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On Thomae More. 8 u,tO,RiS.*
Ev&
Brann
Among ·the new and most pecuHarly modem disciplines tl)ere is one, to be
pb.ced, I auppoae. among the aocial studies, sometimes called
11
fu turology,"
whioh deals with the art of conjecturing concerning the future.
Those who pu.r-
sue this art often say that there is a great "need for modem utopian pictures." .
· Let me Q
.uote a. passage from a founder of this art, Bertrand de Jou.venelr ·
It im tim@ that exports represented the many different out ocmee which can be obtained by many different uses of cu:r many and increasing poeeibilitiee.
Thia repreaentaticn ehould he in pictures aacording
to the utopian tradition.
Sinae thf.I 11u topian tra.. i ti on" begins with the book Thomas More called
d
11
Utopie. 11 e.nd einee it is in human matters commonly the case that the first of
a kind iR alao the truest to that ldnd, it seems right to go to More's book
·to connlder what a utopia properly so called might be, end whether such a work
can do wha t the atudent of the future needs it for--to supply the ends to be
nchicved by our profusion of means.
*
Lecture
~i.ven
at St John's College, .Annapolis, on May 5, 1972
�-2-:-
1.
Utopias as Political Poetry
Two poems purporting to be by the poet laureate.of Utopia wer,e prefixed
to the book by More's Dutch friend Peter Giles, whose house is the setting
for the narrative.
One of them says:
The ancients called me Utopia (or nowhere) because of
my isolation; now however I a.m a rival of Plato's Republic, perhaps even a vie tor over it, for what it delineates
in words, I alone have exhibited in men and works and the
best laws. I dese.ry-e
be called by the name of Eutopia,
(or th·3 good place).
to
I cannot resist first quoting from the . original of the other, which is given
in the Utopian language and alphabet:
n :Bar~l ·h~ magl~mi
baocan soma gymnos~phaon •
.t\grama· gymnosbphon labare.'ll bMha
bodam11omTn. n
I alone of all lands without the aid of philosophy
Have expressed for mortals the philosophical city.
Both poems express the srune point.
a.ted in words" by its actuality.
in Pl1J.tar.ch's
Utopia surpasses other cities "delineNow the original of this claim is to be found
Lives where it is made of Lycurgus, the founder of the Spartan
polity:
All who have written well on politics, such as
Plato ••• have taken Lycurgus for their model, leaving behind them, however, mere projects and words:
whereas Lycurgus was the author, not in writing but
in reality, of a government •• o He by the example of
a complete philosophic city raised himself high above
the other lawgivers of Greece.
It is almost belaboring the obvious to point out that Utopia is riot. actual
in quite the same way Sparta was, and yet this observation can serve to introduce the question concerning the way in which a utopia has being.
Now the answer to the question is not hard to formulate.
Utopias are
communities constructed in the imagination and expressed in words, word ·pietures, a< :kind of poetry.
Accordingly Sir Phil .r\.. p Sidney includes the Utopia
�-3-
as a poetic work in his De.fense of Poe ·s.y and s e.ys of the utopian poet:
••• he yieldeth to the powers of the mind an image of
that whereof the philosopher bestoweth but a wordish
description·, which do th neither strike, pierce, nor
possess the sight of the soul so much as that other ·
doth.
Utopias, then, mEJ¥ be called politi cal poetry and belong to the faculty
of the i magination.
2.
Utopia as Day-dream
The first kind of imagining which utopias suggest is day-dreaming, in
the case of the first Utopia, a sort of exoter ic dreaming carried on by a company united in a common desire.
Certainly there was a great d.eal of channed
and longing make-believe among More and his many friends, of which Peter Giles'
invention of a mellifluous Utopian language is an example--they were evidently
so
persu~sive
that one benighted cleric conceived a
by the Pope to Utopia as bishop.
bu~ing
.d esire to be sent
In this spirit also More wrote Erasmus a
letter telling of a day-dream in which he had seen himself as the chosen king
of Utopia "marching a long crowned with a diadem of wheat, very striking in my
Franciscan garb.••
But this view of Utopia as a day dream is ,inadequate.
In fact, More's
Utopia and most, subsequent utopian constructions are sober and disciplined
places which induce strong misgivings in most readers, especially. more recent
readers.
These misgivings have to do not with that irresponsibly diversionary
nature of utopian writing, which was castigated by Marx and .Ehgels in the Communist Manifesto as an "unscientific~· and ultimately reactionary, buildL'rlg of
"castles in the air."
On the contrary, the dissatisfaction comes precisely
from the apprehension of utopias as practical proposals.
cause they are felt
~o
Utopias offend be-
be "static," : monotonous, regimented, drably uniform,
�.-4!""
restrictive.
Mumford, for instance, thinks of Utopia as a human machine which
he regards as the original social evil, as "dystopia" ·or the
11
evil place",
while another writer entitles an article on More's Utopia "A Detestable State."
3. More against his own Utopia
The most curious fact, however, is More's own relation to his book.
. sh~ll
I
give an abbreviated list of items in respect to which More expressed .
disapprobation of Utopian institutions.
It includes almost every feature that
is fundamental.
He
cont~ents
in his own behalf at the ve-ry end of the book, where he says:
•• aMany things came to my mind which in the manners
and laws of that people seemed tt:i\1.'insti tuted and
formed of no good reason, not only in the fashion
o.f their chivalry and their sacrifices and religions
and in others of their laws, but also, yea, and
chiefly, in that· which is the principal foundation
of all their ordinances, that is to sayt in the community of their life and living without occupying
BilY money •••
More in fact regarded communimn as heretical.
Yet even more fundamental than the communism of the Utopians is their
-love of pleasure:
•• ••• they think that all our actions, and in them the yir-
tues themselves, be referred at last to pleasure as their end and felicity."
But More, who secretly wore a hair shirt next
to
his body, considered that
"a perfect man should abstain not only from unlawful pleasure but from lawful. 0
Again, the Utopians pennit free choice of religion, and thus have no idea
of doctrinal heresy.
in the
Dialo~e .Q!!_
More on the other hand, in several places, for instance
Heresies,argues that heretical books should not be suffered
to go abroad, and .that the burning of heretics is sometimes lawful, necessary,
and well done.
�_,_
TheUtopians _permit a rationally planried suicide, _More regards :lt as a
devilish temptation under all circumstances;
the Utopians permit a divorce
under the condition of insuperable incompatibility, More opposes it; the Utepians use no images in their worship, Mare defends their necessity.
How did ' More manage to invent an ideal commonwealth whose institutions
were contrary to his own views?
~at
might seem to be the answer to the ques-
tion, that the Utopians are not Christians, while More himself was a moat de'
.vout Christian, is not sufficient for it does not' explain .·why More should have
imagined "the best state of the .commonwealth" as pagan.
'Ihus it appears that the first Utopia is not a mere dre·am, but a wily
and
comple~
product of the
~magination,
and that, in order to understand it,
it may be necessary to reflect on it specifically as an imaginative product
as such.
4. Utopia as a Product of the Imagination
First of all, utopian communities, because ' they are visually . conceived,
are vivid pictures, and hence exhibit brightly delineated styles of life, usually leaning
to one or the other extreme of possible publicfonn. Some utopi-
as, especially : those celebrating technique, like the old Atlantis of Plato's
Cri ti.as, display a somewhat sinister splendour, or like :Ba.con's ~ Atlantis,
a mysterious but punctilious ritual inagnificPnce; otheri;;, l _lce Houyhnhnm Land
i
in Gulliver's Travels are depicted as rejoicing in subdued and sober rustic
decorousness.
Utopia itsel..f, with its monastic habits and absence of oma-
ment, flirnished the first example of the latter style, -and. indeed Swift, who
numbered More in the tmmatchable sextw.· \.Virate of statesmen which includes
1
Socrates' name9 made his horses, which have not even a name for the vice of
pride• first cousins of the Utopians whose essence ist as we shall see, precisely the absence of pride.
�-6- .
Circwnstantially
pai~ted
though they may be, utopias, as beings of the
fleshless~
imagination, are "arrested appearances," and as such motionless and
Hence a static and two-dimensional character does invariably pervade utopias; it
is this in them which offends those modern critics, who regE.lXd social mo-
bility and opportunity for experience as necessary conditions for a good soci-
ety.
Utopias are
"quasi-c:rt ~stalline
structures" because it is in the nature
of' the imagination to arrest motion.
Secondly, utopias show modes
or
place and time which are appropriate to
their origin in the imagination.
Augustine writes of his imaginative memory as containing images which
can be recalled and reconstructed at pleasure:
All this do I within, in that huge court of my memory.
For there have I in readiness the heaven, ·~arth, sea •••
Yet I did not swallow them into me by seeing when as
with my eyes I beheld .them. Nor are the things themselves now with me, but the images of them only.
The tmagination then is a power of unreal places which can be visi.ted at will.
Most utopias appear to have their origin in such ' voyages within the imagination;
they are places of the imagination expressed as imaginary places.
'therefore
almost all in fact have the form of narrations of voyages of discovery; the
Odyssey is their prototype.
mode 1of their fictitiousness.
But utopirm voyages differ from odysseys ·
in
the
For utopias are not pure inventions but images
whose existence is--on one level-ardently desired.
Hence their descriptions
do not have the ingenious verisimilitude appropriate to tales of adventure.
Insofar as utopian accounts are not disinterested in existence, being institutions of desire in the places of the imagination, they intrude the fact of'
the unreality of their place purposefully and persistently--the very word
"utopia" means "M'1_>lace. "
But what most intimately characterizes utopias is that they tamper with
time.
�-7Thnisbecause . the sole source of the imagination is the past;
it is
stocked with "perpetual sense impressions" left by what is no. longer present,
and so is a power of bringing the past into the present, a commemorative power.
Hence the products of the imagination are often ca.st in the past tense,
"once upon a
~ime,"
a _paradigm product of the purifying and simplifying ima-
gination being the Golden Age.
But since utopias invariably stand as ac.
.
cusa.tions against a particular present, they are often resurrections of a
particular past, . representing_ the pristine community "behind" the degenerate
one.
So Utopia with its
fifty.~four
cities corresponding in number to the
:Ehglish shires, its capital called the "Dark.ling City," built like a foggy
but salubrious
sheep-and
Londo~,
fost~red in
and ;i. ts unenclosed count.ry- :i.de unspoiled by rampaging
s
harmonious . balance with the cities, presents the old
and merry England behind that of the fallen present.
It seems appropriate to note he.re that since utopias by their nature
arise from dissatisfaction with the present, those which do not draw on the
past are utopias o_ terror, in which the evils incipient in the present a.re
f
projected in magrrification onto the future and there depicted with . fascinated
and even avid horror.
Such anti-utopias are warnings based
on
a modern no-
tion of history as progress, but in this case as pe..rjorative progress.
best known examples of futurist utopias are Huxley's
Brave~
The
World and
Orwell's Nineteen Eigl1ty-Four, and it is significant that both, but particularly the latter, understand the realization of their nightmare to depend
primarily on the obliteration of the past.
5. The Special Place and Time of Utopia
As the expression of a thought-infonned product of the imagination, that
ist as political poetry, More's Utopia thus empl.oys special modes of time and
place.
�-8-
Utopia is Greek and means "no-place•.
Utopia is a place of the imagina-
tion wordly in all respects· but that i t lacks bodily e·x istence, the quality of
being there, that is, of real location.
More signifies this by having Hythlo-
day, the narrator, fail to specify exact geographic
coordinat~s.
In addition
some of the names, especially the place names of this region, are privative,
:..:;..
like the land "Achoria'.1 ''Un-country," and the river "Anydrus"--"Waterless".
More and his friends engaged in much pleasantry concerning this lack of geographic placement, giving each other ·circumstantial explanations of how it
crune · to be omitted in the account and earnest commissj.ons to inquire further
of Hythloday, s.o underscoring the claim that More's Uto12ia, al though feigned
in the imagination, is a place on earth in contrast to Plato's Politz, a
product of the .;intellect, which is a "pa.t tern laid up in heaven."
Now, curiously .vague as · is Utopia's locat.i on in place, its settingin
time.is vecy precise.
Three exact dates are supplied:
the date of its foun-
ding; according to the annals of Utopia 1760 years before Hythloday's account,
that is in 244 B.C.; the arrival of some Romans
and
Egyptians 1200 years ago,
that is, in the beginning of the fourth century A.D.; and the arrival of Hythloday' s company; who were left behind during Amerigo Vespucci 1s last voyage
which took place in 1504.
Each of these dates is significant.
Utopia's present goverrunent was
founded just when King Agis of Sparta attempted Unsuccessfully to revive the
constitution of Sparta's original lawgiver, Lycurgus.
'!his constitution in-
stituted a common way of life like that of the Utopians, except that land,
though equally shared out, was held as private property,.
Agis had begun by re-
cindin.g. a law opening the way for inequality of holdings, a law which, Plutarch
.says, had been "the ruin of the best state of the commonweal th."
Utopia is
thus Sparta's successful .counterpart.
The Romans and Egyptians--note, no Greeks--arrived just before Constan-
�-9-
Christi.~i ty
tine .made
the Roman state z·eligion, so that, while bringing the
arts and useful inventions of antiquity and perhaps the occult wisdom of the
Egyptians, they came without either the texts of the waning Greek philosophy
or the news of ·t he rising Christian faith.
And finally Hythloday arrives with
a bo,x: of humanistic learning.•
The effect of these three dates is to
m~k
the Utopians
as
being outside
of the tragedies and passions, the rises and declines, of our human history.
They live in natural but not in human times, they are not atemporal bµt they
~'
to· use
a. modern term, ahistorical, that ·i s to say, they are not bound by
the conditions which arise from prior human action and passion, in particular
from
1!!£
fall . of ~·
Hythloday "startingly observes o.f the Utopians that if
their ch:ronicles .are to be .believed .,cities were there before men were here."
.
.
.
Utopians are not descended from Adam, nor, it seems, are they creatures in the
sense of Genesis, namely such as are capa:tJle of rebellion against their creator.
60
More's Utopia as the "First Ci,ty" o.f
Plato~s
Republic .
A very good way· further to define Utopia as a city having its place and
time
:if1
the imagination, is to see it in the.light of its ostensible source
and defeated rival, the polity which is the product of the intellect, namely
that set out in Plato's Republic.
by
Hythloday;
Plato is the name :inost frequently mentioned
when in particular he speaks of "those things Plato feirgneth
in his weal-public or that the Utopians 2£ in theirs;" he is referring to
Utopia's communism.
In Plato• B dialogue Socrates . aises the question "What is justice?"
r
The way of answering this question assumes that justice is to be found in the
relation of the parts of the hwnan soul and that politic al cornmuni ties are .
magnified expressions of these relations,.
He therefore constructs a sequence
�-10-
of three cities each arising by the addition of a part o.f the soul and corresponding to the dominance of that part, proceeding in
o~der
from the most su-
pine and common to the most superior and rare constituent of the soul.
Now the city in which a common way of life obtains is only the third city,
which is under the dominion of the reasonable part of the soul, that is to
say, which is ruled by philosopher kings.
And even in this, the "philosophi-
cal city," only the rulers and their wanior auXi.l: iaries live communally:
"No one wa· to have any of the ordinary possessions of mankind.
s
They we::i;-e to
be warrior athletes and gua.:rzdians, receiving from the other citizens instead
of annual payment only their maintenance."
This is the first 'p rinciple of
unity of the philosopher's city; the se·c ond, and as Socrates acknowledges,
even more offensive one is "that the wives of our guardians are to be common,
and their children common and no person is to know his own child, nor any
child, his parent."
Since the social foundation of Utopia is the family, or rather the extended family or household, it cert ainly does not share the human aspect of
Socrates' communism.
But neither does it share the economic one.
The actual title of the book referred to as Utopia is On the~ State
.
.
of ~.Commonwealth. The Latin term translated by "commonwealth" is 0 res publ i ca. 11
Sir Thomas
Elyot~
one of .More's circle, in his
~Named
the Governor
s ,p eaks of the irnplications of this translation, referring to those who "do sup-
pose it, so to be called for that, that everything should be to all men in
common without discrepance of any estate or condition."
once alludes to this meaning of shared wealth.
Hythloday more than
And precisely here lies the
distinction between Utopia and the philosopher's city--the communism of the
latter .is an ascetic communism of poverty, while Utopian communism means shared
wealth or well-being.
If Utopia has anything to do with Plato's polity is not
with its third or philosophical city--as Peter Giles' poem had hinted.
�-11 ...
.Now the first Socratic city corresponds to the desires in the soul and
:.
has t:wo stages.
At first there arises a "city of craftsmen," a small, simple,
moderate and merry community based on division of labor for the purpose of
patisfying basic necessities.
ious, the
Then, as desires become mo.re complex and luxur-
city of craftsmen, which Socrates
c~lls
the "true .snd healthy city,"
undergoes a transformation and becomes, as he .says, feverish.·
To the simple
crafts are added the arts of the embroiderer; gold and ivory are used, and
peo,Ple devoted to "forms and c.olors" ·are .introducad into the city.
'file in-
fle.mmation of desire makes the city predatory and brings about the formation
of a warrior class whose presence will institute the second city.
Now Utopia clearly corresponds to this first city, the "true and heal, thy
city" of craftsmen.
There is a sign of this in the · following.
When Socrates'
interlocutor Glaucus first hears a description of their simple and healthy
commQn banquets•he exclaims that this is a "city of pigs,'' by which he does not
mean that they wall.ow but that they like simple and natural foods.
According-
ly the lowest official of Utopia who sits over thirty families and whose chief
function is the control of idlf!ness, .is one "which in their old language is
called the Syphogrant ••• "
'Ihe tennis
Gree~
(for the Utopians are said to
have affinity to the Greeks) and means "pig-sty elder."
The next higher of-
ficials who rule over ten stys. are called "tranibors" or "plain (or clear)
eaters," meaning, I suppose,. that they eat perspicuously prepared dishes.
Furthermore the craftsmen of Socrates' city are limited to fanners,
weavers, shoemakers, carpenters, smiths, and merchants.
The Utopians also
limit their crafts to farming, which all do, and these special crafts:
wool
B.:nd linen working, masonry and metal working, carpentry, and merchandising.
The Utopians too have common banquets with music.
But the Utopians never become luxurious.
With them that sophistice.tion
of the desires which is the occasion for · the genesis of the second, the war-
�-12-
ri.or, city never e;ripeQ.
1he ·part of the soul which dominates in this second
ci. ty is called by Socrates !'apiri tednose, 11 which ia a certe.i.n readiness to
:righteous wrath and a di•position to honor.
.A.a we h$ve eeen, the warring ele-
mont i i directly caru,eoted to euch complexity of desire (whence,
as Socrates
rmyc, a:r.iae all. evils in oi ties) and J>&rticularly to a taet·e for m48rtificence
and apltmclour.
Magnificence, however, ie totally absent in Utopia.
'Ibis ia a conse-
quenoe of "the co1M1unHy o.(' th.eir l:i.fe anrl living without any occupying of
money, · by whi.ch thing only"--to continue More's criticililm of Utopia quoted .
a.bove-.. 11 all
n~bili
ty, magnifi.cence, honour, and majesty, the true . ornaments,
au thfJ common opinion 10., of the ·commonweal th,. utterly
at.royed."
'lbe Utopio.na :prefer comfort to honour.
be
~robe
()verthrown and deBU1', they too make
war., though only in defense of their borders or thei:r frlende • rights, for
'
they rl!lgra.rd it i"ith loathing
as beastly, and they have no spacial claee of
1-larriot'a; their soldiers are tht't ci t:i.7.ene of the land , supplemented by mercen- .
'
ThE1ae ci ti~1en soldiers fight bravely,
no
ta1:1t1~
.for gallantry,
nir1g, H' poaaible,
alw~e
but they hnve
preferi.ng to win through calculation and. cun-
J.nwng the Utopians only one cle.as of people is rewarded.
by ·i11l.dlplay of honour--the virtuoue doad.
'(.
The Utopians as People wl thout Pride
'lllo next quoatton is what More meano to aigni.f.Y by a.aeoc:i.a.ting his UtoSli.o. w l th Pluto' a city o.f c:r.nftAmen.
Plato's firat city
ia a natural city which a.rises naturally and
who~e
ci t.izent·1 11re closft to r1a ture, taken 0J1 the given. and atr ble appearance within
.P...nd w:i thout mon.
In this aoni::1e Utop.ia too is a. natural. d ty.
n.re aa:ld to be partly of Per.•oian ancestry.
The · Utopians
'Now the descriptions· of the Per-
ai nnttt in Jforodotus' Hifltorz (which, inc:ldent1.1.lly, Hythloduy ·bringa to Utopia)
�•ho.,11 ihea a11 wor1hipper• ef nature who ·
..
Gr~•k•
use
no 111agtto, and whe, unlike the
L"ld Ch:ri•Ua.nt 1 '1.o not believ• that the godm have the euie nature a.e
mon 9 iha• ie,
i~•i
thoy
Olli
be im&19d or made inoa.rnate in hunum form.
All
thi• ·held11 o.f the Utopi~•• .cf whom many worship the 11oon or one of 'the :plan-
eta,
while all 8«1"118 on .th• wor.tlip of a sun god who is the artificer of the
u.nivar•• and bear.•
th~
Persian name Mithra•.
So also .all the ora!tB of Utopla are clooe to nature and• of oourne,
par.tiouJ.arly •o the t,U'liv41r•al oraft, farming.
Sp1utilac:i1 the Utopiana themeelvM 1.41·t as forces of nature, aa when 1Cing
lJtONl!ll; the fa~dex· of .1~tQpi•• out the ohannel which made Utopia into a.n is-
l.'mc1, p1· 111han the ohiak• they rdu. ad•:>pt them as m.othera, or when they trana-
plant wh.,le t'o. oau to hav• a closer erJurc4' of wood.
r
ttJeti r
w~•llM g1au,Hn ti,
And they appear natural;.-
for inetance 1 have their ne. tural color,
So oven their
art:U. ioe ie an lntel1ig1mt &nd familiar lldaptation of nature to their own uso.
'
Thua the Utophne ar• not oo
~h
pagans ae children of nature.
'!hi~
aan be . put another wa,.v,
To sey thd
, Utopia co:r:rsaponds to Plato'• first city only is to say
.t hat 'the lJto11iune are laek:tng in oertaJ.n pri.noiplea of the soul, p·a rtioularly
ln thd which g:i.v•o rie• to Md dominates .the aecond or warrior city and ooca ·. 1i .(me in i.t 1a.,p:U':f.oenQ'• honor, and luxury--spiri tedneao, that is, self-
auariiol..
!h!
~
Now the Chria t ian traru1lat.lon of the facuHy of spiritedness ia
9..! l?Q'\t.•
Pl'id.e, "th• craving fox• undue e:xhaltation," says Augustine in hie City
!?.[.
Cl-oq,
was tho or.i.gin of our evil will, that corruptinn o.f. our nature which
u&
u1JU18 n 11elt'-aAHrtive craving "forbidden" fruit because i. t is forbiddeno
.P1·id•1 h
thuo th• ar ig·in of perversion in the nature of man, and as More
ln hhl ~
1!.!1 lbinB! 1
"the very he111l and r.oot of ail sins."
s~a
Now ae Hythlo-
day J1()ints out, th4' Uto.p ians have rio euch perverse pleasure\!; tho.v never
pre- .;~
�-14-
fer the bitter to the sweet; they have no "taste infected by the sickness of
sin; 11 their desires a.re all satisfied by natura.l objects; they do not lmow the
inverte d pl ea.al.ire of self-love; they a.re never unnatural.· '.l'hie is the case
-
pr.ecisely because the Utopians were not created and tharefore do not know that
rebellion of the creature against ·i ts creator, called the fall of .mM, which
is the original case of perv-eree pleasure.
incapable of
aalvatio~
Hence they, unlike
ou.~
pagans, are
by conversion to Christianity, altnough they absorb
easily--for . they are facile in absorbing everything pr ofitable--those features
of Christianity congenial t ·o then:i.
ture · that Hythlodey leavee them
11
So it is by reason of their Ut<>pian na-
unchrist ~ned 11
a..."ld only ostensibly because
there is no priest among his company.
In · his youth More read a aeries of well-attended lectures on Augustine's
91ti of Q2!, so we may well suppose that he considered the relation of hie Utopia tq the two cities of Augustine's work, ~hich •have been formed by two ~oven,
..
'
'
the 4'arthly city by the love of self, even to the contempt of God, ·t he heav1iily by the . love of God. to the contempt of self."
city; their nature . is
nothing~
'lhe Utopians are of neither
absence of perversion; ·they have neither
contempt of f,iod, nor as we shall see, contempt of self; they inhabit an earthly paradise--Wld that is. the essential character of · the painted -city of the
~magination;
its missing dimension is original human evil, which, as a kind of
non-bei,ng» lies beyond the likeness-making :i.magi.na ti on.
8.
Utopia as a Communi. ty of Pleasure
But i f Utopia is pri va.tiv~ with respect to
p~ide,
it is positive with
respect to pleaaure • . Freedom from the vices of the will leaves the Utopians ·
to the enjoyment of their goods, and that enjoyment is the end and center of
their community.
What is · its nature?
their education and their "philosophy,"
To answer that question one must examine
�-15All major utopias follow Plato's Republic in
tional provinces,"
bein~
essentially "educa-
transforming So,cratea• deliberately :.mage-lPas program of
lea.ming· into vivid piot:urea of ideai inati tutions of in1:truction and inquiry.
In the Republic itself, education forms both the peliticul beginning end the
philosophical end of the city.
fut in the island of Utopia education haa a cha.rac ·;eristically diffe+ent
.
.
standing.
The liberal arts, are, to be sure, studied in Utop:.a as in the Republic,
· for the Utopians have made the same
~iecoveries
in leam: .ng as the h"'u.ropee.ne •
.'The trivium, which dee.ls with the arts of language under grammar, rhetoric
.and logic;
ia reduced to one useful art--dialectice, "tlte ways of reasoning
which reasoning has observed useful for investiBating th: .ngs."
phnsizea their lack of concern with pure· logic.
JzythlodB¥ em-
They ha·re no universals and
have never heard of a "second intentiqn, 11 the ref"lective product of the intellect "which," as More ea.ya elsewhere, "is nowhere."
~hich
is nowhere, no intellectual
Hoplace .ha.s nothing
being~.
They possess the full quadriviB!fll, which ooncema t!1e world of nature,
and in it especially ·p ureue astronomy, for they regard· tl 1e world as a spectac le made for man--in fact the whole section · on ed1:1cati•>n appropriately comes
within the a·e otion on sightseeing.
as among the most useful branches
They characteriatica:.ly regard medicine
of philosophy.
Now what characterizes this education is the absen•:e of almost all
phiiosophy,
and
first of all " absence of physics underitood as the inquiry
an
into causes; they confine themselves to engaging in desu .tory and inconclusive
debates, inventing new theories to add to those af the a icienta·.
there is an apparent absence of politics; inquiries
conc&~rning
of the commonweal th'' are absent in the best commonweal th .
Secondly
"the best state
�-16-
And fin•lly as fQt
metaphy~ics, inquirie~
intri being or god,
th~y ha~e
nono,. but r,or· · their highest inquiry they conduct debates "in that part of
.
.
pti!losophy" which entreateth af manners and w.i rt us," and their chief quest.i on ·
is ,
.. •
. in .what thing,· be it ,one or moi~, the felicity ot
~an.~onsi~teth.
But in this· point thay seam almost
too much given and inclined to the opinion of them
which defend pleasure, wherein they det~rmine either
all or the chief~st part Qf menf•· feljcity to rest.
And (which is more to be marveled at) their defense
of ·this so dainty and deli~ate . en opinion they fetch
•van from their grave, sharp, bitter and rigorous
raligiono
Indeed they never have any philosophical di1cussions without resorting to
relitj1ous principles;
thu~
employing the exact convars• · of
~pr~'•
paated cQnton~ion that reason should and can serve religion.
often re-
The religious
principles which they employ are two: . they .Pelif'le in s wise -providence
~hich
governs the world end ordaiMs· felicity for man, and in th~ immortality of tha
soul and its reward and punishment after death.
are .free to
choo~e
what religious practices
In all
plea~e
~ther
respects Utopians
them, but these two prin-
ciples .they are strictly required .to affirm, for as we shall see, they aro
the requirements of a communal pursuit of pleasure.
Now the content of their doctrines of pleasure are 1 as one might guess,
· what we · would call Epicurean.
Epi~urus
It is the notoriously apolitical teaching of
modified to become the political philosophy of the most unlikely
republic ever davised--a stable community of pleasure.
These are tha modifications the Utopians makei the Epicureans believe
that the gods, if there are any, . do not guide the worlds
fore, the Utopians
as~ert
as mentioned be-
divine providence, presumably because without it
the natural circumstance of man would not necessarily be conduOive to pleasure.
The Epicureans beli~ve th~t the soul dissolves with the body; the
Utopians require·tha immortality of the _soul to assure that the
calcul~s
of
�-17-
pl~asures
is not so short term es to admit imparmia•ibla or false pleasures.
The Epicureans belisve in private property'
the Utopians in common wealth,
for they. regard all wealth as "mat·erie. voluptatis," the material of pleasure,
thaugh they abate their communism 'to tha degree that privacy is necessary to
pleasure--this is why they
.
.
~ase
their society on the famJly.
As far as the chief doctrine of Epicurus, that pleasure is the highest
~oad,
i~
concerned, they
agree~
but
they think ·not ·felicity to r. st in all pleasure, b~t
e
only in that pleasure that.is good and honest, and
that hereto as to perfect blessedness our nature is
allured and drawn even by virtue.
It follows that the
Uto~ians
find it possible to absorb the Stoic
position~
that .ts, to obuiate the question Qf the priority of virtue and pleasure as ·
ends among which a choice must be made, . the ref\tc.tion on ·which choice ennobles the pagan philosophers.
The uiitue mQst peculi~rly
In this they
follows.
~elonging to human beings i~ "humanity,"
that is to say man's virtue is simply the
t~re.
~rgue . as
realiz~tion
of
hi~
essential na-
".Now' the most earn~st and painful followers of virtue and haters of
pleasure exhort you to relieve the misery of
others,~
praising such deeds es
"huinanity."
Thus virtue itself is nothing but an argument for
a~d
an instrument of
pleasure, understood however in such a way as to become the basis for a theory
of private and social contracts:
But in that nature doth allow and provoke men one
to help another live merrily ••• verily she commandeth
thee to use diligent circumspection, that thou do not
so seek f6r thine own commodities, that thou ~rocura
othara' incommodities. Wherefore their opinion is,
that not only covenants and bargains made among private men ought to be well and faithfully fulfilled,
observed, and kept, but also common laws •••
Tn this way the Utopians constitute a political community based on pleasure,
t.hat is, on· nature, and therefore stable.
Their only requirement is that
�-18-
·
pl~esuras
ba true and not false.
To te~ch their citizens to make this ~lscrimination is the object of
their . educat.ion.
Bv false or "counterfeit" pleasures arel of course, meant .
tho•e counter to natural desire. for "pleasure they call _every motion and
state of. the body or lfrind lilhsrein. man hes actually dalectstion. 11
r alsa ·
_plaas_
ures are therefore perverse pleasures, namely those which yield no · in,trinsic.ally pleasing state, but are present mostly for the sake of asserting
first among th.esa are the pleas.u res which result from a "futile
oneself.
conopi~acy"
d~es~,
of men, b@~inning with th~ mistaken pleasure of magnificence in
and .going on to the . pleasure tskeM in honor and nobility derived from
property.
Thus the prideful pleasure of conspicuous consumption is the _car-
dinal sin of
~topia.
9.
The Uee of Utopia
Utopia than is a land of pl•asure without pridQ.
-- -
Whan
---
E~asmus
says
of this book called On the Beet Ststa of the Commonw,alth, that in it More
- -
~----.......
"proposed to illustrate the source ahd spring rif political evil," he must
.
.
mean just thie-that Mora in his Utopia has disclosed and eradicated the
root of all evil in
leisur~
pri~e.
Erasmus goas on to say that Mora first,at his
wrote the second book (which contains Hythlodey's narrative of
Utopia) and "recognizing the need for it" hastily added a first.
Where
was the . need to prefix this latter book, which at first sight, seams to
'
contain mostly an account of the particular political evils of More's
En~-
l; and 'for which Utopian inst.i tutions are proposed by Hythloday as the cure?
Ths answer is in the fact that it is "utopian" in the derogatory sense
of the term to paint a pattern of a political community fr.om which human
evil is radically removed1 or worse, as e straight political proposal, i t is
a culpably futile undertaking.
But. when Hythloday solemnly closes, saying
�-19-
that all the world would loMg ago have been brought under the laws of Utopia
"~ere it not that on~ only beast, the prince~s and mother of all mischief~
Pride doth withstan·d and let itH he is . taking a fierce pleasure in vitiating
the book by underscoring precisely the futility of' hie narrstiue.
Hence the
first botJk was wH tten to reh'abili.ta'te the ser;:ond and contains directions for
the proper
~ ~
utopias.
The first book is so.metimas; appropriately, called a dialogue on counsel.
f9r the occasion of Hythloday•s reletirin of ths evils of England !s his da·cided ·refusal. of Peter Gile·s• suggestion that hra should get into a king's court
to·
iris~ruct ·
him with examples
~nd
help him with counsal.
Hythloday allows. that
h~ h~s learned in his travels of institutions which would cure the condition~
which he·had so acutely observed in England, put he shows by serious and
comical examples how his solutions would never ·be taken seriously· at court.
Raphael Hythloday's first name is Hebrew for "tha physician of health,"
and·his laet name is Gresk for "knowing in babble."
vation which is, first, in
its~lf
impossibl~
evmn to advocate in the places that matter.
Hythloday brings a sal•
and which he, secondly, refuses
He is a babbler on two counts.
and . ha knows it.
~ore
himself now attacks Hythloday:
for whereas your Plato judgeth that weal-publics shall
by : thi~ means attain ~erfect felicity either if . philoso-
phers be kings or else if kings ·giv•·themselvss to the
study of philosophy, how far, I pray you, shall commonwealths ~hen be from felicity, if philosophers will nnt
vouchsafe to instruct kinqs with theit gorid counsel?
Hythlo.day objects that philos.ophy can have no power among kings.
More coun-
tersr
Indeed, .this school
philosophy (philosophia scholaetica) h•th not, which thinketh all things meet for .
every place. But there is another philosophy more civil
(philosophia civilior) ••• which knoweth, as you would say,
her own stage ••• And this ia the philosophy you must use.
�-20-
. The Citizen and Undar-Sf\eriff of London, King' a Councillor to be and futura
Lord
Ch~ncellor ~f
England then ·9ivas the content of this "more citizen-like
philos.o phy," tac!tl v h::tnamuting Plato's most radical proposal into practical
wladarn: ·
If
~~il ~pinions ~nd n~ughty
persuasions cannot
be utt~rly and quite ; plucked · out of their hearts, if
you .cannot even as you would remedy vices which use
and custom has confirmed, .yet for this · cause you
muet not l~~u~ and forsake the commonwealth. You
must not forsake tha ·ship . in a tempe~t because you
cannot rul$ and keep down the winds. No, nor you ;
must not labor to drive into their heads new and
strange information which you know well shall be
nothing regarded with them that be of clear contrary
rnlndso But you must ~!th crafty wile and a subtle
train study and endeavor yourself, as much as in
you liath, ta handle the matter wittily and handsomely for the purpose. And that which you cannot turn
to good, so o~dsr it that it be not vary ,bad. For it
ia not possible for all things to be ~ell unles~ all·
men were good, which I . think will not be yet this
good meny years.
.
Many books on
counsel~ng · princes,
such as Erasmus' Education of ,,! Christian
Princs and· Machiavelli's Prince were written in More's age; from these tha
--··
Utopia differs in being a book of counsel for subjects and citizens, and its
first advice to them is
~ ~
inject utopia
~
their counsels•
attack qn radical polities among the advisors of rulers.
Jt is an
But what then is
the profit, not in the book Utopia, but in the land Utopia of the second. book,
the ideal commonwealth itself?
first of all it seems to me that Utopia negatively proposes a great po1itical principle, true in
f~ct · and
potent as a conviction:
that originally
and fundamentally communities are expressions of human nature and that the
converse is not so much the case.
This understanding of the book is, of course,
at variance with. what Utopia appears to exemplify, )')11.mely the reconstruction
of numen nature through a perfectly planned society.
And secondly, in pointing to human perverseness as the
a~oiler
of pol!-
tics and na.md.ng it pride, . an.d by painting a pattern of a prideleas community,
�-21-
positively, by preeanting it in delightfµl
M~te s~ows
it would mean to
very. sen~itive tri that
•
•
•
detail, what
li~e .. in Utopia, w~at the lif~ of pleasure in abstr~ction fro~
tti~ · briginal human c(ln~ition looks like.
•
imag~nativ•
1
'
in
The student of Utopia should become
~rd~osals for new · ~n~ improved ways of life which
r~a-lly impila. an · 2lteration of hum~n nature •
s
Ptnally, Utopia
ag~in
..
by the negative influence of its imaginative
.
·. r11alization, effepts a kind of celebrat.i,on of and satisfaction in the given
.
.
.
human condition.
In his last long work written in the Tower of London, end
:called E_ Dialogue
Ef.
Comfort against Tribulation) More argues that tribulation
is the pre-cond'ition of salvation, a truth which, even when i t is not taken in
: lt~ pre~ise
Christian meaning, exercises a powerful influence on the politics
of · ~hose ~ho
believe it.
And finally, Utopia iS the beneficial o.c casion of a kind of ·civic festivity.
·An early biographer calls Mor~ "our noble new Christian Sricrates," and
More~ ·who ~eeembles Socr~tas bot~ · ~n many particulars of the m~de of his lif~
and the crucial parts of the manner of his death, · resembles him in nothing so
much as in his serene playfulness.
when he
m~ans mer~ily"
~f · ~~re's
favorit&
It was said of More that he "looks sadly
and the "island of Utopia" is written in that way.
write~s,
One
one which Hythloday brought to the· Utopians, . who
.t ake special delight in him for "his many conceits and jests;' is the ancient
writer of comic and fentastical dialogues, Lucian.
Lucian wrote two accounts
oL voyages to the moon whenct '1.he foibles of earth come into sharpa•t focus.
The Utopians, that"facile and facetious" people, equipped with golden chamber
pots and followed about by loving chicks, are just such moon people--in fact
the first thing Hythladay mentioris about
th~
island is that it is moon-shaped.
More can afford such pranks, fbr although like Soctates a participant in dialogues, he is
unli~e
the latter, a writing
Socr~tes.
This effects a difference
�-22-
in · the .form ~t S~cratic ~~d Mor~an itony1 the latter is a~thor end interlo6utor in .one, ~hence he ~an by sob~r spee~h · control from the in~ide of th~
dialogue . Utdpia wh~t me~rim~nt he has set afobt from the outside b~ writing
,it • .
Thus fltore h_ . started a. subtle and inviting game·, which has always
as
dra·wn togeth_.r
B
in
a me~ry end melancholy -inquiry th.ass who
- ~ b~ : Citi~en• of the best commonwealth~
WOUld
like
ta
Just t~is is conv~y~d iri the ful~ title
. of the book as printed in the first editiont
A :Truly Golden Booklet, as Sa~ing as it is restive,
on the Best State of the Commonwea~th and the New
Island of Utopia~
Now to return to the beginning,
I hav~ tried to ~ho~, by looking to
the book call.a d . Utopia, that the term "utopia" bears .a ·c ertai"n particular
original meaning . to wh.i ch the utopian tradition always beers some relation.
But i t is clear that utopias understood in that particular sense are unflitted to fill ~he needs for~ulated by those interested in conjec~uring about
and planning for the tuture.
You will remember that the demand was for an
frnaginativs presentation of a variety of possible "life styles" based on pro- .
jections into the future - of present possibilit{aa.
t~
be used as an
instru~ent
The utopian tradition was
of the social sciences by means of which a
~ore
conscious choice of ends could be achieved.
This seems to me inappropriate
for . two reasons.
no
e~ty
of
First I think there can be
deliberate
pre-pl~nnad vari~
utopias, for a utopia is not a description of mere style but a vividly
. delineated constructiOn·'· in the imagination of political wisdom, and its com..
position is presumably not undertaken until the author has settled his opinions
and persuaded himself of their truth.
realization of the
impossible~
And
~econdly
a utopia is an imaginative
which far from being a
projec~ion
possibilities, if it lies anywhere in time, lies behind.
of present
�-23..;.
.
.
, ,
· ~ritics of t'1e utopian enterprise quite r _ghtly characterize it ae
i
essEmtially .nes~a!gi~, b,acioe;111ard~l.~oklng • . Jn . fact i t _
might be said .that the
notiqn of .utopia and
.
.
.
th~
.' .
concept of a
.
:
"r~tura"
are incompatible.
The urgent
. quas.tion is: " the stu·Ciy of. which of these makes for the better state of the
·.·
.
'
.
�
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 Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
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23 pages
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paper
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On Thomas More's Utopia
Date
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1972-05-05
Description
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Typescript of a lecture delivered on May 05, 1972 by Eva Brann as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
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lec Brann 1972-05-05
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Annapolis, MD
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St. John's College
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English
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text
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pdf
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Brann, Eva T. H.
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<a title="Audio recording" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/260">Audio recording</a>
Deans
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/0ff4e11f50a4c8136675f252f3d28f8b.mp3
81aa8f11a197d4cc9124dfdbf841c807
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.
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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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audiotape (Tape 52, Vol. 1)
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01:31:12
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The beginning of the St. John's program
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Audio recording of part one of a lecture delivered in July 1972 by Stringfellow Barr entitled "The beginning of the St. John's program".
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Barr, Stringfellow, 1897-1982
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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1972-07
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mp3
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<a title="Part Two" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3714">Part Two</a>
<a title="Photographs" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/search?query=%2B%22The+Beginning+of+the+St.+John%27s+Program%22&query_type=boolean&record_types%5B%5D=Item&submit_search=Search">Photographs from the lecture</a>
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English
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lec Barr 1972-07 (part 1)
-
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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 Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
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audiotape (Tape 52, Vol. 2)
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01:02:26
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The beginning of the St. John's program
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Audio recording of part two of a lecture delivered in July 1972 by Stringfellow Barr entitled "The beginning of the St. John's program".
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Barr, Stringfellow, 1897-1982
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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1972-07
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sound
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<a title="Part One" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3713">Part One</a>
<a title="Photographs" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/search?query=%2B%22The+Beginning+of+the+St.+John%27s+Program%22&query_type=boolean&record_types%5B%5D=Item&submit_search=Search">Photographs from the lecture</a>
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English
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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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00:40:16
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LEC_Brann_Eva_1972-10-06_ac
Title
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The Poet of the Odyssey
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on October 6, 1972, by Eva Brann as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
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Brann, Eva T. H.
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Annapolis, MD
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1972-10-06
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St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online.
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sound
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mp3
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Homer. Odyssey
Greek literature
Deans
Friday night lecture
Tutors
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PDF Text
Text
BACH'S. RHETORIC
Beate Ruhm von Oppen
27 October 1972
I
r
DI>- ar I GI r fGl~rrl fl f rl rG §D
4
I
�B A
c H
I
s
RHE T 0 R I C
Beate Ruhm von Oppen
Those of you who have read Albert Schweitzer's great book
on Bach may remember the genesis of it from the preface by Charles
Widor.
He describes how he,
Wider, told Schweitzer one day when
they were playing the chorale preludes that though he could easily
see the logic of Bach in his preludes and fugues, he found much
obscurity in his treatment of chorale melodies 0
excessive contrasts of moods?
Why these
Why the use of contrapuntal
motifs that bore no relation to the mood of a hymn tune?
Young Schweitzer told the master that all this became clear
from the texts.
most.
Widor told him which pieces had puzzled him
Schweitzer told him the texts by heart, and translated
them into French on the spot.
The riddles were solved.
The
two then spent afternoons going through all the 'choral'e pieludes
and Schweitzer showed Wider, as Wider says in his preface, a
Bach whom he had only very dimly divined before.
He then asked
young Schweitzer to write an essay on the chorale preludes for
French organists.
Schweitzer soon found that he had to include
the cantatas and passions, to explain things.
And that was the
beginning of his book on Johann Sebastian Bach, the musicien-po~te,
or musician-poet, as he called him.
The man who was to have spoken here
to-ni~ht,
Nicholas Nabokov,
.,
once said to Mr. Klein, many years ago, that Bach's texts do not
matter, that they did not matter to Bach.
In proof he mentioned
the fact that Bach often re-used music with a new text that had
previously been composed for another texto
I am here to refute
that view and I propose to address myself not only to that
objection to taking Bach's texts seriously, but to other objections
too:
that the declamation is often not the declamation such texts
would have were they read or spoken, even in a heightened form;
that often they are submerged in the music, inaudible or unintelligible;
and that some of the texts, some non-biblical texts
his librettists served up to him, were uninspired, weird, or
in doubtful taste.
�- 2 Let me dispose of this last point straightaway and say that
I am not unduly impressed or depressed by it.
Tastes have changed
since Bach's day and some of the conceits, some banking or cooking
or medical metaphors in a few of the texts may strike us as odd
as may some of the loving, almost amorous exchanges between the
soul and the savior in others.
But one can live with such
oddities and they are neither numerous nor important.
important is Bach's musical treatment of themo
What is
And I for one
am against editing them out, as some pe.ople, even Albert.Schweitzer,
have suggested.
Though Bach could do wonders with almost any text, he was,
it seems to me, at his best when setting and interpreting the
Bible.
Indeed I would not call him a fifth evangelist, as has
been the fashion for some decades now, but a church father, an
interpreter, an exegete of Holy Scripture.
I
could now proceed in Thomistic fashion, giving the other
mostly but not only secularist -- objections one by one, and
then my answers.
fact that I
What makes that procedure impossible is the
can only detain you for about one hour and that I
want to leave half of that to Bach himself.
You ought to hear
at least as much of what he does as of what I have to say about
it.
What he does takes time.
and with time.
Music takes time;
it works in
To allow Bach to have his say means that one
must listen to what comes before a certain crucial point, even
if one .1.'
vnen brutally cuts off or fades out after that point.
~
I
might as well start with the Nabokov objection, the
existence of what are called "parodieso"
The most massive
case of re-use of pre-existing music is the Christmas Oratorio.
Some wri te rs have argued that this cluster of six church cantatas
was composed before the secular cantatas with which it shares a
dozen numbers.
I am not convinced.
I think that here, too,
as in all other known cases of parodies, the ~ecular work came
first, the sacred later -- though some parallel numbers of the
one and the other may go back to a common earlier source. ·
�- 3 -
The Ch:·istmas Oratorio is not only the most massive case of
parody, but it is also the one that comes closest to convincing
people that parodies do prove Bach did not really care what words
he combined his music with.
however,
th·~
As far as I am concerned it is,
only case where one could say an original number .was
"better" than the later adaptation.
For the Christmas Oratorio
Bach drew fairly extensively on a secular cantata (BWV 213) about
young Hercu:.es at the crossroads, of Virtue and Voluptuousness
(or Pleasur1!).
a tenor aria.
You'will hear the beginning of both versions of
In the secular version it is sung by Virtue who
tells young Hercules that on her wings (yes, it is "her" despite
the tenor voice) the budding hero shall soar and rise as on the
wings of an eagle, towards starso
schweben,
r·~ally,
The soaring, on the word
sensibly, "soars," hovers, floats in the air,
having been lifted up, off the ground, most powerfully and
elegantly
b~-
the octave swoop to a syncopated tonic and run up
to the domiJLant, all in the first bar, on the words "Auf meinen
Flti.geln" -- "QEon my wings. 11
Let us hear it.
EXAMPLE 1)
Cantata Ho. 213, Hercules at the Crossroads,
and Christmas Oratorio
··i'. •rt J1._
. · . . . - -· ,t'
c~
iuZ~
t ~t tl -F})l 'ffi\"'~-!DI: ::
R0 <.~J"' <solc.;;t to <)~'<- -----~-----~..:> ( b~-;
J.if .tu., &-f<'..v\ Ir(be.V\_:. .
{\Li r
/
In the Christmas Oratorio this E-minor aria is lowered to
D-minor and the tenor sings it as a song of dedication to the
infant savior and asks for strength and courage for a Christian
lifeo
The first words are "Ich will nur dir zu Ehren leben. 11
The "leben" comes where the "schweben" did before.
As we shall
see later, i1eightlessness was a feature of Bach's music on the
effects of
,~race.
But in this one
instance I myself feel the
music has a more immediate connection with the explicit verbal
�- 4 metaphor "schweben" (for "to hover, or glide") than the implied
metaphor of "leben" (for "to liveo")
But let us listen to both, the D-minor version iri the Christmas
Oratorio, and for contrast, once more, the E-minor version in the
Hercules cantata.
(EX.AMPLE 2 and EXAMPLE 3)
So now you have heard the one example which I myself consider
somewhat superior in the original, secular versiono
In all the
other cases of adaptation I find the sacred "parody" superior to
its secular original and, where it is an adaptation of an earlier
sacred composition, not inferiorq
The traffic was all one way,
from secular original to sacred adaptation or "parody," or from
secred original to sacred adaptation -- never the other way round,
from sacred to secular.
The four short Masses are cases in point here.
Greek
11
They are
Kyries 11 and Latin "Glori as'" short Lutheran Massee, which
use music previously composed for German ohurch cantata.a.
In
the original the music often seems tailor-made for the verbal
cadence of the German text, with such a close fit that even
vordless instruments seem to say the words of the text or at least
clearly refer to it.
And yet that music re-combines with the
different and shorter Greek and Latin texts of the Mass with
triumphant success.
Does that prove the texts did not matter to Bach?
bit of ito
Not a
The meanings of both texts are connected and in the
setting of the words Bach has been both inspired and metioulous
about fit and fitness.
One last word about the Christmas Oratorio.
You have heard
the first bars of the arias sung by Virtue and the Christmasversion
of it..
There is not time -- but neither is there need -- to play
the lullaby sung by Voluptuousness in the cantata about young
Hercules and the cradle song in jhe Christmas Oratorio -- same song,
the one in B, the other in Go
One can choose to be shocked or
amused by the transformation of the singer of that lovely tune
from Voluptuousness to the Virgin Mary.
I am amusedo
But I
see no reason why the nativity scene should not have the tenderness
previously given to the allegorical figure of Pteasure.
Neither
�- 5 -
can I get too excited about the fact that the Christmas Oratorio
begins with a ket t ledrum taken over from the original of the
opening number, a secular cantata beginning
or "Sound ye drums." (B\l.1V 214)
"T~net,
ihr Pauk:en,"
It was a nice literal touch to
delight the groundlings in the secular work.
It is in no way
out of place in the jubilant first number of the Christmas Oratori o ,
which starts with words that do not have an explicit mention of drums.
So much for the problems posed by the parodieso
With my next
example I want to illustrate two points connected with the question
of declamation.
