how we do live – an account
of what human beings are, an account of human nature. Could this account be true? And if we
find it to be so, are we compelled to be, not just rainy day Machiavellians, but Machiavellians
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 2
through and through? These questions, it seems to me, run a lesser risk of being boring.
Tonight I will sketch this Machiavellian account of human nature, chiefly as it is found in
The Prince, but with some reference to the Discourses on Livy. In concentrating on these two
books, I will be following Machiavelli’s advice, at least to some extent. In the Dedicatory Letter
of The Prince, he suggests that it contains all that he has learned and understood; while in the
Dedicatory Letter of the Discourses he writes that it contains as much as he knows and has
learned [P DL:3-4; D DL:3; compare TM, 17]. Either book on its own would presumably suffice
for the experienced student of Machiavelli. But for relative beginners like ourselves, it is helpful
to have the same matter given two different forms. What I hope to show by this sketch is that we
underestimate Machiavelli if we consider him simply as a teacher of amoral or immoral practices
that we can take or leave as we conduct our lives. To the extent that Machiavelli’s account of
human nature is shared by his successors, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau – to
whose thought we trace our political institutions and our understanding of ourselves – we may be
forced to acknowledge his account of human nature as our own. It may turn out that deep down,
where it counts, we are Machiavellians, even though we do not appear to be so, even to
ourselves.
This lecture will have three parts. In the first, I will offer the desire to acquire as the
main element of human nature as Machiavelli depicts it, and show how in a political setting this
desire ramifies into two humors, that of the great and that of the people. In the second I will
sketch goodness as the excellence of the popular humor and virtue as the excellence of the humor
of the great, and I will connect Machiavelli’s distinction between goodness and virtue to the
famous ‘turn’ in Chapter Fifteen of The Prince from the imagination of a thing to its effectual
truth [P 15:51]. In the final part I will suggest that Machiavelli’s view of human nature points to
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 3
a science of human nature without a distinctively human element – what Machiavelli calls a
“science of sites” – and I will raise some difficulties with this science, difficulties that originate
in Machiavelli’s own writings.
I
Readers who leaf through the pages of The Prince or the Discourses in search of the
phrase ‘human nature’ are bound, at first, to be disappointed. As far as I can tell, Machiavelli
never uses the phrase in either work. Mentions of nature, by contrast, are easy to find. In The
Prince, for example, Machiavelli writes of the natures of nonliving things, like sites, mountains,
low places, rivers, and marshes [P DL:4, 14:59]. He writes of the natures of living things, like
beasts, foxes, and lions [P 18:69, 70; 19:78]. He writes of the natures of particular human
beings, alone or in groups, like peoples, governments, ministers, emperors, princes, and cautious
men [P DL:4; 6:24; 4:18; 7:30; 17:68; 19:76; 23:95; 25:99, 100]. He even writes of nature in
general as something that contains things [P 7:26], and that causes particular men to incline in a
certain way [P 25:100].2 But each time he writes about nature, Machiavelli sidesteps the phrase
‘human nature.’ He is willing to write as if particular beings have natures, he is willing to
include particular human beings among these beings, and he is willing to imply that all beings
fall within nature in some general sense; but nature in each of these cases is subhuman or
superhuman – that is, not specifically human. The closest Machiavelli comes to writing about
human nature in The Prince is a single claim he makes about the “nature of men” – that they are
“obligated as much by benefits they give as by benefits they receive” [P 10:44]. Even there, he
does not dignify the nature of men with the specific adjective ‘human.’
Nonetheless, there are plenty of hints in The Prince that Machiavelli thinks that human
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 4
beings do have a nature, if only in the sense of an abiding character. Early in the work, for
example, he considers “a natural difficulty” and “another natural and ordinary necessity” that
confront a new prince: that “men willingly change their masters in the belief that they will fare
better,” but that “one must always offend those over whom he becomes a new prince” [P 3:8].3
In the immediate sequel Machiavelli treats these natural necessities that follow from the
character of men as “universal causes” [P 3:9],4 and suggests that they contribute to an
apparently permanent “order of things” [P 3:11] that endures despite the changes brought by
time [P 3:13; 10:44].5 Later in The Prince he invokes “human conditions” in much the same
way, to explain why a prince cannot have, nor wholly observe, all of the qualities that are held
good [P 15:62]. The conditions in question can be summarized in a single phrase: men are
wicked unless necessity makes them good.6 As with the other natural necessities felt by a new
prince, Machiavelli implies that these conditions will never change, as long as there are human
beings. If they did change, his description of the situation of the new prince, and of the political
situation more generally, would cease to be true.
Similar claims about the abiding character of human beings can be found in the
Discourses, in a somewhat more explicit form. In that work Machiavelli warns early on against
the error of thinking that men, among other things, have “varied in motion, order, and power
from what they were in antiquity” [D I.P.2:6]. To the contrary, “[w]hoever considers present and
ancient things easily knows that in all cities and in all peoples there are the same desires and the
same humors, and there always have been” [D I.39.1:83].7 Not just human beings but human
things have a permanent character: they “are always in motion, either they ascend or they
descend” [D II.P.2:123]. Perhaps as a result, the world has a permanent character too: “I judge
the world always to have been in the same mode,” Machiavelli writes, “and there to have been as
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 5
much good as wicked in it” [D II.P.2:124]. He even flirts, indirectly, with the idea that the world
is eternal. “To those philosophers who would have it that the world is eternal,” he writes, “I
believe that one could reply that if so much antiquity were true it would be reasonable that there
be memory of more than five thousand years – if it were not seen how the memories of times are
eliminated by diverse causes, of which part come from men, part from heaven” [D II.5.1:138139]. It is reasonable, then, that there be no memory of more than five thousand years, even if
the world is eternal. So is the world eternal? However this may be, Machiavelli regards the
world as lasting enough that he can claim that human things have an abiding character. “It has
always been, and will always be,” he announces, “that great and rare men are neglected in a
republic in peaceful times” [D III.16.1:254]. Men “have and always had the same passions, and
they must of necessity result in the same effect” [D III.43.1:302]. If it were to turn out that the
abiding character of human beings included an element specific to human beings, an element that
was a cause or principle of human motion and rest, then despite his avoidance of the term,
Machiavelli could be said to have an account of a specifically human nature.
The best candidate for such an element, in The Prince and the Discourses, is the desire to
acquire. In The Prince this desire sets the tone for the whole book. Machiavelli mentions it in
the first sentence of the Dedicatory Letter, writing “[i]t is customary most of the time for those
who desire to acquire favor with a Prince to come to meet him with things that they care most for
among their own or with things that they see please him most” [P DL:3]. In the particular form
of the desire to acquire a principality, this desire dictates the concerns of the first half of the
work, and is mentioned in three of the first fourteen chapter titles;8 while the second half, which
examines “what the modes and government of a prince should be with subjects and with friends”
[P 15:61], can be understood as containing advice about how to keep an acquisition. But when
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 6
Machiavelli formulates this desire as a principle, he writes, “truly it is a very natural and ordinary
thing to desire to acquire” [P 3:14], without saying for whom, or for what, this is very natural
and ordinary. He does continue, in the immediate sequel, “and when men do it who can, they
will be praised or not blamed; but when they cannot, and want to do it anyway, here lie the error
and the blame” [P 3:14-15], but this amounts to saying that praise and blame are specifically
human, not that the desire to acquire is.9 In the Discourses Machiavelli elaborates: “nature has
created men so that they are able to desire everything and are unable to attain everything” [D
I.37.1:78]. As a result, “human appetites are insatiable, for since from nature they have the
ability and the wish to desire all things and from fortune the ability to achieve few of them, there
continually results from this a discontent in human minds and a disgust with the things they
possess” [D II.P.3:125]. While Machiavelli says that the insatiable appetites and the discontent
and disgust that they produce are specifically human, they are also effects of a cause that is not
specifically human: nature in general.
Not only does Machiavelli fail to insist that the desire to acquire is specifically human; he
also fails to assign the desire a specific end. In The Prince and the Discourses he depicts human
beings who desire to acquire material things like cities and provinces, states and kingdoms,
friends and partisans, and spiritual things like reputation, glory, and knowledge. But he never
argues that these are the proper objects of the desire to acquire. Instead, he asserts in the
Discourses, “each willingly multiplies that thing and seeks to acquire those goods he believes he
can enjoy once acquired” [D II.2.3:132; compare II.4.2:137]. The desire to acquire can have
anything as its object, then, so long as the one who acquires it believes he will enjoy it. But the
omnivorousness of the desire points again to its insatiability. Since the object of the desire is
nothing in particular, but rather acquisition for the sake of enjoying possession, and since
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 7
possession inspires only disgust and discontentment, the acquiring being goes from expecting
future enjoyment to feeling present dissatisfaction, and the desire to acquire must seek a new
object. Machiavelli is right, then, to call this desire a desire to acquire, since it aims at no object
in particular, but rather at acquisition, which is to say the feeling of acquisition, in general.
Human beings feel discontent and disgust with what they have; they enjoy only when they feel
that what they have is increasing.10 The desire to acquire thus resembles a drive to grow, since
its end is an increase in one’s own, without any intrinsic concern about whether one’s own is also
good.11
Understood in this way, the desire to acquire has both external and internal consequences.
Externally, this desire drives isolated human beings to acquire without limit and without
exclusion – in the Discourses Machiavelli mentions that it is even possible to “acquire the
world” [D I.20.1:54]. It follows from this that isolated human beings are almost entirely
formless.12 Perhaps this is one reason for Machiavelli’s practice of using “matter” as a term for
the human beings who are potential subjects of a prince [P 6:23; 26:102, 104]. But in a political
setting, when human beings live together, their desires to acquire interfere with one another, and
form arises. In The Prince, Machiavelli proclaims that in every city and every principality, “two
diverse humors are found” [P 9:39; compare 19:7613]: the people and the great. These humors
are defined by their characteristic appetites: “the people desire neither to be commanded nor
oppressed by the great, and the great desire to command and oppress the people” [P 9:39].14 In
the Discourses, Machiavelli calls these humors the nobles and the ignobles, and writes,
“[w]ithout doubt, if one considers the end of the nobles and of the ignobles, one will see great
desire to dominate in the former, and in the latter only desire not to be dominated; and in
consequence, a greater will to live free, being less able to hope to usurp it” – that is, to usurp
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 8
freedom – “than are the great” [D I.5.2:18].15
Lest we think that Machiavelli means that the people or the ignobles do not desire to
acquire, and that his two humors are therefore different natures,16 rather than ramifications of the
desire to acquire, Machiavelli points in the Discourses to their common source. Having just
characterized the difference between the nobles and the ignobles, he restates it paragraphs later
as the difference between “those who desire to acquire” and “those who fear to lose what they
have acquired,” and then explains that tumults are most frequently generated by those who
possess, because “the fear of losing generates in [them] the same wishes that are in those who
desire to acquire; for it does not appear to men that they possess securely what a man has unless
he acquires something else new” [D I.5.4:19].17 Machiavelli thereby blurs the difference
between the people and the great: fearing to lose has the same effects as desiring to acquire.
Later in the Discourses he makes much the same point, insisting that the difference between a
prince’s and a people’s way of proceeding “arises not from a diverse nature – because it is in one
mode in all” [D I.58.3:117], and that the popular desire for freedom is an effect of the desire to
acquire [D II.2.1:129].18 If these assertions are not enough, Machiavelli also tells a characteristic
story in the Discourses about Clearchus, the tyrant of Heraclea, who, finding himself caught
“between the insolence of the aristocrats… and the rage of the people,” “decided to free himself
at one stroke from the vexation of the great and to win over the people to himself.” By having
all the aristocrats cut to pieces, “he satisfied one of the wishes that peoples have – that is, to be
avenged. But as to the other popular desire,” Machiavelli continues, “to recover freedom, since
the prince cannot satisfy it, he should examine what causes are those that make [peoples] desire
to be free. He will find that a small part of them desires to be free so as to command, but all the
others, who are infinite, desire freedom so as to live secure” [D I.16.5:46]. Even if the humor of
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 9
the great is eliminated from a city or a principality, the remaining popular humor reforms itself
into two humors: the people, and the great.
These Machiavellian indications that the humors of the people and the great are
ramifications of the more fundamental desire to acquire also indicate that it is political life that
chiefly causes these ramifications. In isolation the desire to acquire knows only the feelings of
pleasurable increase or disgusting stasis; the desire to oppress, on the one hand, and the fear of
oppression on the other arise only in the political encounter with other more or less powerful
desires to acquire. Machiavelli acknowledges this in his brief account of the origins of political
life in the Discourses. “[S]ince the inhabitants were sparse in the beginning of the world,” he
writes, “they lived dispersed for a time like beasts; then, as generations multiplied, they gathered
together, and to be able to defend themselves better, they began to look to whoever among them
was more robust and of greater heart, and they made him a head, as it were, and obeyed him” [D
I.2.3:11].19 Thus arose the universal political struggle between the two humors, in which the
great give reputation to one of their number “so that they can satisfy their appetite under his
shadow,” while the people give reputation to one of the great “so as to be defended with his
authority” [P 9:39].20
The desire to acquire also has internal consequences: namely, the ramification of the
present into the past and the future. Like any desire, the desire to acquire involves opposing a
painful, factual present to a pleasant, counterfactual future. A being animated by such a desire
must be able to distinguish what it actually possesses from what it might possess, in order to
direct itself away from the former and toward the latter. So a being who desires to acquire, in
particular, must have memory, a continuing sense of its possessions, and foresight, a sense of
what its possessions might become. In the healthy case, its memory will be the basis of its
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 10
dissatisfaction with the present, and its foresight, the basis of its hope for the future. As
Machiavelli puts it in the Discourses, the insatiability of human appetites makes men “blame the
present times, praise the past, and desire the future, even if they are not moved to do this by any
reasonable cause” [D II.P.3:125].
It is the people or the ignobles in particular who blame the present and praise the past,
since their knowledge of the past is less accurate than their knowledge of the present, and past
things in general are neither feared nor envied [D II.P.1:123]. Moreover, memory supports the
popular form of the desire to acquire – the fear of loss – by preserving an inaccurate but
venerable past, and arguing that excellence consists in this preservation [D I.10.2:31]. Memory
encourages men to honor the past and obey the present, and thereby discourages conspiracies [D
III.6.1:218]. And when it involves fearsome events, memory can bring a state back to its
beginnings, and so preserve it [D III.1.3:211]. Perhaps unsurprisingly, memory is therefore also
an obstacle to the great or the nobles’ desire to acquire, especially when acquisition brings
innovation [P 2:7, 4:19, 5:21]. It is the first concern of new sects to eliminate the memory of
their predecessors, for example [D II.5.1:139]. But memory can also serve the foresight of the
great: if it helps to maintain a nation in the same customs for a long time, it makes it easy for
human beings to know future things by past ones [D III.43.1:302; compare I.39.1:83-84].21
Since the future is on this account the realm of hoped-for acquisition by the great, or
feared loss by the people, while the present is the realm of real possession, whether unsatisfying
to the great or satisfying to the people, the ramification of the present into the past and the future
is also a differentiation between the factual and counterfactual worlds, or between the real and
the imaginary. Taken together, the humors of the people and the great and the ramification of
the present into the past and the future explain the typical progressivism of the great, who want
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 11
to live in the future that their desire to acquire foresees, and the typical conservatism of the
people, who want to remain free of this future.22 Taken together, these forms of the desire to
acquire explain why each of Machiavelli’s humors has its corresponding understanding of human
excellence.
II
So far we have considered the desire to acquire as the core of human nature, according to
Machiavelli. We have also sketched the chief implications of this desire, showing how in
political settings it issues in a progressive great and a conservative people. Each of these
humors, it turns out, also has a characteristic understanding of human excellence: for the people
excellence is goodness, and for the great, excellence is virtue [D I.17.1-3:47-48; compare MV,
24-25]. We will discover, as we try next to fill in the content of goodness and virtue according
to Machiavelli, that the difference between goodness and virtue is also connected to his famous
distinction, made in The Prince, between the “effectual truth” and “imagined republics and
principalities” [P 15:61].
Perhaps because of its focus on the perspective of the great, goodness is only mentioned
twice in The Prince, both times in an ironic and disparaging way. Having begun his
consideration of ecclesiastical principalities with the claim that they are maintained without
virtue or fortune, Machiavelli concludes with the pious hope that “with his goodness and infinite
other virtues” Pope Leo X will make the pontificate “very great and venerable” [P 11:47]. In a
likeminded remark later in the book, during his survey of the fates of the Roman emperors,
Machiavelli notes that Emperor Alexander was of such goodness that he never made use of
summary execution. But he was also held to be effeminate, for which he was despised,
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conspired against, and assassinated [P 19:77]. These examples distinguish goodness from virtue,
and can hardly be said to recommend goodness to a prince. In the Discourses, by contrast, there
is a fuller and less dismissive discussion of goodness. Machiavelli claims that it is the
characteristic excellence of peoples, as opposed to princes, writing that if the glories and the
disorders of princes be reviewed, “the people will be seen to be by far superior in goodness and
glory.” Princes, he explains, are superior to peoples in ordering, but peoples are superior to
princes in maintaining the things ordered – which is why they attain the glory of those who order
[D I.58.3:118]. Despite having characteristically retracted half of his praise of peoples,
Machiavelli leaves them with their superiority in goodness.
This excellence consists, then, in maintaining what is ordered at the founding of a sect, a
republic, or a kingdom, and promulgated by education [D III.1.2:209; III.30.1:280]: namely, the
laws, which are maintained by being obeyed by the people. Both peoples and princes show
goodness when they obey, and so are restrained by, the laws [D I.58.2:116; compare
III.24.1:270, III.46.1:307]. Indeed, early in the Discourses Machiavelli asserts, “the knowledge
of things honest and good” first arose out of the people’s obedience to the great. “[S]eeing that if
one individual hurt his benefactor,” he explains,
hatred and compassion among men came from it, and as they blamed the
ungrateful and honored those who were grateful, and thought too that those same
injuries could be done to them, to escape like evil they were reduced to making
laws and ordering punishments for whoever acted against them: hence came the
knowledge of justice [D I.2.3:11-12].
Now because goodness consists chiefly in obedience to the laws, it is closely connected
to religion as the basis of the laws [D I.11.3:35; I.55.2:110, 111], and to conscience as their
internal enforcement [D I.27.1:62; I.55.2:110]. Through obedience to the laws, goodness
procures and defends freedom [D I.17.1:47], which as we have seen is the goal of the people’s
modified desire to acquire. Lest we think that goodness consists solely in obedience to the laws,
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Machiavelli mentions one example that “shows how much goodness and how much religion”
were in the Roman people. When the Senate issued an unpopular edict that required the plebs to
sacrifice to Apollo a tenth of the booty taken in a recent victory, “the plebs thought not of
defrauding the edict in any part by giving less than it owed, but of freeing itself from it by
showing open indignation” [D I.55.1:110]. Goodness consists chiefly in obedience to the laws,
but perhaps more importantly, in the refusal to use fraud even when one disobeys. It is almost
the same thing as honesty.
Machiavelli signals, in several places, that the opposite of goodness is corruption [D
I.17.1:47; I.55.1:110; III.1.2:209; III.30.1:280]. But there is reason to think that a more
thoroughgoing opposite to this excellence of the people is the excellence of the great, virtue.
This is not just because, as we have seen, Machiavelli is contemptuous of goodness in his book
on princes, nor just because the superiority of princes to peoples in ordering means that they
must destroy a prior order that others are trying to maintain. It is not just because virtue is
inimical to goodness. Rather, it is because goodness can also be inimical to virtue. We see how
so in one of the examples Machiavelli gives to illustrate the goodness of the matter and the
orders of Rome: that of Manlius Capitolinus, who found no one to support his rebellion against
the Senate and laws, and was condemned by the Roman people to death. “I do not believe that
there is an example in this history more apt to show the goodness of all the orders of that
republic than this,” Machiavelli concludes, “seeing that no one in that city moved to defend a
citizen full of every virtue, who publicly and privately had performed very many praiseworthy
works” [D III.8.1:238].23
In contrast to his account of goodness, Machiavelli’s account of virtue is developed more
fully in The Prince, and in particular in the book’s second half, Chapters Fifteen and following,
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where he turns to consider “what the modes and government of a prince should be with subjects
and with friends” [P 15:61]. This statement of what remains of his project implies that the first
half of the book considered what the modes and government of a prince should be with
foreigners and with enemies; and when we see that the explicit subject of the first half of The
Prince is “How Many Are the Kinds of Principalities and in What Modes They Are Acquired”
[P 1.T:5] – that is acquisition – this implication is confirmed. We seem to be on a firm
Machiavellian footing: with foreigners and enemies the prince follows the desire to acquire,
while with subjects and friends he practices virtue. The generality of Machiavelli’s opening
statement on virtue might therefore come as a surprise. “A man who wants to make a profession
of good in all regards must come to ruin among so many who are not good,” he writes. “Hence it
is necessary to a prince, if he wants to maintain himself, to learn to be able not to be good, and to
use this and not use it according to necessity” [P 15:61]. Necessity, and not the difference
between friend and enemy, or subject and foreigner, determines whether the prince should be
good or wicked. The “so many who are not good” include friend and foe alike. To be able to act
as necessity demands, we will learn, is virtue.
Machiavelli connects his new account of virtue to his famous move from the imagination
of a thing to its effectual truth, or from how one should live to how one lives [P 15:61]. Before
considering this connection, though, let’s follow his development of this account of virtue in the
chapter of The Prince devoted to whether a prince should be honest. Since combat with laws –
what we might call the combat of the good – is often not enough, one must have recourse to
combat with arms: so “it is necessary for a prince to know well how to use the beast and the
man” [P 18:69]. The ancients understood this necessity, and communicated it by depicting the
centaur Chiron as the teacher of Achilles. “To have as a teacher a half-beast, half-man,”
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Machiavelli writes, “means nothing other than that a prince needs to know how to use both
natures” [P 18.69]. We have mentioned that Machiavelli is willing to say that there is a nature of
princes [P ED:4]: this nature now seems to be something more comprehensive than the nature of
a man or the nature of a beast, if it is capable of using, or imitating [P 19:78], both of these
natures. “Thus, since a prince is compelled of necessity to know well how to use the beast,”
Machiavelli continues, “he should pick the fox and the lion, because the lion does not defend
itself from snares and the fox does not defend itself from wolves. So one needs to be a fox to
recognize snares and a lion to frighten the wolves” [P 18:69]. Each animal, then, has a single
defect that is remedied by the other: the fox’s astuteness remedies the lion’s gullibility, while the
lion’s fierceness remedies the fox’s contemptibility [compare P 19:79].
