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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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01:25:27
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Francis Bacon and the Conquest of Nature
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on April 25, 1975, by Laurence Berns as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
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Berns, Laurence, 1928-
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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1975-04-25
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sound
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LEC_Berns_Laurence_1975-04-25_ac
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<a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/1091" title="Typescript">Typescript</a>
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Bacon, Francis, 1561-1626
Philosophy, Modern
Friday night lecture
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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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01:08:45
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Bach's rhetoric and the translation of his texts: with examples taken mainly from the <em>Passion According to St. John</em>
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on May 02, 1975 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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1975-05-02
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lec Ruhm von Oppen 1975-05-02
Friday night lecture
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Aristotle's Definition of Motion
by Joe Sachs
Aristotle defines motion, by which he means change
of any kind, as the actuality of a potentiality as such
(or as movable, or as a potentiality-Physics 20la 10-11,
27-29, b4-5.) The definition is a conjunction of two terms
which normally contradict each other, along with, in
Greek, a qualifying clause which seems to make the contradiction inescapable. Yet St. Thomas Aquinas called it
the only possible way to define motion by what is prior to
and better known than motion. At the opposite extreme is
the young Descartes, who in the first book he wmte
announced that while everyone knows what motion is,
no one understands Aristotle's definition of it. According
to Descartes, "motion . . . is nothing more than the action by which any body passes from one place to another"
(Principles II, 24). The use of the word "passes" makes
this definition an obvious circle; Descartes might just as
well have called motion the action by which a thing moves.
But the important part of Descartes' definition is the
words "nothing more than," by which he asserts that
motion is susceptible of no definition which is not circular, as one might say "the color red is just the color red,"
to mean that the term is not reducible to some modification of . a wave, or analyzable in any other way. There
must be ultimate terms of discourse, or there would be
no definitions, and indeed no thought. The point is not
that one cannot construct a non-circular definition of such
a term, one claimed to be properly irreducible, but that
one ought not to do so. The true atoms of discourse are
those things which can be explained only by means of
things less known than themselves. If motion is such an
ultimate term, then to define it by means of anything
but synonyms is willfully to choose to dwell in a realm of
darkness, at the sacrifice of the understanding which is
naturally ours in the form of "good sense" or ordinary
common sense.
Descartes' treatment of motion is explicitly anti-
12
Aristotelian and his definition of motion is deliberately
circular. The Cartesian physics is rooted in a disagreement
with Aristotle about what the best-known things are, and
about where thought should take its beginnings. There is,
however, a long tradition of interpretation and translation
of Aristotle's definition of motion, beginning at least five
hundred years before Descartes and dominating discussions
of Aristotle today, which seeks to have things both ways.
An unusually clear instance of this attitude is found in
the following sentence from a medieval Arabic commentary: "Motion is a first entelechy of that which is in
potentiality, insofar as it is in potentiality, and if you prefer you may say that it is a transition from potentiality to
aotuali.ty ." You will recognize the first of these two statemen ts presented as equivalent as a translation of Aristotle's
definition, and the second as a circular definition of the
same type as that of Descartes. Motion is an entelechy;
motion is a transition. The strangeness of the word
"entelechy" masks the contradiction between these two
claims. We must achieve an understanding of Aristotle's
word entelecheia, the heart of his definition of motion, in
order to see that what it says cannot be said just as well by
such a word as "transition."
The word entelecheia was invented by Aristotle, but
never defined by him. It is at the heart not only of his
definition of motion, but of all his thought. Its meaning
is the most knowable in itself of all possible objects of
the intellect. There is no starting point from which we
can descend to put together the elements of its meaning.
We can come to an understanding of entelecheia only by
an ascent from what is intrinsically less knowable than it,
indeed knowable only through it, but more known because more familiar to us. We have a number of resources
by which to begin such an ascent, drawing upon the
linguistic elements out of which Aristotle constructed the
word, and upon the fact that he uses the word energeia as
�January, 1976
a synonym, or all but a synonym, for entelecheia.
The root of energeia is ergon-deed, work, or act-from
which comes the adjective energon used in ordinary
speech to mean active, busy, or at work. Energeia is formed
by the addition of a noun ending to the adjective energon;
we might construct the word at-work-ness from AngloSaxon roots to translate energeia into English, or use the
more euphonius periphrastic expression, being-at-work. If
we are careful to remember how we got there, we could
alternatively use Latin roots to make the word "actuality"
to translate energeia. The problem with this alternative is
that the word "actuality" already belongs to the English
language, and has a life of its own which seems to be at
variance with the simple sense of being active. By the
actuality of a thing, we mean not its being-in-action but
its being what it is. For example, I recently saw a picture
of a fish \vith an effective means of camouflage: it looks
like a rock, but it is actually a fish. I don't seem to be
talking about any activity when I attribute an actuality to
that thing, completely at rest at the bottom of the ocean.
But according to Aristotle, to be something always means
to be at work in a certain wav. In the case of the fish at
rest, its actualitv is the activity of metabolism, the work
by which it is constantly transforming material from its
environment into parts of itself and losing material from
itself into its environment, the activity by which the fish
maintains itself as a fish and as just the fish it is, and
which ceases only when the fish ceases to be. Any static
state which has any determinate character can only exist
as the outcome of a continuous expenditure of effort,
maintaining the state as it is. Thus even the rock, at rest
next to the fish, is in activity: to be a rock is to strain to
be at the center of the universe, and thus to be in motion
unless constrained otherwise, as the rock in our example
is constrained by the large quantity of earth already
gathered around the center of the universe. A rock at rest
at the center is at work maintaining its place, against the
counter-tendency of all the earth to displace it. The center of the universe is determined only by the common
innate activity of rocks and other kinds of earth. Nothing
is which is not somehow in action, maintaining itself
either as the whole it is or as a part of some whole. A rock
is inorganic only when regarded in isolation from the uni-
verse as a whole, which is an organized whole, just as
blood considered by itself could not be called alive, yet
is onlv blood insofar as it contributes to the maintenance
of some organized bodv. No existing rock can fail to contribute to the hierarchical organization of the universe; I
can therefore call any existing rock an actual rock.
Energeia, then, always means the being-at-work of some
definite, specific something; the rock cannot undergo
metabolism, and once the fish does no more than fall to
earth and remain there it is no longer a fish. The material
and organization of a thing determine a specific capacity
or potentiality for activity, with respect to which the corresponding activity has the character of an end. Aristotle
says "the act is an end and the being-at-work is the act,
and since energeia is named from the ergon it also extends
to the being-at-an-end ( entelecheia)" (Metaphysics, 1050a,
21-23). The word entelecheia has a structure parallel to
that of energeia. From the root word telos, meaning end,
comes the adjective enteles, used in ordinary speech to
mean complete, perfect, or full-grown. But while energeia,
being-at-work, is made from the adjective meaning at work
and a noun ending, entelecheia is made from the adjective
meaning complete and the verb exein. Thus if we translate entclecheia as "completeness" or "perfection," the
contribution the meaning of exein makes to the term is
not evident. I would suggest that Aristotle uses exein for
two reasons, which lead to the same conclusion: First,
one of the common meanings of exein is "to be" in the
sense of to remain, to stay, or to keep in some condition
specified by a preceding adverb, as in the idioms kalos
exei, "things are going well," or kakos exei, "things are
going badly." It means "to be" in the sense of to continue
to be. This is only one of several possible meanings of
exein, but there is a second fact which makes it likelv
that it is the meaning \Vhich would strike the ear of
Greek-speaking person of Aristotle's time. There was then
in ordinary use the word endelecheia, differing from
Aristotle's word enteiecheia only by a delta in place of
the tau. Endelecheia means continuity or persistence. As
one would expect, there was a good deal of confusion in
ancient times between the invented and undefined term
entelecheia and the familiar word endelecheia. The use
of the pun for the serious philosophic purpose of saying
a
13
�The College
at once two things for whose union the language has no
word was a frequent literary device of Aristotle's teacher
Plato. In this striking instance, Aristotle seems to have
imitated the playful style of his teacher in constructing
the most important term in his technical vocabulary. The
addition of exein to enteles, through the joint action of
the meaning of the suffix and the sound of the whole,
superimposes upon the sense of "completeness" that of
continuity. Entelecheia means continuing in a state of
completeness, or being at an end which is of such a nature
that it is only possible to be there by means of the continual expenditure of the effort required to stay there.
Just as energeia extends to entelecheia because it is the
activity which makes a thing what it is, entelecheia extends to energeia because it is the end or perfection which
has being only in, through, and during activity. For the
remainder of this talk, I shall use the word "actuality"
to translate both energeia and entelecheia, and by actuality
I shall mean just that area of overlap between being-atwork and being-at-an-end which expresses what it means
to be something determinate. The words energeia and
entelecheia have very different meanings, but function
as synonyms because the world is such that things have
identities, belong ,to species, aot for ends, and form material into enduring organized wholes. The word actuality
as thus used is verv close in meaning to the word life, with
the exception that it. is broader in meaning, carrying no
necessary implication of mortality.
We embarked on this quest for the meaning of entelecheia in order to decide whether the phrase "transition to
actuality" could ever properly render it. The answer is
now obviously "no." An actuality is something ongoing,
but only the ongoing activity of maintaining a state of
completeness or perfection already reached; the transition
into such a state always lacks and progressively approaches
the perfected character which an actuality always has. A
dog is not a puppy: the one is, among other things, capable of generating puppies and giving protection, while
the other is incapable of generation and in need of protection. We might have trouble deciding exactly when
the puppy has ceased to be a puppy and become a dogcrt the age of one year, for example, it will probably be
fully grown and capable of reproducing, but still awkward
1
1
14
in its movements and puppyish in its attitudes-but in any
respect in which it has become a dog it has ceased to be
a puppy.
But om concern was to understand what motion is,
and it is obviously the puppy which is in motion, since it
is growing toward maturity, while the dog is not in motion
in that respect, since its activity has ceased to produce
change and become wholly directed toward self-maintenance. If the same thing cannot be in the same respect
both an actuality and a transition to actuality, it is clearly
the transition that motion is and the actuality that it isn't.
Descartes is right and Aristotle is wrong. Of course it is
possible that Aristotle meant what Descartes said, but
simply used the wrong word, that he called motion an
entelecheia three times, at the beginning, middle, and end
of his explanation of what motion is, when he really meant
not entelecheia but the transition or passage to entelecheia.
This suggestion would be laughable if it were not what
almost everyone who addresses the question today believes. Sir David Ross, certainly the most massively qualified authoritv on Aristotle of those who have lived in
our century ;nd written in our language, the man who
supervised the Oxford University Press's forty-five year
project of translating all the works of Aristotle into English, in a commentanr on Aristotle's definition of motion,
writes: "entelecheia ·must here mean 'actualization,' not
'actuality'; it is the passage to actuality that is kinesis"
(Physics, text with commentary, London, 1936, p. 359).
In another book, his commentary on the Metaphysics,
Ross makes it clear that he regards the meaning entelecheia has in every use Aristotle makes of it everywhere
but in the definition of motion as being not only other
than but incompatible with the meaning "actualization."
In view of that fact, Ross' decision that "entelecheia must
here mean 'actualization' n is a desperate one, indicating
a despair of understanding Aristotle out of his own mouth.
It is not translation or interpretation but plastic surgery.
Ross' full account of motion as actualization (Aristotle,
New York, 1966, pp. 81-82) cites no passages from Aristotle, and no authorities, but patiently explains that motion
is motion and cannot, therefore, be an actuality. There are
authorities he could have cited, including Moses Maimonides, the twelfth century Jewish philosopher who sought to
�January, 1976
reconcile Aristotle's philosophy with the Old Testament and
Talmud, and who defined motion as "the transition from
potentiality to actuality," and the most famous Aristotelian
commentator of all time, Averroes, the twelfth century
Spanish Moslem thinker, who called motion a passage
from non-being to actuality and complete reality. In each
case the circular definition is chosen in preference to the
one which seems laden with contradictions. A circular
statement, to the extent that it is circular, is at least not
false, and can as a whole have some content: Descartes'
definition amounts to saying "whatever motion is, it is
possible only with respect to place," and that of Averroes,
Maimonides, and Ross amounts to saying "whatever motion is, it results always in an actuality." An accurate
rendering of Aristotle's definition would amount to saying
(a) that motion is rest, and (b) that a potentiality, which
must be, at a minimum, a privation of actuality, is at the
same time that actuality of which it is the lack. There has
been one major commentator ·on Aristotle who was prepared to take seriously and to make sense of both these
claims.
St. Thomas Aquinas, in his interpretation of Aristotle's
definition of motion, (Commentary on Aristotle's Physics,
London, 1963, pp. 136-137), observes two principles: ( 1)
that Aristotle meant what he wrote, and (2) that what
Aristotle wrote is worth the effort of understanding. Writing a century after Maimonides and Averroes, Thomas
disposes of their approach to defining motion with few
words: it is not Aristotle's definition and it is an error. A
passage,, a transition, an actualization, an actualizing, or
any of the more complex substantives to which translators have resorted which incorporate in some more or
less disguised form some progressive sense united to the
meaning of actuality, all have in common that they denote a kind of motion. It motion can be defined, then
to rest content with explaining motion as a kind of motion is certainly to err; even if one is to reject Aristotle's
definition on fundamental philosophical grounds, as Descartes was to do, the first step must be to see what it
means. And Thomas explains clearly and simply a sense
in which Aristotle's definition is both free of contradiction and genuinely a definition of motion. One must
simply see that the growing puppy is a dog, that the half-
formed lump of bronze on which the sculptor is working
is a statue of Hermes, that the tepid water on the fire is
hot; what it means to say that the puppy is growing, the
bronze is being worked, or the water is being heated, is
that each is not just the complex of characteristics it
possesses right now; in each case, something that the thing
is not yet, already belongs to it as that toward which it
is, right now, ordered. To say that something is in motion
is just to say that it is both what it is already and something else that it isn't yet. What else do we mean by saying that the puppy is growing, rather than remaining
what it is, that the bronze under the sculptor's hand is
in a different condition from the identically shaped lump
of bronze he has discarded, or that the water is not just
tepid but being heated? Motion is the mode in which
the future belongs to the present, is the present absence
of just those particular absent things which are about to be.
Thomas discusses in detail the example of the water
being heated. Assume it to have started cold, and to
have been heated so far to room temperature. The heat
it now has, which has replaced the potentiality it previously had to be just that hot, belongs to it in actuality.
The capacity it has to be still hotter belongs to it in
potentiality. To the extent that it is actually hot it has
been moved; to the extent that it is not yet as hot as it
is going to be, it is not yet moved. The motion is just
the joint presence of potentiality and actuality with respect to same thing, in this case heat. A number of things
need to be noted here.
In Thomas' version of Aristotle's definition one can
see the alternative to Descartes' approach to physics. Since
Descartes regards motion as ultimate and given, his
physics will give no account of motion itself, but describe
the transient static configurations through which the moving things pass. By Thomas' account, motion is not ultimate but is a consequence of the way in which present
states of things are ordered toward other actualities which
do not belong to them. One could build on such an account a physics of forces, that is of those directed potentialities which cause a thing to move, to pass over from
the actuality it possesses to another which it lacks but to
which it is ordered. Motion will thus not have to be
understood as the mysterious departure of things from
15
�The College
rest, which alone can be described, but as the outcome
of the action upon one another of divergent and conflicting innate tendencies of things. Rest will be the anomaly,
since things will be understood as so constituted by nature as to pass over of themselves into certain states of
activity, but states of rest will be explainable as dynamic
states of balance among things with opposed tendencies.
Leibniz, who criticized Descartes' physics and invented a
science of dynamics, explicitly acknowledged his debt to
Aristotle (see, e.g., Specimen Dynamicum), whose doctrine of entelecheia he regarded himself as restoring in a
modified form. From Leibniz we derive our current notions of potential and kinetic energy, whose very names,
pointing to the actuality which is potential and the
actuality which is motion, preserve the Thomistic resolutions of the two paradoxes in Aristotle's definition of
motion.
But though the modern science of dynamics can be
seen in germ in St. Thomas' discussion of motion, it can
be seen also to reveal difficulties in Thomas' conclusions.
According to Thomas, actuality and potentiality do not
exclude one another but co-exist as motion. To the extent that an actuality is also a potentiality it is a motion,
and to the extent that an actuality is a motion it is a potentiality. The two seeming contradictions cancel each
other in the dynamic actualiity of the present state which
is determined by its own future. But are not potential
and kinetic energy two different things? The rock which I
hold six feet above the ground has been actually moved
identically to the rock which I have thrown six feet above
the ground, and at .t hat distance each strains identically
to fall to earth; but the one is falling and the other isn't.
How can the description which is common to both, when
one is moving and the other is at rest, be an account of
what motion is? It seems that everything which Thomas
says about the tepid water which is being heated can be
said also of the tepid water which has been removed from
the fire. Each is a coincidence of a certain actuality of
heat with a further potentiality to the same heat. What
does it mean to say that the water on the fire has, right
now, an order to further heat which the water off the fire
lacks? If we say that the fire is acting on the one and not
on the other in such a way as to disturb its present state,
16
we have begged the question and returned to the position
of presupposing motion to explain motion. Thomas' account of Aristotle's definition of motion, though immeasurably superior to that of Sir David Ross as interpretation,
and far more sophisticated as an approach to and specification of the conditions an account of motion would have
to meet, seems ultimately subject to the same circularity.
Maimonides, Averroes, and Ross fail to say how motion
differs from rest. Thomas fails to say how any given motion differs from a corresponding state of balanced tension,
or of strain and conshaint.
The strength of Thomas' in terpreta ti on of the definition of motion comes from his taking every word seriously. When Ross discusses Aristotle's definition, he gives
no indication of whv the he toiouton, or "insofar as it is
such," clause should have been included. By Thomas'
account, motion is the actuality of any potentiality which
is nevertheless still a potentiality. It is the actuality which
has not cancelled its corresponding potentiality but exists
along with it. Motion then is the actuality of any potentiality, insofar as it is still a potentiality. This is the
formula which applies equally well to the dynamic state
of rest and the dynamic state of motion. We shall try to
advance our understanding by being still more careful
about the meaning of the pronoun he.
Thomas' account of the meaning of Aristotle's definition forces him to construe the grammar of the definition
in such a way that the clause introduced by the dative
singular feminine relative pronoun he has as its antecedent,
in two cases, the neuter participle tou ontos, and in the
third, the neuter substantive adjective tou dunatou. It is
true that this particular feminine relative pronoun often
had an adverbial sense to which its gender was irrelevant,
but in the three statements of the definition of motion
there is no verb but estin. If the clause is understood
adverbially, then, the sentence must mean something
like: if motion is a potentiality, it is the actuality of a
potentiality. Whatever that might mean, it could at any
rate not be a definition of motion. Thus the clause must
be understood adjectivally, and Thomas must make the
relative pronoun dependent upon a word with which it
does not agree in gender. He makes the sentence say that
motion is the actuality of the potentiality in which there
�January, 1976
is yet potentiality. Reading the pronoun as dependent
upon the feminine noun entelecheia with which it does
agree, \Ve find the sentence saying that motion is the
actuality as which it is a potentiality of the potentiality,
or the actuality as a potentiality of the potentiality.
This reading of ,t he definition implies that potentialities exist in two ways, that it is possible to be a potentiality,
yet not be an actual potentiality. I said at the beginning
of this talk that Aristotle's definition of motion was made
by putting together two terms, actuality and potentiality,
which normally contradict each other. Thomas resolved
the contradiction by arguing that in every motion actuality
and potentiality are mixed or blended, that ;the condition
of becoming-hot of the water is just the simultaneous
presence in the same water of some actuality of heat and
some remaining potentiality of heat. I also said earlier
that there was a qualifying clause in Aristotle's definition
which seemed to intensify, rather than relieve, the contradiction. I was referring to the he toiouton, or he
kineton, or he dunaton, which appears in each version of
the definition, and which, being as I have claimed grammatically dependent on entelecheia, signifies something
the very actuality of which is potentiality. The Thomistic
blend of actuality and potentiality has the characteristic
that, to the extent that it is actual it is not potential and
to the extent that it is potential it is not actual; the
hotter the water is, the less is it potentially hot, and the
cooler it is, the less is it actually, the more potentially, hot.
The most serious defect in Saint Thomas' interpretation of Aristotle's definition is that, like Ross' interpretation, it broadens, dilutes, cheapens, and trivializes the
meaning of the word entelecheia. An immediate implication of the interpretations of both Thomas and Ross is
that whatever happens to be the case right now is an
entelecheia, as though being 3't 70 degrees Fahrenheit were
an end determined by the nature of water, or as though
something which is ·intrinsically so unS'table as the instantaneous position of an arrow in flight deserved to be
described by the word which Aristotle everywhere else
reserves for complex organized states which persist, which
hold out in being against internal and external causes
tending to destroy them.
Aristotle's definition applies to any and every motion:
the pencil falling to the floor, the \Vhite pages in the
book turning yellow, the glue in the binding of the book
being eaten by insects. Maimonides, Averroes, and Ross,
who say that motion is always a transition or passage from
potentiality to actuality, must call the being-on-the-floor
of the pencil, the being-yellow of the pages, and the
crumbled condition of the binding of the book actualities. Thomas, who says that motion is constituted at any
moment by the joint presence of actuality and potentiality,
is in a still worse position: he must call every position of
the pencil on the way to the floor, every color of the
pages on the way to being yellow, and every loss of a
crumb from the binding an actuality. If these are actualities, then it is no wonder that philosophers such as
Descartes rejected Aristotle's account of motion as a useless redundancy, saying no more than that whatever
changes changes into that into which it changes.
We know however that the things Aristotle called actualities are limited in number, and constitute the world
in its ordered finitude rather than in its random particularity. The actuality of the adult horse is one, although
horses are many and all different from each other. Books
and pencils are not actualities at all, even though they
are organized wholes, since their organizations are products
of human art, and they maintain themselves not as books
and pencils but only as earth. Even the organized content
of a book, such as that of the first three chapters of Book
Three of Aristotle's Physics, does not exist as an actuality,
since it is only the new labor of each new reader that gives
being to that content, in this case a very difficult labor.
By this strict test, the only actualities in the world, that
is the only things which, by their own innate tendencies,
maintain themselves in being as organized wholes, seem
to be the animals and plants, the ever-the-same orbits of
the ever-moving planets, and the universe as a whole. But
Aristotle has said that every motion is an entelecheia; if
we choose not to trivialize the meaning of entelecheia to
make it applicable to motion, we must deepen our understanding of motion to make it applicable to the meaning
of entelecheia.
In the Metaphysics, Aristotle argues that if there is a
distinction between potentiality and actuality at all, there
must be a distinction between two kinds of potentiality.
17
�The College
The man with sight, but with his eyes closed, differs from
the blind man, although neither is seeing. The first man
has the capacity to see, which the second man lacks. There
are then potentialities as well as actualities in the world.
But when the first man opens his eyes, has he lost the
capacity to see? Obviously not; while he is seeing, his
capacity to see is no longer merely a potentiality, but is a
potentiality which has been put to work. The potentiality
to see exists sometimes as active or at work, and sometimes as inactive or latent. But this example seems to get
us no closer to understanding motion, since seeing is just
one of those activities which is not a motion. Let us consider, then, a man's capacity to walk across the room.
When he is sitting or standing or lying still, his capacity
to walk is latent, like the sight of the man with his eyes
closed; that capacity nevertheless has real being, distinguishing the man in question from a man who is crippled
to the extent of having lost all potentiality to walk. When
the man is \valking across the room, his capacity to walk
has been put to work. But while he is walking, what has
happened to his capacity to be at the other side of the
room, which was a]so latent before he began to walk? It
too is a potentiality which has been put to work by the
act of walking. Once he has reached the other side of the
room . his potentiality to be there has been actualized in
Ross' sense of the ·term, but while he is walking, his
potentiality to be on the other side of the room is not
merely latent, and is not yet cancelled by an actuality in
the weak sense, the so-called actuality of being on that
other side of the room; while he is walking his potentiality
to be on the other side of the room is actual just as a
potentiality. The actuality of the potentiality to be on
the other side of the room, as just that potentiality, is
nothing more nor less than the walking across the room.
A similar analysis will apply to any motion whatever.
The growth of the puppy is not the actualization of its
potentiality to be a dog, but the actuality of that potentiality as a potentiality. The falling of the pencil is the
actuality of its potentiality to be on the floor, in actuality
as just that: as a potentiality to be on the floor. In each
case the motion is just the potentiality qua actual and the
actuality qua potential. And the sense we thus give to the
word entelecheia is not at odds with its other uses: a mo-
18
tion is like an animal in that it remains completely and
exactly what it is through time. l\'ly walking across the
room is no more a motion as the last step is being taken
than at any earlier point. Every motion is a complex
whole, an enduring unity which organizes distinct parts,
such as the various positions through which the falling
pencil passes. As parts of the motion of ,the pencil, these
positions, though distinct, function identically in the
ordered continuity determined by the potentiality of the
pencil to be on the floor. Things have being to the extent that they are or are part of determinate wholes, so
that to be means to be something, and change has being
because it always is or is part of some determinate potentiality, at work and manifest in the world as change.
I shall close by considering the application of Aristotle's
account of motion to two paradoxes famous in antiquity.
Zeno argued in various ways that there is no motion. According to one of his arguments, the arrow in flight is
always in some one place, therefore always at rest, and
therefore never in motion. We can deduce from Aristotle's
definition that Zeno has made the same error, technicallv
called the fallacy of composition, as one who would argue
that no animal is alive since its head, when cut off, is not
alive, its blood, when drawn out, is not alive, its bones,
when removed are not alive, and so on with each part
in turn. The second paradox is one attributed to Heracleitus, and taken as proving that there is nothing but
motion, that is, no identity, in the world. The saying goes
that one cannot step into the same river twice. If the
river flows, how can it continue to be itself? But the flux
of the river, like the flight of the arrow, is an actuahty of
just the kind Aristotle formulates in his definition of motion. The river is always the same, as a river, precisely
because it is never the same as water. To be a river is to
be the always identical actuality of the potentiality of
water to be in the sea.
1
Joe Sachs graduated from St. John's in 1968; he took his M.A. degree at Pennsylvania State University after graduate studies at the
New School for Social Research, New York; he was a teaching assistant at Penn State and became a tutor at St. John's in 1975. This
is the text of an informal lecture delivered to the summer freshmen
in Annapolis on July 6, 197 5.
�
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Aristotle's definition of motion
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1975-07-06
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Typescript of a lecture delivered on July 6, 1975 by Joe Sachs as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
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Sachs, Joe, 1946-
Friday night lecture
Tutors
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HOMO . LOQUENS FROM A BIOLOGICJl.L STANDPOINT
by
Curtis Wilson
St. John's College
Annapolis, 1"..aryland
Septeil'ber, 1975
�The words homo loquens, in the title I announced for this lecture, mean
speaking man, man the speaking one. As a designation for the human species,
homo loquens perhaps has an advantage over the official zoological designation,
homo s~piens, man the sapient, wise, discerning one, the one who savours the
essences of things. The human capacity for loquaciousness is somewhat more
obviously verifiable. But what has that capacity to do with things biological?
This is a complicated and problematic topic. Forgive me if I first approach
it by slow stages, then attempt a gingerly step when the going becomes treacherous~
I wish to begin with a small technical matter, an aspect of the physiology of
speech-production.
Respiratory patterns in different species of air-breathing vertebrates
differ in many details. Different species have special regulatory systems,
adapted to special behavior patterns. There is the panting of dogs, specially
adapted for cooling; birds, during flight have the unique ability to increase
their intake of oxygen a hundredfold; the sperm whale can go without breathing
or dive for 90 minutes, the beaver for 15, man for about 2 1/2; and so on. All
these differences are species-specific.