I
could, of course, just take one piece by Bach and use the
hour to show and discuss what happens in that.
But I have decided
to accept the challenge of our absent lecturer and to attempt a
systematic refutation.
Different pieces must be used to make
different points, though one piece never illustrates one point
I would therefore ask you to listen in a . bi-focal sort
only.
of way:
for the main point to be made in a
pi~ce
that is played,
but not to the exclusion of all else that may be relevant to the
subject of Bach's rhetoric.
cantatas and the Magnificato
My examples will be drawn from the
To include anything from any Motet
would, I decided reluctantly, take too long.
to St. Matthew I take as read (and heard)
Sophomore~
The Passion according
or, for Freshmen and
still in the offing -- and f or the Passion according t o
St. John there is, alas, no time.
Nei t her is there for the
B-minor Mass.
Of the roughly two hundred extant church cantatas only a
portion are available on record;
cantatas a much higher proportion.
of t h e rough dozen secular
A couple of examples I
wanted to use were once available on records, but no longer are.
The ones I have now chosen seemed best for the purpose, but may
not be;
in any case it was quite difficult to make a choice, a
necessarily
invidi~us
are available.
and painful choice, among the riches
t~~t
Some of you can certainly think of equally good
or even better examples, and I hope you will mention them in the
question period.
Yo 1 may ask:
i
on records?
why restrict the examples to what is now available
My answer is that the voices, both human and instru-
�- 6 -
mental, are very important for an assessment of Bach's rhetoric and
I want to give you as much of them as I can.
If you want to read
about the subject and try things out on the voice or piano, there
are the books by Westrup and Whittaker, Spitta, Gchweitzer, Pirro,
Parry, Terry, Tovey, and others.
And there are all the scores in
the libraryo
And do consider Bach's texts and his treatment of them, listen
to what he tried to !22:X when he sango
of translation.
Consider, also,the problem
We might discuss it in the question period.
For words did matter to Bach;
they assuredly and audibly
mattered to him when he set them to music in the service of his
church and of his Lord and God, the word made flesh.
Most of the
cantatas were written when he was cantor of the church and choir
school of St. Thomas in Leipzig.
Bach was deeply concerned about the meaning of the scriptural
and other texts which he used in his church music.
Re searched
'
for the meaning and thought about it and conveyed it in a variety
of ways, some of them taken straight from the art of verbal rhetoric,
some of them not available to that art;
but these latter, too,
were governed by the word.
Verbal and musical rhetoric were seen as connected arts at
his time and rhetoric was still taken very seriously and taught
in the schools and universitieso
The connection with music was
made in a whole body of teaching called the doctrine of affects or
of figures.
The feelings or affects were represented bl musical
figures, somewhat analogous to figures of speech.
Johann Sebastian Bach -- unlike his sons,, who in their day
became more famous -- was a keen and educated rhetorician.
This
must be clear to any careful listener to his vocal music.
It was
also attested by Johann Abraham Birnbaum, a teacher of rhetoric at
the university of Leipzig, who wrote of Bach that
He so perfectly knows the parts and advantages which the
elahoration of a piece of music has in common with the
art .of rhetoric, that it is not only a most satisfying
pleasure to hear his thorough discourses on the similarity
and greement between the two; but that also one can only
marvel at the skilful use he makes of them in his work.
�- 7 -
Birnbaum was defending Bach against an attack by a contemporary
musician and critic, Johann Adolph Scheibe, who had asked:
Bow can a man be faultless as a writer of music who
has not sufficiently studied natural philosophy, so
as to have investigated and become familiar with the
forces of nature and of reason?
How can he have all
the advantages which are indispensable to the cultivati on of good taste who has hardly troubled himself
at all with the critical study, the cultivation and
the rules which are as necessary to music as they ~re
to oratory and poetry, so that without their aid it
is hardly possible to write with feeling and expression?
What Scheibe called "the forces of nature and .of reason" v.ras now
being asserted against the theology and biblical exegesis of Bach;
and the new rhetoric of emotion and expressiveness began to prevaii
over Bach's homiletics, his preaching oratory.
Scheibe was not alone in his criticism.
the rise and antagonistic to revelationo
Rationalism was on
But quite apart from the
con tent of his vocal compositions, Bach was attacked-for their form,
too.
There is no time to go into the technicalities of the doctrine
of figures, though every example that follows could be discussed in
technical termso
Suffice it to say that a man like Johann Mattheson,
though on the one hand aware of -- indeed a writer on -- the system of
"figures," on the other ridiculed Bach for what he took to be faulty
or unnatural declamation.
He found a ready target in the opening
chorus of the cantata Ich hatte viel Bektimmernis (BWV 21) which, as
he put it, "for a long time does nothing but repeat"
I, I, I, I had much grief, I had much grief, in my heart,
in my hearto
I had much grief ••o
and so on, and so fortho
But the
The repetition is undeniable.
chances are that Bach knew what he was doing.
Re may have wanted
to present the troubled "I" imprisoned in its self-centered grief
and in its self-echoing heart -- then to contrast it with the
consolations of the Lord delighting the soulo
lation of the German translation of verse
19
The English transof Psalm
94
(and I
give you that, because tense and structure differ somewhat) would
be: "I had many cares in my heart;
but thy consolations cheered
my soul."
Ich hatte viel Bekfimmernis(se) in meinem Herzen;
aber deine Tr6stungen erg6tzten meine Seelec
�- 8 -
It was that ~' the "but", that Bach wanted to highlight, the
contrast he wanted to bring out, both directly and indirectly,
in the musical treatment of the word itself -- a
0
mere" conjunction
and in that of the two halves of the whole statemento
It is
conjunctions -- and I could give you a whole list of them --
that show more clearly, perhaps, than anything else how concerned
Bach was with sentence structure, grammar, and syntax -- and not
just with imagery.
Indeed the word ABER is put in a musical equivalent of capital
letters triply underlinedo
It could not be more arresting and
(Very unlike an "aber" in Brahms, I would say o)
emphatico
It
is preceded by an instrumental sinfonia or introduction, slow,
sad, with sinuous oboe and violin parts
int~rplaying
over a
shifting base of sustained and strangely modulating string and
organ ch(; :ds o
Then comes the chorus, with the triple exclamation
"Ich, ich, ich," followed by quasi-fugal or canonic entries,
maintaining the sadness with many suspensions, seconds, and
sevenths, and introducing some agitation with hu.mmering syllables.
Cantata 21, Ich hatte viel Belctf:mrnernis
Ich hatte vial Bektl.mmernis
in meinem Rerzen;
abe£_ deine Tr6stungen
ergBtzt~n mAine SP.,le•
v b b C2
@
~
=1
•
t{
lc.t.,
(
I had many cares
in my heart;
but Thy consolations
cheered my soul.
f"
"f
fc}\./
This goes on for thirty-six bars, and then comes that lapidary ABER:
�- 9 -
It is the pivotal point of this number and the pivot of the message
of the entire work.
In this chorus it prefaces a lively section
on the consolations of the Lordo
The rest of the work has the
same contrast, which is
in this number, of anxiety and
prefigure ~1
solace, even joy, culminating in a triumphal chorus of great splendor
at the enJ.o
The whole work -- it is .Bach's longest cantata -- is
about that ABER.
So let us listen to the beginning
o
(EXAMPLE 4)
You may have found the first choral portion somewhat repetitious
too;
but you probably saw the point in retrospect.
.Bach's
contempoTaries objected to it because it was "unnatural."
But can "naturalness" be the sole or even the chief criterion
in the musical delivery of a message?
Under that heading there is also the question of the natural
stress and length of syllables in speech and what happens to them
when speech is sung, or becomes song.
In one of his Motets -- that is, as its name might indicate,
a vocal composition with words all the time, no independent
in8trumental parts or interludes -- Bach set the text of verses
26 and 27 of Paul's Epistle to the Romans, chapter 9:
Der Geist hilft
The Spirit helpeth
unsrer Schwachheit auf,
our infirmities,
denn wir wissen nicht,
for we know not
wie wir beten sollen,
what we should pray for
wie sich's gebfihret;
as we
-
v
..__,
-
.__)
sondern der Geist selbst
v
-
u
-v
~
ought~
but the Spirit itself
vertritt uns auf's beste
maketh intercession for us
mit unaussprechlichem Seuizen.
with groanings which cannot be
uttered.
After a cheerful and vigorous first line, clearly indicative
of the hel:J givAn us in our weakness -- especially, and most
graphically, in a. long, low first syllable of Schwachheit, which
after more than four bars is swung up an octave, in the sopranos,
for the sylla"t:iles
11
-heit auf" (in the German the Spirit helps
our weakness u_;,.) , there is due stress on the need f01.· such help,
�- 10 -
in the repeated conjunction "denn" (for "for we know not~ •• '' J
separated from the rest of the clause by rests and echoini :from
one choir to the other.
After "we know not what we should pray
for as we ought" comes: "but the spirit makes intercession for us
with inexpressible groanings."
And what does Bach do?
At that
''but, 11 just before the word "sondern, 11 he switches from 3/8 to
common time (or
~common
4/4)
which, however, he treats in a way so
as to lift the listener out of his seat and shift the
singer from foot to foot, uncertain where the beat comes, as you
can see in the bit of notation I have given you of the clause of
liberation introduced by the "sondern:"
The declamation on that "sondern der Geist selbst vertritt ur.s auf's
beste" is, of course, what the experts of the day
would pronounce "faulty."
and our day -The musical accents, put in very
deliberately and consistently by Bach himself, do not fall on
the stressed words or syllableso
It is like a sudden off-beat
bit of danceo
But unfortunately it i10uld take too long to play
it now.
I put the squiggly line under the word "vertritt" because
I suspect a pun there:
the verb treten means "to step," vertreten.
to step in the plac6 of someone or something eI.peo
What better
·,
way to illustrate the mediation or intercession of the Spirit
than by a shift of beat or tread?
Strangely enough the ABER in the earlier example was off-beat
too.
The spoken aber is a trochee.
And it is interesting that
Bach, in the example from cantata No. 21 which I played before,
did not bring it in on the downbeat, but on the naturally weak
beat after it, and gave both syllables an unnatural, artificial
stress.
�- 11 -
Albert Schweitzer, though most keen on the imagery and pictorial
aspects of Bach's music and quite capable of casting occasional
aspersions on Bach's way with words, quite rightly referred to
the next example we shall hear as one that shows the immediacy
with which Bach's music arises from the natural declamation
of the text:
-
v
\)
Selig ist der Mann,
v-v
der die Anfechtung erduldet;
u
-- v u - v
\.)
denn nachde:m er bewlihret 1st,
u-uv
v
v
-1......>
v
-'-.,J
wird er die Krone des Lebens
\../ v
empfangen.
Blessed is the man
that endureth temptation:
for when he is tried,
he shall receive the crown
of lifeo
But now, if we do what Schweitzer tells us to do; simply
read that sentence with the values and accents given to the
syllables by the lengths and stresses of the notes, we discover
something rather more interesting than "natural 11 • or - correct
declamation.
(For notation see next page.)
After the threefold "Selig" (Blessed, blessed, blessed),
the sentence gets going:
blessed is the man ••o and straightaway
we have misplacements of stress or lengtho
clause that follows it gets "worse."
In the relative
And the most playful,
\J
v
dancing distortion of the spoken rhythm comes on "Wird er die
-\._jv-vv--
Krone des Lebens empfangen. 11
The hemiola and its variant on
the final "empfa.,'Ylgen" are not just what one might expect in
any dance of those dayso
It performs a rhetor1cal function
by its very linguistic "unnaturalness."
by grace.
Li st en.
It overcomes gravity
(EXAMPLE 5)
The music is mellifluous and the overall emphasis is on
grace, beatitude, and the crown of life.
�~£, -vi~ -d~r~ I~-· dyl
1
Sa,y 4\t
1' .f.. ·---.....1"'- --u.. -·---..--·-un -- .. .IJ u rl-F . QJ/] O'!'ff
u - -- ---- - --·
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.
... - . .
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w.I 1()) I
(1' (if l\JI [j i
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)JitrnnTr \l
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rrlu u r/Jf) u.cr;
(- ~~~ g-~-S1B'f--ryrf?'~QJ)J ~.
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/ ~b
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r r "ft· f
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rdrullt
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Du11fr71 ifJJ
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"dtp -
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r t~~ 1\1 11~uYr +s1
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rrfn I(( u u Iu
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r r
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tTuh n·u· ~rA
0
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·- GT -
�- 13 Compare this with a cantata that also deals with the overcoming of temptation but which does it very differently, both in
text and music.
It doe s not st art and end with the blessedness
ihat is the reward of virtue, but on the contrary starts with
the imperative: "Resist sinl": "Widerstehe doch der Stinde", and
supports it not with a promise but a. warning: "le3t its poison
take hold of you" : "son st ergreifet di ch ihr Gift. 11
It is all
struggle and conflict and even the music is "unnatural" or strained
with the singer, like th8 fiddles before her, coming in on the
leading tone, then going down to -~he dominant and up to the
A
subdominant,
I\.
...
7 --- 5, 4, outlining a dominant
~eventh
chord,
"
over an equally astonishing, inoistant 1, and an opening chord
of 7 D
4 Ab
2 F
1 Eb.
I
In the opening phrase the root STER of Widerstehe, or
"stand," as in "withstand," comes on the repeated subdominanto
Later that root syllable is sustained first on the 5,
th~n
on
tJ1e 1, standing its ground against the pressures of changing and
conflicting harmonieso
Let us hear the beginning:
~
\iji -
cJer-<k ~e., J~tt.... lti ~diA.~ ch...
(EXAMPLE 6)
�- 14 -
After this sombre battle song against sin, with its musical
insistence on the need for steadfastness, let me just mention
so~~
other words that Bach is apt to stress by long notes, some verbs,
-
v
-
v
notably, like beten, to pray, or halten, to hold.
And he gives
them ·1ong notes not only when they are in the grammatical imperative,
67, Halt im Gedl!chtnis Jesum Christ (Hold in
remembrance Jesus Christ), or No. 70, Wachet, betet (Watch, pray),
as in cantata No.
but in §:!£l. mood or tense, ever mindful of the need for sustained
effort and concentration, vigilance, prayer, and steadfastness.
Even the evangelist's reference to Jesus prayine in the Matthew
-vv
Passion is lengthened somewhat on betete, though in recitative
-- which is closer to the spoken language -- the length must be
less than in an aria or chorus. ·
From this hortatory kind of preaching let us go to something
q_11ite different, a rhetoric that works by a choreography of layout,
an art of positioning or deployment, almost what one might get in
a piece of typography.
It comes in the Christmas
Ich freue mich in dir (I rejoice in Thee, P,WV 133)0
cant~t~
The words
of the first part of the soprano aria say: "How sweetly it rings
in the ear, this word:
heart."
How it penetrates my
my Jesuf is born.
Even the repetition pattern of phrases and words may
give you an inkling of how Ba..Jh went about setting this text:
Wie lieblich klingt es in den
Ohren~
How sweetly it rings in
the ear
Wie lieblich
klingt es,
wie lieblich klingt es in den OhrE:n, ·
wie lieblich kling:t es in. den Ohren,
wie lieblich kling! es in den Ohren,
wie lieblich klingt en in den Ohr~m,
dies Wort
--
dies Wort
Mein Jesus ist geboren
dies Wort:
geboren.
Wie dringt es in das Herz hineini
this word:
my Jesus is born.
How it penetrates the heart!
You will hear the loveliness of the ringing before the
focussing starts in <:!arnest, on "the woi·d, thP word, the wordo"
&nd when,
afte~
all this very pointed preparQtion, the word comes,
�- 15 -
"Mein Jesus ist geboren," the first three words of it are delivered
on a monotone dominant -- the l!lost concentratPd '.Nay of communicating anything, I suppose, in the- midst of music -- after which
the word "geboren 11 (or "born") comes
dov.11
to the tonic and up
A
again, to remain susp•3ndeil on
a
A
vulnerable 6, then a 4, or
SQbdominant, which may indeed pierce the heart as much as any
verbal or pictorial account of incarnation and nativity.
Let us hear ito
(EXAMPLE 7)
In the example we
There is another use for the monotone.
have just heard it gave an almost hypnotic concentration on the
word8 "Mein Jesus ist .
II
Another Christmas cantata, No.
64,
Sehet 1 welch eine Liebe (See how great a love), has, in its
soprano aria, a monotone emphasis on the firmness, durability,
eternity of the things that Jesus gives, compared with the
vanities of this world, which on8 can hear going up in wisps
--
of smoke o
'l'he words for what endures are bleib2t fest und ewig
steh'n and they are deliver£-d on monotone quarter notes; with the
"stehen" lasting for over two bars.
The alto aria in the sam ( cantata supplies the opposite
e)._treme:
upward leaps of major sevenths, :intervals wbich are
hard to sing but have their clear rhetorical function.
the singer sings about gladly giving
~
When
everything for the sake
of heaven, she leaps from the lower tonic to the upper leading tone,
on the word
11
hin,
11
or "up. 11
The aria is about the insignifican<)e of tbe world w11en the
inheritance of heaven is assured.
Freedom from care and for an
unencumbered pi l grimage through life, a dancing pilgrimage, are
put to us in the ,iaun.ty and at the same time steadfe:.lt musi<' scored
onl;r for alto, oboe d'amore, and conti..'1UOo
Over the steady eighths
of the 6/8 time th8 reed instrument and human voice interplay in
wonderfully free and varied rhythm and the singer's words are placed,
both in time and l)i.tch, in ways that are much more telling than they
vu-u-u
1Nould be if spoken.
"Of the world I'm asking naught" -V
v
v v
11
Von der Welt verlang 1 i<'h nichts": spoken German ¥Jould have very
little stress on the
"~",
none on "der" and much on "Welt."
�- 16 -
But Bach comes down with a bounce, an unprP.pared downbeat, on ".YQ!!"
and keeps doing it with tireless resilience.
Von der Welt verlang 1 ich nichts,
From the world I 1 m asking naught
wenn ich nur den Himmel erbe.
if only I inherit heaveno
Alles,
All, all I give up,
All~s
geb 1 ich hin,
weil ich genug versichert bin,
bev.ause I am suffioiently assure d
dass ich cwig nicht verderbe.
that I shall not perish in all
eternity.
The way he dismisses natural gravity and ocatters the "nichts 11
sets the world at naught with an inspired and physical immediacy.
Bach does not only say it, he does it.
As we shall now
h~ar.
(EXAMPLE 8)
So much, then, for the delivery of texts with linguistically
usual or unusual
and interva:'.s:
acc .~n+,uation
and lengths and a variety of pitches
tbe rhetoric of declamation and gesture and dance.
It is an oratory of breat hing, tooo
In the motet Singet dem
Herrn ein neuas Lied (Sing unto the Lord a new sonf;) Bach not only
sings, rejoices, dances, and plays, as the text of the psalm enjoins,
but at the end, on the words "let everything that has breath praise
the Lord" -- in German "Alles was Odem hat lob:: den Her-rn, 11 he
enacts, brings home, thP. breathing, th e breath of life, in loud,
long, large-lunged "!"s and "Q"s, a clear allusion to Alpha and
Omega and at the sg,me time a i·eligiouD
breat h:~ng
must lister L to it for yourselves one day.
exercise o
You
Or better still, sing it.
·~
Thus there is preachment, and there is enactment of what is
preachedo
And, of cou.;.-se, the content of the preaching
the whole range of faith, hope, charity, R.l1d the rest..
to exemplify them all;
cov·~rs
Impossible
but they are all there, as one would expect,
in cantatas for every Sunday and Holiday of the church yearo
But there is one more objection to sung s9rmons as such that
I should deal with:
not so much that they are ineffectual -- and
I don't believe they are;
more effectual
tha~
on the contraryj I believe they are
spoken sermons 9 on the whole -- but that they
uan be u1intelligible o
I was going to say "inaudjble,"
�- 17 -
but actually what I mean is the kind of piece, mostly a choral
pieoe, where the proliferation of polyphonic parts makes it hard
to hear the wordso
My answer to that is that indeed the words ' may at t:imes b13
indistinct, but that at other times, sufficient times, they are
clea·cly audibleo
Take~
for instanc3, a very
the opening nu~ber of cantata Noo
th~..:e,
verse 8: "He hath shewed
45
compl~x
pi•1oe like
that has as its text Micah
oh man, what
~s
good;
6,
and what
does the Lord require of thee but to do justly, and to love mercy,
and to walk humbJy with thy God?"
The German differs a little
and has some . . . hing like: "You have been told, man, what is good
and what the Lord demands of you:
God. and to
Godo
11
pra~tice
namely:
to keep the word of
loving-kindness o.nd to be humble before your
The German is:
"Es ist dir
ge~mgt,
Mensch, was gut ist
und was der B.err von dir fordert, nfunlich Gottes Wort halten
1md Liebe tib ·m und demtltig sein vor deinem Gotto" And this is
what happens:
(We won 1 t have time to play it and you w.i ll just
have to take my word for it):
An a:ngulo.r and fairly agitated
instrumental prelude prepares us for a grand choral fugue..
i:"1::1trwnent s keep on with their
intror~_notory
The
music, while the vocal
entries over this ritornello do not invariably have on-= set of music
for one
~et
of words and some of their declamation is rathnr
"instritmer.taJ.," i.e., not exactly tailored for voio3 or wcrdso
But we hear successive fugal entrios
''~~
a long "-sagt '' for "you have been toldo"
ist dir gesg.gt," with
Then the four voices
sing that first phrase all together, homophoni~ally.
This
happens three times, with polyphonic announcement followed by
homophonic repetition.
All these come through clearlyo
After the third homophonio repetition, the sopranos immediately
and audibly carry the sentence a bit further:
gesagt 1 _~a~§ch,
wa3
~_:Lis_:!'._un£_~as
11
Es i st dir
der Herr van dir forde-rto"
The way the other voices come in and combine on those words
makes them only moderately audible.
But Baeh has taken care
to get each part of the phrase across clearly somewhere or other.
The altos have a clear, slow descent with a half-note to each
syllable on "was der Herr
~
dir for-dert" when the agitation
�- 18 -
of the mu5ic seems otherwise too complex for comprehension of
the wordso
But the domination of the "instrumental" rather than
declamatory way of writing means that it is expedient for Ba.ch ·
to conclude the instalment on the first part of the sentence more
homophonically, with the words more clearly audible in the last
bar or two because the voices sing them all together.
The
orchestra then has a few bars of this angular music by itself
before the choir, all voices together, homophonically and with
great chordal resonance, crash in with an ultra-audible "N..!MLICH"
on two half-note chords, followed by a bar's rest and another
homophonous "n.!!mlich" to launch the rest of the sentence after
the "namely:"
"n.!!mlich Gottes Wort halten und Liebe ttben und
de m
iitig sein vor deinem Gotto"
There are long, emphatic notes
on "halten," for keeping, holding on to, the word of God, and
there is a slow and very distinct whole-note descent of the
sopranos in the phrase about walking humbly before Gode
The
whole sentence is then delivered again, in a similar though
somewhat abridged form and with only one "ntl.mlich, 11 the one that
runs into the phrase about what God wantso
The earlier more
dramatic "n1:!.mlich" -- with the first one quite alone, followed
by a pause before the repetition -- shows Bach's rhetorical method
clearly.
That is how an orator might stress ito
"!hat preceded
it in the cantata might have made the music run away with the words;
what follows it is what matters and he has to draw attention to ito
So we get the audible conjunction, the "namely," or "to wit. 11
The biblical context, what precedes the text of
Bible, calls for the arresting
11
n1:!.mlich"
·~he
cantata in the
it is a
even~:
stream of verbose questions about how the Lord may be propitiated:
'
"Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before the
high God?
Shall I come before him with burnt-offerings, with
calves of a year old?
Will the Lord be pleased
of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil?
~~th
thousands
Shall I give
my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the
sin of my soul?"
Uone of these things, comes the answer, and
refers the voluble enquirer to an earlier communication -- "you
were told" -- and then, patiently, sternly, spells it out once
�- 19 -
more:
NAMELY:
obedience to the word of God, love, and humility.
And in case the musical excitement of it all is too great for the
congregation - to take it in -- ioe., the prose of it -- as clearly
as it should, the tenor, before himse+f singing his electrifying
aria on the consequences of the knowledge of what is due to God,
recapitulates what the opening chorus has sung, in the clearly
audible (and very expressive) paraphrase of his recitative,
stressing the need · for fear of and obedience to the Lord, for
humility, and loveo
From this discussion of the audibility or intelligibility
of a text let me finally go on to a much more ·difficult matter:
wordless messages.
There are what is known as cantua firmi in
many of the cantataso
A cantus firmus is a hymn tune or ohant
sung in slow motion in the midst or on top of a polyp1tonic pieo e.
There is the advantage, here, of simultaneity:
several thin gs at once in musico
you can say
But that is not all.
The ripieno choir's entry with the slow soprano line
0 Lamm Gottes unschuldig in the opening number of the Matthew
Passion, on the cue, the word "lamb," provided by the com pl ex
double chorus below, is very powerful when it happenso
What
would be the effect of that passion hymn -- a German adaptation
of the Latin Agnus Dei -- if it were not su_ng, but played on a
wind instrument?
That, in fact, is Bach's more usual procedure,
and the wordlessness of such
ca~tus
firmi may increase their power
-- provided, of course, the listener re g isters them, as any
attentive listener willo
Bach wrote for a congregation , that
not only registered but recognized them.
Bach's familiarity with the hymnal was such that he drew on
whatever verse of whatever hymn was most apposite at any given
moment -- witness the reshuffling of the original order of
stanzas in the passion chorales, for instance, in the Passions
according to St. John and St. Matthew, and, of course, with
different, ap propriate harmonizations.
An instrumental cantus
firmus is just a melodic line and leaves it to the listener to
think of the intended words, perhaps even to choose between two
or more possible sets of words.
�- 20 -
It is in part this ~mbiguj_ty and appeal to the listener to
think, to articulate for himself, that gives a wordless cantus
firmus such force.
Its increasingly arcane nature, the growing
secrecy of the message with the waning of the tradition that :Bach
could still take for granted in . his day, may actually add to its
force -- provided the listener attends and engages himself.
is less a matter of "research," though that may
help~
It
than of
attention.
Once one knows that Bach is up to such tricks as cantus firmi,
registering them is the first step t6 identifying them, either by
instant recognition or by a little effort.
·rhe immediacy of a
lost tradition may be gone, but familiarity with a surviving bit
ef it may help, and so may familiarity with other works by Bach
or by other composers.
Let me give you an example.
The traditional tune of the Magnificat is not sung in Bach's
Latin Magnificat.
It is played by the oboes over the singers'
Suscepit Israel puerum suum,
He helped his servant Israel
recordatus misericordiae suae.
in remembrance' of his mercy.
TONUS PEREGRINUS in the Magnificat (Suscepit Israel)
f:lf ~-~ f . lf , l f' Tr Ir. 1f>' I fTP . f ~
~~~ )~r· -1r· \ F' \ r-c - r ·-\ -r· r · \ t-· 1- r :r -;:
r l
'1\t f _f~F · \ fT(Rtf ·Tf~r1171'r '. !I
\
�- 21 -
It is, on the other hand, sung as well as played in various
movements of Bach's so-called German Magnificat '· the cantata
Meine Seele erhebt den Herrn (My soul doth magnify the Lord, BWV 10);
and in the alto and tenor duet "Er denket der Barmherzigkeit und
hilft seinem Diener Israel auf" which corresponds to the Latin
"Suscepit Israel," the cantus firrnus is also given to the a'boes
while the s ingers and continua sigh away in a phrase dominated by
descending minor secondso
Let us first hear the Latin version
(EXAMPLE 9) ••• and now the German version (EXAMPLE 10)
Er denket der Barmherzigkeit
He remembers his mercy
und hilft seinem Diener Israel auf.
and helps his servant Israel up ,
TONUS PEREGRINUS in alto/ten>:Jr duet of cantat<::. No. 10
One strange thing about that tune is its age and long history.
(And tradition is another kind of simultaneity.)
: The tune is
known as the Tonus Peregrinu..s and was originally, from the 9th
century onward, associated with psalm 114, In exitu Israel, the
one the pilgrims sing in Dante's Purgatory: "When Israel ,went
out of Egypt ••• "
It now survives in the doxology of some
English-speaking churches.
I am glad to say
~hat
two of Bach's
settings of it are included in the il'iusic for Freshman Chorus.
And I would like to end with yet another, the setting that begins
Th e German words mean: "My soul doth magnify
For he hath
the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my savior.
cantata No. 10.
regarded
th~
lowliness of his handmaiden:
for behold from
henceforth all generations shall call me blessed."
The words
are spoken by the Virgin Mary after the annunciation, when she
visits her cousin Elisabeth (Luke 1, 'verse 46-48)0
But you
may prefer to think of the pilgrims in the Divine Comedy
or, for that matter, anywhere.
(EXA~IPLE 11)
�- 12 -
Maine Stell
e~hebt
den
He~ren
und main Ge!~t freuet sich
Got tee, meinea HeilaHdes; ·
~eine
soul magnifies the Lord
and my spirit rejoices
in God, my · ea.Vi
I
denn er hat
My
elende Magd
our;
for he has his lowly handmaiden
angesehen,
regarded.
Siehea von nup. 8,ll
verden mich eeli~ preisen
~lle Ktndes Kind.
Behold, from now on
I
shall call
·(German word order)
m~
blessed
all children's children.
1
TONUS PEREGRH1US in soprano a.nd alto parts of cantata. No. 10,
op1ming chorus
.... ..... -~ · · · · ·:Of~-~(!.· 1 ··- ·-··- -·-·-· ·1· P- - .~ .l . ._· 1···- ?;;h;-:=.;· ~-- --·1··.. ~~-·-·:···
·
··
·
- -- -~- - . )··G : P~.r·. r-:·r-~-r:~·: -1 --~~~r·· - ·o . - -~~ -- - - - fP• (.:(_- ~ · -~--•-·
.
--··_-
· ·
~ ~ --
.
_ ·l·-~:·
M"
.. . . ... · ·-:.... . -·· --
-K- ~I' -t.r'"'-
f..ebt
&'e~
. ··- , - I . . - . .
l+ef"- t'<h
-
-- . ·
�'
\...
,- ~ . '<. J . r·"\...J . 1J,...
t I , \ r.
.<. ' .
___ _________________
..
"
I had many cares
in
roy
heart;
a1Jer deine Trost1u11s..~_rn
hut Thy consol at i ons
err:-ot~te-1 F 0 i- ·e (,e_el" e
. ::!_
L'. _ _r.~~~---_:~ _::_
_
c'i1ee :red my sou l •
f i~k ~t:~= ~~~~- ;-G~ -;;{ i~~
-v
Jt \,1
~~Jt~~~*l~~§t~
�Der Ci-e i s t 11 i 1 ft
our i nf'i rn-]t ies ,
f 01·
'.Je
kn o ~.-1
not
vlnt we shou l a
1c'l '""
,I •.• .._,,
~1
"'-ich
,::)
-'--
.J
f c
..J
v
r e_':__l;;_ __ c__ ,
-·J~ilir 0 t
--
<._]
sondern der Geis t selbot
u
- :: rtr itt
v
.._
)
\_J
un s auf
f or
as we ou::J1t :
·,
-
~ray
___
---·-,
\..J'
' ~=: ____ ,,
l)ezt c:
but t he Spir i t itself
mal:et h inb;rGe ssion for us
'.VJth
groan1~1gs
-;;r~1ich
c annot b e
uttered.
�-·
+£'.{_
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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
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
36 pages
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
Bach's rhetoric
Description
An account of the resource
Typescript of a lecture delivered on October 27, 1972 by Beate Ruhm von Oppen as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Ruhm von Oppen, Beate
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
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1972-10-27
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online.
Type
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text
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
lec Ruhm von Oppen 1972-10-27
Relation
A related resource
<a title="Sound recording" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3605">Sound recording</a>
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/906666f4be01ee8828436adb8d8df69d.mp3
7fb0256b3063ed18cb448a05d1194a18
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
audiotape (Tape 109)
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
01:21:03 (Cuts off at 01:20:23 and resumes at 01:20:52.)
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
Bach's rhetoric
Description
An account of the resource
Audio recording of a lecture delivered on October 27, 1972 by Beate Ruhm von Oppen as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Ruhm von Oppen, Beate
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
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1972-10-27
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
sound
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
mp3
Relation
A related resource
<a title="Typescript" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3585">Typescript</a>
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
lec Ruhm von Oppen 1972-10-27
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/7d8bf181257e4904fd4e06249eb6e2b3.pdf
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�Lecture Schedule 1972-1973
Sept 15, 1972 Hugh McGrath
SJC Annapolis
Sept 22
Nancy Wilson Ross
Old Westbury, NY
Sept 29
Richard Kennington
Penn. State Univ., University Park, PA
Oct 6
Eva Brann
SJC Annapolis
Oct 13
Harford Theatre Assn.
Oct 20
Oct 27
Nov 3
Nov 10
Nov 17
Dec 1
Dec 8
Dec 15
Jan 12, 1973
Jan 19
Jan 26-27
Feb 2
Feb 16
Feb 23
Mar 2
March 9
April 6
April 13
Douglas Allanbrook
SJC Annapolis
Beate Ruhm von Oppen
SJC Annapolis
Wye Allanbrook
SJC Annapolis
Virgil Thornson
NYC
Leonard G Ratner
Stanford Univ., Stanford CA
Mortimer Adler
Inst. for Philosophical Research, Chicago
IL
Erwin Straus
Lexington KY
Edward Sparrow
SJC Annapolis
George Wend
SJC Alumnus, Baltimore MD
Christopher White
Curator National Gallery, Washington DC
King William Players
Sen. Eugene McCarthy
Washington DC
Matitiahu Braun
Jacob Klein
SJC Annapolis
William O’Grady
SJC Annapolis
Herman Kahn
The Hudson Inst., Crodon on Hudson NY
Amadeus String Quartet
San Francisco CA
Muhsi Mahdi
Harvard Univ. Cambridge MA
“The Circle and the Square”
“Asian Wisdom and the
Modern World”
“Decartes and the
Enlightenment”
“The Poet of the Odyssey”
“The Abduction from the
Seraglio”
“Keyboard Music and the
Art of Illusion”
“The Rhetoric of J.S. Bach”
“Dance, Gesture, and The
Marrage of Figaro”
“Words and Music”
“Rythmn in Classical
Music”
“The Objects of Discourse”
“On Hamlet”
“Jesus of Nazareth, Lamb
of God”
“Computer Mathematics”
“Dürer as a Draftsman”
“Taming of the Shrew”
“Poetry and Politics”
Violin Concert
“Speech, Its Strength and
Its Weaknesses”
“Plato’s Republic and the
Search For”
“The Prospects for
Mankind”
Concert
“The History and Myth of
Philosophic Religion”
�April 27&28
May 4
May 18
Catholic Univ Players
Catholic Univ, Washington DC
Nicolas Nabokov
Paris France
Modern Theatre Group
Apr. 27: “As You Like It”
Apr. 28: “The Birds”
“Stravinsky and Irony”
“The Dolls House”
�
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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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4 pages
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paper
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Office of the Dean
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Lecture Schedule 1972-1973 (handwritten & transcribed)
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1972-1973
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Schedule of lectures and concerts for the 1972-1973 Academic Year.
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Lecture Schedule 1972-1973
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Annapolis, MD
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St. John's College
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English
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text
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St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
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pdf
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October 06, 1972. Brann, Eva T. H. <a title="The poet of the Odyssey" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/261">The poet of the Odyssey</a> (audio)
October 27, 1972. Ruhm von Oppen, Beate. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3605" title="Bach's rhetoric">Bach's rhetoric</a> (audio)
October 27, 1972. Ruhm von Oppen, Beate. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3585" title="Bach's rhetoric">Bach's rhetoric</a> (text)
Contributor
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McGrath, Hugh
Ross, Nancy Wilson, 1901-1986
Kennington, Richard, 1921-
Brann, Eva T. H.
Allanbrook, Douglas
Ruhm von Oppen, Beate
Allanbrook, Wye Jamison
Thornson, Virgil
Ratner, Leonard G.
Adler, Mortimer Jerome, 1902-2001
Straus, Erwin
Sparrow, Edward
Wend, George
White, Christopher
McCarthy, Eugene
Braun, Matitiahu, 1940-
Klein, Jacob
O'Grady, William
Kahn, Herman
Mahdi, Muhsi
Nabokov, Nicolas
King William Players
Friday night lecture
Lecture schedule
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/bb5852b4995f70c1fcb4e8f8589e7acd.mp3
664f549e919a6c23e42ab33bfaa94ea4
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.
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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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wav
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00:58:39
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Speech: Its Strength and Its Weaknesses
Description
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on February 23, 1973, by Jacob Klein as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Creator
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Klein, Jacob, 1899-1978
Coverage
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Annapolis, MD
Date
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1973-02-23
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The Greenfield Library holds the literary rights to Jacob Klein's work.
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sound
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mp3
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Oral interpretation
Language and languages
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English
Identifier
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Tape_100
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/28fc0ef83421bc48ced180ef9592f166.pdf
4752df1c50794c0b6c8b320b1782ea68
PDF Text
Text
On The Dis coverv of Deciucti ve Seier ,._:y
A Lecture Given at S t. John ' ::; C llege
o n September l ; , 1973
by Curtis Wilson
�On the Discovery of Jeductive Science
How did the notion of deductive science--science based on
defi r itio~s.
postulates_, and axioms, science consisting of a sequence of proposi tior:s.
each of which is deduced, either from previously deduced propositions, or
from the definitions, post ulates, and axioms initially set out--how did this
notion first come to be thought of. and then realized?
For there seems
to have been a partic ul ar moment in whic h this idea was first conceived;
so far as we can tell, it di d not meke its appeara nce at differe nt times
e nd places, independently .
conception?
Can we leer ;: a nythi ng about t he or igina_:_
I am going to pursue this question. altho ugn es you
wi~l
at once realize, it is not the sort of questio n that is likely to receive
a non-conjectural a nswer.
The grou - d
~ere
hes been worked into a deep
and slippery mud by the trampling feet of conte nding scholars;
merA
non-c lassi cists or not yet classicists like mvselt are liable to stLmble
over the m
oulde ri ng carcasses of de funct t heories, not yet dece ntly interreu
Certai n questions of historica l fact that are materia l to this discussior
I am able to answer only conj ectural ly .
At the sa m
e
time, I wish to
affirm that my primar y ai m is not to esta bl i sh historical facts, nor
vat
to hypothesize possible ca uses for those facts, but rather to locate
the mea ning of facts that, it seemed to me , come nearest to bei ng relieble .
I
went to be gin by sayi ng somethi ng a bout pre-Greek mathematics.
The oldest m
athematical documents know n from a ny place on t his earth are
Egy ptian papyr i stemming from the Middle Kingdom, 2000- lR OO B. C., and
clay ta blets dug out of the
sa~ds
of Mesopota mia, and stemming from abo ut
1800-1 600 E. C.
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�In figure I you see a transcription from a papyrus now in Moscow,
showing the computation of the volume of a truncated pyramid with square
base and top.
The base is four cubits on a side, the top two cubits on
a side, and the height or distance between base and top is six cubits.
The text says:
"Add together this 16 with this 8 and this 4. ;T6 is
the area of the base, 4 the area of the top, and 8 the product of the side
of the base by the side of the top~~
~e heighi7;
you get 2.
You get 28 .
Multiply 28 by 2.
Compute one-third of 6
You get 56 .
Behold: it is 56.
You have found right."
Now the result is right.
if you were building pyramids;
It is something you might want to know
but by the time of the Middle Kingdom
the Egyptians had ceased building pyramids , enjoyable though that occupation
seems to have been, as we gather from the inscriptions of rival work gangs.
It is not clear that there was any immediate practical reason for anyone
in the Middle Kingdom to know the rule for computing the volume of a
truncated pyramid.
in the first place .
But the real puzzle is how this rule was discovered
It is a complicated rule , and there is no plausible
empirical way of arri ving at it by, say , weighing certain objects; therefore
reasoning was involved .
But on the other hand, the Egyptian mathematicians
would not fall back on algebraic transformations in the modern manner ,
since their mathematics dealt e xplicitly only with particular numbers .
There are a number of hypotheses as to how the Egyptians' procedure could
have been arrived at, the most plausible , I think , involving a slicing of
the pyramid into parts.
Let us take another example.
"A square and a second square whose side is 2
have together an area of 100.
Cf.
+
4 of the first square,
Show me how to calculate this . ''
note that Egyptian fractions , with one exception , are unit fractions ,
fractions we would write with 1 as numerator.
They are written by
putting a line above the number we call the denominator.
The exception
was 2/3, written by putting two of these lines above the numeral 3.
Now for the solutionj]
"Take a square of side 1, and take 2
+
4 (3/4) of 1 as the side of the other
square.
"Multiply
2
+
i by itself;
this gives ~
+
16.
"Hence, if the side of one of the areas is taken to be 1, and that of the
other is
2
+
4,
then the addition of the areas gives 1
2
+
2
+
I6 .
�"Take the sQuare root of this;
it is l
+
4.
"Take the square root of the given number 100;
"How many times is l
+
4
contained in 10?
it is 10.
Answer B.. "
The two squares then have sides 8 x l = 8 and 8 x
t
= 6, the sum
of their squares being 100.
Now Egyptian mathematics has certain general characteristics .
Firs t, Egyptian m thematics, whatever it is dealing with--areas, volumes ,
a
numbers of bricks or loeves of bread or jugs of beer--is always a matter
of numerical calculation .
integers and fractions.
The mathema tician is a computer who uses both
Second, there are no explicit proofs whatever,
but reasonings have to have been emp l oyed in the solution of problems.
Fi nally , whil e the pr oblems prese nted in the papyri seldom appear to be
actua l practical pr ob le ms , they give
the ge neral impression of being
the sor t of proble ms tha t a n instruct or migh t think up for his s t udents,
in order to pre pare them for solvin g pr actical problems.
Instructors
seldom s ucc eed i n be ing strictly pra c ti cal, but the Egyptian ones appear
to have unde rstood their a ctivity as occurring within the horizon of the
practical .
A istotle claimed tha t the mathematical arts had been founded in Egypt ,
r
beca use there the pries t ly cla ss wa s allowed leisure;
but this is i ncor rec "'
The Eg yp tia n ca l c ul a tive art was the possession not of a priestly cla s s ,
bu t of scr ibes who ha d practical functions in the state, and among wh om
there wa s rivalry.
So we find one scribe ridiculing another:
"You come to m to inquire conce r ni ng the rations for the sol die r s,
e
and you say ' r e ckon it out.
1
You a r e deserting you:r office I •••.
I caus e you t o be abashed when I bring you a commend of your l or d,
you who e r e his Roya l Sc r i be .
A bu i lding ramp is to be constructed ,
730 cubits long , SS cubits wide, SS cubits high at its summit •• ••
The quantity of bricks needed for it is asked of the generals, a nd
the scribes are all asked t ogether , without one of them knowing
a nything.
They all put their trust in you •• • • Behold your name is
famous • • •
Answer us how many bricks are needed for it?"
It seems likely, then, that the mathematical papyri were textbooks used
in the school for scribes.
�In Babylonia, the m hematical texts appear to have been produced
at
by • similar class of scribes.
proofs ere entirely absent;
The texts give problems with their solutions;
t he procedures are always numerica l .
the problems practical problems?
example from the time of
Once again, yes and no.
Hammurabi ~
Are
Here is an
1700 B. C.:
"I have multiplied length and width, th us obtaining the area.
Then to the area I added the excess of the length over t he width.
The total res ult i s 183 .
with the result 27.
I omit the solutio n.
eq ua tion.
I have also added the length a nd width,
Required:
length, widt h, and area."
For us it would involve t he solutio n of a quadratic
This Babylonia n pro bl e m does not strike me a s a practical probl e m,
or a near neighbo r to one .
Th e adding of a length to a n area seems to me
decidedly impractical, per haps e ven nonsensical .
a bit haywi re:
This is ma the m
atics gone
a pedagog ue might inve nt it to bemuse his pupils, a lways
understa nding , of course, that
~alculating
is a good th ing.
Babylonia n mathemat i cs, however, is a go od deal more powerful t he n
Egyptian mathema ti cs .
Whe n the Babylo nian scri be wrote:
'f2 = lj
24,51,1 0
(I em using the I ndian numerals in place of t he Ba bylon ian), he m nt
ea
1
+
24
60
10
51
+ 602 +
603
This is the Babylo nian approximation to the sq uare root
of 2, or diagonal of a square of unit side.
The Babylonians definitely knew a nd used t he proposit i on we call t he
theore m of Pythagoras, which is i nvol ved in getti ng thi s approximation,
but nowhere do any of the c lay tablets that have bee n decip hered give
a proof of this or any othe r t heorem .
The approximation, which is pr obably
t he result of a series of successively closer approximations, is good to
one-millionth .
Ptolemy will still be using i t, ha ving a cquire d it probab l y
indirectly from the Ba bylo nians, when he computes his ta ble of chords
in the second century A. O.
Now if we turn to other civilizations besides the
Eg y~tia n
and the
Babylonia n , but still uninfluenced by Greek thought-- the civilization of
the Yellow River valley , say, or
Maye~
civllization- - I think we shall once
agai n find e computational art, often highly developed , but not explicit
deductions .
You may on occas ion find the contrary asserted.
Joseph Needham
in his Science a nd Civilization in China gives a passage from a Chinese
mathematical text which perhaps origi nated as early as t he 4th century B. C. .
it is accompanied by a diagram which he labels "proof of the Pythagoras
Theorem" (Fig ure 2 ·, P. 5).
4
�I quote from the text:
"Of old, Chou Kung addressed Sheng Kao, saying, "I have heard that the
Grand Prefect L'.Ihat is Sheng K~ is versed i n the art of numbering .
May I ve nture to inquire how Fu-Hai anciently established the decrees
of the celestial sphere? ••• I should like to ask you what was the
origin of these numbers?
~ the course of his reply Sheng Kao say!!i/
" Lat us cut a rectangle diagonally, and make the width 3 units, and
the length 4 units.
5 units l ong.
The diago nal between the corners will t hen be
Now after
drawin~
a square on this diagonal, circumscribe
it by hal f rectangles like that which has been lsft outside, so as to
form a square plate.
Thus the outer half recta ngles of width 3, l ength
4, and diagonal 5, together make two recta ng les ~ total area
then the remai nder L'.Ihat is, of the square of area
This is called ' pil i ng up the rectangles.
4.27
.££7;
is of area 25.
1
"The methods used by Vu the Great in governing the world were
derived from these numbers •••
He who understands t he earth is a wise
m n, and he who unde rsta nds the heavens is a sage.
a
derived fro m a straig ht line.
rig ht angle .
Knowledge is
The straig ht line is derived from the
And the comb i natio n of t he r ight angle with numbers is
what guides and r ules the ten thousand things.
"Chou Kung exclaimed, ' Excel lent indeed!'"
Nothing here, I would
u rge~
theore m of Pythagoras, so-called.
has really been proven, certainly not the
Needha m hes shown in overwhelm
ing detail
that be twee n the 5th century B.C. and the 15th century A. O. no people on
earth exercised more tech nical ingenuity then the Chinese.
5
Lo~
in advance
�of the West, they possessed caste i r on, en escapement c lock, the navigational
compass, gunp0111der, printi ng by movable type, the segmental arch bridge.
But as for deductive science, the Chinese would not encounter it until the
Jesuits came to China in the late 16t h ce ntury, bringing the textbooks of
their fellow J esuit, Christopher Cla vius.
It is e cur i ous fact that, for
some centuries thereafter, Chinese students reciting their Eu clidean theorem
out of Clevius would finish not with our Q.E. D. but wit h the Chinese word
for "nail."
Apparently they were citing their
a uth ori ty ~
"c la vus 11 being
the Latin word for " nai l."
It is conceivable t hat some day, in the investigatio n of early
civilizations un i nflue nced by Greece, evide nce wi ll turn up for the existence
of some pieces of ded uctive mathemat i cs.
On t he basis of what is known today ,
the prospects for s uch a find are di m.
Ded uctive mathemat ics is a rare
bird, which first settled, so far as we
k n ow~
How did it happen 9
in Greece.
Whet did it mea n tha t it ha ppe ned?
Seeking a n
answer, I t ur n to a doc ume nt of late a ntiquity, a comme ntary on t he first
book of Euclid's Elements written by Proc lus in the middle of the 5th
century A. O.
Proclus was a member of the Pl atonic Academy i n Athens
during the last ce ntury of its 900-yeer existence.
The comme ntary i ncludes
e kind of catalog ue of ancient geome ters which is based on an earlier history
of geometry, now lost, by Eudemus, a disciple of Aristotle writi ng in the
late 4th century B.C.
The acco unt begi ns by sa ying that geome t ry was first
discovered among the Egyptia ns , and originated in the remeasuri ng of their
lands necessitated by the a nnua l floodi ng of the Ni le.
Prac l us then proceeds
as fol lows:
Thales, having travelled in Egypt, first i ntroduced this theory into
Hallas .
H discovered ma ny things himse lf , and pai nted t he road to
e
the pri nciples of ma ny others, to those who came after hi m, attacking
some questions in a m
ore ge neral way, and others i n a way more depe nde nt
on sense perceptio n.
Gfter me ntioning the names of two other a nc i e nt geometers, Proc lus
co n ti nues~
After t hese, Pythagoras tra nsformed t he phi losophy of t his (geometry)
into a schem of liberal education.
e
He surveyed its princi ples from the
highest on down, and investigated its t he ore ms s e parately fro m matter
end intellectually.
He it was who discovered the doc trine of irrationals
�and the constr uction of the cosmic figures.
A little farther on we
read~
.
.
.
.· .
.
Hippocrates of Chics, who invented the method of squaring lunules
(crescents formed from arcs of circles) and Theodorus of Cyrene
became eminent in geometry.
For Hippocrates wrote a book on elements,
the first of whom we have any recbrd who did so.
With respect to
Procl us says.
Hi~pocrates
A ffagment of
of Chics, there is no reason to doubt what
Hippocrat~s'
work on lunules still exists,
end i t shows a high level of .r igor • . ThusHippocrates may very will have
writte n a book on the ele ments of geometry .
Thus, at the time Hippocrates
was teaching geometry in Athen s, around 430 B. C., the process of tur ning
geometry into a ded uctive science :was in all probability well advanced.
Thales, who was active abo ut a ce nt ury and a half before Hippocrates
of Chios, is a much more shadowy figure , end it is unclear
interpret what Procl us says about him .
ho~
we should
Proclus attributes to Thales the
discovery a nd proof of five propositions:
(1)
A circle is bisected by any diameter.
(2)
V
ertical a ngles of intersecting straight lines are equal.
(3)
The ba se a ng les of an isosceles triangle are equal.
(4)
Two triangles s uch that two a ngl es a nd the included side of one
are equal to two a ngles a nd the i ncl ud ed side of t he other,
are themselves eq ual .
(5)
The a ngl e at the periphery of a semicircle is right.