But if each of the two bestial natures that the prince should use has a single defect that is
remedied by the other, what use does the prince have for the other component of the centaur: the
nature of a man? Machiavelli has implied that this nature is needed for combat with laws, since
this is “proper to man” [P 18:69]; but we would be forgiven for doubting him, since he has also
claimed, six chapters earlier, that good arms are the necessary and sufficient condition of good
laws [P 12:48]. We might begin to suspect that combat with arms is also sufficient, and that the
prince who knows well how to use the nature of the fox and the lion has no need of the nature of
man in addition – that he could be entirely inhuman, all beast. But Machiavelli has more to say.
“[I]f all men were good, this teaching would not be good,” – if all men were honest, that is, there
would be no snares, and it would suffice for a prince to be a lion – “but because they are wicked
and do not observe faith with you, you also do not have to observe it with them” [P 18:69].
There are infinite modern examples, he claims, in which “the one who has known best how to
use the fox has come out best,” because a faithless prince has ensnared the gullible. “But it is
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necessary,” Machiavelli continues, “to know well how to color this nature, and to be a great
pretender and dissembler; and men are so simple and so obedient to present necessities that he
who deceives will always find someone who will let himself be deceived” [P 18:70]. The nature
of the fox needs to be colored because its astuteness is limited to recognizing snares, as opposed
to setting them. There is a use for the nature of man after all: it equips an otherwise brutish
virtue with the specifically human ability to lie.
In restating his conclusion, Machiavelli makes it clear that his discussion of “In What
Mode Faith Should Be Kept by Princes” [P 18.T:68] is really a discussion of his account of all
virtue, which is to say a discussion “Of Those Things for Which Men And Especially Princes
Are Praised or Blamed” [P 15.T:61], or a discussion of human excellence in general. “[I]t is not
necessary,” he writes, “for a prince to have all the above-mentioned qualities [the traditional
virtues and vices] in fact, but it is indeed necessary to appear to have them” [P 18:70; compare
15:62]. Lest we infer that it is necessary to have some of these qualities, he then sharpens his
restatement: since “by having them and always observing them, they are harmful; and by
appearing to have them, they are useful,” it is necessary to “remain with a spirit built [edificato]
so that, if you need not to be those things, you are able and know how to change to the contrary”
[P 18:70]. To use a nature, or to imitate a nature, turns out to mean not to have but to appear to
have that nature. But to appear to have a nature one does not have is to lie. So the specifically
human ability to lie seems sufficient to generate the appearance of, and therefore sufficient to
make use of, all the other natures a virtuous prince might need.
This reading is supported by the discussion of Severus in the next chapter of The Prince.
Since Severus was a new prince whose actions were great and notable, Machiavelli wants “to
show briefly how well he knew to use the persons of the fox and the lion, whose natures I say
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above are necessary for a prince to imitate” [P 19:78]. These natures are now persons, things
that can be impersonated. “[W]hoever examines minutely the actions of this man will find him a
very fierce lion and a very astute fox” [P 19:79], Machiavelli continues, again omitting to
mention the person or nature of a man. But it turns out that being like Severus is not sufficient
for the best kind of prince: “a new prince in a new principality… should take from Severus those
parts which are necessary to found his state and from Marcus [Aurelius] those which are fitting
and glorious to conserve a state that is already established and firm” [P 19:82]. Since we know
from the Discourses that those parts are called goodness, we might conclude that this is the use
of the nature of a man. But Marcus was an enemy of cruelty [P 19:76], whereas Severus was
very cruel [P 19:78], so the new prince who combines their parts will be neither, though he will
know how to appear to be both. In other words, the virtuous desire to acquire uses the
specifically human ability to lie to impersonate a man, just as much as to impersonate a lion or a
fox.
Understood in this way, the nature of the prince is something built, rather than something
grown. But this is also true of the nature of peoples. Recall Machiavelli’s practice of referring
to the people as “matter” to be formed by the prince [P 6:23; 26:102, 104], and his claims that
knowledge of goodness arises from obedient gratitude to the great, and knowledge of justice
from laws to protect against ingratitude [D I.2.3:11-12]. If the excellence of the people is
goodness, the maintenance of orders founded by the great, then the nature of peoples is
something built by the great, just as the nature of the great is something built by the great
themselves. The great, we might say, and especially the prince, give form both to their own
formless desire to acquire, and to that of the human beings around them. And they are guided in
this formation by necessity.
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Machiavelli means this foundation on necessity to justify his claim in The Prince that by
departing from the orders of others in his discussion of virtue and goodness, and focusing on “the
effectual truth of the thing” rather than on the imagination of it, he is writing something “useful
to whoever understands it” [P 15:61]. Imaginary republics like Plato’s and imaginary
principalities like Christ’s, which “have never been seen or known to exist in truth,” are used to
illustrate how one should live – that is, they are used to support goodness. Real republics and
principalities, by contrast, are used by Machiavelli to illustrate how one does live. That there is a
difference between how one should live and how one does live is a sign of the failure of the
imaginary realm to make human beings completely good, and a sign of the need to turn to the
real. “Hence it is necessary for a prince,” Machiavelli concludes, “if he wants to maintain
himself, to learn to be able not to be good, and to use this and not use it according to necessity”
[P 15:61].
So the virtuous live in the realm of the real, according to Machiavelli, while the good live
for the most part in the realm of the imaginary, or the counterfactual. The virtuous live in the
present, which exists, while the good live mostly in the future, which does not. What is
surprising about this conclusion is that it exactly contraries the conclusion we came to in our
analysis of the desire to acquire, which had the humor of the people seeking to maintain present
possessions, and the humor of the great hoping for future acquisitions. In other words, each
humor of human nature, each way that the desire to acquire expresses itself in a political setting,
must need the native realm of the other. The good people need an imaginary future because their
desire to acquire, frustrated by the competing desires of the great, is limited in the real world to a
hope for maintenance; only in another world, or in a city in speech, can they hope to avenge their
subordination and become great. The virtuous great, by contrast, need the present because their
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practice of lying – that is, their construction of imaginary worlds – for the sake of future
acquisition needs to be informed by present necessities imposed by the people they are lying to;
in other words, they require goodness for their virtue to be effectual. The difference between
goodness and virtue, we could say, is the difference between an ignorant self-deception and a
knowing deception of others.
III
Having concluded our sketch of Machiavelli’s view of human nature, understood as the
desire to acquire, with its two humors and their corresponding excellences, we might begin to
wonder whether this view is true. This is too big a question to explore in the final part of this
lecture, though Machiavelli’s view does have the merit of explaining a common moral
phenomenon: the concern of those who are trying to be good, that they might be the dupes of
those who are not. Instead, this final part is devoted to a narrower, though related, question: does
Machiavelli think that his account of human nature is true?
Recall that in the fifteenth chapter of The Prince Machiavelli claims to turn from the
imagination of a thing to its effectual truth, and from how one should live to how one lives [P
15:61]. He makes these claims right after announcing his turn to “what the modes and
government of a prince should be with subjects and with friends” [P 15:61], and presumably
away from what his modes and government should be with foreigners and with enemies. The
first chapter of The Prince, by contrast, refers in its title to the modes in which principalities are
acquired [P I.T:5], and so announces the subject of the first part of the work. The suggestion in
both parts of The Prince, then, is that what human beings should do follows directly from what
they in fact do. What human beings in fact do provides the content of necessity, on the basis of
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which virtue acts. Moreover, Machiavelli’s distinctions between foreigners and subjects, or
between foes and friends, vanish from the perspective of necessity. The first part of The Prince
focuses on acquisition, and so on foreigners and foes, but it treats in the same spirit how
acquisitions are maintained, and so mentions subjects and friends [for example, P 7:29-30].
Similarly, the second part focuses on how the prince should treat subjects and friends, but the
virtues that Machiavelli discusses in this part are needed also for dealing with foreigners and foes
[for example, P 17:67-68]. Perhaps the clearest indication that these divisions vanish from the
perspective of necessity is the title of the fifteenth chapter of The Prince, “Of Those Things for
Which Men and Especially Princes Are Praised or Blamed” [P 15.T:61]. Attentive readers will
remember that Machiavelli has already, much earlier in the work, said what these things are:
“truly it is a very natural and ordinary thing to desire to acquire, and when men do it who can,
they will be praised or not blamed; but when they cannot, and want to do it anyway, here lie the
error and the blame” [P 3:14-15]. The difference between the first and the second parts of The
Prince is the difference between what human beings do to acquire, and what they ought to do.
The first part of the work is chiefly descriptive, the second chiefly hortatory; and Machiavelli’s
exhortation is based on his description: men should learn not to be good – that is, to be virtuous –
because men are not good – that is, they are corrupt. In other words, Machiavelli’s exhortation
to virtue requires two things to be true: that men are corrupt, and that there is a difference
between corruption and virtue. Let’s look at each of these criteria in turn.
One objection to Machiavelli’s claim that men are corrupt is that this may accidentally be
so, but it is not so necessarily. As we have seen, human nature, according to Machiavelli,
consists of a matter that is not specifically human, the desire to acquire, that can be formed to
have specifically human excellences, goodness and virtue. In other words, human nature is
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malleable. (Moreover, Machiavelli is evasive about what is specifically human in goodness and
virtue: in The Prince, as we have seen, he guardedly identifies fraud, which uses or imitates
brutish natures, as specifically human; but since fraud merely serves the desire to acquire, it does
not serve a specifically human end.) In the Discourses Machiavelli makes this malleability more
explicit when commenting on Livy’s disparaging claim that the French begin battles as more
than men, but end them as less than women. “Thinking over whence this arises,” he writes, “it is
believed by many that their nature is made so, which I believe is true; but because of this it is not
that their nature, which makes them ferocious at the beginning, cannot be ordered with art, so
that it maintains them ferocious to the last” [D III.36.1:292]. To be precise, the nature of the
French makes them ferocious at the beginning of battles; it is the failure of this nature that makes
their ferocity lapse. This failure can be avoided, and their nature maintained, by the order
imparted by art. The Roman army, Machiavelli indicates later in the same chapter, exemplifies
such ordering. Nothing its soldiers did was not regulated: “they did not eat, they did not sleep,
they did not go whoring, they did not perform any action either military or domestic without the
order of the consul” [D III.36.2:292]. Not only can the difference between male and female be
maintained by art; art can also constrain the natural movements of growth and reproduction.
This artful ordering of nature produces the excellences that Machiavelli names goodness and
virtue.
But Machiavelli also admits in the Discourses that there are limits to what art can achieve
with its human material. He mentions two reasons why we are unable to change our natures as
necessity demands: “one, that we are unable to oppose that to which nature inclines us; the other,
that when one individual has prospered very much with one mode of proceeding, it is not
possible to persuade him that he can do well to proceed otherwise” [D III.9.3:240]. These
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reasons, which correspond to Machiavelli’s injunction in The Prince that one must both be able
to change one’s nature, and know how to do so [P 18:70], suggest that the limits to malleability
are imposed by the energy and the opinions of each human being.24 Since there will not always
be a human being available with the needed energy and opinions to do what necessity demands
in each case – and this is especially so if, as Machiavelli implies, success renders one’s opinions
inflexible – art will eventually fail to order nature, with a consequent failure of virtue and of the
goodness it orders. A permanently good human order, then, is not to be hoped for, despite the
malleability of human nature. Corruption is necessary, and so virtue is needed.
The requirement that virtue be different from corruption is trickier to establish. We have
seen that both of these forms of human nature are opposed to goodness; they differ because
virtue in departing from goodness looks to a different standard, necessity, whereas corruption in
departing from goodness does not. The difference between virtue and corruption depends, then,
on the existence of knowable necessities in human life. Now we have seen Machiavelli write as
though necessities are knowable by human beings; this is what he seems to mean when he urges
princes to “learn to be able not to be good, and to use this and not use it according to necessity”
[P 15:61].25 In other words, Machiavelli seems to think that there is a science of necessities. But
in The Prince and the Discourses taken together, Machiavelli mentions science only twice: both
times in a chapter late in the Discourses that asserts that a captain must be a knower of sites, or
of “the nature of countries” [D III.39.T:297; III.39.2:299]. The argument of this chapter closely
parallels that of a similar chapter in The Prince, titled “What a Prince Should Do Regarding the
Military” [P 14.T:58] – a chapter where, admittedly, science is not mentioned. In these two
places, Machiavelli advises that princes, captains, and the great should train in hunting, part of
the practical mode of the peaceful exercise of the art of war [P 14:59].26 Hunting yields
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particular knowledge of the country in which one trains. “First,” Machiavelli writes in The
Prince, “one learns to know one’s own country, and one can better understand its defense; then,
through the knowledge of and experience with those sites, one can comprehend with ease every
other site that it may be necessary to explore as new” [P 14:59]. Particular knowledge becomes
general knowledge, and defensive ability becomes offensive ability, because of a “certain
similarity” between the corresponding features in every country, “so that from the knowledge of
a site in one province one can easily come to the knowledge of others” [P 14:59].27 Machiavelli
makes sweeping claims for his science of sites. Not only is it necessary for a captain to have this
“general and particular knowledge” of “sites and countries” if he wants to work anything well [D
III.39.1:297-298], but it will allow a prince to know “all the chances that can occur to an army”
[P 14:60]. While Philopoemen, Machiavelli’s example of a possessor of this science, led his
army, “there could never arise any unforeseen event for which he did not have the remedy” [P
14:60]. As long as we have the energy to be able to act as necessity demands, the science of sites
guarantees that we will know how to do so.
We might grant Machiavelli’s claim that there are no supernatural kingdoms: that
because all countries are alike in nature, knowledge of one leads to knowledge of all. But why
does he think that a perfected science of sites allows a prince to overcome fortune? A sentence
from the Discourses is helpful here. “Whoever has this practice,” Machiavelli writes, “knows
with one glance of his eye how that plain lies, how that mountain rises, where this valley reaches,
and all other things of which he has in the past made a firm science” [D III.39.2.298]. This talk
of plains, mountains, and valleys should remind us of the comparison in the Dedicatory Letter of
The Prince, between the natures of peoples and of princes, on the one hand, and the natures of
mountains or high places and of low places, on the other [P DL:4]. By limiting his use of the
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word “science” in The Prince and the Discourses to the science of sites, Machiavelli indicates
that there is no science specific to human beings, nor even one specific to living beings. Human
nature and living nature are continuous with nonliving nature, and psychology is continuous with
geography – or better, with physics. The malleability of human nature, then, is great enough that
nonhuman and nonliving phenomena are imitable by human beings, but not so great that human
beings become incalculable as a result.28 Just as there are no superhuman kingdoms, there are no
supermen – though as we have seen there are centaurs.
This understanding of Machiavelli’s science of sites is puzzling, though, because it seems
to require a descriptive treatment of virtue, rather than the hortatory one that we find in the
second part of The Prince. If human beings are as determined and predictable as nonhuman
bodies, why not describe what they do, rather than fruitlessly exhorting them to behave otherwise
than they do? In particular, we would expect Machiavelli to insist that princes do learn to be
able not to be good, and to use it according to necessity, to the extent that they have the most
excellent form of the desire to acquire. Instead, as we have seen, he insists, “it is necessary for a
prince, if he wants to maintain himself, to learn to be able not to be good, and to use this and not
use it according to necessity” [P 15:61; emphasis added]. Now what sense does this condition,
“if he wants to maintain himself,” make in the light of Machiavelli’s claim that all human beings,
and the great above all, are driven by the desire to acquire? Since acquisition presupposes the
persistence of the acquiring being, how could a prince not want to maintain himself?29
In the chapter of The Prince devoted to conspiracies, Machiavelli admits that there exist
very rare human beings with “an obstinate spirit,” who do not care about death. A prince cannot
avoid death at the hands of such a conspirator, because “anyone who does not care about death
can harm him” [P 19:79]. Since the threat of death and the consequent loss of all one’s
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acquisitions – the threat of ruin, as Machiavelli puts it – is the paramount necessity faced by
human beings [for example, P 15:61], these very rare human beings apparently fall outside the
scope of this necessity, and therefore outside the scope of the science of sites.30 There is no
remedy available to princes for such unforeseen events. We might expect Machiavelli to try to
account for the existence of such human beings by tracing their obstinacy back to the desire to
acquire, saying, for example, that they do not care about death because they hope for an afterlife
in which they will be rewarded. But he does not do so; instead, he says only that they are
motivated by the desire to avenge a “grave injury” [P 19:79-80; see also D III.6.11:227] – a
desire that can be satisfied in this life, even if one does not long survive its satisfaction.
In the Discourses Machiavelli claims, “private men enter upon no enterprise more
dangerous or more bold” than a conspiracy against a prince [D III.6.1:218; see also III.6.4:223].
In The Prince, by contrast, he writes, “nothing is more difficult to handle, more doubtful of
success, nor more dangerous to manage, than to put oneself at the head of new orders” [P 6:23].
The obstinate spirit one needs to brave the greatest danger in a conspiracy is presumably also
needed to brave the greatest danger in founding something entirely new, for every new
foundation begins as a conspiracy against the old. We might wonder, then, whether this account
of human nature is adequate to explain the activity of the new prince, or even Machiavelli’s own
activity. Is Machiavelli himself motivated by the desire to acquire? We cannot seriously believe
that a virtuous possessor of the science of sites, for whom, as long as he is armed, no accident
can arise for which he does not have the remedy [P 14:60], could be compelled to endure a
“great and continuous malignity of fortune” [P DL:4]. Machiavelli does make it seem, at the
beginning of the Dedicatory Letter of The Prince, that he desires “to acquire favor with a Prince”
[P DL:3]; but in the Preface to the first book of the Discourses he claims instead that he has
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always had a “natural desire… to work, without any respect, for those things I believe will bring
common benefit to everyone” [D I.P.1:5].
These doubts about Machiavelli’s science of sites – that it ought to preclude the hortatory
character of the second part of The Prince, and that it cannot account for human beings who are
contemptuous of death – suggest that the account of human nature in The Prince and the
Discourses is partial, and that Machiavelli knows it.31 Through these works he means to shape
human nature, to the extent that it can be shaped, by an education that claims that human nature
is more malleable and more predictable than Machiavelli really thinks it is. For the sake of the
common benefit, he means to persuade the great to act as if they are acting only according to
necessity. This project would amount to nothing more than a curiosity in the history of political
thought were it not for its remarkable success. We are the indirect beneficiaries of Machiavelli’s
questionable attempt: we who believe that our natures are malleable, especially by technology;
we who believe in rights founded only on necessities; we who believe ourselves great because of
the dream of acquisition without limit; we who believe in progress, and in the necessity of a
better future; and we who believe ourselves to be the people whose acquisitions the laws of
nature and of nature’s God secure. Without attention to Machiavelli’s account of human nature
we run the risk of remaining the unconscious inheritors at third hand of a partial account, of a
project, posing as a science, to narrow human possibilities through education. We risk being
Machiavellians without knowing it. How is this to the common benefit of everyone?
Jeff J.S. Black
Annapolis, Maryland
20 June 2012
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 27
Notes
1
References to The Prince and to the Discourses will be given in the text, in the forms [P Chapter:page] and [D
Book.chapter.paragraph:page], respectively. In these references, DL stands for dedicatory letter, P for preface, and
T for title. The editions used are Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince. A New Translation with an Introduction, by
Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1985), and Niccolò Machiavelli,
Discourses on Livy. Translated by Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov. (Chicago and London: The University
of Chicago Press, 1996). I also refer to Harvey C. Mansfield, Machiavelli's New Modes and Orders: A Study of the
Discourses on Livy. (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2001) in the form [MNMO, page]; to
Harvey C. Mansfield, Machiavelli's Virtue. (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996) in the
form [MV, page]; and to Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli. (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago
Press, 1958) in the form [TM, page].
2
In the former passage, Machiavelli writes, “states that come to be suddenly, like all other things in nature that are
born and grow quickly, cannot have roots and branches” [P 7:26], while in the latter he writes that a man cannot be
found who is so prudent to accommodate himself to changes in fortune, in part “because he cannot deviate from
what nature inclines him to” [P 25:100]. In two passages in the Discourses analogous to the latter passage in The
Prince, Machiavelli writes that we are unable to change in part because “we are unable to oppose that to which
nature inclines us” [D III.9.3:240], and “it is given by nature to men to take sides in any divided thing whatever, and
for this to please them more than that” [D III.27.3:275]. In these last three passages we might expect Machiavelli to
write “his nature” or “our nature,” but he does not. There is one passage in the Discourses where he refers to “the
wicked nature of men” [D III.29.1:277], but he makes the reference while quoting a view with which he does not
agree.
3
In nearby chapters at the beginning of The Prince, Machiavelli uses the phrases “natural prince” [P 2:7] and
“natural affection” [P 4:17] to refer to the prince who inherits a principality and the affection felt for him. The
natural and the ordinary are closely connected at this point in the work, and they both refer primarily to the sequence
of human generation. The new prince is opposed to the natural or ordinary prince in Machiavelli’s argument, and
the natural and ordinary is both an obstacle and an opportunity for him.
4
Machiavelli may mean to contrast these “universal causes” with the “superior causes” that he mentions in his
discussion of ecclesiastical principalities [P 11:45].
5
“[T]ime sweeps everything before it and can bring with it good as well as evil and evil as well as good” [P 3:13],
according to Machiavelli, and “worldly things are so variable that it is next to impossible for one to stand with his
armies idle in a siege for a year” [P 10:44]. There is another reference to an “order of things” much later in The
Prince: “in the order of things it is found that one never seeks to avoid one inconvenience without running into
another; but prudence consists in knowing how to recognize the qualities of inconveniences, and in picking the less
bad as good” [P 21:91].