In a human being, the respiratory patterns during quiet breathing and during
speech are remarkably different (see Table I). The volume of air inhaled, as
shown in the first item of the table, increases by a factor of 3 or 4 during
speech. The time of inspiration, as compared with the time for a complete cycle
of inspiration plus expiration, decreases by a factor of 3. The number of breaths
per minute tends to decrease drastically. Expiration, which is smooth during
speechless breathing, is periodically interrupted during speech, with a build-up
of pressure under the glottis; it is during expiration that all normal human
vocalization occurs. The patterns of electrical activity in expiratory and
inspiratory muscles differ radically during quiet breathing and during speech.
Both chest and abdominal musculature are utilized in breathing, but during speech
the abdominal musculature is less involved, and its contractions are no longer
fully synchronized with those of the chest musculature. In quiet breathing,
one breathes primarily through the nose; during speech, primarily through the
mouth.
More than you wanted to know, I'm sure. My point was to show that breathing
undergoes marked changes during speech. And remarkably, humans can tolerate
these modifications for almost unlimited periods of time without experiencing
respiratory distress; witness fillibusters in the U. s. Senate. Think now of
other voluntary departures from normal breathing patterns. If we deliberately
decide to breathe at some arbitrary rate, say, faster than ordinary -- please
do not try it here -- we quickly experience the symptoms of hyperventilation:
light-headedness, giddiness, and so on. Similar phenomena may occur when one
is learning to play a wind instrument or during singing instruction; training
in proper breathing is requisite for these undertakings. By contrast, talking a
blue streak for hours on end comes naturally to many a three-year-old. The
conclusion must be that there are sensitive controlling mechanisms that regulate
ventilation in an autonomous way during speech. More generally, it is evident
that we are endowed with special anatomical and physiological adaptations that
�-2-
enable us to sustain speech for hours, on exhaled air.
Do we speak the way we do because we happen to possess these special adaptations,
or did these adaptations develop during evolution in response to the pressures of
natural selection or the charms of sexual selection? I think there is no way of
answering these questions; it is difficult enough when one can refer to skeletons,
which fossilize; behavioral traits do not. But whatever the answer, there is
still this further question, whether the genetic programming for speech extends
beyond the mere provision of vocal apparatus? Might it not, in addition,
determine the make-up and structure of language in a more detailed and intimate
fashion?
Such a question runs counter to views that are widely held. Is not language,
after you have the voice to __
pronounce it with, fundamentally a psychological and
cultural fact, to which biological explanations would be largely irrelevant? Do
not languages consist of arbitrary conventions, made up in the way we make up the
rules of games? Wittgenstein speaks of language as a word-game, thereby likening
it to tennis or poker. Is it not apparent that the conventions of any particular
language, like the rules of :tennis o::-: poker, are transmitted from generation to
generation by means of imitation, training, teaching and learning? Are not
these the important facts about language, the facts that reveal to us its nature?
Until recently, students of linguistics and psychology have tended uniformly
to answer these questions in the affirmative. To many, the extraordinary
diversity of human tongues has seemed argument enough against any assumption of
linguistic universals, that is, characteristics of language imagined to be
rooted in human nature. The reductio ad absurdurn often mentioned is the attempt
of the Egyptian king Psammetichos to determine the original human language. As
reported by Herodotus, Psammetichos caused two children to be raised in such a
way that they would neither hear nor overhear human speech, the attendants
being instructed meanwhile to listen out for their first word. The report was,
that is was Persian. The experiment is said to have been repeated in the 13th
century by Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, and again around 1500 by James IV
of Scotland, who was hoping that the children would speak Hebrew, and thereby
establish a biblical linec:_ge for Scotland. No result was reported.
Stress on the arbitrariness of language has been enhanced by a coalition
between linguistics and behaviorist psychology. Behaviorist psychology is led,
by its premisses, to the view that language is merely an arbitrary use to which
the human constitution, anatomical and physiological, can be put, just as a tool
can be put to many arbitrary uses by its manipulator. A recent account that
views language in this way is the book Verbal Behavior by B. F. Skinner. Along
with other behaviorist scientists, Skinner holds that all learning can be explained
by a few principles which operate in all vertebrates and many invertebrates.
The process is called operant conditioning. Learning the meaning of a word,
Skinner holds, is like a rat's learning to press a bar which will cause a buzzer
to sound, announcing "food pellets soon to come". Learning grammar, likewise,
is supposed to be like learning that event A is followed by event B, which is
in turn followed by event c. Many an animal can be trained to acquire associations
�-3-
of this kind. Skinner would hold that there is nothing involved in the acquisition
of language _that is not involved in learning of this kind.
Unquestionably, we would be mistaken to deny the importance or the power of
the conditioned reflex, either in language acquisition or in other learning.
The experimental psychologists have recently announced that even the visceral
organs can be taught to do various things, on given signals, with rewards provided
immediately afterward to reinforce the action. We are told that rats, with the
reward held out of another shot of electrical juice in a certain center of the
brain, have been taught to alter their blood pressures or brain waves, or dilate
the blood vessels in one ear more than those in the other. Similar achievements
in operant conditioning are held out as a bright future hope for humans. What
rich experiences in self-operation are not in store for us?
On the other hand, the successes of this technology do not necessarily
tell us much about the character of what it is that is being conditioned. The
behaviorist treats the organism as a black box; he controls the inputs and
records the outputs; what goes on in the box is not, as he claims, an appropriate
concern of his. He cites the similar situation in quantum physics. In the case
of quantum phenomena, the physicist cannot successfully describe what is there
when he is not looking, not using probes that interact with whatever it is. But, _
between the situation in quantum physics and the situation in the study of animal
behavior, there is this difference. Animal behavior goes on, observably so,
· even when the animals are not being experimented on. May it not be important
to try to observe this behavior, before we .set out to change it, as we can, so
frighteningly, do?
Those who study the behavior of animals in their natural habitats nowadays
have a special name for their study, Ethology. Long hours of patient observation,
much of it during the last 50 years, have demonstrated how intricate, how unexpectedly adaptive, how downright peculiar, are the patterns of behavior specific
to particular species of animals. Many of the patterns function as communication:
the elaborate courtship rituals of birds, the less elaborate ones of butterflies
and certain _ ish; the way in which two dabbling ducks, on meeting, lower their
f
bills into the water and pretend to drink, as an indication of nonagressiveness;
and so on. Among these behaviors, there is one tha.t has been called truly
symbolic. That is . the dance of the honeybee, the symbolism of which was first
recognized and deciphered by Karl von Frisch in the 1940's. Let me describe
it briefly (see Figure I) •
The dance that a forager bee performs in the dark hive gives, by a special
symbolism, the distance and direction of the food source she has found. If, for
the Austrian variety of bee, the food source. is less than 80 meters away, she
performs a round dance, running rapidly arouna in a circle, first to the left,
then to the right. This in effect says to the hive bees: "Fly out .from the
hive; close by in the neighborhood is food to be fetched."
�-4If, on the other hand, the food source is more than 80 meters away, the
forager will use the tail-wagging dance. The rhythm of the dance tells the
distance: the closer the source, the more figure-of-eight cycles of the dance
, per minute. The tail-wagging part of the dance, shown by the middle wavy line
in the diagram, tells the direction, in accordance with a curious rule. On
the vertical honeycomb_ in the hive, the direction up means towards the sun,
and the direction down means away from the sun. If the tail-wagging run points
60° left of straight up, the food source is 60° to the left of the sun, and so
on. Directions with respect to the sun have been transposed into directions
with respect to gravity, the directions are reported with errors of less than
30.
This same dance is used in the springtime when half the bees move out of
the hive and form a swarm, seeking a new nesting place. Scout bees fly out in
all directions, then return and dance to announce the location they have hit on.
It is important, of course, that the selected spot be protected from winter,
winds, and rough weather, and that there be abundant feeding nearby. The
surprizing thing is that not just one nesting place is announced, but several at
the same time. The dancing and the coming and going can continue for days. By
their dances the bees engage in mutual persuasion, inciting one another to inspect
this site or that site. The better the site, the longer and more vigorously the
the returning bee dances. The process continues until all the scout bees are
dancing in the same direction and at the same rate. Then the swarm arises and
departs for the homesite it has thus decided upon. Mistaken decisions are few.
The dance
human language
the language a
depends solely
of the honeybee is symbolic in a genetically determined way. That
is not genetically determined in the same way is easy to show:
child learns, whether Swahili, Cantonese, Urdu, or any other,
on the language of those by whom he is brought up.
·
The vocabulary of a human language is not genetically fixed. However, I
do not believe that the discussion of the biological foundations of language
can properly end at this point.
My reasons for saying this are two. In the first place, there are certain
features of human speech which are not found in the natural corrnnunication
systems of animals, but which are found universally in all known human languages,
present or past. The existence of these features is, at the very least,
consonant with the possibility that there is a genetic foundation underlying
human speech. The facts appear to be most easily accounted for by assuming
that there is such a foundation, , forcing human speech to be of a certain basic
type.
Secondly, this same assumption receives support from the study of primary
language acquisition in children. It is not that Psammetichos was right,
or that children if left to themselves would commence to speak proto-IndoEuropean
or any language resembling
adult human language. All genetically determined
traits depend for their appearance to a greater or lesser degree, on features
of the environment. The genes or genetic factors do not of themselves determine
an
�-sbody parts or physiological or behavioral traits. Rather, they determine
developmental processes, which nonnally succeed one another in a determinate
way, but can be profoundly affected by environmental influence. These facts
point to the possibility that genetically determined traits might appear only
in the course of maturation, and then only in response to specific influences
from outside the organism. Ethologists inform us of many instances of speciesspecific, genetically based behavior that emerge only in this way. An example
is imprinting. Thomas More described it in his .Utopia. Chicks or ducklings
or goslings, a few hours or days after hatching, enter a critical period. Whatever object they first encounter during this period, within certain limits of
size, and moving within appropriate limits of speed, they begin to follow,
and continue to follow through childhood. The object followed can be, and
usually is, the mother; but it can also be an ethologist like Konrad Korenz
on his hands and knees, or something stuffed at the end of a stick. Failure to.
develop imprinted responses during infancy may cause behavioral abnormalities
in the adult bird -- abnormalities that cannot be corrected by later training.·
Imprinting is only one of many known species-specific characteristics or
behaviors that appear in the course of development, in response to what are
sometimes called "releasers", environmental stimuli of specified kinds. It
will be my contention that important features of human linguistic capacity are
of this kind.
After discussing these two points, I shall conclude with certain reflections
on what they might mean.
I begin, then, with three features of human speech that do not appear to
be found in the natural communication systems of animals (see Table II) :
1.
Phonematization
2.
Concatenation
3. · Granunar
What is meant by phonematization? The vocalizations heard in the human
languages of the world are always within fairly narrow limits of the total
range of sounds that humans can produce. We are able to imitate, for instance,
the vocalizations of mammals and birds with considerable accuracy, given a little
training, but such direct imitations never seem to be incorporated in the vocabularies of human languages. In all human languages, the meaningful units, words,
or more strictly speaking, morphemes, are divisible into successive, shorter,
meaningless sounds called phonemes. Morphemes are the smallest meaningful
units into which an utterance can be .divided. A morpheme can be a single word
such as "water"; it can be more than one word as in "spick and span"; and it
can be less than a single word, as in the "er" in "whiter", which turns the
adjective "white" into a comparative. Phonemes are the meaningless sounds into
which morphemes can be di.v ided. A phoneme is not, strictly speaking, a single
sound, but rather a small class of sounds; it can be defined as the smallest
�-6distinctive unit functioning within the sound system of a language to make a
difference.
Refinements aside, the central fact I wish to convey is this:
in all languages, morphemes are constituted by sequences of phonemes. This
is a fact that the inventors of the alphabet were probably about the first to
come to understand.
The fact could have been different. One can imagine a language in which
the symbol for a cat was a sound resembling a miaow; in which size was represented
by loudness, color by vowel quality, and hunger by a strident roar. Morphemes
in such a language would not be analyzable into phonemes.
All human languages are phonematized, but each language uses a somewhat
different set of phonemes, in each case a small set.
Parrots and mynah birds excel other animals in the imitation of human
speech, but i t is doubtful that they speak in phonemes. The matter could be
put to a test.
A parrot that had heard only Portuguese, and had acquired a
good repertory of Portuguese words and phrases, could be transferred into an
environment where he would hear only English, and have the opportunity of
repeating English exclamatory remarks. If these remarks emerged with a
Portuguese accent, the n it would be clear that the parrot had learned Portuguese
phonemes, which he proceeded to use in the vocalization of English words.
In
the opposite case, we would conclude that the parrot had the capacity to imitate
sounds accurately, but had not acquired the habit of using phonemes for the
production of speech.
In the human child, speech by the same test would turn out to be phonematized.
The second general characteristic of human speech I have listed is concatenation. Human utterances seldom consist of single morphemes in isolation;
in no human speech-community are utterances restricted to single morphemes;
in all languages, morphemes are ordinarily strung together into sequences.
To
be sure, the peoples of many, perhaps most cultures, are less garrulous than we;
they use language only in certain circumstances and only somewhat sparingly,
while we talk a good deal of the time. It is nevertheless true that humans
in all speech-communities concatenate morphemes.
The third property presupposes concatenation; it is the property of grammatical or syntactical structure. By "structure" I am going to mean a set of
relations that can . be diagrammed. In no language are morphemes strung together
in purely random order. Native speakers of a language normally agree in
rejecting certain utterances as ungrammatical, and in recognizing certain
other utterances as grammatical. According to Noam Chomsky, for instance, the
sentence "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is grammatical, though meaningless or nearly so; the concatenation ... furiously sleep ideas green colorless",
the same words in revers e order, is ungrammatical.
The one concatenation admits
of a syntactical diagram, the other does not.
�-7It is generally assumed in linguistics that the grammar of a language is
completely describable by means of a finite and in fact small set of formal
rules. For no natural language has such a description been achieved as yet,
otherwise one could program a computer to utter the grammatical sentences in
the language. Apparently the mechanism involved in the grammar of a natural
language is complex. I shall return to this topic again; the point now is
just the W1iversality of grammar -- a relatively complex kind of system -- as
a feature of human languages.
All three properties I have described are, so far as the available evidence
indicates, without cultural histories. Phonematization, concatenation, grammatical
structure, are features of all known human language, past or present. And although
languages are always in process of change, it is not the case that these changes
follow a general pattern from a stage that can be called primitive to one that
can be called advanced. No known classification or analysis of human languages
provides any basis for a theory of the development of language from aphonemic,
non-grammatical, or simple imitative beginnings.
These facts are consonant with the hypothesis that there is a genetic foundation underlying human speech, forcing it to be of a certain basic type, and in
particular, to have the features I have just described. In support of this
hypothesis, I take up now the development of language in the child.
The first sound a child makes is to cry.
Immanuel Kant says the birth cry
has not the tone of lamentation, but of indignation and of aroused
wrath; presumably because [the child] wants to move, and feels his
inability to do so as a fetter that deprives him ·o f his freedom.
More recently a psychoanalyst has written of the birthcry:
It is an expression of the infant's overwhelming sense of ir.feriority
on thus suddenly being confronted by reality, without ever having had
to deal with its problems.
In view of the anatomical immaturity of the human brain at birth, these adult
interpretations are rather surprizing. No doubt the infant in being born undergoes
a rude shock. But crying is a mechanism with a number of importan~ functions;
one of the earliest is clearing fluid out of the middle ear, so that .the child
can begin to hear. The mechanism is ready to operate at birth, and the infant
puts it to work. The sound made in crying changes slightly during childhood,
but otherwise does not mature or change during one's life. Crying is not a first
step in the development that leads to articulate speech; it involves no articulation;
the infant simply blows his horn without operating the keys.
A quite distinct sort of vocalization begins at about the 6th or 8th week
after birth: little cooing sounds that appear to be elicited by a specific
stimulus, a nodding object resembling a face in the baby's visual field. A
�-8clown's face painted on cardboard, laughing or crying, will do for a while.
The response is first smiling, then cooing. After about 13 weeks it is
necessary that the face be a familiar one to elicit the smiling and cooing.
During cooing, some articulatory organs are moving, in particular the tongue.
The cooing sounds, although tending to be vowel-like, are not identical with
any actual speech sounds. Gradually they become differentiated. At 6 months
they include vocalic and consonantal components, like /p/ and /b/. Cooing
develops int.o babbling resembling one-syllable utterances, for instance /ma/,
/mu/, /da/, /di/. However, the babbling sounds are still not those of adult
speech.
The first strictly linguistic feature to emerge in a child's vocalizations
is contour of intonation. Before the sound sequences have determinable meaning
or definite phonemic structure, they come out with the recognizable intonation
of .questions, exclamations, or affirmations. Linguistic development begins not
with the putting together of individual components, but rather with a whole
tonal pattern. Later, this whole becomes differentiated into component parts.
Differentiation of phonemes is only approximate at first and has to be progressively refined. The child is gradually gaining control of the dozen or so
adjustments in the vocal organs that are required for adult speech. By 12 months
he is replicating syllables, as in "mamma" and "dada". By 18 months he will
normally have a repertory of three to 50 recognizable words.
I have described this development as though mothers were not trying to
teach, but of course they normally are.
It is nevertheless a striking fact
that these stages emerge in different cultures in the same sequence and at
very nearly the same ages, and in fairly strict correlation with other motor
achievements.
Detailed studies have been made of speech acquisition among the
Zuni of New Mexico, the Dani of Dutch New Guinea, the Bororo in central Brazil,
and children in urban U.S.A.; in all cases, intonation patterns become distinct
at about the time that graspin9 between thumb and fingers develops; the first
words .appear at about.the time that walking is accomplished; and by the time
the child is able to jump, tiptoe, and walk backward, he is talking a blue
stre:i.k. Among children born deaf, the development from cooing through spontaneous
babbling to well-articulated speech-sounds occurs as with normal children,
but of course the development cannot continue onward into the stage at which
adult words are learned through hearing. Among the mentally retarded, these
developments are chronologically delayed, but take place with the same correlation
between various motor achievements. Given the variety of envirorunental conditions
in these several cases, it seems plausible to attribute the emergence of
linguistic habits largely to maturational changes within the growing child,
rather than to particular training procedures.
The specific neurophysiological correlates of speech are l .i ttle known,
but that there are such correlates and that they mature as speech develops is
supported by much evidence. The human brain at birth has only 24% of its adult
weight; by contrast, the chimpanzee starts life with a brain that already
weighs 60% of its adult value. The human brain takes longer to mature, and
�-9-
more happens as it matures, including principally a large increase in the number
of neuronal connections. A large part of the discernible anatomical maturation
takes place in the first two years; the process appears to be complete by about
14 years of age. By this time the neurophysical basis of linguistic capacity
has become localized in one of the two cerebral hemispheres, usually the left.
If by this time a first language has not been learned, no language will ever
be learned. Speech defects due to injuries to the brain that occur before the
final lateralization of the speech-function are usually overcome; but if the
injury comes after lateralization, the speech defect will be permanent.
Capacity for speech does not correlate uniformly with size of brain.
There is a condition known as nanocephalic dwarfism, in which humans appear
reduced to fairy-tale size; adult individuals attain a maximum height of between
two and threefeet (see Table III). Nanocephalic dwarfs differ from other dwarfs
in preserving the skeletal and other bodily proportions of normal adults. Brain
weight in these dwarfs barely exceeds that of a normal newborn infant. The
brain weight of the nanocephalic dwarf, given in the middle row, is only a
little over a third of that of a 2 1/2 year old boy, but the ratio of body
weight to brain weight is equal to that of a 13 1/2 year old boy. These
dwarfs show some retardation in intellectual growth, and often do not surpass
a mental age-level of ~ or 6 years. But all of them acquire the rudiments of
language, including speaking and understanding; they speaJc grarm:natically, and
can manufacture sentences which are not mere repetitions of sentences they have
heard. The appropriate conclusion appears to be that the ability to acquire
language depends, not on any purely quantitative factor, but on specific modes
of organization of human neurophysiology.
One further point concerning the neurophysiological basis of language. The
main evidence here is provided by aphasias (aphasia= a +~ava1, not+ to speak).
These are failu~es in production or comprehension of language, resulting from
injuries to the brain. And this evidence argues, for one thing, against regarding
language ability as being encoded simply in a spatial layout of some kind, say
a network of associations in the cerebral cortex. Subcortical areas are involved,
as well as cortex. The aphasias most frequently involve, not disruption of
associations, but rather disruption of temporal order, affecting either phonemes
in the production of words, as in spoonerisms, or words and phrases in the production
of sentences. The patient is unable to control properly the tempcral ordering
of these units, and as a consequence they tumble into the production line
uninhibited by higher syntactic principles. In general, the sympton is lack
of availability of the right thing at the right time.
Language is through-and-through an affair of temporal patterns and sequences.
The neurophysiological organization required for this cannot be simply that of
associations. In the making of speech-sounds, for instance, certain muscles
have to contract, the efferent nerve fibers innervating these muscles are of
different lengths and diameters, and as a consequence the times required for a
�-10-
nerve inpulse to go from brain to muscle differ for different muscles. Hence
the nerve im.pulses for the production of a single phoneme must be fired off
from the brain at different times, and the sequences of impulses for successive
phonemes must overlap in complex ways. In the simplest sequential order of
· events, it thus appears that events are selected, not in response to immediately
prior events, but in accordance with a hierarchic plan that integrates the
requirments for periods of time of several seconds' duration. All this patterning
in time is thought to depend on a physiological rhythm of about 6 cyles per
second, in relation to which other events are timed. Arrangements of this
complexity do not come about by learning. The evidence here, as well as the
observations I have already described as to the way voice-sounds develop in
children, points to the existence of an innate mechanism for the production of
phonemes, one which is activated by a specific input, the appearance of the
human face, and which matures in stages.
Could anything similar be argued for competence in syntax, the ability
to understand and produce grarn.~atical sentences? Here you will undoubtedly
be more doubtful, for surely the grammars of different languages are different.
Please recall that the sets of phonemes used in different languages are also
somewhat different. The universality of phonematization is compatible with
different languages employing different. subsets of the humanly possible phonemes.
The claim for universa~ity of grammar must be of similar kind. The grammars
of human languages are not of just any imaginable kind of ordered concatenation
of morphemes. Rather, they derive from a certain subclass of the imaginable
orders, a subclass involving phrase structure and what has been called "deep
structure". The production of grarrnnatical sentences turns out to pose requirements similar to those necessary for the temporal ordering of phonemes; a
serial order in which one element determines the next is insufficient; there has
to be hierarchical organization, in which elements connected with one a,.,other are
separated temporally in the production line.
Let me return now to the description of stages in the primary acquisition
of language by a child.
At about the end of the first year of life, the child normally utters his
first unmistakeable word. For a number of months, while the child is building
up a repertory of about 50 words, he utters only single-word utterances. He
frequently hears sentences like "Here is your milk", "Shall daddy take you by-by?",
and so on, but he will neither join together any two words he knows nor can he
be induced to do so on request. Does he lack the memory or the vocalizing
power to produce a two-word utterance? The evidence is against these suppositions.
Then, roughly between 18 and 24 months, he suddenly and spontaneously begins to
join words into two-element phrases: . "up baby", "baby highchair", "push car",
and so on. What explains the shift?
An important observation at the one-word stage is that these single words
are given the intonations or pitch-contours of declarative, interrogative, or
�-11-
hortatory sentences. The single-word utterances seem to function in meaning
in the same way as sentences will function later cm: "Doggie" might mean,
for instance, "There is a dog". When the two-word construction "push car"
appears, it is not just two single-word utterances spoken in a certain order.
As single-word utterances, both "push" and "car" would have primary stresses
and terminal intonation contours. But when they are two words programmed as
a single utterance, the primary stress and higher pitch come on "car"; and
the unity of the whole is indicated by the absence of a terminal pitch contour
between the words and the presence of such a contour at the end of the sequence.
What appears to be happening is that the child is by stages increasing
his span, his ability to plan or program longer utterances. Grammar is already
present in embryo. Further development will be a process of successive increases
in span or integration, on the one hand, and progressive differentiation of the
parts of utterances on the other.
Imitation plays a role in this process, but it is seldom mere parroting.
In Table IV I have listed some imitations actually produced by two children,
whom I shall call Adam and Eve; both were about two years old.
First note that the imitations preserve the word orderof the model, even
when not preserving all·the words. This is not a logical necessity; it is
conceivable that the child might reverse or scramble the order; that he does not
suggests that he is processing the utterance as a whole. A second fact to
notice is that, when the models increase in length, the child's imitation is
a reduction, and that the selection of words is not random. The words retained
are generally nouns, verbs, and less often adjectives: words sometimes called
"contentives", because they have semantic content; their main grammatical
function lies in their capacity to refer to things. The forms omitted are what
linguists call "functors", their grammatical functions being more obvious than
their semantic content. The omission of the functors leads to a kind of telegraphic
language, such as one uses in wiring home: "Car broken down; wallet stolen; send
money American Express Baghdad". In the child's telegraphic utterances, how
will the appropriate functors come to be introduced?
While the child engages in imitating, with reductions, the utterances
of the mother, the mother frequently imitates, with expansion, the utterances
of the child (see Table V). The mother's expansions, you will note, preserve
the word order of the child's sentences, she acts as if the child meant everything he said, and more, and it is the "more" that her additions articulate.
She adds functors. The functors have meaning, but it is meaning that accrues
to them in context rather than in isolation. The functors tell the time of
the action, whether it is ongoing or completed; they inform us of possession,
and of relations such as are indicated by prepositions like in; on, ~' down;
they distinguish between a particular instance of a class as in "the highchair",
and an arbitrary instance of a class, as in "a sandwich"; and so on.
�-12How or to what extent these adult expansions of the child's utterances help
the child to learn grammatical usage is uncertain. It has been found that
inunediate imitations by the child of just uttered adult sentences are less
frequently well-formed than spontaneously produced utterances. The view that
progress toward adult norms arises merely from practice in overt imitation of
adult sentences is clearly wrong. The child rather appears to be elaborating
his own grammar, making use of adult models, but constantly analogizing to produce
new and often mistaken words or forms.
Take pluralization (see Table VI) . In English there are a few irregular
plurals, as of mouse, foot, man. The child normally regularizes these plurals:
mouses, foots, mans.
Instead of foot vs. foots, some children give feet for the
singular, feets for the plural. One does not get an initial fluctuation between
foot and feet, such as one would expect if only imitation of adult forms were
a _ work.
t
Most English plurals are regular and follow certain formal rules. Thus we
have mat vs. mats, but ~atch vs. matches. Words ending in sibilants, such as
match, hors e , b o x, add a vowe l before the..§_ of the plural. Children have difficulty
with pluralizing these words, and tend at first to use th e singular form for
both singular and plural. Sometime s a child will analogize in such a way as to
remove the sibilant, substituting for instance, for box vs. boxes, the singularplural pair bok vs. boks. Then at some point the ch~ld produces the regular
plural of a sibilant word, say, boxes. Frequently when this happens he may
abandon temporarily the regular plural for non-sibilant words, so that one gets
foot vs. footses. What is happening? Overlaid on the child's systematic analogic
forms, there is a gradual accumulation of successful imitations which do not fit
the child's system. Eventually these result in a change in the system, often
with errors due to over-generalizing.
Consider also the past tense inflection, which in English bears considerable
similarity to the plural inflection (see Table VI again). There are regular
forms like walk-walked, and irregular ones like go-went. Among the regular verbs,
the form of the past d e pends on the final phoneme of the simple verb:
so we have
pack-packed and pat-patted. In the case of past-tense inflection in contrast
with pluralization, however, the most fre q uently used forms are irregular, and the
curious fact is that the child often starts regularizing these forms before having
been heard to produce any other past-tense forms.
Thus goed, doed, corned appear
among the first past-tense forms produced.
The analogizing tendency is evidently
very strong.