Now these are general , theoretical propositions, theorems, propositions
to be contemplated rather than mere rules for sol utio n of problems.
The e nunciatio n of the m may therefore mark a decisive step in the emergence
of theoretical scie nce.
But how were they proved?
The usual guess is that
it was by superpositio n, the visual showing that one figure or part of a
fig ure would coi ncide with a nother .
If this is right, the n it is unlikely
t hat we have here the notion of a logically co nstructed theory which begins
with expressly enunciated premises and advances step by s tep.
need not have e nunc i ated any premises explicitly.
to the principles, es Proc lus says;
TI:lales
He pointed the road
the extent to which he laid out
principles is totally unclear.
As for Pythagoras, .
who~.e
books have been devote. in recent times
d
to showi ng that the encie'n t eccol..ints . of his mathematical exploits are
7
�unworthy of trust.
2
These accounts stem from members of the Platonic
Academy from the 4th century and later, men who saw in t'ie 6th-century
oythegoras a forerunner of Plato, and who tended to attribute to him
discoveries that had been made later on i n the Pythagorean tradition.
Pythagoras cannot have known all the five cosmic figures, because two of
them, the octahedron and the icosahedron, were first discovered by Theaetetus,
a contemporary of Plato .
evidence that
lines.
Pythegor~ s
Contrary to what Proclus says, there is no good
knew anything abo ut the doctrine of irrational
The old verse quoted by Plutarch, according to which Pythagoras,
on making a certain geometrical discovery, sacrificed an ox,
cannot be true, because it is well attested that Pythagoras was a vegetarian,
who believed in transmigretior, of souls end was opposed to the killing of
What we can be fairly sure of, with regard to Pythagoras, aside
animals.
of course from his having had a golden thigh, is that he had made the flight
to the Beyond end had become the leader of a cul t, a medicine men, a shaman.
He can well heve taught that odd numbers ere ma le, even numbers female;
that five is the marriage number;
1, 2, 3, end 4.
that ten is perfect, being the sum of
Somewhat similar beliefs have been found ell over the
world, in connecti on with rituals end creation myths, and have not led to
ded uc tive mathematics.
Pythagoras' thought see m to have been cosmogonic,
s
concerned with t he coming-to-be of our world out of somethi ng prior e nd
more f undamental.
There is no trustworthy evide nce that Pythagoras ever
carried out an $xplicit proof.
On the other hand, the transformation in the character of mathematics
that Proclus attributes to Pythagoras may well have bee n brought about by
Pythegoreahs .
tradi tion;
The old accounts
~peak
of a split within the Pythagorea n
the Mathematikoi, those who wished to discuss &ild teach openly
the mathematicel disciplines, separated off from the secret cult, the
Akousmetikoi , the hearers of the sacred end secret sayings.
Reliable
4th-century so_
urces ep_eek of the eri th.rneticel studies of the 5th-century
Pythagoreans.
Ar istotle says that the so-celled Pythag oreans were the
first to deal with mathamete, mathematical disciplines.
According to
the Epinomis, a dialogue written either by Plato or a follower of Plato,
the first and primary disciplines o.r me theme of the Pythagoreans was eri thmetic.
Now it is possible to make a plausible recanstruction of some
8
�of this early Pythagorean arithmetic.
When this is done, we find
ourselves before a piece of deductive science, quite possibly the
earlies~
thst ever was;
and it is a science in which the principles
are explicit, anr in which the theorems are, to use Proclus' terms,
investigated independently of matter and intBllectually.
The reconstruction necessarily starts from Euclid's text, which
appears 1o be : to a certain extent, a compilation from earlier texts which
it drove
we
~now
o~t
of circulation, and which are now wholly lost, so that
of them only from certain references by Aristotle or Plato or
other ancient eJthors.
The reconstruction proceeds by a kind of literary
archaeology.
Flourishings
s.c.
Thales
fl or. 585
Pythagoras
flor. 550 B.C .
Parmenides
flor. 475 B.C.
Hippocrates of Chios
flor. 430 B.C.
Archytas of Tarentum
flor. 400 B.C.
Theaetetus
c. 415-369 B.C.
'"llato
c. 428-348 B.C.
ristotle
A
384-322 B.C.
Euclid
flor. 300 B.C.
Permi t me t o give here a set of not very reliable dates.
Flourishin~
was something Greeks did as a rule at age 40, j ust as they often died at
80, to suit the taste f or symmetry of a certain 2nd-century B.C . chronographer named Apollodorus.
Euclid wrote about 300 B.C.
There are good
gr ounds to believe that a good deal of geometry had been organized as
Ei
deducti ve science by the time of Hippocrates of Chics, about 430 B.C.;
end there are plausibilities in assuming that portions of arithmetic had
been organized deductively even earlier.
In discussing this development,
I shell went to refer to Parmenides, who lived in the first half of the
5th century;
to Archytas of Tarentum, a Pythagorean end friend of Plato
living around the tur n of the 5th end 4th centuries;
and to Theaetetus,
another friend of Plato, who died es a result of battle wounds in 369
s.c.,
and was ona of the greet mathematicians of antiquity, being the author,
in ell probability, of nearly ell of books X end XIII of Euclid's Elements.
9
�In 1936, Dakar Becker pointed out a number of peculiar facts
concerning Propositions 21-34 of Book IX of Euclid.
These theorene are
for the m9et pert so obvious that it is herd to imagine why anyone would
be eo fussy es to want them proved.
"If as many even numbers as we please
be added together, the whole is even."
Certainly.
"If from an even number
an even number be subtracted, th,., remainder will be ever.."
Who will doubt it?
The proofs, with one exception, do not depend on any previous theorems
in Euclid's Elements:
tney depend rather on certain definitions given
et the start of Book VII, the first of the arithmetical books .
exceptio n, IX .32, depends on IX.13.
The one
Bu t Bec ker sus pects the proof as we
now have it to be Euclid 's eme nda tion of the origina l proof;
that IX.32 follows quite stra igh tforwardl y fro m IX .3 1 .
he s hows
Th us Proposit i ons
IX.21 to IX.34 can be a self-s uf ficient set of prop osi tions depe nde nt only
on certain defi ni tio ns.
Moreover, with one cur ious except ion , no thi ng else
in Euclid 's Elements depe nds on t he s e propositio ns.
The exceptio n is the
last propositio n of Book IX . whi ch moder n editors dele te as no t being
integral to Book X.
It i s the ancient proof of the incom
rnens urability of
the side and diagonal of the square, a nd what i t depends on is t he doctri ne
of the even and the odd, a nd more
specifically ~
Propositio ns 32-34 of Book IX.
Becker believed that, origi na l ly, before i ncorpora ti on i n Euclid's
Eleme nts, the doctrine of the eve n a nd the odd had led to another co nseque nce,
the traces of which have bee n left i n Euclid.
Propositio ns 21-34 of Book IX
are followed by two fi nal propositions , 35 and 36 ;
35 is used for the proof
of 36, and 36 shows how to construct a perfect number--perheps all perfect
numbers, but t hat I believe is not yet known.
Euclid 's proofs for these
two propositions depend on propositions in Book VII having to do with
ratios of numbers.
Becker shows that 35 a nd 36 can be proved on the bas i s
of the immediately precedi ng propositions of Book IX, independe ntly of
any reference to ratios.
Thus Becker's c onj ecture is that, long before
Euclid, there existed a treatise on the even a nd t he odd, includi ng Propositio ns
21-36 of Book IX and t he lest proposition of Bo ok X;
t hat out of piety
Euclid or some ancient editor added this treatise to the Elemen ts, then,
in an effort to integrate this addition with the whole, changed sona of
the proofs, making use of propositio ns on numerical ratios from Book VII .
This hypothesis et least accounts for the pec ul iarit ies of Book IX that
I have cited.
J (1
�- That s uch a doctri ne of the even and the odd already existed in the
5th century is supported by the fact that Plato defines arithmetic as
the doctrine of the even and the odd, and refers to this doctrine as
a familiar discipline.
Following Be cker, Van der Wee rde n has argued that most of Book VII
of Euclid had also been worked out in the 5th century.
One of his arguments
is that Archytes of Tarentum, in a work on musical theory written about
400 B. C., depends on propositions found in Book VIII , a nd these propositions
depend in turn on propositions in Book VII .
Now since Ar chytas is punctilious
in working out the mos t trivial syllogisms, it is extremely unlikely that
he me rely ass umed the propoeitio ns he needed;
be already proved.
he must have known theffi', to
On the other ha nd, if the propositions of Bo ok VII
existed in any form in Archytas' time, then Van der W
aerde n concludes that
t hey must have bee n i n almost exactly their preeent for m and thus in
apple-pie order;
for Book VII is worked out with gree t care and !n
such a strictly logical fashion that no step c:e n be removed withodt',
the whole collapsi ng.
There are other cl ues that lea d Va n der W
aerden
to believe t hat most of Book VII was complete be fore Hippocrates of Chios
wrote in lunules .
Two pieces of ded uct i ve arit hmet i c, then, along with fUppocrates
1
quadra t ure of l unules, constit ute th e available presumpt ive evide nce for
the character of 5th-century de ducti ve m
ett.rMtics.
Ca n we learn a nything
fro m them, which m ht throw light on t he question of what it meant for
ig
them to come to be?
I want to ta ke up, first, t he demonstratio ns , then,
the premises on whic h t hey are based .
Every Euclidea n propositio n e nds wit h th e ste r eot yped f ormula ,
~¥ l~1. JeC.taf<.., m ning : the very thing that it was necessar y to s how.
ea
The i nfinitive h e re,dEt~C\"(., seems to he ve had the origi nal mea ni ng of
s howi ng vis ually.
Thus in Pl ato's dialog ue Cr a tylus
Socrates says:
"Ca n I not step up to a men a nd se y to him , ' This is your
portrait~
a nd show him perhaps his own likeness or, perhaps, that of a womanr
And by 'show' (bK~~)
! mean,-· br!~ before the se nse of sight. "(430
Early geometry must have been primarily a kind of visual showing, the
pointi ng out of a symmetry, or the poseibility of the coincidence of
two figures, superposition.
But in Euclid's text every effort is made
to red uce the dependence on s uperposition to a minimum .
Thus we co m
E
w
s uspect that there was pre•nt a kind of anti-illustrative, anti-empirical
11
8
)
�tendency in mathematics, as it was being transformed into deductive science.
Thie same tendency is detectible in arithmetic as we ll as geometry.
Pythagorean arithmetica l doctrines seem to have been originally worked
out and taught with the aid of calc ulating pebbles.
There is a frag ment of
the comic poet Epicharmus, writte n proba bly before 500 B.C ., that r uns as
followa:
"~hen
there is e n eve n number present, or, for all I care, en odd
number, and someone wants to add a pebble or to take one away , do
you think that the number remai ns uncha nged?"
"Not me!"
"W
ell, the n, look at people:
one grows, a nother one perhaps gets
shorter, and they are co nstantly s ubj ect to c ha nge.
Bu t whatever
is changeable in charac ter and does not re ma i n the same, that is
certainly different fro m what is c hanged.
You and I are also
differe nt people f rom what we were yesterday, a nd we will still be
different i n the f ut ure, so that by the s ame argument we are never
the same."
Presumably the sl y rogue goes on to arg ue that he need not pay the debt
he contracted the day before .
ristotle, too, speaks of t he Pythagorean ·pebble fig ur es, t he tria ngles ,
A
squares, and rectangles formed of pebbles with which the Pythagoreans ta ught
arithmetica l truths.
W can easily see how t he y could have satisfied
e
themselves, with their pebble figures, of the propositio ns co ncer ni ng the
even end the odd.
Take Proposition IX.30:
if an odd number is t he divisor
of an even number, the n this sa m odd number is also the divisor of half
e
the even number .
0(
I
. , ...
••
••
•••
y
•
1•
I
••
•
/3 ,
eve n number
i •••
The nu mber will be a rectangular numbe r, with our odd number , the divisor,
represented by the pebbles for ming one of the sides.
But the number as
a whole is even, hence divisible in half, es by the vertical line.
W see
e
at once, then, that our odd number is a side of the hal f rectangle, hence
a divisor of the half.
The proof of this proposition in Euclid is qui te different.
ere not represented by points, but rather by lines.
The numbers
W know that A
e
rchytas
repreaente numbers in this way, by lines, as a matter of course, and
12
�presumably, therefore, this . mode of representation had become
before his time, that is, already in the 5th century.
~ow
co~ventic - ~ .
by looki no a:
a line which represents a number, one cannot tell whether the number i s
even or odd, since any line can be halved:
consequently, Euclid's visual
representation of the numbers does not help us at all to see
wh~
the
proposition is true.
A pebble configuration could only represent visuall ;
a particular number ;
the new representation has the advantage of generality ,
but it also has the disadvantage that it forces one to look for an entirelv
new proof.
The ne w proof that
~uclid
gives 0s involves the famous reduction
to the absurd, or indirect demonstratio r..
that the odd number
Ct(",
The important step is to show
the divisor, measures the even number~ an even
number of times, or in other words, that the quotient,
i:::uclid's argument runs as follows:
possible, let it be so.
Now
C(
I
SS '/
that
multipl ,,,in g
y
taker at the start to be odd , and an odd number
y
y ,
is not odd , for if
8 . end
makes
multipl yi~ g
yie ld s onl y an odd number , as Euclid has oreviouslv showr.
would be odd, which is impossible
at t he start to be even.
1
!x~ if V~To V
i s even.
' },
0(
was
an odd numbe r
Therefore it
because it was take;r
Thus the anti-illustrative tendency brings with
it the reductio ad abs urdum proof .
It is s urpris ing how many red uct io proofs occur in t he arithmetical
treatises that , accordi ng to Becker a nd Ve n der Wa erde n , stem from the
5th-ce ntury D
ythegoreans.
In propositions 21-36 of Book !X there are
s ix s uch proofs. or eight if we accept Becker's
35 and 3E.
reconstr ~ ctions
of 32,
Tn the first theore ms of Book VII there ere 15 s uch proofs .
Moreover, t he proof of the incommens urability of the side and diagonal
of the souare is also a reductio, and in this case we have to do with
a truth whi c h is altogether non-vis uali za bl e.
Let m pause to review
e
the strategy ot that proof.
oe)e
relatively prime, therefore not both even.
2
2
2
0( = 2 f> • The refore 0(
is even,
Therefore
is even.
~
Therefore
~2 =
Therefore~
an even
numb~r .
=an even rumt~r.
f{(J ~Va, To V
�Suppose, if possible, that the side and diagonal of a square .!!:.!.
colTllHtnaurable.
Then there would be a length that measured both, and also
a largest such length.
~ times, and the side
Now 0( and
/3
Lat this largest such length measure the diagonal
f,
times, where 0( and
fJ
are integers or whole numbers.
cannot both be even, for otherwise our unit length could
have been doubled, and the numbers helved, contrary to the assumption that
the unit length was the largest possible;
must be odd.
so at least one of the numbers
The sequence of the proof then shows that both must be even,
or as Aristotle says in referring to this proof, that the same number must
be both even and odd.
The only alternative left is to relinquish the
original assumption that
commensurable.
0(
and
f3 exist, or that s i de a nd di agonal are
In this demonstration human reason exhibits a rather
astonishing power, the power to discover whet eyesight could never in
any way disclose.
This discovery would e ncourage the a nti-ill ustrative
tendency, a nd t he reco urse to indirect proofs.
It also implies that geometry
cannot be subsumed under arithmetic, a nd needs therefore to be built up
as en independent science in its own right.
But the releva nt point at
this moment is that the emergence of ded uctive scie nce appears to be
connected with this anti-ill ustrative tende ncy, a nd with the closelyconnected introduction of reductio proofs.
What about the principles or premises of Pythagorean arithmetic?
I have already mentioned that t he premises of the doctri ne of the eve n
end the odd are to be found amo ng the definitio ns of Eucl id 's Book VII ,
and only there.
The same thing goes for the doctrine concerning divisi-
bility and proportionality found in Book VII itself.
And fundamentally,
ell the definitions of Book VII rest on the first two definitio ns , the
definition of number--a number is a multitude composed of unit s or monads-and then the definition of monad :
monad is that according to which each
of the things that are, each of the beings, is called one.
definitions do, above all, is to
whole numbers .
li~it
the following
what these
discussio~
to
Comparing this Greek arithmetical theory with Egyptian
and Babylonian numerical work, we see that the Greek theory is s harply
distinguished by its careful avoidance of fractions;
and the first
definition, whatever else it is doing, is expressing this prohibition
against fractions, this insistence on the indivisibility of the one or
unit.
This insistence
1119S
already traditional in Plato 's time.
14
�In the Republic Socrates speaks of "the teaching concerning the one ·•
(
(
\.
1t 7rFf<-
I
/e
C/
le &v f<~ l')<rr~
),
end explains whet he means by it,
I quote:
••• You er g doubtless aware that experts in this study, if anyone
to c ut up the 'one' in argument, laugh at him and refuse
atte~pts
to allow it ;
but if you mince it up, they multiply , always on
guard lest the one should appear to be not one but a multiplicity
of parts ••• Suppose now ••• someone were to ask them, "My good friends,
whet numbers ere these you are talking about, in which the one is
s uch as you post ulate, each unit equal to every other without the
slig htest differe nce end admitting no division into perts?"
do you think wo ul d be their answer?
What
This, I think---that they are
speaki ng of units which can only be co nceived by thought, a nd
which it is not possible to deal with i n a ny other way,
~hy
Socrates' expla natio n tells us
had to be i nsisted upon ;
the indivisibility of" the one
if t he one were divisible, then (t would be
a multiplicity of parts, hence many, not one.
t hat the one is
In other words, the though t
divisi ble is self-contradictory.
Thus the insistence
on the indivisibility of the one, which is Eu clidean and also, accordi ng
to Plato ' s Socrates i n the Republic, pre- Platonic, is the concl usion of
an indirect demonstratio n, a reduction to the abs urd.
I have not yet taken up the pr inciples used i n early ded uctive
geome try, but let me recapit ulate whet I have said, and consi der wha t
it s uggests.
The earliest ded uctive sc i e nce, as far as we ca n tell ,
wa ~
the arithmetical theory of the so- ca lled Pythagoreans of the 5th ce ntur ·
Their scie nce dif f ers fro m all earlier ma t hematics, first , in exhibiti ng
e n a nti-empi rical tende ncy, whic h sough t to eliminate mere visual showing .
as wit h the pebble fig ures ;
second ly, in m
aking use of indirect demonstretior·
or proof of som
ething by red uct ion of its opposi t e to absurdity :
thirdly,
in i ns isti ng upon the indivisibility of the one, on the ground that
admissio n of its divisibility would co ntradict the very meaning of t he
word "one . "
N these feat ures cell to mind certai n lines that remain of
ow
a poem written early in the 5th century, the poem by Pa rme nides of Elea :
end to no other author of this time can these features be related ,
try to sa1 some words about the poem of Parmenides.
Only fragments of it remain.
controversial.
Their interpretation is thoroughly
There is widespread assurance that, whatever it was that
p:;
�Parmenides meant, he was wrong.
On the other hand, it will be little
conteatad, I believe, if I say that Parmenides was the founder of Dialectic.
Aristotle says that Zeno of Elaa, Parmenides' pupil, was the founder
dialectic;
of
but I think that may be because Zeno wrote out arguments in
prose, whereas Parmenides wrote a poem in epic verse, while dialectic has
essentially nothing to do with verse. I believe there is also rather
general agreement that Parmenides, in composi ng his poem, was responding
to, and attacking, earlier cosmogonies, which sought to derive all the
variety and diversity of the world out of some underlying stuff, understood to be the real stuff of the world.
The poet begins by describing his journey in a chariot, drawn by
that know the way, end escorted by the Daughters of the Sun .
mar~s
arrive, high in the sky, before the gates of Nigh t a nd Day.
They
The Sun
Maidens persuade t he Goddess Justice to ope n the gates, a nd Permenides is
welcomed by the goddess who takes his hand and ass ures him that it is right
end just that he, a mortal, should have take n this road.
H must now learn
e
both the unshaken heart of well-rounded truth, a nd the un r el iable beliefs of
mortals.
The goddess describes three ways of i nquir y:
(~dr() and cannot not be;
attenda nt of Truth;"
rily not be;
first, "That it i s,
..
this is the way of Pers uasion, f or s he is the
second, "That it is not
(OU!f.
E;o't'"<./) , and must necessa-
this I tell you is a way of t ota l ignorance;"
"That it is, e nd it is not , t he same a nd not the same;
third,
this is the wa y
t hat ignorant mortals wander, bemused."
An initial difficulty t hat we face i s t hat , altho ugh t he pronoun "it"
is not expressed in Greek, we can hardly resist t he impress ion that there
is something that is being talked abo ut, a nd we s houl d like t o know what
it is .
The next fragme nts may be helpful .
"It is the same th ing that ca n be thought and ca n be."
''b.lhat ca n be spoken of and thought must be;
for it is possible
for it to be , but it is not possible for nothing to be.
These
things I bid thee ponder . "
In a preliminary a nd s uperfi cial way I think I can conclude that
the subject of the verb €0"'C~Y is:
that which is intended in thought,
what we call the object of thought.
argument:
that which thought intends
16
The goddess is presenting an
~
exist;
but nothing ca nnot exist;
�therefore thac which thought intends cannot be nothing;
hence it
must exist.
The syllogism holds, I believe, although at that point in time
logic had not been i nvented.
But whet does it meen?
way is cannot be entertained in thought.
it is intentional in character .
That which in no
Thought always is of somethi ng ,
Hence I must accept the
Gedde s ~ '
rejection
of the seco nd way, or non-way, of inouiry .
But the Goddess means somethi ng more.
Some of this "more" emerges
es she proceeds to dispose of t he third wey of inquiry.
This '.: che way
whereo n, she says, mortals who know no thi ng wa nder two-headed;
guides the wa ndering thought in thei r breasts;
both deaf
perplexity
they are borne a t ong,
e nd blind, bemused, es undiscer ning hordes, who have decided
to believe that it is , and it is not, t he same and not the sa m , and
e
for whom there is a way of a ll things that t ur ns back upon itself .
says the goddess, "shall this be proved:
"Never,"
are not, ere;
that things tha t
but do tho u hold beck thy thought from this way of
inq uiry, nor let cust om t hat comes of much experie nce force t hee to
cast alo ng this way a n aimless eye a nd a noise-cl utte red ear and tongue ,
but judge t hrough logos (t hrough reasoning ) t he hard-hitti ng re futat io·
I have uttered. "
"It is necessery,"adds the Goddess,"to say and to think t hat Be ing is . "
Now i n one way , t his is ell simple and unde ni.l!!ble.
Whe n I entertai n
a n idea, when I use e word to sig ni fy some idea, I inte nd what I affi
of es a consta nt, invaria ble.
t~inki ~ g
N
ever mind that my thought, m intending
y
of what I a m t hinking ab out, is a s hifting a nd not ver y co nt r ollaoi e
process.
What i s t hought e nd named is i ntended as having a certain
fixity .
Ot he rwi se, as A totle puts it , to seek tr uth wou l d be to
ris
follow flyi ng game.
W wo uld be reduced to t he level of Crat ylus, wn0
e
did not think it ri ght to say a nyt hing , a nd instead only moved hi s f inger,
a nd who criticized H
erecleitus for s a ying that it is imposs ible to step
t wice into the same river, for he, Cretylus, said t ha t one could not do it
eve n once.
On one level , the words of the Goddess are simply telling
u~
whet t he prereq ui sites e nd necessities are for speech and thought that
will be free of contradictio n.
Per~e ni des'
poe m is the ear li est docume-
preserved fro m the past whic h speaks explicitly of the logical necess i L1es
of thought .
�V.t the diecouree of the Goddeee ie more strange end frightening,
or ineane, or ee Whitehead might say, important, then I have bean making
it out to be.
The Goddess is not concerned with just anything that
might be thought;
Being.
aha is concarned--she aeys so again and again--with
What is all this silly talk about Being?
Being to do but be?
What else is there for
"It is necessary," says the Goddess,"to eay and
to think that Being is."
Is it?
Then is it necessary t:.o say and to think
that rain rains, that thunder thunders, or that lightening lightenings,
and are not these parallel caaee?
to this question.
I shall litter come back, vary briefly,
It is just here that the poem becomes exasperating end
impossible, prompting Aristotle to eay more than once:
false, and the conclusions do not follow.
the premises are
From the fact that Being just
ia, the Goddess proceeds to conclude that Being is precisely One, and
contain• no plurality, no multiplicity or differentiation within it,
and no motio n.
In particular, a nd to A
ristotle's great disgust, the
Elastics claim to have discovered the self-contradictory character of
motion.
It is Zeno, Parmenides 1 pupil, who formulates this discovery
ir the most memorable wa y.
The flyi ng arrow is in every insta nt exactl y
where it is, is et rest in the space equal to itself, and since this is
true of every moment of its fli ght , it is a lways at res t , it does not
move.
N
ever mind the mortal wound we thi nk it ca n i nflict;
this does
not answer the argument, it does not tell us how m
otion can be consistently
thought.
The ques tio n is not whether Ze no is wrong but how.
being debated in
th~
It is still
philosophical journals.
In the case of Parmenides, a more insistent ques t ion is what he can
have meant by his poem.
There is a second part to it, called the W of
ay
Seeming or Opinion, of which 40 lines remain, and this speaks of the
coming-to-Iba of the uisible things of our ordinary world out of Fire end
Night.
Di d Parme nides intend the Way of Op inion to have a ny validity at
all, or only to present the bemused and e rring beliefs of
mortals~
Plutarch remarks that
P•rmanide~
has taken away neither fire nor water nor rocks nor
precipices, nor yet cities ••• for he has written very largely of
tl!\e.aarth, heaven, su n, moon end stars, end hes spoken of the
generation of men.
Treditione credit Parmenides with having given laws to the city of Elea ,
and with having bean the firet to aay that the Earth is round, that the
18
�Moon shines by reflected light, and that the m
orning star is identical
with the evening star--momentous diecoveries every one of the m.
But
such actions and discoveries do not seem easily compatible with the
teeching about Being that the goddess has set forth, with such emphasis,
such imperial absolutism.
no place in it for
huma~
The heart of well-rounded truth appears to have
law , for the earth's rotundity and its conical
shadow, for Venus and her i.rregularities, or for Parrnenides or you or me .
The speech of the
Godde~s
is
never~heless
as I have said, dialectic takes its start.
sophists begins.
fateful.
With Parmenides,
The age of those called
Gne of the earliest of them, Protagoras, is clearly
reacting to Parmenides whe n he makes his famous statement :
man, he says,
is the measure of all things, of the things that are, that they ere, and
of the things that are not, that they are not.
Who but Parmenides had
raised these questions about Being and not-Being?
Protagoras has concluded
that the Parmenidean standard of truth, that is, freedom from contradiction ,
is unreachable;
thought, he thi nks , inevitably involves contradiction.
Therefore he t urns to sense-experience, end asserts his right to say that
the same thing ca n et one time be, a nd et another tinE not be , according
es he, Protagoras, holds it to be or not to be.
In Protagoras' time and
later, there will be other objectors with other form ulati ons, rejecting
the speech of the Parmenidean Goddess in othe r ways.
argues, first, that nothing is;
known;
Gorgies, for insta nce,
second, that if anything is, it cannot be
third, that if anythi ng is end can be known, it ca nn ot be expressed
i n speech.
Among the Permenideen sequels, I want to suggest, was deductive arithmetic.
For according to A
ristotle, Parmenides was the first to speak of
the Dre accordi ng to logos, according to definition;
end arithmetic seems
to have become deductive just when the Pythagoreans set out to fou nd the
doctrine of the even end the odd on the definition of the One, on
its
essential indivisibility, end proceeded in Pa rmenidean style to formulate
proofs which relie d no longer on visualization but rather on non-contradiction of the logos .
Of course--ar,d this is a crucial qual ificetion--no ari thmeticien could
follow the teaching of the Par,menideen Godd$SS strictly.
W
hen the deductive
eri th.metician took his start from the indivisibility of the One, ha was
proceeding in accordance with e Parmenidean neceaeity of thought.
19
W
hen he
�went on to multiply the O . in order that
ne,
violating the
Permenicle~
W of Truth.
ey
arithm~tic
might be, he was
Permenidean-wise, how could
there be many ones, each exactly the eeme ea every other, and yet each
retaining its identity to the extent of remaining separate from the others?
The way in which these many ones can be, or ere in being, is e question
not for arithmetic, but for meta-arithmetic, but apparently the arithmeticians recognized that their discipline depended on the question
about being.
The Euclidean definition of Monas, One, reads:
Mona s is
that in accordance with which each of the beings is celled one.
A plurality
of beings--what they are rema ins unclear--is here presupposed.
Ae for geometry, the violations of the Permenidean logos that are
necessary in order for it to becom.e deductive are m
ore
The
drastic~
definitions of point and line with which Euclid begins Book I were no
doubt modelled on the definitions of One and N
umber, but there is a world
of difference between the cases.
~ithout
is
The definitions tell us that e point
parts, that a line is without breadth, but we cannot go on
to derive any geometrical propositio n from these rattier problematic de nials .
It was the questionable character of the geometrical things that led Protagoras to reject the possibility of geometry altogether:
does not touch e straight pole in one point only;
impossible, Q.E.D.
a wheel, he said,
therefore geometry is
But even if the geometrical definitions are granted,
thPy do not provide a s ufficient bas is for the organi zation of geometry
as a deductive sc i ence.
At the beg i nning of Euclid's Elements three kinds of principles ere
set out.
('/
ofo~
First, definitions or
.,,,
...
third, common notions or KO<V<lit.
second, postulates or
E:.VVO<~.
argued that the term }(.oe,vo,l l11vrx.O(<.
and therefore not due to Euclid.
may 111&11 have been ~!~crrcl';
;
)
,,
~("ttYrcy';
About a century ago, it wes
had to be of late Stoic origin,
Wes the:r:e an ear lier Greek term?
rt
this is the term that Proclus constently
uaae instead of Not~ /v~cqc.. , end it may heve been the term in front of
him in his Euclidean text.
ueae
'
~"
~1'bv~r~f~
Instead of ~t. for definitions, Proclus commonly
this usage is found earlier in Archimedes, end earlier
still i n Plato's Republic, wher.e the odd end the even, end the various kinds
'
of figures end angles are said to be tr.a.tad in the sciences that deal with
them es Jir.fitf<Y&S
and ~~J'µ q'71(
•
All thi-ee of these terms,
m fJttYErte,
, ~tr{µ ty'7"tY
, were connected at one time with the practice of dialectic.
�The t er m o{c,7.J!A-~T~, post ulates, comes fro m t he ver b C(~T{w, to req uire,
to ask. " W never, " Procl us tells us, "the stateme nt is unk nown and neverhe
theless is take n as tr ue wi th out th e stude nt's conced i ng it, t he n, A
ristotle
J/
says, we cal l it a n C{ l TY)f'ACX:·"
J
whic h ca n al s o mea n to require, to ask;
dialogues.
I
,
/
The ter m ~cwf(~o(comes f rom ~ww,
it is ofte n so used i n the Platonic
To be s ure, Pr oclus sa ys of the axioms th8 t they are deemed by
everybody to be t ,- us a nd no one disputes them.
I beli eve t hJ.s statement
reflects a n A totelia n and post- Aris t ote l ian usage .
ris
Aristotle himself
refers to the ear lier, dialec tical usage whe n he says: br,~ l dW
is used of
a propositio n which the ques tio ner hope s the questioned perso n wil l concede.
(
/
A for the term UTro()e<ret.<:, , there is perhaps litt le nee d to mention its
s
dialectical use .
At a certa i n po int i n Plato's Repub lic, Socrates speaks of
the principle. of non-contradictio n, the presuma bly unshakeabl e principle
according to whic h it is not possible for the same thi ng at the same time
in the same respect and same rela tion to suffer, be, or do opposite things .
And having e nuncia ted the principle, he says, "Let us proceed on the hypothes is
that this is so, with the understandi ng t hat, if it ever appear otherwise,
everything that res ult s from the assumpt ion s hal l be invalidated .'' (43~a)
And as even the not-so-dialectical A
ristot l e recognizes, this princi ple can
only be esta blished cont r oversially. tha t is to s ay , dialectically, agai nst
e n adversary who offers to say some thing .
M general point is a s imple one.
y
The first bo ok of the ele m nts of
e
geometry of whi c h we have record was writte n i n the middle of t he fifth
ce ntu ry, by Hi ppocrates of Chios.
An a nti -vis ua l , anti-ill ustrative tend e ncy
t hat had first emerged, so far as I know, in Parmenidea n dia l ectic, is
a l read y prese nt i n the geometrica l proofs of Hippocrates of Chios that have
come dow n to us , a. g .proofs of i nequalities t ha t would be obvious to visual
inspection.
The fact that at an early stege the ter m adopted for the
s
premises of geometry were t erms of dialectic, terms referri ng to assumptio ns or concessions that do not entirely lose their provisional character
but are req uired i n order that a discussion m
ight proceed, reinforces the
impression that the transformation of geometry into a deductive science
was carried out i n a context determined by the practice of dialectic.
21
�It is also important to realize hare that the premises of geometry
had to ba concessions:
propositions needed to derive whet not only
geometers but even surveyors and carpenters knew, yet propositions which
violated, in the most obvious way, the canons of the Parmenideen logos.
Two things equal to the same thing, Euclid tells us, are equal to each other.
But whet is equality but sameness, and how can three things that ere exactly
the same be three?
How, moreover, are we to perform the absolutely impossible
feats that the c/t1t(1'40fT~ require--to draw a straight line from point to point,
to extend a line, to describe a circle?
by Socrates in the Republic:
Pert of the paradox here is described
"The science (of geometry)," he says, "is in
direct contradiction to the language spoken by its practitioners.
epe.ak in a ludicrous way, although they cannot help it;
They
for they speak as
if they were doing somethi ng and as if all their words were directed towards
action.
For all their talk is of squaring and applying and addi ng and the
like, whereas the entire discipline is directed towards knowledge." (527a-b)
It is probably this peculiar mixture that Timaeus is referring to when he
speaks of geometry es apprehending whet it deals with by a bastard kind of
reasoning.
I should like to conclude with a short summary of and comment on whet
I have been saying, followed by a brief epilogue .
Deductive scie nce appears to have been first discovered by a few Greeks ;
so far as I know, this discovery remained unique .
into oblivion during certain times;
Knowledge of it fell
et whatever later times the possibility
of deductive science has been recognized, the recognition hes come through
the . recovery of
Gr~ek ' deductive
science.
What did the original discovery
involve, what did it mean, for those who made it?
have sought to examine.
That is tha question I
From a plausible reconstruction of Pythagorean
deductive arithmetic, I am led to conclude that the essential moves were
a~ay
(1)
the turning
from visualization and taking recourse in logos;
(2)
the application of a negative test, the method of indirect proof or
reduction to the absurd.
Now these two steps ere diel•ctical steps, they
ere the steps of the method thet Socrates in the Phl!edo
own:
describes as hie
"I was afraid," ha says, "that my soul might be blinded altogether if
I looked at things with my eyes or tried to apprehand them only by the help
of the senses.
And I thought I hmd better hsve recourse to th• loqos •• ••
Thie wee the method I adopted.
I first assumed some principle, W'hich I
22
�judged to be the strongest, and then I affirmed as true whatever seemed
t o agree wi th t his, and that which disagreed I regarded as untrue. "
But i n all the features that Socrates mentions, Socratic method is essentially
Eleatic, Parmenidea n dialectic.
The search for the sources of Pythagorean
deductive arithmetic thus l eads us back to Parme nides, or to someone else ,
who lived abo ut t he same time , and whose uttera nces had the same effec t .
What was so special . so pecul ia r, abo ut the discourse of the Parme nidea n
Goddess, that it coul d pre cip i ta t e what foll owed?
"Thinki ng a nd the thought that it is,"
the sa me .
says t he Goddess, "are one a nd
For yo u will no t fin d thought apart from t hat which is •• ;
for
there i s a nd s hal l be no other besides wha t is, s ince D t iny has fettered
es
it so a3 to be whoJe and immovabl e ."
" It is necessary to say a nd to th i nk . "
the Goddess adds,"that Bei ng is."
These words are spoke n r.ot E,y Parmenides but to Pa r menides .
H is being
e
called upon to s ay a nd to thin k, and the saying and thi nki ng are not separated ,
al tho ugh t he order ir, which the f
_,oddess names them is worth not ici ng , being
the opposite of t hat which we m
oder ns te nd to ch oos e.
bet ter remind ourselves , is Greek t hin ki ng ;
meant:
The thinking , we ha d
the verb is
to perceive by the e yes , to observe, to notice .
!J2!irl, which once
I t is not to
conceive, to analyze . to grasp, to attack i n our thinking.
And that which
Parmenides i s asked to say and to notice, what will it do for him to say
e nd to notice it ?
The sente nce, "Be i ng is ," does indeed offer nothing to
grasp, nothing to conceptual ize, nothing to attack i n our thinking, nothing
to analy ze.
Excep t -- there is a twoness there.
verb, essentially, of course, the same word .
present , and there is its prese nce.
There is the noun and the
Yet, there is that which is
To say and to notice not onl y whet is
prese nt but its prese nce is to be arrested in front of someth ing .
to be , at least a little bit, asto nished.
us .
I t is to respec t what li es before
It is to think appropriately, as bef its the m
atter.
Greek t hought ceased aski ng:
It is
At some point
O of whet do the many things come to be?
ut
and began to ask i nstead: W
hat is the Being of that which is in front of us?
Ti to on is the Greek:
what is t he bei ng ?
implicit the so-called laws of logic :
In this question, there are
A is A, A is not not- A.
scie nce, I em propos ing, takes it start here.
Deductive
W
het seems to have been
importa nt, for these beginnings, was not answering the questio n but purs ui ng
it.
Even Aristotle, fro m whom we have received more answers than questions ,
nevertheless says:
23
�~oth
formerly and now and forever it remains something to be sought
and something forever darting awsy: Ti to on ?
Suppose, if you will, that the account I propose is something like
J1e
truth.
Then deductive science came to be and perhaps still comes to
be aa a result both of a logos from beyond the gates of Night and Day, and
of the fracturing of Being and of the Motion going on in the Realm of Fire
and Night.
Or can deductive science proceed on its own way, simply leaving
behind whet triggered its coming-to-be?
It has sometimes attempted to do
to become, for instance, purely formal, with the specification of
this ~
every element end every rule of operation, and the exclusi on of every bit
of explicit or implicit ontology, with the intent of i nsuring log ical
completeness and consistency .
The effort has led t o ma ny refinements;
but the odd result of modern metamathematica l study is t hat t he eff ort
cannot succeed in its original intention.
l'lathemati cs does no t succeed
in being completely in itself and for itself .
I t s t r iumph lies not in
isolated grandeur , but in coping as best it ca n with necessities that appear .
Deductive mathemati cs , no t quite a c e ntury afte r coming to be , underwent a crisis with r espec t to its foundations .
~
Jrability can well have been early
i~
The discovery of incomme n-
the 5th centur y.
It impl ies, rather
1
ibviously one would think , the falsity of the old Pythago r ea n do ctr ine that
1 11
!2
is number , whatev e r that doctrine may have meant.
But i f t he d i scovery
,,1as early, an important c onsequence of i t was s omewha t slow in be ing real i zed .
~ -he
teaching concerning ratios of magnitudes was origina l ly con ce ived in
1a numerical fashion:
fou r magnitudes a re proportional when the first is
the same part, parts or multiple of the second t hat the third is of the
fourth.
That definition is still being used by Hippo crates of Chi os.
Archytas, around 400 B. C., is saying that logistic , the doc t r ine of r atios
of numbers, has the highest rank among the arts . and in particular it is
superior to geometry, "since it can treat more clearly then the latter
whatever it will."
Archytas thus fails to notice that the fact of incommen-
s urability sets a new task for mathematics , the formulation of a new
definition of proportionality, one which will apply to megnitudes that
rney be incommensurable.
24
�The problem is solved by the early fourth century, possibly by
Theaetetus;
at least he is the first we knOliln to have used the new
definition, and he did so extensively.
The new definition of same ratio
or proportionality ls not the one embodied in Euclid, the definition due
to Eudoxus, but a precursor of the latter, one which we can argue Euclid
excised from Book X es it came down to him from Theeetetus.
The manner
At the beginning of Book VII of
of the new definition is worth noting.
Euclid , a method is given of determining the greateat common divisor of
two numbers ;
it has come to be called the Euclidean algorithm.
What is the greatest common divisor of 65 , 39?
65
39
26
39
26
13
But 13 measures 25.
Ans:
13 is g.c.d. (65,39) .
The lesser of the two numbers is subtracted from the greater until
a yet smaller number remains .
This smaller remainder is subtracted from
the preceding subtrahend in the same manne r, and so one continues, obtaining
a series of decreasing remainders , until one arrives at a remainder that
measures the preceding remainder .
1 .1
the case shown, this number is 13,
which is the greatest common divisor of 65 and 39.
This same procedure of successi ve, in-tur n, subtractions--lts Greek
name was antanairesis---can be applied to megnitudee, in order to determine
their common measure .
But suppose t hey are incommens urable;
then the
subtractions would go on forever, without any remainder being found that
measured the preceding remainder.
A particular such
~ituetion
is shown in
the following diag ra m, which showg the side and diegonel of a square:
A
EB
(aymmetry)
CD
DE
(isoecelee rt. 6. )
CD
=
CE
= AB (or CB) - CD (or EB)
AC - AB
And ao on ad infinitum.
c
8
E
25
�f iret the aide is subtracted from the diagonal, leaving CD;
then subtracted from the side CB t111ice, and so on;
CD is
I will not go into.
the .proof of incommanaurability hare, 111hich necessarily involves a
reduction to the absurd;
but one can get a hint from the diagram as
to why the process would be infinite.
procaaa of antanairasis would
~o
pair of original magnitudes.
The
subtract two times frorn rel1)8inder
three times from remainder n.
Nevertheless, this infinite
on in e determinate way, for e given
n~
remainder, for example, might
.!:!::.!.;
and remainder n-1 might subtract
The two and three, along with the corres-
ponding numbers for all the other subtractions, would characterize and
define the antanairesis as a whole.
definition of same ratio:
Then same antanairesis could be the
a first magnitude wo uld have to a second magnitude
the same ratio as a third to a fourth if the first and second magnitude
had the same antanairesis as the third end the fourth.
With this definition,
it ie possible to prove, for example, that rectangles under the same height
are to one another as their bases, because one sees that the antanairesis
111ill go on in the same way with the rectangles as with the bases, even
though the antanairesis be infinite.
There are other mathematical exploits of Theaetetus, embodied in
booka X and XIII, and they are of a kind with the formulation of the
definition of proportionality that I have just described .
Using theoreme
about numbers in new ways , Theaetetue succeeds in rendering what was
inexpressible expressible .
Such achievement, I would suggest, should be
put down under the rub r ic of
Pa~cal's
esprit de finesse , rather than
under his esprit de geome trie, the geometrical turn of m nd, which Pascal
i
so berates for i t s blindness to t he pro blem of the principle s.
The
Pythagorea n mathe nia t a, arithmetic , geom tr y, a nd the rest, are not libe r a l
e
arts merely or pr ima ril y i n being deduct ive , i n proceeding s t e pwi s e i n
accordance wi th ce rtain r ules .
essential relation to tb_e
Their liberali t y, it seems t o me, ha s an
a~reness
not merely of logical necessity , but
of that necessity with which they ere designed to cope :
we are free men
when we ere aware of tha-t ne.e.essi ty and can begin to cope with it.
liberal arts become f ully
Hber~+ _ only
The
as we turn to11JBrd the problem of
the principles, toward the rMtr.ix of necessity in which those principles
ere embedded, toward the question of being from which those arts take
their riae.
26
�Notes
l. (p. 1) This lecture owes everything, or nearly everythl~g. t~ '
number of studies by historians of mathematics, parti~~1~:'.;;
0. Becker, "Die Leh re vom Geraden und Ungeraden im n0Tc: nr. Rue:.
der euklidischen Elemente,'' uellen und Studien zur Gesc~1ch~Q
der Mathematik ••• , Abt. B, Band 3 193 , 125-1 5;
B. :., va!1
der Waerden, "Die Ari thmetik der Pythagoreer, '' Mathematische Annalen,
!20, (1947-1949), pp. 127-153, and Science AwaJcening (Ne~ Y~~k:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1971): G. Vlastos, "Zeno of Elea" in .i::nclyclopedia
of Philosophy, VIII, 370;
O. Neugebauer, The ~xact Sciences in Antiquity, 2d ed., 1957; and above all articles by Arpad Szabo: "Zur
Geschichte der Dialektek des Denkens, 11 in Acta Antigua Academiae
Scientiarum Hungaricae, II (1954), 17-62, and "The Transformation
of Mathematics into Deductive Science and the Beginnings of its
Foundation on Definitions and Axioms," in Scripta Mathematica, 27
(1964), 28-48 and 113-139.
For the Proclue text I depended on
Procli Diadochi in Primum Euclidis Elementorum Commentarii (ed.
Friedlein, Teubner, 1873) and the recent translation by the late
Glenn H. Morrow, A Commentary on the First Book of Euclid's Elements
(Princeton, 1970). In the section on Parmenides there may be recognized a certain inspiration, much diluted, of Martin Heidegger~s
What is Called ~hinking? (tr. Wieck & Graz, New York:
Harper & Row ,
1954).
?. In particu1ar, see Walter Burkert , Lore and Science in Ancient
~lthagoreanism.
27
�
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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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On the discovery of deductive science
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Typescript of a lecture given on September 14, 1973 by Curtis Wilson as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
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Text
TRIAL
IN
BERLIN
Beate Ruhm von Oppen
A FORMAL LECTIJRE DELnrnRm AT ST JOHN-ts COLLEGE
�The place of the trial was Berlin, the time January 1945; the court
the so-called People's Court, the highest court for political crimes, such
as treason. It was meeting in a requisitioned building, the court building
having been destroyed by bombs. The presiding judge was Roland Freisler,
the same that had tried and sentenced some rebellious students in Munich
in
1943~
He had tried many cases since. The present one now was one of his
laste Three weeks later he was killed in a massive air raid on Berlin. The
chief defendant in this trial in the last winter of the war was a thirtyseven year old lawyer and landowner by name of Moltke, Count Moltke. He
had a whole string of names. The court only used the first, Helmuth.
The war was approaching its end. The British and Americans had sustained and defeated Hitler's last gamble, a winter offensive in the West, in
the Ardennes. The Russians were about to enter Germany on a broad front in
the East.,
The trial in Berlin was a treason trial@ But, as the defendant wrote
to his wife,
'~his
affair is really somewhat better than the celebrated Huber
case. For even less actually happened. We did not so much as produce a
leaflet~"
What hs meant by "the celebrated Huber case" was the case of those
Munich students and their Professor, Kurt Huber, who had been sentsnced to
death for writing and spreading leaf lets against the Nazis. The group had
chosen "The White Rose" as its
of years
ago~
name~
I lectured about it in Annapolis a couple
In the subsequent discussion the name of the group and the
students who chose it were referred to as rather too "exquisite" and concentration on leaflets as a way of fighting the Nazis was criticized as unrealistic:
why didn't they rather gather arms. My response was to ask what a handful of
students could be expected to do against the kind of regime I had tried to
describso I had probably failed to set it off clearly enough against a mare
police stats, let alone pre-revolutionary America, or, for that matter,
Richard Nixon's. Incidentally, thoss students had, in fact, carried arms, for
strictly tactical purposes: when they went out at night to write slogans on
walls and expected to have to shoot their way out if the police arrived@
That question "why didn't they?" and the counter-question "what could
they do?" stand for a whole range of "why didn't they" questions, question•
of methods and purposes, means and ends. And together they raise the question of
�-2-
what is sometimes called "realism,."
Why did the defendant in the Berlin trial two years later consider
his case "even better" than the case of the White Rose? Because, he said oddly
enough, "even less actually happened."
We shall have to see what in fact did happen. And then we might try to
discuss whether we agree or disagree that such a case was "better." The
discussion may be difficult and should be delicate; it muat be conducted with
some awareness of the prevailing circumstances -- which there is now no time
to describe. When I say that the Nazi system went beyond a mare police state
I mean that its legal and extra-legal methods and instruments of persuasion and
of coercion were more comprehensive and more
dreadful~
It was a one-party
state in which all rival parties and organizations were forbiddene The press,
the media, !11 publications were strictly controlled, and so were the pulpits,
though the regime did not dare go all out in a frontal onslaught on the
churches. But National Socialism had the character of a counter-religion. It
was especially intent on the indoctrination of the young~ Ta have any kind
of career at all presupposed membership in the Hitler Youth, which was officially
compulsory, though some managed to escape it. The Nazi Party, or, to give it
its full name, the National Socialist German Workers' Party, was not only a
party, but a Movement, one which swept much before it that had seemed quite stable
before. Once in power it engendered and exploited psychological pressures among
the people that ware unprecedented in modern
society~
or, for that matter, in
any society. There was, in addition to new laws, prisons and the legal administration of justice, the whole universe of concentration camps, even in peace
time; during the war they proliferated and once Hitler had decided on tha destruction of the Jews of Europe, death camps
we,re
added in the East. Their
existence and operation was secret, a State Secret. Rumor was always rife -and always punishable -- and reliable and comprehensive information impossible
to coma by. In peace-time the unauthorized getting and spreading of information
could be punished as defamation of the state or of the Party or Movement; in
war-time it might rank as treason@ Anyone resisting the system had a hard time and
a short expectation of life.
!
I
iJ
�-3-
For someone who had opposed the Nazis from the beginning, the
defendant in that trial in Berlin in January 1945 had had a surprisingly
long life. But then Helmuth James van Moltke, who achieved the age of
thirty-seven, bore a name that 1JJas renowned in the annals of German
history; and he was a trained lawyere Hitler hated lawyers. He knew
why~
The defendant's great-grand-uncle Helmuth von Moltke was the
general who had enabled the Prussian chancellor Bismarck to beat the
Austrians and the French and to unite the German states in the second
German Reich. The name of Moltke still had some magic in Hitler's Third
Reiche The family estate Kreisau, in Silesia, which had been the old
Moltke 1 s reward for his services to the fatherland, had passed to his
great-grand-naphewe In fact Helmuth James had had to take it on, quite
suddenly and not at all enthusiastically, in 1929, at the age of
22~
during
the world economic crisis produced by the Wall Street crash, which coincided
with the discovery that Kreisau was very heavily in debt, with bankruptcy
quite probable. He sat to work with a will, and within a year he had, by
dint of great skill, extremely hard work and negotiations, made Kreisau
solvent once more,
The defendant's mother was of British-South-African
James Rose Innes
descant~
her father, was a famous chief justice in South Africa,
renowned for his liberalism
His grandson Helmuth James van Moltke's legal
flair and training may have been a factor that prolonged his life. In the
end it did not save it,
it enabled him to go exhaustively into all the
possibilities of defence against the charges brought against him. He even had
the effrontery to argue in mitigation the fact that he had never made a secret
of his critical attitude, but on the contrary had, as he thought it was his
duty and that of any servant of the state, warned against policies and practices
he saw as dangerous and
harmful~
The court's reaction to this line of defence is not recorded. In fact all
we have on the course of the trial is Mcltke 1 s own fairly full account and
comment which he smuggled out to his wife in three letters between being tried,
sentenced, and hanged; and the official Top Secret text of the sentence, with
reasonso
�-4-
What were those reaeone? That the defendant had had knowledge of
a plot to overthrow the government, declined to join it and warned his
friends against it, but did not report it to the authorities. And that
he himself formed a circle to seize power, in case of a German defeat,
with people who were not National Socialists.