6
“[O]ne can say this generally of men,” Machiavelli writes, “that they are ungrateful, fickle, pretenders and
dissemblers, evaders of danger, eager for gain. While you do them good, they are yours, offering you their blood,
property, lives, and children… when the need for them is far away; but, when it is close to you, they revolt” [P
17:66]. Having taught his reader later in The Prince that a prudent lord cannot observe faith, he continues, “if all
men were good, this teaching would not be good; but because they are wicked and do not observe faith with you,
you also do not have to observe it with them” [P 18:69]. Indeed, “men will always turn out bad for you unless they
have been made good by a necessity” [P 23:95]. Machiavelli’s other claims about the apparently abiding character
of men include, “men in general judge more by their eyes than by their hands, because seeing is given to everyone,
touching to a few” [P 18:71], and, “men are much more taken by present things than by past ones, and when they
find good in the present, they enjoy it and do not seek elsewhere” [P 24:96].
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 28
7
Machiavelli repeats this claim much later in the Discourses, in a way that suggests an amendment. “Prudent men
are accustomed to say,” he writes, “and not by chance or without merit, that whoever wishes to see what has to be
considers what has been; for all worldly things in every time have their own counterpart in ancient times. That
arises because these are the work of men, who have and always had the same passions, and they must of necessity
result in the same effect” [D III.43.1:302]. What prudent men say by custom rather than by chance, and not without
merit, is then corrected by what Machiavelli says in the immediate sequel: that it is true that the works of men “are
more virtuous now in this province than in that, and in that more than in this, according to the form of education in
which those people have taken their mode of life” [D III.43.1:302]. Education can shape nature, such that “Men
Who Are Born in One Province Observe Almost the Same Nature for All Times” [D III.43.T:302; emphasis added].
Similarly, when investigating “Whence It Arises That One Family in One City Keeps the Same Customs for a Time”
[D III.46.T:306], Machiavelli argues that this “cannot arise solely from the bloodline, because that must vary
through the diversity of marriages, but it necessarily comes from the diverse education of one family from another”
[D III.46.1:306].
8
“How Many Are the Kinds of Principalities and in What Modes They Are Acquired” [P 1.T:5]; “Of New
Principalities That Are Acquired through One’s Own Arms and Virtue” [P 6.T:21]; “Of New Principalities That are
Acquired by Others’ Arms and Fortune” [P 7.T:25].
9
This suggests another reason why Chapter XV, titled “Of Those Things for Which Men And Especially Princes are
Praised or Blamed” [P 15.T:61] is also about acquisition.
10
The desire to acquire thus amounts to a desire for novelty. Later in the Discourses Machiavelli writes “men are
desirous of new things, so much that most often those who are well off desire newness as much as those who are
badly off. For, as was said another time [at D I.37.1:78], and it is true, men get bored with the good and grieve in
the ill” [D III.21.2:263].
11
And just as reproduction is growth by other means, so are one’s offspring and their acquisitions one’s own
acquisitions, by other means. Consider Machiavelli’s hints about how Alexander VI used Cesare Borgia [P 11:46].
Death is not simply a limit of the desire to acquire. But compare note 27, below.
Machiavelli does occasionally refer to a good that is the goal of acquisition. For example, in the
Discourses he writes,
[i]t appears that in the actions of men, as we have discoursed of another time [D I.6.3:21-22,
where he wrote of “inconveniences”], besides the other difficulties in wishing to bring a thing to
its perfection, one finds that close to the good there is always some evil that arises with that good
so easily that it appears impossible to be able to miss the one if one wishes for the other. One sees
this in all the things that men work on. So the good is acquired only with difficulty unless you are
aided by fortune, so that with its force it conquers this ordinary and natural inconvenience” [D
III.37.1:294].
But it is not clear that by “the good” here Machiavelli means anything other than any acquisition that can be felt and
so enjoyed.
Also, there are occasional hints in The Prince and the Discourses that some acquisitions can be harmful to
the body that acquires them. In The Prince Machiavelli first raises the possibility of such acquisitions when he tells
his reader that to keep an acquisition the prince must ensure that the acquired body becomes “one whole body” with
the acquiring body [P 3:9]. If the new acquisition instead remains disparate with respect to the prince’s other
possessions, then he runs the risk of losing it. A powerful foreigner can easily gain the lesser powers in a disparate
province, since the lesser powers, moved by their envy of their rulers, quickly and willingly make “one mass” with
the foreign invader [P 3:11]. A prince who rules a disparate state, and who fails to prevent powerful foreigners from
taking advantage of this disparity, will soon lose his new acquisition, and “while he holds it, [he] will have infinite
difficulties and vexations within it” [P 3:11]. So acquisitions can be harmful to the prince and his state as long as
they remain disparate with his other possessions; in general, Machiavelli claims, “the disparity in the subject”
explains why some conquerors hold their acquisitions while others lose them [P 4:19]. This disparity can be
eliminated, and the new acquisition made into one whole body with the acquiring state, by eliminating the new
acquisition’s memory of its previous way of life [P 4:19] – that is, by making the acquisition more complete.
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 29
Acquisition in Machiavelli’s account thus resembles nutrition, in that the acquired body must become like
the acquiring body before it can be good for the acquiring body. As long as an acquisition remains disparate, it
remains undigested, and a cause of “difficulties and vexations.” But it is not until he considers cities and
principalities that live under their own laws before they are acquired that Machiavelli suggests that some
acquisitions are by their nature indigestible. Considering the case of a city, he claims at first that “a city used to
living free may be held more easily by means of its own citizens than in any other mode, if one wants to preserve it
[P 5:20]. But Machiavelli soon admits that this is impossible: “in truth there is no secure mode to possess them
other than to ruin them” [P 5:20]. The acquisition of a free city is necessarily harmful: “whoever becomes patron of
a city accustomed to living free and does not destroy it, should expect to be destroyed by it” [P 5:20-21]. The
indigestibility of such a city results, as we might expect, from the persistence of the memory of its way of life,
despite length of time, benefits received, and anything short of destruction [P 5:21]. So the only secure way for a
prince to keep such an acquisition is to eliminate it, or to live in it – that is, rather than digesting it, to be digested by
it [P 5:21].
This marks the extent of Machiavelli’s admission in The Prince that some acquisitions are not good for the
acquiring body. In the Discourses he writes that “[t]he intention of whoever makes war through choice – or, in
truth, ambition – is to acquire and maintain the acquisition, and to proceed with it so that it enriches and does not
impoverish the country and his fatherland” [D II.6.1:140]. Machiavelli thereby admits that there can be acquisitions
that are not good. A later chapter title, “That Acquisition by Republics That Are Not Well Ordered and That Do Not
Proceed According to Roman Virtue Are for Their Ruin, Not Their Exaltation” [D II.19.T:172], suggests that virtue
might be the necessary and sufficient condition that makes acquisitions good, though Machiavelli ends the chapter
by suggesting that “acquiring was about to be pernicious for the Romans in the times when they proceeded with so
much prudence and so much virtue” [D II.19.2:175]. His most general remark about the goodness of acquisition in
the Discourses comes in a chapter whose title proclaims its concern in part with the causes that eliminate the
memories of things, where Machiavelli asserts in passing that “in simple bodies, when very much superfluous matter
has gathered together there, nature many times moves by itself and produces a purge that is the health of that body”
[D II.5.2:140]. But this remark about the goodness of acquisition, like the analogous discussion in The Prince,
reduces goodness to similarity to the acquiring body: that is, it reduces the good to what is one’s own. It does not
point to the an account in terms of a good that is independent of one’s own.
12
Almost, because the presence of other competing desires to acquire is likely not the only source of formative
effects on the desire to acquire. To the extent that circumstances resist acquisition – one is not strong enough, for
example, to climb the tree to reach the desired apple – the desire to acquire is also given form. But these formative
effects are presumably not as lasting as political ones. If they were, then our common experience of infantile
weakness would yield in everyone the humor of the people.
13
Here Machiavelli writes, “in other principalities” than the Roman empire, “one has to contend only with the
ambition of the great and the insolence of the people” [P 19:76]. In the Roman empire one had to contend as well
with the cruelty and avarice of the soldiers.
14
Later in the same chapter Machiavelli will reformulate this distinction, writing, “the great want to oppress and the
people want not to be oppressed” [P 9:39]. The disappearance of command from his formulation calls for an
explanation, and Machiavelli provides one in the sequel when he claims, “when a prince who founds on the people
knows how to command,” among other things, “he will see he has laid his foundations well” [P 9:41], since
“citizens and subjects” can become “accustomed to receive commands” [P 9:42]. Where oppression is concerned,
the great and the people have nothing in common; but they do have something in common where command that is
not oppressive is concerned. Command is thus the closest thing to a political solution to the existence of two
humors.
15
One difference between the perspectives of The Prince and the Discourses is signaled by Machiavelli’s different
description of the desires of the two humors in the two works. ‘Command and oppress’ in The Prince becomes
‘dominate’ in the Discourses. In the former work Machiavelli distinguishes between kinds of domination; in the
latter he does not.
16
Mansfield writes that according to Machiavelli, morality
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 30
is controlled by natural temperament, by the two humors that divide all mankind and underlie all
moral behavior and opinion. By speaking of humors Machiavelli indicates that they are not habits
of the mind nor mental in origin but prerational dispositions. Not being rational in nature, they
cannot be reconciled by speech or argument. These are two human types who do not understand
each other – the one preferring security and comfort, suspicious of anyone who desires more, the
other seeking risk and demanding honor, unbelieving that anyone could be satisfied with less [MV,
24].
17
Machiavelli’s sudden shift from the plural to the singular in the course of this passage is both striking and
puzzling. Could he mean to imply that men can be made to feel secure in their possession if only one man among
them – their prince, for example, who in a sense has what they have – acquires something new?
18
“It is an easy thing to know whence arises among peoples this affection for a free way of life for it is seen through
experience that cities have never expanded either in dominion or in riches if they have not been in freedom” [D
II.2.1:129]. Moreover, if a republic “will not molest others, it will be molested, and from being molested will arise
the wish and the necessity to acquire” [D II.19.1:173]. The desire to acquire is also an effect of the desire for
freedom.
19
There is a similar but less detailed account in the previous and first chapter of the Discourses. Since all cities are
either founded by natives or by foreigners, and all foreigners were natives elsewhere, then the original foundation of
cities
occurs when it does not appear, to inhabitants dispersed in many small parts, that they live
securely, since each part by itself, both because of the site and because of the small number,
cannot resist the thrust of whoever assaults it; and when the enemy comes, they do not have time
to unite for their defense. Or if they did, they would be required to leave many of their
strongholds abandoned; and so they would come at once to be the prey of their enemies. So to
flee these dangers, moved either by themselves or by someone among them of greater authority,
they are restrained to inhabit together a place elected by them, more advantageous to live in and
easier to defend [D I.1.1:7].
20
That the command of one of the great produces a political struggle between the two humors indicates that this
command is not a perfect solution to the existence of the two humors. This is partly because the great continue to
desire to acquire by oppressing the people. But it is also because the satisfaction of the people’s desire to be free of
oppression cannot amount to a satisfaction of their more fundamental desire to acquire. Even a free people is
compelled to recognize the superiority of the great, whose fundamental desire they share, and to see this superiority
as an obstacle to the satisfaction of their desire to acquire. The result is envy: the desire that the great be deprived of
their superiority. Machiavelli acknowledges this difficulty early in The Prince, when he considers the challenges a
prince faces in holding a recently-acquired province that is disparate from those he already holds. “[T]he order of
things is such that as soon as a powerful foreigner enters a province, all those in it who are less powerful adhere to
him, moved by the envy they have against whoever has held power over them” [P 3:11]. Even or especially
founders face envy [P 6:25], though Machiavelli conceals this difficulty in his concluding exhortation of a prince to
seize Italy and free her from the barbarians [P 26:105]. Since envy persists among the people even when they are
free from oppression by the great, and arises among the great when they elevate one of their number to command the
people, Machiavelli distinguishes envy from fear [P 7:31; D II.P.1:123] and elevates it to a characteristic of human
beings in the Discourses. “[T]he envious nature of men,” he writes there, “has always made it no less dangerous to
find new modes and orders than to seek unknown waters and lands, because men are more ready to blame than to
praise the actions of others” [D I.P.1:15]. The political solution to the existence of the two humors is not just
command, but hidden command.
21
According to Machiavelli, there may be airborne intelligences, by contrast, who foresee future things by “natural
virtue” [D I.56.1:114].
22
This is not to deny that the people, and especially an oppressed people, might long for a future in which they are
free from oppression. But such a future would require that the great be deprived of their superiority. The people are
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 31
typically conservative as long as they cannot imagine a satisfaction for their envy. In a chapter titled “The Multitude
is Wiser and More Constant than a Prince,” Machiavelli admits that under a corrupt prince the people fear the
present more than the future, while under a corrupt people they fear the future more than the present, because in the
future a tyrant might emerge [D I.58.4:119]. But the corrupt case is not the typical one. Similarly, circumstances
might require the great to fear the loss of their acquisitions, rather than to desire further acquisitions – for example,
when threatened by a superior desire to acquire. But this is also an atypical case for the great.
23
Manlius’ fate points to another of Machiavelli’s remarks about goodness. Later in the Discourses, in a chapter
partly titled “For One Citizen Who Wishes to Do Any Good Work in His Republic by His Authority, It Is Necessary
First to Eliminate Envy” [D III.30.T:278], Machiavelli suggests first that “virtue and goodness” can eliminate envy,
and then characteristically revises his claim by adding that “goodness is not enough” [D III.30.1:279, 280] –
implying that virtue, if not sufficient, is at least necessary.
24
Extraordinary energy is needed for a prince to avoid the dangers of either being loved or being feared, according
to the Discourses. “One cannot hold exactly to the middle way,” Machiavelli writes, for our nature does not consent
to it, but it is necessary to mitigate those things that exceed with an excessive virtue” [D III.21.3:263; compare
22.3:266]. Perhaps most difficult is the apparently miraculous feat of ordering virtue and goodness in the same
human being. In the same work Machiavelli praises
the generosity of spirit of those [Roman] citizens whom, when put in charge of an army, the
greatness of their spirit lifted above every prince. They did not esteem kings, or republics; nothing
terrified or frightened them. When they later returned to private status, they became frugal,
humble, careful of their small competencies, obedient to the magistrates, reverent to their
superiors, so that it appears impossible that one and the same spirit underwent such change [D
III.25.1:272].
25
In a later formulation, Machiavelli writes that the prince “needs to have a spirit disposed to change as the winds of
fortune and variations of things command him” [P 18:70].
26
The theoretical mode of the peaceful exercise of the art of war involves reading histories and imitating some
excellent man in the past [P 14:60]. The practical and theoretical modes of the peaceful exercise of the art of war,
added to the wartime exercise of this art, make up the whole art of war, which Machiavelli says should be the only
art of the prince, because many times it enables men to acquire states, and it helps them to maintain them [P 14:58].
Machiavelli wrote a book called The Art of War.
27
Machiavelli repeats this reasoning in the Discourses. “Once one individual has made himself very familiar with a
region, he then understands with ease all new countries; for every country and every member of the latter have some
conformity together, so that one passes easily from the knowledge of one to the knowledge of the other” [D
III.39.2:298]. Without this familiarization with one’s own country, one comes to know new countries either never,
or only after a long time and with difficulty.
28
As Mansfield puts it,
Machiavelli adumbrates the modern scientific understanding of nature that, with Bacon, abandons
natural beings and begins the search for natural laws, but he does no more than adumbrate. Since
he approaches the question of the nature of nature from the standpoint of what is good for human
beings, he remains faithful to the fact that in morals and politics, different natures appear distinct
to us, above all the difference between good and evil [MV, 21].
I mean here to fill out the content of Machiavelli’s adumbration with respect to human nature, and to point out the
resulting tension between his abandonment of natural beings and his fidelity to the natural difference between good
and evil. One sign of this tension is that while the science of sites seems to entail a mechanical or hydrodynamic
account in which lifeless nature is primary [see, for example, P 25:98-99], the examples that Machiavelli offers for
the excellent human being to imitate are chiefly living beings [compare P 25:100-101]. It is not clear whether the
living or the nonliving is the primary category for Machiavelli’s comprehensive science.
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 32
29
A reader who remembers the example of Pope Alexander VI from The Prince might object at this point that
Alexander hoped to continue acquiring after his death, using his son Cesare Borgia as “his instrument” [P 11:46].
But acquisitions made through one’s offspring can be lost to death just as well as one’s own acquisitions, as long as
one’s offspring are also mortal [P 7:31-32]. Also, it may necessarily be the case that a prince’s instruments are
always inferior to him; had he lived, Alexander VI might not have made the errors that Cesare Borgia made
[compare P 7:32-33 with 18:70]. Lastly, the pleasure of an predicted acquisition might necessarily be poorer than
the pleasure of a real acquisition, if one has doubts about the possibility of enjoying it.
30
We learn by Machiavelli’s treatment of the same episode in the Discourses that the centurion with the “obstinate
spirit” was not in fact the initiator of the successful conspiracy. Rather, he was the instrument of a prefect, who was
himself driven to conspire against his emperor by the necessity imposed by the prefect’s fear of death [D
III.6.11:227]. This elaboration does not detract from Machiavelli’s admission that some human beings cannot be
compelled by the threat of death, and so his admission that his science of sites is not comprehensive.
31
There are other details in The Prince that raise similar doubts about the science of sites. For example, Machiavelli
suggests that “obedience to present necessities” is what makes human beings vulnerable to being deceived [P
18:70]. He seems to mean not just that necessities can be manipulated [compare D III.12.1:247], since a human
being would be no less excellent were he to be responsive to artificial necessities as well as to natural ones, nor just
that necessities can be apparent rather than real, since a science of sites would distinguish only real necessities.
Instead, he seems to mean to qualify his claim that it is sufficient for virtue to orient itself by necessity. In the same
chapter Machiavelli also warns that “the vulgar are taken in by the appearance and the outcome of a thing”; and
there is a similar passage in the Discourses where he writes, “all men are blind in this, in judging good or bad
counsel by the end” [D III.35.2:291]. Again, if necessity were as knowable as Machiavelli elsewhere claims that it
is, judging by the end would not be an instance of blindness or gullibility.
�
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"Everyone Sees How You Appear; Few Touch What You Are": Machiavelli on Human Nature
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Black, Jeff J. S., 1970-
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Machiavelli, Niccolò, 1469-1527
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Typescript of a lecture delivered on June 20, 2012 by Jeff Black as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series.
Mr. Black is a tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis. His talk is on exactly what constitutes human nature in the work of Machiavelli. In particular, he considers how this view has affected the way we see Machiavelli's works and what it has to teach us about his writings.
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https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/1e9e51b80314fb05e958aefd2ecdf7d8.mp3
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The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a></strong>.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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Courage, Insight, Sympathy, Solitude: The Genealogy of the Noble Type in Part Nine of <em>Beyond Good and Evil</em>.
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Boxel, Lise van
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St. John's College
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2012-08-01
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Annapolis, MD
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A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audio recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a copy of my typescript available online."
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Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900. Jenseits von Gut und Böse. English
Nobility
Philosophy
Courage
Good and evil
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900
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English
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Bib # 80814
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on August 1, 2012, by Lise van Boxel as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series. <br /><br />Ms. van Boxel was a tutor at St. John's College. Her talk is on Nietzsche's <em>Geneology of Morals</em>. In particular, her talk examines what it is that makes up a "noble type" for Nietzsche by looking at a close reading of part nine of his work. Her lecture aims to point towards a positive definition of what the noble type in Nietzsche actually constitutes.
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Graduate Institute
Summer lecture series
Tutors
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Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
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Talking, Reading, Writing, Listening: A Lecture for Parents and Students
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Brann, Eva T. H.
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St. John's College
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2011-11-04
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Annapolis, MD
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A signed permission form has been received stating, "I herby grant St. John's College permission: To make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. To make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. To make an audio recording of my lecture available on the St. John's College web site."
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English
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LEC_Brann_Eva_2011-11-04
Description
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on November 4, 2011, by Eva Brann as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Deans
Friday night lecture
Tutors
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Text
Michael J. Brogan
November 22, 2013
Dwelling in the Land of the
Confessions
It's surprising that a lover of wisdom should lavish as much attention on the particulars of his own life
as Augustine does in the
Confessions.
While any number of philosophers before him had sought to live
by the maxim inscribed in Apollo's temple at Delphi-yvm8t crcaU1:6v, know thyself-none known to
me had taken this as a directive to reflect on the contingencies of his own biography, let alone publish
his thoughts on such intimate matters as a vexed relationship with his mother, a childish loathing of
school, a troubled sexual history, or an enduring tendency to overindulge at the dinner table. In the
Phaedo, Plato does have Socrates recount how he lost his youthful enthusiasm for the study of nature
(96a-1 OOa), but in their exclusive attention to the evolution of his philosophical orientation, these
autobiographical remarks hardly compare with the astonishingly inclusive narrative of a sinner's
wandering path to God that Augustine gives us in the
Confessions.
Socrates, his account of his "second
sailing" notwithstanding, lives out the Delphic command not by brooding over his individual history or
unique identity but by enlisting dialogue partners in a collaborative search for the truth of those
experiences potentially shared by us all in virtue of our common humanity. To oversimplify a bit, he's
interested not so much in
who he is as in what he is, not in this individual man called Socrates but in
what it means to be a human being in general.
Even more pronounced is the contrast between Augustine and Plotinus, the thinker who
perhaps exercised a greater influence on him than any other pagan writer. The Neoplatonist's disregard
for merely individual selfhood is memorably captured in the testimony of his disciple Porphyry, who
writes that "Plotinus, the philosopher our contemporary, seemed ashamed of being in the body. So
deeply rooted was this feeling that he could never be induced to tell of his ancestry, his parentage, or
1
�his birthplace."1 No mere quirk of temperament, this reticence is governed by Plotinus's overriding
ambition to identify completely with the incorporeal intellect in its capacity for timeless contemplation
of the divine One. It's this aspiration that motivates his refusal to share even the bare facts surrounding
his origins as an embodied self.