· The occurrence of certain kinds of errors on the level of word construction
thus reveals the child's effort t.o induce regularities from the speech he is
exposed to. When a child says, "I buyed a fire car for a grillion dollars,"
he is not imitating in any strict sense of the term; he is constructing in
accordance with rules, rules which in adult English, are in part mistaken. At
every stage, the child's linguistic competence extends beyond the sum total of
the sentences he has heard. He is able to unders tand and construct sentences
�-13-
which he cannot have heard before, but which are well-formed in terms of general
rules that ar·e implicit in the sentences he has heard. Somehow, genius that
he is, he induces from the speech to which he is exposed a latent structure of
rules. For the rest of his life, he will be spinning out the implications of
this latent structure.
By way of illustration of this inductive process, and .of a fur~her stage in
the achievement of grarrunatical competence, let me indicate some aspects of the
development of the noun phrase in children's speech (see Table VII). A noun
phrase con~.ists of a noun plus modifiers of some kind, which together can be
used in all the syntactic positions in which a single noun can be used: alone
to name or request something, or in a sentence as subject, object, or predicate
nominative. The table at the top gives a number of noun phrases uttered by Adam
or Eve at about two years of age. Each noun phrase consists of one word from a
small class of modifiers, M, followed by one word from the large class of nouns,
N. The rule for generating
these noun phrases is given below in symbols: NP ·
is generated by M plus N.
The class M does not correspond to any single syntactic class in adult
English; it includes indefinite and definite articles, a possessive pronoun, a
demonstrative adjective, a quantifier, a cardinal number, and some descriptive
adjectives. In adult English these words are of different syntactic classes
because they have very different privileges of occurrence in sentences. For the
children, the words appear to belong to a single class because of their common
privilege of occurrence before nouns; the lack of distinction leads to ungranunatical
combinations, which are marked in the table by an asterisk. Thus the indefinite
article should be used only with a · comrnon count noun in the singular, as in
"a coat"; we do not say "a celery", "a Becky", "a hands". The numeral two we use
only with count nouns in the plural; hence we do not say "two sock". The word
"more" we use before mass nouns in the singular, as in "more coffee", and before
count nouns in the plural, as in "more nuts"; we would not say "more nut". To·
avoid the errors, it is necessary not only that the privileges of occurrence of
words of the class M be differentiated, but also that nouns be subdivided into
singular and plural, common and proper, count nouns and mass nouns.
Sixteen weeks after Time I, at Time II, Adam and Eve were beginning to make
some of these differentiations; articles and demonstrative pronouns were now
distinguished from other mewbers of the class M. Articles now always appeared
before descriptive or possessive adjectives, and demonstrative pronouns before
articles or other modifiers.
Twenty-six weeks after Time I, the privileges of occurrence had become
much more finely differentiated. Adam was distinguishing descriptive adjectives
and possessive pronouns, as well as articles and demonstrative · pronouns, from
the ' residual class M; Eve's classification was even more complicated, though she
was a bit younger. Also, nouns were being differentiated by both children:
proper nouns were clearly distinct from common nouns; for Eve, count nouns were
distinct from mass nouns.
�-14Simultaneously with these differentiations, further integrations were
occurring: the noun phrases were beginning to occur as constituents in longer
sentences; the permissible combinations of modifiers and nouns were assuming
the combination privileges enjoyed by nouns in isolation. Thus the noun phrase,
for Adam and Eve, was coming to have a psychological unity such as it has for
adults. This was indicated by instances in which a noun phrase was fitted between
parts of a separable verb, as in "put the red hat on". It was also indicated
by substitution of pronouns for noun phrases in sentences, often at first with
the pronoun being followed by the noun phrase for which it was to substitute,
as in "mommy get it my ladder", or "I miss it cowboy boot".
Whether any theory of learning at present known can account for this sequence
of differentiations and integrations is doubtful.
The process is more reminiscent
of the development of an embryo than it is of the simple acquisition of conditioned
reflexes or associations. What is achieved is an open-ended competence to comprehend sentences never before heard, in terms of a hierarchical structure, that
embeds structures within structures.
To illustrate, let me use, not a child's sentence, but an example that Chomsky
excerpts from the Port Royal Grammar of 1660 (see Figure II). The sentence is:
"Invisible God created the visible world".
The sentence may be diagrammed as
shown in the figure; Chomsky calls these diagrams phrase markers. There is a
phrase marker for what he calls surface structure; this has the function of
determining the phonetic shape and intonational contour of the sentence. And
there is a phrase marker for what he calls deep structure; this shows how prior
predications are embedded in the sentence, and determine its meaning.
Are formal structures like the one indicated by this diagram really operative
when linguistic competence is being exercised? There are a number of indications
that this is so. One indication is the extent to which the understanding of language
involves resolution of ambiguities, or disambiguation as it is sometimes
massively put. Consider the sentence "They are boring ' student~" (see Figure III) .
This has two different interpretations, which are represented by the diagrams
on the screen.
In interpretation A, the word "boring" is linked with the word
"students"; the students are thus characterized as boring.
In interpretation B,
the word "boring" is linked with the word "are", which thus becomes the auxiliary
verb in the present progressive tense of the verb "to bore", it is the students
who are being bored, by certain other persons designated by "'.:he pronoun "they",
but otherwise mercifully unidentified.
In an actual conversation, the context
of meaning would have led us to apply, as quick as a thought or perhaps more
quickly, the correct phrase marker to the interpretation of the sequence of uttered
sounds.
Other examples show how deep structures are essential to understanding
(see Table VIII). Consider the two sentences:
John is eager to please
John is easy to please.
�-15-
These sentences have the same surface structure. But a moment's thought shows
that the word "John" has two very diffe·r ent roles to play in the two sentences.
John in the first sentence is the person who is doing the pleasing; in the second
sentence he is the person who is being pleased. John is the underlying subject
in the first case, and the underlying object in the second case. Deep structure
or grammar is involved in understanding the difference in meaning of the two
sentences.
An opposite sort of case occurs when the surface granunars of two sentences
are different, although the meaning is essentially the same. Consider this
sentence in the active mode: "Recently seventeen elephants trampled on my
summer home".
Now consider the following sentence in the passive mode: "My
summer wa.s trampled -on recently by seventeen elephants." A native speaker of
English feels that these sentences are related,that they have the same or very
similar meanings. Yet their surface structures are very different. Recognition
that both sentences are describing the same event presupposes that speaker anJ.
hearer refer them both to a single deep structure embodyin~ the single meaning.
Something similar happens in recognition of similarity between visual patterns,
where there is no point-to-point correspondence between them.
Now all of this is unlikely to . seem astonishing, for it is' very familiar,
You and I, like the bourgeois gentilhomme, have been speaking and listening to
more or less grammatical prose for a long time now. People living at the seashore
are said to grow so accustomed to the murmur of the waves that they never hear
it. Aspects of things that could be important to us may be hidden by their
familiarity. The point I have been seeking to make is one that is due to Noam
Chomsky, a linguist I have been depending on more than once this evening. The
grammaticality of human languages involves properties that are in no sense
necessary properties of a . system that would fulfill the functions of human
communication. A grammar, for instance, in which statements would be generated
· word-by-word, from left to right, so to speak, so that any given morpheme would
determine the possible classes of morphemes that might follow it, is a kind of
grammar that might have been used, but was not. Instead, human speech involves
dependencies between non-adjacent elements, as in .the sentence "A.Tlyone who says
that is lying", where there is a dependency between the subject noun "anyone"
and the predicate phrase "is lying". All operations in human languages,
transforming, for instance, an active into a passive sentence, or a declarative
into an interrogative sentence, operate on and take account of phrase structure.
Example: we form the1nterrogative of the English.sentence, "Little Mary lived
in Princeton",. by introducing an auxiliary to the verb ("Little Mary did live
in Princeton"), then inverting the order of the auxiliary and the noun-phrase
which is the subject, to get "Did Li.ttle Mary live in Princeton?" It would be
entirely possible to form interrogatives in a different way independently of
phrase structure. There is no apriori reason why human languages should make
use exclusively of structure-dependent operations. It is Chomsky's conclusion
that such reliance on structure-dependent operations must be predetermined for
the language learner by a restrictive initial schematism of some sort, given
genetically, and directing the child's attempts to acquire linguistic competence.
�-16Put differently, one does not so much teach a first language, as provide a
thread along which linguistic competence develops of its own accord, by processes
more like maturation than learning.
The Chomskian analysis requires that we take one more step. The fact that
deep structures figure in the understanding and use of language shows that grammar
and meaning necessarily interpenetrate. The child's grammatical competence
matures only along with semantic competence, the organization of what can be
talked about in nameable categories and hierarchies of categories. This process,
like the development of grammatical competence, involves successive differentiations.
Sensory data are first grouped into as yet global classes of gross patterns,
and then subsequently differentiated into more specific patterns. The infant who
is given' a word su.ch as "daddy", and has the task of finding the category labelled
by this word, does not start out with the working hypothesis that a specific,
concrete object, say his father, uniquely bears this name. Rather, the word
initially appe ars to be u s ed as the labe l of a general and open category, corresponding
to the adult category of people or men.
Infra-hwnan animals are taught with
difficulty, if at all, to make the generalizations involved in naming, whereas
children fall in with the ways of names automatically.
Name s, other than proper
names, refer to ope n and flexibl e c l a s ses, which are subj e ct to e xte nsion and
differentiation in the ~ourse of languag e usage.
Catego rization and naming
involve relations between categories; nothing ever resides in a single term;
~ means nothing without £ and probably ~ and ~; £ means nothing without .5:..
and c and d. Children go about assimilating the relations that are embodied
in language, not me rely imitatively, but in an active, inventive, and critical
way.
They are full of impossible questions:
"How did the sky happen? How did the sun happen?
like a lamp? Who makes bugs?"
Why is the moon so much
At first, they are ultra-literal in their reactions to idioms and metaphors.
When grandmother said that winter was coming soon, the grandchildren laughed
and wanted to know: "Do you mean that winter has legs?" And when a lady said "I'm
dying to hear that concert", the child's sarcastic response was, 11'Then why don't
you die?" Sometimes reconciliation of adult requirements requires genius.
Chukovsky reports that a four-year-old Muscovite, influe nced both by an atheist
father and by a grandmother of orthodox faith, was overheard to tell her playmate:
"There is a god, but, of course, I do not believe in him." The active analogizing
and generalizing of 4- and 5-year olds is discernible in the odd questions they
can put:
"What is a knife -- the fork's husband?"
"Isn't it wonderful? I drink milk, water, tea, and cocoa, but out of
me pours only tea."
"What does blue look like from behind?"
�-17For a certain period, there is a special, heightened sensitivity to the strangeness
of words and their meanings; by age 5 or 6 this talent begins to fade, and by
7 or 8 all traces of it have disappeared. The need has passed; the basic principles
of the child's native language have been mastered.
What is it that has in fact been gained? We say, knowledge of a language.
But what is a language, my language? Thoughtfully considered, this is a wellnigh impossible question, because a language is .not a simple object, existing
by itself and capable of being grasped in its totality. It exists in the
linguistic competence of its users; it is what Aristotle would call an actuality
of the second kind, like the soul, or like knowing how to swim when you are
not swirruning. Through it I constitute myself a first-person singular subject,
by using this short word "I", which everyone uses, and which in each seems to
refer to something different, yet the same. And through it I am brought into
relation with others -- the ubiquitous "you" -- and with the public thing that
is there for both you and me, a treasury of knowledge and value transmitted
through and embedded in language.
We hear language spoken of as "living language", and there is evidence
enough to make it more than a metaphor. Language reproduces itself from generation
to generation, remaining relatively constant, yet with small mutations, enough
in fact to account for-its growing and evolving, leaving vestiges and fossils
behind, and undergoing speciation as a result· of migrations,, like Darwin's
finches on the Galapagos Islands. A change here provokes an adjustment there,
for the whole is a complex of relations, mediating between a world and human
organisms that are a part of it. The way a word is used this year is, in
biological lingo, its phenotype; the deep and more abiding sense in it is its
genotype.
It is we, of course, who are accomplishing all this; but we do not know
how we accomplish it. It is mostly a collective, autonomic kind of doing, like
the building activities of ants and termites, or the decision-making of bees.
It takes generation after generation, but we are part of it whenever and however
we utter words or follow them in the sentences th.at we hear or read, whether
lazily or intently, whether with habitual acceptance or active inquiry. Always
the words are found for us, and fitted with meanings for us, by agents in the
brain over which we exercise no direct control. We can either float with the
stream, sometimes a muddy tide of slang and jargon and cliche, or struggle cross
stream or upstream. Sometimes we can, sensing the possible presence of a meaning,
attempt a raid on the inarticulate; we can launch ourselves into speech, discovering what it is that we mean as we proceed. We "articulate"; the word once
meant division into small joints, then, by an effortless transition, the speaking
of sentences. There are unexpected qutcomes. We may find that our utterance is
ungrarrunatical or illogical; or we may discover that the connection of ideas
leads in directions we had not previously considered. In any case, phonetic,
syntactical, and semantic structures are being actualized in time, without our
quite knowing how. Yet we can strive after that lucidity and precision which,
when achieved, make language seem transparent to what there is.
�-18I have already been carried beyond the two propositions I set out to defend,
and in doing so, I have moved into a region of ambiguity. The question as to
what is determined by nature, independently ofus, and what is man-made, is an
ancient and disturbing question, embedded in old etymologies and myths.
(See Table IX). In more than one language, the word "man" is derived
from "earth". So it is in Hebrew: Adam, "man", comes from the word for "ground".
As shown in the upper diagram, the IndoEuropean root for "earth" gives us "man"
and "human" as well as "humus". The notion here is that of the autochthonous
origin of humans, their origination from the earth itself; it is a notion found
in early cultures all over the world. An implication would seem to be that man
is like a plant in his naturalness. On the other hand, as shown in the lower
diagram, the IndoEuropean root "wiros", "man" or "the strong one", leads not
only to virile but, staggeringly, to world, suggesting that man makes himself
and his world.
The dicho~omy, the tension, emerges in the Theban cycle of myths (see Table X).
Following a suggestion of Levi-Strauss, I am listing elements of it in chronological
order from left to right and from the top downward, but in columns, to show the
repetition of similar elements. Cadmus is sent off to seek his sister; he
kills a dragon, a chthonic monster, that will not permit men to live, and sews
the teeth of the dragon in the earth; from the teeth sprout up armed men who
kill one another, all except five who become the ancestors of the Thebans. In
column I are listed events of the myth in which blood relations seem to be given
too much importance. In colu..~n II are listed murders of brothers by brother,
of a father by a son: here blood relations are brutally disregarded. Column I is
thus opposed to column II. In column III, chthonic monsters that were killing
off humans are themselves killed by men; we can interpret this as a denial
of the autochthonous origin of man, an assertion that man has now become selfsufficient, himself responsible for his continued existence. In column IV .a re
listed the meanings of the names of the Labdacidae, including Oedipus; the
etymologies all indicate difficulty in walking or in standing upright. In myths
throughout the world, this difficulty in walking or standing is characteristic
of the creature that has just emerged out of the earth; the names given in column
IV thus constitute an assertion of the autochthonous oYigin of man. Column IV
contradicts column III, just as column I contradicts column II. The myth
de?ls with a difficulty of one sort, not by resolving it, but by juxtaposing
it to another, parallel type of opposition. Neither man's rootedness in nature
nor his transcendence of nature is unproblematic:
The study of language and its acquisition by children indicates that our
language has genet~c foundations or roots. These, however, have their fruition
only under appropriate conditions, only through culture. Man is by nature
a cultural animal. He does not fabricate his linguistic culture out of whole
cloth.
On the one hand, it becomes conceivable that a universal grammar and semantics
might be formulated, describing the species-specific features and presuppositions
that characterize human linguistic behavior universally. On the other hand,
nature's gift of language brings with it an apparent freedom from deterministic
necessity not previously present. Most of our sentences are quite new; it is
�-lguncommon for one sentence to come out the same as another, though the thoughts
be 1;.he same. Our utterances are free of the control of detectible stimuli.
The number of patterns underlying the normal use of language, according to
Chomsky, is orders of magnitude greater than the seconds in a lifetime, and
so cannot have been acquired simply by conditioning. While the laws of generation
of sentences remain fixed and invariant, the specific manner in which they are
applied remains unspecified, open to choice. The application can be appropriate.
Articulate, structurally organized signals can be raised to an expression
of thought.
Achievement here is subject to change and old laws, and it depends on a
sensitivity to old meanings as well as new possibilities. It requires both
strength and submission.
�TABLE I
Respiratory Adaptation in Speech
Breathing
Quietly
During Speech
3
3
Tidal volume
·soo-600cm
Time of inspiration
Time of
inspiration + expiration
about 0.4
about 0.13
Breaths per minute
18-20
4-20
Expiration
Continuous &
unimpede d
Periodically interrupted, with increase
in subglottal pressure
Electrical activity in
expiratory muscles
Nil or very low
Nil or very low at
start of phonation;
then increases rapidly
and continues active
to end of expiration
Electrical activity in
inspiratory muscles
Active in inspiration & nil during
expiration
Active in inspiration
& in expiration till
expiratory muscles
become active
Musculatures involved
Chest & abdominal,
closely synchronized
Mainly chest; slight
de synchronization
between chest and
abdominal muscles
Airways
Primarily nasal
Primarily oral
1500-2400cm
�FIGURE I
ROUND DANCE
..,.,,,.
/
,....
- ---
/
'
I
l~
1 "'-;
/"'-
-
t
/
-/~:
--./...:
.-
.--..:_
'\
'\\
""
'./,,
~
\
I
I
I
I
1
\
I
I
\
I
I
~
'
/ ' /
/
/
~.,.......::....-
.....:..
......... ........ .
.
TAIL-WAGGING DANCE
-· - -.....
. .
..,&'"
, .
lrn/
...._
.-.,.
• /?' ,,--.
\
/
..-.
~
/
r
'l~
-k::;~/
'
'
\.
...~~}~\.
I
~
'
)
'
\
(....
(
\
'
I
/
~
\
t
t
'
\
\
· J,-
'~
) .
l
I
1 \
\.. '-
--....-- _.,,. /
I
l
d
'
I
'
I
I
/
-......
__.
_.,,.,,.. /
�TABLE II
Species-specific Features of Human Speech
1.
Phonematization
"Morphemes":
the smallest meaningful units into which an
utterance can be divided.
Examples:
water
spick and span
"er" in "whiter", "taller", etc.
"Phoneme":
the smallest distinctive unit of sound functioning
within the sound system of a language to make a
difference.
Examples:
/p/ vs. /b/
/t/ vs. /d/
Phonematization: all morphemes in all natural human languages
are divisible into phonemes.
single morphemes are strung together into sequences,
rather than being used in isolation.
2.
Concatenation:
3.
Grammar or Syntactical Structure:
in no human language are
morphemes strung together in purely random order.
Examples (Chomsky) :
Grammatical:
furiously"
Ungrammatical:
colorless"
"colorless green ideas sleep
"furiously sleep ideas green
�TABLE III
Comparative Weights of Brain and Body in Humans,
Including Nanocephalic Dwarf, Chimpanzees, and Monkeys
Body Wt.
(kg)
Brain Wt.
(kg)
Human (male)
2-1/2
13-1/2
1.100
12.3
yes
Human (male)
13-1/2
45
1.350
34
yes
Human (male)
18
64
1.350
47
yes
INanocephalic
dwarf
12
13-1/2
0. 400
34
ye_s_u_
Chimp (male)
3
12-1/2
·o.4oo
34
no
47
0.450
104
no
0.090
40
no
I
Chimp (female)
adult
Rhesus monkey
adult
3-1/2
Ratio
(Bcdy : Brain)
Speech
Acquisition
Age
I
�TABLE IV
Imitations by Adam and Eve, Two years of Age
Model Utterance (parent)
Child's Imitation
Tank car
Tank car
Wait a minute
Wait
Daddy's brief case
Daddy brief case
Fraser will be unhappy
Fraser unhappy
He '.s going out
He go out
That's an old-time train
Old-time train
It's not the same dog as Pepper
Dog Pepper
No, you can't write on Mr. Cramer's
shoe
Write Cromer shoe
a minute
Contentives
Nouns:
Daddy, Fraser, Pepper, Cromer;
tank car, minute, brief case, train, dog,shoe
V~rbs:
wait, go, write
Adjectives:
unhappy, old-time
Functors:
the possessive inflection 's
the modal auxiliary will
the progressive inflection -ing
the contraction of the auxiliary verb is
the preposition on
the articles the and an
the modal auxiliary can
�TABLE V
Adult Expansions of Child Pronouncements
Utterances of Child
Mother's Expansions
(Additions circled)
Baby highchair
BabyE in the ) highchair
Mommy eggnog
Mommy(£ad herleggnog
Eve lunch
Eve~ having1lunch
Monuny sandwich
Mommy
Sat wall
~sandwich
~sa~wall
Throw Daddy
Throw\it t~ Daddy
Pick glove
Pick(!he'j glove
&J
�TABLE VI
Plural Inflection
Regularization of irregular fonns:
Singular
vs.
Plural
mouse
mouses
foot
foots
feet
feets
man
mans
or:
Words ending in sibilants
First Stage:
(as well as horse, match, judge, etc.)
treated as both singular and plural
~ox
bok vs. boks, in analogy with normal
Possible Second Stage:
"s" pluralization, replaces box vs. boxes
Third Stage:
after box vs. boxes is produced, then we also
get foot vs. footses, hand vs. handses
Past Tense Inflection
goed
corned
/
come
went
~came
buyed
doed
do
---------
~did
/
buy"-....
~bought
�TABLE VII
TIME I:
Noun Phrases with Generative Rule
A coat
That Adam
Big boot
*A celery
That knee
Poor man
*A Becky
More coffee
Little top
*A hands
*More nut
The top
· *Two sock
Dirty knee
My Monuny
· Two shoes
My stool
*Two tinker toy
NP ~ M +
N
M
a, big, dirty, little, more, my, poor, that, the, two
N
Adam, Becky, boot, coat, coffee, knee, man, Monuny, nut, sock,
stool, tinker toy, top, etc.
TIME II:
A.
Subdivision of Modifier class with Generative Rules
Privileges peculiar to articles
Obtained
Not Obtained
A blue flower
*Blue a flower
A nice nap
*Nice a nap
*A your car
*Your a car
*A my pencil
*My a pencil
Rule:
B.
NP -7.
Art + M + N
(Not:
NP --7 M + art + N)
Privileges peculiar to demonstrative pronouns
Not Obtained
Obtained
*That a horse
*A that horse
*That a blue flower
*A that blue flower
* Blue a that flower
Rule:
NP --7 Dem + Art + M + N
*Ungrammatical in adult English
�FIGURE II
Chomskian Phrase Markers
"Surface Structure"
Sentence (S)
~
Subject
(Noun Phrase)
Predicate
/~
/~
Noun
.
. Adjective
t
.Invisible
t
God
Verb
Object
\
the visible world
created
"Deep Structure"
Sentence (S)
·~
1~
Predicate
Subject
/\
God
/~
Object
Verb
S
/l~
Subject
J,
God
Copula
J
is
Pred . Adj.
-}
invisible
J
Created
l~ S
//~
Subject Copula Pred.
the world
J..
the world
"' .
is
\.
Adj.
visible
�FIGURE III
"They are boring Students ... :
Two Interpretations
Interpretation A
Sentence
Predicate ,
Subject
~ Nominative
Predicate
j
I
Verb
I
I
Adjective
Copula
Pronoun
students
boring
are
They
\
J
I
j
~Noun
Interpretation B
Sentence
/~
Predicate
subject
I~
verb
Pronoun
j
They
Object
I~
Progressive
Aux
j
are
\
boring
\
Noun
\
students
�TABLE VIII
Evidence For "Deep" Structure
Surface structures the same,
deep structure different:
John is eager to please.
{ John is easy to please.
Surface structures different,
Recently seventeen elephants
trampled on my summer house.
deep structures the same:
My summer home was recently
trampled on by seventeen elephants.
Visual patterns recognized as similar,
although no point-to-point correspondence exists between them.
--
-7
~-
�TABLE IX
Some Etymologies
_/7
gum an
(Germanic)
dhghem
------------~----------.-:.-gumen
'
(IndoEuropean)
(Old English)
= "earth"
= "man"
homo, humanitas ·
(Latin)
humus
(Latin)
="mould", "ground"
chthon
(Greek)
= "earth"
human
(English)
humus
(English)
chthonic ----,...autochthonous
(English)
= "fromthe earth
itself"
= . "of the earth"
vir---(Latin)
= "man"
--->- virile
{English)
wiros
(IndoEuropean)
= "man"
we.r
(Germanic,
Old English)
="man", "the~
strong one"
~
weorold ~ world
(AngloSaxon)
(English)
= "age of man",
"world"
alt, old
(AngloSaxon)
= "age"
�TABLE X
I
Blood relations
overemphasized
II
IV
III
Blood relations
underemphasized
Chthonic monsters
that would not
permit men to live
are slain by men
Difficulties in
walking straight
and standing
upright
Cadmus seeks
his sister
Europa,
ravished by Zeus
Cadmus kills
the dragon
The Spa rti (the
sown dragon's
teeth) kill one
another
Labdacus (Laius's
father) = "lame"
Laius (Oedipus' s
father) =
"left-sided"
Oedipus kills
his father,
Laius
Oedipus kills
the Sphinx
Oedipus "swollen-foot"
Oedipus marries
his mother,
Jocasta
Eteocles and
Polyneices, brothers,
kill one another
Antigone buries
her brother,
Polyneices,
despite
prohibition
Column I
Column II .. Column IV
Column III
�Bibliography
(In the preparation of this lecture I made use of the following books: the book
by E. H. Lenneberg, as well as the book edited by him, was particularly useful.)
Benveniste, Emile, Problems in General Linguisitcs (Coral Gables, Fla.: University
of Miami Press, 1971)
.,
Chomsky, Noam, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1965)
-------------, Cartesian Linguistics (New York:
-------------
Language and Mind (New York:
Harper & Row, 1966)
Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1968)
CrYstal, David, Linguistics (Penguin, 1971)
Frisch, Karl von, The Dance Langua ge and Orientation of Bees (Cambridge, Mass.
Belknap Press of Harvard, 1967)
Goldstein, Kurt, Language and Language Disturbances (New York, 1948)
Lenneberg, E. H., The Biological Foundations for Language (New York:
& Sons, 1967)
John Wiley
Lenneberg, E. H. (ed.), New Directions in the Study of Language (Cambridge, Mass.:
M. I. T. Press, 1966)
Lindauer, Martin, Communication Among Social Bees (New York:
Lyons, John, Noam Chomsky (New York:
Atheneum, 1967)
Viking Press, 1970)
Saussure, Ferdinand de, Course in General Linguistics (ed. Bally & Sechehaye; tr.