These reasons were spelled out in greater detail, as follows:
The accused was administrator and finally owner of the family estate
Kreieau in Silesia. He was also a lawyer, specializing in international
law and admitted at the British Bar. His membership in Nazi Party organizations was minimal, just enough to allow him to carry on his farming and
legal practice. In the war he was employed as legal advisor to the Supreme
Corrmand of the Armed forces. He always took -- the official account now adds
somewhat suddenly and incongruously
-- an interest in religious and ec-
clesiastical questions, iri the relationship between church and state and the
question of "rechristianization", as well as in agrarian policy and the
decentralization of administration.
Around 1941, the official account goes on, he began to think about
the future in case the war should be lost, and started discussing it with
friends and acquaintances, none of whom were National Socialists and some of
whom had since been convicted as traitors. In 1942 and 1943 there were two
longer meetings at Kreisau, the first dealing with re-christianization and the
relations of church and state. The Jesuit father Alfred Delp -- who was a
co-defendant at this trial and also sentenced to death
spoke about the
Catholic view on social policy, with special reference to the papal encyclical
Quadrageeimo Anno. And Moltke later checked with a Catholic Bishop that the
hierarchy still endorsed that document. The second Kreisau meeting dealt with
questions of administration and the relationship of the states and the Reich.
There was also a search for people who would be suitable and willing to carry
out the policies that were discussed.
Meanwhile there had been contact with the conspiratorial circle of
Carl Goerdeler, the former Mayor of Leipzig, to which Moltke was opposed because
�-5-
he considered it reactionary, (while he, let me interpolate, was
interested in establishing common ground between socialists - many
of them
and
v~ry
anti-clerical - as wall as conservatives and liberals
Christians~
between trade unions and the churches of both de-
nominations; the Protestant church being far more to the Right in
Garmany than the Catholic.)
The official document summed the case up in the following words:
"All Count Moltke did constitutes treason: high treason in the midst
cf warw He cannot lessen its gravity by saying that he
thinking and did not
procs~d
w~s
only
to carrying out planse For he did more
than think : he also gathered a circle for the discussion and deuelcpment
of plans; and finally he looked for msn to carry them 01.rtu,, 11 The reasoning
of the sentence gees en ta argue that auen thinking about the case of
defeat is criminal; and that the definition of trsaacn cannot be limited
to a man out to rob us of our way of life
his own exercise of
force~
In
peace that might be en acceptable limit. But in War the outer enemy counts
on the internal opponent and vice
versa~
Moltke 1 s treason must be regarded
as a particularly grave case. He spread defeatism and helped the enemy@
At this point twc articles cf the penal code were adduced: paragraph
83 (on organizational cohesion) and paragraph 9lb (on aiding an
; in
addition, paragraph 5 of ths Special Penal Ordinance for War which dealt
with activities or utterances detrimental to the national def enca or to
to Moltke's defeatism end its
morale, and which was evidently made tc
inf ectiaus effects or potential
But, the
cf the sentence went on, this was not all~ From
1940 onward Moltke heard about and mambara of his circle wera in contact with
the gr·oup of
Carl
Goerdelar~
Beck
This group was plotting to overthrow the gauarnmente Maltke
was against itl' on the
Lo~don
former chief of general staff) end of
~
inteir
alia~
that
h~
knew from his visits to
before ths war that Goardeler 1 s British contacts were
confin~d
to
right-wing reactionariesg Yet finally he agreed to a meeting of the two groups
at which he explained his opposition to
Goerdeler~
The meeting broke up in
�-6-
acrimony. Moltke continued to warn his associates against the Goerdeler
group. Yet he did not report it to tha authorities. This omission alone
would be punishable by death under paragraph 139 of the Penal Code. But
the real point was that all these things were part of a whole and meant
that Moltke made himself into a servant of the enemy and therefore had to
be punished by death.
~
So much for a summary of the sentence.
Actually the death penalty was not mandator¥ under any of the laws
that were adduced. Much therefore depended on the judge and his impression
of and reaction to the accused. Ths judge was Roland Freisler, the most
radical and ruthless of the Nazi judges
Hitler himself once referred ta
him as a 'Bolshevik' in his Table Talk@ He
was~
as I have said, the same
judge that had presided over the court that sentenced the l"lunich sh1dents,,
But that was nearly two years earl!Gr, in February
1943~
During
the last
winter of the war and after the initial rage and vengeance against all who
ware connected with the plot of July 1944 was spent, after thousands of
arrests and hundreds of executions, during the winter of the Russian advance
on Germany and the last German offensive in the West, it was observed that
the Pecpla 1 a Court wee perhaps
a bit more lenient in its
sentences~
Therefore Moltke, whc had been cpposad ta asaassination, indeed ta any
attempt ta overthrow the regime by force, and who had baen under arrest
since January 1944, six months before Stauffenberg planted his bomb and
failed ta kill Hitler, on 20 July 1944, Moltke had, it would seem, a chance
of getting away with a prison sentence@
The official arguments 1 for all their harping on . .hi-a education .and
elevated position and the greater responsibility these carried with them, were
not very convincing on the naad to kill him and Delp, but not Eugen Gerstenmaier,
a Protestant cleric, or church official, anoths:r Kreisauer and c:o-defem::ant
who, unlike the other twc 1 was actually arrested at Stauffenberg 1 s conspiratorial headquarters in the war ministry in Berlin in the evening of 20 July 1944,
and who nonetheless got af f with a seven year jail sentence@
There
~~,of
course, plenty of other things
Moltk~
had dona that the
court did not know about and that would have laid him open to severe punishments
In the absence of such knowledge and of convincing arguments in the aff icial
�-7-
explanation of the sentence, we must now turn ta the trial itself@
Moltke's own account of it is reliable and has been preserved
-- I am tempted to say "as by a miracle" or a whale series of miracles.,
first the very fact that he was able to write it, able not only psychologically but physically. Usually those condemned to death were hauled
straight off to the gallowse Moltke was taken back to his prison
Then, the Protestant prison chaplain, Harald Pcelchau, was a friend af
his and
bean a member cf his circle, a fact that was never found out
in the year of investigation. This
to his wife and back
He also
to
it out af
to
trial,. /:\nd shB
to
letters from Moltke
out tha account cf the
he hands of the
all his other letters and the Kreiseu
Silesia became a theatre cf war end ia now
Whan we turn to Moltka's awn account, we find that all these flat
in the official sentence about
away amang other t
Moltke~s
interest in
of
and decentralization
like
that
even the mention of Kr9isau discussions of Catholic views on social
concealsd rather then ravealad ths drama
the trial, and cancasled it
reason, the same reason that made Moltke urge his wife to
account cf the trial to
known. Three times he
steted it in his latt9rs
The f
2t time
caHsd ::1.t the
of the tLrhole
the third time the drama or
What was that crux
and
the way the trial had
him to death? It
the trial
t
however much their actions
cf the offic!sl sentence were flat, tortuous, and unconthe document
put in
what
wa~
Top Secret, th® court did not dare
bean elicited from the mouth cf the judge, farced from
him by the complete and inccmtr·mJertibla non-violence of the dsfendant, a
defendant who was able and willing to take his stand on principle, willing to
�stake his life, able to manage his defense in a way that did not permit
his accusers to pervert the cause of his condemnation as was commonly
done.
Let me give you those three places in Moltks's own
words~
trans-
lated: I am canuinced they are an accurate reproduction of what went on in
that court. He had a lawyer's memory.
The first. After the discussion of the charge of defeatism and of
preparations for the time after the Nazis, Moltke goes on to FreislerWs
diatribe:
But now came the crux of the whole thing. "And who was
present? A Jesuit father! Of all people a Jesuit father!
And a Protestant minister, end three ethers who were later
sentenced to death for complicity in the July 20 plat!
And not a single National
So~ialistl
eey: that doss remove the
!
No~
not ons$ I must
A Jesuit father, end
of civil
disobedience! And you also knew the Drovincial Head of the
ans of the
off foials of
• ha uieits Count Moltke
not
s most.
Kreisau! And you are
no decent German would touch
who have been excluded
f r:om all
service bacauae of their attitude
If I
there is a Provincial of the Jesuits in a town, it is
almost enough to keep ms out cf that town altogether! And
the other rauerend gentleman. Whet was he after there? Such
psapla should confine their attentions to the hereafter and
leave us here in peace! And you went visiting Bishops! looking
far something you had last, I suppose! Where do you get your
orders from? You get your ordere f rcm the Fuehrer end the
National Socialist Party! That goes fer you as much as for any
other German; end anyone who takes his orders, no matter under
�-9-
what camouflage, from the guardians of the other
world, is taking them from the enemy, and will be
dealt with accordingly."
"And so it went on," commented Moltke, "but in a key which made the
earlier paroxysms appear as the gentle rustlings of a breeze." After this
climax, he added, the end came in about five minutes.
He summed up this first account of what went on in court in these
words:
This concentration on the chur.ch aspect of the case
corresponds with the intrinsic nature of the matter
and shows that Freisler is a good political judge
after all. It gives us the inestimable advantage of
being killed for something which (a) we really have
done and which (b) is worthwhile.
A bit later in the same letter he commented:
The best thing about a judgment on such lines is this:
It is established that we did not wish to use force; it
is further established that we did not take a single
step towards setting up any sort of organization, nor
question anyone as to his readiness to take over any
particular post
though the indictment stated other-
wise. We merely thought ••• And in face of the thoughts
of ••• three isolated men, their mere thoughts, National
Socialism gets in such a panic that it wants to root out
everything they may have infected. There's a compliment
for you •••• We are to be hanged for thinking together.
Freisler is right, a thousand times right; and if we are
to die, I am in favour of dying on this issue.
But he hoped that their death could be turned to some immediate account and
added:
I am of the opinion -- and now I am coming to what has got to be
done
that this affair, properly presented, is really
somewhat better than the celebrated Huber case. For even
less actually happened. We did not so much as produce a
�-10-
leaflet. It is only a question of men's thoughts
without even the intention to resort to violence •••
All that is left is a single idea: how Christianity
can prove a sheet-anchor in time of chaos. And just
for this idea five heads ••• look like being forfeited
tomorrow 9 •• Because he made it clear that I was opposed in principle to large estates,
tf-1at
I had no
class interests at heart, no personal interests ~t ~li,
not even those of my outfit, but stood tor the cau·P
of all mankind, for all these reasons Freisler has
unwittingly done us a great service, insofar as it may
prove possible to spread the story and make full use of
it. And indeed, in my view, this should be done both
at home and abroad. For our case histories provide
documentary proof that it is neither plots nor plans
but the very spirit of man that is to be hunted down •••
All this was written after the prosecutor had asked for the death
sentence for Moltke and four co-defendants, but before the court had pronounced. The next day, January 11, brought the decision: Moltke and Delp
and one other were to die, Gerstenmaier got off with a prison sentence. On
that day Moltke once more returned to the drama of the 10th when he wrote:
The following, as it turned out was the really dramatic
thing about the trial. During the procedings all factual
charges had proved to be untenable and were dropped •••
Schulze (the prosecutor) in his summing-up expressly
stated that this case "differs radically from all parallel
cases, for in the conversations there was no mention of
violence or organised opposition" -- whereas the question
under discussion was the practical demands of the Christian
ethic, nothing more. And it is for this alone that we stand
condemned.
Moltke continues:
In ona of his tirades freisler said to me: "Only in
�-11-
one respect does National Socialism resemble
Christianity: we demand the whole man. I
do~'t
know if the others sitting there took it all in,
for it was a sort of dialogue between Freisler
and me -- a dialogue of the spirit, since I did
not get the chance actually to say much -- in the
course of which we got to know one another through
and through. Freisler was the only one of the whole
gang who thoroughly understood me, and the only one
of them who realized why he must do away with me.
There was no more talk of me as a "complex character"
or of "complicated thinking" or of "ideology," but:
"the figleaf is off." But only so far as Freialer
was concerned. It was as though we were talking to
each other in a vacuum. He made not a single joke at
my expense, as he did
agai~t
Delp and Eugen. No, in
my case it was all grimmest earQest. "From whom do
you take your orders,
fr~m
the other world or from
Adolf Hitler? Where lie your loyalty and your faith?"
Rhetorical questions, of course. At any rate Freisler
is the first National Socialist who has grasped who I
am.
Then there was a pause during which the Catholic prison chaplain visited
Moltke and he was shaved and given some coffee and something to eat, and
then he resumed the letter:
The decisive phrase in the proceedings was: ".... Cmietiufty
has one thing in common with us National Socialists, and
one thing only: we claim the whole man."
And later this letter, which supplements and
amplifies his earlier report,
goes on to describe how the Christian component of the case came to be singled
out, by the providential elimination not only of all connections with plans
for a violent overthrow of the regime but also of co-defendants and charges
and motivations that would have enabled the court to pin blame on individual
�-12-
or sectional interests. "And so finally I am selected," Moltke writes,
as a Protestant, am attacked and condemned primar.ily
because of my friendship with Catholics, which means
that I stood before Freisler not as a Protestant, not
as a big landowner, not as an aristocrat, not as a
Prussianj not as a German
elimin~ted
~-
all that was definitely
earlier in the trial •• ~No, I stood there
as a Christian and as nothing else@ "The figleaf is
off," says Freisler.
Yes~
every other category had
been removed.
Yau can read those letters in a
little.book~•
There is also a full-length
**
biography that gives some of the historical and sociological context of the
life that culminated in this trial@ The question is
figure very prominently in that biography
~~
~
though i t doss not
whether there is a real and
necessary connection between the Christian convictions of this political
convict end his life end actions up to that final
dialogue~
I think there is@
Moltke himself certainly thought there was.
*
*
*
It was in the summer of 1940, when France had fallen, Russia was still
neutral and in
with
, and Hitler was at the pinnacle of his
power and seemed invincible, that Moltke had started,
, to collect
the secret standing seminar cf ccnasruatives 1 liberals, socialists, Protestants
and Catholics, far the discussion af a human
order ta supersede the
Nazis' so-called New Order. One of the first things the group found itself in
agreement on
and that included the socialists
~~
was the need to
rechristian~
ize Germany if it was to be re-humanizeda This did net mean a clericalization
cf politics or education. It meant a restoration and defence of the freedom of
religion and of conscisnceg
*A German of the Resistance .. The last Latters of Count Helmuth James van
Third Edition® Berlin: Henssel
**Michael Balfour and Julian
Verlag~
Frisby~
1972~
Helmuth von liJoltke; A Leader Against
Hitler. London: Macmillan, 1972 9 and NGw York: Ste Martin's Press, 1973.
l"loltke~
�-13-
Thi9 experience of the rediscovery of the central political
relevance of Christianity during the years of Nazi rule is described
at greater length in a chapter of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Ethics. I
hava often been struck by the way Bonhoeffer's writings era exemplified
or paralleled in Moltke's life. The two men knew each other. They even
travelled together to Scandinavia on a wartime mission, in the spring of
1942, for the Abwehr
or Counter-Intelligsnce department, the "outfit"
Moltke referred to in his prison letter, a hotbed of conspiracy against
the Nazis, whose heads, Canaris and Oster, were later executed too. Otherwise Moltke and Bonhosffar had little contact and they did not see eye to
eye on the desirability of assassinating Hitler. But more of that anon©
What matters hers is the discovsry both men and many others mads in the Nazi years
that there was a close connection between Christianity and civilization and
between apostasy and barbarism,
Bonhaeffsr put it, that
or~as
11 R~ason~
culture,
all these concepts which until
had served as battle
ver::y
the
Jesus Christ himself 1 had
Ch:r
come very near indaed ta
'?
also in
lJ~consc1ous
which deeiree not to fall victim to
the Antichrist to take
comment an the truth cf both statements
that "He that is not
is not with me
It could, or course
is
ove:r~
be
9
is
e.nci often is :i
could be restored and defended without religious
that
Moltke himself
sanction~
ht so in the earlier phase of the Nazi regimso But subse=
quent experience taught him otherwise® During the war, in the spring af 1942 1
in a long letter en the German situation which he managed to get ta a friend
in England 1 he wrote:
Perhaps you will remember that, in discussions before the
war, I maintained that belief in God was not essential for
coming to the results you arrive at* To-day I know that I
wee wrong, completely wrong. Yau know that I haue fought
the Nazis from the first day, but the amount of risk and
readiness for sacrifice which is asked from us now, and that
which may be
aak~d
from us tomorrow, require more than right
�-14-
ethical principles, especially as we know that
the success of our fight will probably mean a
total collapse es a national unit. But we are
ready to face this.
This last consideration must have been a very serious one. Among
his oppositional friends and associates Moltke was probably unique in not
only not being a nationalist but not even a patriot. The others felt that
in opposing Hitler they were the real patriots, however much the Nazis
might arrogate a monopoly of patriotism to themselves. But Moltke was above
even those considerations and the consolations and conflicts they gave rise
to. Yet he knew that the fight against the Treaty of Versailles had been
Hitler's trump card at home and abroad and that the threat of another such
treaty or a worse one made domestic resistance a desperately lonely undertaking.
In such an undertaking one needed a faith to sustain one, faith that
fortified one against being overwhelmed by the historic events of the moment
and their massive psychological effects, and faith that had indeed a connection
with "another world'' from that dominated not only by the Nazis but by all
those who thought like them elsewhere: or those who, at any rate, could not
free themselves from the coils of collective thinking.
This, of course, is natural enough in time of war, even one that, like
the second world war, has an aspect of international civil war about it. Even
in peace people find it difficult or even undesirable to think of themselves
and others except as parts of collectivitiesQ In fact nowadays that is how
"identity" tends to be defined: in terms of menbership of this or that collective:
black, white, red; racial, religious, national, or sexual. But in war the need
to feel one belongs to some group or other becomes even stronger. And
nations~
naturally, lay claim to their nationals and require them to perform services
and observe loyalties.
Moltke, incidentally, did at one time think of emigrating, leaving his
Silesian estate -- to which he was very much attached
leaving his law practice
in Berlin, leaving his German roots and connections, and trying to make a go of
�-15-
it in England where he qualified as a lawyer by virtually commuting
across the Channel in the late
193~!e;but
he had understandable
hesitations, and when the war broke out, he was in Germany.
He then worked as a legal advisor to the German High Command and
did his utmost to persuade his superiare of the benefits of international
law. He laboured to prevent or reduce breaches of it by the Germans, even
to interpret infractions by the other belligerents in ways that favoured
them. In human terms this meant, for instance, getting people classified
as prisoners of war whose status under the Geneva Conventions might be rather
dubious, or arguing against the slave trade that foreign labour should not
be forcibly drafted to Germany but that people should rather be allowed to
man their own industries at home in the occupied countries, or it might mean
fighting against Hitler's order that any captured Russian political Commissars
should not be treated as prisoners but were to be shot at once.
Moltke was indefatigable in this work and achieved an amazing amount of
success considering his relatively junior rank. Some of his successes might
not be lasting -- but even just prolonging someone's life or liberty was worth
the effort. His powers of persuasion must have been prodigious. What he ascribed
them to himself, apart from hard work (he was always in command of his facts),
was the appeal he could make, beside all arguments of expediency he might
marshal, to the residual decency in people, who might even be relieved, on
some occasions, to hear someone say things that had once been generally accepted
as true and good, but which were now as generally relegated to the status of
sentimentality or worse.
In the pursuit of such "sentimentality," or one might call it "justice"
or "humanity", he had to keep and use his head. Theatrical gestures would have
helped no-one. But this need to keep his head worried him at times, when he
wondered whether he was getting hardened, just as he had already worried earlier
whether the mere fact of staying and carrying on might not help maintain the
facade behind which the Nazis did their devilish work. The strain of this sometimes became almost unbearable.
�-16-
A latter of October 1941 may give you an idea of
this~
It was
written at a time when Russia was but America was not yet in the war.
In his official position Moltke had access ta classified information,
the kind of thing that never got into the
press~
He writes:
The day has been so full of ghastly news that I
can't write collectedly although I came back at
5 and have had tea= What I mind most at the moment
is the inadequacy of the reaction of the military.
Falkenhausen and Stuelpnagel [they wars the generals
in charge of Belgium and France] have returned to
their places instead of resigning after the latsst
incidents,
n~w
and
horribl~
orders are going out
and nobody seems to care@ Haw can one bear oneYa
share of guilt?
In one part of Serbia two villages have been reduced to ashes and of the inhabitants 1,700 men and
240 women have been executed® This was called the
"punishment" for the attack on three German soldiers@
In Greece 240 men were shot in one village® The
uillaga was burnt down, the women and children were
left on the apct to mourn their husbands and fathers
and hcmsso In France extensive shootings are going on
as I writs© In this way c9rtainly mora than a thousand
and thousands more
Germans are being habituated to murder® And all that is
child's play compared to what is happening in Poland
and Russiae Is it right for me to learn of these things
and yet sit at my table in a
wall~haated
room and drink
tea? Do I not thereby make myself into an accomplice?
What shall I say when I am asked: "And what did you do
during this time?"
I
!
I
�-17-
Since Saturday they have been herding the
Berlin Jews together. They are collected at
9.15 in the evening and shut into a synagogue
overnight. Then they are sent, with what they
can carry to Lodz and Smolensk. The authoritues
want to spare us the sight of how they are left
to perish in hunger and cold and that is why it
is done in Lodz and Smolensk. A friend of Kiep's
saw a Jew collapse in the street; when she wanted
to help him get up, a policeman intervened, prevented~her
and kicked the body as it lay on the
ground, so that it rolled into the gutter. Then he
turned to the lady with a last vestige of shame and
said: ''Those are our orders."
How can one know of such things and still walk
about a free man?
His actions gave the answer. It was not a question of the "right" to refrain
from an instant reflex. It was a case of duty. There were things he could do
or could try to do, and those he did, accepting the risk of arrest, but not
courting it.
Hatching or joining a plot to kill Hitler was not among those things.
This was not because he lacked the courage but because, unlike Bonhoeffer, he
judged it to be wrong, for several reasons. One of them was his conviction that
the assassination of Hitler -- even if it succeeded, and he had his doubts
about that -- would not cure the Germans of Hitlerism but might, on the contrary,
make a martyr of him and give rise to another legend, worse than the one that
had vitiated politics after the first world war, when it was said and widely
accepted that the undefeated German army was stabbed in the back by traitors at
home. Moltke was convinced that the only cure for the German disease was a clear
military defeat -- not the whole cure, of course, but a necessary part. And the
Nazis would have to be in charge until that def eat was accomplished so that the
responsibility for it should be unmistakably theirs.
This does not mean that he was enthusiastic about the Allied policy of
�-18-
demanding "Unconditional
Surrender~"
especially about the way that slogan
affected propaganda. It was launched by Roosevelt and accepted by Churchill
at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, at a time when the Russians
were bearing the brunt of the war and clamouring for a second front in the
Westo The battles at Stalingrad and in North Africa were, at last, turning
the tide of the war, and Roosevelt probably got carried away by historic
echoes, by the elation of
Amarica~s
growing power, and by the desire to assure
the hard-pressed Russians, and more particularly the ever-suspicious Stalin,
that the Western allies would never conclude any kind of negotiated peace with
whatever kind of German regime* Whenever Germans opposed to the Nazi regime
tried to establish contact with the West, Roosevelt refused to have anything
to do with these "East German junkers" as he called them and the British
government rejected all such fselars as aiming at a "soft peace" or a split in
the coalition between the Wast and Soviet Russia" When Stauffsnberg finally
tried and failed to kill Hitler and remove his regime, the official mood in
London was one of relief at the failure; the reason given was Moltke 1 s: that
the plot, if-it had succssdad, would only have meant another stab=in-the-back
legendQ Publicly Churchill made a scathing comment, in the House of
Commons~
on
the German top-dogs now being at each other's throats. Much later, after the
war, he mads amends for this and paid tribute to the plotters.
But there was another reason for the unwillingness in London and
Washington to consider any oppositional German approaches" It was the feeling
that Germany needed a thoroughgoing social revolution or re-construction and
that this would have to be brought about or facilitated by Allied occupation,
by American, British, and Russian occupation (the Franch were included at a
later stage, at de Gaulle's insistence). The Russian part has, actually,
happened.
Moltke and his friends had their own plans for social change -- including,
incidentally, the nationalization of some key industries. They proposed to take
mining, iron and steel, the basic chemical industries and fuel and power into
public ownershipo They also had their own plans for the purgation of the body
politic and the punishment of war criminals and of Nazis who had committed
crimes in Germany. They were convinced that punishment J2y Germans in conjunction
�-19-
with the International Court at The Hague, rather than by the victors1 was
not only desirable and possible, but would also be more efficacious.
Others of the Kreiaau discussions and proposals still have a
curiously prophetic ring about them, especially those concerned with the
need to create smaller social and political units, units in- which people can
once more feel they belong and amount to something, feel responsible. The
plans for a federal structure of Germany and for a united Europe anticipated
some actual later developments. The need for the re-christianization of
Germany that they felt so strongly in the hell of the Nazi counter-religion
may have found some counterpart in the growth of Christian Democratic parties
in Western Europe; and it is probably no accident that it was the Christian
Democrats in France, Germany, and Italy who made the first bold moves after
the war to get away from the stranglehold of nationalism and the nation state,
to found some kind of European unity.
These developments may not quite have taken the form that was or
indeed could be envisaged by the internal opponents of Hitler's Fortress
Europe, but their recognition of the dangers of totalitarianism in all its
forms and of the manipulability of mass societies, their search for remedies,
retains its relevance to the problems of our day.
The People's Court in Berlin knew of the Kreisau discussions and their
outcome only in vaguest outline. The incriminating evidence was very sparse.
Moltke and his associates had been extremely careful and circumspect while at
liberty, and brave and resourceful
under interrogation, some of it -- though not
in Moltke's own case -~accompanied by torture. The court did know of the
selection of Regional Commissioners that were to take over after the removal of
the Nazis and of the instructions that the Kreisauers had drafted for them. But
the chief emphasis in the trial was on their temerity in thinking of and providing
for a German defeat; not on working for it, but on thinking about it. Freisler
knew as well as Moltke what narrow limits are set to effective action against
a totalitarian regime. He had no inkling of Moltke's effectiveness within those
limits. But he sensed and said what was the basis of that effectiveness and the
real danger to the regime: the faith that was opposed to the Nazi faith.
�-20-
The Christian faith had, since the Reformation, split Germany
into mutually hostile Protestant and Catholic factions and had been subject
to erosion in the decades before Hitler, exploiting the split and the loss of
faith, offered himself as the new Saviour.
It must have been this realization that made Moltke, the Protestant,
so determined and methodical in his contacts with the Catholics, not only
with the Jesuits, but also with layman and with the Catholic Bishop of
Berlin, Count Preysing, who happened to be the most clear-headed and recalcitrant member of the German hierarchy as far as the Nazis ware concerned.
(Incidentally, Preysing had written a rather interesting article on Thomas
More on the occasion of MoreYs elevation to the sainthood, in 1935,
lJillim
and at a time when such a canonization had clear
political overtones.) Moltke saw Preysing quite regularly for the discussion
of current problems and what could be done about them, right down to the
content and style of pastoral
letters~
Moltke had the reputation -- rightly or wrongly -- of being incapable
of telling a lise He was certainly capable of telling less than the whole
truth. In the conduct of his court case he withheld as much incriminating
information as hs could, and that was a lot. Ha was very
careful~
as were
his associates, to limit tha damage, and blame what could not be denied on the
dead or on those who were for other reasons beyond the reach of the regime.
The prosecution never learnt of the third Kreisau meeting (one concerned with
foreign policy, the punishment of Nazi criminals, and the instructions to ba
given to the post-Nazi Regional Commissioners)© It did not know what want on
at countless smaller meetings in Berlin, at meetings with resistance leaders
abroad or with representatives of the German occupation
SS
~on
~
military or even
whom Moltke got to work to reduce the harm they were doing and ta
increase the good. He did not volunteer information to his interrogators about
his part in the rescue of the Norwegian Bishop Beraqrav or of the Danish
Jews~
So what he says in his letters about his trial is true: he was
condemned not for what he had dona but for what he ~· His widespread and
energetic and dangerous activities on behalf of victims of the regime, his
�-21-
efforts to foil and counteract the purposes of the Nazis and to prepare for a
human political order to supersede theirs (and that very preparation, those
discussions, were, of course, invaluable for the preservation and fortif ication of mental health in Hitler's madhouse) - all these activities were
the expression of tte kind of man he was, a man who took his Christianity
more and more seriously. George Kennan, who only knew him in the early
stages of his clandestine activities, described him, in his Memoirs, as "the
greatest person, morally, and the largest and most enlightened in his concepts" that he met on either side of the battle lines in the second world
war.
I did not know him at all. I have only read hundreds of his letters,
letters in which he is very much alive, in his integrity, his intelligence,
his seriousness, and his caustic wit. They give a picture rather different
from that in the literature about him. On the basis of my knowledge of the
period and of those letters I would even suggest that he was a realist.
�
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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 Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
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22 pages
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Trial in Berlin
Description
An account of the resource
Typescript of a lecture delivered on November 28, 1973 by Beate Ruhm von Oppen as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
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Ruhm von Oppen, Beate
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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1973-11-28
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pdf
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English
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lec Ruhm von Oppen 1973-11-28
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<a title="Sound recording" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3599">Sound recording</a>
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/bfe8d90a992062695b802c582a6150c6.mp3
96dcdd2bd7a0e62801e8ee9b83c2da02
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.
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
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00:52:51
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Trial in Berlin
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on November 28, 1973 by Beate Ruhm von Oppen as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
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Ruhm von Oppen, Beate
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Annapolis, MD
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1973-11-28
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St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online.
Type
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sound
Format
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mp3
Relation
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<a title="Typescript" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3588">Typescript</a>
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English
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lec Ruhm von Oppen 1973-11-28
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/5c4f47134187fef58a3caf5d6a2020da.pdf
d9795587b4f291b11fe4b77ea2ec06f4
PDF Text
Text
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�Lecture Schedule 1973-1974
Sept 14, 1973 Curtis Wilson
“On the Discovery of Deductive
Dean SJC Annapolis
Science”
Sept 21
National Players
Tartuffe
Washington DC
Sept 28
Charles Bell
“Satanic Math”
SJC Santa Fe
Oct 5
Edward Rosen
“The Achievement of
Grad School of CUNY, New York NY Copernicus”
Oct 12
Noel Lee
Concert
Oct 26
Stillman Drake
“Galileo’s Place in the History
Univ. of Toronto, Toronto, Ont
of Science”
Canada
Nov 2
Fr. Stanley Jaki
“The White Ribboned Darkness
Princeton NJ
of the Night Sky: Some Lessons
in Cosmology”
Nov 9
Mortimer Adler
“Majority Rule & Misrule”
Inst. for Philosophical Research,
Chicago IL
Nov 16
Bernard Knox
“Thucydides: Power, Empire,
The Center for Hellenic Studies,
Democracy”
Washington DC
Nov 30
Beate Ruhm Von Oppen
“A Trial in Berlin”
SJC Annapolis
Dec 7
Ray Williamson
“Archeo-astronomy of the
Inst for Space Studies, NYC
Southwest Indian Pueblos”
Dec 14
Owen Gingerich
“The Copernican Revolution, A
Smithsonian Inst. Astrophysical
16th Century View”
Observatory, Cambridge MA
Jan 11, 1974 Robert Jastrow
“The Coming of the Golden
NYC
Age”
Jan 18
Conrad Schirokaner
“Sung Neo Confucianism, It’s
CUNY New York NY
Content and Context (960-1279)
Jan 25
Ellen Davis
“The Vapheio Cups”
Queens College, Flushing NY
Feb 1
Georges Edelen
“The Judicious Hooker and the
Vinalhaven, ME
Laws of the Ecclesiastical
Polity”
Feb 15
The Gerles
Concert
Feb 22
Jonathan Griffin
“Translation of Poetry- Theory
London England
and Practice”
March 1
Howard Schless
“Chaucer- Wife of Bath Tale”
NYC
March 3
Martin Levin
“The Five Regular Solids”
Baltimore MD
Mar 8
Gisela Berns
“Lucretius”
�April 5
Apr 12
Apr 19
Apr. 26
May 3, 1974
May 8
May 17
SJC Annapolis
John Graham
Thomas Fulton
Johns Hopkins Univ. Baltimore MD
Allan Bloom
Univ. of Toronto, Toronto, Ont.
Canada
Michael Ossorgih
Jacob Klein
SJC Annapolis
Eva Brann
SJC Annapolis
Harry Golding
SJC Annapolis
Concert
“Physics and Mathematics: A
Foundering Marriage”
“Rousseau”
“In Introducing Dostoevski’s
The Brothers Karamazov”
“Plato’s Phaedo”
“What is a Body in Kant’s
System”
“Hume”
�
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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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5 pages
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paper
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Office of the Dean
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Lecture Schedule 1973-1974 (handwritten & transcribed)
Date
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1973-1974
Description
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Schedule of lectures and concerts for the 1973-1974 Academic Year.
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Lecture Schedule 1973-1974
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Annapolis, MD
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St. John's College
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English
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text
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St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
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pdf
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Wilson, Curtis
Bell, Charles
Rosen, Edward
Lee, Noel
Drake, Stillman
Jaki, Fr. Stanley
Adler, Mortimer Jerome, 1902-2001
Knox, Bernard, 1914-2010
Ruhm von Oppen, Beate
Williamson, Ray
Gingerich, Owen
Jastrow, Robert
Schirokaner, Conrad
Davis, Ellen
Edelen, Georges
Griffin, Jonathan
Schless, Howard H., 1924-
Levin, Martin
Berns, Gisela N.
Graham, John
Fulton, Thomas
Bloom, Allan
Ossorgih, Michael
Klein, Jacob
Brann, Eva T. H.
Golding, Harry
King William Players
Relation
A related resource
September 14, 1973. Wilson, Curtis. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3669" title="On the discovery of deductive science">On the discovery of deductive science</a> (audio)
September 14, 1973. Wilson, Curtis. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3651" title="On the discovery of deductive science">On the discovery of deductive science</a> (typescript)
November 28, 1973. Ruhm von Oppen, Beate. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3599" title="Trial in Berlin">Trial in Berlin</a> (audio)
November 28, 1973. Ruhm von Oppen, Beate. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3588" title="Trial in Berlin">Trial in Berlin</a> (typescript)
March 8, 1974. Berns, Gisela. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/1082" title="Time and nature in Lucretius' De rerum natura">Time and nature in Lucretius' De rerum natura</a> (audio)
March 8, 1974. Berns, Gisela. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/1088" title="Time and nature in Lucretius' De rerum natura">Time and nature in Lucretius' De rerum natura</a> (typescript)
May 8, 1974. Brann, Eva. T. H. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/1237" title="What is a body in Kant's system?">What is a body in Kant's system?</a> (typescript)
Friday night lecture
Lecture schedule
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/81b24b3fe4a605a69d36bdc96fc71d7f.pdf
77efc19749a51816a00e1c213b4ee6d3
PDF Text
Text
, QUX
®
~n RH
A FORMAL LECTURE
DELIVERED AT
ST JOHN'S COLLEGE
by
Eva
13rann
JS' tr ~OD~
x·s s · r
?
�What la a Body in Kant's Syat. .1
1.
*
The reason for this inquiry.
I think it. is ray first duty to explain why I have chosen
to inquire into the place and meaning of body in Kanta' syst•••
I would like to begin by
calll~
on an eaaay by Kant
entitled •concerning the Noble Tone of Late Raised in Phlloaopaay.•
In this essay Kant points to Plato and Pytha8oras aa the partly
unwltti~
progenitors of those who philosophize in a certain
elevated and enthusiastic mode.
•the philosophy of Ariatotle,
on the contrary, is work• he goes oa to observe in sober pra1...
And he calls Aristotle an extremely prosaic philosopher,•
adding that •at bottom, after all, all philosophy la prosaic.•
What characterizes Arlatotle'a philoaophical work la that it la
an acute and serious analytic and synthetic labor performed by
the pure intellect, resulting in a uaable product, such •• a
preli•inary table of categories, (B 107), which provides the
materials for a later worker to employ ayste. .tically (B 107).
*
furt
Rta1on, First Edition (1781),
Aa
Critiqyt
Ba
Critique of P\Jre Re11on, Second Edition (1786).
FHMa
a(
Foundatione of th! Metaphysica of Morale (1785).
HFSN1
MetaphY!lCfl Foun4tt1ons of Netural Scienc1 (1786),
tr9ns. James Ellington (Library ot Ltberal Arta, 1~7u)~
MFDR1
Hetaphxeical Foundations ot the Doctrine ot Right (1797)"
OP1
KOP1
K.ant'a Ooya PoatU!UJI by Erich Adickea (Berlin
1920~
�2
I have begun by citing this essay
becaue~
my inquiry will
unavoidably issue in the questU>n whether phtlosopy should be
prose and work or perhaps something else.
And furthermore I
feel obliged to set off the spirit of llY present uadertaking
from that of philosophical work.
For I came on my question
concerning body not at all in the orderly progress of finding
and accomplishing a task, but in a most unsystematic or anti-
aysteaatic waya
by attending to certain particular sections
and sequence• in Kant's work which struck me with a sense of
aaazement and revelation as well as a conviction that through
these passages there
of Kant's edifice.
m~ht be
access to the unfounded foundations
As a result it now seem• to me that the
11arvel of Kant's thought lies in this very circumstance -· that
in the naae of systematic co11pletene1s it throws open depth
upon dizzying .depth of inquiry.
Let
11e
begin by setting out the items of my conviction and by
showing how they all implicate body in the crux of Kant's effort.
2.
The ends of the Critique of Pure Reason.
The f irat of such clues comes out of the very plan and the
iap1ied end& of that enco•passing systematic edifice, the Critique
of Pure Reaaon.
This firat of Kant's three critiques has two great enda.
The central end is "critical~ l n the proper, ordinary senaea
human reason ie exposed as a faculty
system of illusions.
f~r
a definite and inevitable
In etriki.ng these down, Kant aakes a
�3
clearing for the poaaibillty of d11illu1loned human actlon,
performecl in tile face of tbe defecta of humaa r•aoa..
Thi•
po a a ibll ity ls worked out 1n the second crlt ique, the
Crltiqyt of fr19tlcal Reaaon.
The encoapaaaing taak, however, la bnt'a review of tbe
grounds of human knowledge.
Suoh a revlev la called a •critique•
ln a 1enee aore peculiar to Kallt• and lta deter11laed end la the
certlflcatlon of what we call, eiaply a.S grandly, •aelenee•,
and ln particular, of pbx1ic1, aa tbe al.ngle trutll•prMuelng
effort.
To say the ,.., thing ln other vorda; tbe poaltlve
critical enterprise la the e1tabllalment of •experience.•
Experience la the jolalq of the graap of understanding witb
so• •empirical• -tter,
-•ing
to•thlmg whleb
co•• to ua,
in part, adventltlouely, · ao•thlng nloh 11 glvea to ua.
Thia
product, a graapecl give• thlag, - t • preclaely bat:'• quite
traditional . .tlon of truth aa •adaequatlo iatellectua rei,•
the fitting of thought to thing (I 82).
I aall bave to retura
to thie definition of truth.
The Cr1tigut gf Psgt &••op, then,
not only clear• tbe
deck• for the practleal uae of our reaaon, .,_. alao provl•e&
th• foundations for lta theoretical u . . , and thla latter part
aeataina the great positive dlscoverl••
~
tile book. · It waa
in eonaldert.ns thia two•fold poaltlve aat negative end of the
work that I hM a flrat f"llng of havlllS oo• oa an •l&M·
Let •
nplain.
The flrat critical 1yat. . , tbat nl.C!b uaderllea theory.
1• aald to be perfectly oomplete.
lta ..-tapbyaloal 1uper•atuotUE"e
la a .... work of neablllg out, to be lef't: largely to pup1l•·
�4
Philoao~
ia essentially finished (B 884).
The second
critique, the er1tique ot fractical R911on, 110st explicitly
contains no nev truth• nor any proaiae of new truth•• it
ller9ly toraulatea the full meaning of what, according to Kant,
we all know even before any philosophical intervention•
that
ve auat do as ve ought rather than as ve want if we are to
respect ourselves (FHM,
sec. I).
therefore its effact on our
llvea la not to give them a content but only a forma
whatever
ve do, ve 11Uat do it as beings whose reason ls a ruler.
Hence
neither of theae two critical systems presents in itself a
vorklng project for hUllAll reason.
w'vl : c.~ 1 !>
1
The theoretical enterprl1e founded in the first critique,
·'
"
doee, on the other hand, provide our lives with an infinite and
legitl-te bu1lnea1, naaely physical science.
Nov having expended
a truly enor110u1 effort on well-founding such work and oft
showing that reaeoa baa no other, does Kant glory ln its beauty,
praiee lta pleasures, deund that its aodes infora public and
private life?
In Plato's TiMeus, for instance, which, anacbro?
-
niatically and la.accurately apeaking, also containa a theory of
acience, the eaterpriae la acceptetl by Socrates as •a feast of
accounta• (27 b) and a celebration.
So ooapletely does Kant
o•it all com1ent on the human significance of this single vast
peraiaaible use of the human understanding that hi.a omlasion
arouses auapiclon 'of an ieaue too deep in the foundations of the
syatea for pa111.ng explanation.
I 1hall atate right away that I "9lleve there to be
evidence, not peripheral and flnlcking, but bold and central,
that la
I.ant'•
•Y•t- phyaica •• the
aclence of bo41iea do••
�5
indeed play a central human role,
12£....it
the one access
~
have .tQ .S2.J.lr .Q.!m souls, and provides all the self•knowledge
~
£!!.n
~·
~
I cannot tell why Kant never explicitly drew attention
to this circumstance in all lts pathos, except by noting that
all great philosophical works that I know have these telling
lacunae, junctures too sensitive, d"ep and dangerous to bring
out in words.
3.
The grand design for the deduction of physics.
Let me now adduce somewhat more external evidence for the
overwhelming importance which the science of bodies has in Kant's
system by sketching out the intention not of one work, but of a
sequence of three works which largely occupied his later years.
This sequence contains a grand design for the deduction of
empirical physics, an apparent contradiction in terms, which the
setti~
out of the design will be only partly able to reconcile.
The first of the texts in question ls again the Critique of
Pure Reason
and within lt the section called the "Principles of
the Understanding."
understanding isa
One form of the principal proposition of the
"The conditions of the possibility of experience
ln general are at the same time conditions of the possibility !lf
the oblects _of experience." (B 197).
That is to say, the
foundations of science are simultaneously the conditions of its
objects, namely bodies, so that physics and bodies are established
together.
Both are the ultimate result of the same long deduction.
The "Principles of the Understand i1'lg" only establish experience
and its objects in general.
"from the first"1 objects
By "in general" Kant
are~
means~
priori insofar as they
have fro• the very first a form of which we ourselves are
the source and which precedes any empirical addition.
priori,
�6
Such general objects are called things, and in their proper
coaplex of lawful relations, they are called nature. -The next work in the sequence, which i.s in the grand
critical 'esign parallel to the work on the metaphysics of morals
t\~ed
Metaohvsical Foundations of the Doctrine of Ri.&ht and
Virtue
(5), la called the Metaphysical Foundations of the Sclence
of Natµre.
In this work the outline of the metaphysics of phyeics
is laid down.
By a •metaphysics• Kant means the plan of a
completed system of pure rational cognition proceeding by
specification fro• the critical preparatloa.
The metaphysics of
nature (or or physics -· again, the object has the same foundation
I
as lta acience) is therefore the specification of the •general
object• established in the first Critique by the introduction
of an empirical concept, namely !ftter understood as the •11avable
in space•.
And so we have a •metaphysics of corporeal nature•
or a •doctriae of body• (MFSN 469), a pure science resulting
froa the application of the transcendental principles to an
e11pirical concept.
(Here a note oa the terms
and •transcendental• seeas appropriate.
and mean respectively only this•
~
•pure•, •a priori",
All three are privative
2'·
before, and beyond
all sensation.)
I shall give the contents of the Metaphysical Foundations
ln brieflest outline and return to the work later.
In it
. .tter, the movable in apace, is treated under four headi:Dgaa
1.
insofar as it is aerely aovable, 2.
apace, 3.
insofar
insofar as it 110vea other utter, 4.
a1
i.t fills
aot aa lt is
an object of exper_ence 1 but as it ls related to a knower, a
i
subject, and his faculties of knowledge.
�7
I should add that the ti,le of thl1 work, of which a
reasonable alternative translation i1 the •Hetaphy11Gal
Principle• of Natural Science,• also iadlcates a corrective
purpose beside thAt positive sy1temat1c one.
It is intended to
oppose the implications of the title N.vton gave to the
work in which he presented the very physics Kant 11 groundings
the Hatbelllltlcal Principle1 of Natµral Pb1101oplly.
Kant will
contend . e11phatically that it is not aatheaatics whloh furnl1be1
the principles of philosoJ*y, but, in a carefully liaited aenae,
the conver1e •• mathematics la not usable in natural science
without a l'letaphy1lcal foundation.
(OP 21, !!.!A•• 72).
When we coae to the third work in the critical deaign, there
is no longer a parallel text dealing with the 11etaphysica of
morals.
Thia ls in a moat general way quite understandable,
for the theory of practice by its very natures comea
t:o
an end
in deeds, whereas the theory of experience issues in further
theory.
In any case, ln his old age Kant was preoccupied
principally with ...king notes for what he expected to be bla
aoat laportant work (KOP, 3), the completion of the deduction
of experiaental physics.
Thta enor11aue agglomeration of notes,
including also much other ..terial, became known as the Qm!!
Po•tUllUll•
Kant called his projected work the •Transition from
the Metaphysical Foundation of Natural Science to Physics.•.
Hia great concern was that there should be no jump or discontinuity
in the syste.,tlc deduction of the empirtcal investigation of
corporeal nature.
(I ahould note here tbat the word •deduction'
la lllJMt• ..c i.t•a, and that I aa using lt, legltl.aately, I
�8
think, ia tba
Mn•• in which one •llbt apeak of the deduotion
ef EuelidMll ..... projective geoaetry, -nln& a apec1f1oatlon
of general prl.naiple1 to yleld a .,re partlaular 1y1t... )
Wllat bat intended to provide in thia •transition• vu an
antlolpatton of all tbe possible finding• of pby1lca, an
aatl.clpatlon which be considered •••ible bY virtue of lt1
1y1t...tlc character, and neceaaary to, lta
preaervat~.
Thia 11 certat.nly die place to interject th• long-deferred
expoanat ion of what hat -n• by a • •Y•t-·.
hnt' a aetaphor
for a ayat. . la that of a work of architecture, in which
th• foundations, the Aroundvork, deteralne a unified superstructure.
The non-metaphorical description la ln ter11s of prlnclple1 and
their rullag powers a ayat.. le a universe ptryaaively formed
by it1 funda. .atal lava, which deteralne at once the nature of
it• parts !ml their re lat ioaa.
I vhould add that for Kant
thought la such that to tbink and to -.Ile ayateaa are one and
the aaae operation.
Io return to the •transition to Pby•1oa•.
The anticipation
of phy1lcal inquiry amounts to an exhaustive claaaiflcatlon of
all conceivable forces, forces being the ultlllate ooncern of
phy1lca, •• we ahall see.
Such a •topic• of forces ls intended
to direct and regulate all future lnveatlgatlon (OP 21, A!&•, 640).
I 1hall not go into thla claaalflcatlon very far, because there
le a aeft89 of failure over the whole unwieldy enterprlae, due
both to
IC.a•'•
falling powers and, again •• ,,. shall .... to tbe
lnberently llalCl••• and aelf·•efeatlng ab&raoter of the atteapt
to direct •perlmentatlon .! priori.
�9'
Aside froil corroborat 1ng that the illpulre and coacern of
Kant• a ayat• really la the acience of bodiea, the Opu1 Pg 1
t,.,_
i• aoat lntrlquiag for the telling gliap••• it glvea of tbe
wotlye1 of thl• concern.
\\
,,
The critical aapecta of th• '2lz!.ll. are
doainatecl by the theae of 11lf•d1tenirwt1pp, 11lf•tff11tion, aad
11lf•knowleclg1, by the way in which I ayaelf become the •preprl.etor
and originator• of ay world.
Kant hillaelf •keil an elliptical
statement concerning this matter well worth quoting (OP 22, 73)1
Fl.rat the conacioueneea of oneself aa a faculty of
representation, second the determination of oneaelf
aa a function of oneaelf, namely a force (via) of
representation. Thtd the appearapee of oneself
ae a phenomenon, ae a 11&nifold of representation•
a thoroughgoing deteraination of ·o -.11' 1 but only
aa appearance and not aa a thlng in itaelf s
· objectively ·• x, but as the aubject 11 affected by
the understanding• 1tnowledge 2! ongelf tbrough
1,1lf•dtttr1ination in space IDSl ~·· (ay italic•)
The importance of this passage to
my
•position
beoo••
clear if I anticipate myself by stating that aelf•deterat.nation
in apace l!lsl ti.lie is preclaely physlce •• the 11ince
~
science 2'
2' l!slll 11
llll•
r ·ahall however baae ay argument for tbia atateaent not on
the opus Pootuma, but on the vigorous and completed works
publiahed by Kant bilulelf.
4.
The lllportance of body in the Crltiaue•
Raving aketched out in a Vf.ry external way the deduction of
phyeica through three worka, I llU8t now return to the t.aportance
of body witbla the critique of Pure Rea19n.
to -ke ay
~
I aaat give a very brief rnlev of certain f\lltd-tal critical
)<,
�10
Ia accordance with the not lon of truth set out before, the
great faculttea.
When I aay •1 thlnk•,
I
I - n Chat I perfora a flxed nU11ber of deflnlte functlo•••
(
v
Tbe
ayatem ef these operationa of dla•@t't, which Kant teraa •categorlea•,
la called the •understanding", vhlch gra9ps or conceives an
object.
\~
It la the first faculty.
second faculty is receptlve1
provldes the form under which what la given to be graaped
can be received.
ln
The
~t•a
It la called the •aenslbllttf• and yields,
term, "lntultlona•, sights.
ICaftt's aost crucial critical discovery.