For all that he owes to the self-effacing Platonic sage, however, Augustine himself has no
qualms about directing his gaze and ours to the particular circumstances and events of his unique,
unrepeatable, and still-unfolding life. Quite to the contrary, he writes in the confident hope, reiterated at
several key points in the Cotifessions, that by reflecting on that life, seeking out the narrative threads that
bind it into a unity, he and his readers might be drawn ever closer to the eternal, divine truth. But how
does a lover of wisdom--one, moreover, as indebted to Neoplatonism as Augustine acknowledges
himself to be-arrive at a hope like this one? How is it that he comes to see his embodied, time-bound
existence as no mere image to be forgotten as quickly as possible in the ascent to its divine original but
as something worthy of the most serious and sustained attention?
Now, one approach to the question immediately comes to mind. As an orthodox Christian
believer, the author of the Confessions fully accepts the doctrine of the Word made flesh. God himself,
on this account, took on all the characteristic features of human finitude: he was born of a particular
woman at a particular time and place, spoke a particular language, practiced a particular religion, lived in
relationship to particular human others-we could extend forever this list of "accidents" that
individuate the incarnate beings that we ourselves are and that Christians believe God in Jesus became.
While some of these properties and relationships are undoubtedly less important than others, who are
we to scorn the whole lot of them if God himself has deigned to take them on? Who are we to be
"ashamed of being in the body" if the Creator of all things, of corporeal substances no less than of the
spiritual, saw nothing shameful in becoming incarnate? If the humanity of Jesus Christ, indeed his very
flesh and blood, is indispensable to our salvation, shouldn't we at least have second thoughts about
2
�renouncing our own humanity, or attempting to locate it exclusively in a disembodied intellect that
manages to shed the burdens of finitude?
But of course these are very big "ifs"- too big, I think, for a community like ours whose
conversation appeals to no higher authority than natural reason. While Augustine believes he can find
in the writings of the Neoplatonists themselves the doctrine of the Word that was with God and that
was God, not even he claims to apprehend the incarnation of that Word on any basis other than faith.
My ambition tonight is to see how far we can go toward making sense of the intensely personal
approach of the Confessions without appealing to postulates drawn from sacred doctrine. While I suspect
that Augustine's unprecedented way of applying the Delphic maxim becomes fully intelligible only
against the background of his specifically Christian commitments, we might nevertheless begin to
understand the peculiar strategy he employs in the Confessions by considering the deficiencies that come
to light there of a philosophy conducted in a wholly impersonal key. However dazzling a glimpse it may
afford of the eternal truth, Neoplatonic introspection, we shall see, fails to open out onto what
Augustine calls "the way that leads not only to beholding our blessed fatherland but also to dwelling
therein" (7.20.26). 2
PART I
Before examining their limitations, however, I want to begin by briefly considering why the "books of
the Platonists" (7.9.13 ) were attractive to Augustine in the first place. His study of them comes directly
on the heels of his disillusionment with the Manicheism he had been espousing for the better part of a
decade. Disheartened by the moral and intellectual bankruptcy he has found even among the elite
members of that sect, he has also come to reject their sharply dualistic vision of good and evil as
coeternal principles locked in cosmic combat. Such a view, he concludes, is irreconcilable with his
dawning certainty that God must be beyond all change, corruption, or violation. Nothing can harm a
divinity worthy of the name, and this means that God could have no compelling reason to engage in
3
�battle with eternal forces of darkness. In fact, such forces are no more than the figments of an
overheated mythic imagination: for together with being immutable, God is by nature infinite; it makes
no sense, therefore, to posit a reality that would constrain in any way his power to implement his
perfectly good will.
With his Manichean convictions thus in tatters, Augustine finds himself not so much freed as
unmoored, drifting toward a radical skepticism that, for all its philosophical plausibility, can't possibly
quiet the clamor of his restless heart. It is in this state that he becomes newly open to the possibility of
reconciling with the Catholic Christianity in which his mother attempted to raise him, an orthodox faith
which, largely due to Bishop Ambrose's brilliant preaching on the allegorical sense of the Old
Testament, he has ceased to disdain as the bastion of simple-minded literalism. He realizes, for example,
that our being in God's image need not entail that he be confmed to a body like ours, as the Manichees
had mocked the Catholics for allegedly believing. At this stage, however, Augustine finds he can do no
better than replace such anthropomorphism with a less crude but no less materialist notion of God,
now imagined as a subtle body extended throughout infinite space, permeating and exceeding a created
world conceived on the analogy of a sponge submerged in a vast sea (7.5.7). To think in this way, he
realizes, commits him to the absurd view that an elephant, for example, must contain more of the
divine presence than a sparrow, yet he remains frustratingly unable to understand God or anything else
in nonmaterial terms. He writes: ''Whatever was not extended over, or diffused throughout, or
compacted into, or projected up to definite measures of space, or did not or could not receive
something of this kind, I thought to be completely non-existent" (7.1. 2).
It's this crucial error that the books of the Platonists enable him to overcome, not simply by
introducing him to an impressive theory of incorporeal being but by showing him a path leading to
nothing less than a direct experience of the purely spiritual, first within his own soul and ultimately in the
divine beingjtself. Taught to shun the external and direct his gaze inward, he eventually catches sight of
what he calls the "unchangeable light" above the mind. After ascending beyond bodies and the power
4
�to perceive them and onto the soul's rational faculty of judgment, he says that in realizing its own
mutability, this reasoning power
raised itself up to its own understanding. It removed its thought from the tyranny of
habit, and withdrew itself from the throngs of contradictory phantasms. In this way it
might find that light by which it was sprinkled, when it cried out, that beyond all doubt
the immutable must be preferred to the mutable. Hence it might come to know this
immutable being, for unless it could know it in some way, it could no wise have set it
with certainty above the mutable. Thus in a flash of its trembling sight it came to that
which is. Then indeed I clearly saw your "invisible things, understood by the things
which are made. " (7.17. 23)
Many of you will no doubt recognize the final sentence here as a citation of Paul's Letter to the
Romans (1: 20). By quoting Scripture, however, Augustine does not mean to imply any essential
difference between the experience he is recounting and the one described by Plotinus and his disciples.
As in the writings of those philosophers, the inward turn of Confessions 7 corresponds to a movement
away from absorbed attention to the particularities of the material world and toward the timeless,
intellectual contemplation of the "unchangeable light" at the source of all finite things. That eternal
light is one and the same for Plotinus as for Paul, for Augustine as for you or me. If our highest good is
indeed to gaze upon it, it's understandable that a thinker like Plotinus would regard attending to those
things that differentiate us individuals, the temporal accidents of birth and biography, as at best a
distraction from our true calling. In the famous treatise known as "On Beauty," Plotinus insists that
what we ought to be doing is chipping away like sculptors at everything exterior to the eternal light
within us. "Do you see yourself, abiding within yourself, in pure solitude?" he asks.
Does nothing now remain to shatter that interior unity, nor anything external cling to
your authentic self? Are you entirely that sole true light which is not contained by space,
not confmed to any circumscribed form . . . ? Do you see yourself in this state? Then you
have become vision itself. Be of good heart. Remaining here you have ascended aloft.
You need a guide no longer. Strain and see. 3
But what if "straining" isn't enough? What if "remaining here" proves too difficult? For all the
serene confidence that marks Plotinus's writings, even he and his disciples sometimes seem to
acknowledge the impossibility of simply willing the soul to arrive at and persist in its transcendent
5
�vision. Porphyry, for instance, claims to have had the experience just once, in his sixty-eighth year,4 and
while Plotinus says that for
comes "suddenly"
him "it has happened often,''5
he also characterizes it as something that
(exaiphnes)6 upon a soul that is all too quickly sent back down into the comparative
dullness of mere discursive reason.7 Now, I suppose it's possible (though personally I doubt it) that if
Augustine had experienced nothing worse than this inevitable slide from
nous to dianoia, from pure
contemplating to the difficult labor of thinking things through, and if, moreover, he had found some
way to reconcile the suddenness of the introspective vision with Plotinus's confidence in the sufficiency
of effort ("straining'') to bring it about, he just might have remained content with what the books of the
Platonists were able teach
him
.
But as he recounts in such compelling detail in the
Confessions, his
rapturous and reassuring vision of the unchangeable light is followed almost immediately by a plunge
back into currents of temptation that prove to be just as irresistible as they had been before. No
transformation of his life ensues, no conversion or reorientation of his misbegotten aims and ambitions
follows upon the ecstatic experience that liberates his mind. "I was borne up to you by your beauty," he
confesses, "but soon I was borne down from you by my own weight, and with groaning, I plunged into
the midst of lower things"
(7.17.23). In other words,
the tyranny of habit reasserts itself immediately,
and he succumbs to old patterns of feeling and acting despite seeing them more clearly than ever as
obstacles in the way of his deepest desire. The good he approves unreservedly in his mind he fails to
pursue with an undivided heart; unable to do what he wants, he does the very things he hates.
How depressing! Wouldn't we like to think that even a pale approximation of a 'vision like the
one Augustine reports would have a profound effect on the way we live our lives? Wouldn't it be easy
to love the truth and to do it if we were only certain what the truth was? But this is just the sort of
comforting illusion that Augustine indulged in until his ecstatic vision deprived him of what he calls
"that former excuse, in which I used to look upon myself as unable to despise the world and to serve
you because knowledge of the truth was still uncertain to me"
6
(8.5.11).
Now, approaching thirty years
�of age, he has attained the certainty he's long been seeking, and yet he discovers that he is just as
enthralled to his old, enervating habits as he ever was. Able to see the truth, he still cannot draw near
enough to bask in its radiance.
If we are at all persuaded of the authenticity of his testimony-influenced, perhaps, by an
uncomfortable awareness of our own failures to translate insight into action, to do the truth we knowwe have reason to wonder whether any mere vision, however dazzling, can set us on the sure path to
the good. Understanding alone is perhaps not enough to overturn long-settled habits of self-indulgence,
indolence, and despair, no matter how irrefutable the evidence becomes that these are precisely what
keeps us from the happiness we seek. To use one of Augustine's favorite images, it's as if we can
become enchained to ways of life we know to be toxic to our souls. He writes:
For in truth lust is made out of a perverse will and when lust is served, it becomes
habit, and when habit is not resisted, it becomes necessity. By such links, joined one to
another, as it were-for this reason I have called it a chain-a harsh bondage held me
fast. A new will, which had begun within me, to wish freely to worship you and find joy
in you, 0 God, the sole sure delight, was not yet able to overcome that prior will
grown strong with age. (8. 5. 10)
,
,
Now, we call "habits" those dispositions to feeling and action that come to be in us as a result
of repetition. What we do habitually we do not because nature compels us or reason convinces us but
simply because we have done likewise in similar situations time and again in the past. Here's a trivial
example. I'm in the habit of drinking a cup of coffee first thing every morning. I don't remember
making a deliberate choice to start doing this, butif ever I did, it must have been a long time ago: at this
point in my life, it's only a slight exaggeration to say that deliberate choice of any kind becomes possible
for me only after I've had that first cup. I suppose if I were to summon my inner resources I could
manage to break a chain now thousands of links long by choosing to have tea tomorrow instead. After
all, it's not my nature that determines me to drink coffee, as it is, say, the stone's nature that causes it to
fall or the fire's that makes it rise, but merely my long-settled habit-a practice become second nature, so
to speak.
7
�But might there be situations in which this is a distinction without any practical difference,
occasions when second nature constrains no less than first and habit takes on the character of
compulsion? For Augustine there were, and we need not have suffered from any of the conventionally
recognized "addictions," I think, to identify with his experience of habit as an iron chain holding him
back from goods he has to come to perceive with incontestable clarity.
In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle observes that, unlike those powers that are in us by nature
(e.g., sense perception), the potencies for which precede our exercise of them, the virtues of character
are like physical or technical abilities in that they come to be in us only after we have been engaged in
the activities associated with them (1103a25f.) We become capable of courage, for example, only by
repeatedly doing courageous things, meaning those things the already courageous person does, just as
we become harpists by repeatedly practicing the harp under the tutelage of an accomplished player. As
we grow more accustomed to being at work in them, these activities become easier for us, more
pleasant, we could even say, more "natural" to us.
Unfortunately, though, this is at least as true, and probably more so, of bad actions as it is of
good: as Augustine knew all too well, a past defined by repeated indulgence in any kind of excess or
deficiency can make a future characterized by strength of will or self-control, let alone full-fledged
virtue, appear entirely out of reach. How I conduct myself today seems largely determined by what I
did yesterday, even when the memory of this recent past fills me with shame and regret over having
acted otherwise than I knew I should.
I want to turn now to Augustine's analysis of time to see what light it might shed on this
indebtedness or even enslavement of the present to the past, and also on the shape that a rehabilitated
future might ultimately take. My hope is that doing this will bring us a step closer to our goal of
understanding the significance of Augustine's autobiographical turn in the Confessions.
8
�PART II
Though it would take all night (at least) to do justice to his fascinating and intricate meditation,
the basic paradox of time Augustine identifies in Book 11 can be expressed in a few words. It seems, he
observes, that the present is the only time that actually exists, since whatever the future is, it is not yet,
and the past is no longer. Upon scrutiny, however, the present itself turns out to look like nothing more
than an extension-less boundary between those two nonentities, the past and the future. "It flies with
such speed from the future into the past," Augustine says, "that it cannot be extended by even a trifling
amount" (11.15.20). Hemmed in as it is on both sides by nonbeing, the reality of the duration-less
present itself falls under serious suspicion. Here is Augustine again:
[I]f the present were always present, and would not pass into the past, it would no
longer be time, but eternity. Therefore, if the present, so as to be time, must be so
constituted that it passes into the past, how can we say that it is, since the cause of its
being is the fact that it will cease to be? [11. 14.17, emphasis added]
Thus it appears that neither the future, nor the past, nor even, now, the present has a sure hold on
being: future and past are not, and the present is only in so far as it ceases to be. But Augustine is
unwilling to conclude from this that time is mere illusion. Should we decide that it exists only in a
secondary or derivative sense-a kind of moving image of eternity, as the Timaeus has it-it
nevertheless remains too fundamental to our lived experience, and our ways of talking about that
experience, simply to deny its reality altogether. The task is to try to understand what time is, if not in
itself then at least as it is for us. What we can say for sure, Augustine thinks, is that the past and future
depend for their being on the present; they "do not exist except as present things" (11.18.23), he says.
It seems no less true, however, that the present itself cannot be apart from the past and the future, for
what else could provide the present the "space" it needs to extend beyond the length-less and breadthless instant that exists, if it exists at all, only by rushing headlong into non-being?
9
�Characteristically, Augustine looks within himself for a way beyond the impasse. It's there, in
the soul or the mind, that future and past things acquire a kind of presence (and therefore beinj), as
correlates of the mind's acts of expectation and memory, respectively. It's also there that present things
achieve stability by being held in attention, an act of the mind that articulates itself beyond the point
like instant by looking back to a beginning and forward to
an
anticipated end. Whereas on initial
reflection time had seemed to vanish into the nothingness of a not-yet-existent future, a no-longer
existent past, and a perpetually self-destructing present, its claim to at least relative being can now be
redeemed so long as we're willing to pay the price of acknowledging its dependence on the mind's own
activity. The three times, Augustine says, "are in the soul ...the present of things past is in memory; the
present of things present is in intuition; the present of things future is in expectation" (11.20.26). Taken
as a whole, time can thus be described as a "distention of the mind" (distentio animz) (11.26.33) , a
stretching or swelling of present consciousness backward into a remembered past and forward into an
anticipated future.
While it's certainly possible to distinguish memory, expectation, and intuition or attention as
three separate acts of the mind, Augustine's analysis makes clear that to do this would be to engage in a
kind of abstraction. For in our lived experience of things, memory, expectation, and attention form a
single, continuous whole. The mind, he says, "looks forward, it considers, it remembers, so the reality
to which it looks forward passes through what it considers into what it remembers" (11.28.37). To
illustrate this dynamic, he reflects on the experience of reciting a psalm he knows by heart. Once he's
formed the intention to recite and is about to carry it out, the psalm, or rather, his recitation of it, is one
of the "things future," which is to say, it exists for the mind in the mode of expectation. The ray of
consciousness is pointed forward, so to speak, casting its light over the whole psalm as something to be
brought out into the open as an audible presence. As the recitation proceeds, the stock of expectation
decreases in proportion to memory's increase, until, having reached his proposed end, the speaker falls
silent and the psalm in its entirety exists by way of its resonance in the recollecting minds of its hearers.
10
�What happens between the beginning and the end of this process, namely, the ongoing
transferal of expectation's funds into the account of memory, corresponds to present time in its more
expansive, non-instantaneous conception. The act of the mind responsible for this making present
Augustine variously calls "intuition" (contuitus), "attention" (attentio), and "intention" (intentio). Present
consciousness, we come to understand, doesn't just passively register a now that arises only to perish
(or, more accurately, arises only lry perishing); on the contrary, the attending or, better, the intending
mind plays an active part in the unfolding of temporal events, as both Augustine's heavy reliance on
words with tend(}--stretch out-at their root, as well as his pregnant choice of the recitation example
powerfully suggest. About that recitation, Augustine writes:
The life of this action of mine is distended into memory by reason of the part I have
spoken and into forethought (expectatio) by reason of the part I am about to speak. But
attention (attentio) is actually present and that which was to be is borne along by it so as to
become past. (11. 28. 37, emphasis added).
It's worth hearing that again: what was to be is "borne along" by attention into the past. The Latin verb
here is traicitur, a passive form of traicio, which could also be rendered as "transports" or "conveys." It
combines the preposition trans-"across" or "along"-with the root verb iacio, meaning "throw," so we
might think of attention as the act of throwing an expected future into a recalled past. The sense of this
would be to emphasize how time for Augustine is not merely something that we suffer but is also,
perhaps even primarily, something that we ourselves do. It's hard to know how to say this: the mind
constitutes, enacts, unfolds, or perhaps lives time, in the transitive sense of an expression like "living
one's life." But whatever verb we finally settle on, the crucial thing to grasp is that the soul itself makes
an indispensable contribution to the experience or even the very being of time in shouldering an
expected future and bearing it along into a recalled past.
If the full significance of this activity does not come fully to light in Augustine's psalm example,
what he says toward the end of Book
11 leaves no
doubt about the ultimately moral horizon of his
11
�analysis. After describing the temporal process by which the action of reciting the psalm reaches
completion, he asserts that "[t]he same thing holds for a man's entire life, the parts of which are all the
man's actions" (11.28.38). (In fact, the scope can be widened even further to take in all of history, the
"whole age of the sons of men," though I'll keep our focus for now on the life of the individual.) Just
as I look ahead in expectation to the psalm I am about to recite, so too do I project a practical or moral
future for myself, setting about in the present on the task of converting into a happy memory what is
now only an aspiration to act in accordance with my conception of the good. In this way, "that which
was to be is borne along" into the past.
Of course, there are many ways for our moral intentions to misfire. However completely he
comes to rely on God's grace, Augustine remains sensitive to the constant vigilance, the intense daily
effort required of him if he is to
fulfill
his divinely reordered aims. Readers of Book 10 of the Confessions
know that his baptism did not render him immune to the temptation of taking it easy, of allowing
himself to be swept up by the rushing current of the merely instantaneous now instead of rising to the
challenge of actively living time, that is, of anticipating a virtuous future and then undertaking the
arduous task of carrying it through the present and into the past. "I am a burden to myself' (10.28.39),
he writes, vividly evoking his sense of this labor, the obligation imposed on us imperfect, temporal
creatures not to while away the time but to strive, with God's help, to close the gap between what we
are now and what we are called to be.
The difficulty of that task, as our discussion of habit has prepared us to see, seems to be directly
proportional to the distance separating what we will to become from what we have already been. In
other words, the more radically the future we project for ourselves departs from the past we recall, the
harder it is to bear that future successfully into the present. In the hopes of deepening our
understanding of this phenomenon, let's return once more to Augustine's recitation example. Forming
the intention to say the whole psalm from beginning to end involves calling it up to the forefront of his
mind from out of what in Book 10 he had called "the great cave of memory" (10.8.13). Only because
12
�he has already learned it by heart at some point in the past can he now look forward to reciting it in the
present. And this suggests, if the example is as paradigmatic of all temporal experience as I believe
Augustine means it to be, that anticipation is itself grounded in recollection, in other words, that the
projected future "borne along" by a present intention is first assembled by the soul from materials
drawn from its past. Augustine makes the point more explicitly in Book 10. Within the memory, he says,
I encounter myself and recall myself, and what, and when, and where I did some deed,
and how I was affected when I did it. There are all those things which I remember
either as experienced by me or as taken on trust from others. From that same abundant
stock, also, I combine one and another of the likenesses of things, whether things
actually known by experience or those believed in from those I have experienced, with
things past, and from them I meditate uponfuture actions, events, and hopes, and all these again
as though they were actually present. "I will do this or that," I say to myself within that
vast recess of my mind, filled with images, so many and so great, and this deed or that then
follows. (10.8. 14, emphasis added).
What this passage allows us to see, I think, is that temporal life, or the activity of living time, is
marked by a kind of circularity. In proposing a course of action to myself, I cannot but rely upon the
"abundant stock" of past experiences, either my own or those attested by others and found credible to
the extent that they are consistent with my own. In other words, before the anticipated future can be
borne along into the remembered past, the past must first be launched forward into the future as the
indispensable material out of which the soul shapes its expectation. Now, this is not to say that in acting
in the world we only ever repeat ourselves, or that the wheel of lived time rotates around a fixed point.