Baskin; New York: 1959)
Skinner, B. F., Verbal Behavior (New York:
Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1957)
�
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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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34 pages
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<em>Homo loquens</em> from a biological standpoint
Description
An account of the resource
Typescript of a lecture given on September 19, 1975 by Curtis Wilson as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
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Wilson, Curtis
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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1975-09-19
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pdf
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English
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lec Wilson 1975-09-12
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<a title="Sound recording" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3670">Sound recording</a>
Deans
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/a715ac5c895949d67ad8e9052c322938.mp3
d0ee594456840281f563f2772ece653d
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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formallectureseriesannapolis
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<em>Homo loquens</em><span> from a biological standpoint</span>
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An account of the resource
Audio recording of a lecture given on September 19, 1975 by Curtis Wilson as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
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Annapolis, MD
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1975-09-19
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lec Wilson 1975-09-19
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<a title="Typescript" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3652">Typescript</a>
Deans
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/d3c8853da4ea88c12ca2842ede8c34fe.pdf
b2f2d4ec5e5d663b296189b78ab1a7d3
PDF Text
Text
~
ST
JoHN's Co LLE GE
ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND 21 404
FouN oLo IW6 As KING W i LLI AM's ScHOOL
Lecture Schedule 1 975 -76
Sept . 1 2, 1975
Curtis Wilson, Dean
St. John's College Annapolis
Homo loquens from a Biological
Standpoint
Sept. 19
The App l e Hill Chamber Players
Concert
Sept. 26
Charles Bell, Tutor
St. John'sCollege, Santa Fe
Rome
Oct. 3
Laurence Richardson
Duke University
Pompeii
Oct. 1 0
Douglas Allanbrook, Tutor
St. John ' s College, Annapolis
Power and Grace
Oct. 17
Long Weekend
No Lecture
Oct. 24
Alumni Weekend
Tom Simpson
St. John's College, Santa Fe
Newton and the Libera l Arts
Oct. 31
Wolfgang Lederer
How One Cures the Soul
Nov . 7
All College Seminar
No Lecture
Nov. 14
Douglas Allanbrook, Tutor
St. John ' s College, Annapolis
Concert
Nov . 16
James Ack erman
Fogg Art Museum
Harvard University
Miche langelo's Religion
Nov. 2 1
Duane Rumbaugh, Chairman
Dept . Psychology
Georgia State University
The Learning of Language
by The Chimpanzee
Nov. 28
Thanksgiving
No Lecture
Dec . 5
King William Players
Play
Dec . 12
Mortimer Adler
Institute for Phi losophical
Research
The American Testament
Jan. 9, 1976
Robert L. Spaeth, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
The Connection of Physical Science
With Philosophy and Re l igi on in
the Thought of Sir Arthur Eddington
Jan . 16
Howard Fisher , Tutor
St. John ' s College, Annapolis
The Great Electrical Philosopher
T[L[I'HONE 301 -l61- 2"371
�Page 2
Lecture 1975-76
Father Colman Barry, Dean
Catholic University
The Church Divided:
Question
George Anastaplo
Rosary College
Piety, Prudence and the
Mayflower Compact
Feb. 3
Joseph Tydings
Cancelled
Feb. 6
Long Weekend
No Lecture
Feb. 13
Annapolis Brass Quintet
Concert
Feb. 15
Joseph Alsop
Medici Art Collecting in the
15th Century
Feb. 20
Robert A. Goldwin
Special Consultant to the
President
Of Men and Angels:
In Search
for Morality in the Constitution
Feb. 27
Steven Crockett, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
Webern, Symmetry, and Time
March 5
Herbert Storing
University of Chicago
The Founders' Views on Slavery
March 14-29
Spring Vacation
No Lecture
April 2
Ray Williamson, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
How Far is Up (On the Size of
the Universe)
April 9
Leonard Lutwack
University of Maryland
The American and His Land:
The Literary Record
April 13
Charles Segal
Brown University
Euripides' Bacchae
April 23
Max Isenbergh
University of Maryland
School of Law
A Serious Citizen's Guide to
Reading the Constitution and
Judging the Supreme Court
April 30
Eva T. H. Brann, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
The Declaration of Independence
May 5
Reality
No Lecture
May 14
Paul Tobias
Cellist
May 16
(Sun)
Thomas 0 'Brien
Keats and Nature
May 21
Benjamin Milner, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
Jan. 23
Jan.
30
A
�
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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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2 pages
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paper
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Office of the Dean
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Lecture Schedule 1975-76
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1975-1976
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Schedule of lectures and concerts for the 1975-1976 Academic Year.
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Lecture Schedule 1975-1976
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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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September 12, 1975. Wilson, Curtis. <a title="Homo loquens from a biological standpoint" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3652"><em>Homo loquens</em> from a biological standpoint</a> (typescript)
September 12, 1975. Wilson, Curtis. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3670" title="Homo loquens from a biological standpoint"><em>Homo loquens</em> from a biological standpoint</a> (audio)
Contributor
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Wilson, Curtis
Bell, Charles
Richardson, Laurence
Allanbrook, Douglas
Lederer, Wolfgang, 1912-2003
Ackerman, James
Rumbaugh, Duane M., 1929-
Adler, Mortimer Jerome, 1902-2001
Spaeth, Robert L.
Fisher, Howard
Barry, Fr. Colman
Anastaplo, George, 1925-2014
Tydings, Joseph D. (Joseph Davies), 1928-
Alsop, Joseph, 1910-1989
Goldwin, Robert A., 1922-2010
Crockett, Steven
Storing, Herbert J., 1928-
Williamson, Ray
Lutwack, Leonard, 1917-2008
Segal, Charles
Isenbergh, Max
Brann, Eva T. H.
Tobias, Paul
O'Brien, Thomas
Milner, Benjamin
King William Players
Friday night lecture
Lecture schedule
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/e161b1902496189185006af499e784f4.mp3
f646d177f8618ed933cedaa7063b3641
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 Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
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Bib # 10072
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On knowing how and knowing what
Description
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on September 17, 1976 by Curtis Wilson as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
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Wilson, Curtis
Coverage
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Annapolis, MD
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1976-09-17
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sound
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mp3
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<a title="Typescript" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3653">Typescript</a>
Deans
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/6d99d1fd78293c9f087e4d115903549e.pdf
df5feafbf57724224be37971ccc7b036
PDF Text
Text
On RnoWfng Ho
ond
1U1oWin~
Wboi
[urtt·s A. Wilson
�ON KNOWING HOW AND KNOWING WHAT
Curtis A. Wilson
My lecture this evening concerns the relation between making and
knowing; between skill or craft or art--the Greeks called it techne--and
contemplative knowledge; between knowing how and knowing what.
I begin
by attempting to sketch, roughly, three different, successive ways in
which this relation has been lived or thought about .
First, a primitive stage, paleolithic, pre-agricultural. Certain
relics of it, both living and non-living, have persisted into our ti.me and
world. Among the relics are, first of all, skeletal remains and tools,
implements.
Primitive humans were tool-makers.
It was an amateur French
geologist and antiquary , Boucher de Perthes, who in the 1840's and 50's
first began to identify the chipped flint tools of the Old Stone Age, and to
defend them for what they were before his disbelieving contemporaries.
Then , since the 1920's, evidence has accumulated that humans were toolmakers even before they were human , that is , before they assumed the physical
form of present-day Homo sapiens .
It was not the brain that came first,
but upright posture and the hand . When the hominid precursors of the hlUllan
race came down out of the trees and walked upright upon the plains, they
thereby freed their fingers and opposable thumbs for new uses, for the
making and deployment of tools , weapons, utensils. The australopithecines
of South Africa, with only 500 cubic centimeters of brain, no more than a
chimpanzee or gorilla, were already walking erect and using stone implements.
The more recently discovered remains of Homo habilis, "handy man", as his
discoverers named him, show a brain of 800 cc , still not the normal size
for Homo sapiens , which is 1200 to 1500 cc; but Homo habilis is already, 3
and 3/4 million years ago according to Mary Leakey ' s r ecent find, an
upright -walking tool-maker. The available evidence thus goes to show that
the freeing of the hands for tool- making and tool-use preceded most human
evolutionary brain enlargement . It looks as though the cerebral enlargement
and the increasingly skillful use of the hands went together, the two
developments reinforcing each other and yielding evolutionary advantage to
the brainiest and handiest who were, so we can plausibly guess, the same .
The stone-age humans, then, came provided with the bodily and psychic
equipment for seeing , grasping , and handling objects . We can guess that they
were provided also with an exceptional capacity for learning. Coordination
of hand and eye in handling objects , ability to learn new ways--these were
what made possible the use of sticks and stones as extensions of human
limbs . But probably we are thinking so far only of individual capacities ;
the true acquisition of a kind of tool by a group of hominids or humans
implies that the making and using of it can be taught and learned , and so
transmitted by tradition. There would have to be a continuing society,
capable of transmitting traditi on. And this is exactly what the archeological
�2
record reveals--continuity of traditions of tool production , lasting through
millenia, with but minor c~anges.
Tool production was socially controlled. The implements of each
type are practically identical in any given culture, over long periods and
large areas. The hand-axes of figure 1, for instance, were shaped by a
fairly elaborate process of chipping , a process that would take any one
of us a pretty long time to learn . The hand-axe is believed to have been a
general purpose tool, used.mainly for cutting and scraping, as in skinning
game. It seems to have been the predominant tool in the equipment of the
early Stone-Age hunters. Its production and use started in southern Africa
about a half million yearsago , and then spread northward through Africa
and Asia Minor and Europe over a period of several hundred thousand years,
with only minor variations and improvements in technique. Hand-axes dug
up at sites as wide ly separated as the Cape of Good Hope and London are
indistinguishable except for their being made of different types of rock.
The traditional character of Stone-Age craft is also represented by
the paintings made by Upper Paleol i thic man in a hundred caves or so of
southern France and northern Spain (figures 2 and 3). These were started
about 30,000 years ago and were kept up for 20,000 years, with increasing
refinement and detail and t:i:ueness to what is seen .
The paintings were painted, of course , by lamplight and from memory.
The ordering of the paintings within the caves--bison, horses, and oxen in
the central chambers; deer, manunoth, and ibex in outer areas ; rhinoceros,
lion, and bear in the farthest recesses--seems to be fairly constant,
suggesting tradition-controlled practices. Among the paintings are occasional
drawings of men dressed in the skins, horns , and tails of various animals,
much in the manner of the medicine men or shamans in North American Indian
tribes. This suggests a connection between the paintings and ritual magic,
perhaps the preparation for the hunt.
But p rehistoric skeletons and artifacts reveal very little indeed
as to how the primitive looked out upon his world, and viewed his own role
within it . There is another kind of evidence, the whole set of observations of ethnologists on pre-literate, stone-age peoples surviving into the
present or recent past. To what extent these peoples have remained untouched
by civilizations, past or present , may be uncertain, but certain characteristics
appear to be common . The human communities are small, going to several
hundred at most; within them , everyone knows everyone else. They are selfcontained economically. There are no fUll-time specialists; even the job
of shaman is a part-time one; for everyone must help with the task of food
getting. The wanen, to be sure , have different roles from the men, seedgathering, for instance , instead of hunting. The members intermarry and
have. a strong sense of solidarity. They think their own ways better than
those of others. The Bakouris in central Brazil, for instance, have one
and the same word for "we", "our", and "good", and another for "not we",
"bad" , "unhealthy" • Men and womer. within the group are s ef~n as persons, not
�3
as parts of mechanical operations . Groupings of people depend on status
and role, not on mere practical usefulness. However pressing or demanding
the business of survival, the focus is not on mere individual survival,
but on the kinship unit, the personal nexus that joins human being, society,
and nature in an endless round of birth, growth, decay, and rebirth .
The
central meaning of things lies in the linking of the deceased to the living
and the yet unborn . The moral and sacred order predominates over the merely
technical . The useful arts , with all the know-how they involve, are not
isolated as merely useful or artful, but like an intense sport or dance or
ceremony , form part of the sacred round .
As for knowledge, theory conceived as aiming at universal validity ,
it is absent . There is nothing for it to be of. There is no concept of
a nature within which things happen according to regular, impersonal,
cause-and-effect sequences . Natural events are interpreted as part of the
communal life. Nature is though of as replete with spirits, acting by
social norms which can be violated only at risk of retribution . The reg u lar ity of occurr ences remains in the background, does not become a theme .
The primitive human is alerted only if the event is a misfortune, or otherwise emotionally priv ileged ; and then he traces it to an evil spell, or
the enmity of a spirit , or a neglected ritual . But even here there is n o
rule-like r egulari ty to follow in the interpretation . Everything is particular:
this tree , this river , this animal, this man, this spirit. And spirits are
capricious . A person may indeed attempt to exercise spiritual power ov er
spirits ; if he succeeds , he is a shaman, that is , a technician of the spirit .
But woe to him who , having gained status as a shaman, fails in confrontation
with another shaman t o win the contest in the exercise of shamanistic
power ; shame , e x ile , possible insanity await him.
The shaman's power i s
not founded in stable wisdom ; its exercise is a risky affair.
Meanwhile , primitive consciousness is filled with knowledge, knowledge
connected always in the most intimate way with know-how; knowledge in the mode
of acquaintance with kinds of thing , kinds of material, kinds of processhow to coax fire into the hearth , how to use tension and twist to send the
arrow hurtling through the air , and so on . Things, materials, and processes are silently recognized in their generic characters, and these
recognitions form the tacit background for all the activities of everyday
life . But the theoretical knower, he who would bring these things forward
out of their tacitness into lucidity and articulation, has not yet appeared .
Second phase . This begins with the invention of agriculture.
Knowledge and utilization of the reproductive cycle of plants brings a
new kind of independence of external nature, a new set of possibilities
and problems .
Human life ceases to be parasitic upon the animals and plants
that nature happens to provide . Foresight and planning must now extend
through one annual cycle to the next . New and quite different techniques
replace the old:
the sowing of seed, hoeing, reaping, threshing, storing,
grinding, baking, brewing . Permanent settlements become possible; people
now live in villages. Within a relatively short span of time, considering
�4
the hundreds of thousands of years that paleolithic tribes had wandered
the earth, within a very few thousand years; between8000and 3000 B.C., the
agricultural revolution passes into the urban revolution. In the river
valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates, the Nile, and the Indus, that which
we call civilization first emerges.
Civilization means, in the first place, a number of things added
to society: a marketplace, writing, a city, public control of irrigation,
public works. Different civilizations develop away from the forms of folk
society in different ways, but in all, there are certain features distinguishing them from primitive, folk conmunities. Kinship ceases to be the basis
for the organization of society, and is replaced by residence. In other
words, the state has come to be. As villages ball up into towns, and towns
into cities, the members of society come face to face with diversity of
beliefs and customs. Personal relations are replaced by impersonal, economic,
utilitarian ones . Crafts become full-time occupations, often engaged in
under conditions of lowly servitude . The old moral orders may persist in
greater or lesser degree, but they necessarily suffer in the midst of recognized diversity. The conmon result is a state cult that draws int o
itself various elements of the old cults, in the effort to gain general
acquiescence.
Already there are those who are taking in hand the management of the moral order; these are the priests . Probably also there are
scribes , those who master the calculative and notational skills required
for the construction projects of the state and for the keeping of records.
In brief, a literate elite has come to be, which separates itself from the
world of the rural farmer and the town craftsman. The separation has been
said to be fatal to science. But the literate elite, narrow-minded and
self-serving though it often may be, has the functi on of maintaining the
lore of mathematics and astronomy and the calendar. In Babylonia, between
the 6th and 3rd century B.C., the sophistication of mathematical procedure
and the accuracy of astronomical prediction became astounding.
Still, this was not science in our sense. Egyptian and Babylonian
mathematics had nothing to do with ideas, or, in particular, with the idea
of nature. At least in the west, this idea of an immanent order in the
universe, independent of any arbitrary will, was first clearly articulated
by certain wise men, legislators and merchant princes of the 7th and 6th
centuries in the canmercial republics that the Greeks established along
the coast of Asia Minor. It is worth noting that these wise men express
themselves in the language of the administration of justice and of commercial
or monetary exchange. Anaximander puts it thus:
That from which all things are born is also the cause of their
coming to an end, as is meet, f or they pay reparations and atonement
to each other for their mutual injustice in the order of time.
And a century later Heracleitus is saying:
All things may be reduced to fire, and fire to all things, just
as all goods may be turned into gold and gold into all goods.
�5
The second part of the statement refers to coinage, which was invented
about 610 B.C. in Lydia. So human processes and artifacts are used to
express the nature of nature.
It is a man fran Ionia, too, who first challenges the popular
and Homeric notion that the arts were given to men by the gods from the
beginning. "The gods," says Xenophanes, "did not reveal to man all things
from the beginning, but men through their own search find in the course
of time that which i s better." And Anaxagoras says: it is because man
has hands that he became wiser than the brutes. Later on, the pre-history
of the human race becomes a theme for the Sophists. Among the Greek thinkers
generally , beginning with the Ionian philosophers and continuing down to
Aristotle, the theories differ in detail and emphasis, but in all of them
the past is viewed as the history of the progressive humanization of the
animal man through the invention of the arts.
Now of all the Greek discussions of the arts, the one tnat will
have the most influence in later times, and against which the initiators
of modern science will stage their revolt, is the Aristotelian account.
According to Aristotle, art imitates or completes nature . This formula
undoubtedly has more than one meaning and application. One way in which the
arts complete nature is in giving rise to leisure, which frees humans for
what Aristotle regards as their highest function, the pursuit of knowledge
or science. Aristotle says:
As more arts were invented, and some were directed to the necessities
of life, others to recreation, the inventors of the latter were
natur ally always regarded as wiser than the inventors of the former,
because their branches of knowledge did not aim at utility. Hence
when all such inventions were already established, the sciences
which do not aim at giving pleasure or at the necessities of life
were discovered, and first in the places where men first began to
have leisure.
But how does art imitate nature?
is as follows .
I think the fundamental meaning
Things come to be, Aristotle says (and he is quoting a common view),
either by nature or art or chance. Chance is an incidental cause; it means
that something comes to be that could have come to be by design, but it
occurred in fact by accident. Nature and art, on the other hand, are similar
to one another, and unlike chance, in that each of them acts for an end.
That nature acts for an end is most obvious, Aristotle says,
in animals other than man: they make things neither by art nor
after inquiry or deliveration. Wherefore people discuss whether
it is by intelligence or by some other faculty that these
�6
creatures work,--spiders, ants, and the like. By gradual
advance in this direction we come to see clearly that in plants
too that is produced which is conducive to the end ••• If then it is
both by nature and for an end that the swallow makes its nest and
the spider its web, and plants grow leaves for the sake of the
fruit and send their roots down (not up) for the sake of nourishment, it is plain than this kind of cause is operative in ~hings which
come to be and are by nature.
Both art and nature act for the sake of an end , but they differ
in that nature is an internal principle of motion or change, in that in
which it acts, whereas art r esides essentially in a subject distinct from
the material on which it acts. Art is characterized by a form or idea
which is present in the soul of an intelligent being and is used to direct
his activity; and this form is the form of the artifact or artful result
that the artist or artificer aims to realize in the material. The arts
are thus principles of change belonging to an exterior agent, like the idea
of health in the physician which causes outside of itself the physical
health in the patient . Nature is also a form, but is internal to the
natural thing; it is like the doctor doctoring himself. The tree grows
by an internal principle, the house is built by the external agency of
the builder.
Now art is closer and more familiar to us than nature, for it is
that by which we act on the world around us . It therefore serves Aristotle
as a precious intermediary for the explanation of what nature is. Nature
is less easily knowable to us than art, yet it is knowable--so Aristotle
claims. To know the nature of a thing, according to Aristotle, we must grasp
the what of it, its being-what-it-is. We can do this, he says, by means
of the definition. Through the verbal formula of the definition the intellect
knows, has present to it, the what of a class of things, say swallows,
spiders, or trees. This is undemonstrable but nevertheless graspable knowledge, for according to Aristotle, there are forms in things which are
knowable. The knowing of them constitutes the starting point for all further
knowledge claiming universal validity.
Third phase. The founders of modern science rejected Aristotle's
claim, and along with it they rejected the notion of art as imitating
nature . They begin, on the contrary, with the assertion that, as between
the products of nature and the products of art, there is .!!£essential
difference. As Francis Bacon puts it, "men ought ... to be firmly persuaded
that the artificial does not differ from the natural in form or essence . •. "
Knowledge canes to be identified with making , cognition with construction.
"We know the true causes only of those things that we can build with our
own hands or intellect," says Mersenne in the 1620's .
"To men is granted
knowledge only of things whose generation depends upon their own judgement,"
says Hobbes in the 1640's. Meanwhile, there is a reappraisal of the practices,
operations, and know-how of the arts called mechanical. Says Galileo:
�7
I think that antiquity had very good reason to enumerate the first
inventors of the noble arts among the gods, seeing that the cormnon
intellects have so little curiosity .... The application to great
invention moved by small hints, and the thinking that under a •••
childish appearance admirable arts may be hidden is not the part
of a trivial but of a super-human spirit.
In the new way of looking at things, it is the machine which serves
as the model of what can be understood and explained. What is a machine?
That may not be so easy to say. The word "machine", derives from the Greek
m~chane, which means a contrivance for doing something, an expedient, or a
remedy against ills. In antiquity the word in both Greek and Latin came
to be applied particularly to devices for lifting weights , levers, pulleys,
and the like. Also , in Lucretius' poem, the word machina is applied to
the enti re world in the phrase machina mundi, and this phrase reappears
in Christian writers of the middle ages, with perhaps the connotation that
the world is something made. But the machine that chiefly served as model
and inspiration in the new science of the 17th century was a particular
machine, invented sc;me three centuries before: the weight-driven or
mechanical clock.
Kepler,who in 1604 first introduced detailed mechanism into the
theory of the heavens, wrote at the time:
At one time I believed that the cause that moved the planets
was a soul .•. I now affirm that the machine of the universe is similar
not to a divine animated being, but to a clock •.• and in it all
the various movements depend upon a simple active material force ,
in the same manner that all the movements of the clock are due
to the moving we ight.
A few years later, Descartes extends the metaphor to nature as a whole.
There is no difference (he says) between the machines built by
artisans and the diverse bodies that nature alone composes except
the following: the effects of the machine depend solely upon the
action of pipes or springs and other instruments which for the
reason that they must have some proportion to the hands of those
who build them are always so big that their figures and their motions
appear visible, whereas the pipes or springs that produce natural
effects are generally too small to be perceived by our senses.
It was on the analogy of clocks and mills that Descartes proposed to
account for the functioning of all animals as well as the functioning of
the human body. Controversy over Descartes' view of animals as machines
provoked one controversialist to insist that "every Cartesian, in order
to be consistent, should therefore affirm, with the same seriousness
with which he affirms it with respect .to beasts, that the other human
beings who coexist with him in the world are machines." The claim that
human beings are simply machines, and not in need of the immaterial rational
�8
souls with which Descartes had still seen fit to endow them, is at length
asserted gleefully in the 1740's by Lamettrie, who concludes that life
is solely for pleasure, becomes enormously corpulent and dies of indigestion
at the court of Frederick the Great. But it is an altogether serious claim
that Jacques Monod makes, in his recent book Chance and Necessity, when
he affirms that all living things are chemical machines. In this pronouncement, I take him to be espousing the vast program of research that is
molecular genetics.
I now turn to the consideration of certain machines. I shall try
to make evident what makes them tick, what principles are involved . Later
I shall return to the relation between knowing how and knowing what. I
beqin with the so-called mechanical clock , the great paradigm of the
17th century revolutionaries of science.
Instruments for keeping track of the daily passage of time have
been known since very ancient times: wax candles and hemp ropes, certain
lengths of which were supposed to burn in a definite time; sundials;
sand-clocks; and especially water-clocks, which were in use in early
Egyptian civilization and which from Alexandrian times, the third century
B.C., onward, often assumed very elaborate forms, with special jackwork actuating puppetry to mark the passage of the hours. But the clock
called mechanical was invented about A.D. 1300. See figure 4.
What you see here is an alarm clock of about 1400 frc:m a monastery
It rings the bell at settable times, and since the hand
around the face in 16 hours , which is exactly the length of the
winter night in Nuremberg, the presumption is that it was used
the sexton, so that he might in turn call the monks to read their
offices.
in Nuremberg.
travels
longes t
to wake
nightly
Before going to the heart of the mechanism, let me say a few words
about the gearing, which transmits measured amounts of rotational motion
from one part of the apparatus to another. There is nothing novel about
gear wheels in A.D. 1300. Gearing was used in the windmill, (see figur e 5) ,
to change from a vertical plane of rotation to a horizontal plane of rotation;
the windmill of this type was invented in the late 12th century, the earlies t
sure date for one being 1185, in Yorkshire . Twelve centuries earlier,
similar gearing was already being used in water wheels (see figure 6) ,
invented apparently in the first century B.C. But even more elaborate
gearing was being made as early as the 3rd century B.C., by Archimedes
and others, for calendrical computing machines and planetar ia . In 1900
the sunken wreck of a Roman ship was found in the Aegean Sea by sponge
divers; it has been dated to about 80 B.C. It contained, along with a lot
of statuary, presumably destined for sale to the upper fluffy duff of Rome
and other Italian cities, a peculiar mechanism of iron, badly rusted
(see figure 7). Only in 1972, with the aid of x-radiography, was sense
made of it; its gear ratios, it turns out, are based on astronomical constants
well-known in antiquity. It is a calendrical cc:mputer, which was turned
�9
by hand, in order to find out where the sun, moon, and planets would be
at giv en times . Similar types of gearing must have been used in a
mechanism described by Cicero . He writes:
••. Whe n Ar chi me de s fastened on a g lobe the movements of moon,
sun, and five wandering stars , he , j ust like P l a t o' s God who bu ilt
the world in the Timaeus , made one r e v olution of the s ph e r e control
several movements utterly unlike i n s l owness and swiftness. Now
if in this wor ld of ours phenome na c annot take place without
th e act of God, neither could Archimedes have reproduced the
same movements upon a g l obe wi thout divine genius .
There is enough evide nc e to suggest a long traditicn of geared calendar
work and planetaria, starting with Arch imedes and his contemporaries,
transmitted through Islam to the West, and c ulminating in a number of clockdriven planetaria constructed in the midd l e of the 14th century in Europe.
As far as the gear-work is concerned, the c lock seems to come into being
fully-fledged as a "fallen angel from the world of astronomy". The
gear-work is one source of the clock, deriving from the heavens, but it
still needs a terrestrial heart. By this I intend that which makes it,
literally, tick. Look once more at figure 4.
On the left hand, at the top, you see a bell; our word "clock"
comes from the French word "cloche" meaning bell. Below the bel l , and
slightly to the left, you see a wheel shaped something like a crown, and
therefore called a crown wheel. Around its axle is wound a cord, which goes
to a weight that you cannot see. Suspended by a string in front of the
crown wheel is a vertical rod, called the verge, and at the top of it is
rigidly attached a bell clapper. The way thi s bell-ringing mechanism works
will be clearer in a moment. Now this bell-ringing apparatus, it seems,
was first used just by itself. You released a catch, the weight began to
fall, the crown wheel to turn, and the bell to be hammered by the clapper
at the top of the verge. out of one motion, the releasing of the catch, you
got several motions, the bell rung several times: a helpful gadget for
a sleepy or lazy bell-ringer.
But on the right you see another crown wheel, with another verge
suspended in front of it, and atop the verge, a horizontal bar with weights
on it, called the foliot, meaning "crazy dancer ". The invention of the
weight-driven clock consisted in seeing that the mechanism of the bellringing gadget, here on the left, could be used for a quite different
purpose, to solve the problem of making a clock go by means of a weight.
What is that prob lem? In 1271 Robert the Englishman wrote: "clockmakers
are trying to make a wheel that will accomplish a comp lete revo lution
each day, but they cannot quite pe rfect their work." The difficulty was
that the weight as it falls tends to accelerate, and so to make the clock
go faster and faster . One could of course use a brake or some form of
friction to keep the weight fall i ng at a constant rate, but very qui ckly
the rubbing surfaces would wear smooth , so tha t the speed of the clock
�10 .
would increase. The invented solution was what is called an escapement:
in the case of the 14th century clock, it is a verge and foliot escapement . We shall see best how it works by turning to a simplified diagram ;
see figure 8.
Here the gear work has been eliminated for simplicity's sake,
and the crown wheel has been replaced by a wheel with projecting pegs ;
both may be called 'scape or escape wheels . The previous picture did not
show clearly the pallets or little plates that project from the verge
.above and below, in such a way as to mesh with the indentations i n the
' scape wheel .