Thia paaalve faculty ls
It is not strictly
apeaking a "faculty• at all but a formal receptacle for •aeasatlon•,
which la Kant'• tera for whatever la adventitious in hllllan
experience.
a
But, agaln paradoxically, it also contains an
ptlori given, a •pure intuition• or transcendental material,
a pura-acruature of relatlona, aa it were.
The aensiblllty, in turn, bas two aspects or faces, an
outer and an inner aense.
I ahall leave the outer sense, which
Kant teraa •apace•, for later and now describe briefly only the
lnner, which Kant terms •ttae•.
Tl. . la nothlag but our capabillty for receiving our own
original tranaoendental self, that ls, our thinking aelf, as
an appearanoe.
It la •the intuition of ourself and our inner
eeaditicm". (B 49).
•Every
act of atttntion can provide ua an
example• (B 157) of the act of aelf•affection la which ve
appear to ouraelvea.
And when we exaaine the character of our
intuition of ouraelvea aa originators of thought ve find it to
have the fora of a flow of •nova•a coaac1.ouaneas la precisely the
�11
stream we
c~ll
time1 to appear to myself aeans to activate or
determine my sense of tlme.
Here I must interject a note on the particular text which
I am going to deal with.
The part of the Critique which is the
prime source of what follows is that section called the
"Analytic of Principles" of the understanding.
Here those two
totally disparate faculties. the understanding and the sensibility,
are brought together by a third power, hidden and mysterious
(B 181), which Kant terms the "iru.ginat1on."
By means of this faculty
casts
~lnto,
~he u~~i:ng
grasps, or
the pure formal material available in the
sensibility •• but only into its inner sense, only
~ ~·
The products of this injection of thought into ti.lie are called
"schemata". Thus schemata are thought•inforaed structures of
time, or, equally, temporallzed operations of thought.
The
example of a few scheaata will make immediately plausible the
claim tat they are nothing but the pattern under which our
thinking appears to ourselves.
For instance, our consciousness
is understood by us to be fuller or emptier down to vacancy
lere we have the appearance in time of that function of the
Jnderstand1ng called the category of reality, which is the thought•
function corresponding to a given object1 the resultant temporal
thought structure is the scheru. of aomethlng insofar as it fills
time. the
waxi~
(B 1R2).
So also our consciousness itself subsists•
and waning materiality of our consciousness
•Tiae
itself does not run out, but in it the existence of what ie
mutable runs on" (B 183) ·- here we have the appearance of
the category of substance in t 1Jne, and the
~~·esul tant
schema io
�12
that ot
.,JJftll,,,.
t:be
peraanence of 10-thing real in ti-·
In a like
tboee f-11 tar and t11e¥ltable pattern• of our· temporal
thtdf\na by wbleh ve d1aoover la nerythlng ve conaider
ae~tlou of 110Hnt1 of attention, namely ftU!lber, and
tf ,.rJ'.)r.,,
cante_.&MOua autual actloa, nuely aiault19tty, and rule-
v-rl'IN
s(;V\
sc»veJ1ned· 1ucceaa1on, naaely cauoe and effect.
With the ach...ta aet out, the prlnctplea of the understanding
are then si~ a aet of fund~tal rule•.
Thew• rulea d-nd
that, and alao tall hov, tbeae time-involved categoriea Mlat
now in
tura be 1ntroduoed into 1MCe, ae that aa object of
•nperl-••, 111bleh - n a of truth or M science, uy ari.ae.
they are ttaea, ln accord••• with the prinoiple of prlnc1plea
quoted before, at the • - tlae tbe rulea for t:be conatltutlon
of tbe objeota of experience am for any poaalble true acoount
of tbell.
Thia peculiar aequence, ill which the categories are (\rat
brought together with ti.lie and only then vitb apace, iadlaatea
that tlae ia the een& of aeaaea, the priury fora in vblch
utryth1M chat presents ltaelf to us at all ftrat appeara1
•aut el.,e all repreaentation1, vtiletber they have
outer thlags a1 object• or aot, belong ln Cbemaelvea,
•• ••teralnatloaa of the · aoal, to dle l ...r atate,
while ~hta inner atate belo~•·••to tt .. , it follova
that t l • la an a · priori conclltio• of all appearance
la general, tbat is• the l~ late cond lt ion of the
1tmer appearance (of MUl) and beoauae of thla alao
tba ..cit.ate condlttoD of outer appearaaaea.• (1 ~-50).
And 19t Chere l•
110
aclence of the aouL ·:appearing in
aa th_..- t.a a aolence of the body appearing in apace.
t
1-
Noalaally,
the •iAlllOe of uture, as the atudy of all appearano••• lRcludea
�13
both, but hnt Mk•• it very elear tllat there 1• not now and
never can be a sclenoe of 10ul, a .payehology,
Tbe reaaoa la not
111trely that otb• th1ak1ng subjects will naturally not aumlt to,
or lf they do, vlll aot reuin unaffected by, our 1aveat1gatlona,
rather it 11 inherent both in the poverty of
t 1-
lteel f and of
tbe lawleaa variability of its contents (A 381).
IC.ant c\at•e.(ve shall aee later vby) that 1clenoe la auell
only inaofar aa there ia Mtheutlce in it, preferably g•-.try.
Nov the geoaetric iaage of t lme is the flowing 1 iae of a lag le
di•eaeioa, whieh ehova how poor fsychology auat be . .t1'ellat1cally
when compared to three d 1.Jlenat.onal apace (MFSN 471).
It follow•
tbat no self •knowledge of interest can come through the study
of soul
u
~
apD!ars.
I aust add that Kant forcefully proves
that lt is an illusion of reaaon to think that the soul caa know
itaelf y
,1'
11. lD it1elf
(B
399ff.).
Self •kpovledge
1eea1 ,t2
/"<
lm alygether preclu4td.
And now we auat look at two sections Kant added to the
"Analytic Prlnclplea" in the aecowi edition of the Cr1t19ue,
the "lefutatlon of ldealiaa• and the "General Note to the Syat. .
of Priaclplea•.
In theae additt.ona I.Cant endeavor• to aupply a
pla09 where we aay look to aH ouraelvea fully
mi• aatiafyingly.
'Ehle place ia the outer sense, IHCI•
The outer sense ls the aecond face of our senaibility, a
receptive fora for all Jlhat is other than ourselvea, for all
co-a froa the outalde to affect us, for
-
•••tion proper.
.
outer ..... is also. in inexplicit but apt refiectlon
of
~t
But
thi•
�14
purpose, the source of the most telling feature of all the objects
within it, which is that they have their parts outside and beside
one another and are extended in three dimensions.
Thus it is the
very structure of the f or11 of outer sense which not only guarantees
but even requires that spatial objects shall be subject to geometry
hence Kant's requirement that natural science be geametric is
really the same as his claim that it can only arise in space.
(It is of course also numerical, since all the contents of outer
sense appear in inner sense or title as well, and number> it will
be remembered, is a time schema.)
To return to the additions to the text with which Kant decided
to conclude the section on the application of the temporalized
categories to space.
Here he says that it ts noteworthy that
"in order to understand the possibility of things according to
categories, and so to display the objective reality of the latter,
we need not only intuitions, but even always outer intuitions"
(B 291).
So, for instance, in order to give objective reality to
the concept of substance, we need an intuition in space, namely
11atter, because that alone determines permanence, while ti11e ls
in constant flux.
Even to grasp our own changing consciousness
we need to
it as a line in space and "the real reason for
i11a~ine
this is that all alteration presupposes something permanent in
the intuition, but that in inner sense no permanent intuition at
all is to be 11etwith."
(B 292). And Kant concludes/a
"This whole
observation is of great importance ••• ln order to indicate to us
the limitations of the possibility of such knowledge whenever there
is talk of self-knowledge out of mere inner consciousness and
the determination of our nature without the aid of outer empirical
intuitions: (B293).
�15
Outer empirical intuitions are, as we shall see, bodies.
Kant ls therefore saying that bodies are the necessary conditions
of our steady presence before ourselves.
where
appear !2 ourselves !!!S! in
~
*
~
They~~
sole place
lies our substance.
It should be noted that this strange outcome is at least
consonant with Kant's peculiar understanding of outer appearance.
For when sensation comes to us from what might
be
called the
absolute outside to fill our sensibility, the resulting appearance
tn no way belongs to the alien source of that sensation and is
quite incapable of indicating anything concerning the nature of
that source which Kant ·calls the "thing in itself".
It is rather
the case that the appearance, the shaped sensation, is entirely
formed by
but the
USJ
~
one might say that sensation itself adds nothing
of our being affected, the mere activation of t:he
subject (B 207).
5.
*
The use of the term body.
At this point I would like to interject an observation on
the word 'body' which I have used in posing my questions
ts a body in Kant• s systera7
What
Kant himself cal l _ the science
s
founded in the Metaphysical Foundations of the Science of Nature a
"doctrine of bodies", so the word seems perfectly appropriate.
And yet it ls not a weighty word, or one of consequence, in the
Kantian text.
(HFSN 525)1
Let me give its definition in the Foundations
"Body ls a matter between determinate boundaries
(and such matter therefore has a figure)."
A quantity of moving
..
lllltter ts called a mass, and so a 11ass of determinate shape is
�16
also called a body (537).
Body is therefore a mere delimiation
of matters a110rphous matter 1.s the basic, pervasive object of
interest, whose concept is to be expounded.
Nonetheless I want to hold on to the word body, for the sake
of displaying a consequence of the insistence on founding the
science of bodies metaphysically.
This is the starting, non-
plussing disappearance of that inert lump which move·s by effort,
that shapely solid, that handy repository of trust, that constant
object of our most solicitous care, that terminus of an attraction
or revulsion (wholly different from the forces of si.railar name
into which Kant will resolve matter), that whole which antecedes
all distinction of form and matter, that possible seat of soul
which most of us mean when we say 'body' and which first excites
the inquiry into bodily nature called physics.
*
A note to point up the omission of body in its immediate
organic sense from Kant's system.
I here mean that body which is
a living, sensate center of interpretation of other bodies as alive
or dead.
Kant never, to my knowledge, treats the relation of such
a body as mY Q!!!1
a little work in
to the transcendental outer sense, to space.
~hich
In
the relation of body and soul is indeed -
discussed, the letter on the "Organ of the Soul", he says1
"For if I am to make the place of my soul, that ls, my
absolute self, intuitable anywhere in space, I must
perceive myself through that very same sense through
which I also perceive the matter which surrounds me,
just as happens when I want to determine my place in the
world as human being, namely that I must observe my
body in its relation to other bodies without me. -Now the soul can perceive itself only through inner .
sense, but the body, be it internally or externally,
only through outer senses and so can simply determine
�17
no place for itself, because for this purpose it would
have to make itself an object of tts own outer intuition
and would have to place itself outside itself, which is
self-contradictory."
Let me first comment on this passage insofar as it seems to
contradict the "Refutation of Idealism" in the Critiaue.
For in
that too there is no indication that I am to determine myself as
a human being in a certain place within outer sense or space, but
rather the outer sense !!.
~
whole contains the stuff which makes
my self-appearance possible.
But further, note the problem which Kant evadesa
Hy body
as an outer appearance has a very special character -- it is a
kind of sink hole of sensationr all sensation streams toward it
and all existence or non-existence is controlled from it (as when
I close my eyes) e
This is a difficulty for Kant's outer intuition,
s·ince it, like Newton• s d ivi,ne "sensory• of infinite space
(Optics, Qu• 28) ought to be homogeneous, isotropic (the same in
al 1 direct ions) , and cont iJ1uous, while 11y body and its instrument1 ike sensory organs represent a point of discontinuity, of
preference, and a warping of space.
Hence it does appear to
behav~
like a seat of soul, and this consideration cannot be acco1111<>dated
in Kant's system.*
6.
The constitution of body.
Let me go on now to describe Kantian body as it ts developed
from the "Analytic of Principles" of the Critique through. the
Metaphysical Foundations of the Science of Nature•
is not, of course, temporal, but merely critical.
This genesis
�18
The functions of the
on
nothi~
understandi~,
insofar as they operate
given, enclose in thelr grasp, that is, conceive, an
empty object, a mere
x.
It is only when, next, these concept
functions operate on the pure content of the sensibility that
a material object arises, and such an object of pure material is
a pure object of experience, a thing !!l general.
a.
"Thing" in the Critique.
Let me briefly recount the principles by which a "thing" is
established.
There are four of them, in accordance with the
number of basic concept functions of thought termed "categories".
Two of these are constitutive and are called "mathematical"
because they assure that all things shall be so constituted as
to be extensively and intensively measurable.
are called "dynamic", because they
re~ulate
The other two
the relations which
all things by their very nature as things must have with each
other, and they assure that all things whatsoever shall be
enmeshed in one dynamic system, a system of mutual influence.
The first principle is called an axioma
it is axiomatic
that all things have extension, that all are spatial intuitions
and hence measurable.
The second principle is called an anticipationa
it is to be
anticipated that everywhere in space things will have some degree
of perception, that is, measurable intensity of sensation.
Third comes a group of three principles called analogies•
we may infer by analogy that even things not immediately available
to observation are bound to each other by definite relations,
�19
which are spatial applications of the time
t.
sch~ata,
as followsa
Time itself as duration is to appear in space as substance
so that all things whatsoever will have a steady substrate, a
permanent existence.
2.
Time as connected succession is to
appear in space as cause and effect, so that all things are to
be similarly related as causes and effects.
3.
Time as simultaneit)
ls to appear in space as the mutual relation of interaction, so
that all things are in a like way to affect each other conteaporaneously.
The fourth principle is called a postulate and adds nothing
to the nature of things objectively but only determines their
subjective relation to the faculty of knowledge.
Let me review ina little more detail the nature of a thing
as it emerges from the so-called "Anticipations• and the first
"Analogy", for these are the principles most directly relevant
to the bodily nature of things.
They provide, in effect, the
foundation of •reality" and "substance• in Kant's system of nature.
In the first
analo~y,
in one of those amazing junctures which
make Kant's system so suggestive, substance is established as
~
spatial representation .Q! consciousnesea
" ••• There must be in the objects of perception, that is,
appearances, that substrate which represents time 1n general, and in which all alteration or si11ultaneity
can be perceived by 11eans of the relation of appearances
to the same. Now the substrate of all that is real •••
is substance.... It follows that the permanent, in
relation to which all time relations of appearance can
alone be determined, is substance in appearance, that
ls, the real in appearance, which, as substrate of all
alteration, always remains the same." (B 225).
When we recall that time as the pure content of the inner sense
�20
l• ayeelf l.n appearance, the state•nt that 1ub1tapce i i
•Mtiallztd aelf la corroborated.
And thus a truly novel
...nift8 baa been attacbed to an 014 ter11 algnlfyl.ng self•
•• Subatanee la now the three dt.eu-..1
eube1at11'18 bel.ag.
appttrtnpt of soul to itself.
In tbe •Anticipations• the alterationa
to be
predicated
of eubetanee are founded, or rather a guarantee la given
~
cbaqea 1n con•olouaneea vlll occur, even though lta qualltt.ee
••ftN)t M
eetabllebed A priori.
That we -Y anticipate that
•ubatance will always be in varying degree aenee-activated, that
things will alwaya be ••naatioa•fllled, that neither ti.M nor
epace· w111 ner be co111>letely eapty -·this ls the critical
requtr....-nt of rglitys re.a llty la the deterainatlon of a
'
'
eubatance ae having giatence, that ia, •• being a thing there and
then (B 225).
bnt'a ayatea requires that the things of nature
be . .de quick with aen•ation, that they materialize.
b.
-
Wxl!tJA.--_
Mtt100y1ical Found&tione of the -seience
of
tyre
In th• Metaphysical fqJlldation1 the transcendental structure
la realized by the introduction of an •eapirlcal eoacept•, the
concept of Mtter.
By an ••pirlcal oonaept" Kant actually
aeana a •concept of soaetbing eaprlcal", tbat la, a concept which
is la
118
vay tbe re•ult of ob..rvatloa (though to clal.a existence
for it would require experience), but rather simply a closer
conceptual deteraination or specification of the transcendental
"thi118" eetabllabed ln the Grltiaue•
concept ia
~ ;..a.ut
The aetaphysica of such a
it.- ful 1 ex pl teat ion.
Kant presents the
concept of matter aa lf he had chosen one of a l\Ullber of
�21
poas ible 1natance1 or specifications of a natural thiag ( 4 70) ,
But 1n fact, it 1eeas to •• ao other
~botce
wae po11lble,
et.nee utter turne out to be the tmt.que and nece11uy flrat
empirical ooaeept of the aclence of nature.
Matter la the na• •• ironically choaen if anyone expects
to be presented with .0- sol id stuff -- of tbe concept of the
"movable i.n apace•.
It t.s poaat.ble to reooaatruct the lit.aet.ag
reason why the JIOVable in apace t.a the basic concept of the
acienee of nature froa tbia sentence•
"Ibe funda11ental deterain•
ation of a 1011ethlng that le to be an object of the external
senses must
be
110tlon, '51£ tblreby UlX
affected" (476, ay italica).
aa
theat
11p111
lll
The .,vable ia aiaply that which
can excite aenaatien, aeaaation beirg appropriately undtratood
by Kant aa tut vho1e very uture it is to be movi..tg am 11&alfold.
It r-in• to 1upply another oat.1s1on by conjecturing what
epeciflcatlon of the tranacendental I.ant 11 actually perfor111ng1
the 110vable appear• to be
nothi~
but the real aubatance of tht
Critique, but now_ specifically 0Pn11dert4 ill
11R'ratelx
~
G laa•
any otber, truly
!WW
~
DSl
•ace
~
At leaat it 11 difficult to 4lacover
deteralnatlon in the conoept of -tter.
The Mtt!Phvt1cal Found!t\ont ooaee in four ·parta which are
eo11pletely parallel to the "Analytic of Princlplea• aad are
pretenttd in the fora of propo1itlona and proofa follow1Jla fro•
those principlt••
the ft.rat part. vblcb derive• froa tbe principle of extmalve
quantity (tire Axlolq of Intuition), eatabl ishea tbe geo-trle
treatlleDt of polnt •tl.ou.
motion• la ter11a of
It deals with the 0011po1t.tion of
_..t.ng ooordlnate •Y•t••• or •1paoe1•, and,
in refuting Newton's notion of abaolute apace, provld•• a
�22
metaphysical foundation for so-called Newtonian relativity.
(This is the principle that when bodies interact or are all
subject to the same accelerative forces, they constitute a
space for which absolute motion or rest are not internally
discriminable.
Principia, Axioms, Cors.
v, VI).
The second part derives from the principle of intensive
quantity (the
~Anticipations
of Perception"), which requires
some degree of sensation in things and hence their reality.
Thie part is headed "Dynamics" because it shows that the essential
qualities of matter are forces, and dynam1s
misappropriated by physicists for force.
is the Greek word
Tnis part is the most
important to my purpose precisely because it deals with the
most intimate nature of body.
The third part, which derives from the principles governing
the relations of things (the Analogies of Experience), is
called "Mechanics" since in it are deduced the laws
~overnlng
the
interactions of bodies in systems, trose "laws of nature" by
. which bodies are held in systems.
In this part Newton's
"Axioms or Laws of Motion" are, with certain suggestive variations,
completely deduced as propositions.
Here also Kant draws the
physical consequence which follows from his understanding of
substance as the steady spatial substrate of all alterations
it is the law of the conservation of matter.
*
A note correlating the Propositions of Mechanics of the
Metaphysical Foundations with the Axioms of Motion
of the
Principia Mathematica.
Proposition 21
"First Law of Mechanics", the law of the
conservation of matters proved, as just noted, by an application
�23
to matter of the first Analogy concerning the permanent in
space, or substance.
It has no explicit counterpart in the
Principia but is an implicit consequence of the corpuscular
view of matter set out in the •Rules for Philosophizing• which
introduce the third book of the Principia and contain the
application of the previous mathematical results to the world of
matter.
For the hard impenetrable atoms there posited can neither
come into nor go out of being.
Proposition 31
•second Law of Mechanics•, a fora of the
law of inertia, namely that every change of matter demands an
external cauae1 proved py an application of the second analogy
concerning cause and effect.
Its counterpart is Newton's
Axiom of Motion I, that every body continues in its state of
rest or unifora 110tion unless forces are applied.
Proposition 41
"Third Mechanical Law•, laying down that
in all coll18Unication of motion action and reaction are always
equal to one another1 proved by an application of the third
Analogy concerning interaction.
Corresponds to Newton's Axiom
of Motion III, the law of equal and opposite action and reaction
of bodies.
Proposition 1 establishes as the operable quantity of Kantian
physics the quantity of matter as measured by its •quantity of
110tion•, that is matter compounded with velocity (momentlDI •av).
This proposition is formally parallel to Newton's Axiom of
Hation II, in which the basic operable quantity la defined as
force, coapounded of mass and acceleration (F-raa).
Force aa
seen in acceleration or change of velocity la simply absent from
�24
Kant'• foundation of physics, and this omission coastitutes the
aoat
·~•lflcant
technical difference between Kantian and Newtonian
physic••*
Finally, the fourth part, which derives from the principle
concerning the relation of things to the faculty of knowledge
(the Postulates of Empirical Thlnklng).prescrlbes what
propositions of physics are to be asserted as possible or aa
necessary.
.
To returR to the •Metaphysical Foundations of Dynamics•,
which deals vith aatter insofar as it fills apace.
It ls in
filling space that utter asserts its "reality", its power to
affect the aenaea.
The universal principle of dynamics isa
•Atl that is real in the objects of our external senses ••• must
be regarded aa a llOVing force." ( 523).
"The concept of matter
iareduced to nothing but 11<>ving forces1 this could not be
expected to be otherwiae, because in apace no activity and no
change ean be thought of but mere 110tion: (524).
Force is
the condition of possibility of matter whose possibility la not
itself, in turn, explicable and whose concept ls not itself
derivable fro• anotner.
As
~ant
puts it, force itself cannot be
aade conceivable (513).
IC.ant provea that matter ia in fact nothing but force by
ahowing that all the appearances of spatial objects are accounted
for by forcea and only by forces.
In the course of these proofs
i . abollabea solidity, understood as the ability of matter to
occupy apace by reason of . .re existence (498) •• an implicit
�25
part, I think, of the ordinary view of body.
And he attacka
a view he regards as the consequence of positing solidity,
Descartes• corpuscular or atomic theory which asserts the
l'lystery of mathematical and . .chanical iapenetrability, and
requires mere blocks of extension to 110ve each other externally
(502, 533).
Hatter requires two original forcesa
a repulsive or driving
force and an attractive or drawing force, corresponding to the
two possible directions of interaction between point centers of
force (497).*
The prlaary repulsive force is the force 11<>re inti.J'lately
associated with our sensing of extended things.
"Hatter fills
space not by its mere existence, but by a special moving force•
(497, which in resisting penetration is the cause of palpability.
It is, hence, a •superficial" force, a source of surfaces and
contacts, which nonetheless conetltutes matter throughout so
that it is infinitely divisible -- there is always a new surface.
On one force alone, however, matter could not fill apace
but would,: by repelling itself to inflnt.ty, become dissipated
and vanish•
Therefore, 1.n order that body might become mncrete,
as it were; 4 cotmtervailing original force it wanted.
This
seeond f orce cannot be imaediately sensed or even located in a
body, out can only be notice<! in its effects.
It is a penetrating
force which does not need the agency of other matter but acts at
a distance even to infinity and precisely where it is not
(512).
Whereas repulsion provides matter with its outside, so to speak,
attract1.on gtYes it its inner cotEs:wace and ._.,. !!tie aegaeata
crit:lqm of . 1.ant•a ~ltt la glvea - Hegel
(Science of LggiC, Bk 1, See. I, cb. 3, para. 6, a, Mote).
.
* .A p'll-oH•l•l
�26
of aatter close or dense. _ It - is therefore the force which, as
it binds a body to . itself. also holds body to body in a system,
such aa the planetary system.
*
The•e two forces equally and simultaneously constitute
-tter -- a body b
not as in Boecovitch' s Theory of Natural
Philotophy (1763) a region in space where attractive and repulsive
forces alternate> wit. the repulsive force prevail·ing and going
h
off to infinity near the center of the body while the attractive
force similarly prevails but goes off to zero away from that
center.
Instead two field-like expanses of force are super-
imposed and together give rise to regions of various density
variously delillited, which correspond to bodies.*
Let Kant himself concludea
•tf we revlew all our discussions of the metaphysical
treataent of aatter, we shall observe that in this
treataent the following things have been taken into
considerationa first, the real in space (otherwise
called the solid) in its filling of space through
repulsive forces second, that which with regard to
the first as the proper object of our external perception
ta negat1ye, namely attractive force, by which, as
far as may be, all space would be penetrated, that is,
the solid would be wholly abolisheda third the
1111.tation of the first force by the second and the
consequent perceptible determination of the degree
of filling of space: (523).
Thia last •perceptible determination• is matter, while body is
but aatter shaped between boundaries and therefore nothing but
a figure inacribed into the continuous expanse of mattera
body ••• is . .tter between determinate
boundaries~
(525).
•A
Self-
determining solid bodies are simply incompatible with Kant's system.
That -tter does fill all of space and fills it continuously,
ao that there la no empty space, is a possiblltty df such
�27
consequence to physics that Kant concludes the Metaphysical
Foundations with its consideration.
Within this work the
dynamic plenum remains merely a powerful posslbllty, and the
ether as a special pervasive · "external" matter Which reali.mes
it remains a physical assu11ption (523, 534, 563 ff.).
But
it seems to me that the fullness of space ts co11pletely deducible
metaphysically
from the very constltut ton of appearance. For i.t
follows both from the continuities of nature requi.red by the
principles of the understanding (.B 281), and from the fact that
space, as the receptive form of sensation, can never in itself
appear, which ls to say -that there can be nothing i.n appearance
corresponding to
~mpty
space
(~,
.B
261).
I note here only
in passing that if a plenum does require an ether, it may, as
an ultimate reference system, well be incompatible wi.th the
previously established
prlnclpl~
of relativity.
But this very
inconsistency is proof that Kant's metaphysics of nature does
not merely ground Newton's physical results retrospectively -on the contrary it looks forward not only to a physics of force
fields, but also to the great - ether debate which ended only with
the momentous negative experiments performed just a century after
the publication of the Metaphysical Foundati.ons.
Its sequel, the "Iransition ••• to Physics", shows that Kant
was also concerned about the loss of independent body i.n the
spread of dellmitable stuff.
In the very pages in which he now
undertakes to show that an ether of some sort ts indeed not 11erely
a reasonable assumpti.on but a deductive necessi.ty of the system,
he also tri.es to establish i.ts very contrary, na11ely natural, organic
body
(~,
OP 21, 21R).
The effort here i s to lntroduce a body
�28
whlch ls not merely_, by a regulative fiction of reason) subjectively
interpreted aa organized to serve an end, but which ha&- an
objective principle of
self-determinat~on
(OP 21, 209 ff.),
an "1nner force" or proper principle of motion, and may therefore be termed "a self-limiting quantum of matter having a
certain
fl~ure"
(170)~
Kant regards thls task as properly
belonging to the "Transition".
But he also concedes that such
bod 1es might wel 1 be "inconceivable" ( 570), that is, not
derivable in the systems therefore, it seems to me, this effort
must fails
the system of well-founded matter called nature
cannot, as Kant himself has shown in the letter on the organ of
the soul, yield bodies fitted by reason of their self-contained
unity to be the seat of life or soul. -- Indeed, how could nature
contain such places, being itself the epiphany of soul1
7.
The excesses of the system.
Kant considers that the metaphysical foundations of matter
and 1ts science have been laid, and the possibility of
understood as experience ls forever guaranteed.
knowled~e
Henceforth
eaplrical physics may be safely and infinitely pursued -safely because its principles lie !. priori in myself so that all
experience ls self-experience, and infinitely because all of
its occasions are excitations which flow to us, with ever fresh
adventitiousness, from an alien source.
But at this juncture a difficulty arises.
In order for the
systematic character of physics promised by its principles to be
preserved throughout the enterprise, a regulative framework
of investigation must be laid down.
The great preoccupation of
�29
Kant's later years was to assure the •rational coherence• (MFSN 534)
of the science of nature by an ever-closer explication and
specification of its basic concepts.
soul as IUlture seems to require that
The representation of the
!ll aasuaptl"ODa and
hypotheses either be soon converted into deductions or discarded.
Less and less is left to observation.
To give a prime exaaplea
the law of the force of attraction,
naaely that it varies inversely as the sqU4re of the distance
between the centers of two bodiea, ia a specification,
~
observation, of innuaerable aathematical posaibilltiea antecedently
set out in Newton's Princloia (III, i•vlii, particularly land ii).
Kant too state• that •no law whatever of attractive or of
repulsive force may be risked on a priori conjectures• (534).
And yet Kant deduce• the inverse square law from the mode of
diffusion essential to his attractive force together with a
fact of Euclidfan geometry, namely that the surfaces of concentric
spheres increase as the squares of their radii (519).
This ever-growing regulation of observation insofar as lt
ls attributable to the richness of the system in deductive
consequences, might be ai.Jlply a credit to it.
And so it would
be, were it the case that nature, when arraigned before Kantian
reason, the •appointed judge who coapela the wltneasea to
answer questions which he has himself formulated• (B xiii)>
always willingly and plausibly responded in the required terma.
But the fact of the matter, worth far more consideration than
has gone into this passing remark, aeeaa to be that phyaiciats
have largely by-passed Kant's •topic• of forces and have super-
�30
ceded bu -tapbyalce •• for ·exa111>le, its
conatlt~tlonally
Euclidean apace aa well aa the categories of causality and
si11Ultaneity •• preauraably coapelled thereto by nature herself.
And yet it la this very excess of doctrinal consequence which
ult• the study of Kant's 11etaphyslcs of physics the indispensable
pbllo1oph4.ctl CoJIDle11nt to the study of classical aechanics.
For in attempting to account completely for all that ls found
therein, Kant, even as he falls, unfailingly aide reflection'
on the terms of physics.
In any case, the failure to preserve the adventitiousness
of nature and hence to become a viable guide for experlaental
physics la only a derivative difficulty of the systea.
.
Hore
radical and revealing questions arise about it, beginning with
the excessive lllportance attached to physics as the sole self•
atudy and ending only in questions concerning the nature of
philosophy itself.
Let . . conclude with the briefest formulation of auch
questions by returning to the work with which I began, to Kant's
essay
invel~hlng
against the "noble tone• in philosophy of
which Plato la the unwitting progenitor.
particularly Kant unalstakably alludes
To one d1.alogue
(.su.&,:.,
1ft mentioning
Mttypa, cf. Ti-eus 50 ca.) as the embodlaent of all that he 11Ust
disavow in Plato's view of raatheaatlcs, of the world of appearances,
of
truth•telll~
itself -· the Ii.Jlaeu••
It ls al.,st as if the
treatise on the Hetaphya1cal foundations of the Science of Nature
were a specific response to the dialogue •• not, however, in the
110de of •i111>le di...trlc contradiction which Kant reserves for
his closer opponents like Deecat:t. . , but by way of that aoat
�31
radical contrariety which characterizes true alternatives.
A parallel study of these two texts would raise the aforesaid
questions in some such termsa
Kant destroys bod ie@ to preserve the reality · :<~ .
~'Qpearances,
and gives up the self-deter111ining coherence of 1 •, a i~ld· al natures
for an assured perceptibility of nature
• thi~s.. •
understoo·.,~
"> ...a
system of
But may not the articulated and .. d·t:st: inct.,. beauty of
natural bodies and configurations require the intellect to forego
sensation-filled dynamic reality as well as ultimate 1.mpenetrability
in favor of Timaeus' mathematical solidity (53 c ff .)7
Does not
the inexhaustible originality of this mathematicised nature coapel
us to reconsider whether our sensibility can possibly be the sole
source of her f orms7
Kant denies the soul a seat in nature in order to preserve
nature herself as the appearance of the soul and the · repreaentation
of its rational operations.
Thus nature becomes a system, an
edifice founded on principles and constituted as well as soverned.
throughout by laws derivative from the functions of thotJ8ht.
But IWAY not the curious complex of regularity and irrationality
which is the visible world suggest yet a third relation of soul
to body, expressed by Timaeus as the girdling of body by soul
(36e)7
Thus body would arise not as Sll!I. own outer appearance,
but as the inner effects of
~world
which is indeed intelligible,
but not wholly so.
Kant regards the continuing study of palpable 11tµre, the
science of body, as the most serious hU11an theoretical activity,
and its secure foundation in our own faculties as a COllpleted
philoaophical labor.
But uy it not be that the account of the
�32
visible world ts, as in Timaeus' phrase, only .a . •1tkely story•
..
(e1.kon mythos, 29 d), and that physics thrives on just those
hypotheses., analogies, and likelihoods which Kant disavows in
his essay?
Then may not this perpetually tentative and open
physics be a sort of high amuse11ent with useful effects rather
than humanity's central study, and a model-making project -- the
•story of likenesses•, to which Timaeus' phrase alludes-- rather
than a well-grounded system~
Hence a metaphysics of physics may
finally have to yield to an inquiry into the nature and being of
models, which may require the playful poetry of mere philosophy
as exemplified in Plato's noble dialogue, rather than the working
prose of Kant's ayot!!lftic philosophy.
�- 33 -
Addendum_ to p. 24, top:
ThP reason for Kant's substituti8n of mv for ma is,
however, not merely a tPchnical matter.
Kant's Proposition 3
begins with the words :"Everj change of matter has an external
cause" (543).
But, as I have noted, this cause is "motion"
or "momentum," rather than the force of Newton's Law II.
ThP reason
forces Kant
~or
this substitution is as follows.
~as
The two
posited in the section on dynamics constitute
matter, but do not cause changes Q.f.
™'
which is
·~' O
say that
thev do not affect the motion of "matter in motion."
Now for
Kant the causes of motions can only be other motions, since a
cause is nothing but an appearance wh:i.ch determines another
appearance later in time (B 234) -and
the same kind as its effect.
must therefore be of
:But since effect is a change
in space of a mass-, the cause must equally be such an
"external" change, namely motion.
Consequc-ntly in the
context of the section on mechanics the dynamic forces
function only as mediating mechanisms for the communication
of motions.
These latter momenta alone are Kant's "motiTe
forces o"
This explanation was deTeloped by the members of my
preceptorial on the Foundations.
�
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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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formallectureseriesannapolis
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What is a body in Kant's system?
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1974
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Typescript of a lecture delivered on May 8, 1972 by Eva Brann as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
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lec Brann 1974
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Annapolis, MD
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text
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Brann, Eva T. H.
Deans
Friday night lecture
Tutors
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https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/50e88d199c529ac41487bf8d699c11e1.mp3
aaa30ff6feb7f52b3200cacf8a1a071a
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.
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Berns, Gisela N.
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Time and nature in Lucretius' De rerum natura
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1974-03-08
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on March 8, 1974 by Gisela Berns as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
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Lucretius Carus, Titus. De rerum natura
Philosophy, Ancient
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<a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/1088" title="Typescript">Typsecript</a>
Friday night lecture
Tutors
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Text
't'!MF. AMP NATURE
IN LlTCRET!US
1
"DE RERUM NATUR!\ 11
GiselA. B�rns ·
· St.
·r
John's ColJP�e
...
Annapolis,
MarylRn�
�Revised version of R lecture,
�1ven
at
March
1974.
St.
John's College,
Translations of the Latin quotes
appended
at
the end.
�1
I:
In bno'k one of •n�
a.
niscnssion or
.
'T'hemP.
r e ru m
.
n.'l tnr::t" , · 1 n th� context of
thin.rr:�, Lucre-
properti�s ann accinents of
tius �ef1 nes time as a�ciitent
of
motion ( 1., IJ,t;Q-82):
tempus item pe:r- se non est,
serl rebus ah fpt=;iS
con'3equitnr sP.nsus, transactum qntd s1. t in n0vo,
tnm qu�e res 1..nstet, quid porro deind� sequrttur;
nee ner se quAmquam temptl's sentir� f'at�ndumst
��r.1otum ab rernm motu placid::1que qulete.
{1, 459-63)
'rh� ttoro distinguishable aspects of time are:
net'cn,�nce on motion a'ld rest of
thin�s, aml
�P.n'"'n�ence on human perception.
Epicurus
fh I
�, u G �
w
.
S
,
.a
A
han {1e fi nfht time as
s/s K«-T�7:e1·r:ll<-?.
::tn:v
mot.ion"2.
"�n'1�1t�" f.ln.d
as
·�
J
1) its
2)
. �c<.'ll"z;"o(. 6'c...dll(.
I
tn t.ucretius• df"fi.n1t.ton,
1. ts
in his l'TOrl{
cert::tin mea!-':!lrinf""
.1
I
rLS
.
·
.
Tte�
I
I
l.(.tv·"t�·f.l-()5 ""'
n�rc�rtton of
.
hm-mv0r,
l•rh�rn
"s�ntire"• l'ther� "fe�l:tnr:.. "ta.'kes·the place of
,
or
11 a c�rtnt�
1m11� tl;rr-P. t�rm�:
"tf'":'mnnG11, •aetnl=l", 118.P,rum", 1V"'0M to lJr
.
1Yl �t��h n Nrty t:hat 11tP.mpuR" t1enot0� th .... r.ost Flht::t:"'JC:t,
11RP'VI�m11 t'l-10 mo�t concr�t.; !'l�pe�t of ti.11e, while· "nt=-t.""r;" �rw('rs
r- ..1th, !ll,rd:rnct arid concrete mc1ni n.n;.
n ... .... f'l
?p�n. H�rc. 1413, Pr. 55, A. BA'PI('-.\'?.7,1, eel. and. c0rnm. , T1
concPtto del tempo nella fisj ca r1tom:t�t icll, Epimn ,.n. i.n !!!P.M.
..
u. T>11'1'V')()'m�, Genova, 1959, 25-59, p.
JR.
��t')mp'1�t.l�! tn
r.t')mmntnt
(l�(�):
l1l1f"' Of h001{ r1Vf"'
A.
t.r.mrortl
rot:"
rum�" "t�un
"�tc ,T01V�l1'h. 'lr>t�.R
roll tn� t imP. rh'ln.r-:r:r: thr> t 1 m"!1
· n r ·:th1Yif':�."
Tn th�
·
1)
thr:-�"
P.r.tm.sr, two
of thi.s
<1our��
·
r,p�ce,
t1.m�
of time, ·h�bmrm
'
afl motion and.
for
common .r:rourH1
·Lncret inA 1
-
\•- .
-�
�
�nd thC' phi l.o.r.:o
...,
The
Aef!m�
.
·'
their youth,
.
.
be
transformed
bP.h·u�en sp:r:ttially extenncd
phor1cA.11y as spnce of time
as sp.-"l.ce,
1;.
of time
"-
,.,
.. .
·"·
depf')rHi.ence
to
'
..
A
.
of time
their mn.turity and
on bottle:=:
1 nto
a
tn motion
corre!1ponot:mce
motion a.nd tim0. 1 expressed. meta(cf.
w�th
6, JOO-J; 11 326-?).
most p.'lra
doxlclllly from the 't>�holc of time t o the point of time,
th11r: mtrrorr; thr'l �urn
of thinr;£ 1
Th(>.
mere_ qm1ntitative meani:n�,
a
·l"Fll1f':E'!!l from infinitely r;reat to infinitely :-::mall,
r:nm(>.,
1� thP.
in mnn.ller or 1:-trr;l')r nmo1mts of t l rr.r:-,
or.thinr;s hi:\ve-their times,
space
l-Jhn.t
2)
spn.ce rnnl"('r. from .r:rm�rfil
A.s
;.
...
0
thro1ir:h
ar;
from quantitative to qualitative mnrm\n�:
th1 nt:1'r.: h'O'!pp(-)n in time,
th�ir old F.l'(e.
And
timP.
!lccirt.ent of motion?3
f!s
of t 1me
accm\nt
A.niJ
to p'1T't1cu1A.r,.
force?
time ns
this poetic v1.el'r of timP.
nh1. en) .rtofini tion or 1 t
notion
1.n 'th� conncct1 on hetw��m
Nha.t
thra� . d1f.ferent"mP.t:'lphors
�
r�lntPd -quf'stlonr.: Nil.J.
.
nhl?YS
th�
same
nnd not
and.
th0
1..nf1.n1.te mnttcr .1nfin1.tely in motion throutr,h i'nf1 n1tc
JTi'or
a moT'e extensive study of the eptcurean <1oncept of time,
my Diss., G. NECK, Das Problem n11r Zeit im Epikuretsmus,
Heinelber�, 1 964, ch. 1, �eitbe��iff. pp._ 14-?4.
r.f.
·
�J
��
r:natHL.
n
Time
as
Gpnee-,
is mor:tly conr.�1.vr!d 1r1tth
how�ver,
q1inltt�t1.ve n.r; well as qnn'rltitative mcan1n�.
only hapr.>en in time, in
smaller or lnrr:er nmmmts
t.h�'>Y n.lso hAve theiJ;" times,.their
and th�lr
old a�c.
The
youth,
not
of timn,
their maturity
most strlkin� example
is th(' account of the birth
for
this u�ar:e
'
(2, 1105-6), p-rowth (2, 110.5-30,
1120-1, 1123, 112?), maturity (2, 1130), decay (2, 1131-
esp.
71�, esp.
l�)
Th1nr:n
11'31-?,
of our worl�;
nl'3.tnro;..
If
\'7e
111�5), and death
at the end.
or the
(2, 1.1.50, 1166, 11()9, 11?2second book of
.•ne
rerum
keep in mind that time had been defined ns
accident. of motiot:L and that,
in the expression space of timr-:,
1 t hA(1. be en substituted metaphortcally for the spnco measured
th:roup;}1 by .m ot ion ,
..
.
tative .. meanin�
lienee
ann
.
. .
the coincidence of quantitative and qua1i-
of time has to be understood a s
between·a phase in
th e
but now
.
'"
.
-r :•
this
pha�e of the motion,
expresse� as phase of the movlnr;
accin.ent time for
the
p
corres on-
the mot i on of a body through space,
space of time,depending on
The safeguardin�
a
•
condition
body
for this
in motion :l.s
body
itself.
suhs.t1tut1on of the
the
occurrence
of'
.
�In thA eni curenn 1.mder-standinr; of tnfini te matt�r infini.tely
in motion throup:h inf i nit e spacA, t.tme, be1.nr; an act:!id.0l'Jt of
motion, 1s ::tlso inf1nit�.
The p."lrarlox 11t.rhole of t ime" han to
hA tF.�1u�n as a con���ston to man • s d e s i re to compreh�nd the
object of his thoua;ht and �peAch (cf. my Diss., op. cit.,
pp� 17-lJ.O; for the t h n m e of infinity in all 1 ts differ-ent
.'l.�n�cts '\ cf. R. 1-TONDOT...FO,. I�' 1.nfini to n8l pensiP.rO dell 1
nnt:ich1tA. clnssic:::t, Fi.rem>:e 1956).
The other Jk'lradox "point
nf. t:l ml'.'11 has to n.o with the connection of continuity and
infinitP. divisibility of time (cf. my Diss., op. cit.,
pp. 10-20, 39-L�O; cf. J. MAtT, Zum Problem des InfinitesimaL"'n
bel den antiken Atomlsten, Berlin 19.54).
l
�4
mot J.on
lnN�:
1n accorflnncP 1'11. th fi x:eo
rloceo rHct1.s, '1.i.tn quRequ0 cre_.'lta.
1'n0'l0l"f:' �tnt., 1.n eo qun.m �it nul"rll"A :n���ssnm
nee vnlidnn alennt aevi·rccctnltct"c le_n;0n.
v
(5� 56-A,
'rh�se 1m'1s,
th0 1:1t'1S Of time,
of
determine
lie of a body
f
phases, within
phnSP.S
the
in moion.t
bony, at
motion
example
time a.ppen.rs most
The perception of differ
natl.Jrally
where
o the
t
in connection l'TJ.th
,qt .times the hoavenly
other times the time d.etermineit -by it, is seen in
(�,
692;
1,
31 1 ;
.5t 1183-.5).
::�b�ms from the account of
orce:
f
11sic
The.other most striking
man
nnd combines all three m(,'!taphors of
1 s·
c u l t :ura. l development,
t ime,
time as space,
volvend.a a e tas commutat tempera rermn,"
rolling time changes the times of thinGs�
The naturn.l or cnltur,:1l
1)
thr�o aspects:
change of things
the different
the
nynnmic
be t;r-1-spcd
cau_o;ht,
A.r:
"rollin,:, time,"
in
the nature of
tiMe,
and J)
of the development
phases
t h ings ,
is
cause of
as
different phnscs
1'volvendn n�tas, 11
chanr;e,
inherent
times
of
things."
in
inthc metaphor force
reco!VliZerl,
as 11volv(mda af!tas commuta.t tempera rcrttm,"
time chan,n;es the
the meta-
-"tlr.-tcs of thinr:s,"
motion of time,
the
•
1172
tn
of the succession of
the metaphor
ts
''thu�
2,
can
"tempora. rerum," ets
character
motton
(5, 1276; cf.
determined quantitativoly and qualitatively by
phor spaceof t me 'as
i
?.)
sp.,.ces
to time a.s not only space for motion,·
he motiOVl. of heavenly bOdies,
t
are
d 1. fferent
Also motion it se l f .
Motion of
R:nn.
Of
r:ometimes
lietie of a movinrr body,· leads
f
m
he
t
s�?.nond metaphor or t:\me,
but
the
of natur0,
2,302)
time, \'lhich·quantitatively and qualitatively dintinr;uishnhle
mnke up the
ent
called the laws
soetieFl
m
m
cf.
as
''
of
rollinr;
This me ns that the Nhole
a
�5
. phcnomP.non chiln.oop,
hoin�,
nnn
�tme
irt 1. ts
�rrnct,
��
mirrored
is
f or c e
thrPo n spccts:
as
ti�e.
to bo th� one metnphor most
sncms
from the epicurean understanding of time
Tt., nevertheless,
Lucretius'
"Ne
then 11time,
,
utterly destroys,
sir;ht"
( 1, 225).
first,
from
that
shows
a1..ray,
caused
as it l'lere,
as ar;e td thdraNs them from our
(2,69�70} a:nd "if time
q·notes
Chant:,e appears to be
pe�ceive all th1.nr,s flat�
it takes
accidr-mt of motion.
inherent in thln.rr.s and c.'J.used hy the force o�
lnn� lRnse of time,
a�e,
As
remote
the one which occurs most frequently in
"De rerum natura."
both by forces
time:
is
mone of
�aur:n,
11a�e,
in
seems
to effect
throup.;h a.�e"
•
in the
st{';ht"
whatsoever, throut;h
The con)parison of th� two
the
lon� lapse
chanrr,e
of t ime11 ,
in thin:';s.
'f'hP space of tirrie wh ich has to be measured throw;h by thir.r;s
subject to
chan�e is �onceived as having chAnging influence on
them:
omnta enim debet, mortal! corpore quaA sunt,
tnflnita aetas consumpse ante acta dicsque.
quon si in eo �patio atque ante a�ta netate fuere
e qutbus haec rerum consistit.snmma refectn,
1.mrnortali sunt n atu ra praedita certe.
(1, 2J2-6; cf.
551-64)
This po�erful influerice, �ometimes called "the forces of
rneA.s1a"eless time"
( 5, 377-9),
irnnf-l�t on thin�s,
as
also as R. particular
time as
"ante
force of time,
to
ls
not only seen as a r;enerc:tl
11infinita aetas,"
as
impact,
in successive
,.;raspable
"infinite time,"
acta dies,''" as "the r;one by da:,r.
11
but
moments of
The destructive
appears t o be so st ron � that th in �s are imagi neo
suffer under· the "torments o f ·time":
Denique non lapides quoque vincl cernis ab aevo,
non altas turris ruere et put e j cer e saxa,
r
�OP.lHhl":t nP.Hm �imu}:l.Cl":lf}ll�- fA:=:8:::t fntj :1Ci
nrotollP.l"e firiis
por-:t-:e nnqu0 a(lverims natur.'lP. foeclP.l".'l· nit1?
c'l0'111.Clu,.. non monimenta virum rliln:rsa. vi<icmu�,
(quaerP.re pronorro, s ihi cumque scnescere credas,
non ruere avolr,o� silices a montibus altis
nee va.l ioas aevi v ires perferre p!l t iq1te
fini ti ?
ncqw:- enim cn.d.erent avolsa repente,
ex inf1n1to quae tempore pertolerassent
omnia tormenta aeta.tis, privata fra�ore.
.
.
- nrm
._
�Ac sRnctum numen fati
:
)
( 5, )06•17)
l'f'lhe force. of rollinp.;- time chang1rp::· the. times of thinp;s .
( _t;, 1 ?7i1)
is
finRlly spoken -of as chan�inp; the nature of
the WOl"lC'l:
1"111tnt . en1.rn munni nc'lt1.1ram tot ius aetas .•
ex nliC''lH� nl.ius status exci.pore 0mni11 c'l.eb0t
omnir-t mi�rant,
nee ma-n c t nlla sui sim\.lis rAs:
omnln commut::tt natura 8t vertere �Or,'it.
n�mque a1iun. rmtrcsc it et n evo nobile lal'l,cr,net,
norro al1un (sue) crescit et (P.) contempti�'o exit.
�tc lt";'i tur muncH naturam tot ius n.et�s
mut � t , et ex aliO terrnm s tatu s CXCipit altAr,
quod potu it nequeat, posstt quod non tulit nntc.
(5, 82A-36)
II:
In
· · ·· .
order to
1)
Devel opment
clarify the con·nection beb1een the
thr�e different metaphors. of time'
ann
discover tht� �om
2)
mon r:round for the poetic view of time and the philosophinnl
�efinition of it ,
we will have to consider the relation of
t ime to nature , the key · te rm in Lucr et i us
'
"De
rerum
natura."
Inextricably connected with change of thin�s,
ti�� .1n motion of time throur:h·
s
lite
or
a_p;ainst n.nture
( 2,
space
297-307;
of thin.�;s, whether �rm.,.th or decay,
both:
t i me and nature:
.•
force of
of time cannot act out
cf.
5, )06-10).
- ·
occurs under the
Chanr:e
laws
of
�7
rloc�o diet i n, quo '1Ut'li1C1U0 cre�.tn
sint, in eo qunm sit r h r rr.t re n�n/3ssum
nee val1das valeant nevi rescindere lP.�en.
foec
h'!rA
·
(5, 56-8; cf. 2, )02)
Hhnt.rloes it mean to speak of time, ch�n�in� the nrltur� of
the
whole world.,
of time,
chanp:inp:
:8ptcurus,
anct to
.
1-torld
of nature,
darinr; to rr,o heyond
break open
to be, what
c om e
thinr:s,
all
t.he nature of the whole world
(1, l,f..-77), cttme h::tck
Crln
�lterinr:,
the·
t ir;ht
locks of the r;n. t e n
out of
bei.nr:,
of
victoriously Nith th� kno'tiTlP.nr:e of
cannot,
.
finally how each thine has
totality of be in� and non-beinc.;,
f';'Oinr;
(5, 828-36)?
the flam inc; Nails of the
.
pm1er c:lefined and. it s deep-set boundary mnrk."