Augustine mentions here that as he deliberates he "combine[s] ...the likenesses of things" drawn up
from memory, thereby suggesting that the soul enjoys at least some degree of creative freedom in its
activity of conceiving for itself a future as something other than an exact replica of its past. But it's still
no use pretending that a path of total novelty is ever open to us; the future is inescapably indebted to
the past, expectation inevitably takes its stand on the ground of memory.
It's not hard to grasp that this poses a grave threat to the possibility of the deep and abiding
transformation the young Augustine came to recognize as his only hope for happiness. For if my
13
�memory teems with images of a life fundamentally inimical to the good; if the virtuous examples of
others seem too remote from my experience to be plausible or even attractive models for me; and if the
claims of the philosophers to offer an escape from time and all its woes have proved too good to be
true, then my desire for the happy life, no matter how firmly rooted in a clear vision of its reality and
goodness, seems fated to go unfulfilled. In their essentially timeless character, transcendent moments of
insight, like those Augustine attains by way of Neoplatonic introspection, are essentially cut off from
memory and expectation, mere interruptions of the circuit of lived temporality. As such, they remain no
more than isolated points of light, like individual stars in a vast night sky-beautiful, to be sure, but
virtually powerless to illuminate the ground beneath our feet as we stumble along in search of the way
that leads not only to beholding but to dwelling in the land of our desire (7.20.26; 7.21.27).
Augustine opens a window onto the potentially ruinous dependence of expectation on memory
in recounting a conversation he had with himself a few years before his final decision to seek baptism.
Approaching the age of thirty, he looks back with chagrin at all the time that has passed since his
teenage reading of Cicero's Hortensius first set him on flre with the love of wisdom. The bitter anxieties
and disappointments of those dozen years have left him more convinced than ever of the futility of a
life given over to worldly ambition. His disillusionment with the rationalist pretensions of the
Manichees and his deepening admiration for the philosophically sophisticated preaching of Ambrose
have inclined him, as he puts it, to "fix my feet on that step where my parents placed me as a child"
(6.11.18). He's going to do it, he really means it this time, he's going to put away what he calls his "vain
and empty concerns" by committing himself fully once and for all to the Catholic Church. Just notyet.
"[I]ime passed," he says,
and still I delayed to be converted to the Lord . . I loved the happy life, but I feared to
find it in your abode, and I fled from it, even as I sought it. I thought that I would be
too wretched, if I were kept from a woman's arms. I did not believe that the cure for
this disease lay in your mercy, for I had had no experience with that cure. I believed
.
14
�that continence lay within a man's own powers, and such powers I was not conscious
of within myself. (6. 11.20)
Notice what's holding him back. Though he has long suspected that the cares imposed by
married life are for him incompatible with the spiritual freedom he desperately desires, he also knows
himself well enough to realize that he lacks the strength to live without the comforts afforded by sexual
intimacy. In the terms of his metaphor, he suffers from a "disease" whose symptoms he knows how to
treat but whose cure, he has learned, lies completely outside his own power to effect. Whether or not
we think it makes sense to diagnose as an illness his inability to commit to celibacy, with a little
imagination most of us will be able relate to Augustine's predicament here. He knows exactly what it
would take for him to be happy, but bitter experience has convinced him that he's just not up to the
task. Nothing he finds in the spacious caverns of his memory allows him to envision for himself a life
of genuine health, and without the means to palliate the symptoms of his disease, he fears that taking
up residence in "God's abode" would serve only to increase his misery. Thus he shrinks back from the
decisive step, without, however, being able to resign himself to a future as fatalistically determined by
the past as his own seems certain to be.
Perhaps there is little we can reasonably say about the causes of Augustine's ultimate escape
from this desperate situation, at least if we want to keep open the possibility that it was indeed God's
grace that finally set him free. I think we can conclude, though, that whatever it was that finally lifted
the terrible burden from his soul in that Milan garden, the experience he describes as "a peaceful light
streaming into my heart" (8.12.29) would have been every bit as isolated and ineffectual as his Plotinian
visions of the eternal truth turned out to be had it not become possible for him to discern the
underlying continuity of his past life of unhappy wandering with the baptized future he was finally
empowered to project for himself. For as his analysis of time has shown us, to the extent that the
present remains divorced from the past that precedes it, it cannot but have the character of the instant
that is only by ceasing to be, the point-like now that suddenly-exazphnes-emerges out of nothingness
15
�only to vanish again just as suddenly. From such
an
instant, however charged with divine presence it
might be, nothing of lasting, practical significan�e is likely to follow-nothing more consequential, at
any rate, than the sort of wistful memory and infinite, impotent yearning that threatened to consume
Augustine in the wake of his disappointing experiments in Neoplatonic ascent.
In concluding, then, I want to suggest that Augustine's passionately personal reflection on the events
leading up to his fmal conversion is intended to recall and thereby reinforce the vital links between the
future opened up to him on that momentous day in Milan and even the darkest periods of his youthful
estrangement from himself and from his God. Though his conversion undoubtedly marks a new
beginning, even a kind of rebirth, it succeeds in doing what impersonal introspection had failed to do
because Augustine is enabled to see it as the culmination of a process that had begun in him long
before. The call he finally answers in deciding to seek baptism is the very same call that had never
ceased resounding in his heart, even when he was desperately trying to drown it out in the frantic
pursuit of sensual pleasure, emotional and intellectual titillation, and worldly success. In looking back
on his past, he comes to see that in the anxiety, disappointment, and doubt that marred his life of
secular striving, God himself had been calling him home.
You were always present to aid me, merciful in your anger, and charging with the
greatest bitterness and disgust all my unlawful pleasures, so that I might seek after
pleasure that was free from disgust, to the end that, when I could find it, it would be in
none but you, Lord, in none but you. For you fashion sorrow into a lesson to us. You
smite so that you may heal. You slay us, so that we may not die apart from you. (2.2.4)
Augustine meditates on his past in the Confessions to learn again this lesson of sorrow, which is
also, paradoxically, a lesson of great hope. From out of the caves of his memory he no longer draws up
the despair-inducing confirmation of his own weakness that had paralyzed him as a young man, but the
liberating assurance that God had always been with him, even in the depths of his sin. Recollections of
events in which that divine presence now seems unmistakable nourish his expectations of future
16
�assistance, giving him the strength to stand firm against present temptation in the confidence that his
conversion will turn out to have been the decisive event of his life, and not a mere prelude to another
aborted attempt or humiliating failure to change his ways.
But as his unsparing assessment of his present condition vividly demonstrates, he knows that
nothing is guaranteed. To be sure, conversion to the truth for him comes as a gift, but that giftperhaps like all gifts-is profoundly difficult for a creature with a long history of proud self-assertion to
receive. Ever present is the temptation to refuse or return it in the fatal conviction, born of pride and
despair, that there is no genuine good beyond what we can obtain for ourselves. The books of the
�
Platonists did nothing to disabuse Augustine of this error. "Strain and see," they told him, at once
puffmg him up by preaching the sufficiency of effort, and casting him down by showing him no more
than the way to behold the blessed country when his heart's desire was to dwell therein. The way beyond
beholding is a way of humility, and Augustine's searingly honest examination of his life is his attempt to
walk it.
Thank you.
1
Porphyry, "On the Life of Plotinus and the Arrangement of His Work," in Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephen
MacKenna (New York: Penguin, 1991), p. cii.
2
3
All Augustine quotations are from The Confessions of St. Augustine, trans. John K. Ryan (New York: Doubleday, 1960).
Enneads 1.6.9, in The Essential Plotinus, trans. Elmer O'Brien (Indianapolis: Hackett , 1964 ), pp. 43-44.
4 "On the Life of Plotinus," p. cxxii.
s
6
7
Enneads 4.8.1.
Enneads 6.7.34.
Enneads 4.8.6.
17
�
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"While Augustine believes he can find in the writings of the Neoplatonists themselves the doctrine of the Word that was with God and that was God, not even he claims to apprehend the incarnation of that Word on any basis other than faith. My ambition tonight is to see how far we can go toward making sense of the intensely personal approach of the Confessions without appealing to postulates drawn from sacred doctrine. While I suspect that Augustine's unprecedented way of applying the Delphic maxim becomes fully intelligible only against the background of his specifically Christian commitments, we might nevertheless begin to understand the peculiar strategy he employs in the Confessions by considering the deficiencies that come to light there of a philosophy conducted in a wholly impersonal key. However dazzling a glimpse it may afford of the eternal truth, Neoplatonic introspection, we shall see, fails to open out onto what Augustine calls 'the way that leads not only to beholding our blessed fatherland but also to dwelling therein.'" - excerpt from lecture
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Dwelling in the land of the Confessions
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<a title="Audio recording" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/18">Audio recording</a>
Friday night lecture
Tutors
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What does music mean? Examples from Bach, theory from Kant
Matthew Caswell
Is music about anything? Can music represent anything at all? That is, can it mean
something besides itself?
Much of our music may seem to bear meaning unproblematically, since it consists of
sung lyrics. Indeed, the association of musical tones with speech is primeval and enduring:
the oldest poems and prayers were at the same time songs, we are told. But if music as
music can represent, it doesn't do so in the manner of its ancient companion, speech. Like
musical tones, words are sounds, but these sounds are taken by us as tokens of concepts,
universals which we put to use in judgment, predicating the concepts of one another. There
has been great controversy across the ages over how exactly strings of words in a sentence
manage to mean something, but no one doubts that words have meaning. (It would be difficult
to articulate such a doubt to yourself, or to anyone else, for obvious reasons.)
We are less sure about tones. Since music is not a language of signs, it cannot be
translated or decoded into prose in a way that carries over its power as music. At the same
time, many of us would resist the claim that music is meaningless. Beethoven inscribed on his
Missa Solemnis: "from the heart, may it reach other hearts." The composer wasn't merely a
deft technician able to incite feelings in others; he took himself to be a thinker- that is,
someone with a communicable inner life. What is in our hearts as we make music, and what
do our hearts receive upon listening? In order to begin to answer these questions, we will first
survey three of the ways music can be thought to mean, or to represent, using as our
sourcebook of examples Bach's St Matthew Passion. In the second part of the lecture, we
will turn to the account of the meaning of beautiful art offered by Immanuel Kant, perhaps the
greatest modern theorist of the beautiful. As we shall see, Kant's deep metaphysics of
representation may be especially well-suited to making sense of the beautiful representations
of music. 1
1 Kant is thought not to have been a music-lover. Nevertheless, his brief remarks on music in the Critique of
Judgement are insightful. He argues that music is only beautiful in so far as it pleases through our reflection
1
�I.
BACH
At least three different species of musical representing can be found in the Passion. In
many of the oratorio's passages, combinations of these categories are mixed and blurred; our
analysis will to some extent abstract from this highly multifarious character of Bach's work.
Furthermore, our examples will all be taken from the recitative portions of the work, Bach's
setting of the scripture text. The recitatives, while ornate and dense with musical invention,
involve less complicated poetic and musical structures than do the song-like arias, chorales,
and choral numbers, making our task of analysis and organization a bit easier.
Type 1: Sound Imitation
Perhaps the simplest way for a musical sound to point beyond itself is by resembling
some other sound from the wider world. Think here of a timpani rolling in imitation of thunder,
or of a bassoon muttering in imitation of your grandfather's voice. Like a portrait of a friend is,
among other things, a likeness of our friend, the timpani roll sounds something like thunder,
and can therefore represent as a stand-in. This is the model of representation scrutinized by
Socrates in Book 10 of the Republic: representation here stands to thing represented as
image to original. Obviously, the objects artificially imitated by sound can only be things that
are already audible.
Let's first listen to a brief recitative passage, and then focus on an instance of sound
imitation within it. The Gospel text, recounting the disciple Peter's betrayal of Christ, in
English, is as follows:
on its "forms"; that is, melody, harmony, and even tone itself for Kant are not mere sensations but structured
objects of reflection. Even his critique of music's essential intrusiveness, and thus lack of "urbanity" (he
compares the inescapable spread of sound to the spread of an odor) is perceptive. Artists like Bach were
surely aware that much of their power lay in the audience's inability to "turn [its] eyes away" (KU, 330).
2
�And Peter remembered the words of Jesus to him, "Before the rooster crows, you will deny
Me three times." And he went out and wept bitterly. (Passion, §46, measures 5-12)
Now take a look at a moment about a quarter of the way through that selection- it's the
first example on your handout. In the second measure, the Evangelist hops through an
arpeggiated triad on the word "kraehen" or "crow", the sound of his voice recalling the sound
of a rooster's crow.
[see example #1, handout: §46, measures 7-8]
Directly mimetic moments like these are rare in the Passion. The tones, whose native tongue
is melody, are here compelled to play the part of mere noise. Though they point to something
by reminding us of it, they seem to mean little; they are not a language giving utterance, but
an auditory reminder. There is also something humorous in these moments: it is the comedy
of Bach's noble tones momentarily throwing on the low dress of inhuman, unspiritual sound.
One of the most charming things about this technique is that the dress can be thrown off as
easily and as quickly as it is put on.
At the same time, it should be noted that this imitative dress is still music's own. We
are not fooled into thinking a rooster has snuck into the church; Bach has pointed to the
animal's call from well within his musical world. After all, the sound here hear is a dominant
triad, and real roosters don't sing chords. 2 The tonal material of this imitation thematizes its
artful distance from its referent, ensuring that it is heard as an imitation. 3
I also will note here that there are more complicated and richer uses of sound imitation
in the Passion, but because they are not merely imitative, I'll return to their investigation a bit
later.
cf Kant's discussion of bird-song, and its imitation: KU, 302.
Any other sound imitations in the Passion? See the alto aria "Buss und Reu": "die Tropfen meiner Zaehren"
[the drops of my tears] are accompanied by a drip-dropping in the flutes (Passion, §1 0, measure 70).
2
3
3
�Type 2: Tone-painting
Can music point to anything besides other sounds? Consider the following recitative
section from earlier in the Passion. The Gospel text is as follows:
"And they sang the hymn and went out to the Mount of Olives. Then Jesus said to them: All of
you will be made to fail me in the course of this night. For its is written: I will strike the
shepherd, and the flock of sheep will be scattered. But after my resurrection, I will lead the
way for you into Galilee." (Passion, §20)
In the first verse of this passage we find a second species of musical representation. This is
the second example on the hand-out. Just as the disciples' motion up the mountain will be
narrated in the text, the cello accompaniment steps up the degrees of the scale, marked
staccato, through an octave.
[see example #2, handout: Passion, §20, measures 1-3]
The term of art for this technique is "tone-painting,"- there are in fact several of them in this
section- and they each involve a deceptively simple analogy. For the tones do not actually
"rise" in space. Perhaps because we feel the so-called "higher" tones more in our head, and
the "lower" in our chests, we associate the change in pitch with the up-down direction. More
fundamentally, tones in a melody constitute a heard order, and so are strongly analogous to a
set of discrete "places" or topoi to which one might move. This fact underlies the analogical
sense of our talk of musical "steps": because the scale, a determinate set of discrete pitches
in order, is already implied by the melodic or harmonic context, we hear the "rising" sequence
here not simply as a change in position, but as a step-by-step motion from one place to
another, without skipping any places along the way. Moreover, since tones recapitulate their
melodic function at the octave- as when men and women sing a tune together, they sing
exactly an octave apart- , we hear that our steps have taken us as far as we can possibly go-"all the way" to top of the mountain, so to speak. 4
There are in fact two 'arrivals' at the summit here: first the accompaniment leads us from C# to the C# in
the voice on the downbeat of the next measure, then the voice extends the climb to A, the root of the
dominant seventh chord pointing to a resolution in D. Together, both climbs make up a harmonic "?-station",
4
4
�This sort of tone-painting is knowing and witty. While the sound imitation of the
rooster's crow made use of an auditory resemblance, the tone-painting does not resemble,
but analogizes. We notice the analogy between the tonal motion and the locomotion noted in
the text, and smile at Bach's artistry in coordinating the two. One could imagine an entire
Passion oratorio composed this way, with the text continually illuminated or decorated with
musical analogies of the action. This would be an amusing, arch, and civilized work, but would
suggest that music's representational power is of a decidedly second-order nature. For the
musical "ascent" here tells us no more than the text already does on its own: its delight is in
the artistry-the cleverness, I want to say-- used in contriving the analogy. Indeed, like
musical sound imitation, tone painting is always heard as artifice. To take the melodic ascent
as a representation, one must intellectually connect the two sides of the analogy, which are in
themselves alien to each other. 5
Type 3: Musical ideas
What about this passage, a few moments later in the Passion? Jesus is speaking to
his disciples at Gethsemene, and says to them "sit you here, I will go go there and pray." This
is the third example.
[see example #3, handout: Passion, §24, measures 4-6]
Bach has Jesus stretch out the word "bete"-- "pray", as the strings execute a beautiful
cadence in the accompaniment. Is this measure of music a representation?
Let's take a closer look at the music. The first three syllables of Jesus' address spell
or "return" passage.
5 Tone painting typically makes use of the sort of spatial analogies music is ripe for, and therefore
often (I suspect always) involves a musical analogue of locomotion. These analogies are aided by the
conventions of the graphics of score-writing: when you look at the score for the above passage, you see the
signs for the tones arranged up an incline. Or look at the tone painting from a moment later, where Jesus
speaks of the scattering of the flock (§20, measures 8-1 0). We know that Bach did in fact devote special
attention to the appearance of the St. Matthew Passion score. The fact that this visual duplication of the
analogy is really only available to the musical insider with score in hand underscores tone-painting's
cleverness and humor.
5
�out a triad in B-flat, with a deep B-flat chord held in the strings. But as he lands on his fourth
syllable, "hier", the strings add an A-flat to this same triad, generating a mild dissonance, and
leaning unmistakably forward towards the next chord. The strings then resolve the
dissonance, drawing out a long, rich, major triad on E-flat, into which Jesus begins to speak
the word for prayer. 6 He leans through a dissonant F on the downbeat of the measure, and
then holds an E-flat through the first syllable, resting in the tonal home or center of this
passage. The accompaniment here begins to cycle through a series of chords, each casting a
different light on and around that same E-flat. Jesus' bass voice allows his words to be set in
the middle of the pitch-range of the accompanying strings. He is thus surrounded by the
chords which seem fo emanate from him. This effect is often called Jesus' "halo" of strings.
The effect through the first half of this 'bete' measure is of a slowly beating oscillation
of different gestures away from home. Then, just as Jesus finishes speaking, the strings
finally move more dramatically to a dominant seventh chord on B-flat, rooted on the fifth
degree of the scale, and featuring a poignant tritone dissonance between the top and middle
voices. The dissonant chord is resolved to the home triad, completing the periodic harmonic
journey.
The strings form this harmonic period in four voices, the top two moving contrarily
towards each other, and the bottom two moving contrarily away from each other. Contrary
melodic motion helps maximize the individuality of the voices, without frustrating their
harmoniousness. Indeed, the string voices in this passage seem to act on their own for the
sake of each other: gracefully making way for one another, or pausing to offer friendly
resistance. Here Bach compounds contraries within contraries, intensifying the harmonious
diversity of the motion. The crucial dominant seventh chord, unlike the other chords in the
sequence, is articulated across several overlapping rhythms, prolonging the tension in that
chord as we hear each voice move into place within the leaning whole of the chord. Bach
postpones the appearance of the tritone dissonance until the last possible moment. The
whole passage is balanced, natural, gentle, and whole. It is a graceful motion that has its end
in sight as it begins, but whose particular trajectory is not exactly determined, but rather full of
rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic contingency along the way. (Let's listen again.)
The whole passage seeks its home in E-flat. This home was established in the immediately preceding
chorale, "lch will hier bei dir stehen", which begins and ends in E-flat major. The Evangelist narration then
picks up with an F-chord, which functions as a secondary dominant. The F gets its seventh with the word
"Gethsemene", resolving to 8-flat, which will go on to serve as the dominant seventh in Jesus' prayer
passage.
6
6
�Is this a representation of prayer? Obviously, no sound imitation, as we saw in Type 1,
is at work here. Unlike our Type 2 tone-painting, the musical motion here does not resemble
some locomotion, by means of an analogy between tones and place. After all, a prayer is
neither a noise, nor is it a locomotion. And for this reason, we detect none of Bach's ironic
authorial cleverness in the connection between prayer and this cadence. We do not smile at
the artful touch: rather, we are moved by what may seem to be a glimpse of a true nature.
The lack of isomorphism connects the music and the thought more intimately: we are not
hearing something that sounds like a person praying, and we are not hearing prayer
illustrated or decorated, we are hearing prayerfulness made audible. Here, the music-- the
tones in time Jesus sings-- and the object-- a prayerful inner disposition-- are not thoroughly
alien to each other, but seem rather to be of a piece.
To say that the cadence "means" or "represents" prayer might be misleading. It would
not be possible, without the text, to deduce what in the world the cadence was "about." At the
same time, the things in the world it would be the perfect setting for are not limitless. This is
not Aeneas sinking his sword into Turnus' chest; it is not Hamlet castigating his mother; it is
not even Socrates cooling his feet in the stream. Although we can't spell out the rule
according to which, given either the thought or the music, we could derive or compose the
other, we might have the curious impression that no other moment than this one is as well
captured by this particular cadence in the strings and voice. In its contingency with respect to
any rule, it is particular, unlike the two previous Types of representation.
The text makes the notion of prayer explicit for the listener. There are other concepts
we might reach for in an attempt to articulate the meaning of the passage: above, I used the
words 'graceful,' 'gentle,' 'natural,' and 'whole.' But none of these words, and not even the
leading notion 'prayer' seem to get the music just right. Our concepts may be appropriate, but
they do not exhaust. This feature of conceptual inexhaustibility was also missing in the sound
imitation and tone painting examples. The sound imitation and the actual call of a rooster both
involve a quick rising figure: to some extent, they both bear the same sound. The motion of
the tones and the motion of the disciples are analogues: they are both step-wise changes in
place. Here, the act of prayer and the motion of the phrase are both .... something. We need
not remain silent about what that something is, but we know we won't be able to spell it out
satisfactorily.