Now suppo se the ' scape wheel moving in the di r ection of
t he arrow. The peg at t he top of t he wheel is j u s t striki ng the upper
p a llet. The motion of the wheel , and hence of the descending weigh t , is
momentari l y c h eck e d by t he inertia of the system composed o f verge , foliot ,
and the weight s o n the f ol i ot . Then the driv i n g weight slowly acce l e r ates
this system till the peg has pus h e d the t op p al l e t out o f the wa y, and
has set the verge and foliot swinging c ounterclockwise as seen from abo ve.
For a brief moment the driving weight can fal l freely. But now the swing
of the verge and foliot brings the bottom pallet between the pegs of the
scape wheel; notice that the bottom pallet proje c ts from the verge in a
different direction, something over 90° away from the direction of the
top pallet . Almost immediately, the peg at the bottom of the wheel strikes
the lower pallet. Now this peg at the bottom of the wheel has to be moving
in the opposite direction from the peg at the top of the wheel, just because
of the way wheels are. Hence the counterclockwise swing of verge and foliot
is stopped, and the fall of the driving weight slowed again, until the verge
and foliot are slowly accelerated into a clockwise rotation. Thus the
fall of the driving weight is repeatedly interrupted by being compelled
regularly to reverse the motion of the verge and foliot with weights.
This
is an instance of what is nowadays called negative feedback:
a process
produces an effect that slows down and thus regulates that very process.
By means of it, the average overall motion of the weight, and hence of th e
clock, is rendere d uniform.
So originated th e weight-drive n clock, throug h the invention
of the escapement, which is literally what make s the clock tick. And this
clock, suddenly, toward the midd l e of the 14th c entury, s e ized t he
imagination of the burghers and princes of Eur ope. Towns vied wi t h towns
t o have in church or townhal l the mos t elaborate set o f p l anets whe el ing ,
cocks crowing, angels trump eting, and apos t le s, k i ngs , and p r ophets ma rching
and counterrnarchi ng to the ho urly b oomi n g of th e b e l ls . And also i n th e
middle of t h e 1 4th century , Nicole Oresme , schoolman , bishop , adv iser to
the kin g of France , first enunciated the metaphor of the universe, or at
least the supra-lunar part of it, as a vast mechanical clock--a metaphor
that would later be e x tended to the whole world and become a metaphysics.
The fascination was with the mechanical marvel of the thing, with
automatic, rhythmically self-acting machinery. Earlier I evaded the problem
�11
of defining the word machine. We need distinctions here, and with the
invention of the clock , the automatic machine which is no longer a tool
in the sense of a prosthetic instrument or extension of human limbs, I
suggest we would do well to confine the term machine to devices that
store energy , then release it in determinate ways, under various constraints
and feedback mechanisms, so that particular purposes are accomplished. I
should note that this term energy achieved its pres ent-day sense only a
litt le over 100 years ago; I shall come back to the problem of its meaning.
By the constraints the stored energy is compelled to bring about certain
determinate motions, either desired in themselves , as in the clock, or
for the work they can accomplish. The criterion of a good machine is
completeness of constraint: the parts of the machine should so connect
as to eliminate all but the desired motions.
By this criterion, the 14th century clock was not very good , and
in fact it needed a little old lady in a black smock to re-set it every
day. The v erge and foliot escapement in particular , must be criticized
because its swing is stopped only by an impact between the pallets and
the teeth of the crown wheel, and every such impact brings with it a
recoil- - a source of extr a friction, wear and tear, inaccuracy . Moreover,
the swing of the verge and foliot has no proper period of its own; its
temporal span depends simply on the successive impulses that it receives,
which are unlikely to be exactly equal.
Improvements came . From the 14th century onwards, the craft of
clockrnaking begins to flourish, to develop into skille d instrume nt-making,
a craft ca:nbining mathematical know-how wi th expertness at the lathe and
gear-cutting machine . The clockmakers and their offspring, the instrument-makers , will have a very great deal to do with the scientific and
indus trial r e volutions of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Already in
t he 16th century they were producing tiny spring-actuated watches. But the
difficulty about the verge and foliot escapement is met only in the 17th
century, with two new inventions.
The first of these inventions i s Galileo ' s and Huygens' replacement of the foliot by the pendulum; see figure 9 . The verge is shown at
the top of the drawing; it is now horizontal, at right angles to the pendulum
to which it is rigidly attached . The advantage of the pendulum is that
it has an almost constant, natural period of swing ; the period approaches
more nearly to constancy as the amplitude of swing is diminished. This
clock is much more accurate than a verge and foliot clock, but unfortunately
the verge with its pallets required a 40° swing to clear the teeth of
the crown wheel, and with so l arge a swing, slight differences in amplitude
make for noticeable differences in period.
The second invention reduces the angle of swing; see figure 10.
This i s the anchor escapement, invented apparently by Wm. Clement about
1670. Only part of the 'scape wheel is shown here. The bent lever above
carries the pallets, and rotates from side to side on an axle that is
rigidly atta8hed to the pendulum's fulcrum. The arc of swing has now been
reduced to 3 or 4°. With this improvement, and continued refinement of all
�12
moving metal parts to reduce recoil and friction, 18th century clocks could
be made that deviated from their average rate by no more than 1/10 second
per day.
Reduction of friction , elimination of impact and recoil, achievement of thesmoothest working and greatest efficiency--these are machineshop matters. But the concern with them, we shall see, leads to important
conclusions : that the universe is not an eternal clock, and that change,
not locomotion, is fundamental . This brings me to the second machine I
shall examine, the steam engine. ·
The first practically successful steam engine was built by a provincial iron-monger, Thomas Newcomen , between 1702 and 1712. There had
been various previou s efforts to use the expansive force of steam, some
of them going back to Hellenistic times . The trouble with these devices
was that they did not develop much power . And this they did not do b e cause the metallurgy was not available to make boilers and pipe joints that
would hold steam at high pressure . A successful steam e n gine built around
1700 had to us e low pressure steam . The solution was , to use it in
conjunction with the weight of the atmosphere , which had been discovered
by Torricelli and Pascal a half century before. We do not know how
Newcornen came by his ideas , but in any case, his engine was an atmospheric
engine . See figure 11.
This is the 1712 version of Newcomen ' s engine , hooked up for
pumping water fran a mine, the main u se to which his engine was put .Below
on the right is the boiler, just beneath the piston cylinder . When steam
is admitted to the cylinder, the piston rises to the top, mainly because
of the weight of the pump rod hanging from the other end of the rocking
beam. Next, the connection between boiler and cylinder is closed, and
cold water is sprayed into the cylinder , condensing the steam and so producing a partial vacuum . This allows the atmospheric pressure , acting on
top of the piston , to force it back to the bottan of the cylinder, and so
raise the pump rod. Then the next cycle is started by the admission of
more steam. Notice that the force stroke is altogether due to the atmosphere ;
the steam pressure never rises much above one atmosphere of pressure .
The
working of these engines is said to have been accompanied by an extraordinary amount of wheezing, sighing , creaking, and bumping. They were
compared, of course, to living things . They were dreadfully inefficient .
By minor improvements, the thermal efficiency was approximately doubled
by the 1770's, bringing it up to what we would now calculate as being
about 1%.
More important improvements in efficiency were made by James Watt,
during the last quarter of the century . As instrument maker to the University
of Glasgow, he was asked in 1763 to repair a small model of a Newcomen
engine, and was astonished by the huge quantities of steam required to
make it work. Much steam was consumed just in heating up the cylinder ,
�13
after it had been cooled down in the steam-condensation phase of the cycle .
It would be an e c onomy if t h e cylinder could be maintained always as
h ot as t h e ste am ent e ring i t . " The means of accomplishing this did not
immed iate ly p r esent itse lf," W t s a ys ; "but early i n 1765 it occur red
at
to me that, if a communi c ati on were open ed between a cylinder containin g
s team, and a nothe r v e s sel wh i c h was e x hausted o f a i r and oth e r f l u ids ,
the s te am, as an elas tic f l uid, would imme diate ly rush into the emp ty
v e sse l .... " Thi s wa s the i nvent ion o f the s eparate condenser. See fi g ure 12.
On the right is the b oile r C; E i s t he p i s t o n cylinde r, which i~
enclosed i n a s team jacke t; d own b elow it i s the separa te c ondenser F,
and beside it, the vacuum pump H which is operated by a rod and chain
connecte d to the rocking beam. When the p iston i s a t the top of its
stroke, the exhaust valve to the conde n ser open s , and steam begins to be
drawn from the cylinder into the condenser. Steam at about atmospheric
pressure is simultaneously admitted to the cylinder above the piston,
forcing the piston downward; the advantage o f using steam rather than
atmospheric air is that the cylinder stays hot. When the piston reaches
the lower end of its stroke, the exhaust valve to the condenser is closed,
the inlet valve that admits steam above the piston is also closed , and a
valve is opened which allows steam to flow from the cylinder above the
pis t on , through a pipe which is to the left of the cylinder, to the cylinder
below the piston . The pressure on the two sides of the piston is thus
equalized , and th e piston rises, being pulled up to the top by the weight
of the pump rod . The separate condenser led to about a three-fold
improvement in efficiency .
Watt ' s further improvements were aimed not at efficiency but at
making the steam engine a n effective replacement for the wa ter wheel,
in delivering rotary power to factory equipment . See figure 13. I shal l
not describe this engine, except to point out that it had to deliver
power in both halves of its cycle, and so be double-acting , and this
required that the piston rod be rigidly connected to the rocking beam,
and at the same time , that it be kept moving in a straight line--no
mean problem to solve , but Watt solved it by the invention of what i s
called a parallel-motion linkage, and thereby initiated a whole branch of
mathematical study. The large flywheel you see at the right helps by its
rotational inertia to keep up a smooth delivery of power. Above t he flywheel,
to the left of its center , you see the centrifugal governor, whose speed
of rotation is made to regulate the amount of steam entering the cylinder~
anothe r in s tance, like the clock e s c apement, of negative feedback.
What about steam engines for railway locomotives and steam boats ?
Engines for these purposes would have to be less massive than the Watt
engine; but if they were to be a good deal smaller and still develop
the req uired power, they would have to us e high-pressure steam. Watt
had always opposed the high-pre ssure engine, on the grounds that it was
unsafe; and so high-p r e ssure e ngines did not s tart to appear until after
180 0, when Watt' s various patents lapse d. The new engines were unsafe;
life on the Mi s sissippi and indeed the e ntire history of steam powe r frcm
�14
1800 to 1850 was punctuated by appalling explosions. The new engines
were also three and more times more efficient than any earlier engines . A
variety of experiments were now undertaken to discover what the most
efficient engine would be like. On what did efficiency depend? Was there
a limit? If so, how could it be approached or attained?
These questions receive their first general answer in a small
book published in 1824 under the title Reflections on the Motive Power
of Fire. The author was a young man of 29 named Sadi Carnot . The thinking
in this book was deeply influenced by the thinking in another book by
another Carn ot , Lazare Carnot, famous for his role in the military and
political history of France during the 1790's, and also Sadi's father.
In
1782, Lazare Carnot had written a b ook entitled Essay on Machines in Ge n eral .
In the preface he states:
One of the most interesting prope rties of machines, which, I
believe, has not yet been remarked . .. is that in orde r to make them
produce the greatest possible effect, there must necessarily be
no percussion, that is to say, that movement should alway s change
by insensible degrees.
This , of course, i s an ideal condition which is impossible to attain in
practice, and can only be approached. The principle is nevertheless
important. It acc ounts, for instance , for the superior efficiency of an
overshot waterwheel as compared with an undershot water wheel . In the overshot
wheel , the water d rops into a bucket at the top of the wheel , and then
acts on the whee l simply by i ts weight, rather than by its motion .
In
the undersho t whee l, the water gains speed by descending along the stre am
bed, then impacts against the blades at the bottom of the wheel; but a
good deal of the possible effect, about half , is lost in the eddies and
turbulent motion of the water . Lazare Carnot had a formula for what
was being lost; he called it live force--it was what we now call kinetic
energy. And he shows that, in an ideal machine in which all friction,
impact, and brusque motion is avoided, all the kine tic e nergy that is used
up can appear as what we now call "work", measured by we ight raised through
a distance; he uses neither of the terms "work" or ''energy", whose strict
modern usage dates from the 1850's, but he has the ideas.
Now the way in which Carnot the younger at first makes use of the
elder Carnot's work is as follows. Heat, thought Sadi Carnot , is like
water, in that just as water tends of itself to flow downhill , so heat
tends of itself to flow from the hotter to the colder body. And just as
the waterwhe el utilizes the live force of the descending water to do work,
so, thought Sadi Carnot, the thermal machine does work by making use of
the descending heat. Now the conditions for the maximum generation of
power from the water wheel were that the water should enter the machine
without turbulence and leave with velocity. Similarly, Carnot reasoned ,
the thermal engine would achieve its maximum effect if all the heat trans-
�15
ferred from hot body to cold body had the effect of changing the volume
of the gas or steam in the cylinder, and hence causing the piston to move;
none of the heat should be permitted to follow its natural propensity of
simply flowing frcm hot body to cold body without further effect. How
could this condition be met?
See figure 14, which shows what Carnot imagined . Let there be a
volume v of gas or steam in a cylinder , its pressure being represented
1
in the diagram by the height of the point A. Also, let the cylinder be in
thermal contact with a reservoir of heat, such as a steam jacket that can
be maint ained at a constant temperature 8 ; and suppose the cylinder to be
1
at a temperature only infinitesimally less than 0 . Heat will then flow
1
frcm the heat reservoir into the cylinder; the gas will expand ; and the
piston will move outward .
It will move very slowly , of course, because
the transfer of heat will be very slow , since the temperature difference
between reservoir and cylinder is only infinitesimal. Never mind; we are
concerned not with speed but with thermal efficiency, with getting the
most for our expenditure on fuel; and while it may take several millenia
for the locomotive to progress from here to Glen Burnie, we are in no
hurry, of course, and can do a bit of extra thinkin g in the interim.
What I have been describing
is the isothermal expansion indicated
in the diagram by the line from A to B. It is the most efficient of all
ways of getting work from heat, so why not use it, letting the gas expand
for e v er? Of cours e , we would need an infinit ely long cylinder, which is
an inconvenience . Also, we had better note that as the gas in the cylinder
e xpands , its pressure falls, in accordance with a well-known law called
.Ebyle ' s law ; the falling pressure is indicated in the diagram by the falling
of the curve AB from left to righ t . By-and-by the pressure of the gas will
have fallen to the level of atmospheric pressure, and then the p iston will
stop .
So this won't do; what we need, clearly , is a series o f processes
in which the system is brought back to its initial state ; that is, we n eed
a cycle, so that the isothermal expansion can be started over again.
What about simply compressing the gas isothermally, back from B
to its initial state A? This won 't do, either , because we should have to
do just as much work in compressing it as it had originally performed in
its expansion . Those of you familiar with plots of pressure against volume
of a fluid know that the area under such a curve represents work performed;
and of course the area under the curve AB, namely V ABV , is just the same
2
as the area under BA, the same curve traversed in t~e opposite direction.
We need to return the gas to its initial state by a less costly route.
The solution to the problem is called a Carnot cycle. Here is the way of it.
Stop the isothermal expansion at B , while the pressure of the gas
is still above atmospheric; remove the cylinder from contact with the. heat
reservoir at temperature 0 , and immediately insulate it thermally, so that
no heat can pass in or out} then let the gas expand further.
Because
�16
heat is not allowed to pass in or out, this further expansion, from
B to C, is called an adiabatic process. Note that the adiabatic
curve is much steeper than the isothermal curve; this means that the temperature is dropping as well as the pressure.
Let there be a cold r eservoir,
containing, say, ice and water at temperature 8 , and let the adiabatic
2
e xpansion continue until the gas almost reaches this lower temperature, or
is infinitesimally above it. Next place the cylinder in contact with this
cold reservoir, and compress the gas from C to D.
During the isothermal
compression from C to D, we are having to do work on the gas , and heat is
flowing out of the cylinder into the reservoir . However , we do less work
than we would have to have done t o compress the gas at the higher temperature.
Finally, compress the gas adiabatically from D to A, so that its
temperature rises to the original temperature 0 , and its pressure and
1
volume assume the original v alues indi cated by Ehe point A . We are now
ready to begin a new cycle .
What have we gained? A ce rtain amount o f heat has been taken from
the hot reservoir; call it Q . A certain net amount of work h as been done
1
by the engine, say, in raising a weight ; call it W. W i s the difference
between the work the expanding gas does, represented by the area v ~cv
3
1
and the work done~ the gas in compressing it , namely v AQCV ; e viden~ly
3
1
the net work is r epresented by the area of the curvilinear quadrilateral
ABCD.
For an expenditure of coal or oil or wood yielding the heat Q , we have
1
gained the work W. And Carnot asserts that no thermal engine working
between_ the same two reservoirs at temperatures a and 8 could be more
1
2
efficient.
Carnot p roves this assertion, but before showing how he does so
I wish to correct an error that his argument contains , one which follows
from the analogy of the waterwheel . He assumes that all the heat Q that
1
enters the cy l inder during the isothermal expansion from A to B also leaves
the cylinder during the isothermal compression from C to D; he assumes ,
in other words, that Q is equal to what I have labelled Q . Actually,
1
2
the energy to do the work W is extracted from the heat Q , and so W is
equal to Q minus Q . This conclusion , or its equivalent , was reached
2
1
simultaneously by more than a dozen Europeans thinking and experimenting
independently during the 1830's and '40's ; Sadi Carnot himself reached
it before his early death in 1831 . Natural philosophers were pushed to it
both by a conviction in the unity of nature, and by a variety of observed
instances of what we would now call transformations of energy . What is this
energy that is being transtormed? All that can be said, I believe, is that
it is something capable of doing work, capable of raising weight through a
distance, and as such capable of being treated quantitatively . There is
no single mathematical formula for it. But the postulate that there is
this entity called energy which is conserved in all the transformations
of nature has come to be basic in all scientific accounting, all our dealings
with nature, all scientific thought about the economy of nature.
It is
called the first law of thermodynamics.
�17
Now for the proof, appropriately corrected, of Carnot's theorem,
see figure 15. The efficiency of Carnot's engine is given by
W/Q ,
where we can measure work and heat in the same units of energy.
Let there
be, if possible, a more efficient engine, working between the same heat
reservoirs, and let it produce the same amount of work W while extracting
from the hot reservoir a smaller amount of heat, Q 1 .Then its efficiency
1
will be Y/' = W/Q ~ where Q 1 is less than Q , so ~hat Y)' is greater than
1 this more efficient engine to run the Carnot engine
1
1
Y)· Now let us use
in reverse , which we can do, since all the processes that go on in the
Carnot engine are reversible. Run in reverse, the Carnot engine becomes
a refrigerator; a net amount of work W is put into it; it extracts heat
Q from the cold reservoir and rejects the larger amount of heat Q to
2
1
the hot reservoir. And to run the Carnot engine in reverse, we can use
the work W produced by the new and supposedly more efficient engine, which
I have labelled l in the diagram . Coupling these two engines together in
this way, we obtain a rather peculiar device. There is no net input or
output of work.
Heat , in amount equal to Q -Q ', is extracted from the
1
1
cold re servoir and r ejected to the hot reservoir.
That is all. This
result does not violate the first law of therrnodynmanics. Yet surely,
Carnot and the physi cists who followed him judged, it is impossible ; heat
of itself does not flow up a temperature gradient. And therefore Clausius
and Kelvin in the 1850's formulated a law, the second law of thermodynamics,
of whi ch this result would be the violati on . As Clausius put it:
'1 =
It is impossible to cons truct a device that, operating in a
cycle , will p roduce no effect other than the transfer of heat
fran a cooler to a hotter body.
Let me n ow try to formulate the main implications of this law
and of the reasonings that accompany it .
First , as we can see from the diagram of the Carnot cycle , it is
never possible to convert any quantity of heat completely into work,
without further effect ; some of the heat must always be ejected to a colder
reservoir.
This means that, even in an ideal heat engine, the efficiency
is always less than 100%. I mention in passing that the efficiency depends
on the temperatures of the two heat reservoirs, and is improved by raising
the temperature of the hot reservoir and lowering that of the cold reservoir.
This accounts in part for the superior efficiency of the high pressure
steam engine, which provides a higher difference in temperature between
the boiler and the atmosphere .
Secondly , the Carnot engine represents an ideal limit; no actual
engine can reach that limit, or come close to it. The temperature difference
between reservoir and cylinder cannot be made infinitesmial. The adiabatic
containers never insulate perfectly. Always some of the heat follows its
natural propensity and flows from the hotter to the colder bodies without
causing any motion of the piston, without doing any work.
This means that
if a heat engine does some work, raising a weight, say, and if we then
undertake to have the weight fall and the engine run in reverse as a
�18
refrigerator or heat pump, in an effort to restore the exact initial conditions from which we started, we will not succeed except by investing
extra energy in the process. In this sense, the processes that go on in
the heat engine are irreversible.
Thirdly, by a series of particular arguments dealing with each kind
of process encountered in the world, chemical, electrical, nuclear, and so
on, it results that all natural processes are irreversible, in the sense
just explained. In each case, some heat is dissipated, and the reversal
of the process would require that we extract this heat and convert it completely into work done, say into the lifting of a weight , without any
further effects ensuing . But this would violate the second law of thermodynamics . Each process, then, has a natural direction , towards a more
stable configuration or state. To be sure, any given process may be run
in the reverse direction, by making special arrangernents , but these always
involve the irreversible expenditure of available energy .
If we consider
all the changes that occur in the surroundings as a result of any process,
then the second law assures us that of the total energy with which we
began , some will hav e became unavailable for the production of useful
work . As a measure of the transformation of free into unavailable energy ,
the physicists use a quantity called entropy , which increases as the transformation proceeds .
I f in any natural process we consider all the energy
exchanges involved , we find that the net result is an increase in entropy.
By computing the c h anges in entropy in any process , we can determine its
natural direction , which is the direction of entropic increase .
From any o n e moment , then, to any later moment , the world changes
irreversibly . Perhaps we are in some sense aware of this, just in b eing
aware of being alive ; but it is a different matter to assert it as a
fundamental fact o f natural science . A number of physicists during the
19th century felt the 2nd law of thermodynamics to be disturbing, and
attempted to reduce it to mechanics , that is , to derive it from mechanics .
But this cannot be done, for the simple reason that the equations of
mechanics are indifferent as to whether time runs backwards or forwards,
and therefore irreversibility is not derivable from them . What the physicists
in fact did was to construct a kind of analogue to thermodynamics , called
statistical mechanics. It turns out to be quite as irreducibly and fundamentally statistical as it is mechanical. The kind of statistics used
must be chosen so as to fit the system studied, and lead to the known
empirical consequences that thermodynamics predicts. In any case , the
second law remains, as Eddington called it, "time's arrow", signifying
not hCM fast change will occur, but the overall direction in which it will
irrevocably go, toward configurations that we may call more stable .
Thermodynamically, then, the world changes irreversibly; but in
special circumstances, it appears that it does so in ways that especially
interest us. Let there be, for instance, a sun, radiating energy unremittingly into the unfillable sink of outer space. But in its flow from hot
to cold, let some of the energy pass by way of an earth, an assemblage of
�19
certain chemicals, a temporary trap for the energy in its inevitable
entropic descent. In such case, Morowitz has recently argued, with high
probability the improbable happens; that is, order arises--symmetry,
cyclical transformation, process that has a shape and pattern. Matter
which left to itself, in the dark, without a sun to shine upon it, remains
inanimate, random, chaotic, now under the surge of solar energy is transformed into an ordered dance of living forms. Are they forms that we will
recognize, feel convivial with, if it comes to be the point of our being
introduced? Or is life as we know it a very unique thing, perhaps a species
of some more inclusive genus, but nevertheless a quite distinct species?
The question is very speculative, but if one examines the delicate balance
of conditions our earth has~enjoyed up to now, and if one considers the
extent to which chance e vents, events that were not determined mechanistically
to happen, have entered irreversibly into biological evolution , then the
likelihood that human-like beings exist elsewhere in the universe looks
small, nothing worth gambling on. Living systems could have employed righthanded proteins, instead of left-handed ones, and perhaps that would have
made little difference. But the evolution of the human brain, into which
thousands of irreversible events have entered, has happened only once that
we know of; and the alternative possibilities seem countless. A conclusion
on which I expect us therefore to agree is that life-stuff as we know it,
and the biosphere within which and with which it evolves, are to be cherished
as our proper heritage . And thermodynamics, wearing the human smudge and
sharing the human smell , is the .economic science that must guide us in
the management of this our household, warning us of the irreversible
character of our transactions with nature, the finitude of the resources
upon which we draw, the ineluctable price of degradation of energy that
must be paid for every maintenance or achievement of order or form or value.
I have been engaged in what can have seemed a long digression from
my original theme , but I think I am not too far from my starting point ;
something that also happens with random walkers . Modern science in its
inception, I have said, set up for itself the program of science as construction, the sublimation of our age-old capacities for lifting, heaving,
pushing, pulling, taking apart, rearranging. Perhaps there is something
inescapable about our imagining that program as carried to completion-the completed description of the world and of ourselves as an assemblage
of spatially and temporally located, deterministically interacting parts-a machine. Yet surely the resu lt is bizarre, a bad metaphysical dream, a
world of bare fact from which problems and persons, learning and knowing
and valuing are absent.
If asked to argue against this image on the basis of scientific
results, I should say that there are no doubt certain bridges over which the
effects of molecular happenings--the deterministic ones and also (please
remember!) the chanceful ones--move into our world of sweet and bitter, hot
and cold, painful and pleasurable, clumsy and skillful. And I should
propose that if chance has acted in the development of the biosphere, it
must also be active in the normal functioning of the living body and can
be expected to lead to its most significant effects in the functioning of
�20
the human b r ain . Long ago Epicuros , knowing t hat otherwise knowing and
willing were imposs i b le , p ostulated an alt ernative t o necessity in the
swerve of the atoms . Th e pr esent- day version of tha t alt e r nativ e i n physics
allows us to s peculate how de cisions and de l ibe rations u tili z e (but do
not consti tut e !) t he chance -li ke for king of t he causality of eleme nta ry
events, how morally and logi c al l y a ch an ce of a l t e rnative s equence can
b e come s i gnificant in allowing us to wi l l yes or no, to give way to or to
"stand up to t emptation". Of cours e I do not know this; i t is sp e cu l a t ion.
Less s pe cul a tive ly, I wou ld re - di r ect your a tte ntion from the constructed, or what is assume d t o be constructed , to the constructi ng , that
is, the practice of skills that is everywhe re entwined in the activity of
science. Now these skills involve , to begin with, the us e o f our body
and of tools. our own body is the only t hing in the world that we never
normally experience as an ob j e ct; we experi ence it rather in terms of the
world to which we are attending from our body . It is by making this
intelligent use of our body that we fe e l it t o b e our body, and not simply
an object. When we adopt a tool for use, we transform it from an object
into a sentient extension of our body. Suppose, for instance, we are
using a probe to explore a dark cavern. If we are using it f or the first
time, we feel its impact against our fingers and palm ; but as we become
accustomed to its use, our awareness of its imp act on the hand is transformed
into a sense of its point touching the objects we are exploring. We become
aware of the feelings in our hand in terms of their meaning located at the
tip of the probe or stick to which we are attending. We attend from the
feelings in our hand to their meaning at the tip of the probe. So, in
the exercise of this and other skills, the re is a tacit background of
perception and rule-following, and a focal awarene ss directed to an object.
Similarly, in the vocal exp ression of a thought, I rely on an
ability to produce syllabic sounds, on an acquaintance with vocabulary and
a grammatical skill in stringing words together to form sentence s , but all
of this muscular and linguistic know-how is tac it and subsidiary to the
meaning that I am attempting to convey . All thought contains components-rules that are being followe d, pe r cept ions , dispositions to act or respond-on which we depend but of which we are not focally aware . Thought dwells
in these components as if they we r e p arts o f our body. Thinking is not
only of something, though it is always and necessarily that; it is also
fraught with the roots from which i t springs. Like a muscular skill,
it has a from-to character.