.the
n..rr:.�in,
and,
rm.tur-e
11\•rhn.t
it::::
�ratnr�,5 ns
of comin� into bein�,
is matter in motion throur;h SIJc'lCe
21), which hrinr.; s forth hirth ann death
( 1, hl9-·
of thin,o;s: .. .
Nnn� nr,-e 1 quo motu ,cr,enitalia m:1teriaL
corporA. r�r: vt:t.roiaf: P:1 ,ry.ant: f:eni tnr:qne resol vnnt
0t f111:1. vi facerc id �op:anh1r
r.tt ol_l i s
r���ibi mobilitFt� map.-nnn per in::l'Y'\h rrten.nd1. •
PX'f'Ptliam:
tu te nJr.t1.r: prn.ehr.rp mP.m""nto.
n::tm r.r>rte non 1nt�r :1e �t l rn.tn r.0hn�1"et
T:'l."'lh')riP.s, q110n1Am mlnnt rP.m q,,·:rnq'lf" v1t1P.mns 1
f't. f11Jfi.Rl lonr:inqvo fln�r"' OIT!nir-1 CP.rni!T!\1� n.r>vo
P.X
CUlisquf' Vetl.lStr-ttP.!Tl �ubti,_lCPT'e Tl0'itr1.� 1
r.nrr t��P.'Y'\ 1.ncolumts vtt10.atur spmmn. mn,,er0
l"):r-')nt,.,.,..oa qn 1.8, quae �.ecedunt cor1)or� en jrpH� 1
,, ..... ,c r�.br.nnt Mi nnnnt, ·CP.l,., veY!er� :111ro:n:l TIP t'!onn�t.
11.1.., ��:rv��f'.�rP J A.t
fl1'1rf'C'f'cn.,.,. co�mt,
,.,�r. l"P'110rnntur ibi.
slc r e rn M �nnm�. novntm-
quilf'qur>
O
haP� co'Yltrn
1 ntPr �e m0rt<=�.les Mlltn:=� \·i.vFnt.
i. r�.e ��ntes, n 1 iae m1 n'.ll1Yl b.J r •
j "11jll0 hrovi. rmnt io mutnntur s��cl.n a rd. nnntl :rr:
,..t 111l�.st cnrsores vita.P. 1c=tmpnnn. tr::�r'!,1r1t-..
.
�..-�mn,.,,..,
"�
et
, , r�P :-:c11n t
a1
(?, �?-70)
0n
t"lc hn.�is of thls creattve. . and n.ostructive form�,
.
�nd
nr:1t11r0.
('P0"' n �"'0mn.,..,...henr:i.vP. stuny of the 00!1C'f'nt nf ,,...,t:n:rn. 111
V1��nt.i11!i 1 "D') rcrnm nn.t.J,r-r-�:,11 �f. Y . • sllj,L'!"'/'.�PT, St-.�1dirm ::":1Jr.1
nl-. � 1 1'1ronh l �r.h�n N� tnrhen-,:ri ff der P.grner- rni t hC!r>onderr.r
I>
h
�
Pf."!T"l�lrr:i.chtlr:un� (ler, T.ukrez, Archiv fur Re�ifff1f;€'!SchichtP.,
7, 1Q(?, 140-284
�H
thi�
llf..
..
1mr:rr t:>��'ion m L n;h t he,
of tho truth
thnt, nn.tltrr- only expl io:ttcs th0 hi flo on oh�rr-:��
t0r'i�ttr.� of mAtter.
hnNe,r'"'r,
Lucr�tiw� nev0r tire� of rr:-m1rHnn.•--:
tn rl�fin.i te
or "n:"lrt� f'l.�blr'�e,"
··Matter in m ot inn thl"Ollrrh �p1r.�
wnys
"p::tcts
of
r,rooNth
llnr'l ·decay
t
a
resul f:s,
fact whi0h
or nf!.turc":
.I"J. U.'l !'r'onter quo nun� in motu r>rtn�i pi(lrum
onrpora ::;1_mt, in eodem ante a�tn aetntr· fuere
r--t nm:t hn.l"'c n0mper stmtli ration" fP'Y'rntur
pf: qn!:i� �onsuerint r:1r;n1 ..;ir;nenh1r er'!nf'm
r.onr'licione et erurtt et cret.:c.ent: vlr:tuo vGlohunt,
qnn.nt11m cuique datum est per focclera :nnturni.
( 2. 297-302)
't'hP. _pr"oblcmatic
w::ty"
and
t1,e
er
of expressions
"such .·things as have been wont
be bron.�ht
that·
c ha ra ct
to birth under
"honds of
experi.mentation of
nature"
likn
to
"in
a
come to
the same condition"
similar
being,
ind.icates,
will
hO\ITcver,
provid.e no More than a 'framework for
matter in
m ot i on . through spa.ce:
cert e neque consilio primordia rerum ,
oroine se r.uo quaequ� sa�n�i mente 1ocarunt
·
rH',� quos lJ..ltA.P.qne (darf:mt rnotvs pepir:ere profecto)
sP.d quia mnlta modis muJ.tts mutn.t<:!. pe� omne
�x i11fini to v�xa.ntur -perci ta plne;is,
onme C'l'enu.s JT!otus et coetus exncri11nd.o
tannem del.reniunt in tal:l.s c:UspositurR.f.:,
qualibus haec rerum consistit summa creatn,
et mn l t os etiam magnos servata per. :-:tnnor'lt F:0.mel in motus coniectast convl':'_ntf?ntls' J
.
effictt ut largis . avidum mare fluminis tmn 1 s. . .
.
(1, 102i- :n; of. 5,
nam
·
�·lhat
can
be
the
too faulty t o
criterion for
abl�
to
in a
"convenient mov�ments"
world
be crea ted. by r;ods (5, 1B7-2J4) and continually
P-nrrar:ed in a l'lar' between
r0neated
ln_6,1�2)
l ife and death
The
( 2, 569-80)?
example o� nat ure trying (5, 837-924), but
bei�� nn
cre at e monsters (1, 199-2QL�; -2, 700-29) suggests
"conVP-l"lient movements"
.
must mean stability of growth,
that
.
maturity
�9
n.n�
�r-�r1.y.
'•rhat.
The formuln for nn.tnro:
not,
c:::m
finR.11y how
ann
it� <'!cep.;..Get boundary
thf>
account of
"certain matter,"
1 nto be1 nr: and. n:oint';
214-).
out of
1s
�1ost. compactly. it
motus, ordo,
cnch thi nr: hns
mark''
positura,
position and shapes of
is explicaten ln
"certain times"
as
as
matter" (2,
realfty
min� uncovers
Olll"'
in
ve ·the
"meetinp:s,
1020-2;
cf.
1,
ordr=>r,
675-8}.
process
The
of rr;co(�-
our
Bf')nr.c-s
of motion and ref:t of thinr;s; · this rP.'1] i ty,
ntoms censr;J.ess1y
as
as deceptive appearance,
an� e�tahlishing the conditions
venien.t
·
motions,
simple stability:
The true res t however,
motion.
( 1, 159-
"materia! concursus,
orn0r of these terms follows the ord.er of tho
-ncr�ci
to bn,
responsible for thinr:s cominr.
stated
nition from complex mobility to
r.rmn
its pm-11er dnfinl"!d
(1, 75-7)
beinf: at
fi�;ttrae,"
cnn
11Nhnt
underlyin� that restlesGness
for the
achievement of
"con-
movements" is to be found in the "shBpe" of atoms.
That
"shape" of atoms bears special importanne for the ::nnture
of
thinp; can be
a
seen from 1 ts central
the hook about motion and rest:
motirm and. rest in
trc:1.tm0.nt
terms of
turn
p:ivcs Nay to
in atom�
body and minc'l
{ 2,
a
11
shape"
730-1361-J., 856-990).
of atoms
nyi:n.r;
1").-"J.l rs
(21
but noN not
(motion ann.
rme bP-in� "shape"
(2, 6?.-JJ?) leacln
( 2,
333-729),
Hhich
•
•
ln tei'ms of atoms,
COrro"'!SpOndil1[':
but,
in terms of compounds,
991-117L�)
a po::;iti·t,rc
The Fir.ale describes the ::urn
1 n the three main pa rt s Of the bOOl< 1
tothA Pl"'ooemium,
n nn
(2, 1-61),
ne.1;ative treatment of colour and fcclin/3'
of t'-lin,r,;r, in motion and rest,
rl.�.
After the Prooemi mn about
of motion and rest in termr: of a.to�s
over into the dJ r;cussion of
in
position in boo k t\.'10,
of
worlds bcin0 born
Thus, hool< hro s hol'l s
rest), gronped. around
•
of atoms,
a
one
a
syr:1mctry of
{rest):
the
the pairs b ei n� motion and r e s t
in
�10
terms of compounds b1.
ro�t:
th e
in terms
of atoms· in the first and_
The special importance of
book.
·nature
Prooemtuni nnd Ffria le,
birth
�escrintion of the
·
third
shape
of
of a thing is shown in a·quote
and mot.i.on :md
mr-:tin part::; of
ofatoms forth�
book five,
from thn
bur world:
of
�"d·nova temnost:1.s '}naedam mol�sque coorta.
d 1 ff,t("ere inde lo�i partes coepcre :nnr·esqun
'"�tlm nnri bus ·hmf""i r
'
e
s l":t cliscludere muYlnmn
mr.mhrnl']ue divldere
magna s disponerc pnrtes.
omnir;enis e.'prlncipiis, discordia qnorum
lntr.rvalla vias conc xu s poniiera. plap;as
r.oncursus ·motus
ia mfsc�ns
propter d.lssimilis formas varin�qne fir;urns,
quod non omnia sic· potcrant �onhmct�- rn::mere
nee motus inter sese dare convenir.ntiG, ...
-·
r:!f.
·
9t
·
tnrha.bat proel
·
(5, 4J6-h5;
.
Diffnrently from platonic or aristotelian
Nhr.rc shape
for-
.q,
< ELcfos
thin,;,
"mnt0:ri.a:t
ln
the
concur,,�,
>J/IX.
�
li ' (..
.·
J
Or
I
motui,
ordo;
The inquiry
of Lucretius•
shape ()�
or
a.ll the factor:-;,
positura, fic;urnc,"
their p.:'l.rt in determininr.; ·the appearance
III.
uiace thour,h,
mcn:r.c
f'-Oe 'f ?') )
cpiCUI'(!rtfl contPxt,
Lnt1-lt-2)
of
a
plny
thin�.
Recapitutation
into the· mean in�
"De rerum natura",
of
"nature,"
the key t��=r
aim�d at clarifying th� r0ln
tion of nature and time,
and consequently the relation of the
philosophtcR-1 definitlon.
and
the poetic
met11_phorn of tim0.
The relation of nature and time be com e s espe�ially poi�
n.'lnt
in a passar,e from book o:r: e, i>Thcre both con�epts, tim� and
nature,
are. coupled
into one: .
Postremo quae cumque dies naturaque rebus
paulatim tribuit moderatim crescere cogens,
�l1
ocu l o ru m a c i e r. c ont r:;n t a t u 0 r1. ,
porro qune . cumqn e a evo mA. c i equ 0 r; �;1 r:. s cunt ;
n e e , m:lre qu� e impend ent , v e r: c o s ::rl 0 saxa p� r c s a
qn :t t:l C'pl oqu e a m t t t:1nt i n tempore c crnc r c po s s i s ,
c orpor i bu s cne cis i r; i tur natur.:1 p;er i.t r e s .
( 1 , 322-8 ; c f . 628- )1�)
· m 1 l ln !)o t e c t
nee
·
·
If
ment ,
at
c on s i de r s ;
one
" �rhat ever
be,T, inn i n s and end of th i s
first ,
day and na t ur e adds
i s r � s tated in ·
11 by bod i e s
( cf . 2 , 127..;:B ;
129 ; · 132 -llH ) .
nat nrc "
r o rcc ,
t o t h i n ,n; s
.
Th€7 double forc c;
" natu re , 11
us
'' boi! i e s uns e en , '' · in ord e r t o effect
t i me ••. · and " thr ough
pre s en t s
" n a;r and
inr: the o t h e r
C hanr_�e of
chanrr,e .
t ime ::mn_ o c cay , "
" D ay ,
both f rom l'li th i n and from '\'T i t h out .
ccmt " clay and nature , "
l it t le by l i t t l e "
un s e en t h en natt.1 re t reat s t h i n rr,f-l "
c orres pond s t o one force ,
th in r:Y.s occurs " in
i t s elf
11
n�.ture ,
s ince
it
is
ch ang e
the
of
be f o!' e
" nature ,
appearances
us r e f l e ct about the permanen c e of be inr;·.
impiyinr:
a s ma l l ,
un i t of t ime ,
o c curs
in sma l l · s t eps ,
sum of t h in�s .
by t h e
in ' th� s u m of t h inr;s ,
s c;:�. l e
is
of nature ,
erni.nr� t he world ,
th� world ,
a n a c c lc'l. e nt
t o the
t h e same truth :
defineo
di es
,
11
i s h e ld
of
the
in ba lanc e
re f l e c t inr.: chanr;e w i t h
As
such ,
creat lve and d e s truc t ive powe r ,
law s of
therefore ,
"
the part s
o f mot i on .
grm'lt h and d e cay ,
der ived from t h e movement s
" rh1.;r ann. nature , "
the forc e '
it
s inc e nature c ompreh enn s the Nhole
the.
of me�nings from
T i me ,
s in c e
chanr;e of th ines
cont in1,1al l y a l t e ri n g
laws o f nature .
c on-
The t erm " d:1y , "
The sum of . things , h owever ,
permanent
i s P.n �. c c i d�nt
o f t h e fac t that
11
1 :::; ,
wh i ch make s
quant itat i ve ly and. qua l i tat i v e ly
rem incl s us
t h at
in the double
l t i s t he force o f t ime wh i ch make s u s r e f l e c t about
of
� t , te
of at om s .
repre s ent s
" day , 11
s tand :J
two
gov
d e t er m t n inrr,
u n i e s natura qu e ,
a s pe c t s o f' one and
f or the
changeable a spe ct
�12
of appearan c e s , · the m ea su rahl e actual i zat.ion of · in fin.i te
.
.
·
m:'l. t t � r in i n f i n t t e mot on throt�eh inf ini t e s p. � ;
'lc
i
" n:itnre , "
· fj rm laNs
infin i t e
s tands. for the un ch�n�eable a spect
nat1i ra : "
be i n
r;
t
,
he
i
s pace . 6
three a spec t s
The three met aphors - of t im e :
of nat ure :
i :n t er�hAn,�l'!ab i l i
An� Rcc 1.1lcnt ,
cnrno� wt th
�Y
mat t·e r ,
between
explA ins
mot i on ,
of
corre s pond t o the
- The
and s p.-=tc e .
natur e and t ime ,
chnn�e than w1 th pcrmnn�nce ,
·
·
cay and deat h ,
_
force
betwenn suhs tanc�
i t s e l f throu �h mnn 1 s bP. 1 nr: mor�
t irne , than with nature
with
"
of in f i n te mat te}" in in f in i te mot t on throu�h
mot i on of t ime • and r:: pa. ce of · tlme ,
t i me ,
of
.
.
m,orc
and thA-refore
S i m i larly , ·_ b i rth ann
con -
r;r owt h ,
de
a r e not pre s ented equa l ly und er . the influen c e
o f nature and t ime , but bi rth and growth more under t h e 1. n
f1uence of nature ,
of
time .
its
with
de cay and
neat h
more unde r-
the influenoe
· Once 1 1. f e . has be� , man s eems to be m o s t c oncerned
·mean in·r.:ful compl e t ion and therefore with t ime effe c t in,
chan e t oward s ·that end. .
�
The, re lat i on of t i m e and nature ,
ph i cal poem ,
t erms ,
can be gra sped
in Lucret i u s •
ph i l os o
:ln . another c omparabl e pa i r of
in the re l at i on of . 11 fortune " · and 11 nature . •
· Subs equent
�A'qX , i.n h i s n i ss .. , D tfferen ?. . fl.er d emol � r 1. t l s c h<"n u n d
1..., , "� 1 � ch cm N�t,.tr.nh i l o s onh t � ( M�rrA 1 , 1 , F'ran trf'prt · a . M .
1 0 -:::! 7 ,- 1 ..:.. ')? ) , T"!1 t. h �r. htwi l 1 innt:1y port. .,..a .y� th i � � nnn0c t 1 o"' of
"1 � t1 l r'0 rmrl t 1 mP. : 11 n t e � l l S:\J"11 � fY!1fH� i: ?. tl'Ylf': . i st 0 ie hl n � � ;'1., :"' � 1 ,,.rT.'o"T"' . ii t:"-r Jl':r:ml<'ret �n 1Tatm · • -· di e Z ei t ihre ald:u o � e Fo'Y"m
Di �
": 0 1 t r'f...... rr:� f";�n i st. n a s Fen·� r r'f e s He r: rms , n�f' i U e F.rsche innn.�
0•·r i � VPl"� ehr-t un� i h r n 0n S tenmel iter Abhti.n n:j ":k8 i t tmd H e
·
� 0"1 l0 si l!k�i t
aufclr1'fckt . 11 ( n:o . · 1�2- 3 )
tti\R:X i n · c �ptn re of th o;
0 r- � t'l!n t: l ."l.l:1 ; thou�h , lacks s upnort from \<Tork l:�r: l·Ti th t: h e t. P. xt s
N"'l i r. l't Nnn l n. h ave prev!"lnten h i m from i d cnt i fy1 np: 'Rp i cnru n 1 '1 nd
L1 1 �r,.t:l n s ' . not i on of time , ann led h i m t o i" oticP. t he , · crHci n l
c o -0:v:t st�nce o f n.e f ini t i on and metaph qrs of t i me i n Lucrct t u s >
t-rorl-:- .
4v .
en�
•
•
•
·
•
•
�RR
the
�overn in�
( 5 , 77 ) , t h �n
f i r r-: t na t u r e
rp t o t e � dl"'� cr ihe ,
T he � on t e xt ,
world .
an
t h:'\t
prov i o e s
fortune " :
nnture det erm tne s
S i m i ln.rly �
the
� l �nr
it
t h e een err.t.l laws · of
the
No.rln ,
po s s ibl e w i th i n t h o s e
relat i on of nature and. t i me ,
aml r�.c c i n ent , was s h own t o c on s i s t i n the re l ::tt
.
1 on of
t hrou Fr,h
The conn ect i on bctl·reen the t h re e
of na tu r e ,
pe ct s
behmen
d ence
forc e ,
fo!'ce
the
unde!" the
expl icat es
r;round for
a.e f i n i t i on ,
metaphors of
three
under . the
is
t i me R S f orce ,
ln mot i on of . t i Me
fo�
there f ore , . bec omes t h e key
the three
of
mat t e r ,
m on
t ime .
of
the
i ndi c at e s
pa i r s
aspect . of nature ,
a s pe c t of
mat, e r ,
t
t ime ,
the
spe c lal
chan{!e<'lble .
a
nd
t he common
m o t i on , and
of
�
groun
space ,
t i me
of
The fa ct t hrt t
a s t im e expl i c,a t e s na t u r e
the po e t i c viel-t
c orre s pon
impo rt anc e of
the pe r�anent ,
the
,
is
the
c om
and i t s ph i lo s oph i cal
.
for the m e taph o r i c a l use
and
as
conne ct i on ·
one t o one
The
t ime .
·
mnt' t � r·
and f o r c e
of t i me
l:nm .
of sub s tan c e
in m o t i on throur;h space
space
h1.t t
to nnt11ri"'l ,
framework for " �ovcrn i n �
the
only t h e part i cular move s ,
f ortur P.
��k c �
however ,
equa} n o r r i va l forc e
thr:� t; f ortune is n f) i t h c r
" �overnin� nnt u re "
fortun� ( 5 , J O? ) ,
de f in i t i on as
its
of
ac c i
den t o f mot i on .
'T"hP-mA ,
Dev e l opment ,
ann.
.to lm� erRt:=m rl h ow t tme ,
ac c i d ent ,
�"11 th l'l � tnre ,
of t h e world ,
th�
�s
th8 subs tance
be c omn s
d oe s
not ,
h m'l�ver ,
vThi ch
th i. s subs t i tut i on takes place ,
c on � i n �rtn.�T,
the
d e p�l"ln en c e
s e c on d.
aspect
mean to
e s R::ty t r i. ed
intt"?. rchnnr:eab l c
�1.1h s t i tu t i on of th e o.ef i n it i on by m e·taphors
1 m n ers tanrl " h ow "
its
of th i s
Recapi tulat i on
also
of
e n ta i l e d
t ime .
under stand
To
11 Nh�.r "
a que s t i on t o be ansi'mred by
of Lu c re t i u s
on human percept i on .
1
d e f i n i t i on of t ime ,
�r u m�>�t of T.l l �rr.t 1 u s ' f1 P.f 1 n l t i on
"''-1 n f i r r. t
��n�n� Pn c P
on
mot t on ami
r� r: t
Ntl f.l
t l r:'l'� ' r.
of t h j nt,_;!C :
t. � mpns i t �m p�r ::: 0. n on � s t , r. r n rP.hu n ah i p� :t �
c nn r: � q, t i tiu• s �'l"l stt s , trrmsac t n m qq i.� s i t i n :v: v o ,
tnm q1 1ae ros 1 nf1 t �t , 'l.U io. porro n P- lnn c r-:cqu-:1. tu r ;
n r- c !)�r s e quer!'iquam · tempus s r-mt l rc · fl'lt endum s t
� em otum ab rerum motu plac id.aque qu i At P. .
·
-
'T'he S t:! c on d as pe ct .
( 1 , h.59 - fl ) }
t i me ' s d�pe!lden c e on hum�n pr:!rcept i on ,
imnl t e s both man ' s awarene s s and. man ' s- ""v�lua t i on of t t rne .
M::l.n 1 s
of t i me , . com inP-:
::\Narfm� s s
� t �mr-: . from
hetl'leen
rea lms i s iTIA.n 1 s d1 f ferent
1
·
, 1 0 08;,.9 ; 2 , '3 07 ) ,
(5,
R2B - J 6 ) ,· and
t'lrilln�
TT1 0 re
-
th rough
{ 2 , 5fl9 - 8 0 ) , i s
n e::t th
a lways
h�mG\n nnt u r � .
t ou�h c on
�
of t i m e ,
wh r! t h e r
7.
c on s tant cyc l e of
the
( 2 , JOJ ,
lt fe
and
�:'!me and always not the
wh ere deve lopment
R ame
in time eventual l y mean s
t i me s e ems t o he c om e more a nrl
the more . one m oves
from t h e part s t o thq
8
?r. f . P . n�JA. GY , Proc c R s ann Value :
rr � Ph " , A A , 1957 , l�L�-2t1 .
0
, "
, where the, sum .. of .thinp.:s
the
back t o the he r;inninp; ,
ne_p;l i ,cr.ibl e ,
l•Th o l e .
wh o l e
the s e tlfro ,
evaluat i on
· nature or human nature · t s · concernen .
· ,
- · 1\fi t h in nat u rP , :1s a
trwm s e l V P- �
well a s · t h i nrrs of
th in�s of nature n s
'T'hP. rPa s on for d i s t fngu i s h inp;
"'V>. c tert ,
from · 11 t h in�s
An epi cur0an d i l emma ,
J,�OP.'\ RDI , TJA. p: ine R t ra , 11 . 292-? :
" c o s i 0 () 1 1 1 -u omo
i l"l"l"' fl. l""::l. , e d P. l l 1 etad:t ch 1 e i ch lnma ant i ch e , e fiel seguir che
f�.YJ.V1.o f! r.mo r;l i avi 1 ne not i , sta n11tura oenor vert:'te , anz l
p�occ n � p�r s i lun�o cammino , che s emhrn a tar " . cf . S . BORRA ,
� n1 r i t i e f orme affini in Luc rez i o e Leopa rd i � Bol ogna ,
· ·r f .
19 )4 .
11 .
'
1
�1.·ii t.h :l t1 t. h n
At
c on t � xt
of nn.tur� :
qun r. i · 1. nn � :l.nqn o · f 1 u e r e
omn i !"t
�ern t mu r.
n.ev o
o�•J l i s qn c v e t u s t a t e rr. subd u c t:: re n o r. t r i s .
c1 i in tnmen incolum i s v i dr"at 1 1 r s u r'Hna man e re pronte :rr-m qu i a , qw1e d e c� rl u n t cor�or!:l cn l qu e ,
1 mn i-1 n h0.1 m t m innunt , quo vennre anr:m i n e (lon�nt .
· i l lr:t r-; en e- s c ore , at ha e c c on t rn. flor� r: c e r e cor,unt ,
n.ric remoran t i t r i b l ; s i c r e rum summa novatur
s emper , et . . i n t er se mo rta l e s mu tu� v i �Jnt .
m.t r;e s cnn t a l i a e p:ent e s , al i ae m i nuun t u r ,
i nrtu n brevi s pnt i o mut an tu r n r-� e c l a rm i mnntum
et q11a s i cu r s o r e s v i t a l 1ampaci::.t t rnd unt .
ex
·
( � , 69 -79 ;
Th i s i na t ff erence · df 'tlme and. nature ,
man c ont ent of l i fe ,
.of . 1 1. fe :
cf .
w i t h re s pe c t
) , 9 71 )
t o any hu
move s man t o re s i s t nature for the
sake
9
Qu od ( s i
i am rerum i F.;n orem pr i mord i a quae s int ,
h oc tame,., ex i ns i s ca e l i rat i on i bu s rm s l m
conf i rmare a l i i sque e x rebus redCi e re mn l t i s ,
nflCJl l P. quam nob i s ci i v i n i tn s e s s e r.mratam
t ant a s tat prae d i ta cu l pa .
na t u rn m rerum :
pr inc i ni o qw = tn t u m cae l i t e ,:;i t i mnetus i np;en s ,
inn � av i d a m JX rtcm mont e s s i lvneque ferarum
'l
:r}o ss fl dere , t �nent rU TIA S · va s t :18qu e palude s
et mar0 , quon l �t e t err�rum cl l. s t :i. net orn s .
1 n c'i n n u :1. s porro nrope pn rt i s - fArv i 0 u s nrd or
n.c'i s i nuus que r:e l i casus morta l i hu s a u f e rt .
quod super e s t :=t.rv i , tamen id na tnra sua · v i
s ent i.bus obducat , n i v l s . humana rc s i s tat
vi t n i cau sa. va l id ·o c onsue.t a b i nenti
in�emere et- t e rram pre s s i s pro s c ind ere rtra t r i s .
.
)
·.
( 5 :;
The d i f f e r ence betwe en the de s cript i on of
cry i np.: in 1 t s he l ple s sne s s
la.r�e ly t a ken care
mAan
(5,
of by na t u re
re s i �at i on be fore nat ure
f o r ilevel opment
.
t o �ff l rm
..
•
.
.
:
222-7 ) ,
,
195- 109 )
the newborn c h i
ld ,
and t he youn� ani mR �_ s ,
hers e l f ( 5 ,
2 2 8-34 ) ,
does not
but rec ov1i t i on of t he ne�d
i n t h e ca ? e of man :
" One
s o small are t he trace s
..
th int; I fe e l abl e
of nature
left ,
wh i ch
9"'or a more extens i v e s tudy of the e p i curean v i eN of man t s
e xne r i ence of t ime , cf . my D i s s . , op . c i t . , ch . 3 , Z e i t e r.
fahrun� , pp . 140-9 .
�t
rr>rt. � n..,., �on J r! n ot di�pe l for u n ,
f"rom l i v 1 n o:
m !'l.n
a
th�t. n ot h tnr; n tn t'J �rs
l i fe l•rorthy of �od � "
{ J , 3 19-22 ) .
t o ov e rc ome . tbe 1.no i ff e rence of
on� 1
man 1 s
�
· the
l i. fP.t ime ,
t n :-r l.t: of"
t hourrh r e. latcrl ,
rorm s :
detachment from t �mpor3.l th ings t•ri th in h i s ol'm
o t h er
man
1 i f� by s e e int-:. h i ms elf
of h i r- 01'1!1 nat ure
IT'-'ln .
Th i s ·
t i me nnd nn.t u re , l'T i t h
.
takes on two ,
t o human- l i fe ,
r � � pP.ct
1H l
a. �
1 s o.vP.rconi inr: t hP. t f'mpora l i ty of h t s
as
p.: rt or mn.!lk ind , a11n. the o evcl opm0.nt
"l
fi vP of " ne rernm
·
of
part of th e d evel opment of the natur�
_d e s cript i on of the dev e l opment . o f
Lu cre t iu s '
n P. t u ra "
c omr>l t cat ed. s tate � �nt of
.
m·m
end s Joti t h
( 5 , 92.5-lh57 ) ,
th�
man ,
a
in
bo 9�
rather
'princj.:Ole� nf chrmee : 1 0 .
.
.
c t i mpin;rn.e s i mu l e xperiP.n t i n m ent. 1 :=:
'f'rt.n lrl t 1 m docu i t p�o .e t empt i m :prC"'jl"efJ :\. P.nt t r.-; .
s i c nnnm · qu i cqu i ft paula t im prot. r:1 h i t
rat i oque in lu m ini s eri;'3i t ora � ;
, , r;u s
n.P.tl'l.s
in : mcd.ium
.
.
1\ r:-
rt.
f 1. r R t
.
.
qu ote from book fou r shm·rs
. ..-.
1.mpP. J.1. inr:
force . t ol'mrd-s
h"! t:11 � � f'r u': e 'of both ,
Rlt.l , R J)2 ) .
. ( 5 , 1 1-1-52 -.5 )
('4., 822-5-? L
pro�r.r"' B S ,
" u s �J s " ,
" pr::J.ct i c e "
mer-t n s
�ot i on and !'"--'-'!. �t t on
1-t- , R ) l , R 3 5 ,
( cf .
" i mni r;rn� e x:nnri ent i a nent l s "
� im:l. lnrly ,
th�
rn e n 11 �
: �·: .
t: '1 Yl c � of h.n man rea s on - in the pro cP � t: o f ch�n.� e .
1 h 1 o r of
t h i A s t n.tcment
t h � r i. r !1 t t\·10 l i n e s :
-� ,.,n " ,
!l.r�
" aeta s " and
re p�nt
" r�t 1 o " ,
" reas on "
the p:J tt ern o f
" t ime " ana
coupleO. .a s . f orc c � t m;1ard s pro�:re s s ,
nJ. n c � of · " p:l'a.ct i �c , "
1 0 ::-' or
of prin c i.pl 0 s
Th e las t t'·ro
in t h e place of
" t j me "
" r�n
i n thr!
" the experien c e
more ext ens ivP s twly o f the eni eurcan unfl crs tann 1 n f" of
'· '
t i m e :1. !1 f orce of o.eve l opmcnt , iri .natuPo - or h i s t ory ., c f � . my
f) f � s- � , op . c it . , ch . 2 , Z e i t funkt i on , pp . 75-139 .
n.
�'
I'
of t!-1 � c."'l. r;rn"'
m inr! . "
" rr-� l � f:' S u p , "
s upp l an t ,
t h e ore t i. �.'!:\ 1 verb ,
Two prr:I c t i cn. J. v e rh s ,
in the
" t au �ht , 11
las t
nu t 11
l ines , th e
two
" b ri n?.: r:
m o re
f i rs t
f r om the
t No l i n e s
,
r�.nd
and
thw :; e ffe c t · A balance _o f the ory and pra c t i c e
in b o t h prirt � .
ThP. c omna r i s on b e t l>re e n t h e t wo
t h e i n t e rc hn.n ge
part s
nhl l i t y between na t u r e and. t i me
� P�t ,
d i s m1 s s ed �a�l i er
· of t h e deve l opment of
l•rh 1 ch
is s e en ,
human nature ,
onc e unde r the
H e re ,
t o t h e role of t i m e ,
inf lu ence
nnrsues
of change ,
of hum9:n a ct i on
has an ad ned i n i t i at ive
t h e worln
lies
i n the c on t e xt
the p r o c e s s
human m ind or human re::1 s on .
the l'TOrld of nature and
s on •
be tween sub s t an c e anfl a c c i
( 5 , 828-36 ) .
1 mrler the i n f lu ence of t ime ,
ca s e s :
,
r e ca l l s
,
one�
in b o t h
The d i ffe ren ce be tween
of human nature ,
wi t h re s p e c t
in that man , on a c c ount of h i s rea-
end. s and make s
c h o t c e s wi t h a v i m'l to ends :
s i c v o lvend.a aetas commv tat t e mnora rer,l m .
in pr et i o , f i t nul l o d.eni.qu e honore ;
"90rro a l iud s u c c ed i t e t ( e ) cont empt 1 bu s e x it
inque (U e s maf;i s adpe t i tur f l oretque repertum
laud ibus et m i ro e s t mort al i s int er h onore .
( 5 ' 1276-8 0 )
f'l1 1 od fu i t
I n a d d i t i on t o the blind mechani sm of atoms , wh i ch ,
realm of natur e ,
effect s change ,
The
the
s tA.tement of princ i p l e s ,
n ev e l opment ,
u s u s et
end.s
in the
man ' s cho i c e , e xpre s s ed in
appre c iat i on or c ontempt , ' be c ome s
mP.l"l t .
.
rnain fac tor of develo!l
i n the d e s c r ipt i on of rJ:::-.n 1 s
with a ra t h e r amb t r:u ou s c l i max :
imni grae s irnu l e xperi ent in ment i s
p8_,, lat im doCl.l i t pe<'ietempt i m proF;re d i ent i s .
s i c unum qu i cqu id. priu l at im protrah j t aeta s
in m e d i u m rat i oque in lum in i s e r i. �i t ora s ;
nrtmque a l id e x a l i o c lare s c e re cord e v i debant ,
a. r t i bu s a.d s u m mum don e e venere cacumen .
( 5 , 1452-7 )
The d i ff i cu l t y of h ow to int erpret
t l v e ly ,
a s hi s t or i cal ful f ilment of
11 cacumen11 ,
t he
e i t h e r pos i
m
deve lop ent o f human
�lA
nature
( cf .
J , 3 1 9 - ?. 2) , or ne�n t lvn ly , as
noint b �twAen p.;rowt h anit decay •
.
natural tu rn i nr.:
inrt i c at e s the ii i fferenc�
in evaluat i on of t i m e , wh ethe r nature as a wh ole ,
wi thin natur� iR concerned .
nature
t i on of a
r;:tther lat e stage in the
t n�r l l i c l i fe . ( 5 ,
1 379- 1415 ) ,
t i on s from the d e s cript ion
1 1 fe
The fact tha t
( 2 , 1 -hl )
'·
surr.�ests
development
or hum;1n
.thf) des crip
of man , . th�
contai n s word for �orord
rep� t i
of the ep! curel\11. att i tu d e t ol-mrd s
how important t i me and · h i s t o r i ca l
o eve lopment of. hu mnn nat ure are for th� . ach i evP.ment of t h e
T h e - wi s dom ,
h i c!:he � t · w1srl.om .
acqui red ove r a lon� s pac e of
time , from pr1m1 t i ve man t o �pi curu n ( .5 ,
t o cons i s t in a more and.
natu re and.
human
na t ur e
cosmns ,
as world ,
la'<T nnd
randomnes s .
�rtf.lbles
him
1 1-fA "
w i th in nature :
int e l l i p: i ble
Rhown
as
With the pas sin!'_; of
chaoti c environment , bu t
in c au s e ::: ann
eff e c t s ,
in
Man 1 s experience w i t h nat u re not only
to cont rol ann
( cf . 5 , 19 5-234 ) , but
�t !!tnff inl': of h imself and
on h i s cont rol
is
more art i ctJlat e un<'l erf}t;andinp; of
t im e , nature appears not any more
A.s
92 5-:-1L�57) �
change na tu r e " for the sn ke
of.
als o re f l e c t s btick on h :\. s unn er
h i s rel::tt l on
to other
men ,
that t s ,
a.nn chan�e of human nnt u re . wi t h in nn.ture . ll
. ..
.
.
.
r. ontr-ol �n� chnn o:-e of nat 1 1 re an, human natur� l'li t h 'i :n nA.tl l re
1 � � · h ol'r�v�r- , not thP. �a.m0. tl s t}le mnre. rnon ern. 11 0.on'}u e s t o r
n nt:m"e 11 •
� onqu 0 s t of :n.1lb.tl)'e , a s , for i n r.: tnnc e , P . B�.�o:n en.
vi � i ons i t , . � �pe!1.fk:: on the 11 closer and purer l e�r:ue betHP en
th e s r:> tNo f:=tcu lt.i� s , the �x-perl ment�.l 11nn the ra t. i o:nn.l ( �nch
rH" h�.s r.. � ver- ye t ber-m mn.cte ' � ( Nov . Orp; . ,, . 1 , !\ph . 9 5 ) ; " For
thP m"'.t t. Ar i:n hn-no. l s no m(!re . f� l :t c i ty of f:: peou l r-1 t t on ; hnt
t.,P r"I"}A 1 hn s i r.. � � � o:n o fortunes · of the hvmA.n ra ce , Rnt1. :1. 1 1.
nnw�r of opel"::l.t i on .
For mA.n 1 ::: hut the ::l � rvRnt .9.nc' t int ·'! r -
pr-�t.P.T' ' or nature : \'lhat he <'t oe s and wh at he 1qlows i s . on l y
'IITl-t � t h e hns obs erved o.f n�ture 1 s ord e r i n fl)ct o r i n th nn,o;h t ;
.
11
·
�l <)
1,
( cr.
rf:'ll i": on ,
n
P.mnh � � t s· on
reveal s
n:tb t�A
in the i r
mot 1 (\n
t h r m H th
of P;rmr t h ,
ha s
or
" hum:tn
ra l l s
the diffe renc� bo tNe en nature and h u man
re spec� ive
t h f.'
s t ab i l i t y
In hnman natu't"e , man , hnv l n r::
law s of a l l compound bod i e s ,
On the
only ha s t o c h oo s e the
mnt t n r in
" conveni ent m ovemen t s , "
mAtnr it;y anrl d e cay .
under
In nature ,
d e v e l opment :
space effects
l aws o f. p:rowth and d e cay .
h f'.'! not
" human minrl "
in an.<'U t i on t o hl l m:tn ac t i on an d t i me , a s prin c l pl � �
o f ch �.l, r�o ,
hot1 :v ,
The
119-22 ) .
o t h e r hann .
s t eps
that i s
the
hav i ng rea s on ,
of h i s growth , but he
t o f ind l i m i t s , . f o r bod. i ly as 't're l l a s
a
s p i. r i t ual need s ,
i t s whi ch w i l l ke e p h im w i t h i n " c onveni en t �ovement s , "
al�y
l i m
that i s
b0.yont1. th 1 � h e knows not h ing ann can d o not h i n.� .
For the chn in
of f'!:l 1 J s e s cB.nn ot. hy any f o r c e he l o o s en or hrol�cn , nor c:tn
nR: t H re be c omman cl ed excn pt by be inr,: obeyed .
fl.nd s o t h o s e tl;Tin
oh j r> ct. � , hu man l<nowl ed �e and humR-n '!'JOWe r , n o rea l ly meet in one ;
nnn i t i s froM i .o:n oran c e of c:J.u s e s that opern t i on fai l s " ( �rov .
Or� . , D i s t r i b . Op . , s ect . 6 ) .
n r mean i t t o be a h i s t ory not
on l �r of' n FJ.ture f'ree and at larr,e ( t'lhen she i s left to h r� r mm
cour � e and n oe s h e r wo rk her own Nay ) . .
hut much more o f n2.
tnrP. 1. m n er con s t ra int ancl v e xed ; that i s t o say , �rh en hy r-trt
r-tno t ho hnnil. o f man she i s forced out o f her natura.l s t a t � ,
A.nrl s qu l". ezen a11d. m oulr'l en: " Orov . Orp: . , D i s tr th . Op . , s e c t . 3 ,
c f . 1 , A nh ' s • 1 -11- ) ; " On a r: i v en horly , to g-enP-ra t e and s n ne -r i n
d H ce. ::t n eN nature or ne1'1 natu.res · l s t he Nork R-nd n. i m of h' lfTl"l.n
'V'�'""' r .
O f r3. rd ven nat1 1 re t o n t ::>r�over t h e f o rm , t h e tru " � m� c i
f i c r'l t -r r " rcn c e , or n1ltnre - en�en n e r ing n n t u re , o r � O'Jrc0 of
P.JT!:).n�.t. l on , . . . is t h e work ann a i m of humf.J.n 1m<nT l e n p.:c '' ( N ov . Orr; .
?. , A nl-l . l ) .
T h ou ,�h BA con qu ot A s Lucre t :t u s ' pra i s e of Epi <'l l T'U S a s
rl:l � cove re r o f t h e n�. tu re of t h i n�:1 ( N ov . Orr; . , 1 , A ph . 1 ?. 9 ) ,
ann t hour:h Lu c re t in s speaks , in t h e Rccotm t of mr:tn 1 s d evf'lop
mcn t. , of t h 0 co opera t t o:n of 11 p�a c t i c e anrl th e oxne r t en c r.l of t: h e
�n rrPr m i nr:'! 11 ( 5 , l?ln-AO ; anrt m y Dis s . , op . c i t . , pp . 111�- R ) �
h e l'TOn l n never , l i. ke Ba con , s p�ak o f man ' s " end cnvor t o " S t n-hl i sh
�net exb�11n t h � pm-;cr f\nd dom i. n i. on o f the humnn r.1. c e 1. t s b 1 f over
th� nn j vr> r :< r " ( il ov . Or.r; . , . 1 , A :oh . 1 ?9 ) .
i
Bn. � on • s v 1 G i on of t h P.
11 f" r.'ln 1 'Y'� of ma 1 1 ov e r thinr;r: " ( Nov . Orr: . � T , 1\ nh . 1 2 9 ) rr s t � m:
t r. r-- �nnnor d. t i on that he hil s 11 ri s tn.b l i. :.hen forever a t ru e · .<: n•l
ln.,·r fn l Pl.., rr i F! p;r:> br> bm en the emp l r t c::J. l 1lnd t h e ra t 1 ona l fn c. 1 .1 1 ty ,
t: h 0 1 m 1 d nil nnd i 11-s tn.rred c'U vorc e and S "'! TJ."l. r(l t i on of '•Th i ch h : � �
t h rrwm tnto c on f1 1 R i on :o�. lJ. t h e affn. i P :_:! o f th8 h1.lm� n fa1'1 i. 1;r " ..
( �! rw . Oro; . , In s t �n t . r1ar;nn. , PrP. f :; ; cf . 1 , .ll. ph .· 9 5 ; cf L . �,-;:P.P') ,
.'�. n i. � t rorlu ct l on t o the pol i t i cn. l pl1 i l o s ophy of F . Bacon , D t � r: . �
C11 1 c-=trr,o 1957 , ch � 7 , The C on que s t of •Nn.tu re ) .
·
.
.
�,., ; t'1 i n
{ cf .
th� frrmc1-ror.-k o f
hu mn.n
· 5 , J.ltJ0- 5 ; 2 , 1 -6-1 ) �
�ur·u � ,
ove r the o l ii
i.tr,
fn l f 1 1rrtc.n t
t h e pr:J z c l>Th i ch e l cvat n s !\pi
is
( r!f . - 1 , 6 ?. -?9 ; 3 ,
t h e new r:od of culture
ft , 1. -lr.? ) ,
in
Th i s wi sdom ' t o lmm-1 t h n. l i m i t :.
nnt\1rc
!lnpropr l ::t t � for · man 1 r.
ri.ntnro
r:o<'l s , C�res �
on l �,r d cn.lt w i t h bod i ly nn cd s
( 5,
Rncchu8 rmrl
1�3 0 ; 5 , 1-90 ;
Pcrculc � ,
Nh o
To l�ON t h e l l m :t t �
· 1- 51� ) .
annrorrr :J n. t P. f or humn.n nat u re m ean� t o know the 1 i m t t s for c on
t r o l l tr1 � rino
�1-,n.nr:inp;
l'lA. ture and nn.ture as
.
pro s pe c t
The
?4 ;
2,
. e sn .
in book
re s pe c t
sake o f 1 1 fe , "
both
hu man
a : l>lh.o l e . ·
..
of the death
of human nat u re
refle c t
than w i th
" f or the
ll J l -2 ), wh i.ch will
d eve l opment
mak� man
nature
,
Of
t
our na u ral world
set an
en
d
( 2 , 1105-
t o nny h i s t o r i c<t l
whether pos i t i �e or ner;at i vc , l 2
on t i me more w i t h respect. · t o
to the l i fe o f . mank i nd .
his
ot-m l i fe
A s Lucre t ius
c la i ms
t hree :
i l lud. in h i s rebu s v i de o f irrriare pot e s se ,
usqw� a<'leo naturarum ve s t i p;ia l inqu i
nP.rvola , quae nequ eHt rat j_ o dene ll e re n ob i. s ,
l � t n ih i l i npf'?rl_ i at d i p:na m n. i s n e r;ere v i tam .
( J ; 3 19 -22 )
1? � �1-- olarr-: wi cl e l y d t. s a.c:r:rne about the po� t t i v e
0 1� rt e ,n:n t i v 0.
evn. l n at i on o f man ' s h i � t or i c a l d ev P. l opmr.m t hy t; h 0 F:})lc11 rr�an s .
l!f" l th (:' J"' t h e s i mply
n iUJi'FB TDA , I l f i!Ja] e 0 0 ]
V l ihro el i J,l l cr�z l o , F.pi cu ren in mP m . H . B i P'norJn , GP.novn. 1 0 .� 9 ,
1 ?�"Ll r)5 ; 'P . I<'LT�Tf1.'Jt;;R , Ph i l o s onh :l P. und J) i c h t Jmn s t �.m !�nn e 0 P. s 2 .
P.u ch � s n � s
80 , J 9 52 , J�Jl ; I. .,R 0'!3 TN , S u r ln
c ol1.c0'!"lt 1
e p1.curvmn� nn
R evue d e m�Jtap�y s iqu P. � t
�o��l e , 2 1 , 1 9 16 ,
n o� t h e �imply
r'r'T�;\l T . T.<1. m orale n 1 'En i cure et s e s r.q nnort s n.ve c . l e s r! oc t r i ne s
�O.Ylt 0l"lnQrninc s , Par i s 192 7 )
v i eN
fi o j'u s t :t c e t o t h e
e n 1 �nrean al>rarene s s .of th e prqbl emat i c char::1.c i;( er o f humar-.
11 T) r- n n-re r.; s " .
A.nprecJat i on or both a s pe ct s , pe s s i m i s t i c nr.n
ont 1 m i s i t c ( F . f1. IAfi.! COTT I , L 1 ott im1 s mo re la.t t v o ne l 11 l)e re rum
natura '' rl.i Ln �rez i o , Tortno 1960 ; R . MONDOL:PO , La c omprens i on e
<h� l s ol"p:e t t o umano nell 1 ant i chita c la s s i ca , Fi renz e , 19 58 ; my
D i s s . , on . c it . , pp . l Jl-9 ) , s e em s to c om e closest to the t ruth .
p� ss l m ir: t i c ( P.
on
�u;rez ! Hermes ,
.
pror:r??� ,
6�7-719 ) ,
opt 1 m i st i c ( � . � .
seems t o
An
�.
Tn �
on�
nP!"l.th .
t h in:� t h �
Th e
·
r:.oo :::
.
ano
at om s ,
bool< �
cosm of worlds ,
.
fou �,
i�
t i mo ::m �
th e books n.hou t
t wo , the boolm ab ou t thA m i r, ro�o�m
one ann.
f i ve nnd s i x ,
t he books ahou t
the
s h O\'l'S mn.n ' s s pe c ial po $ i t i n w i h in
o
t
mR.r.�o
thP.:
sum
be in� i n t h e c n e r betwe en m i cro c os m and macroco s m ,
e t
o f th in�s :
h P.
are n ot conc nrn cd. abou t
por, i t i on o b oo k s three and
f
T.0-n , hP-b·mcn b oks
o
of
'
i s :::tt t h e same t i m e part
of the cyc l e of t i me and nature and.
Mf!:tt 1 s
able t o detach h i m s e l f from i t o acc unt of h i s ' rea s on .
n
o
m i nd and. s ou l enable h i m t o be a
ware of t i me ,
tl.:l e mAa su rable as p c o nature .
e t
f
.
.
role wi tl1 in tJ aturA ,
A \'r.;lre
t o be awa re of
of nature and t 1me 1 s
man becom e s aware of death ,
more so t h :1.n
sJn,ce . the end t o t h e fulfi lment of hum�n nat u re
of ; pir .tl ,
t
m ore s i � i f i cant than the beginning of i t s prom i s e .
is
The ex
hortat i on o person i f i ed nat u r e t
f
o overc m t he fear of de a t h ,
oe
in t h e Fin l o h ok three ,
ae
f o
in mo re gen r l t e rms ,
e a
f
ea of t h e
r
e xh rtat i n t ov e rcome t h
o
o
o
e
the P.n�. o . mo i on .
f
t
pl i c i tly ,
means ,
book abou t m t i n and r s ,
o o
e t
end of t ime ,
The Proo m ium of b o t w ,
e
ok
o
im
the
pra i s ed the task of the epi curean
ph i l osohe r to gain res o er m t i on t h roug
p
t
v
o
h
enabl in� h i m
and ,
the power of � ind ,
t o evaluat e t h e needs of body and m ind ,
an d . t here
fore t
o set
l i m i t s for h i m s e l f in a cr. ord ance wi th human nature
( 2 , 1-61 ) .
Th e f ct t ha
a
t b ok thr
o
ee e xpla in st h e na ure
t
mind and
one , at
s oul
in
in mot i on th rour,h
t e rm s of bod i e s
lea� , wond r abmlt
t
e
r:a i.n r e s t o e r m ot i on and t
v
the
chance s
h e l"e fore
tm•rard s t im e w i c h w uld rend.e r i
h
o
t
l i fe RS · i t appears t o be ' � 6r ihe
the � 1 nale of b o t re e, nat u re ,
ok h
t h e nnc han�eab le aspect o f
v oid ,
of t h e m i nd ,
tot ake on
make s
ever t o
an at t i tude
as ne,g l i t�ible for one
i i fe
o f
'3 1_nr:le
of t he sum of t h i � g s .
In
a lways pre s ent and repre s �n t i n
being , t r i e s · t o
c onvince man ,
that
�t lM� ,
n l1 r
1
n�vel"' pre s ent , n e t ther a s
wholP.
n6t- i n i t r::
r�:nrP- s �n t inr: th� c han,n;enbl� aspe c t of.
n � .�u. �i.bl� a.s fl\r
as
humAn life i s .
ncc io.ent of mat ter .
a c'c l �.ent
of
in
fo rc e of t i me ,
t i. m e :
man
means that
the poet i c me taphors
and. s pa c e. of t tme ,
m ot i on of. t i m e ,
chan �in� th e nature of the wh ol e · 1'10rld 11
a l t erin[",' a l l thi ngs "
on
are there fore not
the same leve l , but one ,
,
An
.1 n
or fina l ly •
to he reihtcP.d t o i t s ph i l o s oph ical d efini t 1 on .