There is also marked difference in the response of the listener at moments like these,
compared with the cases of sound imitation or tone-painting. While we might delight in the
7
�cleverness of either of the former, pleasure is more deeply involved in our apprehension of
the third type of representation. "Pleasure" is in fact not the whole story: there is a complex of
pleasures and pains in our hearing this passage- pains of longing, pleasures of
consummation. No one has ever been moved to tears by a sound imitation, nor by a
tone-painting.
Speaking of tears, I'd like to note another, more complicated case of musical
representation in the Passion, one in which the first and third types are brilliantly combined.
For not all imitable sounds are as cheeky as a rooster crowing. What about the sounds of the
human voice, especially that voice when it is involved in the inarticulate expression of
emotion- the laugh, the sigh, the sob--? Some have thought that musical meaning as such
derives from the refined imitation of emotionally expressive vocal sounds. I don't think musical
meaning can possibly be accounted for on such terms, but Bach will sometimes allude to
expressive sound imitation, at the same time that he transcends it. Take this passage, from
the close of the episode of Peter's betrayal we looked at above. It's the fourth example on
your hand-out.
[see example #4, handout: §46, measures 9-12]
"He went out, and wept bitterly'' -- Bach sets the last two words to a weaving, sinuous melody
in f-sharp minor, the key of the famous subsequent aria. On the word "weinete"-- "wept"-- the
line sinks from the tonic f-sharp through the upper half of the minor scale, landing on a
chromatic non-scale tone b#. This unexpected tone arrests our motion down the scale,
leaning sharply back up towards the scale-tone 5 (c#) which we have just descended through.
The Evangelist takes the opportunity of this unstable, hanging arrest to leap up almost an
octave, and to wind even more torturously than before back to the tonic and the fifth, framing
the final cadence. No one has ever wept so melodiously. Holding key tones over the beats,
and making bold moves between the beats, the cry becomes a passionate dance. As the
exquisite articulation of the melody takes over, and takes on a life of its own, the sound that
reminded us of crying becomes something else: not an imitation of an audible sign of anguish,
but a representing of the anguish of regret and penitence itself: sorrowful anguish made
audible. As in Jesus' prayerful harmonic period, we here get a glimpse of the otherwise
invisible. As in the earlier example, our apprehension is a complex of delectable pleasures
and pains. And in both cases, the fully musical idea, unpredictable according to any thinkable
8
�rule, moves us.
In the foregoing descriptions, I have in several places referred to the leaning tendency
of particular tones and chords, naming the former by their scale degree, and the latter by the
technical vocabulary of 'tonic, dominant, etc.' Analysis of the tonality of a piece is a crucial
task in attempting to make its particular meaning clear in speech. In this sense it is similar to
the analysis of the meter of poetic verse, the grammar of a sentence, or the logical figure of a
proof. The phenomenon of tonality, of the heard relational structure of tones, is all-important
to music, and so theoretically interesting, we might be led to say that the meaning of music is
simply tonal function. In Zuckerkandl's terms, the meaning of a tone or chord would then just
be its "dynamic quality." Simi·larly, music's rhythmic order in time unfolds through the cycling
of upbeats and downbeats, and we might add rhythmic quality- a tone's position in the
time-wave which it itself generates- as another element of musical meaning. On this
interpretation, music would not represent anything beyond itself, and our thinking about a
piece of music, if it were to remain non-fanciful, would be confined to reflection on the
movement and structure of the musical sounds themselves.
There is something incomplete in this conception of musical meaning, however. To be
sure, music cannot make Peter's anguish present to us without the means of tonality and
rhythm. 7 But I take it that an essential element of our understanding of such a passage, and of
our pleasure in it, is that something not exclusively musical is being made present. The
moving syntactic relations in time and tone enable music to 'make sense', as it were, but they
do not, on their own, make it beautiful. As Zuckerkandl is well aware, a tune may establish a
tonic center perfectly adequately and yet bore us to tears. In his treatment, the question of
music's meaning is separated from the question of music's beauty or greatness; and thus, the
word "beautiful" hardly appears in Zuckerkandl's wonderful guide into musical phenomena,
The Sense of Music. An alternative approach, which we will see is Kant's, would understand
the pleasure in judging the beautiful as itself the reception and contemplation of a particular
sort of meaning. Accordingly, we might understand the tedium or vapidity of some music, like
the sort we are subjected to in elevators, as an emptiness of meaning; while they are
rhythmically and tonally intelligible, these unbeautiful tonal utterances seem to say little or
nothing to us, and their deficiency of representational power is essentially linked with their
What about "atonal" music? We'd have to investigate case by case to see if such music deserved the title
"atonal," strictly speaking. Some allegedly atonal music may involve the search for new, non-diatonic
"dynamic qualities." Some may depend upon frustrating expected tonal structures at every turn, and thus
presupposing tonality as an implicit background (cf "non-Euclidean geometry").
7
9
�deficiency in pleasure.
To summarize: Deep pleasure in the apprehension of a representation whose meaning
is conceptually inexhaustible, a form in sound that seems to be the natural manifestation of an
inaudible truth- these are the features of what I want to call a musical idea in the fullest sense.
How does music achieve this representational power? What in us is at work as we perceive
it? And why does it feel so good? That is, why is it beautiful, and what does its beauty mean?
Maybe Kant can help.
II.
KANT
Kant's inquiry into taste and beauty makes up the first half of his third Critique, the
Critique of Judgment. Towards the close of the investigation, the question of beauty's
meaning leads Kant to a surprisingly expansive treatment of the ways in which representation
can happen. Namely, he finds himself required to rethink the relation between the poles of his
famous dualism of intuition and concept. The first Critique of Pure Reason developed this
Kantian duality, according to which spontaneous intellectual acts (the concepts) must be
brought together with given sensible forms (the intuitions) to make knowledge possible.
Concepts without intuitions are "empty"-- they are mere thoughts, unable to pronounce truths
or falsities about the world. Intuitions without concepts are "blind"-- they cannot be taken to
represent anything, and so strictly mean nothing. Everything we can know is articulable in a
judgment in which intuition and concept are thought together.
What Kant now points out is that the exhibition in an intuition of a concept, the "making
sensible" of a thought, is possible in two rather different ways (KU, 351). 8 The first way,
familiar to readers of the first Critique, he calls "schematic:' Here we take the intuition as
bearing the "monogram" or calling card of the concept, and accordingly take the particular
given intuition to be an "example" of the universal concept. 9
The second way of exhibiting pure concepts Kant here calls "symbolic." He cautions
the reader to observe that people usually use the word "symbol" incorrectly: the designation of
a concept by a sensible sign is not an exhibition, a making sensible, of the concept at all, but
a "mere characterization." In the latter, Kant writes, "the signs contain nothing whatever that
belongs to the intuition of the object." The only thing linking the sensible articulation and the
8
9
References noted 'KU are to Kant's Critique of Judgement, Akademie page numbers.
To be precise, in an empirical judgement, the intuition is an "example", in a priori, a "schema".
10
�referent concept, in this case, is the arbitrary or conventional act of our own intellect. The
so-called "symbols" of algebra are in truth mere 'characters' or tokens in this sense.
But a genuine symbol, according to Kant, is an intuition that represents by being
thought in an analogous way as that which it is the symbol of. Kant offers the following
example: a hand mill is a symbol of an absolute monarchy, while an organism is a symbol of a
constitutional monarchy. The rules according to which we reflect on the relations in each pair
are the same: the parts of the hand mill move through the mechanical force imposed by an
external impulse, as the members of the absolute monarchy are coerced by fear of the king;
while the parts of the organism are self-moved, according to an idea of the whole animal, as
the members of the constitutional monarchy act according to their systematic roles in the legal
idea of a constitution. (How much longer and more awkward that is to spell out, than it is to
present in the unexplained analogy!)
The hand mill and the animal allow us to see, they "submit to inspection", the different
sorts of monarchy, if we are willing to take them symbolically. It may help to be annoyingly
precise here, since the enmeshed relation between thing and appearance is especially knotty
where analogy is concerned: There is something about the monarchy which is is also present
in the handmill. It is that 'third' thing-- a sort of power relation-- that is directly 'made visible'
here; in other words, both the monarchy and the mill are examples of external force. At the
same time, the monarchy itself is indirectly made visible in the handmill, in so far as they both
bear the relevant power relation. Thus, the one is a symbol of the other.
Symbolic representation or meaning abounds in our language: a "sub-stance" doesn't
literally "stand under" anything 10 , but the spatial and causal relation articulated in an empirical
'standing under' is analogous to the metaphysical relation between a thing and its accidents;
just as that which "de-pends" on a cause doesn't literally "hang from" it (KU,352). It is striking
that Kant's examples of symbolic language (which work in German as well as English) come
from his Table of Categories, the "pure concepts of the understanding." Apparently we are
unable to speak these non-sensible thoughts except by analogizing them to sensible items
around us, although for most of us the symbols have petrified, and we are rarely aware of
their symbolic character. If this is true, it is likely that no speech is merely "characteristic,"
outside of the rarified realm of modern mathematics.
Kant's notion of symbolic representation will turn out to be crucial in his culminating
investigation of the beautiful as the symbol of the good, even later in the Critique. But for our
10
I know this etymology is spurious.
11
�purposes, I want to direct our attention to how Kant begins the thread of aesthetic meaning a
bit earlier, in his discussion of "fine" or beautiful art. There, Kant is occupied with articulating
the subtle role of concepts in fine art. We don't think a work of art is beautiful because we
recognize what concept it should be subsumed under. To judge that a poem is an Italian
sonnet, or that a painting is an impressionist rendering of an orchard, or that passage of
music contains a perfect cadence, all this tells us nothing about these works' beauty. These
judgments are "schematic," for they determine the given object as an example of the class, in
accordance with a rule. But judgments of beauty-- what Kant calls judgments of taste-- do not
use concepts this way. The beautiful object seems ideally suited for thinking over, for
contemplating, without it ever being decided once and for all what it is. It excites our minds
into a maximal activity, what Kant calls "free harmony," in which our imagination traces every
detail and our understanding ranges through a "wealth of thought," each activity propelling the
other. This harmony is "free" in that it is not in the service of rendering a determinate
sentence. Kant takes this "quickening," rather than being exhausting, to be self-strengthening,
a becoming-more-alive. He often relies on the term "play" to capture the leisure, spontaneity,
and energy of judging the beautiful. In Kant's conception, the beautiful is not relaxing, but
stimulating. We are not transfixed by beauty, but "linger" over it. It doesn't strike at a moment,
but unfolds across time in the extended activity of our reflection. 11
In this connection, it is worth noticing one of reasons Kant cites for ranking music
below the other arts. He writes that while the visual arts are "lasting," in so far as their forms
endure in space as we reflect on them, music is inevitably "transitory." Indeed, he observes
that we tend to find musical passages which do manage to endure by "involuntarily" lodging
themselves in our memory "annoying." But this criticism might be turned on its head: because
musical forms vanish as we linger over them- indeed they must do so to be present to us at
all- to have them in the ear is to be immediately aware that they pass us by, slip away, and
evanesce. This may, after all, be the source of beautiful music's particularly heart-breaking
power. Music makes intimately manifest the mortality of the "feeling of life" through which we
enjoy the beautiful.
Now, Although judgments of taste are free from conceptual determination, they are in
fact often rich with concepts, since they always involve the understanding. A beautiful
11 Much art, and much music in particular, has the effect of transfixing us in an overwhelming moment.
According to Kant, this is not art of the beautiful, but art of the sublime. Perhaps "Sind Blitze, sind Donner"
(Passion, §33, measures 104 ff) provides an example of the sublime in the Passion.
12
�landscape brings to mind the interdependence of the ecological whole and the efforts of
human cultivation. A beautiful horse may bring to mind the natural purposes of power and
speed, or the human purpose of war. And in the case of art, the artifice of the object always
gives some concrete conceptual direction to our reflection. After all, we only know it is art
because someone purposefully made it (KU, 303). Of course, many artificial expressions are
not beautiful. The representations of men and women on restroom doors point to a
determinate purpose, we quickly see what they mean, and our grasp of their meaning is what
allows us to see them as artificial in the first place. But they are not thereby beautiful, and in
fact the determinate nature of their meaning prevents the free harmony through which we
judge beauty from getting off the ground. Thus, beautiful art, in so far as it is beautiful, cannot
have a determinate meaning, for it cannot be read as an exhibition of an example according
to a specifiable rule. In his attempt to say what it is an exhibition of, to account for the in
principle unaccountable, Kant introduces his notion of "aesthetic idea" (KU, 314).
Readers of the first Critique know that "ideas", for Kant, are concepts of reason, in
which a totality or whole is thought The world, as the cosmic whole, is an idea; as is God, as
the highest being. Ideas are never given in experience, which is to say, experience always
falls short of them. An "aesthetic idea" is a totality for the senses; that is, a given sensible form
for which no concept is adequate. Kant describes how
the poet ventures to make sensible the rational ideas of invisible beings, the realm of the
blessed, the realm of hell, eternity, creation, and so on. Or again, he takes things that are
indeed exemplified in experience, such as death, envy, and all the other vices, as well as
love, fame, and so on; but then, going beyond the limits of experience by means of an
imagination that emulates reason by reaching for a maximum, he ventures to make these
sensible with a completeness that no example in nature affords. (KU, 314)
Now, by supposition, the mode of representation here cannot be "schematic," since the
intuition is not definable as a case of a rule. It must, rather, be "symbolic": in our judgment of
the given form, we take its elements to be related to one another in a way analogous to the
relation among the elements of the non-sensible ideal. Kant quotes a minor poet: "the sun
flowed forth, as serenity flows from virtue" (KU, 316). I don't know if this is really all that
beautiful, but let's give Kant some slack. It is not simply the case that the sun is to its rays as
moral contentment is to moral goodness. This would be a symbolic representation, but a
determinate one, like the handmill and the autocracy, in which the rule instantiated on each
side of the analogy could be discursively articulated. Kant's claim is that in running through
13
�the image of the sun, we find that no determinate articulation is adequate to capture the way
in which it is like virtue. Rather, we range through boundless partial characterizations,
stimulated towards further contemplation of the image. This is the free play of taste in the
presence of the beautiful, and it feels good.
Note that in this example, the poet has quite explicitly directed our reflection towards
what the image is to mean. But this is not necessary for symbolic representation in aesthetic
ideas. It may even be the case that the less explicit the directing of our reflection, the more
stimulating that reflection will become, since its scope will be less circumscribed. On the other
hand, to give too little direction risks disengaging the understanding altogether, falling back
into meaninglessness. The great artist strikes this balance perfectly, convincing us that the
sensible form means something, but letting that meaning escape any final determination.
Kant gives an interesting example of meaningless aesthetic experience earlier in the
Critique. "The changing shapes of the flames in a fire or in a rippling brook" are not beautiful,
according to Kant, even though they pleasantly engage the imagination (KU, 243). These
scenes, however, fail to call the understanding into activity, and so the play is one-sided. We
can easily call to mind musical versions of this formless flickering and babbling. One sign of
their one-sidedness is that these sorts of experiences are relaxing, they put us at ease by
releasing tension. They are a sort of massage for the mind. The beautiful, on the other hand,
wakes us up. For in the beautiful, the understanding is maximally active, striving to make
sense of the given form, to apprehend its meaning. Recalling Kant's famous formulation in the
first Critique, without concepts our aesthetic reflection is blind.
Once Kant interprets the forms of fine art as "aesthetic ideas", it becomes possible to
think of beautiful nature as meaningful in the same, subtle way. The real sun's streaming rays
give us far less conceptual direction than the poet's somewhat pedantic metaphor, but as we
take them up in a judgment of taste, our understanding is stimulated into the same sort of
harmonious activity. Even though we know the sun is no work of art, we reflect on it in taste
as if it were the expression of some meaning that escapes determination, as if some truth was
made sensible and submitted to our inspection in the concrete appearance. The intense
pleasure afforded by fine art, and by beautiful nature, lies in this delicate balance of
significance and ineffability: we feel it means something, we know its meaning can't be
articulated. Kant often tries to capture this tension in aesthetic judgment as such with his
claim that the judgment is one of "Zweckmassigkeit ohne Zweck''
("purposiveness-without-a-purpose," or, perhaps, "fittingness without a fit"). In light of the
14
�account of aesthetic ideas, aesthetic pleasure can be recast as a delight in this
'meaningfulness-without-a-meaning.' 12
If beautiful forms as such are aesthetic ideas, and aesthetic ideas always "strive
toward something that lies beyond the bounds of experience," the meaning of a beautiful form
must always point beyond the sensible, towards the supersensible. That is, through symbolic
representation art and nature both render the supersensible, sensible. When supposedly
"empirical" items like death and love are taken up by fine art, their representation directs us
towards an unconditioned principle, and thus towards the unseen supersensible ground of
these familiar features of life. Of course, we don't gain knowledge of these grounds by means
of art. Rather, our reflection is directed towards them, as we take the beautiful form to be a
glimpse of the unknowable.
Some readers have thought Kant's account of fine art as the exhibition of aesthetic
ideas puts so-called non-representational art beyond the scope of his theory. Instrumental
music, at least in so far as it could not be reduced to sound-imitation or tone-painting, might
seem to be a clear case of art that depicts nothing at all. But Kant's account is in fact a
challenge to many familiar models of what "representation" is in the first place. If we think of a
representation as an isomorphic stand-in, where the thing and its representation are related
as original and image, then it is certainly true that much beauty, including beautiful music, is
non-representational. 13 Indeed, nothing, according to Kant, is beautiful by virtue of its service
as an imitative copy. However, a thing-as-it-appears is not related to that thing-as-it-is-in-itself
as original to image. The appearance is not a copy. Rather, things have sensible
manifestations by appearing to us. The two aspects are not distinct beings, but rather
complementary standpoints. In the case of beauty, we take something supersensible as if it is
appearing. The form present to our senses is not an imitation of some absent thing, but a
present manifestation of the unseen, and in this Kantian sense a 'representing,' a Vorstellung.
Precisely because we can't fill in the content of the reference of the appearance though
aesthetic judgment, we can never say adequately what is being presented. But in our
reflection, the perpetually out-of-reach reference is always pointed to, sometimes with less
and sometimes with more guiding direction. In this way, all beauty is representational and
One great irony of the third Critique is that while its analysis of beauty begins by privileging nature over
art, Kant surprises his readers late in the book by revealing that all beauty, understood now as the exhibition
of aesthetic ideas, is a sort of art.
13 Alternatively, in a more modern mood, if we think of a representation as an arbitrary token signifier, beauty
is also non-representational.
12
15
�non-representational at the same time.
The notion of an aesthetic idea can help us make sense of the powerful and puzzling
way in which Bach's music has meaning. Jesus' cadential prayer passage is a symbol in
Kant's technical sense: in our contemplation of it, we sense that our reflection on its audible
elements is analogous to a reflection on the elements of an inaudible reality involving piety,
gentleness, and loving sound-mindedness. In other words, Bach has found a way to make the
holy, inner character of the speaker sensible, he has submitted that character to our
inspection. While we might well be provoked into articulating the meaning of the passage in
words, we know that just what Bach has articulated in tones will escape us. We can be told
that Peter wept, we can witness a depiction of Peter weeping, but Bach's recitative measures
make the invisible and inaudible interior of Peter's soul present to us in tones. This art of
aesthetic ideas promises to deliver truths to its listener; we feel we are close to understanding
something perhaps otherwise unknowable in listening. Because there is no rule according to
which these musical passages could be constructed and classified, we are unlikely to call
them "artificial", even though they are art. Rather, the sounds seem to arise from a
non-sensible principle as if they were natural. Accordingly, we sense that the connection
between representation and meaning is not a contrivance linking alien things, but a union of
what belongs together.
Our delight in the fittingness of the contingent, understood as meaningfulnesswithout-a-meaning, may help make sense of poetic pleasures and meanings as such. In a
great sculpture, the posture of the figure seems just right, so very just right as to be an
expression of an impossible-to-define principle. In his interview with the diabolical
Smerdyakov at the bench outside their father's house, Ivan Karamazov notices his
half-brother carefully drawing ,one foot along side the other, playing with the toe of his boot,
and then shifting the position of his feet back again, throughout their chilling, obscurely
conspiratorial conversation. Dostoevsky has worked his typical magic here: we couldn't have
predicted Smerdyakov would do this, and we don't know why Smerdyakov is doing this or
what it means, and yet in its unanticipatable contingency it seems so perfectly fitting that it
must have its source in the unseen nature that is Smerdyakov's character. We are moved by
indeterminate meaningfulness of the aesthetic idea. 14
The frozen gesture of the sculpture and narrated gesture of character have a power
14
Regarding Smerdyakov, see Kant's discussion of "the beautiful representation of the ugly."
16
�that trades on their indeterminately symbolic function: indeed, this is the way of gesture as
such. In his Doctrine of Right, Kant suggests that a handshake is an attempt to make the
intelligible act of a meeting of wills in a contract visible, in a symbolic gesture depicting the
two-sided unity of the agreement. He goes so far as to say that the parties thereby "manifest
the perplexity" of the intelligible act (MdR, 272). 15 Similarly, kneeling and bowing one's head
are not natural indications of humility and supplication; they represent the latter by means of
some analogy between the arrangement in space of our embodied selves and the attitude
(so to speak) of our minds. We thereby make our supplication visible. Bach's music can
similarly be seen as an audible gesture, a sequence of meaningful movements, giving Jesus'
piety the sensible form of a heard symbol.
The difference between mere motion and symbolic gesture16 helps capture the
difference between tone-painting, and what I've called musical ideas. The motion of bowing
one's head or taking one's knee takes place in space and time. However, Jesus' prayer
cadence does not analogize this motion (that would make it a tone-painting) 17 , but symbolizes
the same inner change manifested in the bodily gesture, but in tone and rhythm. Where the
pitch-painting takes place in the dynamically bare axis of up-and-down, the tonal gesture's
motions occur within a matrix of home, away, tension, and rest. The "fall" referred to in the
term "cadence" (Latin: cadere) is not a descent in pitch, but a falling-to-rest in the tonal field of
dynamic quality. Indeed some of the string voices in our prayer passage rise in pitch as they
"fall" to home. The tonal-rhythmic field gives us access to a symbolic gestural power that far
outstrips mere pitch-relation, and may far outstrip the material resources of every other fine
art. Because music is so rich with tensions and resolutions, pullings, failings, holding still,
balancing, imbalancing, and coming to rest, and because these motions and forces are
distilled and disembodied in tonal and rhythmic forms, music is perhaps the most intensely
and exquisitely gestural form of representation available to us. For this reason, whenever we
most want to make something spiritual manifest to ourselves, we will want to hear it in music.