So do we keep expanding our body into the world, by assimilating
to it sets of particulars which we inte rgrate into comprehensive entities.
So do we form, intellectually and practically, an interpreted universe
pop ulated by entitie s, the p articulars of which we have interiorized for
the sake of comprehending their meaning in the shape of the wholes to
which they belong.
�21
So do we recognize a problem, Meno's paradox to the contrary notwithstanding; to recognize a problem is to recognize that something is
present though hidden; it is to have an intimation of the coherence of
hitherto uncomprehended particulars.
So also do we come to recognize a person, in a gesture or in the
performance of a skill . Indeed, we cannot recognize a skill unless we
understand that we are faced with a coordinated performance, and proceed
to pick out the features that are es sential to it, the action that is at
work within it . So we get to know the intimate parts of a skill and the
powers of the person behind it .
Finally , what about objectivity, objective science in the view
I am taking? I should answer, first, that we stand on no platform, from
which a strictly detached knowing is possible. The zero-point of our
history is not accessible to us; even as knowers, we are subject to
irreversible time. But standing within our world, the world that has come
to be for us , we can once more entertain, following the example of certain
Ionians, the idea of knowing as universally valid, true knowledge as a
ideal , limiting notice. This will be a moment of suspension of practical
acti vity.
It will be a moment of wonder, in which there emerges the idea
of the essentialwhatness of things, their being . To entertain the idea
of such knowing is to enter consciously a tradition that i s embodied but
dormant with in u s ; it is to accept, not a model, but an unfinished and
unfinishable task. To seek to uncover the original meaning of this idea
is an essential step toward the discovery of what we are.
�?'".
3in.
2
0
Acheulian hand-axes from Furze Platt nror l\1aiclcnhcocl.
P'IGTTRE l
�FI"r .. RE 2s Cave
P~intinp
The red deer, below, frequentl y painted on the walls of
Lascaux, was probably one of the principal food sources of
the inhabitants of the area. Now restricted to mountainous
and forested regions of Europe and Asia, this deer
species--of wh ich the North American elk is a
variety-formerly inhabited diverse environments.
�P'!GPRE
'.5: Cave
Paintin!" of Wild Ox or Auroch•
�P'T'1T'RE 4: 2:arl:v ~othic Alarm Glock, c. 1400, from Crurch of
St. Sebaldu1 in
Nuremb~rg
[ - '\) --__/
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'
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(th• diagr.'" h
5: Po1t Windmill
of th• 16th century)
'fl'IGURE 6
Roman mill with gean:
after Vitruvius.
�FFitTRB 7s Calendrical "'rearing from Calendar
Macrine, 1st century B.C.
�l'!":TTRS' 8 I 3irnpl if'ied
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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.
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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
Text
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paper
Page numeration
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34 pages
Dublin Core
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Title
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On knowing how and knowing what
Description
An account of the resource
Typescript of a lecture delivered on September 17, 1976 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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1976-09-17
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St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online.
Type
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text
Format
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pdf
Relation
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<a title="Sound recording" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/282">Sound recording</a>
Language
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English
Identifier
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lec Wilson 1976-09-17
Deans
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/4d55357c1e7a582f9eb7237a62561d8d.pdf
bb36a4932e3c65780358e9721538e65f
PDF Text
Text
f
I
ST
JoHN 's Co LLEGE
ANNA POLI S. MARYLAND 21404
FouNDED 1&% M
KIN G WiU.IAM·~ SrHooL
Lecture Schedule 1976-77
Sept. 1 7
Curtis A. Wilson , Dean
St. John 's College , Annapol is
On Knowing How and Knowing What
Sept. 24
Noel Lee, Piano
Concert
October 1
Hugh McGrath, Tutor
Poetry Reading
October 8
All-Col l ege Seminar
No Lecture
October 1 5
Long Weekend
No Lecture
October 22
Bruce Venable , Tutor
St. John's College, Santa Fe
Philosophy and Spirituality
in Plotinus
October 29
Professor Arnal do Momigliano
Universi ty College
London, England
The 18th Century Background
to Gi bbon
November 5
Professor Wm . M. Goldsmith
Brandeis University
The Dialectic of Presidential
Power
November 1 2
Robert Sacks, Tutor
St. John ' s College, Santa Fe
Genes i s
November 19
John S. Steadman, Tutor
St. John ' s College, Santa Fe
Why Should Gloucester Attempt
Suicide, and Why Must Cordelia Die?
November 26
Thanksgiving
No Lectur e
December 3
The University of Maryland Trio Concert
December 10
King William Players
Play
Dec. 16- Jan. 3
Winter Vacation
No Lecture
January 7
David Bolotin, Tutor
St. John ' s College, Annapolis
The Ajax
January 14
Michael Ossorgin, Tutor
St. John ' s College, Santa Fe
Celebrating with a Book
(The Brothers Karamazov)
January 21
Paul Sperr y Tenor and
Rose Taylor, Mezzo
Concert
January 28
Dr . Adelyn Breeskin
washington, D.C.
Changing Trends in 20th Century
Painting and Sculpture
TELEPHONI 'lOI ·lEd · 2'171
�Lecture 1976-77
Page 2
February 4
William O'Grady, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus
February ll
Long Weekend
No Lecture
February 18
Leo Raditsa, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
The Collapse of Democracy at Athens
and the Trial of Socrates
February 25
Jonathan Griffin
On the Translation of Rimbaud's
Poetry
March 4
Sequoia String Quartet
Concert
March 5
Charles Bell, Tutor
St. John's College, Santa Fe
Slide show:
A.D. 1500
March 6
Charles Bell, Tutor
Slide Show:
Shakespeare
March 12-27
Spring Vacation
No Lectures
April l
Paul S. Minear
Yale School of Divinity
The Epistle to the Galatians and
Christian Freedom
April 8
David Starr, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
On Plato 1 s Timaeus
April 12
Martin Robertson
University of Oxford
Daedalus on the Parthenon
April 22
David Eisenbud
Institut des Hautes
Etudes Scientifiques
The Interplay of Algebra and
Geometry -- A Twenteeth Century
Theme
April 29
Peter Quint
University of Maryland
On The Constitutional Law of
the Nixon Administration
May 6
Stillman Drake
University of Toronto
A. B. Johnson:
Philosophy
May 13
Reality
No Lecture
May 20
Alan Dorfman, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
Freud and Ethics
Language and
�
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
Number of pages in the original item.
2 pages
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Creator
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Office of the Dean
Title
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Lecture Schedule 1976-77
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1976-1977
Description
An account of the resource
Schedule of lectures and concerts for the 1976-1977 Academic Year.
Identifier
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Lecture Schedule 1976-1977
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 owns the rights to this publication.
Format
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pdf
Relation
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September 17, 1967. Wilson, Curtis. <a title="On knowing how and knowing what" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/282">On knowing how and knowing what</a> (audio)
September 17, 1967. Wilson, Curtis. <a title="Typescript" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3653">On knowing how and knowing what</a> (typescript)
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Wilson, Curtis
Lee, Noel
McGrath, Hugh
Venable, Bruce
Momigliano, Arnaldo
Goldsmith, Wm. M.
Sacks, Robert
Steadman, John S.
Bolotin, David, 1944-
Ossorgin, Michael
Sperry, Paul
Taylor, Rose
Breeskin, Adelyn Dohme, 1896-1986
O'Grady, William
Raditsa, Leo
Griffin, Jonathan
Bell, Charles
Minear, Paul S. (Paul Sevier), 1906-2007
Starr, David
Robertson, Martin
Eisenbud, David
Quint, Peter E.
Drake, Stillman
Dorfman, Alan H.
King William Players
Friday night lecture
Lecture schedule
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/edf751d064ff28012445edd4d5929c84.mp3
17ddf7b73e53cd0a282d3bdadcae7fdd
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
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00:59:58
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Bib # 10108
Title
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On the Imagination
Description
An account of the resource
Audio recording of a lecture delivered on November 18, 1977, by Eva Brann as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
The first few sentences of Brann's lecture are cut off by recording problems, just after the word, "Tonight." In Brann's lecture transcript, this paragraph reads, "Tonight I shall commit the deliberate indiscretion of trying to say what may be, all in all, unsayable. Let me, therefore, begin with a little disquisition on ineffability."
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Brann, Eva T. H.
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
1977-11-18
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
Subject
The topic of the resource
Imagination
Deans
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/25a086e1bc7cadebd11b756e114dfc35.pdf
257b0953875888ba89ef2865e9bf8a95
PDF Text
Text
i
.· ST
JoHN's CoLLEGE
\.,
ANNAPOLIS. MARYLAND 21404
fouNotD lW6 AS KING WiLliAM's ScHCJOL
TENTATIVE LECTURE SCHEDULE - FIRST SEMESTER 1977-78
v
September 16
Mr. Edward G. Sparrow, Dean
St. John's, Annapolis
Man, Image of the Word
September 23
Mr. Frank L. Fernbach
Some •rhoughts on Labor's
Progress and Problems
American Federation of Labor
and Congress of Industrial Org.
Washington, D.C.
September 30
Professor Harry Jaffa
Claremont Men's College
October 7
All College Seminar
October 9
(Sunday)
Ste John 1 s, Santa Fe
October 14
Long Weekend
October 21
Kronos String Quartet
Concert
October 23
(Sunday)
Mary A. Tobin
Exxon Company
Energy Crisis
October 28
Michael comenetz, Tutor
St. John 1 s, Annapolis
Chaos, Gauss, and Order
November 4
Mrs~
Charles Bell, Tutor
Florence Berdann,
The Declaration of Independence
and the Constitution
P.ascal's Reversal (Sat. 2 p.m.)
The Century of Mozart(Sun.8p.m.)
Daumier:
Lithographs
Baltimore Museum of Art
November ll
November 18
For Our Times
Professor Donald L. Kemmerer
University of Illinois
The Role of the Money
System in American History
Miss Eva Brannf Tutor
On the Imagination
St. John's, Annapolis
November 20
(Sunday)
Providence, Rhode Island
November 25
Thanksgiving Holiday
December 2
Mr. Mortimer J. Adler
Institute for Philosophical
Research
Mr. Bertram Minkin
TELEPHONE 'WI· 263- n71
A Greek Poet and His English
Language; the Poetry of
Demetrios Capetanakis
The Vicissitudes of Western
Thought
\
\
�TENTATIVE LECTURE SCHEDULE - FIRST SEMESTER 1977-78
December 9
Play
December 16 January 4
Winter Vacation
January 6
Dr. Otto Morgenstern
Africa -- Our Concern
Linda Tarnay and
Dance recital
January 13
Dancers
January 20
Professor Neil Weiner
Marlboro College
END OF FIRST SEMESTER
Health and Virtue:
Contemporary Psychology
and Aristotle's Ethics
�ST
JoHN's CoLLEGE
Ai'INAPOLIS, MARYLAND 21404
FoUNDED lb':J{, /\S KING WiLLIAivl''> ScHOOl
November 18, 1977
LECTURE - CONCERT SCHEDULE - SECOND SEMESTER 1977-78
January 27, 1978
Mr. Thomas Simpson, Tutor
St. John's, Santa Fe
The Scientific Revolution
Will Not Take Place
February 3
Professor Wm. Theodore deBary
Columbia University
The Analects Of Confucius
February 10
Long Weekend
No Lecture
February 17
Professor Robert Jenson
Lutheran Theological Seminary
On The Enjoyment Of God
February 24
Father William A. Wallace
Catholic University of America
Causality And The Growth
Of Scientific Knowledge
March 3
Dr. Renee C. Fox
University of Pennsylvania
The Rise of Medical Ethical
Concern In American Society:
What Does It Mean?
March 10
Dr. Thomas Pangle
Yale, Department of
Political Science
Montesquieu And The Philosophic
Basis Of Modern Republicanism
March ll March 26
Spring Vacation
No Lecture
March 31
Brother Peter, O.S.B., Monk
Mt. Saviour Monastery
The Function Of A Staretz
April 7
Professor Malcolm Brown
Brooklyn College of the City
University of New York
The 'Hybrid Reckoning'
Of Timaeus 52
April 14
Miss Beata Ruhm von Oppen, Tutor
St. John's, Annapolis
Interpretations Of The
Magic Flute
April 21
Mr. John Shirley-Quirk
Bass/Baritone
England
Concert
April 28
Mr. Hugh McGrath, Tutor
St. John's, Annapolis
*
Translation and Description:
Paul Valery's Le Cimetiere Marin
Father Zossima, a character in The Brothers Karamazov, is a staretz.
IHLI'HONE 301-261- n71
*
�Lecture Schedule - Second Semester 1977-78
May 5
Professor David Lachterman
Georgia State University
Mathesis and Descarte's Geometry
May 12
Real Olympics
No Lecture
May 19
Mr. Howard Zeiderrnan, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
Investigating Philosophical
Investigations
May 26
Commencement
�
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
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
Number of pages in the original item.
4 pages
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Office of the Dean
Title
A name given to the resource
Tentative Lecture Schedule - First Semester 1977-78 & Lecture - Concert Schedule - Second Semester 1977-78
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1977-1978
Description
An account of the resource
Schedule of lectures and concerts for the 1977-1978 Academic Year.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Lecture Schedule 1977-1978
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
Publisher
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St. John's College
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
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text
Rights
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St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
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pdf
Relation
A related resource
November 18, 1977. Brann, Eva T. H. <a title="On the imagination" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/262">On the imagination</a> (audio)
April 14, 1978. Ruhm von Oppen, Beate. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3604" title="Interpretations of the Magic Flute">Interpretations of the <em>Magic Flute</em></a>
May 19, 1978. Zeiderman, Howard. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3873" title="Investigating philosophical investigations">Investigating philosophical investigations</a>
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Sparrow, Edward G.
Fernbach, Frank L.
Jaffa, Harry
Bell, Charles
Tobin, Mary A.
Comenetz, Michael, 1944-
Berdann, Florence
Kemmerer, Donald L.
Brann, Eva T. H.
Minkin, Bertram
Adler, Mortimer Jerome, 1902-2001
Morgenstern, Otto
Tarnay, Linda
Weiner, Neil
Simpson, Thomas
deBary, Wm. Theodore
Jenson, Robert
Wallace, William A.
Fox, Renée C. (Renée Claire), 1928-
Pangle, Thomas L.
Peter, Brother
Brown, Malcolm
Ruhm von Oppen, Beate
Shirley-Quirk, John
McGrath, Hugh
Lachterman, David Rapport, 1944-
Zeiderman, Howard
King William Players
Friday night lecture
Lecture schedule
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/bd24d41bfc122ecbdf84c326f644e976.mp3
8b5ffe20ef4f0b0c69fc193cd4d1d611
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
audiocassette
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
00:57:05
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
Interpretations of the <em>Magic Flute</em>
Description
An account of the resource
Audio recording of a lecture delivered on April 4, 1978, 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
1978-04-14
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
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LEC_Ruhm_von_Oppen_Beate_1978-04-14_ac
Subject
The topic of the resource
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 1756-1791. Zauberflöte
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/b19524c9cf0f69ecaa8017c17dbc0c1f.mp3
37d7c27400a92e2cc0900afdd0baa81f
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
audio cassette tape (Tape 388)
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
01:04:35
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
Investigating philosophical investigations
Description
An account of the resource
Audio recording of a lecture delivered on May 19, 1978 by Howard Zeiderman as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Zeiderman, Howard
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
1978-05-19
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
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
lec Zeiderman 1978-05-19
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/8b23fbd385e0a3115d7c8c4b3801ef3c.pdf
1a061a88f6fdda2f5ff89cad5754e433
PDF Text
Text
ST
JoHN's CoLLEGE
ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND 21404
FouNom J(,9G A~ KING WJLliA/vl's ScHooL
FORMAL LECTURE/CONCERT SCHEDULE - FIRST SEMESTER 1978-1979
September 15
Mr. Edward G. Sparrow, Dean
St. John's College, Annapolis
September 22
Professor Louis Finkelstein
Queens College
The Real World
The Late Paintings of Claude
Monet
September 29
Professor Louis L. Snyder
The Graduate School and
University Center of the
City University of New York
Milieu and Personality: The
German People and Adolf Hitler
October 6
Mr. Robert Gerle, Violin
Ms. Marilyn Neeley, Piano
Concert
October 13
Mr. Stefan Peters
Department of Insurance
Boston, Massachusetts
Gauss - A Path-breaker of
Modern Mathematics
October 20
Mr. Robert S. Bart, Dean
St. John's College, Santa Fe
Things As They Are
October 27
All-College Seminar
Thoreau - On Civil Disobedience
November 3
Mrs. Frances Stevens
Plymouth, England
The Dramatic Imagination
November 10
Mr. Mortimer J. Adler
Institute for Philosophical
Why It Is Sometimes Necessary
To Read Aristotle Backwards
Research
Chicago, Illinois
November 17
Dr. Leon Kass
Chicago, Illinois
November 24
Thanksgiving
December l
Professor c. Grant Luckhardt
Georgia State University
December 8
Play
December 15 January 3, 1979
Winter vacation
IW:I'JION[ 301-261- 2"l71
Looking Good:
Human Affairs
Socrates 1
Biology and
Ideal State
�FORMAL LECTURE/CONCERT SCHEDULE 1978-79
PAGE TWO
January 5
Dr. Andrew B. Schmookler
Tucson, Arizona
The Riddle of Evil:
of Social Evolution
January 12
Professor Krister Stendahl
The Divinity School
Harvard University
The Jewishness of Jesus and
His Gentile Followers
January 19
Mr. David Stephenson, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
The "Oceanic FeeliFJ.g 11
Whole and Part
A Theory
:
�."'~Jo;;,m""o•:..} ST
·~ '¥'
~"11!1\ a~
E.<'b()) , ...
cr.
~8'f7.<;.\i>~'/
JoHN's CoLLEGE
ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND 21404
FouNDED
109~
A'>
KING WilliAM\ ScHOOL
FORMAL LECTURE/CONCERT SCHEDULE - SECOND SEMESTER 1978-1979
January 26
February 2
Mr. Richard Rephann
Concert
Mr. S. Frederick Starr
Historical Patterns in
Kennan Institute for
Advanced Russian Studies
Soviet Life Today
February 9-12
Long Weekend
No Lecture
February 16
Mr. John White, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
11
February 23
Mr~
Thomas McDonald, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
Some Thoughts on Kant
March 2
Annapolis Brass Quintet
Concert
March 8-19
Spring Vacation
No Lecture
March 23
Mr. Joshua c. Taylor
National Collection of
Fine Arts
Art for the Thoughtful
0n Imitation"
Washington, D.C.
March 30
Queens College
April 6
The ReUse of Sculpture on
the Arch of Constantine
Mr. Thomas Slakey, Tutor
Changing Concepts of Morality
Miss Ellen Davis
St. John's College, Annapolis
April 13
Mr. Douglas Allanbrook, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
Piano Concert
April 20
Dr. Dimitri Conomos
University of British Columbia
The Early Music of Eastern
Christendom
April 27
Professor John Herington
Yale University
On The Oresteia
May 4
Real Olmypics
No Lecture
May 11
Dr. Arnold M. Cooper
Professor of Psychiatry
New York Hospital - Cornell
Medical Center
Psychoanalysis in 1979
Commencement Weekend
No Lecture
May 18
TELH'HONL 301- Hd- 2")71
�
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.
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
3 pages
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Office of the Dean
Title
A name given to the resource
Formal Lecture/Concert Schedule - First Semester 1978-1979 & Second Semester 1978-1979
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1978-1979
Description
An account of the resource
Schedule of lectures and concerts for the 1978-1979 Academic Year.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Lecture Schedule 1978-1979
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
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Sparrow, Edward G.
Finkelstein, Louis
Snyder, Louis L.
Gerle, Robert
Peters, Stefan
Bart, Robert S.
Stevens, Frances
Adler, Mortimer Jerome, 1902-2001
Kass, Leon
Luckhardt, C. Grant, 1943-
Schmookler, Andrew Bard
Stendahl, Krister
Stephenson, David
Rephann, Richard
Starr, S. Frederick
White, John
McDonald, Thomas
Taylor, Joshua C. (Joshua Charles), 1917-1981
Davis, Ellen
Slakey, Thomas
Allanbrook, Douglas
Conomos, Dimitri
Herington, John
Cooper, Arnold M.
King William Players
Friday night lecture
Lecture schedule
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/bc116b6849eb1799c304798798c77304.pdf
24c6130e2736d2ded4b5550a99c58a5f
PDF Text
Text
Plato' s Theory of Ideas
Eva Brann*
Ny subject for tonight is, as announced, "Plato' s Theory of Ideas".
vlhether that subject actually in-terests you, or you think that it ought
to interest you-- you \vill, I imagine, regard it as a respectable lecture
topic .
And yet I have to tell you that every term in the project is
wrong-headed.
Let me, therefore begin by explaining why that is.
I mean that
First, Plato' s Theory of Ideas·is not a subject at all.
it is not a compact mental material to be presented on an intellectual
pla-tter.
Plato himself refrained from making it the direct theme of any
of the twenty-five or more dialogues which he wrote.
Ins·tead; the ideas
appear in the context of conversation, incidentally and in scattered
places.
He gives the reason directly in a letter:
There is no treatise of mine about these things, nor ever will
be.
For it cannot be talked about like other subjects of
learning, but out of much communion which has taken place
around this business, and from living together, suddenly, like
a light kindled from a leaping fire, it gets into the soul, and
from there on nourishes itself.
(Seventh Letter 34lc).
I t follows that my lecture, like all the similar scholars' efforts, is
an outsider' s attempt to short-circuit a required initiation, u.n attempt
which betrays my lack of genuine participation in the truth I
veying as a molded matter.
am
con-
On the other hand, there is also much in
Plato' s works \vhich invites such an exposition of his doctrine:
much
explicit and provocative argumentation and many promises of an
externally communicable way to insight.
* Friday Night Lecture, delivered in Annapolis on September 14, 1979 and
in Santa Fe on February 15, 1980.
�-2-
I have another reason for thus
boldly ploughing in.
Last summer
there died that man, that teacher in this school, who, as it seemed to
many of us, best knew the way into the Platonic dialogues .
Jacob Klein .
His name
lS
While he was alive, I, for one, resting secure in the
fact of his existence, postponed a bald confrontation of my own with
this ultlinate philosophical matter.
But now, I thought, the time had
come to be bold in acting on tpe advice Socrates gives to his friends
in the course of the last conversation of his life.
When he is asked
where they will find someone to charm away their fears that philosophy
is impossible
once he is dead, he tells them that not only among the
Greeks, but also among the barbarians-- that, of course, includes us -there are many good people who can do this for them.
But then he adds:
And also you must search for them among youselves, for
probably you will not easily find people more �able
than you are to do this .
{Phaedo 78 a) .
We speak of "Plato' s Theory", and let me now say something about
that.
.
.
Its chief source are, to be sure, the works of Plato, and he is
1
.
J.ts u tJ.mate master .
1)
Yet within his works, the·-:-. Dialogu�-��1 it is not
Plato but his teacher Socrates who originates and maintai�s the theory .
Plato presents Socrates as having.a life-long hold on it, though he
speaks of it under continuously changing aspects .
There is a so-called
"late" dialogue, the Parmenides, in which the elderly author imagines a
boyish Socrates�- a wonderful turnabout-- and in which Socrates'
'
originating claim is elicited by the father of philosophy, Parmenides,
.
{130 b) .
hlmself. v
There is another dialogue, also written late in Plato' s
life, the Sophist, in which an old Socrates, just a few weeks away from
death, listens silently while a stranger brings the theory to its height
�-3-
with the solution of its deepest difficulty.
And finally there is a
"middle" dialogue, the Phaedo, in which Socrates, in the last conversation
of his life, addresses the theory more directly than anywhere else.
Plato,
)
at least, wished the world to think of "Socrates Theory of Ideas".
But then, more accurately, he would not have had us think of a
"theory" at all.
By� theory we usually mean a conceptual construction
designed in principle to yield satisfying explanations for every problem
. 2)
.
A theory ought to be falslfiable, which means it should
brought to lt.
be capable of being made to reveal its incompleteness or inconsistency
by strenuous formal reasoning, so that it may be discredited and disTherefore it is its author' s responsibility to present it in
carded.
the most impregnable form possible.
aplenty in the Theory of Ideas.
Scholars do find such difficulties
But here is a curious circumstance:
they are all anticipated in their boldest form in that very dialogue,
the Parmenides, which represents a boyish Socrates as first proposing
the Ideas.
3)
Can you think of another philosophical theory which is pre-
sented at the very beginning in terms of a series of devastating
difficulties, never to be explicitly
resolved?
The point is, the Ideas are not a theory.
Socrates calls his bringing
in of the Ideas a "supposing" (Phaedo 100 b); the Greek word for a
supposition is a hypothesis. A hypothesis is, literally, an underpinning,
a prop.
4)
It comes to him and he comes on it at every departure and at
every turning.
It is a basis he ackr10wledges _so that he can carry on
___
as he must; not a conclusion presented for verification but a beginning
which then becomes the end of inquiry.
It is first the condition that
gives him heart for a search, by making it possible for him to frame a
question that has in it the arrow to an answer.
One might say that it
�-4-
allows him to make a suspect of the unknown.
{Meno 8 6 b).
Thereafter,
however, the Idea-hypotheses--for the hypothesis is not the proposition
that there are I deas but each Idea itself--are to be used as stepping
stones to their own conversion into something not merely supposed but
truly beheld, "seen".
{Republic 511 b. ).
Such suppositions are surely
not fruitfully accosted by formal hammer-and-tongs argument, though they
are, of course, amenable to careful and critical inspection.
I keep calling these Socratic suppositions Ideas .
The word "idea"
I
is a transcription of a term Socrates himself uses, idea.
it is an infelicitous term.
For ask yourselves what we usually mean
by an idea, for instance when we say:
lecture ".
Nonetheless
"That' s her idea of a good
Clearly we mean an opinion or a mental image or a concept,
often in opposition to "the real thing ".
This modern notion of an idea,
the result of an earth-shaking intellectual upset, is that of a mental
representation, sornet.):l_ing befm::e
_or
in the organ of ideas, the mind .
The use of the term would cast my exposition into a false, albeit
familiar, frame, and I would only make things worse were I to insist
that Socrates' I deas are "real", and worse yet, "really exist".
,
Socrates' own chief word is eidos.
-
Like the word idea it is built
on the simple past stem of the word to see, which signifies the act of
seeing once done and completed .
Scholars have collected the many meanings
of eidos which flow continuously from the broadly ordinary to the
narrowly technical:
class, kind.
shape, figure, face, form, characteristic, quality,
But, of course, when we dwell on the multiplicity of Greek
usages, we are standing the matter on its head, for they are all
revealing differentiations from the dead-center meaning.
Eidos means
sight, aspect, looks, in that eerily active sense in which a thing that
has looks or is a sight presents itself to our sight and our looking.
�-5"Looks", then, and, not idea or form, is the most faithful rendering of
eidos.
5)
of eidos .
But it sounds too curious, and so I shall tonight speak simply
The plural is eide.
for his hypothesis .
Eidos, then is the word Socrates chooses
For that choice he might, for this once, be called
a "Greek thinker", one who cherishes and yet overturns the wisdom of his
languageJwhich associates seeing and knowing:
built on the stem of "I saw" .
"I know" in Greek is
Eidos is a choice full of witty depth,
for the first of all those notorious Socratic paradoxes is surely that
the eidos is invisible .
So let me convert the falsely familiar title "Plato's Theory of
Ideas" to "Socrates' hypothesis of the eide" .
I shall pursue the eidos
under seven headings, for it shows as many aspects as there are beginnings
to Socrates' inquiry# Indeed, that is what makes his hypothesis compelling:
"d
that so many roads lead to t he el os . 6)
I.