"'T'imP.
In oth ':! r \•roro r-:
t hRt t i me i s on ly
mot i on throu r:h space ;
Thi s
nature .
ap:oearnnc e s , i r:
c.onc o rn ed .
p(!T'S On i f i. � d nn.t u rc tr1. e s t o C OnV 1. riCC
p:1.r t � ,
of
are
( 1 , 1�59 - 6 ) ) .
r.m d " nature
int erchan �eable
terms
subsumed under t h e o t h e r ,
t ime ,
n.:
"l.ture .
rm tnt en i m mund i nnttir::t!'l t ot iu s a r:> t n s
�l i oque n l i u s st�tus exc i n�re omn ia d ehf:'t
" "=' � !TI�ne t ulla s11 i s im tl i s r0 � :
omn i a n i rrr�nt ,
ornni � c o!"!m1.1 tr:1.t nat u r-A- ,_t vert ,qyoe C O '"': i.t .
n ,.rnqn e A.l. 1 uo pn t rP,:;ctt et nevn �.e'!J i l e l:1r:�uet ,
110""1"'0 �.l i n n ( mw ) c r0 � c i t e t ( f) ) cont 0mpt i.bu s e xi t .
s i c i r: i tnr mnnn. i n a tu rn.m t ot i u � a.ot �. s
� , tRt , et e x al to t nrram statu s c xc 1 p i t n lt e r ,
r:J.n on . notn i t :n equeat , po s s tt quod n on t n J ; t :1.n t e .
��
( 5 , 82A-Jh )
� tm n �.rl. �r
to
th� s;rmme t-r-y of
it 1. r. cn s s :J. on About
a1
s hane of at oms \Ora �
t. Ari n � al l th 1 nr:;s "
�'1 , ' "· 1 1 �r
�ff�cted. hy
n n"'l�n t rl. t nn.tu r� "
111"! -r . p . 9 above .
book b-To 13
i � framed by
both .
( 831
in
,
Nhel"A
th e c �� t :r."1 l
rmrroundnd
by t h e d i t:l -
f':hf' ll � c ount of " t i m f' ehn.n-
'T'he c �ntr::t l pos i t i o� of " om11 l::1
R?.8-36 )
..
.
.
.
ann. the comprehr-m s i ve
-
ch.'!racte
�' '1
nn '!':nr1 r1 t ot 1 n � "
·.
·R 1·l ,... '"" '"' f-! t
" mntat rm 1. m mnnrH nA.t1 1 r'1.m t ot i u r: n e t :"l � "
1.n
hm·rP.v0.Y. , thn.t t t m e :t s on ly
1
the appn.rrmt ,
!' 1 '11"l. l l;r �11 rn·m ln the c ent er of Ln oret :i.ur: 1
of
nn.turc ,
t;h l') :ro�t .
t. r.inmph of Prooerr: ium fou r
t � felt e1ven r.torc i f -one i s aNa.re of i t s
H i T.lDO l :Jrto:::
( 73-87 ) .
th e po s s e s s i on of
th!'YJ
There ,
H t ppol�r t o s ,
fi"UJ 'feo 5'0 v'?
by t each inP;:l. l-1- , . reveled
f l m·rers
to Artemi s ,
v i oJ..qt e TTlead.m'l ,
snr i :n o:t i me
wat e red
bee . l5
hy·
A ! dos
F:u r i p i d e t 1
fancJ'i n,o;
h i mGe l f in
vers i on of the
and 1 ov.c s
own brow .
Ln cre t ius and t h e Mu s e s ,
na ture ra ther
a
l<Treath of
or ,
been
2 1 -7 ) .
an
i. n
i ma�c ,
the
poet ,
l ov e s t o approac:h rm<t
to
pluck fl ovre rs and
to
Th e re lat i on of H i p:pol;rt o s
a l t ered t o
th e re lat i on o f
more poignant ly ,
of t 'l1 e poet and ,;enu s , . the eond.e s s over h i s
l h'P or
_by
and v :l. s i ted only by the
of t h e Hus e � ,
nnd h i s �odd e s s A rt em i s h a s
( 1,
9 2 1 � 50 )
s ou rce ,
a pos s e s s ion
In Lucre t ius '
wreath for h i s
of th in rr,s "
] ,
( cf.
in h i s ded.:i. cat i on of
t o o r inl{ from virr; i n s prin�s ,
::\
,
t: h 0. d� t fj cn.t i on
fl m-rers wh ich were plu cked from
t ravers ing path le s s f l e ld s
B e ek
t h P. pP.r::: nn i. f t r:�
aYJn. t h � Pro o�?.mium of book fon r ,
'J'hP.
hu t. t h.1. t
11 ])0 rern m n"'.t u r.., " ,
tn th e h'1 lancr> of the Ti' i n:l] e of book t h rP. e ,
t i on of'
1
The fa ct that
t o t h e re lat i on
poem 11 0n the nature
th e wrent h ,
h mt�ever ,
is
tud�r o f t h P. ph i l o s op'-1 ical i mpJ. i cat i ons of t h i s key
c f . m;r '' N ..,mos n.:n rl Phys i s " , An tnt: erpretnt i on of
l\u r i nide s 1 H i nnolyt os , HerM e s , · 1 0 1 , 1973 , 16 5-87 .
n
nrt� s 8. �('} ,
�
1 .5Por
n · c omprehens l ve int e rpretat i on of th i s pa s sa .o;e , 0 s pe c i a l l �
1.t � s�rmhol ,_ oal mean in� , cf . C . S EGA L , T h e Tra.n:P.n y o f th e H inno
lyt os ; 'l"he \>Ta t ers of Ocean and the Unt ou ch ed M eati m'l , HS C P , 70 ,
196 5 ; 11 7-69 .
�ne i ther ror th� Mn � � � n or VP.nu s ,
has � miv�th in� t o · <lo ·
ldth
bn t for- tt:te poe t h i m!=:elf ,
·
h i s pos s e s s i on of a t cach in�: , . a
tea�li 1. n.rr, n ot only about Venus ,· but about Venu s _ and Mars ,
two -rm-rers repre s entat ive of creat i on and d e s t ru c t i on ,
t or;eth<"r ,
forin the wh o l e of " the nature of" th ingr-f. "
0mpnas t � on
t eac h inP," as r e a s on for
1. J ln� tri ou s wreat h
that
csw 'f_eoGJ v-, ,
t i on i s evem s tronp;e:r s i pc e Lucret iu s •
.. '
" th e whole natu�e of · th inn;-s • .
i s a r:ift by
. Th i s oppos i
t eac}'l ing cla i ms t o be
The
i mar;e of_ th e
v is i t ed by the sprinp;t im� bee ,
lat e meaclo1>r ,
The
_
seekinr: thn
nat u re ra t he r thA.n A.n Ftch i eventent by t each l ne .
a.bont
the noet speaks of h i m s e l f and h i s l i s t eners as
·; ·
There ,
" be e s
flmt�ery �lade s , feedirtg on · all thy gold�n l'IOrds " ,
( 3 , 9-1 7 ) .
pas sar�e s ,
Hlppo l y t o s and the
r,uc:re t i u s 1
" De rerum natura " ,
in th�
a t eachine ,
cons idered worthy of eternal · l i fe
one from Eu r ipide s '
inv i o-
in the
i s u s ed
_
Pro oemlnm of book three l�i th reference to Epicuru s .
the
\·rh i ch ,
1 s d iamet r i cally oppos ed. to the Eu:r t p i rl ean
v i el..r t hat v i rtue ,
H ippoly t os '
the po e t ' s
the
Thour:h the tNo
one
from
s eem t o s tat e oppo s i t e vi et'ls ,
the
out c ome of the Euripidean play pro ve s H ippolyt os ' v i ew to be
at leA.st insuff i c i ent , if not fal s e .
The s t ronr;es t conclu s i on
t o he d ral'm from ·the play would. he that man can hav e no meaning·
ful relat i on wi t h · the divine ,
a conclu s i on wh ich l eads more or
l e s s d i rec t ly t o Lucre t iu� •· pr id e in
from t h P. t i r:h t knot s of ro l i p; i on"
T n the
o f " D� rP.rum
Prooemium . �'f
nat ur� "
as
b oo k . one ,
well
fr e e .i np; the minds of men
6-7).
t h e ber;innin� of · the 1>1h o l e
a s t he bep;i nn ing· o f i ts first .
half , V�nus was ha. f ed as r.;odd.e s s
i
(4,
"
f"OVerninr; nature , ·
( orit.P.rinr: the sacri f i ce of Iph igene i� oy Agamemnon )
P.xampl� for re l igi on and i t s act s aga in s t na ture
whi l e
Di <lha
s t ood a s
( 1 , 62-79 ) .
�Jn
t h � P1"" o oem i u m
hn l f of
of hpok
r mir ,
"De r�rum n n t. n rn " ,
D i ann ;
t. n f" pn. r; s .<:t p:P. f r om Eu r 1 p i r=J e s '
ani'. v t rtne , as a r: i ft ,
�:n n.chi nvement ,
( 3 , 1 '3 )
t in s ,
is
by n.a t u re ,
s e c on r'!
.
in t h e trrln s f ormnt ton of
H i p:polyt o s ,
b y t ea c h i n r,- .
t. h ou r:h t o f Ji:pi curu s 1
t h 0 bc n: inn tnp: o f t h e
is r8 j e c t c n.
for V nn,,H3 ,
i s ne � l e c t c d f or v i r tue ,. · R. s
Th i s ,
.i n turn ,
mean s that
t e a c h i n r: be tnr: w o r t hy o f e t ern a l
of fame
c ont i nu e r'!. by the . e xpec tR.t i on
of h oney . l 6
surround inp.;-
Th e pra i s e
of
the cu:r
l i fe
for Lu cre
\'rho t rans f orm ed th� ph i l o s oph i ca l t e a ch i n � in t o
n o P t i c t eRchinp; ,
the
a
wormwood vrit h a t ou c h
of
t eachin,o; r.:lt h e r than
riF.t t u r e
as
s ou rcP. of v irtue l 0. ave s on e l'li t h t h e qu e s t i on whe t her nat u re ,
i n� i f fe ren t
to
he
t oward s man and t he fulf i l lment of h i s l i fe , i s
m e r e l y s tud i e·rt. or whe ther man
nn � 1 re f or the sake of l i fe "
is
suppos ed
( 5 , 206 -9 ) .
t o " re s i s t
The Prooemium
of
book tNo , t h e book about m ot i on a.nd. r e s t , bef, l n s \'Ti t h a c on .:.
s i d e rat i on of the
life
S l•Te etn e s s . o f · wa t c h i n� the r� s t le s sne s s
cau s ed by e lemen t s
of nature ( th e
s h i pNre c k )
of
and h umo!ln
l f'1tn th r0 s pe c t t o t h e re lat i on b e h 1ceri t h e p.'ls sar:,e of Eu r- i p j de s I
H inno1yt os ( 73 - 8 7 ) a nd t h e two oc currence s of t h e s n m e t h nmn
' " D e rn :rum na t urrt11 { 1
9 2 1 - 50 ; h , 1 - 2 5 ) , I \-;ouJ/l
· i n I.n0r e t iu s
SUf"!"'0 S t th.<tt t h e f i r r: t h R l f .( 7 3 - 8 1 � of tho Eur i pi n E"'an pa � s n r,A
i s t r0.n t 0t1 i n the f i r s t Luc r e t ian ver r; i o·n ( 1 , 9 2 1 - 5 0 ) , ��h U 0
t 'I1 P. s 0 c ond ha l f ( 82 - 7 ) of i t i s fl ea 1 t \·r i t h , '11-Tl11:�:n i t o c cu r s t h e
r: '::' c onr'i t i me ( 1�- , 1 - ? 5 ) .
The re<t s on for t h i s dJ s t r l bu t l on c n n
he fonnfl t n the m o r e t h e ore t i c:l l a s pe c t of Eu :r i p i d A S ' H i pp o l y
t, , s , 7 J - R 1 r-t�1r. T..ucr0 t iu s 1 " De re rum nat1 1 rn." ; 1 , 9? 1 - ) 0 ( " :1 u �
TJP. l" :-: n � � i s or.Jn P m l1 n t u rr:tm rr:•rnm ft1 18. c on s t n t �� omptn f i r:urn " ,
1 , Ohf1-_50 ) , .'1 nrl t r e m o r e p�act t c:'l. l a s pe c t o f Eu r i 1) i o e s 1 H i p:;o 1 y
t 0� , P2 - 7 , ann. Lucre t i u s ' " D n rerum nat u ra " , 1r. , 1 - 2 5 ( " d urn }!Pr
.
s '8 i ci s omnr>m nn t nrnm r.e r1.1 m a c percn t i s u t i l i tn. t em " , l� , ? lt - 5 ) .
('. f . my " �J o n o s and Phys i s " , o:p . c1 t . , 165-9 : for t h e s i r;n i. f t �.'"l n c c
o f t'l1r-- c on t o x t f or the d l f f e renc e o f t h e . tNo Lu c rc t i an p:1. ::: ; :1.r/� S ,
c f . r. . S TRAUSS , tT o t e s on Lu c r e t i u s , Liberal i sm Anc i ent and JV' nf!. .
. .
� rn . rr��·T York , 196 8 , p .
113 .
�?. (
nn tnr0.
( �h � ·nn t t l� ) ,
''lh i l e <me n e l f
'T'h c � n t r:h t of swcetne � s ,
t P. � ch 1 n� of Fp i curn s
t"J ou�h ,
rA �t ( ? , 1 - f> ) .
i r: a t
i s :l�h i �v0.r'!. t 1-tr 0n rrh th �
( ?. , 7 - 19 ) , throu r-:h t h e t � <t �h i n;"': "l.hnn t::
t h e nrtturo of t h i n.n:r: , wh i ch wl l l re � cu0 on� fr0m thP. r � :� t
l � r: s n ('> s s of hum:::tn
l i fe
in :::t l l i t r: v :.\r i ou s wny r. .
whnther nA.ture i s
only t o he c6nt empln t e r1 or fo1 1 rr,h t fir;n. t n � t
for t he s ::tke o f l i fe i s never openly answered
" De rl"rum n!itnra " . ·
T he fact
to a c1 tp of wormwood whi ch
rv aronnci
t he
.
.
The
·.
f':Oes throu�h
On a. smaller s oa l e ,
s c riJ')t i on o f l i fe ,
n
�rt
of first
the des cript i on of
the
.
work .
l i fe ,
' bookn ,
has
eve ryt h i n� wort h l iv ing for ,
of
it .
and th e swe et Prooem iw
has
in
i t s c nunt er
the d e s cr i pt i on of the
fr om _ me re l i f e to thn h i r;l"
T h e fact that the c enter of the s i x
t h e t op;et h e rne s s of the F i nale of book three and t h e
l..e t s
R. r t e l' t h � h i t t er wormwood ,
o f cleath ,
thre e ,
c ount er�
i t s coun t e rpa.r t i n the bi t t e r F ina le
d e s cript i on of the h i ghfl st ach i evem ent
Pr ooP.miurn o f book four ,
sweP-t .
has i t s
sw� P.t
the sweet Prooemium of book one , . the rl e
i n the b i t ter F inale of book s i x ,
. est 'rle vel opment
The
of book s i x , . th e de s cr i pt i on of o. cath
the t ea ch in� about t h e nature o f t h in�s ,
ru in of
l i k cn�o
honey and t h en
whol e of Lu cre t iu s •
the d e s c r i pt i on of d ea th ,
of book three ,
l i fe ,
i�
'
Finale
in the b i t t e r
of book fou r ,
t h e t ea chinr,-
Sl-Te et ened. hy th e honey of pn� t .,
s equence
the
:Prooemium of book ona ,
Pr- �t
'l
is
i n Lu crct i n n 1
cup ' s r i m ·ve i l s t he anst'ler even more t han t h e ;
T>ros e t each inp- �. id .
wormwooo
that
Thf"! rtn , � t t nn
u s tas t e ,
fo.r once ,
m i �h t mean tha t even the hi t t n rn c s s
i f und e r s t ooci i n epi curean: t e rm s ,
The
t h e sNect h on ;::
can b e c ons i n ered
:·
themat.-ic ... ; s.equence of death , _ in the. F i nale o f book
�.
.
.
.
and fam e ,
•'
-��
.�
in the P·rooerpium of .book four ,
s e em s
to ref l e
�nnt. onl y th� n e c � s n r-try c m1n n c t 1 on of nnt u re nncl t 1.me ,
wh t �h
1 � a lwtys thP. . same
wh t ch i s al\.,a.y s d i fferent
th e
importan� � of
of t i me ,
ne R s
( anr't r� fers t o the p::t. s t ) ,
( and
r e fe r s
nnrl
t o t h e .future ) ,
t ime . oyer aml aga in s t na tu re .
of trH 1 t
t h n t.
bu t a l s o
Mnn • s awlr P-
w t t h ont t h e awarene s s . of nature , . d. 1 s t ort s h l s
v i eN of t h e r e lat i on o f m o t i on and re s t wi t h in t h e sum of
th in�s .
hr-mo ,
Mnn ' s awarene s s anci eva luat i on of t i m e ,
c on s t i t ut e s his
cruc 1.al n ot
the wh o l e ,
ano
m-1arene s s
on t h e other
o f natur.e , · and i s t h ere fore
only for h i s und e rs t and int:r, of h i m s e l f a s part
but a l s o o f t h e wh o l e
the poet ' s v o i c e
mark ' the
i t s elf .
T h e fa ct
c ent er of Lu c re t i u s '
of
that na t u re ' s
work ,
bears
out the everlas t inp.: t en� i on between nat ure , . encompa s s in."; al l ,
and man ,
s t riving t o encompas s nature .
�2A
A pn�mc H x
rr rn'1. s lnt: t on s
�-
1:
p.
4:
p.
nn .
5:
5-6 :
1,
of the La-t 1. n
quotes :
4 59 - � 3 : -
'Rvr:m s o t i mP e x i s t s not by t t s e l f , hu t from .
t'h \n",s t 'l1 am s e lv � � come s a fe � 1 1 n f\ , '"hat w:1 s
hr-on r;ht t o a c l o:=:1 A i n t j me p� s t , then 't'rhat i. s
nr0f-l �nt · n m'l , a:n.n fu rther �rhat i s r,oi nr: t o be
And :\ t mn s t b e av owed. t ha t n o man
h �rPnft � r .
f � e l s t im� by 1t s P. l f n.p:1 rt from t he mot i on
an d qu i �t re s t. of t h i nr;s .
.'5 , .56-R :
I tPnch , hy \'rha.t ] �N all t h 1.np:s are cr()a. t A<'l ,
nnd how t he�,. mu s t n � �c1 s Abi fl.e by 1 t , ann how
th e;v are not s tron� e:non�h t o break t h rour:h
th� powerfu l st�tut A $ o� t i me .
1 , �32-��
Por inf in ite . t-i me :and . the day that has p;one by
f1l1J � t neefl s have d ev oured r-t l l t h i n.�s · that are of
mortal body . . . Bttt \'lhab:�ver ha s been i n .that s pace
::md r:on e by t i me , out of Nh 1. ch th i s sum of
th i. nr:s c on s i n t s anr'f. 1 s repl r.n i shed , is c ertainly
�n.fl owP-d w i th i mmortal natu l"t! .
5 , 306-17 :
o\ cr�.in , fl.o y ou not beh olfl s t rme s t o o vanqu i nh�fl
�;... t i me , h i .�h t ol'm rs fall in;:. in ru i n s , n.nfl rc ckn
crumhl tnr; m·m�"., �hri nes nn� i mn,-:e s of the [':O� s
�rm'li'1r.t; l'1'0nry rmfl. l-torn , \>Th i l e the i r s� crP d pr� s 0:n� r-
�.�.vm ot f'!'OJ o�.n:- t h P bou.nn a.Y"i. P. s o f fn.t: P. n or s t ru :r.c). t:
::�.�� l n � t +: r.e l m·m of nnt urP. ?
.1\ f"'r-t i n , n o 1·YA.
n0t � � n.
!1 t on � � t 0r-n • 1 p from h i r:;h mo� mt.ains ru � h 1 n,cr h�ac l on c: ,
1u1 .,ble t o br ook or b"'ar t h � s t ern s t.renr:th of a
J. i m l t: e� t l me ?
For· infl��rt t h ey l·:ou l C! n o t - b�r �urld �n l y
t 0Y"TJ n -p n11 r'f fa. l l h P. :J r'fJ on.� , i f frorn t i m e �ver1 a s t. i nr�
f:'he�,. h rvl he1 fl. 011t n;:n. i n s t a l l the t orm �nt s of" t i ��
Ni. th ou t l)r�"lkin� .
•
n.
h�
5 , R?.� -3� �
•
•
t. t m � ch�.n r:e s the n n t. n rf'! of t h e \'t]'lole l>�Ol"1 d
� ,... � on "' r. t::t t e � f t E' r :.:n nther m, , �t ,., r: � rl r. nvert.nlrP.
� 1 1 thin�!1 , nor fl. o� � a.n�rth tno: tlh i c1 P. l i 1rP. i t r- � l r :
n l 1 th i n r;s chn;n p-r t �1 .." i."r n h.':' � r> , '"t:t.tnre a 1 t o r rl f\ 1 1
·
th tnr':s r-tnn r.:rms t"rn tn � t h �:-:1 t o h.trn .
For on0 tl" � '\"":
�ob=: m·ray an" r:roNR f:=t. 1. , t r.Jna fe�ble ,,Ft th ::t.�� �
t herA on anoth �r .r;rm·rs up Rnrt i nsuC's f�orn :l. t p1n �c
of s c orn .
So th�n t j me chn� p:e !:l the nature of th e
r:- ."1 ,..
��··n o1 0 . ,.•n-r-1cl ,
n.n � . on 0 F: b") t. n. n f t. r .... f11"1 0t h � r rw ,- rtal-:· r> �
t. h (' r:-n.rth , r. o t.h. 'l t 1. t c q,.n1. ot h P � r nlv-. t i t ;, hl ,
hn t. c n n h�:lr Nh :1.t t t d i. cl n ot o f oln .
p.
5,
7:
5h-R :
J t: R !"! �h , h�r '!Arhn t 1 a.w { t h r.: };'3.\'T of nn.tn :r-0 ) � 1 1
+: h l n r-:s nrr� r.rr.::1te� , �ml h oN t h r.:y mu� t n r.r.: rl �
:'1h 1.� f." h�, i t , nn d h oN t h A y o.re n ot r-: t T' on r� r.non�h
t o hret:tk t l'rrov r:h t.h r JV'I�·rr.:rfn l r. tnb 1.t r r. o f t 1 :n e .
n.
?,
7:
� ? - 7� :
C i"'f.'� nr.M , T \'r 1 1 1 un f o 1 rl hy l!T}! n t r:l 0Vf"' Jnl"'rt t tr n
�"' r f."� t. 1 v � h o� 1 f"' r. of m�t t n T' hP�('t. � i v r r s R t h 1 n�r ,
n 11 r1 - hrenk u n t. h o !"l r- t h:1.t � r-e hr.[':ot t rm , h �.r N'l-) � t fnrr. r
t. h "" Y 'lrr (� m1 s t rr.1 i nf'� t o � o t h i s , rnvl \·rh nt '7 0 1 oc 1 t.:{
l s nn:no :i :ntP.n t h P m fm• mnv h 1,i; t h ron rr:h t h f' rn l r;n ty
vo1 � :
0 o �rou rcmn.rr:bnr t o ;r.l vr. yonr rrd.. n� t o my word r. .
Ti'C'r i n v�T'Y t ruth , mn.t t e r d. o e s not c 1 r�avl?' r. l 0s r.:
!')n.. �ln�d t o i t se l f , s in('r.: w� s c r. 0ach ' t h tn.r:. ):reM 1 P r.: s ,
nnn · l're pr:o:rce :\ ve a l l th il'l[':G f 1 oN n �·�':"l �r , n � i t l!TP. r c. , i n
t.h c l ontr lap n P. o f t. 1 me , a s a r:c N i. thil r:nrs th�=>m
from our s i r:h t :
rmn yet th� 1.m i vr;rsr: i!'l ::; r �?n t o
rAmA. in uml i m i n t s he n , j_ m.-l S Ml.t ch · o.n a l 1 hod i e s that
� Pprt.rt from Anyth inr; 1 f' P. S f'm t1·1a t f rom wh i ch t h �y
:pn � s ::n'lay , ann b1 e s r-: 1111 th tl'l.cre:l ci e t hat t o wh 1 ch
thP.y have come ; they c ons t ra i n t h A former t o �rmor
olCl. and t h e J at t er nr:a i n t o f l ourt s h , and yet th ey
nh i d e :n o t with i t .
Thus th e sum rif th i n �s i s �ver
be in!"'; repleni s h ed. , n.nn. m ortn 1 s l i ve on e and al1 bJr
r:o;ive- and tal::e .
S orne rac e s wax and others wane , and i n
n s h or t spa c e the t ri b e s of · l i v :t n � th inr:� are chan sed ;
�.nrl 1 i ke runners hanrt on the t orch of 1 i fe .
p.
n.
A:
2 , 297- 3 02 :
The hof! t e s of the f i rs t -be�inn :i.n?:s in t h e rJ.r,o s
prt s t mo\red Ni th the same mot i. on <i s noN , and h e re:tftP.r
't1i l l he borne for ever in a s i m t 1ar 't'lay ; such things
�s have berm l.'Tn!'lt to c ome t o be in.r.; td l 1 be hroup;h t to
b i rth u ncler the same cond i t i on , 1d ll exi s t and grow
ann be s tronr; , inasmuch as i s gran t ed t o each by t he
bond.s of nB. ture .
B:
1,
·
10?1-31 : .
'F'or in very t ru t h , not by d.e n 1 r;n o i n t h e f i r s t
h0.rr1 nn i n �� of th 'i 'Ylf: S place t h � m s 0 lv e s ench in
th e i r orrl.er wi th for� s e e inr; mi nn , nor ind e ed. d i d
t n �;r make r.om1x1 ct wha t . moveml3nt e a. ch � h ou l d
r> t n rt , hnt becau s e · m;:my of them s h i ft inr,: i n
mari.y way s thron.�;h ov t t h e v.rorld a re harri ed and
bu ffet ed by b 1 m·rs from l t mf t 1 e s s t ime ; by t ry ing
movements and un i ons - of every k ind , at las t
th e y fal l int o s uch d i spos i t ons a s thos e ,
�') 0
Nh�rP-hy ou r wor ld o f t h i nr:n i s � rcnt cn n. n � hoJ.d rr
. t o'"':�th �r .
Ann i t t o o , prc � c rven from hnrrn th rour;h
m.·1 ny ,. a m t n:hty cyc l e of yen ros , whrm on c P. i t h :'l s
hr!rm n<'lf:t i n t o. con vcn i rmt movernrm t ::t , hr 1 n�s 1 t
·"l ho1 t t thnt :rivers replen l sh the !';reP.it y s e a
-�
•
p.
10 :
•
•
5 , 43�-45 :
the b i rt h of thP. t•rorlcl } n s o rt of
fr� sh�form�d . � t orm , a ma � n r:at he re_d to�ethcr of
f t :r s t -be,..;i nninr:s of every ldnd , . wh oso d i s cord
\·1.1- n wn.r;tn.� ,.,�:r ani'! confound. i np; i nt e r - s pac e s , path s ,
tnterlr-t.c in.o;s , wP- i r:h t s , bl mu:: , mc e t inr;n , n'Yl.rl mo t i ons ,
hPcnn s e mdnr: to th e i r un1 1 ke forms A.nd varl ous
�hn.nP.s , al l thinp:s \'U�re unable to remain � n un i on ,
R � they do n ow , and t o �1ve an d rc ce ivP.· c onven i en t
movem�nt s .
'T'h'm ( at
pn .
10-11 :
p.
' 14 :
p.
'15 :
1. ,
' 322.;.8 :
IA � t-ly ,
whatevm" day Find n�ture -a � d � - t o th ings
1 :\ tt-le :by l i t tle , impe ll i nP: t h em _ t o P.;row. in
nn e proporti on , the s t ra inin � . s i eh t of the eye
c�Yl. never behold , nor a�a i n wh erever thin�s
f"'rO't� old. t hrou�h t ime and d.e cay .
N o r where rocks
OVP.r-hang.. the sea , devou red by th� th in �R.lt
spray , c
�u ld you see t..rhat they lose in t i me .
By
bod i e s uns een then nature t reats th inp.:s .
1 , 459-6 3 :
;F.ven s o t j_me . e xi s t s not by 1 t s e l f , · bu t
from th 1n�s themA elves co me s a fee ling ,
l>�hrtt llfa s brour;:ht to a c l o s e in t i.rn e pa s t ,
then what i s pre s ent now , and furt her what
Ana i t mu s t be
i s p;oinr: to be hereafter .
avo�red t hat no\'r mr.'ln fe e l s t l me by i t s e l f a
part from the m o t i on ann qu i et re s t of th ings .
2,
fi9�79 :
nerce i ve al l th in�s f l ol'r a1-1R y ,
1 n the l on .n: l�pse of t i me , <:'. S ar;e
'ole
t:t �
it
vrA re ,
tfi thn rr::n·r s t h eM
fr>om our a i 0:h t : · and y e t the univerAe i � s e en t o
rcm:::t in · ·und1 m i n.is'hP.n , inasmuch a s a l l bod i e s that
n �na:rt from A.nyth inr: , l e s �en that from Wh i ch t h r.>y
p.'-l s � aNay , ann ble s s ' w i th increase that t o wh i ch
t h ey have come ; t h ey cons t rn i. n the f o rm e r t o gr"0\'1
oln anfl th� l at t e r._ a�a in to flouri Ah , and �ret the�,r
::t h i_d e _ n ot wi th i t..
Thu� the m.tm of th ing-s i s p·1.r-�r
b0 1 n r: rcpl <m i shen anQ. mortal s l i ve one .nnd. all by
S om � - rac e s W<:tX and o t hers wane , and
�:tve anri _ take .
j_n a sh ort space the t ribe s of" l i v inr: thi ner; a.re
chan.r:;ed , anii l i ke runne-rs }land on the
t orch of- l ife .
_
�'3 1
p.
15 :
5 , 1� � - 1 00 :
B n t 0v �11 ,.r.'lrl t. h 1!": thn t: T V.n.:\•T n n t 1'Tl,.t t n rc
t � !" f l r� t. -1)�",f"': 1 '1n t n :'"':� of t h t n ,rr r: , t.h1.1 r: n1 .1 � 11 n t
l r·H:: t T \<'Y 01 1 1 r'f rlrl rr t o r� ff t rm fr0m t h 0. ,, r. r-:r
wn ',' S of h rnvnn , _ :'1n n t o shm·r from m�n�r o t h t"! r fnct �
th:'1t th(' \·mrl t'l ,m � T1 c v 0 r nn n f' f o r 1 1 r: h�r r.l i v 1 nc
n cn,r r. r :
!1 0 ·fT' rr>rtt hrc t h ,.. fan l t s Nh .: rnw i. t h
i. t r: t ::m r'l. r: f'nr'J motcl't .
T n t. h 0 f i rr: t !'l1 rt r. 0 , of
n 1 1 thf.lt the s l{y eovorc in j tr: mJ r:ht�r
m mr r. m Pn t , a f!T'Nlt P""-rt ts pos :1 e r: fl en by r;rc cdy
monnt a i n s n ncl fore s t s fu l l of \•t i l d bc::u� t s ,
-rn rt rocks and vns ty mn r s h c G hol n , nnd t h 0
s r-- ::t thn.t k0 c n s t h e sh nrc s o f i t s l nnn s f n. r
ap::t rt .
He l l - n i p.:h hto part s of t h e s e land s are
r obbed from m o rta l s by s c orch i nf.i heat , and
c on r: t r.m t l y- fal l inr, fro s t .
Ev en t h e lanr'l t hat
is l e ft , nn ture wou l d s t i l l cover wi t h brambl e s
by h er m•m pm>te r , bu t t ha t man • r: power r e s i s t s
fo r t h e s ake o f l i fe .
p.
16 :
5,
,
1 45 2 - 5 :
'Pra c t i � e and. th erewi th t h e e xpor1 cncP. of t h e
e:1r.;er m i nc'J taur:ht t h e m l i t t l e b y l t t t l e , a s th�y
went forNard s t ep hy s t e p .
S o , l i t t l e by l i t t le ,
t !. me brirf(i:s � out each -s�everaT -thi'h� lrit o · v l ew , a·nd.
r�a s on rat s e s i t up int o the c oa s t s of 1 1 e;ht .
-
p.
17 :
5,
127� - 80 :
5,
1452-7 :
Thu s ro l l i n� t ime chan�c s t h e t i m e s o f t h i n�s .
':That l'Ta s of . value , be c ome s i n t u rn . of n o 'IIT Orth ;
R.nr! t h en another t h 1 nr: ri s e s up r:md l eave s i t s
pl�ce of s corn , and i s s ow;ht m ore and more .
ea ch day , and when f ound bl os s om s i n t o fame ,
A!l.ri i s of wondrous h on ou r amon g men .
p.
17 :
'Prnct i ce rmd th erew i t h t h e 0.xpe r i en 0 e o f t h e
ea n;er m i nd t au �h t them l i tt l e by 1 i t t le , a s t h ey
l'Te'!1 t forwA-rd s t ep by s t e p .
S o , l i t t l e by l i t t l e ,
t :t mr?. br in!Ys out each s ev e ral th tne int o v i ew and
r�a. s on ra i s e s i_t up 1 n t o the c oFt s t s of l i.r:h t
For
t h e y saw one t h i nf{ a f t e r ano t h e r grow c l E!ar i n
t he l r h eart , unt i l by their art s t hey rea ched t he
.
h i g:he s t point .
p.
20 :
3,
3 19 -22 :
On e th in,:; I feel able t o aff i rm
s o sma l l rtre the
t ra c � s of d i fferent nature s l e ft , wh i ch r e as on c ou ld
not di s pel for u s , t ha t not h i ng h inders u s from
l i v in� a l i f e worthy of god s .
.
•
.
�)2
p.
22 :
5 , 826�36
For t 1!11 P- chnnr;o s t h n nnture of the t'lh olc l·mrlr'L
ann .one s t.'lte · a f t " r ; m other mn s t needs ov� r tnkP.
nl l th in�s . nor d o c s anyth in� ah idn l ike i t s e l f :
a l l th inr:s c han rt:e thc i. r n.bon.c , nnt urP. a l t e r 5 a l l
th 1 n �s ann constl"a inn t h�m t o tu rn .
Ti'or 011 0 th in�
rnt: s al'l:J.Y and ,;rows faint and . feebl� ltTi t h ar;� ,
thet'eon n.nother �r ow s up and- i s sues from i t plane
of � corn�
S o t hen t i me chari�e s the nature or the
wh ole w or ld , and one s tate after another overtake s
the eartl1 , s o that i t Qannot bear what it d id ,
bu t can bear what it did not of old .
�
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
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
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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.
Page numeration
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16 pages
Original Format
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paper
Dublin Core
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Creator
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Berns, Gisela N.
Title
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Time and nature in Lucretius' De rerum natura
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1974-03-08
Description
An account of the resource
Typescript of a lecture delivered on March 8, 1974 by Gisela Berns as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Identifier
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Bib # 57328
Subject
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Lucretius Carus, Titus. De rerum natura
Philosophy, Ancient
Coverage
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Annapolis, MD
Publisher
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St. John's College
Language
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English
Type
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text
Rights
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St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online.
Format
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pdf
Relation
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<a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/1082" title="Sound recording">Sound recording</a>
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/990af6e012bacecfba691ecd37b02cea.mp3
1f57fec1ed71fdc024ee515130830a8e
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
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
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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
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audiotape (Tape 227)
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
01:11:29
Dublin Core
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Title
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Kepler and the Mode of Vision
Description
An account of the resource
Audio recording of a lecture delivered on September 13, 1974 by Curtis Wilson as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Creator
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Wilson, Curtis
Publisher
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St. John's College
Coverage
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Annapolis, MD
Date
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1974-09-13
Rights
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St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online.
Type
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sound
Format
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mp3
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
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lec Wilson 1974-09-13
Subject
The topic of the resource
Kepler, Johannes, 1571-1630
Deans
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/fc43bfa6d48e57a010be6b8efde20d36.mp3
5a92cbd383782712a0224dea4560496d
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
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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
audio cassette
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
00:43:01
Dublin Core
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Title
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on November 1, 1974 by Samuel S. Kutler as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Recording is not complete.
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Kutler, Samuel S.
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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1974-11-01
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A signed permission form has been received stating: "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audiovisual 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 typescript of my lecture available online."
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sound
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mp3
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Kutler_Samuel_1974-11-01
Friday night lecture
Tutors
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Text
..
~~
LECTURE SCHEDULE - 1974- 75
St. John's
Kepler and the Mode of
Vision
September 13, 1974
Curtis Wilson, Dean,
College
September 20, 1974
Douglas Allanbrook
Concert
September 27, 1974
Francis V. O'Connor (NY, NY)
Symbolism in Abstract Art
October 4, 1974
Robert L. Spaeth, Tutor, St . John's The Philosophy of
College
Neils Bohr
October 11, 1974
Dr. Leon Kass, Tutor, St. John's
College
October 18, 1974
LONG WEEK-END
October 25, 1974
Professor Philip Fehl, Dept of Art
History, Univ of Illinois
Grace and Redemption in
Michelangelo's Last Judgment
November 1, 1974
Samuel Kutler, Tutor, St . John's
Generalization
November 8, 1974
Sterling Brown
A Poetry Reading
November 15, 1974
Stradivarian Quartet
Concert
November 22, 1974
Elliott Zuckerman
On Measuring Verse
November 29, 1974
THANKSGIVING RECESS
December 6, 1974
King William Players
The Alchemist
December 13, 1974
Mortimer Adler
The Human Constant and
the Changing Scene
December 20, 1974
WINTER VACATION
January 10, 1975
Virgil Thomson (Composer and
Music Critic)
How the Critical Press
Works
January 17, 1975
Donald Brady (Dept of Philosophy
Cheyney State College)
Freud and Philosophy
January 24, 1975
David Stephenson, Tutor, St . John's Beauty Alone has Looked
on Euclid Bare
January 31, 1975
Eva Brann, Tutor, St . John's
February 7, 1975
LONG WEEK-END
February 14, 1975
Leo Raditsa, Tutor, St . John's
February 21, 1975
Ernst Haefliger, Tenor
Teleology and Darwin's
Origin of Species: Beyond
Chance and Necessity?
The Novels of Jane Austen
Thucydides and Aristotle's
Politics
Concert
�- 2 -
The Symbolic Character of
Christian Language and Action
February 28, 1975
Albert Mol1egen (Virginia
Theological Seminary)
March 7, 1975
Ars Antigua de Paris
March 14-28
SPRING RECESS
<April 4, 1975
Ranlet Lincoln (Dean, University
of Chicago, Univ. Extension)
Kirkegaard's The Sickness
Unto Death
April ll, 1975
Ellen Davis (Department of Art
Queens College, New York)
The Metopes of the Temple
of Zeus at Olympia
April 18, 1975
Paul Serruys (Department of
Languages, University of Wash)
Writing and the Origins
of Language
April 25, 1975
Laurence Berns, Tutor, St. John's
Francis Bacon and The
Conquest of Nature
May 2, 1975
Beate Ruhm von Oppen, Tutor,
St. John's College
B·ach' s Rhetoric and the
Translation of his Texts:
Concert
w-ith examples taken mainly
May 9, 1975
REALITY
May 16, 1975
Douglas Buchanan (Massachusetts
General Hospital)
from the Passion according
to St. John.
Some Observatla'ns on the
Present State of Psychiatry
and Psychoanalysis
�october 30, 1975
William Dunham
Campus Mail
Mr.
Dear Will!
In listing the Bicentennial lectures for a proposal I left out Herbert
Storing's on "The Founders' Views on Slavery," March 5. so there are
seven lectures after all!
The corrected list is as follows:
1.
December 12
Mortimer Adler, Director Institute for
Philosophical Research -- The American
Testament
2.
January 30
George Anastaplo -- Title to be announced
3.
February 20
Robert A. Goldwin, Special Consultant to the
President -- John Locke and the Constitution
4.
March 5
Herbert Storing, University of Chicago -The Founders' Views on Slavery
5.
April 2
Donald L. Kemmerer, Department of Economics
University of Illinois - The Role of the
Monetary System in American History
6.
April 23
Max Isenbergh, Professor of Law, University
of Maryland School of Law -- The Pursuit of
Happiness in the American Constitutional
System
7.
April 30
Eva T. H. Brann, Tutor, St. John's College,
Annapolis -- The Declaration of Independence
Sincerely yours,
Curtis A. Wilson
Dean
�
Dublin Core
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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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3 pages
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paper
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Office of the Dean
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Lecture Schedule - 1974-75
Date
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1974-1975
Description
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Schedule of lectures and concerts for the 1974-1975 Academic Year. Also includes a memo of a corrected list of lectures.
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Lecture Schedule 1974-1975
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Annapolis, MD
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St. John's College
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English
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text
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pdf
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Wilson, Curtis
Allanbrook, Douglas
O'Connor, Francis V.
Spaeth, Robert L.
Kass, Leon
Fehl, Philip
Kutler, Samuel
Brown, Sterling
Zuckerman, Elliott
Adler, Mortimer Jerome, 1902-2001
Thomson, Virgil
Brady, Donald
Stephenson, David
Brann, Eva T. H.
Raditsa, Leo
Haefliger, Ernst, 1919-2007
Mollegen, Albert T.
Lincoln, Ranlet
Davis, Ellen
Serruys, Paul Leo-Mary
Berns, Laurence, 1928-
Ruhm von Oppen, Beate
Buchanan, Douglas
King William Players
Relation
A related resource
September 13, 1974. Wilson, Curtis. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3668" title="Kepler and the mode of vision">Kepler and the mode of vision</a> (audio)
April 25, 1975. Berns, Laurence. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/1091" title="Francis Bacon and the conquest of nature">Francis Bacon and the conquest of nature</a> (typescript)
April 25, 1975. Berns, Laurence. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3874" title="Francis Bacon and the conquest of nature">Francis Bacon and the conquest of nature</a> (audio)
May 2, 1975. Ruhm von Oppen, Beate. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3584" title="Bach's rhetoric and the translation of his texts">Bach's rhetoric and the translation of his texts</a> (typescript)
Friday night lecture
Lecture schedule
-
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99dab03edb990ed85ee581009cc3f59f
PDF Text
Text
1~hls 1~ateriai n-iay- 1 6 protected by'
Copyright l;qw (Trtte ·17 !J S. Code)
FRANCISBACONAND THE CONQUEST OF NA'l'URE*
by Laurence Berns
The whole prospect and outlook of mankind grew immeasurably larger, ·and the rnul ti tude of ideas also proceeded at an
incredible rate. This vast expansion . was unhappily not accompanied by any noticeable advance in the stature of man,
either in his mental faculties or his moral character, but
it buzzed the more. The scale of .events .around him assumed
gigcintic proI:'ortions· while he remained cibout the same size.
By comparison therefore he actually became much smaller.
We no longer, had greatmen directing manageable affairs. Our
need was . to discipline an array of gigantic and turbulent
facts.
To this task we have so far proved unequcll.. Science be-:stowed immense new powers on man and at the same time created conditions which were largely beyond his control. While
he nursed the illu5ion of -growing mastery and exulted in his
new trappings, he became the sport and presently the victim
of tides and currents of whirlpools and tornadoes amid which ·
he was far more helpless than he had been for a long time.
_:...Winston S. Churchill
1
The so-called conquest of nature by modern science·, the science
associated with the names of Bacon, Descartes, Galileo and Newton, has
transformed human life almost_beyond description.
The new dependency
of human life upon science, or its product, technology, pervades our
thinking as wel_ as our prac.t ical lives.
l
It might even seem, from
the recent suggestion to replace the term technology with the term
"technotronics", that logos too had become outdated.
*Base.don
1
Our awareness
a lecture given at St. John's College, Annapolis, April 25",1975.
.
.
Speech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, April 1, 1949.
THE GATHERING STORM, Boston, 1948, pp. 38-42; "Mass Effects in Modern
Life" and "Fifty . Years Hence" in THOUGHTS AND ADVENTURES, 1.932.
Cf.
�-2-
of the depth ' of this fundamental dependency should help us to avoid the
hypocrisy of indulgi.n g in loose anti-scientific talk • . .Yet the threat
of nuclear war, overpopulation, environmental pollution, the imbalance
and disappearance of nature in the wild, and so forth, have all made the
problematic character of the great project for the conquest of nature
increasin~ly
evident, even to non-philosophic thought.
But dangerous consequences can be dealt with in more than one way.
If the conception of nature underlying the cOI:iquest of nature by science
is sound, the remedies for the ills consequent .upon the sO-calied conquest · of nature· are to. be found not in less, but more science, or in a
fuller use of science to solve the problems inherent in the application
of_ science to practice-.
If, on the other hand, the dangers brought on
by modern science are natural consequences o.f fundamental defects in
the understandi.n g of nature presupposed by the project, we are directed .n ot
only to the correction or reform of modern science, but to a consideration of the fundamental' alternatives to it.
In
either case the funda-
mental problem turns out to be not only the problem of dangerous consequences, but rather unders.tanding the truth, . or adequacy, of the conception of nature underlying the notion of the conquest of nature.
The modern project, especially with Bacon and Descartes, was worked out in explicit opposition to classical philosophy and science.
is
~ot ' simply
historical accident.
This
The meaning of the conquest of na-
ture cannot be adequately understood ·without understanding the reasons
for rejecting the view of nature it was formed in explicit opposition
2
to, the classical, or Platonic-Aristotelian idea ~f nature.
The idea
of the conquest of nature cannot itself be adequately understood apart
from an understanding of the fundamental alternatives to it.
I
The first word of the first aphorism of
Bacon'~
NEW ORGANON is
"Man", · the . second "nature": "Homo, naturae minister'· et interpres, ••• ";
2 The common, Socratic, element in the philosophies of Plato and of Aristotle
is discussed in my "Socratic and Non-Socratic P?ilosophy: a Note on Xenophon's MEMORABILIA .1.1.13 and 14", THE. REVIEW OF METAPHYSICS, September,
1974, pp. 85-88.
�-3-
"Man, the servant and interpreter of nature, does just so much and
understands just so much of the order of nature as he has observeq in
the thing or in the mind: he neither knows nor is able to know more."
Man is the
~ervant
of nature in so far as
h~
can do or make nothing
except by obeying the . hidden chain of causes •. Man is tbe interpreter
of nature in so ~ar as he does not ·accept what ·he receives as self-evident,. but .rather · as results and signs only of t .h e hidden chain of
causes.
s.igns must be interpreted.
Man should distrust l:>oth his
natura·l faculties for judgement and the signs which nature on her own
provides. him.
It is in the third aphorism that we find the decisive phrase:
.
"For natu- e is · na·t conquered, except by being obeyed."
r
3.
The phrase ·
is on its .face .aosu~d~ or self-contradictory: the same thing .cannot
both be. conquered and obeyed.
Bacon too soiicits :interpretation.
The word nature here .is . being used . in two senses.
In his discussions
of natural history Bacon provides us with the distinctions which resolve the contradiction.
Natural history is divided according to
the three ·conditions . in which nature is found. - There. is 1) nature in
its-ordinary course, free and left to itself, as it presents itself to
the ordinary understanding in the normal movements of. heavenly and
terrestrial bodies, the normal generations of plants and animals; then
2)
there is nature wandering, or in .error . when prodigies and monstro,
sities are produced;. and finally 3) nature constrained and vexed,
forced out of her · "natural" state, pressed an.d moulded by the . art aritl.
hand of man. · It is from this third kind of ·history that. Bacon ·expects mqst. · "For just as in civil affair~ a man's disposition and
the secret sense of his mind and affections are better discovered
when he is troubled than at other times~ so likewise the secrets of . nature brin9 · themselves forward through the vexations. of art more .than
3unfortunately, in the· most widely read English translation, Spedding•s,
among ·other 'inaccuracies, vincitur, "conq.lered", is usually translated as
"conunanded". Spedding was probably misled by the ·imperatur of aph. 129.
See ·Library of Liberal Arts; THE NEW ORGANON, ed. F.H. Anderson, pp. 19,
lines 18 and 1 1 , 29, line 8, and 39; Modern Library, SELECTED WRITINGS ••• ,
ed. H.G. Dick, pp. 441, lines 21 and 22, 451, ·line 10, and 462.
�-4-:when the}' go their own way."
ill its ordinary course.
4
The nature to be conquered is nature
The conquest is . to be accompl{shed through .
the discovery of and obedience to the secret chain of causes hidden
withinand operative throughout nature; which are to be revealed by
experimental history and true interp.r etation.
What is given to .human cognition in its
ordi~ary
course, by nature
in itls ordinary course, does not provide the clue to the discovery of
natw:;e's fundamental structures and laws. · We cq.nnot assume, as the
'
ancients did, that·there is a natural harmony between the mind of ma,n
and the world, that science and philosophy are the refinement and perfection of the
~atural
cognition by· nature.
understanding working on what is given to human
Oil
the contrary, whaf is given by nature to or-
dinaxy cognition obscures and obfuscates man's way to the discovery of
i
the fundamental course of nature, to nature's fundamental laws.
The
first part, then, of the way to the conquest of nature is the "refutation of the natural human understanding."
This culminates in the
refutation of those philosophies that have been based upon this understanding.
.These are, most . notably, the philosophies of Plato and
Aristotle, which take as .their fundamental task thinking through the
. presuppositions and implications of the orientation of the natural
5
human understanding.
The refutation of the natural human understanding is set forward
most fully by Bacon in his discussion of the Idols of the Mind in
4NEW ORGANON,
5
(hereafter designated by" N.O.), I, aph • . 98.
The refutation, or rejection of the natural human understanding has been
tried in different ways. Cf. Descartes's "genium aliquem malignum" in Me-:ditation I: Hobbes's "feigning the world to be annihilated" in DE CORPORE,
chap. 7; ahd LEVIATHAN, chap. 13, where .it is shown why the "condition of
nature" is intolerable: John I.ocke,ESSAY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING,
Book I; and ESSAY CONCERNING CIVIL GOVERNMENT, chap. v, where the part
which nature (compared with labor) contributes to the value of things shifts
from !/10th to l/lOOth to l/lOOOth, to "the almost worthless mate:i;-ials":
Spinoza, ETHICS, Part I, Appendix: _ and G•.W
.F. Hegel, PHANOMENOLOGIE DES
GEISTES, Hoffmeister ed., 1952, Einleitung, pp. 66-68; Baillie trans., . pp.
l35~137.