January, 2015
MdR = Doctrine of Right, Akademie page number
Note that symbolic gesture can include non-motion (striking a posture), just as music can include silence.
17 Could the "lowering" of the soprano and bass voices in the second half of the "bete" measure be a subtle
painting of taking one's knee?
15
16
17
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.
.
What does Music Mean?'Examples from Bach, Theory from Kant
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The poet ventures to make sensible the rational ideas of invisible beings, the realm of the blessed, the
realm of hell, eternity, creation, and so on. Or again, he takes things that are indeed exemplified .in
experience, such as death, envy, and all the other vices, as well as love, fame, and so on; but then, going
beyond the limits of experience by means of an imagination that emulates reason by reaching for a
maximum, he ventures to make these sensible with a completeness that no example in nature affords.
Critique of Judgment §49, 314
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
formallectureseriesannapolis
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
What does music mean?
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Caswell, Matthew
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-01-16
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make typescript copies of my lecture for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a copy of my typescript available online."
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Subject
The topic of the resource
Music, Philosophy and aesthetics
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Bib # 82004
Description
An account of the resource
Typescript of a lecture delivered on January 16, 2015 by Matthew Caswell as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/7060539b4319cc5b31a383b0ea88c34d.mp3
2b7a36e3c45c4c99e665093803f4c161
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
formallectureseriesannapolis
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
00:48:48
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
wav
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Brogan, Michael J.
Title
A name given to the resource
Dwelling in the Land of the Confessions
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2013-11-22
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
mp3
Description
An account of the resource
Audio recording of a lecture delivered on November 22, 2013, by Michael Brogan as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audio recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a copy of my typescript available online."
Subject
The topic of the resource
Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo. Confessiones.
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LEC_Brogan_Michael_2013-11-22
Relation
A related resource
<a title="Typescript" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/13">Typescript</a>
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/f7fe94bafdd022d99723e9c0c00c622a.mp3
1f4ce3433a83047357c2b6e828b8d191
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
formallectureseriesannapolis
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
CD
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
01:05:41
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Brubaker, Lauren
Title
A name given to the resource
Wealth, Virtue and Corruption: Adam Smith's Moral Philosophy
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2011-01-21
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
mp3
Description
An account of the resource
Audio recording of a lecture delivered on January 21, 2011, by Lauren Brubaker as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
A signed permission form has been received stating, "I herby grant St. John's College permission: To make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. To make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. To make an audio recording of my lecture available on the St. John's College web site."
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
sound
Subject
The topic of the resource
Smith, Adam, 1723-1790. Theory of moral sentiments.
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LEC_Brubaker_Lauren_2011-01-21
Friday night lecture
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/6153a94099399c04243e0852a11b1f41.mp3
458b6f190232ae9ff3036ce7c7f5a4f4
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
formallectureseriesannapolis
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
00:42:47
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
wav
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Burger, Ronna, 1947-
Title
A name given to the resource
In the wilderness : Moses as founder and lawgiver
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2013-10-18
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
mp3
Description
An account of the resource
Audio recording of a lecture delivered on October 18, 2013 by Ronna Burger as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audio recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library."
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
sound
Subject
The topic of the resource
Moses (Biblical leader)
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Bib # 81124
Friday night lecture
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/8768a8901f95d5406e12d01727d4ce0f.mp3
551be10c642532426851a3ca2fb771b9
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
formallectureseriesannapolis
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
00:36:19
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
wav
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Casey, Dylan Patrick
Title
A name given to the resource
Surprises and sweet spots : on discovery and recognition
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2013-02-08
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
mp3
Description
An account of the resource
Audio recording of a lecture delivered on February 8, 2013 by Dylan Casey as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audio recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a copy of my typescript available online."
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
sound
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Bib # 80722
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/58f07d33cab72e09ed80e0014f2cf255.mp3
96c1944f85ed391450e46f2c99e6baf0
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
formallectureseriesannapolis
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
CD
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
00:51:53
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Casson, Douglas
Title
A name given to the resource
Stabilizing currency : Locke on money, morality, and natural law
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2011-04-01
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
mp3
Description
An account of the resource
Audio recording of a lecture delivered on April 01, 2011 by Douglas Casson as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
A signed permission form has been received stating, "I herby grant St. John's College permission: To make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. To make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. To make an audio recording of my lecture available on the St. John's College web site."
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
sound
Subject
The topic of the resource
Locke, John, 1632-1704. Essay concerning human understanding.
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Bib # 79790
Friday night lecture
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/1feb06e98eddf199ba6cd00432b64aa9.mp3
43a3c821426394d05562b9fc8d074add
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
formallectureseriesannapolis
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
CD
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
00:56:29
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Davis, Matthew K.
Title
A name given to the resource
Is Man the Measure of All Things? Plato's Analysis of Relativism
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2012-01-13
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mp3
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on January 13, 2012, by Matthew Davis as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission: To make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. To make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. To make an audio recording of my lecture available on the St. John's College web site."
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sound
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Plato. Theaetetus
Relativity
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English
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LEC_Davis_Matthew_2012-01-13_ac
Friday night lecture
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Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series
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The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a></strong>.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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CD
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01:05:00
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Gimbel, Steven, 1968-
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Einstein's Jewish Science: Physics at the Intersection of Politics and Religion
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2012-07-11
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mp3
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on July 11, 2012 by Steven Gimbel as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series.
Gimbel's lecture is on the relationship between Judaism and Einstein's scientific thinking, in particular Einstein's unique convergence of science, religion, and politics. Gimbel holds the Edwin T. Johnson and Cynthia Shearer Johnson Distinguished Teaching Chair in the Humanities at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, where he also serves as Chair of the Philosophy Department. He received his bachelor's degree in Physics and Philosophy from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and his doctoral degree in Philosophy from the Johns Hopkins University, where he wrote his dissertation on interpretations and the philosophical ramifications of relativity theory.
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission: To make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. To make an audio recording of my lecture available on the St. John's College web site."
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sound
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Einstein, Albert, 1879-1955
Physics
Religion and science
Judaism--20th century
Language
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English
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Bib # 80142
Summer lecture series
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67cf9a98edd0947ec6800a445824fd92
Dublin Core
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Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
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01:11:59
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Greene, Joshua David, 1974-
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Beyond Point-and-Shoot Morality: Why Cognitive Science Matters for Ethics
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2011-11-11
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mp3
Description
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on November 11, 2011, by Joshua Greene as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Greene describes his lecture: "How does the moral brain work, and how can it work better?... In this talk I'll review evidence old and new for the dual-process theory of moral judgment, according to which moral judgments are driven by both automatic emotional responses and controlled reasoning processes. I'll argue that these distinctive cognitive processes map onto competing moral philosophies, respectively typified by philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill. I'll then consider the respective functions of automatic and controlled processes. Automatic processes are like the point-and-shoot settings on a camera, efficient but inflexible. Controlled processes are like a camera's manual mode, inefficient but flexible. Putting these theses together, I'll argue that we often make poor use of our moral brains, using point-and-shoot morality to deal with problems it can't handle. I'll argue that when it comes to dealing with peculiarly modern moral problems, we should think more like Mill and less like Kant."
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission: To make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. To make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. To make an audio recording of my lecture available on the St. John's College web site."
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sound
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Ethics
Psychology. Moral and ethical aspects
Language
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English
Identifier
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Bib # 79636
Friday night lecture
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/643bd4878bbac3b1cc8e4c67a0295f40.mp3
6aa78d71bae7f018f0759372165b9a75
Dublin Core
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Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
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00:54:52
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wav
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Grenke, Michael W.
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What will heaven be like?
Date
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2013-01-18
Format
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mp3
Description
An account of the resource
Audio recording of a lecture delivered on January 18, 2013 by Michael Grenke as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Publisher
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St. John's College
Coverage
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Annapolis, MD
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A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audio recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a copy of my typescript available online."
Type
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sound
Subject
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Heaven in literature
Language
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English
Identifier
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Bib # 80720
Relation
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<a title="Typescript" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/29">Typsecript</a>
Friday night lecture
Tutors
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5e9528fe8de7bb3a235a70b32cb69f70
PDF Text
Text
What Will Heaven Be Like?
Michael W. Grenke
You cannot take all luggage with you on all journeys.
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (p.viii).
A lecture prepared for presentation at
St. John's College, Annapolis.
January 18, 2013
�I am not a prophet. I am not here to report to you the facts about Heaven. To the
best of my awareness, I am not in possession of any private revelation that would grant
me a sure understanding of Heavenly matters. What I am is a reader of books, one who, I
hope, reasons while he reads. And what I want to share with you this evening is some of
my reasoning about the idea of Heaven as I believe that idea to emerge in a couple of
texts. The texts I have in mind are likely not known to all of you, and so I will have to
tell you about them. The frrst text, the text that provoked me to attempt this lecture is
Anton Chekhov's short story "In Exile."
Heaven: dark, cold, bare, hollow, and grumbling
"In Exile" is set in Siberia, a place where human beings go after they have been
judged. At the beginning of the story two men are sitting on a riverbank near a campfrre.
The older In;an is called Semyon and the younger man is merely referred to as the Tartar.
Semyon also has a nickname, "Preacher," and he is called by both names throughout the
story. Thus we have two men, one with two names and one with none. Preacher is old
(around sixty), lean, toothless, but still healthy-looking. He is drunk, and he is only
staying awake, and outside of the nearby hut, because he is afraid the men inside the hut
will ask him to share his bottle of vodka. The Tartar is young (around twenty-five). He
is pale and sick and he looks like a boy. Although he is weary and ill, he is awake for a
different reason. He is talking about how nice it was back in his home province and how
beautiful and clever the wife he left behind is.
1
�The Tartar does not like it in Siberia, and yet what I will try to show is that this
Siberia is an image of Heaven. My interpretation is made immediately more difficult, but
I hope not rendered null or, worse, perverse by Semyon's response to the Tartar's talk of
back home. "To be sure, it is not paradise here ... You can see for yourself, the water, the
bare banks, clay, and nothing else .... " (Chekhov, p.90). One could take this denial as
decisive, but I do not. First off, why say this Siberia is "not paradise"? Who would be
tempted to think that it was? And yet if I proclaimed that this auditorium is not Heaven,
the very proclamation would point to the idea of Heaven, and the next natural step for
thinking would be to explain how the auditorium differs from the idea I have of Heaven.
And so ifl consider Semyon's whole initial statement, the matter goes like this. The
Tartar is talking about another place that is nice and has beautiful and clever wives; it is a
place where he would rather be. Semyon responds by saying this place we both are in is
not Heaven, which presumably would be a place the Tartar should prefer, even to
Simbirsk province. The reason this place, this Siberia, is not Heaven is said to be
something "you can see for yourself," with your own natural senses. And what you can
see here is water, bare banks, clay (I will say mud hereafter), and nothing else.
Now what is wrong with these things, such that their presence tells our eyes that
this is not Heaven? Will there be no water in Heaven? This water we can see here is
partially frozen due to the season, but ten paces away it is flowing. The narration tells us
in the next paragraph that this river is dark and cold and that it is making grumbling
noises. If it were bright and warm and burbling would the situation be any different?
Perhaps any water is not good enough for Heaven. Its taste is bland; its transparency
does not delight or beckon the eye. It does not please our senses very much. The
2
�wetness perhaps also does not please, especially associated with the cold. Perhaps water
does not figure heavily in the dreams of happiness of any human beings other than the
desert dwelling.
The bareness of the banks does not give pleasure if we think of the eyes as
things that long to see something, for which the banks are a kind of nothing. Perhaps this
is why the banks are called hollow in their next narrative description. We are meant to
think of what is not there on the banks. Our eyes when they see the banks as bare are
seeking something. A power of vision that adds adjectives to nouns is already modifying
the world. The likeliest thing that our eyes are missing when they see the banks as bare is
vegetation. There is water bounded by soil, but there is no greening life as a natural
consequence. Whether our eyes expect this consequence or merely wish for it, the
absence still renders the banks bare, hollow to our vision.
Next comes the clay. I am mainly inclined to think ofthis detail as equivalent to
mud, but it does occur to me that clay is notoriously not a kind of soil that is good for
growing most plants. With this in mind the water, bare banks, and clay all work together
to give an image of lifelessness. The water raises the expectation of thriving life; it is one
of the preconditions. But this expectation is dashed by the bad soil, hence the bare banks.
But the clay bespeaks lifelessness at an even deeper level, and this is what makes me
want to treat the clay as just mud, not some special kind of mud. Dirt, dust, mud is what
everything solid breaks down into. Mud is an image of decay, an image of corruptibility.
Do our eyes see this too? Do our eyes see in mud a history of something that used to be
there, something higher, something nicer, something beautiful, something that promised
happiness? Do our eyes also see the threat of something yet to come, a breaking down, a
3
�passing away? We should perhaps recall the trouble that young Socrates seemed to have
with mud. He did not want to say that there is a form of mud (see Parmenides 130d).
Perhaps the sight of mud implies a threat to all such Platonic theories of forms?
'Our young Tartar responds to Semyon's invitation to look around in a simple and
characteristic fashion. He looks at this Siberia and proclaims "It's bad! it's bad!"
(Chekhov, p.90). The Tartar is not an ethnic Russian, and it should be noted his Russian
is not good. That may make his expressions simpler than they otherwise would be, but it
may also make him less open to the Heavenly qualities of this Siberia. Perhaps Siberia is
a Russian kind of Heaven.
After the Tartar's outburst we are given a little more description of the land about
this ferry site. It seems strongly significant that Semyon the Preacher is a ferryman. In
fact, the narrative later reveals that Semyon is the only member of the ferry crew who
stays and works at this site all year round. Semyon is the ferryman for this afterlife. We
are told in the narrative that at this moment the people on the other side of the river are
burning last year's grass. This may be a simple agricultural procedure, but it gives the
appearance that the land on the other side of the river is writhing with burning snakes. So
Semyon is the ferryman from where to where? This side of the river is Siberia, it is
Heaven. The other side is Russia proper, it is Earth, but it is also a field of writhing
flame. In this image Earth and Hell look the same.
Welcome to Heaven, You'll Get Used to It
4
�After that Hellish image, the Tartar looks around some more, especially at the
Siberian sky. Though it is a sky like any sky, full of just as many stars, they are different
stars, and the Tartar finds it lacking. He proclaims again, "It's bad! it's bad!" In response ·
to this second proclamation, Semyon announces his wisdom about Heaven. "You will
get used to it," he says. He is old and has been here for a long time, twenty-two years.
He knows this place; the Tartar is just in inexperienced newcomer. Semyon was not
always like this. He was the son of a deacon. He lived in Kursk. He used to wear frock
coats. Now he says he can "sleep naked on the ground and eat grass." So speaking from
his own experience, Semyon says "the time will come when you will say to yourself: 'I
wish no one a better life than mine."' (Chekhov, p.91 ).
How good is Semyon's life? When the seasons change all the other ferrymen
move on. They are said to wander about Siberia begging. Semyon stays put and operates
.the ferry. His going from bank to bank is a kind of image of change within
unchangingness. He compares his life to that ofthe fishes in the river. "The pike and the
salmon are under the water while I am on the water." Is this supposed to make his life
look like it occupies a kind of natural place? And how does Semyon understand the
motions ofthe fishes? Does he think they too just swim back and forth? Or does he just
think of their moving as constituting a kind of life that is in the place where it wants to
be? Fish want to be in the water. They are not wishing for something better. So too,
Semyon is where he wants to be. He says, "And thank God for it. I want nothing. God
give everyone such a life." (Chekhov, p.91).
Want Nothing
5
�In this last statement, Semyon reveals how one comes to see Siberia as a kind of
Heaven. His movement from bare bank to bare bank is a movement from nothing to
nothing. Training oneself to want nothing makes one fit for Siberia, for Siberia, to speak
broadly, has nothing in it that one could want. Wanting nothing might also be
appropriate for Heaven if Heaven is to turn out to be a necessary idea.
By necessary idea I mean two things that are not the same but are not wholly
unrelated. In the first sense, I mean by a necessary idea an idea that emerges out of the
working through of the logic of other ideas. In the case of Chekhov' s Semyon, Heaven is
the idea of a place of happiness, and happiness seems to require one to stop wanting
things. Thus Heaven might have to be a place like Siberia that has none of the things
human beings want. In the second sense, by a necessary idea I mean an idea that one
needs in order to think something that cannot be thought by means of other ideas. A
Heaven that is radically different from the Earth might be such a necessary idea. By way
of illustration ofthis second sense of necessary idea, consider Semyon's life as sketched
so far. One might be tempted to think of his life as a kind of Stoicism; some
commentators on the story have done just that. But Stoicism does not require an idea of
Heaven that is truly different from an idea of this world and its natural possibilities. The
freedom of the Stoic is really just the employment of one of nature's capacities, the life of
the mind, in order to avoid the vicissitudes of the rest of nature's capacities. If one's idea
of Heaven is just some perfection of the possibilities present in this world, then it is not
really differe~t from an idea of this world. I am not inclined to think Semyon is a Stoic,
however, because he repeatedly talks about his life as one for which he ''thanks God,"
6
�and he refers to lives lived otherwise as giving way to the Devil. However, it may be that
a Stoic, if he wants to live a life of the mind that gives him freedom, must seek thoughts
like that ofSemyon's Heaven, thoughts that don't lead him to want things. In the world
we live in, the very sight of things may give rise to our wanting them. If Heaven is
really to be free from want it may have to be free from worldly senses or sensibles.
Our young Tartar wants things. He wants his mother and his wife to come out to
him in Siberia. In response to this, Semyon says, "It's the Devil confounding you, damn
his soul! Don't you listen to him, the cursed one." Semyon classes the Tartar's desire for
mother and wife into the one category of "women" and also introduces the idea of
freedom. The Tartar thinks of these things as desirable natural goods. Because of his
different loves for his mother and his wife respectively he wishes them to come to him
and fill up the empty nothingness of Siberia. In a way, he wants freedom even more.
The freedom he wants is a species of justice, for he was wrongly convicted for the crimes
of others. Those crimes were committed by members of his own family, and his
wrongful conviction was also perhaps orchestrated by a member of his own family.
Semyon tries to convince the Tartar that each thing that people want carries with
it an evil that cannot be escaped. If you try, selectively to fill up the Siberian emptiness
with only the good things from back in Russia you will necessarily also bring in the
Russian evils. Each of the things that we are capable of desiring is also a vehicle of evil,
an imoad for the Devil.
Semyon lists many things that he does not want. "I want nothing, neither father
nor mother, nor wife, nor freedom, nor post, nor paddock" (Chekhov, p.91). The list
seems to articulate just a few examples. The first clause is decisive, "I want nothing."
7
�That is, Semyon's broad implied claim is that everything that we want in this world and
that we think will bring good and happiness into our lives will also bring evil into our
lives and ruin our happiness. Semyon allows no exceptions to this broad claim, for "if
anyone gives way to the Devil and listens to him, if but once, he is lost, there is no
salvation for him" (Chekhov, p.91). Semyon presents his own strict policy of wanting
nothing as the best there is. "And I wish no one a better life. I want nothing and I am
afraid of nobody, and the way I look at it is that there is nobody richer and freer than I
am" (Chekhov, p.91). In this context, Semyon makes a claim that "here you see I live
well, and I don't complain" (Chekhov, p.91). What he means by "live" in this sentence is
different from he means later throughout the story where the question of whether one can
"live" in Siberia is at stake.
Living in Siberia
Semyon does not offer here a theoretical defense of his claim that all the
things of this world that we think of as naturally desirable goods also bring evils into our
world. Instead Semyon tells the tale of a fellow exile whom he has known and watched
for many years. That man, Vassily Sergeyich, is not a foolish peasant like the Tartar;
rather he is a gentleman. But he is still a man who wants things and who tries
disastrously to bring only the good things to Siberia. That man came to Siberia fifteen
years ago, and he began his time rather auspiciously according to Semyon. Vassily tried
to abandon his former life as a gentleman to embrace a new life as a settler. He bought a
house and land (apparently this did not upset Semyon), and he determined to live by his
8
�own work "in the sweat ofhis own brow." This looked promising. Vassily was leaving
Russia behind him and making a life based upon what Siberia offered. Only "from the
very first"·Vassily took to riding out and checking the post from back home. This is
where the trouble started. Perhaps it should also mean that Heaven should receive no
mail from the earth. That is to say, even the interest of Heavenly beings in the lives of
the living may be a problem for Heaven.
The problem with checking up on the news back home may seem a small thing. It
may look innocuous to bring information into Siberia, but Vassily' s checking of the post
either reveals itself to be or transforms itself into a concern with money. When being·
ferried back from his journeys to the town that gets the post (the post is not in Heaven
proper), Vassily begins complaining that the people back home are not sending him
money. Semyon tries to dissuade Vassily and to nip the problem in the bud. "You don't
want money... What use is it to you? You cast away the past, and forget it as though it
had never been at all, as though it had been a dream, and begin to live anew... Now you
want money ... but in a very little while you'll be wanting something else, and then more
and more" (Chekhov, p.92). Seeming to prove Semyon correct, two years later Vassily
has his wife and small daughter brought out to him in Siberia. When they arrive, V assily
seems extremely happy. His wife is beautiful and Vassily cannot take his eyes off of her.
He proclaims to Semyon, "Yes, brother Semyon, even in Siberia people can live!"
(Chekhov, p.92). This claim, that one can live even in Siberia remains a bone of
contention between V assily and Semyon. Life, if one thinks of it as being happy while
wanting and pursuing the natural goods of this world, is what Semyon silently claims
cannot be done in Siberia.