II.
Excellence and Commonness
Speech and Dialectic
III .
Answers and Questions
IV .
Opinion and Knowledge
v.
VI .
VII .
I.
Being and Appearance
Same and Other
Original and Image
Excellence and Commonness
"Philosophy" means literally the love of wisdom .
Therefore it begins
in desire (Republic 475 b, Symposium 204 a) , in desirous love, in erotic
passion, the most acute of all passions .
.
.
young beglmung or.
ph"losophy .
l
7)
That is what we might call the
It is that love which arises when
another human being appears "all-beautiful in aspect", in eidos, as the
�-6-
Greek
phra.>e goes .
(Charmide� 154 d) .
We might simply say that it arises
when someone suddenly becomes visible for us .
For beauty, Socrates says,
has the part of shining out eminently and being most lovable, and of
coming to us through sense, through the most acute of senses, the sense
of sight.
Beauty is brilliance, attractive visibility .
Beauty is sight
par excellence, and a sight is that which, without going out of itself,
draws us from a distance .
But such a sensual sight, such a bodily "idea"
(Phaedrus 251 a), which draws us from afar, affects us with an exciting
and utterly confounding sense of its being a mere penetrable veil, a
mere representation Of some divinity beyond .
such love as adoration.
That is why we speak of
It draws us not to itself but through itself--
the enchantedly attentive fascination with sensual looks goes over into
something on the other side of that surface.
Desire through distance
is called love, and if what beckons is on the further side of surface
sight, it is called philosophy .
For, Socrates says, there is a road,
whose first station is the beckoning irritation aroused by one beautiful
body and which leads us to have an eye, first for all kinds of beauty
and finally to sight its self-sameness everywhere in the world and in
the soul .
(Symposium 210 a).
And that sight, the very source of
visibility, is beyond sense, and is the eidos itself .
There is another beginning in what is extraordinary and captivating,
but its visible aspect is a little duller, though its luster is life-long .
(Phaedrus 250 d) .
It has to do with what is outstanding, excellent .
Some
time or other all of us are overcome by admiration for the fullness of
being of certain people and their deeds, or even by an animal or a tool .
(Republic 353 b, 601 d) .
Such potency of being, such proper goodness,
,
is called in Greek aret�, which means effective excellence, potent
capability.
(Laches 192 b) .
It is more than ordinary usefulness or
�-7-
humanity or sincerity.
It is rather a kind of superlativeness--its
I
name is related to aristos, the best.
It is competitive, "agonistic",
as the Greeks say, and uncommon, although we speak rightly and yet
paradoxically of a "standard " of excellence .
Excellence and how to
engender it is a topic of pervasive fascination .
It interests the
good, the crafty, the curious, parents, citizens, the corrupt--perhaps
them most peculiarly (Meno), them and the young .
But again, as in the case of beauty incarnate, every outstanding
human being, every fine deed,appears as a mere instance, a mere
exemplification of excellence.
It is spurious for being only an
instance and not the thing itself, deficient in being abstracted from
the complete complex of virtues, deformed by being bound to a particular
We all know that even the best-founded hero-worship eventually
setting.
looses its edge and luster as the admirer gains perspective, whereas the
longing to see excellence and be excellent is for an ever-bright,
undeformable shape, looming behind the tainted earthly example .
The beautiful and the best, the fine and the good-- through
these
is the enthusiastic first access to the eidos .
But there is also a more sober beginning, one whose implications
Socrates himself was a little put off by in his first youth, feeling its
meanness .
(Parmenides 130 c) .
For besides the high and shining eidos
of what is beautiful and excellent, there is also a common eidos, or better,
everything, from a small bee to a grand virtue, displays or "has" an
eidos .
(Meno 72).
.
Everything we see, everything tha·t appears in any
way at all, looks (or sounds or smells) like somethin9;\ excellences,
elements, animals, tools .
Everything wears the aspect of being of a sort .
Unless it has the looks of something, we cannot see it, for it has no
�- 8-
coherent shape to draw us; we cannot point to it or name it.
To see is
always to re-cognize; just imagine trying to focus on something -- I shouldn't
Whatever
even say "something'.!-which is truly unique and looks like nothing.
One look
wears a look at all wears that look in common with other things .
presides over numerous things and that is why we can "identify", that is
to say, make out the sameness, of things, of people, elements, animals,
..
tools.
It is not in their multifariou i and difference that we lay hold
...,c. .. _,
,
of things but "by their being bees" or beds or excellences, (Meno 72 b) .
Socrates is far more interested in this common look than in what we call
individuality, that inarticulable deviation from the common which he
never thinks of as
a
source of particular fineness .
He pursues the
common eidos because it is more revealing than the world's idiosyncracies .
For we do not learn of this eidos by looking at individual things;
on the contrary, we can look at them only because they display this
eidos, this look.
For example, Socrates would agree that equal objects- -
scratched lines, say-are needed to call u p i n u s the thought of equality.
A
(Phaedo 75 a) .
But they do that only because they take part in that
eidos which makes them look equal to us, even though they are but
uncertainly, passingly, approximately equal, and from them we could
never gather the sharply precise idea of equalitY; anymore than we can
identify goodness by watching human actions from now till doomsday .
That look of things which not one of them has fully or purely but
which is common to all, that is a wonder to Socrates.
And so both outstanding and common sights point to an invisible
eidos beyond .
II.
Speech and Dialectic
We have a surpassing strange power of reaching the things that share
a look, all of them, at once .
�ve can say the word, their name.
When the
�-9-
eye sees a sight the tongue can utter a sound which is the sensual
appearance of a word, of speech.
. (Third Letter 342 b) .
·
One word
reaches, picks out, intends what is the same in many things.
word presides over many things.
(Republic 596 a) .
One
A word 1s not
a symbol for Socrates, for it does not stand for something by reason
of some sort of fit between it and the thing; rather it reaches
toward something utterly other than itself:
it has meaning .
thinks that what words mean is precisely that co�mon eidos.
Socrates
In fixing
on speech he discovers what the panoramic familiarity of daily seeing
leaves obscure:
that the visible world, particularly the natural world,
comes compounded of more and more encompassing visible sorts, rising
finally into totally invisible kindred groups .
The Greek word for a
visible sort is, of course, eidos and for a kindred group, genos . The
Latin word for eidos is species.
Socrates discovers the organization
of the world into species and genus,
8)
.
and that things can be placed,
defined1by thinking about the meaning of names and connecting them
properly in speech.
All the world seems to be at the roots akin
(Meno 81 d) , and that kinship is articulable in complexes of words.
Such connected speech is what the Greeks call logos.
It is, first
of all, inner effort,
movement, attention, intention; indeed, it is
the same as thinking.
(Sophist 263 e) .
It is always an activity of
discerning and picking out on the one hand, and comprehending and
collecting on the other; in fact that is what the verb legein means:
to select and collect.
Socrates thinks that such speech can reveal the
interconnections of the world, but only if it "looks to" (e.g. , Republic
472 b, 532 a) the interweaving of the invisible eide.
true speech is speech in accordance with the eidos
J.llleaningful and
(Phaedrus 249 b) ;
�-
10
-
names reach for the eide singly and sentences for theit· interconnections.
Socrates calls such reaching speech dialectic, "sorting through".
But he gives that word another sense also, a wider one.
( 2 6 6 c) .
Dialectic
is serious, and, if necessary, uncompromising conversation with oneself
or with another, argument.
(I might say that if the enthusiasm of love
is young philosophy, argumentative dialectic might be called the youngest
philosophy because bright children make l•�.vely dialecticians. )
Now
dialectic does not only reveal the articulated unity of the world.
can also shake our easy acceptance of its oneness .
the obtuse self-contradictoriness of things .
It
Speech can rake up
Such self-opposition comes
out when speech is used in a very original way, in "telling" as the old
term goes, in counting.
Take this index finger.
thumb but smaller than the middle finger.
It has both looks at once.
It is larger than the
It is both small and large .
They coincide in the thing and yet we can
tell them apart and count them as each one, and two together in the thing .
Whoever takes the deliverance of words seriously will find this provoking provoking of thought.
(Republic 523) .
Socrates can account for this
revelation only by supposing that the eidos greatness and the eidos
smallness, which are each one and forever separate beyond the finger,
can be fused in the finger .
are pure and intelligible .
III .
Even if the finger is confounding, the eide
This eidos saves the telling power of speech.
Answers and Questions
Socrates asks questions, of himself and of others, and he urges them
continually:
try to say the answer.
His questions are not quite the usual
kind, namely requests for information or provocations of acknowledgement.
Nonetheless people see a charm or a dignity enough in them to try to
respond.
Socrates' kind of question is preeminently framed to elicit
�-11-
speech .
He asks after that in things which can respond, which is
answerable, .!."E!-�£9Jl_$il::>):�
The Greek term for what is answerable in that
/
way is aitia, the responsible reason.
Socrates thinks that such a
responsible reason -- we sometimes say "cause" -- cannot be some external
linkage of events .
It is an trivializing answer to the question "Why
II
is Socrates sitting in prison� to say that he is flexing his joints in
a certain way.
Although he is too modest to say so, he knows he is there
because of his peculiar kind of courage .
"What makes this face beautiful"?
Similarly, if the question is
the answer he insists on is that it
is beautiful not by a certain incidental shape or color, but "by beauty".
He calls such answers unsophisticated but safe.
(Phaedo 100 d) .
They are indeed so simple-minded as to seem at first futile�-�hey
are answers for those whose a�ition is not to go onward but inward .
For
their safety is in keeping us to the question, in directing us through
its words to a word .
To accept that things are beautiful by beauty means
that the cause is not to be reduced or evaporated in inquiry but kept
in sight and pursued; that granted, the answer
elaborated.
(Phaedo 105 b) .
What is beauty-:-"orexcellence
cn-rl
then be safely
For it poses a new and deeper question:
.:X-
or knowledge?
I should say here that
Socrates does not go about idly asking what scholars like to call the
"What is X? question" .
His questions are not one function with variable
objects, but each is asked differently in each conversation for each is
)
set differently into Socrates' life and each reaches toward a unique
being.
We all know that the answer to the question what something is
can take many forms.
Socrates sometimes begins by showing people that
they quite literally don' t know what they are talking about and can't
mean what they are sayin� ---a charming but dangerous business for the
�-12-
young .
(Apology 33 c), Republic 539 b, Philebus 15 a) .
Sometimes he
proposes a startlingly revealing, seemingly paradoxica � and dubiously
convertable identification, for instance that excellence is knowledge .
And once in a while he does what, persuaded by Aristotle (Metaphysics
98 � b) people think of Socrates as doing first and preeminently:
_
looks for a definition by genus and species and differentiae.
Mr. Klein used to say:
1a
d. 1ogues .
9)
he
so, as
There is no one method for interpreting all the
And yet it is equally the case that Socrates is always
after the same end, on
1s a trail blaze .
a
trail of speech on which the one-word answer
The trail, however, runs asymptotically to its goal;
it approaches it without meeting it .
This goal is the eidos named
the simple-minded but safe answer to a Socratic question .
in
Ultimately
the eidos toward which the word points cannot be attained through speech
but only by itself and through itself.
(Cratylos 439 b) Of it is not
f
.
I
speech which determines the eidos but the eidos which founds speech .
(Parmenides 135 c).
:···.
·.:::
logos is utterly diverse from eidos since its
very nature is to be merely about being; it might be said to climb
along the eidetic structure, articulating, so to speak, the lattice of
p
an impenetrably c rystalline complex.
Yet in the meantime the question which is steadfastly answered as it
itself directs, focusses the soul on the eidos as responsible cause.
IV.
Opinion and Knowledge
Socrates comes to grips with the strangest of human scandals: that
we are able to talk without speaking and to believe without acting.
Human
life is peculiarly capable of heights and excrucia·ting falls, and it is
these heights and depths we most avidly chatter about and have powerfully
ineffective beliefs about.
Indeed, public talk about them is obligatory,--
It is an incantation to keep spirit of excellence from fading.
It
�-13.-
consists of certain partial lopsided truths whose deficiency is obscured
by their familiarity.
Socrates calls such speechless talk, such logos
like utterance without present thought, opinion. (Our favorite phrase
signal that an opinion is coming is:
"I feel that . . . " . )
He thinks
further that it is because we do not know what we mean when we talk of
excellence> that we fail to be excellent .
By "knowing" he does not mean
being familiar with certain arguments and definitions or having a some
sort of competence or canniness in getting what one wants.
Minor 365 d).
what truly is.
(Hippias
He means that our souls are alight with, are filled with,
_
He means a knowledge so live and rich that it goes
immediately over into action without leaving room for the mediation of
a wavering or perverse will.
So Socrated first interest in knowledge
is practical, but I should say here that that knowledge vivid enough
to pass immediately into deed will also be an end in itself, a realm in
which to dwell beyond all action, and that this is yet another one of
the great Socratic paradoxes.
(Phaedo 66 b, Phaedrus 247, Republic
517 b) .
To be cured of being caught in mere. opinion we must know how this
state is possible .
Socrates finds only one explanation plausible .
What
we have opinions about cannot be the same as what we think seriously
about .
(Republic 477) .
The name may be the same, but we cannot have
the same thing in mind when we talk and when we speak.
We are using
our powers so differently that they amount to different powers and must
have different objects . - That is not really so odd an idea:
\Je seem
to switch gears when we pass from pontificatin�_; to thinking, and the
·
matter we have gone into deeply is no longer what it was when we
"knew" it superficially, just as the friend well known is a different
�-14-
person from the friend of first acquaintance.
The superficial glance
is reflected by a surface that masks the depth in which thinking becomes
absorbed.
That first aspect of the world which is the object of opinion,
whose whole character it is to seem and then to vanish before closer
inspection, Socrates calls becoming, because it is always coming to be
and never quite what it is .
It is what is before our eyes.
Our first
fascination is with the shifting, inexact, contradictory things before
our eyes, or with the obtrusive opinions of our fellows, and these are
our unavoidable beginning.
(Phaedo 74 a) .
But as the visible surface
is penetrated and those opinions are searched into, a new world appears,
now to the eye of the thought, steadfast in being such as it is, of a
powerful "suchness,
".
shapely, unique .
Socrates calls this world being.
He understands it to be all that knowledge demands.
For in knowing we
have a sense of being anchored, rooted in something stable and lucid for
the eye of the soul,
(Phaedo 99 d).
It is the world of the eidos as
that which is to be known, the knowable eidos.
(Republic 511 a).
And however I have made it sound, Socrates does not regard the
knowable eidos as his contrivance to grant himself knowledge.
Rather
he thinks that we are, all of us, capable of the experience of going
into ourselves in thought, led on by the beckoning eidos, a process so
vividly like the raising of a memory that he calls it, making
pr;�·N>rcl;cd
it, recollection, the calling-up of a memory.
/'-
a,
myth of
(Meno 81, Phaedo 73).
The way to the eidos is by passage through our soul � not by penetration
of outer things-- or rather, these two ways are one .
I should add that the eidos is knowable but it is not knowledge.
It confronts the soul and is not of it.
To put it in modern terms:
rt
�-15-
is a presence to the soul, but not a representation within it .
He
might say that Being is for us irreduceably aspectual: \./e look at it
and move among its articulations for it has a power of affecting the
soul and being known.
(Republic 511, Sophist 248 e).
Y7e may even,
speaking figuratively, comprehend it, but we cannot pass into it.
For Socrates philosophy, the desire for being,remains forever philosophy,
an unfulfilled longing.
V.
Appearance and Being
The eidos is steadfast and lucid .
us.
It is shifting and opaque.
Not so the world which envelops
Yet the Greeks call what appears before
our eyes the phenomena, which means "what shines out", "what shows itself", for the things that appear glow and ensnare us in their kaleidoscopic spectacle; that is �hy we are all lovers of sights and sounds
(Republic 475 d) .
I should note here that although I cannot help
talking of "things", the appearances are not things in any strict sense
since they have no "reality"
"
(which is but Latin for thinghood) , no
compacted)concrete character .
ness", "affairs"
I
Socrates sometimes uses the word "busi-
(pragmata) for our world .
The "phenomena:' sparkle
busily, but it is all surface .
Now the systematic illusions and the serried variety of appearance
can be mastered by various sciences, for example, sciences of perspective
and classification, but there is still a recalcitrant residue.
That
incorrigible phenomenality show itself as a two-fold multiplicity .
First
there are always many of a kind, many beautiful things, many just acts .
And second, no beautiful thing and no just act is that way perfectly.
unbudgeably, purely, but each changes as our perspective on it changes
in time or place.
Appearance as appearance is scattered and shimmering,
�-16-
fragmented and irredescent.
But most of all it is not what it shows, or to put it plainer:
hppearance is appearance of something, it points beyond itself.
is it whose refracted form is shown to us in appearance?
must be for that very reason in itself invisible .
What
What appears
This invisible eidos
is what Socrates thinks of as the being behind apperance, and appearance
is becoming regarded as a manifestation.
This eidos which is a being,
is all that appearance and becoming are not:
not scattered but o� not
'.)
multiform but of a single look (Phaedo 78 d); not mixed but pure (66 a);
not passive but potent (Sophist 247 e); not elusive and illusory but
_
steadfast and true; not for busy show but the thing in its verity, the
very thing (to auto pragma); not self-contradictory but self-same
(Phaedo 78 d, Cratylos 386 e); not dependent and of something, but itself by itself, absolved from subservience, or "absolute", as later
commentators render Socrates deliberately naive term "by itself"; unique,
immortal, indestructible (Phaedo 78 d), outside time and beyond place
(Phaedrus 247 b).
Most simply, Socrates calls the eidoslthe just, the
beautiful.
Whatever has this characteristic of potent, shapely, and, one might
almost say "specific", self-sameness is called a being.
It provides
,
such "beingness" ('Ousia, Cratylos 386 e, Meno 72 b) as appearances have,
and it does this by somehow "being by", having presence (?-3.rousia,
Phaedo 100 d) in them.
The eidetic beings are responsible for the fact
that the question "What is it?" asks not only what the thing is but also
what it is, that being accompanies every "whatness'.', all. quality.
I should observe again that beings are not "real", for they are not
things and do not move in the categories true of things, nor do they
�-17-
"exist", for to exist means to be here and now .
10)
But they are not un-
'
They are, in the way described, and as they
real or non-existent either .
(Phaedo 104 d) .
appear they give things their looks, their visible form .
VI.
Same and Other
The being I have named so often is not Socrates' discovery .
It comes
to him from those so prejudicially called Presocratics, in particular
from Parmenides who entered{_�� sanctuary of being in a blazing chariot.
Thus it comes to Socrates already fraught with .established controversy
and difficulties .
Even he has an inherited legacy of "problems", that is
to say, of questions posed in terms of his predecessors' inescapable
Questions posed in this way, as problems, notoriously have
doctrines .
resolutions which pose more and tighter problems, and so the tradition of
professional philosophy is set .
Socrates does not escape this unfresh
beginning.
This is the problem Socrates takes up when still almost a boy;
being Father Parmenides discovered is and nothing else.
The
It is, one and
only, without distinction or difference, for we cannot think or speak
what is � not.
There is no sentence which does not contain, audibly
or latently, an1. "is", an assertion of the truth of being.
attention to what speech always says is not primitive .
Such austere
Listen to a
contemporary poet, W. H. Auden:
Words have no words for words that are not true .
(II
·,
11)
\Jo(� S
.
What Parmenides says
that what is, is and in merely being is all one�
��:liiOJJl;s:::!;):: is compelling
St.?lc.:e.
say it nay .
I
we have no immediate speech with which to
But it is equally monstrous, for it negates both our
o.,\ OV\5
\A; I 1-\11
multifarious \'lOrld, the one in which we are at homej 2j<;�� the very
possibility of articulate speech itself.
Because Parmenides' grand
�-18-
insight brings all articulating speech to a halt, his zealous follower
Zeno has taken the clever way of attacking the opposition who continue
to talk and say that being is not one but many.
He understands this to
have to mean that being is at once like and unlike itself, selfcontradictory,· unthinkable.
Socrates knows that the visible world,
at least, is like that and that yet thoughtful speech canno·t bear such
self-contradictions.
So he offers a supposition which saves both at
the integrity of that which. speech is always about, this "is "
once:
which is the bond of every logos, and also the manifest multiplicity
and inconsis·tency of appearance and its gathering in speech.
He saves
Parmenides from sinking into the white silence of being.
Socrates' supposition is the eidos, which is not being itself but
�being.
His resolution is that being is many, but not confused.
The
eide are each self-same, as being should be, but they are also diverse
from each other.
The appearances somehow "participate " in these beings
in such a way that the diverse beings intersect in them and are superimposed.
Thus the appearances become self-opposed; they eide save at
once the purity of being and the alloy of becoming.
"What wonder?",
says young Socrates to the Parmenidean problem with multiplicity
(Parmeni� -129 b), the universal paean of those who have resolved
��
another's perplexity,--An older Socrates will say that philosophy is
wonder.
Socrates' solution, that there are several and diverse beings, of
course poses new problems.
The most telling of these is that each being
is also a non-being--at least it is a not-being; it is not what the
other beings are, so that Zeno' s problem with the self-opposition of the
world of appearance has been but raised into the realm of being.
A few
�-19-
weeks before the end of his life Socrates is present at a great moment
in the course of philosophy Hhen a visitor from Parmenides' country
presents, by way of resolving this higher problem, a momentous elaboration
of his supposition which, while turning it almost irrevocably into a
theory, advances it greatly.
For if Socrates had shown how we can come
to terms with the self-opposition of the world of appearance, . the visitor
will show how we can account for false and fraudulent speech, and even �or
sp
being.
The stranger's bold solution to Socrates' problem is this.
All the
eide are beings, and that is taken to mean thay they all take part in
being it���f; they belong to a highest eidos, the eidos Being.
stranger boldly claims that there
lS
also anothe� unheard of, eidos
which ranges in a peculiar way through all the eide.
It is indeed not-
being, but not-being rightly understood, understood as a being.
258 c) .
He calls it the Other .
The
(Sophist
The eidos of the Other runs through'all
beings and makes them other than each other--not what the other is .
By
being scattered through all being it is the cause of its pervasive
distinction and difference.
It is a peculiar principle which relates
fo\""
by opposition and unifies by diversity, since all have otherness in common;
/'
their very community makes them different .
each other.
It makes all beings confront
It is the very eidos of relativity.
It is not a new name
for non-being that the stranger contributes but a new view of the world
as articulated and bonded through difference.
It is a world in which
the fact that we take one thing for another and speak falsely, as we
surely do, is accounted for.
The stranger mentions in passing also another principle, evidently
not itself an eidos among eide, but comprehending, surpassing and beyond
all .being.
He calls it the Same (25� e) , in antithesis to the Other.
u
r1ous
�-20-
It is that which gives the eidos of Being and through it all the beings
J
)
their steadfast abiding by themselves,
their very own nature,
the Same gives the eide their self-
what they are through and through;
It is the culminating principle.
sameness.
approached,
0.�1'\�\
vividness
it is also called the Good,
t;,\\·\1r·\C,'/\.:.S�
"\
{Republic 509a),
l
their being
Depending on how it is
because it gives bein�their
and in Plato's "Unwritten Teachings"--recall
-t'h c.
\�\
0,\-
that he declined to write down central things-- it seems to have been
�
called the One,
because it is the first and final totality.
speaks of it explicitly,
though in metaphor,
but once,
Socrates
likening it to
the sun because it gives the eide their luminous sightlikeness.(507.o).
Aristotle told a story of Plato's famous lecture on the Good which
>
he held at his school,
the Academy.
People came in droves,
hear something fascinating to themselves,
power.
about health or wealth or
But it was all about arithmetic and how the eide are a c ertain
kind of number,
Good
expecting to
lS
the One.
ending up with the just-mentioned revelation that the
So they got disgusted and drifted off.
Elements of Harmony II,
30).
Mr.
{Aristoxenus,
Klein used to add--as if he had been
there--that only one person stayed,
comprehending and critical.
That
was Aristotle himself.
What Plato spoke about then was what is called dialectic in the last
and strongest sense,
532),
thinking by and through the eide
attending to their grouping,
I
(�yrnploke,
Sophist 240 c).
mingling,
Such dialectic,
and the philosophical activity proper,
namely in the Sophist,
it.
(Republic' 511
hierarchy,
C,
"intertwining".
the ultimate use of the logos
appears in the dialogues but once,
and scholars have not often succeeded in recovering
I should say that there is a chapter in Mr. Klein's book on Greek
mathematics which engages in true dialectic and tells how the eidos Being
�-21-
can be understood as the number Two.
VII.
ll)
Original and Image
There is one greatest, almost overwhelming perplexity about the
eide which Socrates knows about from the very beginning.
How can an eidos do the very business for which it is submi·tted
131 c) .
to us?
(Parmenides
Is not the eidos-unit,
being each one and ever the same and receptive of
neither becoming 'A.t>l"idestruction, still steadfastly
the same? And thereafter, must it not be posited a.\·t-'-'�v
as scattered and having become many in the things
that are becoming, or �:.etS:" yet whole but separate
from itself, which would seem to be the most
impossible of all--that one and the same thing
should be in one and many?
(Philebus 15 b) .
hoW
Then can the eidos be the source of the appearances around us, how can
/' --
it have truck with what is always changing and multiple?
This question
can be called the "lower participation problem" since it deals not with
the community the eide have with each other but with that which is below
them .
It is the question closest to us:
now do we understand the
working relations which the eide--once we suppose them to be-- have to
the variety, the passages and the contradictions of our world of
appearance.
Socrates uses a number of terms to name this relation.
He speaks
I
of the "part-hold", the "participation" (rnethexis, Phaedo 100-102) of
the appearances in the eidos, but, of course, he does not mean a parttaking, as when people take up a part of an awning they sit under.
(Parmenides 131 b) ,
He speaks of a community of the eidos and appearances,
of their being named after it, of the presence of the eidos in them.
Phaedo 100 c, d, 103 b) .
(e. g.
These terms signify that the two realms are
strongly related, but they do not reveal what the appearances can have in
common with beings, or why they merit being named after them)or how the
beings can be with them.
�-22-
But Socrates does use one group of words which tell more.
·
He speaks
of participation through similarity, likeness, imaging, imitation.
(Phaedrus 250 a, Phaedo 74 e, Timaeus 39 e and, above all Republic 510 b).
That our world should stand to the realm of eide as copy to exemplar
(Parmenides 132 d, Timaeus 48 e) has a certain high plausibility.
It
conveys a falling off from the fullness of being, an imitative, derivative
It suggests that one original eidos will have many image-appearances,
mode.
and that each appearance ought not to stand free, but be, like any image,
in some stuff.
(Timaeus 52 c).
It indicates how every appearance could
be doubly dependent, on the e idos for being visible, and on our sight
for being seen.
If the appearances somehow image the eide, their
inferiority, multiplicity, materiality and sensuality becomes comprehensible--and so does the fact of their inescapably beguiling looks.
Yet there are apparently devastating difficulties with this primordial
imitation, of which the one most open to formal. attack is this:
If the
e idos is what is originally beautiful, and beautiful things are copies,
and if the likeness of copies to their originals comes from their sharing
the same quality, then both have the quality of being beautiful.
Then
the e idos of beauty is beautiful, as the eidos of justice is just, and
Socrates does not scruple to say just that.
210 c).
(Protagoras 330 c, Symposium
But that way of speaking, that beauty is beautiful, is an
insupportable redundancy� called by scholars "self-predication".
Furthermore,
if the function of the eidos was to account for the fact that anything is
beautiful, then another e idos beyond will have to be pos�ted to account
for the fact that the eidos itself has been said to be beautiful.
Aristotle
calls this dilemma the •;Third i:1an", because behind the man and the man-like
_,
eidos of mankind there must appear a third man-eidos .
(Metaphysics 990 b).