Cf. _
Jacob Klein, GREEK MATHEMATICAL THOUGHT AND THE ORIGIN OF
ALGEBRA, M.I.T. ~ress, 1968, pp. 72-74 and 117-121; and Leo Strauss,
WHAT IS POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY?, Glencoe, 1959, "Political Philosophy and
History" and "On Classical Political . Philosophy".
�-5aphorisms 38 to 67 •
6
The idols are first mentioned in aph. 23 as
·"certain empty d_ grnas" in contrast to "the ideas · of the divine mind"
o
which are "the true s_gnatures and impressions ·made on creatures, as
i
they are · discovered."
What Bacon intends by "ideas of the divine mind''
is not at first .altogether clear • . The next aphorism, . as if in answer
.to the question, How is one to know what kind of. principles to. seek? 1
remarks that principles .c onstituted by arguments are not to be
relied ·u pon, since the subtlety of
!
nat~e
is
gre~ter
many times over
.
thaii the subtlety of argtiment.
.
dis~overy
Rather, principies that iead: to the
.
.·
.
.
.
.
of new works; new particulars, that render the sciences ac-
.tive, are to be
sought~
In the search for those true signatures and
impressions of the divine mind one is to look not for the divine ideas
s
themselves, as ideas, but as forces and laws, a_ it were, impressed
..
in and shaping and_·governing creatures.
This is not because Bacon
was more :interested in practice, power or useful inventions than he
was in theoretical
truth, but because he thought that the active
principles_ gdverning nature . are to be discovered primarily by determining what, how, .a nd under what; conditions things can be done, or produced.
A theory is not confirmed as true simply ·because it leads to
the production of new works, but new work;s are signs or pledges t J
-iat
one is · t least on the track of . truth.
a
Bacon's emphasis is on light-
bearing over fruit-bearing experiments, that is on discovering causes
rather . 1;.han on immediate usefu_lness.
He was fond of recalling "the
divine. procedure, whi_ in its first day's work created light only
ch
and assigned to it one entire day, on which it produced no material
.·
work."
i
Those who confine themselves too closely to practical utili-
ty, he a.r gties, defeat their own purposes in the long ·run; .for from . the
right kind. of light-bearing experiments and theories, not just occasional and isolated inventions will result," but whole "troops" of inventions.
gether.
The right kind of theory and inventions, or -works, go to8
6Aphorisms, Bacon wrote in DE AUGMENTIS ••• ,Book vi, chap. 2, represent
knowl~dge as fragmentary and incomplete, thereby inviti_ g. the reader to conn
tribute _
and supply what is .missing.
7 THE: GREAT INSTAURATION, Prefkce; and N.O., Boo~ I, apn. 70.
�-6-
Human reason as ordinarily used in the study of nature is
by Bacon "Anticipations of Nature,
call~d
(as a thing rash and premature)."
Anticipations of nature are contrasted with what he calls Interpretations
of Nature, human reason rightly used.
for rhetorical
lectic,
9
p~poses,
For gaining.assent, that is,
an ti.cipations and the "sciences" and dia-
or logic, based upon them are far more · powerful than Bacon's
art of interpretation.
They are more powerful as rhetoric pre- .
cisely because they base themselves on and merely refine those universally shared delusions, or radical errors, inherent in the primary
experience.s and notions of the native human understanding·.
The analogies
by which new '!=hings are related to old in philosophies based on anticipations,· like the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, lie in every
man's common experience; the way of interpretation, on the other
hand, must at fir·st sight seem forbidding and uncongeniaL
It re-
quires an initial suspension of belief about common· experience itself, and it? expositors must supply their own similitudes and compar'isons in order to gain passag·e to men 1 s minds.
What .they must most
rely on, hOWeVer r iS leading men tO particular things I Or faCtS I .themselves, or to those new experiences based on experiment which the understanding left to its natural inclinations would never come
to~
The first class of idols, or false notions, whi.ch are rooted in
the cbmmon natlire of 't he human mind · itself, Bacon calls Idols of the
Tribe, that is the tribe or race of men.
The human intellect is prone
to suppose there is more order and regularity in things than it finds
there • . It is more moved and excited by whatever agrees with and affirms opinions already a.dopted than by what negates them.
It is per-
meated. by infusions from the will and affections, and especially those
wants that foster superstition.
Without warrant it restlessly press-
es on beyond all ends or limits, on to the unconditioned, as Kant
would .say.
"But by· far the greatest bUpediment and aberration of the
8
Cf. Paolo . Rossi, "Truth and utility in the Science of Franc.is Ba:C-on•\', in
PHILOSOPHY, TECHNOLOGY AND THE ARTS IN~HE EARLY MODERN ERA, Harper Torchbooks, 1970, pp. 146-173; and Hans Jonas, "The Practical Uses of Theory",
in THE PHENO'MENON OF LIFE, Harper & Row, 1966, pp. 188-210, esp., sec. v.
9 Bacon's usua. term for Aristotelian logic is dialectic, usually rendered
by Spedding .... s "logic".
�-7-
human · intellect," Bacori'says . in aphorism 50,
0
proceeds ·from the dull-
ne.s s, incompetency and deceptions of the senses."
In his less popu...:
lar natural history, S~LVA SYLVARUM, . (paragraph 98), .there is an interesti.n g discussion of the subject of· this aphorism, given as "touching the secret processes of nature .• "
The knowledge . of man hitherto hath been determined by the
view or sight; ·So that whatsoever is invisible, either in.
respect of the fineness of the body itself, or the smallness
of its parts, or of the stibtilty of the motion, is little inquired. And yet these be the things that govern nature prin...:
cipally; 'and without whic:h yeti cannot make any true analysis
and indication of the proceedings of nature. The spirits or
pneumaticals, that are in all tangible bodies, are scarce
known~
Sometimes they take them for vacuum; wherea·s they are
th~ most active of bodies.
Sometimes they take them for air;
from ' which .they differ exceedingly, as much as wine from .wa- .
ter; and as wood from earth. Sometimes they will have them
to be natural heat, or a porti9n of the element of fire;
whereas some of them are crude . and cold. And sometimes they
will have them to be the virtues and qualities of the tangible parts which they see; whereas they are things by themselves~
And then,. when they come to plants and living creatures, they call them souls. And such superficial specu. lati<:ms .they have; like prospectives, that shew things inward, when they are but paintings. Neither is this a question of words, but infinitely material in nature. For spirits
are nothing else but a natural body, rarified to a proportion,
and included in the tangible parts of·bodies, as in an integument. And they be no ' less differing one from. the other,
than the dense or tangible parts; and th~y · are in all tangible bodies whatsoever, more or less; and they are never
almost at rest: and from them, and their motions, principally proceed arefaction, c;:olliquation, concoction, maturation,
putrefaction, vivification, and most of the effects of nature ••••
·Aphorism SO . in the NOVUM ORGANON goes on:
For the sense by itself is a thing infirm and erring; neither can instruments for enlarging or sharpening the sense do
much; but all the truer kind of interpretation of nature is
effected by instances and by experiments fit and apposite
wherein the sense judges the experiment : only,· and the .experiment nature and the thing itself.
�-8-
Distrusti.n g ordinary sense experience, one must by. careful thinki.ng and
plann~ng·subject
the
th~gs
of nature to conditions of all kinds: pres-
sures, · £orces, mixtures, . and so on, which would never be found in the
ordinary course of nature, in ord.er that nature's normally secret
operations "which are. too subtle for the sense" are forced to produce
10
"some effect comprehensible by the sense."
Given nature is contorted
and transformed under the. guidance of the notions the experiment is
devised to confirm; disconfirm or illuminate, iri order to produce the
kind of experience the experiment aims at.
And it is still the senses,
but the senses lawfully married to the rational faculty, that are our
sources for evidence about the nature of things.
Bacon's refutation of
the natural human reason is not meant simply to disparage the intellect.
The controlled experiment is to judge "nature and the thing itself."
And the
co~trolled
experiment is the product of mind, duly warned and
chastened, but also instructed and .even inspired • . .,A complete separa.:..
tion and solution, therefore, of nature must be made; not by fire in11
deed, but by the mind, .as if by a divine fire."
In his preface to
the second edition of the CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON Kant speaks of this
"intellectual revolution" in natural science partly · discovered by and
partly inspired by Bacon. and carried on by men like Galileo, Torricelli and Stahl.
They learned that reason has insight only into that which it
produces according to a project of its own, and that it must
not ·allow itself to be kept, as it were, in nature's leadingstrings, but must itself show the way ••• constraining nature
·to give answers to questions of reason's own dete.r mining •
••• ~like 7 an appointed.judge who compels the witnesses
to answer questions which he has· himself formulated.
Bacon takes the name ·Of the next class of idols, Idols of the
10:rHE WORKS OF FRANCIS BACON, (hereafter des.ignated . WORKS} Spedding,
. Ellis and Heath, eds., London, 1875, seven volumes, vol. iv, p. 412;
I
11
N.O., Book II, aphs. 16 and 7.
�-9-
· cave, from what .he once speaks of as Plato's ,exquisitely subtle allegory.
Buthe . s.peaks of our spirits being confined within "the caves
of our bodies" and r.estricts these idols to those innate tendencies
to error risi.ng from the special nature of individuals, and their
special
~age
habits~
education and accidental circumstances.
Plato's
of the cave, on the other hand, could be thought of .as encom-
passing the subject matter of all of Bacon's first three classes of
idols, idols of the tribe, of the cave and of the forum •
. The idols of the forum, or market-place, being partly innate
and
. partly acquired . from without are placed between idols th.a t are innate,
those of the tr:i1be and the cave, ·and those which are not innate, t .he
idols of the theater.
The idols of the forum are most troublesome of
all, they stem f;rom the way ·words and names are formed.
Words being
for the most part framed according to the capacity of the vulgar draw
the .intell~ct along the lines and divisions that seem most evident to
vulgar .intellects.
More .acute and diligent observers find words stand-
ing in the way of communication of what they have seen in nature.
The
prudence of the mathematl.cians in beginni.n g with carefully framed
.definitions is. good, but cannot cure the evil in dealing with natural
and material things.
What is required there are methodical and order-
ly arrangements of individual instances.
Men form names for things
which do not exist, like Fortune or Prime Mover; and they form confused names ori the basis of hasty and unskillful abstractions from
12
things.
The ·last of the four classes of ·idols; the idols of the theater,
are from the dogmas; or fable's I or plays of philosophy.
themselves innate, .that is, they depend upon the
They are not
acqu~sition
or accep-
tance ·of some philosophy; yet like everythi.n g else they have a natural
basis.
The peculiarities of the dif·ferent idols of the theater are to
be traced bac:k to different special combinations of effects derived
l2'In aphoi;isms 60 ·and 15 Bacon condemns the use of certain generally .
accepted.names and notions.
seems to have Aristotle;s categories
in mind. But 1ames and notions from the category of quaI?-tity are not
among those co tdemned.
He
�;..10..;.
, from the workings of the innate idols of the tribe and cave.
The idols
of the forum affect all the philosophie~.
Bacon speaks of three prominent types among the idols of the theater.
The first is the sophistical, which to ensnare the assent o.f the
greater number, bases itself upon common experience and common notions.
The 111ost conspicuous example is Aristotle,' who led by the idol of the
~
cave .mentioned in aphorism 44 corrupted his natural philosopt"iy arid his
!
metaJ?hysics with his favorite study, dialectic, or what Bacon also calls
the Vulgar, or common, logic, the logic of the "Old" Organon.
Aristo-
tle fashioned the world out of categories, he tried to account for
sensible differences and substances with words like entelechy and act
which ·are words which describe certain kinds of thoughts rather than
things.
Even when he did resort to experiment in his more specialized
physical and biol_ gical works he framed his questions in such a way
o
that his resort to experience was bound to confirm the positions he had
decided upon in advance, ·a procedure warned _ gainst in aphorism 49 of
a
the .idols of the tribe.
The second class of idols of the theater is the empirical school
of philosophy, those who on a narrow basis of certain experiments and
experience fly or leap up to universal principles and try to explain
everythi_ g else on the basis of the principles observed in their experin
ments.
With great foresight Bacon warns that if his admonitions are
heeded and ~en begin to leave sophistical philosophy, by which he
.means Aristotelianism, to devote themselves seriously to experiments,
this kind of idol could become a much greater hindrance to sound inquiry • .
The third class of idols of the theater, superstitious philosophy,
the corruption of philosophy by admixture of theology and superstition,
is far more wide.spread, in his times, at any rate, Bacon claims.
While
contentious Aristotelian, sophistic philosophy ensnares the inte·1 1ect,
this more poetical, more fanciful philosophy misleads it by flattery.
The natural anlbition of the intellect to fly beyond all limits, warned against in aphorism 48, and the susceptibility of the intellect to
�-11-
influences from the affections and imagination, warned against in
aphorism 49, are catered to and
flatte~ed
by this kind of philosophy.
All idols are riot of equal rcink, and, Bacon explains_, this kind of
idol is keyed to the. natural dispositions of more noble and lofty
spirits .
The most important example here is "Plato and his school"; 13
but. this "apotheosis of .error" shows itself in scholastic
Aristotelian~
ism as well, in the introduction of abstract forms,. final causes and
first causes.
This unwholesome mixture of religion and philosophy
i
must !be stopped, Bacon said, not only becc:i.tise it makes for fantastic
phil<;>sophy, ·b ut also because it leads to heretical religion.
Ef-
fecting .this separation seems to be one of the most incontrovertibly
successful parts of Bacon's project.
!
The. great failure · of ancient phiJosophy, however, a fa.i ling even
.
.
.
.
.
of the atomists whom Bacon praises as superior to ·Plato and Aristotle
in natural philosophy, is that they m~e the quiescent principles ·of
things out of which they are produced rather than the moving prin~
ciples through .which things are produced, the · objects · of their inquiries.
The six received Aristotelian, or vulgar, distinctions of
motion are merely popular c:i.nd make no penetration into nature.
Bacon .
gives fifteen and, later, nineteen different motions in his own pub- .
lished accounts of the simple motions: 4
s
The· ultimate or natural causes of the. e failures are dealt with
in the last of the particular idols of the tribe in apborism SL
The hWnan intellect is carried to abstractions ac'"".
cording to its own nature; and things which are· in flux
it feigns to be constant.
The fault of abstractions is that they feign things ·in flux to be constant.
In aphorism 52 Bacon provides a further clue to his meaning
where he speaks of this idol arising from "the mode . of the impression."
What he seems to have in mind is that the moving thing makes
13Cf. Plutarch Is LIVES ••• , Nicias, XXIII •·
1
'\n · Book III, chap. 4 of the DE AUGMENTIS •• • .I arid aph. 48 of N.O. I .Book II.
These aphorisms dealing with superstitious philoso,PhY and the failure ·. to
search. out the movi.n g principles of things are at the center of Book I (N .0.).
�-12-
.
the sense _ memory and intellect,
,
an impression or impressions which remain constant in what is
impre~sed,
.
that is,
~n
thereby suggesti_ g that
n
what caused it in . the thi_ng itself is also fixed, !Vhereas. it is rea_ly
l
.in motion.
The aphorism continues.
But it is better to dissect nature than to abstract; as
the school of Democritus did, which penetrated into nature
more than the rest. Matter ought rather to be considered
both in its schematisms andmeta-schematisms, and pure ac~,
and law of action or motion: for forms are figments of the
human spirit, unless you are willi_ g to call those laws of
n
action, forms.
Bacon uses . the word form to describe the ultimate .objects of science because that word had become so venerable for so many of
those he wanted :to lead down the path of his new scien~e; what he
means are iaws of motion •15 The intellect in deali_ g with. things
n
in flux moves towards the c_ nstant, but "in nature nothing truly
o
exists besides individual bodies producing pure individual acts
according to law. 1116 · The given compounded bodies of nature are
to be dissected down to the · latent schematisms of more fundamen- ·
· tal bodies constituting them, the schematisms, or meta-schematisms
of the more·fundamental simple natures constituting them are to be
·. studied especially with a view to ·the laws of action inseparable
from their existence.
The natural appetite of the intellect for con-
·stancy is to be satisfied by fixed modes, . orders, or laws of change.
15 In theVALERIUS TERMINUS, which was never published but evidently circulated privately, the equivalent, or corresponding term is "direction"r
WORKs, vol. III, pp. 23?-41. Cf . Ellis's Preface, ibid., pp. 201-05~
This may be the best place to study what Bacon means by the remark
-"that which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the
rule." (N.O., I, aph.3.) Cf. Paolo Rossi, FRANCIS BACON, FROM MAGIC
TO SCIENCE, London, · 1968, pp. 193-201; and Mary B. Hesse, ''Francis Bacon", in A CRITICAL HISTORY OF WESTERN PHILOSOPHY, ed. D.J. O'Connor,
Free Press of Glencoe, 1964, chap. 8.
16
.
N.O., Book II, aph. 2.
�-13...;
B_eginning with natur.a l history and the naturallY: given· forms of
the ordinary course of n_ature, like lions; oaks; . men and water, physics
studies their material and efficient causes, that is, their latent schema.tisms and latent processes, with a view to th:e discovery of the truly_
simple natures and motions out of which they are compounded.
What ·
simple ..natures are is not yet determinable, says Bacon, but he ·speaks
of them
as
being more abstract and general natures like heat and span::...
taneous rotation, attraction and magnetism. 17 .The s_ ggestion may be
u
that in the simple natures material ~onfiguration and simple motion
coalesce as two inherently connected factors of what we might call uni•tary orde~ed material dynani.isms. 18 However that may be, the simple natures. constitute the "alphabet of nature".
Met_ physics, in the literal
a
sense of "meta", after...;physics, begins with the alphabet and studies
its "gram:i;iar" , that i.s how the simple natures are
collected ·~
compounded
· and combined to form the bodies and to produce the operations of the
ordinary course of nature.
Metaphysics studies formal causes, that is
the laws of action of the simple natures, the laws which order and
constitute any simple nature in any subject matter susceptible of
that nature.
The operative part .of metaphysics Bacon calls ;,magic"
s_uggesting · by the term that on the basis of
the
new natural· science
men will be able to generate things ne:ver before seen in nature and of
such a character as to rival in power, fineness and durability the.
things
pro~uced
by natU.re in its regular course.
The term also suggests
that sue!) things · being alien to the ordinary course of nature could
17 .cf. on "simple natures", N.O., Book II, aph •. 5 and Descartes, RULES
FOR THE DIRECTION OF THE MIND (INGENII), Rule 12 •. For Bacon's influence on Descartes s.e e A. Lalande, "Sur quelques textes de Bacon et de
Descartes", REVUE DE METAPHYSIQUE ET DE MORALE, May, 1911, pp. 296-311.
18
.
Cf. DE AUGMENT.IS ••• , Book III, chap. 4, on "Abstract Physics';. Cf.
Laurence Berns, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF FRANCIS
BACON ••• , Ph.D. Dissertation, University . of Chicago, 1957, Appendix and
pp. 175-78 and pp. 193-94. Cf. Rossi; ·£2._~ ·· cit., p. 202.
�-14seem to be of supernatural origin.
Bacon's use of the term meta-
physics, li~e his use of the term form, cannot be _
understood · apart from ·
considerations of his philosophic rhetoric, for it seems to have been
designed first to appeal to those who .might still be attracted by the
traditional name, but only in order to lead them toward a very different
notion of the thing.
.,
"All physics, " Bacon wr_ote, "lies in a mean between
natural history and metaphysics."
Metaphysics is "itself -a part of
physics or of .the doctrine concerning nature. 11 1 9 That is, physics, in
the broad sense of the word, beg1ns with -natural history _ nd ends in
a
metaphysics, with the laws of action of the simple natures.
Bacon knew
that there would be little left of traditional metaphysics, if his way
were followed.
A private letter of 1622, to a FatherBaranzano in Italy,
reveals his intention in part:
Be not troubled about Metaphysics~ When the true Physics
have been discovered there will be no Metaphysics. 'Beyond
true Physics is Divinity only.
"The human intellect," he wrote in the NOVUM ORGANUM, "must not be
supplied with wings, but rather with lead and weights. 1120
Are Bacon's "forms", his . laws of motion, forerunners of the
m.;ithematical formulas of Newtonian physics?
certain.
It is difficult to be
He did say that physics should end in mathematics.-
He did
not seem to appreciate what might be accomplished by framing one's
initial hypotheses . in terms that are representable by mathematical
syriibols~ 21 One might say that he foresaw what· the 9-c;>als of mathematical
physics were to be, without
bein~
clear about the mathematical means
19 oE AUGMENTIS .•• ; Book III, chap. 4, and Book "IV; end; in WORKS, vol.
rv, pp. 347 and 404.
20 Book I, aph. l04 ~ .
2lcf. Jacob Klein, op. cit., note 5, above, Part I, Introduction, and
Part II.
�-15to those. goals. 22
"Inquiries into· nature have the best result when they begin with
physics and. encl in mathematics."
The nearer one approaches simple
· natures, he .said, the easier and plainer everything becomes, as one
moves· from the inconnnensurable to .the comine'n surable, from surds to
rational quantities.
.A gain, . "everything relating both to bodies and
virtues in nature I should_/ be set forth {as far as possible)
bered, weighed, measured . and determined.
num:~
For we pursue· works not ·
speculations, and physics and mathematics well .mixed generate practice."
And most interesti_ngly, we must · "measure virtues, · /-forces_/,
"3.Ccording to the; quanti.t y of the · bodies- in which they subsist and show
how far the mode! of the virtue depends upon the quantity of the body
••• we must pro~eed to inquire what proportion the .quantity of° a body
bears to the mode Of its Virtue. II 23
However, the technique of representing physical 'e ntities by
mathematical sym1Jols, so as to allow what one already knows from
. mathematics to suggest undiscovered relationships between the r'epresented physical entities, was evidently not known to him.
1
Mathematics, he
.sai·d1 "should terminate natural philosophy, not generate or give it
birth." 24 He does not seem to have been very weli informed about the
.
.
.
history of mathematics or mathematical advances being made during his
22
.
.
.
.
But cf. Lalande, ~ cit., note 15, above, pp.
speaks of Descartes's announcement (in RULES ••• ,
geometrical interpretation of sensible phenomena
nearly word for .word a passage from theVAL:J?RIUS
309-311~ · where Lalande·
no. 12) of the method of
in words .which "reproduce
TERMINUS."
esp~ '4 7; Book I, aphs. 96 and 98;
and P:REPARATIVE£-PARASCEVE_/ TO A NAWRAL AND EXPERIMENTAL HISTORY,
aph. vii. _ Cf. Hans Jonas, "The Scientific and Technologic'al Revolu:..
tion", in PHILOSOPHICAL ESSAYS: FROM ANCIENT CREED TO TECHNOLOGICAL
MAN, Prentice-Hall, 1974, pp. 63-65. Cf. Henry . Pemberton·, {editor of
the third edition of Newton's PPJNCIPIA .•• ,), A VIEW OF SIR ISAAC
NEWTON'S. PHILOSO~HY, London, 1728, Introduction, where the iinportance
for Newtonian science of Bacon's critique of the prejudices and obstruc· tions impeding knowledge . and his treatment of induction are stressed.
· 23 N.O., Book II, aphs •. 8, 45, 46, and
24
N.O., Book I, aphs. 96 artd 80; and DE AUGMENTIS ••• , Book III, chap. 6.
�-16own times. 25
Yet the Baconian experiment seems to lend itself to com-
bination with the approach of symbolic mathematical physics.
Both
methods approach nature with a view to discovering the extent to which
nature is subject to ·1aws devised in advance by human reason.
Both
the Baconian experimenter and the mathematical physicist, in the .K antian
phrfi~e,
"prescribe to nature its laws."
Baconian influence can, of
course, be seen in other approaches to physics· and also in other sci,
;
enc~s, iike chemistry and biology.
However this may be, we now turn
our' attention to an· area where the extent of Bacon's influence is less
questionable: the new relation which was to be established between
science and _society.
II
The ·"Great Instauration", great renewal, of the sciences called
for a radical change in t:'.he way. science . and philosophy were to oarr1
on their affairs.
And then let them consider · what may be expected (after the way
has been thus indicated) from men abounding in leisure, and
from association of labors, and :from succession of ages ••• in
which the iabors· and industries of men (especially as regards
the collecting of experience) may wi~% the best effect be
first d.i stributed and then combined.
Bacon's way was "not a way over which only one man can pass at a time
(as is the case. with reasoning)."
His way required a vast new insti-
tutionalized science, coordinating the efforts of
m~y
men in acom-
pleX, hierarchical organization, that was meant to outlast any of the
individuals who were parts of it; th. t is, as we say, it was to become
a
. "historical" and progressive.
This vast enterprise would require far
greater suppori;. from society at large than science and philosophy had
'\
ever received .before.
There would come a time, Bacon hoped and
25see ibid. I and Ellis Is notes to the same in WO~, vol. I, p. 577.
-26
.
· ~' Book I, aph. 113.
�-17expected, when society's dependence on -science would be extensive and
obviou,s; but before that time came about, and if that time was to come
about,_ the
po~V"ers
that be, "who are but in very few cases even moderate27
.
ly learned,." · would have to be won over · to the ne\."1 cause. He· devoted a considerable · amount of thought and :writi_ g to this, his rheton
rical task.
To the extent that his project has succeeded, the need for, .and
the understanding of, his rhetoric has diminished.
Yet without some
understanding of that" philosophic rhetoric, what he accomplished, both
theoretically and practically, - can.not be appreciated.
He regretted
that· it was necessary for him, the architect of the new edifice of
\
science·, to become herald,
recruiter~
and even ordinary workman as
well.
We have already seen some of the consequences of his need to re. cruit new men of science in an atmosphere domi_ ated by Aristotelian,
n
Platonic and Scholastic learning in his use of the terms "form" and
"metaphysics".
In
one . of his _interesting unpublished writings, which
are often more open and less colored by classical terminology, he
speaks about how his plans must be conununicated and transmitted :
inveterate errors like deliriums of the insane must be subdued by art and by wit, and are aggravated by violence and
opposition. We must, therefore, use prudence and humor them
(as far as we can with simplicity and candor), that contraqictions may be extinguished before they are inflamed. 28
~onathan
Swift in his FULL AND TRUE ACCOUNT OF THE BATTLE FOUGHT LAST
FRIPAY BETWEEN THE ANCIENT AND THE MODERN BOOKS IN SAINT JAMES '-S LI BRA.RY pays _ certain tribute -to Bacon in this r _ gard:
a
e
27N.O., .Book I, aph. 91.
28rHOUGHTS AND OBSERVATIONS,~OGITATA ET VISA), translated in the Montagu
American Edl.tion of BACON'S WORKS, Philadelphia, 1855, vol. I, p. 434;
original in WORKS, vol. III, 589 ff. Cf. F .H. _Anderson, THE PHILOSOPHY
OF FRANCIS BACON; Chicago, 1948, -P· 38 ·. The trans_
lation in Montagu is
more literal han the recent translation in THE ~HILOSOPHY OF FRANCIS
BACON, . Benjam: Q Farrington, Liverpool, 1964, which also contains translations of "TL= Masculine Birth of Ti.me" and "Refutation of the -Philosophies".
�-18Then Aristotle, observi.n g Bacon advance with a furious mien,
drew his bow to the head, and let fly his arrow, which missed
· the valiant modern · and went hizzing · over his head; but Des
Cartes it hit •••
'Evidently Bacon ducked.
In addition to those whom he called "true sons of science", to
whom "the lamp" · is
to
be handed on, a new army of assistan-t:s, managers
and administrators had to be recruited.
Appeals had to be made to men
who never before would have been connected with scienc.e , to induce them
to forsake their green fields, humble workshops and profitable businesses to become partners iq the hitherto too fastidious, or too exalted,
quest for truth.
·Bacon encour.a ged them with the par.tial· truth that "our
way of discovering sciences almost levels · men's wits and leaves but
little to individual excellence," just as a man with a compass can draw
a more perfect c.i rcle than anyone else, no matter how excellent, who
uses his hand and eye alone.
There will be a vast array of new tech-
nical and mechanical activities that will leave little to special
.intellectua.l excellence; but B aeon was more aware of the difference
between ordinary men and men of talent and genius than those who criticize him for ignoring it.
Some four pages after his statements about
levelling in the NOVUM ORGANUM, he remarks that what he is attempting
"cannot be brought down to the apprehension of the . vulgar . except by . effects and works only."
29
This should be considered also in connecJ
tion with the question about the relative iinportance
of fruit, works,
or power, on the one h,and, and light and truth, on the other, for the
Baconian ·philosophy.
The new institutionalized science of the future, Bacon saw, required a new relation between science and political life.
Throughout
his long and eminent political career he .tried to gain official support
for his projects.
He was ·mu:ch more successful after his death·, as Abra.-
ham Cowley's ode "To the Royal Society" of science, written in the
29t.J.o., Book I, aph. 128.
�-19middle 1600 1 s, indicates.
From these and all long Errors ·of the Way
In which our wandering Pred~c~ssors went,
And like th' old Hebre~s mariy:'o: Years did stray,
· ::i;:n ·oesarts but of small Extent,
Bacon, like Moses, led us forth at last,
The barren Wilderness he past,
Did .on the very Border stand,
Of the bless'd promis'd Land
And .from the Mountains Top of his exalted Wit,
Saw it himself, and shew'd us it.30
Bacon's success, . and that success being taken . for. granted, has made
it more difficult for us to see the problem as he saw it.
The
relation between political society and science and philosophy is
always a delicate one:
for, .he wrote, there , is no form of polity or
society that does not have "some · point of contrariety towards human
knowledge."
And conversel:y, the arts and sciences· are always somewhat
suspedt ·from the point of view of civil society:
For surely there is a great distinction between. civil affairs
and the arts: for the danger from new motion and new light
is not the same. In civil affairs, truly, even a change for
the better is supected as likely to bring on disturbances;
for civil affairs rest on authority, consensus, fame and
opinion, not demonstration. But in the arts and sciences,
like metal mines, there should be a clamor of new operations
. and further progress. 31
· Altha.u gh Bacon wrote extensively on political sub.jects and working
one's way through the labyrinth of his political thought can be a fascinating enterprise, 32 . we must·confine ourselves here to his specifical. ly scientific politics.
A most important part of his treatment of that
3oTHE WOP.KS OF MR. ABRAHAM COWLEY, London, 1721.
cap~ 26, in WORKS, voi. III~ p. 252: and N.O., Book I, .
aph. 90. Cf. Aristotle, POLITICS, Book II, chap. 8; Thomas Aquinas, S.T.,
I-II, Q.97, A. ·2; and Strauss, op. cit., not~ ·S, above, pp. 221-222; . et al.
:3] VALERIUS TERMINUS,
32 See Berns, op. cit., n. 18, above; and Howard B. White, PEACE · AMONG THE
WILLOWS: THE POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF FRANCIS BACONt Nijhof, 1968.
�-20subject is found in one small book, the fable, or scientific -µtopia, .
entitled the NEW ATLANTIS.
But there too Bacon's views are not simply ex-
posed to view, but become accessible only to a certain art of interpretation.
For · as he says in the ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING beginning his
treatment of government:
it is a part of kriowledge secret and retired, in both those
respects in which things are deemed secret: for some things
are secret because they are hard to know, and some because
they are not fit to utter.
And in the expanded Latin version of this book he begins his discussion
of civil or pol;itical science by telling an . old . story:
that many philosophers being met ·together in the presence of
the ambassador of a foreign prince, each endeavoring to give
a sainple of his wisdom, that the ambassador might be able to
make a . report of the wonderful wisdom of Greece; one of them
remained silent ••. the ambassador tur1J.ing to him, said, "What
have you to say for me to report?" To whom he answered, "Tell
your king that you have found a man in Greece who knew how to
hold his tongue ....
Bacon .goes on to speak of an "art", even an "eloquence in silence" on
these matters.
There is also
a
simpler reason for the indirectness of
the political discussion in the NEW ATLANTIS.
If it is the case that
the scientists control politics in the New Atlantis, · Bacon is in effect
asking the great political men of his own times to contribute to the
'founding and support of institutions which were intended eventually to
deprive
~hem,
or men like them., of any real political power.
Bacon had
surely read; but did not need, the advice tendered by Machiavelli, that
if you intend to kill a man and you want his weapons, you should not
say, "Give me your weapons, I want to kill you."
say, "Give me your weapons." 33
3 '.brscoµRSES ••• , Book I, .chap. 44.
It is sufficient to
Cf • .Ro·ssi, op. cit., pp. 109-116.
�'-21-
Baconis NEW ATLANTIS is written in . explicit correction of Plato'sCRIT!.
AS;_ both works are formally incomplete. 34 The old Atlantis in the CRITIAS, a. luxurious.; technol_ogical, or mathematically organized, society
•was destroyed by earthquakes; the New Atlantis goes back as _
far, but
thanks to .its science does not fall prey to· cycles of natural catastrophe as do all societies in Plauo's account.
-as Zeus is about to speak; what formally
The CRITIAS ends just
cor~esporids
to Zeus's speech
is the completed speech of· the ·Father from Salomon's House, the great
new scientific institute of the future, '"the noblest foundation ••• that
ever was upon the e?rrth; and the lanthorn I or as elsewhere, "the
very eye"_/ of this kingdom."
The speech is a description of Salomon's
House, - or as they also call it, the College of the Six Days Works~
The
soc_iety of Bensalem, for so ;it is called ?5 in the language of the na....,
tives, enjoys prosperity, all kinds of health~producing fruits and
foods, good health and medicines surpassing anything in Europe; and
most natural, most chaste and most pious customs.
Salomon's House, it
seems, is · the source of all their greatest blessings.
Science is de- ·
voted to the twin aims of findi_ g out the true nature e>f things, to
n
the_ ·greater glory of God, and the relief and prospering of .man's .estate.
The island is Christian, havi_ng received both Old and· New Testaments
through a special revelation, which was confirmed by a witnessing Father
from Salomon's.House as a true miracle.
But Jews, _Persians, Arabs, Chal...;
deans and Indians· also live there and are. left to their own·· religions,
and they··.too love and respect the ways of the nation of Bensalem~ 6
34cf. White, op. cit., note 32, above, the chaps. entitled, "Of Island
. Utopias II I esp-:-for the comparison with the TEl1PEST I and "The Old and the
New Atlantis"; see al.so White's chap.·, "Francis Bacon" in HISTORY OF POLITICAL PHIL.OSOPHY, eds. Leo Strauss and Jos~ph Cropsey, Rand McNally, 1972.
35Is it in contrast to Hierusalem, (the way Jerusalem is . spelled in the
NEW ATLANTIS) the good-peace in contrast to the holy-peace (from the
Greek hieros)?
3 6.:rhese things.are said explicitly only of the Jews.
�-22It is a Jew with the interesting name of Joabin who arranges the meeting
of Bacon's narrator with the Father from Salomon •'s Hous·e . · Salomon's House
itself was founded by Solamona, .the . great law-giver of Bensalem, who
reigned. about · 300 ·~B.C.
Although the founding of Salomon's House de-
pends upon the political act of a great king, and Bensalem is called a
· king;dom still, by the time Salomon's House . has come into its own the
power of the king is scarcely visible.
Orders are given to the visi-
)
tor~
not in the name of the king, but in the name of the "state".
When
I
the Father from Salomon's House makes his procession .into the.city, the
first such visit .i,n twelve years, his chariot, described in detail, reminds one of the Ark of the Covenant in the Old Testament.
He, as Je-
sus is often characterized, "had an aspect as if he pitied men."
i
Fif-
.
ty attendants of his own precede his chariot, and two others directly
pr~:cedi.ng
hook.
bear, one a cross, the other a pastoral staff like ·a sheep-
All political and other officials walk behind his chariot . . "He
held up his hand as he went, as blessing the people, · but in silence."
In some of the factories of Salomon's fiouse, the Father reports in a
private meeting with the narrator, they have all kinds of ordnance and
instruments of war, flying.machines of a sort and submarines.
There
are thirty-six Fellows of the College, under them are novices and apprentices and "a great number of servants and attendants, men and women."
The Fellows decide which of their inventions and experienqes should be
published and which not.
They "take all an oath of secrecy, for the
.•
concealing of those which we think fit to keep secret:
tho.u gh some of
those we do' reveal sometimes to the state, and some not."
What all this. indicates is that the ultimate rule both of the
state arid religion, ("which has most power over men's minds 1137 ), is
in the hands of the Fellows of
Salo~on's
House, the philosopher-scien-
tists.
Bacon envisaged a vast expansion of 'human power . as a consequence
of science's conquest of nature.
He evidently thought that these powers,
powers for evil as well as for good, were not. to be put into the hands
37
N.O., Book I, aph. 89.
�-23.;..
of mere st.a tesmen; control · was to be kept in the hands of those who
would be expected to comprehend them, the most powerful and highly
trained philosophic and scientific minds.
While the arrangement of : a
marriage between .science and society clearly forecast a new era bf mutual interest and concern between the parties, rule by the wise was
regarded as the condition for success.
The leaders . of science apparent_.
ly . were also meant to become masters of statecraft, of human philosophy,
to guarantee that the newly discovered powers would fall into hands
fit to use them well.
In aphorisms 127 and 80 of Book One of the .
NOVUM ORGANUM Bacon makes clear that he is speaking about perfe_ ting
c
not only natural philosophy in .the narrow sense, but the sciences of
·1
logic, ethics and politics as well; they were all to be nourished by,
and brought to perfection alo_ g with, natural philosophy.
n
The new
38
science, in its inception, was meant to be a universal science.
The failure to develop the expected human philosophy would seem to
be the most conspicuous failure of Baconian philosophy. · Can any philosophy or science which does not take the orientation of pre-scientific and
cognition seriously ever be adequate for understanding human things?3 9
pre~philosophic
38 More than 350 years after the publication of the NOVUM ORGANUM Maxwell's
and Rutherford's successor, the Cavendish Professor of Physics writes,
.,Phy~ics, indeed, should recognise that it is not in any useful sense the
fundamental science, since that peculiarity which makes it fundamental, the
fact that its laws are, we believe, applicable in principle to the systems
which other sciences investigate, is achieved by adopting an attitude of exclusive . concentration on cer.t ain approved aspects of the phenomena, such as
prevents the development of a scheme by which principle can be translated
into practice." Indeed, the claim of fundamental physics that it is "seeking out the Basic Truth of the Universe" is found to be ,;slightly pretentious". See _
A.B. Pippard, F.-R.S., "Reconciling Physics with Reality," an
Inaugural Lecture, Cambridge University Press, 1972, pp. 35 and 37.
. Old questions seem to be opening again. Is the very quest for a fundamental sdience now even more than "slightly pretentious"? (Cf. F. Nietzsche,
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL, aph. 205.) Or is the way opening for new, and, perhaps, even old contenders?
:39 cf. Leo Strauss, op. cit., note 5, above, pp.23-25, and "An Epilogue"
in LIBERALISM ANCIENT AND MODERN, Basic Books, 1968.
�-24Howeve~
this may be, Baconian science wins the support of society
and the people at large by catering to their fe9-rS and desires_, as
they understand those desires, that is, by providing them with protection _ gainst injury from man and especially from nature, with prosa
-
perity, with .comforts and new pleasures and especially with stronger
and healthfor bodies.
The latent, and riot always · latent, antagonism
between science and philosophy and society is not to be bridged -by
mere words, by the flimsy art of the GORGIAS, by the consolations of
philosophy, by exhortations to virtue, but rather by the .tangible comforts of Baconian charity. · Consolation for and bowing to the ravages
of fortune are not as good as conquering fortune; for in trut?~ Bacon
says, fortune is a name for somethi_ g whic_ does not exist, just · as
n
h
the theoretical presupposition of the notion of fortune, variable and
unstable matter, does not exist.
The ancients produced theoretical ex- ·
cuses, blaming their ·f ailure to . radically improve the estate of man,
on the nature of things, rather than on their own _gnorance, especiali
.
40.
ly their ignorance of the forms, or fixed laws governing all matter. ·
The -depreciation of nature, at least of given nature, or nature
in its ordinary course, implicit in the idea of the conquest of nature
is a, or the, corrnnon theme of mbdern phiiosophy.
In Kant and Hegel
it cUlm.inates in a thorough disqualification of nature for
..
sion of ethical and political standard$.
Or, . in
oth~r
the . provi~
words, Kant and
Hegel found the nature uncovered by modern science, the natu+e which
Bacon said is to be obeyed, altogether incapable' of supplying man with
ethical .and political standards.
As a consequence, for Kant and Hegel
moral and political principles ' must be traced to some other non-natural
sources: . freedom, pure practical reason, spirit and history.
Some-
thing which anticipates, or corresponds to; the later development
occurs also in Bacon, as can be seen by considering the following
40cf. Bacon's use of the ambiguity of the word fortune in his "architecture of fortune", (ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING, Book II), and his attack on
the classical subordination of art to nature, its breeding "a premature
despair in htunan enterprises." WORKS, vol.. IV, pp·. 294-95. Cf. also N.O.,
Book I, aphs~ 75 and 78.
�-2.5-
difficulty.
Men, like lions and oaks, are not fundamental, but rather
compounded forms of nature in its ordinary course.
But one of these
ordinary, compounded forms is to become the conqueror and master of all
_the forms of nature in its ordinary
course~
There must be something
speci_ l, or fundamental about this one of those non-fundamental forms,
a
man.
B~con'
s division of all
philosophy (apart from natural theology)
into natural and human is a kind of tacit ackri.owle_ gement, ·insufficient
d
though · it may be, of the new special status of man in hfs philosophy.
Yet, unlike Kant and Hegel, Bacon .still looked to nature and its funda. mental laws in order to di_ cern the principles of moral:i,ty. 41
s
Sometimes . he claimed to share the ethical goals of the ancient
philosophers, adding only the teaching they neglected about how to · attain those goals; but that position is not long maintained.
The dis-
courses of the ancients on ·morals and politics, he said,, are beautiful
a.pd lofty, like "the stars, which give little light because they are
so high." 42 Bacon, following Machiavelli (THE PRINCE, chapter 15),
lowered his goals in order to guarantee actualization.
to understand the so-called conquest of fortune.
~hat
This is one way
A Baconian might reply
goals which can almost never be put into practice cannot be re-
garded as serious practical goals.
In his widely read ADVANCEMENT
OF LEARNING Bacon divides ·the "Platform of the Good" into two basic divisions, Individual or Self Good; which concerns its.e lf with ·virtue, and
the Good of Communion, or Social Good, which concerns itself with duty.
Individual Good is subdivided into Passive Good and Active Good, and
Passive Good is subdivided finally into Conservative Good and Perfec_
tive Good.
The first division -is . explained as a.rl appetite imprinted in
· everything toward a twofold nature of good, the one as everythi_ g is a
n
totality in itself, the other as it is a part of another body:
Iron
moves toward the lodestone in individual sympathy, but if it exceeds a
41 Cf. also DE AUGMENTIS. ~ • , Book IV I chap. 1.
42 ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING . Book II.
1
�-26-
certain quantity, like a good patriot, it moves to .the earth, the country .of its connaturals.
The conservation of the more general form, the
good of communion, controls all, the . lesser inclinations, as is emphasized by the Christian Faith, which more than any other sect or philo. sophy exalted the good of communion and depressed the private or particular good.
"All other· excellences
-·.t y adni.i tteth no excess. "
are subject to excess: only chari-
This also decides the question concerning
.
.
whether the contemplative or the active life is to be preferred, against
i
Aristotle.
· te~plative
For all the reasons he brings forth in favor of the
life are private.
con~
As far as the private pleasure and digni-
ty of a man's self is concerned, Aristotle is right.
;But men must know that in thi·s theater of man's life it is
reserved only for God and angels to be lookers on ••• for
contemplation which should be finished in itself, without
casting beams upon society, assuredly divinity knoweth it
not.
In
his much less reserved and unpublished, . but privately circulated,
VALERIUS TERMINUS, these same divisions of good are discusf;)ed with no·
admixture of Christian theology or classical terminology, as appetites,
desires, and motions operating throughout material
nature~
He begins
t.his discussion with the remark, that uif the rnor.a l philosophers that
·have spent_ such an infinite quantity of debate touching Good, . and the
highest good, had cast their eye abroad upon nature," to see the "quaternion of g.ood" which he presents as laws _ motion, then they might
of
have"saved and abridged much of their long and wandering discourses of
pleasure, virtue, duty and religion."
In the expanded version of the
ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING,. the DE . AUGMENT IS~ •.• , . the section oil physics,
.
in the discussion of simple or elementary motions, these same motions
with still different names and no obvious connection to morality show
up in the central place·s .
sics.
gre~t
mod~rn
Morality, it seems, is to be reduced to phy-
It is in Bacon's tha.ight rather than Hobbes's that those two
powers of modern thought, Machiavellian political .morality. and
natural science, are first bro_ ght t _ gether. · The · Machiavellian
u
o
�-26a-
.Platform or Exemplar of the Good
*
Social, or Good
of Communion
Duty .
Indiv~dual or Self Good -- Virtue
Passive .Good
Perfective Gocid
Conservative Good
----~------
----------------
-------------~-
Quaternion of Good
----------------- ----------**
. Motion
of enjoying.
or fruition
of approach _
or assumption
of affecting
or operation
of consenting
or proportion
*. From the AD\ ANCEMENT OF LEARNING, 1605: and the DE AUGMENTIS
SCIENTARiuM, j 323
**
From the VALERIUSTERMINUS, est. 1603.
�-27principles, however modified, are found by Bacon to be operative not
only in human nature, but throughout nature as a whole.
But let us try to understand how this works out in hUI!lan terms by
tryi_ g to see what the bes;t, or h:i,ghest, way of life would be for Ban
con. The Active Good of extending and mqltiplying oneself, in conformity with the Social or Communal Good takes precedence over the
fective Good and the Preservative Good, that is, pleasure.
Per~
Internal
perfection, contrary to Plato and Aristotle, is secondarY: to acting ·
upon and relating to others in and for society.
Foreign policy, as
it were, takes precedence over domestic policy.
In his most popu-
lar book, the ESSAYS, · (No. 55) Bacon assigns the highest place of
honor. to found"Srs of empires, states and cormnonwealtlis, like Romulus,
Cyrus, Caesai:_ : Ottoman and Ismael.
,
In the NOVUM ORGANUM, however,
in disti,n guishi_ g three grades .o f ambition, the highest political ambi-:
n
tion is assigned the second place.
The first place goes to him who
would "endeavor to instaurate and extend the power and empire of the
human race itself over the un_v_ rse of things" thro_ gh the sciences .
i e
u
and the arts.
"And yetr to speak the whole truth," Bacon says later
in the same aphorism . " ••• the very beholding of the l _ght is itself
i
a more excellent and fairer thi_ g than its many uses: so surely the
n
very contemplation of things as they are without superstition or imposture, error or confusion, is in itself more worthy than all the
fruits of inventions."
And at the end of the First 'Book of the
ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING, .
We see then how ~ar the monuments of wit and .learning are
more durable than the monuments of power, or of the hands
·••• the images of men's wits and knowledges remain in books,
exempted from the Wrong of time and capable of perpetual
.renovation. Neither are they fitly to be called images,
because they generate still and cast their seeds in the
minds of others, provoking and causing infinite actic:ms and
opinions in succeeding ages •••• letters ••• -as ships pass
through the _vast seas of time, and make ages so distant
to participate of the wisdom, illmninations, and . inventions, the one of the other •••
Apparently E lcon did conceive of contemplation .as the highest
perfection
o
man, but a kind of politic contemplation, contemplatidn
�-28-
of the most far-seei_ g pr'a ctice, or actiqri,. the theory which disclos.es
n
knowl€;dge of "all possible operations", the theory productive of the
most lo_ g range practice.
n
He evidently envisaged a .complete coincidence
of private and social good on the .highest level.
.
Ambition in the highI
.
est sense, the ambition of the founder of the empire of man over nature,
whq is that founder because he is the first discoverer of the cosmological truth, becomes at the same time the performance of the highest
of iduties.
The ambition of the founder of the greatest of all em-
pires is the highest form of the active or extensive good, it is
· realized by means of the highest perfective good, contemplation.
Since
i~
is aimed at securing the maximum of relief_
,·
for mankind as a whole, it
~lso
constitutes the highest of
as 'Bacon defined duty, the action of
an
of society.
and power
~i1
duties,
individual with regard to the
.
well~being
cornfo~t
.
In the ver_y last entry of his natural history
it is difficult not to think that Bacon had himself in mind~
The delight which men have in popularity, fame, honour,
Submission and subjection of other men's minds, wills,
or affections (al though these thi_ gs may be desired for
n
other ends), seemeth to be a thing in itself, without contemplation of consequence, grateful.and agreeable to the
nature of man. This thing (surely) is not without some signification, as if all spirits and souls of men came forth
out of one divine limbus; else why should men be so much affected with that which others think or say? T~e best temper
of minds desireth good name and true honour: the lighter, pop~
ularity and applause.: the more depraved, subjection and tyranny; as is seen in great conquerors and troublers of the world;
and yetmore in arch-heretics; for .the introducing of new
doctrines is likewisean affection of tyranny .over the understandings and beliefs of men.
As this quote indicates, the lowest of Bacon's classes o:t: good, the
conservative good, or. good of enjoyment, will also be fulfilled for the
founder of the empire of man over nature, through the pur_e delight
men have in fame, honor and the subjection of other men's minds.
The "
Father from Salomon Is House "had an aspect as if he pi tied men."
As. Bacon says elsewhere:
�-29-
There is implanted in man by nature itself a noble and
excellent spirit of compassion, that extends itself
even to the brutes which by the divine ordinance are
subject to his command. This compassion, therefore, has a
certain analogy with that of a prince towards . his sub~
jects. Moreover it is most true; that the more4 ~orthy a
soul is, the more objects of com:i;>assion it has •.·
The true temper of Baconian charity, of the Baconian
scientist~
evi-
derttly must combine the spirit of compassion with the spirit of domi.:..
nation.
A synthesis of these qualities along with Herculean, Prome. 44
thean courage
would seem to constitute . something like the grand pas-
~ion of generosity discussed by besc~rte~ in . hi~ PASSIONS OF THE SOUL •
. Both Bacon. and Descartes believed that the vast expansion of
.
powers to be wro.u ght by the new science would have to be matched by
corJl=espondinglY: great resources of courage in .the souls of those men
·who were to release and administer those · powers.
But moderation ·, the
ancients tell Us, is the core of almost all the virtues.
without moderation is rashness.
And courage
The beneficence of the project for
the conquest of nature has not measured up to Bacon's expectations
for · it.
Was it reasonable to think tha.t it woiild?
St. John's College,
Annapolis
43
wom<s, vol. I, p. 758.
.
44
See Bacon's WISDOM OF THE ANCIENTS, No. - 26.
�
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Berns, Laurence, 1928-
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Francis Bacon and the conquest of nature
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1975-04-25
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Typescript of a lecture delivered on April 25, 1975 by Laurence Berns as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
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Bacon, Francis, 1561-1626
Philosophy, Modern
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Friday night lecture
Tutors
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