9
�With the introduCtion ofhis wife into his Siberian life, Vassily undergoes a rapid
downward spiral. His wife starts losing her looks. Age and hardship will do that. Of
course we are all mud. He constantly feels the need for more and more money to
compensate his wife for her hardships with comforts and then with luxuries. He is
sending back to Russia more and more frequently for more and more money. Vassily
also takes to throwing lavish parties full of persons of status but also of dubious
character, such as politicians, in order to make life in Siberia "livelier" for his wife. Of
course, the predictable happens and Vassily's wife runs offwith another man across the
ferry back to Russia. Women will do such things. It is bound up in their natures.
Vassily wanted his wife with him in Siberia because he loves her. He loves her as a good
thing. She is beautiful and she is also the mother of his child. But beauty attracts
attention and interest and will draw other men. In fact just by being a woman, that is a
being of a particular gender, she will be an object of sexual interest. And by being a
mother, that is, a procreative being, she will have an interest in sex. And so the evil that
befell his life, looks to be the consequence of the good he tried to bring into his life.
Vassily chases after his wife and her lover back in Russia for days, with no
success. When he returns to be ferried back to Siberia, he flings himself upon the floor of
the ferry and beats his head upon its boards. Semyon laughs at Vassily's misery and.
reminds him of the phrase "people can live even in Siberia" (Chekhov, p.93).
The evil that Vassily brought into the Siberian paradise continues to go on in this
story for another eight years. In fact more evils keep streaming in. Vassily begins to
pursue securing his own freedom so that he can continue his pursuit of his wife. He
10
�wastes great sums of money pursuing his release from exile. He also grows old and ruins
his health. His happiness leaves his eyes as he walks about in tears.
Then a hopeful element enters the story. Vassily's daughter matures and this
restores cheer to his life. She becomes the "apple of his eye." Vassily is so taken up with
his daughter that he goes all over singing her praises. And because of her presence in his
life, Vassily returns to saying people can live even in Siberia, adding the sentence "Even
in Siberia there is happiness" (Chekhov, p.93). When this is happening, Semyon admits
that Vassily's daughter has good qualities: she is good-looking and lively. But he thinks
to himself, she is "young, her blood is dancing, she wants to live, and there is no life
here" (Chekhov, p.93). Semyon seems to be saying that young women have a nature we
can know about that leads on to evils that will follow them wherever they are. In a later
passage, after the official telling of the story ofVassily is over, Semyon says something
about the daughter that looks like a comment about all women. "They want petting and
ha-ha-ha! And ho-ho-ho! And scent and pomade" (Chekhov, p.94). There is a lot in this
ha-ha-ha and ho-ho-ho. The Tartar's own wife is young and beautiful. Vassily's wife
was beautiful, and she went the way of the other man. But as Semyon's story goes on, it
turns out Vassily' s daughter gets sick instead, she gets consumption. It seems she did not
succumb to the particular evil that Semyon thinks attends feminine nature; rather she
succumbed to the universal evil that attends all living things. Her very disease is named
consumption, as all transient beings are consumed by the passage of time. Sooner or later
being corruptible means one will become corrupted. This is the way of all flesh. It is the
wayofmud.
11
�Now Semyon tries to imply that her feminine nature is responsible even for the
young lady's decline in health. After saying that the young girl wanted to live where life
cannot be, Semyon simply adds, "And she did begin to pine, my lad" followed by a long
ellipsis. This pining is then by implication supposed to be the cause of the consumption.
And the pining occurs because the feminine nature is suppressed in circumstances where
is cannot pursue its natural course. Thus the thwarted feminine nature brings on the
disease. When female nature cannot bring on the evil that belongs properly to it, that
nature thwarted and frustrated brings on the evil that belongs universally to all living
beings; they do not last.
Vassily's daughter's illness, like his wife's infidelity, causes him to rush about the
world with a sense of urgency. This time he goes from doctor to doctor seeking some
cure for his daughter. When he hears of any new doctor Vassily rushes off to seek his
help. He even does the same when he hears of any sorcerer that might help. This sense
of urgency seems to belong to the nature of caring about beings that do not last forever.
If the object of our interest were eternal perhaps the interest would not involve us in any
sense of urgency. In a later episode when some men from the other side of the river call
for the ferry, Semyon responds very slowly. Ferrying is his life's work, it is his place in
the divine order, and yet he moves like "a man convinced that there was no necessity in
this world to hurry" (Chekhov, p.96).
Semyon concludes the telling of the story of Vassily by asserting that all the
rushing about will not save the girl. She will die. Even if the consumption were to be
cured, eventually she would die. And Semyon says that her death will be the ruination of
her father's life.
12
�One Hour of Happiness
After hearing this whole story, our young Tartar responds by saying "Good,
good." He does not seem to take from the story the lesson that Preacher intended. The
Tartar elaborates that having the things we want, such as Vassily's wife and daughter,
even if only for a limited time is good. "You say, want nothing. But 'nothing' is bad!
His wife lived with him three years- that was a gift from God. 'Nothing' is bad, but
three years is good" (Chekhov, p.94). The Tartar goes on to say "that if his wife came to
him for one day, even for one hour, that for such happiness he would be ready to bear any
suffering and to thank God. Better one day of happiness than nothing" (Chekhov, p.94).
With his response the Tartar raises a challenge to the notion that transience is an evil.
And this is important because transience may be the only natural consequence that
attends each and every one of the things of this world. He seems to be defending the
notion that the good things are good even if they do not last.
Semyon does not stay to dispute the matter. Instead, because of an instance of
transience, his vodka has run out, Semyon goes into the hut to go to sleep. Left alone
with his thoughts, the Tartar begins to imagine his wife coming to Siberia. Here we see
that Semyon' s story has had some of its intended effects. One of the first thoughts the
Tartar has seems to be about the way of mud. He thinks despairingly about how his life
will be able to live in Siberia where there is no food. Then his thoughts turn to the way
of women. He thinks how his beautiful, young wife, whom he also thinks of now as
spoiled and shy, will ever be capable of wandering about Siberia begging for alms. This
13
�thought is too terrible. Finally the Tartar drifts off into a sleep in which he dreams that
this Siberian Heaven is only a bad dream and he is really back home in Simbirsk.
The Tartar's sleep and his dream is broken up by another assertion of this-worldly
transience. Men on the other side of the bank are shouting urgently for the ferry. The
men repeatedly shout for the ferry to make haste, but the ferry takes its time. When the
ferry reaches the other side it is revealed that the reason for haste is Vassily Sergeyich.
His daughter's health has taken a turn for the worse and there is a new doctor that he
needs to rush and try. Semyon can be seen to be smiling now. He taunts Vassily even at
such an ugly moment. He throws Vassily's own words back at him. He stretches out the
word "live" and breaks it into two syllables. "Even in Siberia people can live- can liive" (Chekhov, p.96). This is a moment of triumph for Semyon, and he pours it on. Is
this a kind of cruelty on his part or is it merely a necessary harshness that belongs to the
strict either/or demanded by the way of Heaven? Semyon tells Vassily out loud, to his
face, "It is muddy driving now... You should have put off going for another fortnight. ..
and it's always been no use" (Chekhov, pp.96-97). This harsh treatment drives Vassily
off, or perhaps it is just the urgent need to get on with seeking out the new doctor.
After Vassily leaves, the Tartar in his halting broken Russian condemns Semyon
and praises Vassily. "He is good ... good; but you are bad! You are bad! The
gentleman is a good soul, excellent, and you are a beast, bad! The gentleman is alive, but
you are a dead carcass .... God created man to be alive, and to have joy and grief and
sorrow; but you want nothing, so you are not alive, you are stone, clay! A stone wants
nothing and you want nothing. You are a stone, and God does not love you, but He loves
the gentleman!" (Chekhov, p.97).
14
�This prolonged outburst would seem to be a challenge that must be answered, but
no one takes it that way. All the others just laugh at the Tartar and go back to the hut to
go back to sleep. All they mention and seem concerned about is that it is cold. The wind
'
has blown the door of the hut open and no one gets up to close it because "it was. too
much trouble." If cold is a kind of absence, it is a kind of nothing. Does it then belong to
a Siberian Heaven to be cold. In response to the others' complaints about the cold,
Semyon announces that "I am all right." Perhaps this is also a response to the Tartar's
accusation. When the Tartar who remains outside starts crying like a howling dog, all
Semyon says is "He'll get u-used to it!" The word "used" is broken and drawn out here
too, as the word "live" was earlier. In this case it may be a yawn that draws the word out
and breaks it. Then Semyon goes to sleep followed by the others. The last words of the
story are "The door remained unclosed."
A Divorce
For the moment let us set aside the judgment that seems to be called for by the
ending ofChekhov's story and take a look at another fictional depiction of Heaven. Here
I am on firmer ground, for C.S. Lewis's The Great Divorce is explicitly a depiction of
Heaven. This is a work of fiction, a dream. It is not meant to give the facts about
Heaven, nor is it intended "to arouse factual curiosity about the details of the after-world"
(Lewis, p.x). Still the work has a very serious purpose and that is to fight against the
perpetual attempts of one sort or another to mingle the things of Heaven and Hell, to
marry them. Lewis writes that such attempts are "based on the belief that reality never
15
�presents us with an absolutely unavoidable 'either-or'; that, granted skill and patience and
(above all) time enough, some way of embracing both alternatives can always be found;
that mere development or adjustment or refinement will somehow tum evil into good
without our being called on for a final and total rejection of anything we should like to
retain" (Lewis, p.vii). This depiction by Lewis highlights one of the strengths of
Semyon's idea of Heaven; it is an absolute either-or. It demands that you say yes or no to
Heaven, not yes, but. . . Like Semyon, Lewis seems to think one cannot expect Heaven
just to be a place where all the good things of this world are present and cleansed of the
evils that seem always to attend them in this world.
Lewis depicts the attempt to embrace the side of evil as well as that of good as
similar to trying to make the inclusion of mathematical errors useful to the true
calculation of sums. He says "A sum can be put right: but only by going back till you
find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on. Evil can
be undone, but it cannot 'develop' into good" (Lewis, p.viii). As Lewis depicts it in The
Great Divorce, Hell is untruth an unreality and it cannot remain what it is and dwell
lastingly in the truth and reality that is Heaven. Thus if we want the things of Hell (or the
things of Earth) as they are, we are not ready to live in Heaven. The Great Divorce is a
total divorce. The epigraph for Lewis's book is a quotation from a sermon entitle "The
Last Farthing" by George Macdonald, the Scottish minister and fantasist. It reads as
follows: "No there is no escape. There is no heaven with a little of hell in it- no plan to
retain this or that of the devil in our hearts or our pockets. Our Satan must go, every hair
and feather."
16
�A Bus Tour of Heaven
Most of what I have quoted above from The Great Divorce is from the author's
preface where he speaks in his own voice. In the text itself of The Great Divorce C. S.
Lewis appears a character. He is the first person narrator of the story, but he is also
depicted as a deceased spirit, a ghost. Lewis and a group .of other ghosts are down in
Hell, although they do not all recognize Hell as Hell. They catch a bus ride up to Heaven
and each is met by a Bright Spirit particularly suited to help them to let go of Hell and
come stay in Heaven.
This Heaven seems to be a very inhospitable and dangerous place for the visiting
ghosts. The greater reality of this Heaven is,portrayed by all the objects and beings
having much greater hardness and density than their co~terparts on Earth or in Hell.
Thus, for instance, Heavenly blades of grass do not bend and give way to the
insubstantial and light footsteps of the visiting ghosts. Thus walking in this Heaven is
agony and the ghosts must fear lest a rainstorm tear them to shreds with devastatingly
heavy and hard raindrops. One of the visiting ghosts is told "it will hurt at first, until
your feet are hardened" (Lewis, p. 39). Lewis himself"did not entirely like it" (Lewis,
p.24). A ghost called the Hard-Bitten Ghost points out just how unaccommodating this
Heaven is to beings used to living as they did on Earth. "You can't eat the fruit and you
can't drink the water and it takes you all your time to walk on the grass. A human being
couldn't live here" (Lewis, p.52). As if in answer to Semyon's claim that you'll get used
to it, the Hard-Bitten Ghost offers the following example: "What would you say if you
. went to a hotel where the eggs were all bad and when you complained to the Boss,
17
�instead of apologizing and changing his dairy man, he just told you that if you tried you'd
get to like bad eggs in time?'' (Lewis, p.55). This encounter made Lewis's ghost
"question the essential goodness of their country" (Lewis, p.57). How could Lewis not
question the goodness of such a Heaven? The things that we want and the things that we
think we want which seem to define our understanding of what is good. And yet those
things are not present in Semyon' s empty Siberian Heaven and they are not accessible to
us in Lewis's hardened Heaven.
Many of the visiting ghosts that came up on the bus reject this Heaven and choose
to go back down to Hell. A ghost called the Big Ghost is outraged by the Bright Spirit
sent to meet, for it is the spirit of a man who murdered one of the Big Ghost's
acquaintances. The Big Ghost claims he wants justice. "I only want my rights. I'm not
asking for anybody's bleeding charity" (Lewis, p.28). But the Big Ghost is advised by
his Bright Spirit, who, although a murderer, is one of the saved, to ask precisely for
bleeding charity. Justice, at least initially, looks like a principle that can be understood.
The contrasting principle here, charity or mercy does not look to be intelligible. If we
understand by justice giving to each that which is fitting (which is the one definition of
justice in the Republic that is not refuted by Socrates) then justice would seem to be an
adequate principle. George Macdonald endorses this principle in his sermon "The Last
Farthing"- "Righteousness is just fairness- from God to man, from man to God and to
man; it is giving everyone his due." There may remain great practical difficulties in
determining what the fitting is in each case, but the principle of justice is not in need of
some other principle to supplement or correct it. Mercy is not here a principle that
corrects justice, mercy is an alternative principle. The Big Ghost is told he does not
18
�deserve Heaven based on the principle of justice, because "You weren't a decent man and
you didn't do your best. We none of us were and none of us did" (Lewis, p.29). Thus
justice, a principle that could be rationally intelligible based upon the principle of the
fitting is not a part of Heaven. And mercy which might very well resist being made
intelligible is a part of Heaven.
An Episcopal Ghost whose Bright Spirit turns out to be one of his friends from his
school days is gravely disappointed to find that there is no place for intellectual inquiry in
Heaven. His Bright Spirit tells him, "I will bring you to the land not of questions but of
answers, and you shall see the face of God" (Lewis, p.40). The Episcopal Ghost wants to
hold on to the free play of inquiry, and he fears that the achieved truth of Heaven "puts an
end to intellectual activity" (Lewis, p. 41 ). The Bright Spirit tries to address this by
saying, "Once you were a child. Once you knew what inquiry was for. There was a time
when you asked questions because you wanted answers" (Lewis, p.41). But the
Episcopal Ghost cannot see in such final answers as offered by Heaven anything that he
wants. Instead he chooses to return to Hell where he has a little Theological reading
group going and where "there is plenty of intellectual life" (Lewis, p.43).
Beyond justice and inquiry this Heaven seems to be lacking many other things,
activities, and relationships that belong to what human beings tend to regard as making
up the good things in earthly life. There is no place in this Heaven for poetry and music
and painting. As one of the Bright Spirits explains, "Ink and catgut and paint were
necessary down there," to create images pointing to a higher, truer reality, in the Heaven
that is that reality the creative arts are just "dangerous stimulants" (Lewis, p.85). Even
parental love as it might like to assert itself as being the surest and truest good is not
19
�allowed in Heaven. A female ghost comes up to Heaven to see her son who is one of the
saved. But she is not allowed to see him. She is met by the Bright Spirit of her brother
who explains to her that even the "highest and holiest feeling in human nature" does not
have the right of authority in Heaven. In the course of the conversation it is even implied
that God took the life of her son in part to try to make her relinquish her claims about the
height and priority of mother-love.
In the course the interview with this mother ghost, her Bright Spirit explains
something that pertains generally to all feelings, all the wants that belong to human
nature, that is earthly human nature. He says, "no natural feelings are high or low, holy
or unholy in themselves. They are all holy when God's hand is on the rein. They all go
bad when they set up on their own" (Lewis, p.lOO). Nature, earthly, human nature then
has no standing on its own in Heaven. This mother's problem consisted in putting forth
her own love for her child as the highest thing and leaving God out of the consideration.
Her brother explains that getting used to this Heaven involves a kind of thickening
process that will make one more real by giving God priority and centrality in all one's
relations to things. The brother says "the whole thickening treatment consists in learning
to want God for His own sake" (Lewis, p.99).
Seeing what is wrong in this mother ghost who puts her own love before love of
god is key to seeing the faults that keep all the damned from going to Heaven. George
Macdonald, who appears in The Great Divorce as Lewis's Bright Spirit and Teacher,
explains the one reason why the damned are damned. "Milton was right. ... The choice
of every lost soul can be expressed in the words 'Better to reign in Hell than serve in
Heaven.' There is always something they insist on keeping even at the price of misery"
20
�(Lewis, p. 71 ). Holding on to something that can be thought of as belonging wholly to
themselves, which means holding onto something belonging merely to human nature or
to the naturally earthy realm, is what keeps human beings out of Heaven. Working
towards letting go of the kind of things you can claim are all yours is what it means to get
used to the kind of Heaven that Lewis depicts in The Great Divorce. In this depiction of
the thickening process that makes a spirit suitable for Heaven there is a final stage after a
long, difficult walk to the heavenly mountains. In those mountains there is a fountain and
drinking from that fountain cleanses away the last of one's earthly sickriess. "When you
have drunk of it you forget forever all proprietorship in your own works" (Lewis, p.85).
The Value and Intelligibility of the Idea of Heaven
Both of the ideas of Heaven that we encounter in these works of fiction suggest
that Heaven requires us to give something up; it is no small thing. What we might say we
are asked to give up is our human nature. For Semyon's Siberian Heaven we must
abandon all the wants that we have in this world. For Lewis's Heaven we must abandon
our sense that things are our own. For Macdonald a man must give every last farthing
until his personal resources are nothing. After this thorough giving up of our nature we
then begin anew, we can start afresh, we can be transformed into beings of a different
sort, suited to life in Heaven. That new life will belong not to natural beings but to
supernatural beings.
Perhaps that is the greatest strength of these images of Heaven, they drive us to
think about the supernatural. One of Lewis's Bright Spirits tells the Episcopal Ghost that
21
�this is the question, "The one question on which all turned: whether after all the
Supernatural might not in fact occur?" (Lewis, p.37).
What is the value and the intelligibility of the idea of the supernatural? The
supernatural cannot just be another phusis above or alongside the one with which we are
already familiar. That would tum out just to be the idea of our world extended to other
senses and capacities. Heaven could thought of as such a place outside of the range of
our powers of access, operating according to a nature or set of natures different from
those we know. Such a Heaven would be an unknown for us. We could not want it. But
conceptually it would just be another realm of nature waiting to be discovered and
revealed.
Perhaps a more adequate idea of the supernatural is to think of it as the breaking
or abolishing of nature and natures. (One might recall here the breaking of words in
Chekhov's story). A supernatural Heaven thought of as a place without natures could
seem on the surface to be familiar to us. We may be capable of being aware of things,
but withoutnatures could we have senses that add adjectives to things such as a sense of
vision that sees a bare or hollow bank? The things of such a supernatural situation might
have individual names, but could they belong to intelligible classes? But do we need
intelligible classes in order to act and to live? We might need such things if we tried to
live by the guidance of our human capacities alone. But what if we were given guidance,
orders, from something beyond the human? At the beginning of George Macdonald's
sermon, "The Last Farthing," Macdonald says, "There is a thing wonderful and admirable
in the parables, not readily grasped, but specially indicated by the Lord himself- their
unintelligibility to the mere intellect. They are addressed to the conscience and not to the
22
�intellect, to the will and not to the imagination. They are strong and direct but not
definite. They are not meant to explain anything, but to rouse a man to the feeling, 'I am
not what I ought to be, I do not the thing I ought to do!'" Perhaps the idea of heaven is
like this too. As such it is not exactly friendly to the intellect. It denies authority to the
intellect to judge and it resists the attempt even to be apprehended by the intellect.
In reading these fictional accounts I have been driven to seek an idea of Heaven
that is genuinely an idea of the supernatural. The difficulty of achieving such an idea
might be illustrated by the difficulty of assessing the ending of Chekhov's "In Exile."
The door to the hut is blown open by the wind. Is this wind a humdrum aspect of the
natural world, not deserving any special interest? Or is this wind a symbol or a message
from the unseen and unseeable supernatural forces that prevail in the world? Is the
failure to get up and close the door a proper, albeit unexpectedly proper, heavenly
repose? Is it an acceptance, to our surprise, of the empty cold that belongs to Heaven?
Or is it a sad pointer to the defeated and depleted lassitude that is the human truth behind
Semyon's want nothing attitude? Is there a clue in the Chekhov's negative phrasing of
the last word? He does not write that the door remained open, he writes that it remained
"unclosed."
23
�
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Grenke, Michael W.
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What will heaven be like?
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2013-01-18
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Typescript of a lecture delivered on January 18, 2013 by Michael Grenke as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
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Heaven in literature
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Bib # 80676
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<a title="Audio recording" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/28">Audio recording</a>
Friday night lecture
Tutors
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https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/c122c40a15791636b8fafab4cd0f42fd.mp3
73bc0af60004b5469695cf03bad0ae47
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Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
formallectureseriesannapolis
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
CD
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
00:59:31
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Hanning, Barbara Russano, 1940-
Title
A name given to the resource
How Opera Began: And Why It Began in Florence
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2011-03-25
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
mp3
Description
An account of the resource
Audio recording of a lecture delivered on March 25, 2011, by Barbara Hanning as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission: To make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. To make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. To make an audio recording of my lecture available on the St. John's College web site."
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
sound
Subject
The topic of the resource
Opera. Italy. Florence. History and criticism.
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LEC_Hanning_Barbara_2011-03-25
Relation
A related resource
<a href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/7695" title="Typescript">Typescript</a>
Friday night lecture
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