---
�-23-
But in truth, these terrible perplexities, whose various versions
and issues Socrates knows about (Parmenides 132 d, Republic 597 c), miss
the point.
�"-\""'r"'!>t.
'
When Socrates so often chooses to employ "the beautiful" rather
/'
than the noun of quality "beauty", he is not simply misled by the fact
that in Greek, as in English, the former phrase sounds as if it meant a
beautiful thing, being an adjective turned into a substantive.
When he
speaks that way he means to make us face the self-same "suchness" of the
eidos, to divert our desire from appearing beautiful things to a better
but invisible beauty, to convey its greater desirability, to persuade us
to "look to" it .
The turns of speech that call the eidos verily beautiful,
through and through beautiful, the beautiful itself, are philosophical
rhetoric.
They try to lever us into new way of being enchanted, namely
not by that which appears as beautiful but by the very condition of our
seeing and saying that it is beautiful.
The eidos beauty is certainly
not ugly, but no more is it adjectivally beautiful; it is rat�er such
as to be itself the sole source of the attribute in others.
The word
"beautiful " does not describe this suchness, but it reaches for it .
How then can beautiful things be images of beauty if it is not,
as seems indeed to be impossible, by likeness in the sense of sameness
of quality?
It is because imaging is the deepest capability of being,
the accompaniment of the pervasive otherness which haunts it, of the
non-being which dogs every being.
Each being confronts another as its
other, and its own otherness is mirrored in the others.
For the image nature of an image is not really caught when we point
out similarities, say of conformation and color, between it and its
original .
The closest we can come to telling it is to say that an
image is, in truth, not what it images, and then again it somehow is .
�-24-
For example,
we are apt to say of a little statue of Socrates looking
like a pot-bellied satyr:
not.
"That's Socrates",
while we know that it is
We mean that he is in some sense present in the clay--"represented",
but not in truth.
what it is;
For an image is that which in its very nature is not
it is an interweaving of being and non-being.
(Sophist
240 c).
Now among the beings,
it is,
the eide,
each is self-same and truly what
and also other than and not what the others are;
is with respect to the other beings;
But becoming, Socrates explains,
(Republic 477a).
and being;
the interweaving is not a mingling.
is an ru�algam of being and non-being.
The appearances mingle within themselves non-being
they have nei� her steady self-sameness nor fixed difference,
and yet they are somehow enduring and distinct.
nature not what they are.
of being.
its not-being
They are in their very
In that sense they might well be c alled images
So here is a formal way of conceiving the claim that appearance
images the eidos.
But it must be said that it in no \vise solv�s our
greatest problem:
how the eidos drops down from the context of being to
become entangled with non-being in a new and world-making way -- how
there can be an eidos incarnate,(Phaedrus 25la).
most startling to see
Socrates ascribes to us an initial power
i
in children -- of image recognition (eikas a,
we recognize at once the fact o£
in the imitation
(Sldb).
I
Republic 51 �� ),
by which
a counterfeit and the original lurking
In its developed form it is a sense for what
I
Mr.
Klein once called
of philosophy itself.
\\
the duplicity of being",
and it is the very urge
�- 2 5I have said what I thi nk Plato ' s Socrates thought,
this lecture to be what is,
so I must now say what
!
but I do not want
wonde r fully , cal l e d an " academi c " exerci s e ,
think .
But be fore I do that,
let me make mention
one las t time of the name of Jacob Kle i n to whom this le cture is mos t
certainly dedicated in loving memory and who -- so good a teacher was
he -- taught me nothing but what I could strai ghtway r ecogni ze as my own.
Socrates hi m s e l f says of the e i de t hat they have become buzz-words
'
( Phaedo l O Q b);
I
there are even those known , a l i ttle absur dl y ,
frie nds of the e i d e "
'
( Sophi s t 24Ba) .
drawn and fasci nated by Socrates '
them .
Tha t kind of thi ng com e s from being
s i ghts without havi ng ours e �ves seen
�vhat i s more , Plato doe s not reveal, i ndeed conceals ,
dia logues the answer to the question:
di d anyone eve r ? ;
i n s hort :
as " the
in the
did Socrate s himse l f view the e i de ?
are there acces s i ble e i de ?
The re fore our attention i s naturally turned to the Socr a te s through
whom we hear of the se matters and to hi s trustworthi ne s s .
And I fi nd the
man who is commemorated in the Dialogue s trus tworthy beyond a l l others .
I trust hi s s lyne s s and hi s s imp l i ci ty, hi s sobriety and hi s e nthusiasm,
hi s playfulnes s and hi s s teadfastnes s , hi s eros and hi s dignity .
Yet
i t is not mai nly hi s character that I trus t , but h i s presuppositions,
a nd I think that they mu s t have forme d him more than he di d .them.
I make Socrate s '
presuppos iti ons out to be these :
i n human l i fe \vhi ch stands out,
them , an a s ce n t .
that
there
lS
that.
that there are heights and there is a way to
That what is de sirable i s a t a di stance ,
by i t s e l f
.......,
and i n i t s e l f and there fore s i ght· · li ke and yet i nvi s i ble, a n d that there
..___._
must be a means f or reaching i t .
That this mediating power i s spe e ch, which
�-26 net-orrl-y-r-a-i-ses--tJ. s-·but
�Jr ., \·
o-x\- � '-') \ .;, � '
a rouses that irrita bly wonder a t common things
.
.
which wheH-��ulated is ca lled a question .
. 1\
.
And f irst and last, that
where ther e is a question, an answer has a lready been at work ,
and it is
our human task to recollect it _
These presuppositions are not at all n ecessary.
Our specific human
work does not have to be thought of as arising from en thusiasm about the
extraordinary or marvellin g at the common,
I
1
does . ( Theaetetus 15 d ) .
p
as Socrates says philoso hy
I t · can· come from a cool ,
sober sense tha t the
,,
•\T$
ways of the world should be exposed and explained, myths dismantled and \h
/·
depths made plane� that not what is best but \vhat is individual,
is common but what is ordinar � should preoccupy our efforts ;
should not view but master , not play but work,
not ask but determin e ,
not what
that we
not suppose but certi fy ,
not long but draw limits.
I am describing that
self-controlled matur ing o f philoso phy which is responsible for all that
we call modernity .
I do not think for a moment that we should play
truant from this severe and powerful school .
But I do think tha t Socrates '
suppositions are that beginning which can be forgotten but n ever superseded.
�N 0 T E S
1.
Let me add here that the next mo st important sourc e o f the Theory o f
I deas, very difficult to use,
is Aristotle, who reports its technic al e laborations
and problems and looks at it, as it were ,
askanc e .
I
2.
The meaning of theoria in Greek is ,
s ight s e en ,
3.
however ,
that of a viewing, a
contemplation, and in that sense the I de as are very muc h a 1' theory " .
I am thinking o f the so-called problems o f p ar tic ip ation and separation ,
o f s e lf-pre dic ation,
of the Third Man ,
and of eide tic structure.
Incidentally
in the Parmenides Socrate s is portrayed as the s upporter of that very version
of the theory -- that the ideas are " s ep ar ate " from things -- whic h Aristotle
explicitly dehies he he ld .
Aristotle makes this c laim in a pu z zling passage
which is t he prime source for all denials of So crate s '
theory .
4.
a
authors hip of the
(Metaphy s ic s 9 8 7b) .
A Socr atic hypothe s e s is unlike a post-Baconion hypothe s e s in not b e in g
conj e cture to be verified by ob s ervational experience .
It is a little c los e r
t o an a s tronomic al hypothe s e s such a s Pl ato i s said by Simp liciu s to have fir s t
demanded, n amely an inte lle c tual con struction,
to " save the phenomena " ,
a mathe matic al theor y ,
devise d
that is , to display the anomalous appe aran c e s as grounded
in regu l ar itie s acc eptable to r e ason .
On l� a Soc r atic hypothe s e s is in no way
a p o s tu lated construc tion.
5.
Nor is the tran s lation " form" quite good , becau s e it is too reminisc e nt
o f the Aris tote lian distinc tion between form and matter.
'
a form in a thing (Phaedo 1 0 4/d)
I
6.
The e idos may "work "
but it is not its form.
I have given this pr e s entation a questionable c oherence by ranging
through the dialogues as if Plato ' s works constituted a planned-out whole .
then I b e lieve that they do ,
•
1\
But
,
and that what scho lars c�nslder the development· o f
Plato ' s thought from e arly t o l ate dialogue s is largely the advanc ing o f one o r
�-2the other of these different beginnings and aspects.
Accordingly the Phaedrus,
7.
�minently
pr
"
set out,
was once,
in which th i<>. beginning of philosophy is
probably wrongly,
thought to be Plato's earliest
di alogue .
Of course,
8.
the visible things do not constitute the eidos,
eidos their concept,
that is,
the definition which selects the members.
I want to mention also that,
although
does refer to the greatest eide as gene,
it is not his fixed u sage ,
genera,
kindred groups
indicating that in the highest reaC.111cs eidetic
thereby
nor is the
Plat 9
(Sophist 254h),
I
shapeliness yields to
associative characteristics.
I
For Socrates _'n1ethodos means a path of inquiry to be follow·ed
9.
I
533b),
not a pre-set investigatory procedure.
'
10.
The word ousia did play a role analogous to modern "reality" in
(a)
A s we speak of "real" estate,
common language.
property,
Scholars attribute to Socrates the distinction between two u s es
the verb "to be",
u se "is"
what i s
Greek s u sed ou sia to mean one's
s ub stance .
(b)
occurs
acts
as
the predicative and the existential.
a copula,
said of it,
as in
a coupling between the
j
not S o c rate s
'
aim.
"j ustice exits".
of discourse and
The existential "is"
meaning is to be found sometimes,
But di stinctions in verbal
When we say that "the face i s bea u tif u l "
occasion for asking what beau·ty is,
I
y-c,
Greek
pp.
and when we assert that "justics exists"
Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra
79 ff.
usage are
it is for him the
want s to know in what world -- and it will not be one which ha s time
11.
of
In it s predicative
subject
"This face is beautiful".
in the chopped-off sentence " ustice is",
somewhere in the world:
1968)
(Republic
( T he
he
and p la c e
M.I.T.
.
Press,
�-3I n brief ,
i t goes l ike this :
Being is composed of two eide,
a ccording to the stranger the eidos of
I
ch!3 nge and stillness
�
(Sophist 2 5 4 ) ,
5ince first
I
of a l l
everything that i s ,
at once;
is either 1n motion or at rest ,
these eide never mingl e .
though n ever both
Being i s not either o f these a lone, or
their mixture, but precisely both together .
That , however,
is j ust how number
assemblages b ehave ; Socrates himself draws attention to this in that favorite
formula :
f
4 7 6,a ,
!
each one, b oth too .
7f
(Hippias h\ayor 3 0 a ,
�
I
Phaedo 9 a,
Republic
I
Theaetctres l 4 6 e ) .
!
Each unit in a number r emains what it was, one, b ut
b oth together have a new name and nat ure,
is by i tself .
Be ing,
two ;
they are together what neither
the highest eidos, would then be the eidetic
�wo
-- not
'
anything above or beyond the two erdetic units,
constitute i t , b ut simply thei� �
ei�� t
oqeth�£·
change a nd sti l l ness,
Aristotle reports the
interest i n the arithmetic organization of the eid e .
,
a lso points out that the eidetic units a r e not ,
wh ich
Ac ademy ' s
(Metaphysics 9 8 7b ) .
He
l ike arithmetic unit s , indif f erent,
capab l e o f being added and " thrown t ogeth er" any which way ( l0 8 l a ) .
They can
only a ssociate into eidetic numbers uniquely , according to their nature; such
eidetic counting,
proper .
which drives speech to and then beyond its limits,
is dial ectic
O. >"� J.
se
�
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Plato's theory of ideas
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1979-09-14
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Typescript of a lecture delivered on September 14, 1979 by Eva Brann as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
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lec Brann 1979-09-14
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Annapolis, MD
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St. John's College
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text
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Brann, Eva T. H.
Deans
Friday night lecture
Tutors
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ST
JoHN's CoLLEGE
ANNAPOLIS. MARYLAND 21404
FouNom IG'IG A'> KINe WiLLIAM\ ScHOOl
FORMAL LECTURE/CONCERT SCHEDULE - 1979-1980
September 14
Miss Eva Brann, Tutor
Plato's Theory of Ideas
St. John's College, Annapolis
September 21
Mr. Richard Sacks
Columbia University
'Shining Hector' and the
HOllow Norms of Heroism
Mr. Jacques Barzun
Charles Scribner's Sons
Tolstoy and History:
A Look at the Theory in
War and Peace
October 5
Mr. Edward G. Sparrow, Dean
St. John's College, Annapolis
The Love of Truth and
the Liberal Arts
October 12
Long Weekend
No Lecture
october 19
Mr. David Jones, Tutor
St. John 1 s College, Santa Fe
Further Remarks on Value
October 26
Renaldo Reyes - Piano
Concert
November 2
Mr. Bruce Venable, Tutor
Let Man's Soul be a Sphere"
The Soul, Mathematics, and Music
September 28
St. John's College, Santa Fe
11
November 9
Professor Creighton Gilbert
Cornell University
Who Painted the Life of
St. Francis at Assisi? A
New slant on a Classic Puzzle
November 16
All College Seminar
No Lecture
November 23
Thanksgiving Holiday
No Lecture
November 30
Professor Marjorie Grene
Douglass College
Rutgers University
Changing Concepts of
Darwinian Evolution
December 7
Play
No Lecture
December 14 January 2
Winter Vacation
No Lectures
Professor Irving Younger
The Idea of Sanctuary
January 4
Cornell Law School
January 11
Jan diGaetani, Mezzosoprano
Leslie Guinn, Baritone
n Lli'HONE
--101-1.6-l- 7 371
Concert
�FORMAL LECTURE/CONCERT SCHEDULE - 1979-1980
PAGE TWO
January 18
Professor John Hollander
Yale University
Poetry Reading
January 25
Dr. Wilbur Knorr
The Riddle of Euclid's
Fifth Book
New York
(Stanford University)
February 1
Professor Leonard Clark
Earlham College
Hume and the Mechanical Self
February 8
Long Weekend
No Lecture
February 15
Mr. Mortimer Adler
World Community and Cultural
Pluralism
Institute for Philosophical
Research
February 22
Professor Henry Veatch
Georgetown University
Who Is a Logician, and
What Does He Do?
February 29
Dr. Gerald Holton
Jefferson Laboratories
Harvard University
Einstein as Builder of a
World View
Spring vacation
No Lectures
March 21
Mr. David Starr, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
March 28
Emerson Quartet
Beyond the Portals of the Paths
of Night and Day: A Translation
and Interpretation of The Fragments
Concert
of Parmenides
Mr. Nicholas Maistrellis, Tutor
Darwin's 'Origin of Species'
March 7 March 14
April 4
St. John's College, Annapolis
April ll
Mr. Joe Sachs, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
An Outline of the Argument of
Aristotle's Metaphysics
April 18
Mr. Hilail Gildin
Liberal Arts Institute
Queens College
The Design of Rousseau's
Social Contract
April 25
Mr. Richard ttiJeigle, President
St. John's College
Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching
May 2
Father Louis Bouyer
May 9
Real Olympics
The Logos in the Gospel
According to St. John
No Lecture
May 16
Commencement Weekend
No Lecture
�
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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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2 pages
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Office of the Dean
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Formal Lecture/Concert Schedule - 1979-1980
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1979-1980
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Schedule of lectures and concerts for the 1979-1980 Academic Year.
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Lecture Schedule 1979-1980
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Annapolis, MD
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St. John's College
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Brann, Eva T. H.
Sacks, Richard
Barzun, Jacques, 1907-2012
Sparrow, Edward G.
Jones, David
Reyes, Renaldo
Venable, Bruce
Gilbert, Creighton
Grene, Marjorie, 1910-2009
Younger, Irving
diGaetani, Jan
Guinn, Leslie
Hollander, John
Knorr, Wilbur
Clark, Leonard
Adler, Mortimer Jerome, 1902-2001
Veatch, Henry
Holton, Gerald
Starr, David
Maistrellis, Nicholas
Sachs, Joe
Gildin, Hilail
Weigle, Richard Daniel, 1912-
King William Players
Relation
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September 14, 1979. Brann, Eva T. H. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/1239" title="Plato's theory of ideas">Plato's theory of ideas</a> (typescript)
April 11, 1980. Sachs, Joe. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3726" title="An outline of the argument of Aristotle's Metaphysics">An outline of the argument of Aristotle's Metaphysics</a> (typescript)
Friday night lecture
Lecture schedule
-
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Text
AN OUTLINE OF THE ARGUMENT
OF ARISTOTLE'S METAPHYSICS
Joe Sachs
a lecture given
April 11, 1980
�When Aristotle articulated the central question of the group of writings
we know as his Metaphysics, he said it was a question that would never cease
to raise itself.
He was right.
He also regarded his own contributions to
the handling of that question as belonging to the final phase of responding to
it.
I think he was right about that too.
The Metaphysics is one of the most
helpful books there is for contending with a question the aski·n g, .of which is
one of the things that makes us human.
In our time that question is for the
most part hidden behind a wall of sophistry, and the book that could lead us
to rediscover it is even more thoroughly hidden behind a maze of misunderstandings.
~aul
Shorey, a scholar whose not-too-bad translation of the Republic is
in your collected Plato, has called the Metaphysics "a hopeless muddle" not to
be made sense of by any "ingenuity of conjecture."
I think it is safe to say
that more people have learned important things from Aristotle than from
Professor Shorey, but what conclusion other than his can one come to about a
work that has two books numbered one, that descends from the sublime description
of the life of the divine intellect in its twelfth book to end with two books
full of endless quarreling over minor _
details of the Platonic doctrine of forms,
a doctrine Aristotle had already decisively refuted in early.parts of the book,
those parts, that is, in which he is not defending it?
The book was certainly
not written as one whole; it was compiled, and once one has granted that, must
not one admit that it was compiled badly, crystallising as it does an incoherent
ambivalence toward the teachings of Plato?
After three centuries in which no one
has much interest in it at all, the Metaphysics becomes interesting to nineteenth
century scholars just as a historical puzzle:
how could such a mess have been
put together?
I have learned the most from reading the Metaphysics on those occasions
when I have adopted the working hypothesis that it was compiled by someone who
understood Aristotle better than I or the scholars do, and that that someone
(why not call him Aristotle?) thought that the parts made an intelligible whole,
best understood when read in that order.
give you some sense of how the
Met~physics
My main business tonight will be to
looks in its wholeness, but the
picture I will sketch depends on several hypotheses independent of the main one.
One cannot begin to read the Metaphysics without two pieces of equipment:
is a set of decisions about how to translate Aristotle's
ce~tral
words.
one
No
translator of Aristotle known to me is of any help here; they will all befuddle
you, more so in the Metaphysics even than in Aristotle's other works.
The other
�-2-
piece of equipment, and equally indispensihle I think, is some perspective on the
relation of the Metaphysics to the Platonic dialogues.
In this matter the
scholars, even the best of them, have shown no imagination at all.
In the
dialogues, in their view, Plato sets forth a "theory" by putting it into the
mouth of Socrates.
There is some room for interpretation, hut on the whole we
are all supposed to know that theory.
reject it.
Aristotle must accept that theory or
If he appears to do both it is because passages written by some
Platonist have been inserted into his text, or because things he wrote when he
was young and a Platonist were lumped together with other things on similar
subjects which he wrote when he was older and his thoughts were different and
his own.
The Plato we are supposed to know from his dialogues is one who posited
that, for every name we give to bodies in the world there is a bodiless being
in another world, one while they are many, static while they are changing,
perfect while they are altogether distasteful.
Not surprisingly, those for
whom this is Plato find his doctrine absurd, and welcome an Aristotle whom they
find saying that being in its highest form is found in an individual man or
horse, that mathematical things are abstractions from sensible bodies, and that,
if there is an ideal man apart from men, in virtue of whom they are all called
men, then there must be yet a third kind of man, in virtue of whom the form and
the men can have . the same name, and yet a fourth, and so on.
You can't stop
adding new ideal men until you are willing to grant that it was absurd to"add
the first one, or anything at all beyond just plain men.
This is hard-headed,
tough-minded Aristotle, not to be intimidated by fancy, mystical talk, living
in the world we live in and knowing it is the only world there is.
This Aris-
totle, unfortunately, is a fiction, a projection of our unphilosophic selves.
He lives only in a handful of sentences ripped out of their contexts.
The true
Aristotle indeed takes at face value the world as we find it and all our ordinary
opinions about it--takes them, examines them, and finds them wanting.
It is the
world as we find it which continua+ly, for Aristotle, shows that our ordinary,
materialist prejudices are mistaken, and the abandonment of those prejudices
shows in turn that the world as we found it was not a possible world, that the
world as we must reflect upon it is a much ri?her world, mysterious and exciting.
Those of you for whom reading the Platonic dialogues was a battle you won
by losing, an eye-opening experience from which, if there is no going forward,
there is certainly no turning back, should get to know this Aristotle.
But you
will find standing in your way all those passages in which Aristotle seems to he
�-3-
discussing the dialogues and does so in a shallow way.
Each dialogue has a
surface in which Socrates speaks in riddles, articulates half-truths which
invite qualification and correction, argues from answers given by others as
though he shared their opinions,
and pretends to be at a loss about everything.
Plato never straightens things out for his readers, any more than Socrates
does for his hearers.
To do so would be to soothe us, to lull us to sleep as
soon ·as we've begun to be distressed by what· it feels like to be awake.
Platonic
writing, like Socratic talk, is designed to awaken and guide philosophic thinking,
by presenting, defending, and criticising plausible responses to important
questions.
The
Platonic~socratic
words have on1y done their work when we have
gone beyond them, but they remain in the dialogues as a collection of just what
they were intended to be--unsatisfactory assertions.
Hippocrates Apostle finds
81 places in the Metaphysics where Aristotle· disgrees with Plato.
It is not
surprising that Aristotle himself uses Plato's name in almost none of those
places.
Aristotle is addressing an audience of students who have read the
dialogues and is continuing the work of the dialogues.
Many, perhaps most, of
Aristotle's students would, like scholars today, find theories and answers in
Plato's dialogues.
Aristotle would not be earning his keep as a teacher of
philosophy if he did not force his students beyond that position.
Aristotle
constantly refers to the dialogues because they are the best and most comprehensive texts he and his students share.
Aristotle disagrees with Plato about
some things, but less extensively and less deeply than he disagrees with every
other author that he names.
The Metaphysics inevitably looks like an attack
on Plato just because Plato's books are so much better than anything left by
Thales, Empedocles or anyone else.
My first assumption, then, was that the Metaphysics is one book with one
complex argument, and my second is that, in cohering within itself, the
Metaphysics may cohere with the Platonic dialogues.
I assume that discussions
in the dialogues may be taken as giving flesh to Aristotle's formulations, while
they in turn may be taken as giving shape to those discussions.
One need only
try a very little of this to find a great deal beginning to fall into place.
For example, listen to Aristotle in'Book I, Chapter 9 of the Metaphysics: "the
Forms ••• are not the causes of motion or of any other change ••• And they do not in
any way help either towards the knowledge ·of the other things .• or towards their
existence •.• Moreover, all .other things do not come to be from the Forms in any
of the usual senses of 'from.•
And to say that the Forms are patterns and that
�the other things participate in them is to use empty words and poetic metaphors."
A devastating attack on Plato, is it not?
Or is it?
Aristotle says that
positing the Forms explains no single thing that one wants to know.
But doesn't
Socrates say in the Phaedo that to call beauty itself the cause of beauty in
-beautiful things is a "safe but stupid answer"? that one must begin with it but
must also move beyond it?
Again, everyone knows that the Platonic Socrates
claimed that the forms were separate from the things in the sensible world, off
by themselves, while Aristotle insisted that the forms were in the things.
call the Phaedo passage just referred to.
Does not Socrates say that the cause
of heat in a hot thing is not heat itself but fire?
for Socrates?
Re-
Where, then, is the form
Aristotle taught that the causes of characteristics of things
were to be looked for not in a separate world of forms but in the primary
instances of those characteristics right here in the world • . This doctrine may
__
seem to be a rejection of Plato's chief postulate, but listen to Aristotle him)
self explain it in Book II, Chapter 1 of the Metaphysics:
"of things to which
the same predicate belongs, the one to which it belongs in the highest degree is
that in virtue of which it belongs also to the others.
For example, fire is
the hottest of whatever is truly called 'hot', for fire is cause of hotness in
the others."
Do you hear an echo?
Again, Aristotle teaches that form is to be
understood as always at work, never static as is the Platonic form, or is it?
Do not the Stranger and Theaetetus agree in the Sophist that it would be "monstrous and absurd" to deny that life, motion, and soul belong to the intelligible
things?
Do they not indeed define being as a power to act or be affected?
Does
not Socrates in the Theaetetus entertain the same. definition when he construes
the world as made up of an infinity of powers to act and be affected?
dialogues do not set forth a theory of forms.
Plato's
They set forth a way to get
started with the work of philosophic inquiry, and Aristotle moves altogether
within that way.
Much in his
writing~
that is a closed book to those who
insist on seeing him as Plato's opponent opens up when one lets the dialogues
serve as the key.
Then we shall not hesitate to take whatever light we can find in the
dialogues and shine it on Aristotle's text at least to see if anything comes
into the
li~ht.
And this brings me to a third assumption:
substance is of no help in understanding Aristotle's word
qilestion of the
is ousia?
the English word
ousia.~~l
Aristotle claims that it is the
-saitre- as 'Elie question, What is being? and that it is in fact the question everyone
who has ever done any philosophy or physics has been asking.
Since we do not
�-.::>-
share Aristotle's language we cannot know what claim he is making until we
find a way to translate ousia.
The translators give us the word substance
only ·because earlier translators and commentators did so, while they in turn
· did so because still earlier translators into Latin rendered it as substantia.
Early modern philosophy, in all the European languages, is full of discussions
of .substance which stem from Latin versions of Aristotle.
Though oral
traditions keep meanings alive this written tradition has buried Aristotle's
meaning irretrievably.
We must ignore it, and take our access to the meaning
.of ousia from Plato's use of it, but before we do so a quick look at where the
word substance came from may help us bury it.
The earliest Latin translations of Aristotle tried a number of ways of
translating ousia, but by the fourth century AD, when St. Augustine lived, only
two remained in use:
essentia was made as a formal parallel to ousia, from the
feminine singular participle of the verb to be plus an abstract noun ending, so
that the whole would be roughly equivalent to an English translation being-ness;
the second translation, substantia, was an attempt to get closer to ousia by
interpreting Aristotle's use of it as something like "persisting substratum".
Augtistine, who had no interest in interpreting Aristotle, thought that, while
everything in the world possesses substantia~ a persisting underlying identity,
the
ful~ness
of being suggested by the word essentia could belong to no created
thing but only to their creator.
Aristotle, who is quite explicit on the point
that creation is impossible, believed no such thing, and Augustine didn't . think
he did.
But Augustine's own thinking offered
two Latin words whose use had become muddled.
a consistent way to distinquish
Boethius, in his commentaries on
Aristotle, followed Augustine's lead, and hence always translated ousia as
substantia, and his usage seems to have settled the matter.
And so a word
designed by the anti-Aristotelian Augustine to mean a low and empty sort of being
turns up in our translations of the word whose meaning Aristotle took to be the
highest and fullest sense of being.
Descartes, in his Meditations, uses the
word substance only with his tongue in his cheek; Locke explicitly analyzes it
as an empty. notion of an I-don't-know-what; and soon after the word is laughed
out of the vocabulary of serious philosophic endeavor.
It is no wonder that the
Metaphysics ceased to have any influence on living thinking:
its heart had been
cut out of it by its friends.
What does ousia mean?
It is already a quirky, idiomatic word in ordinary
use when Plato gets hold of it.
By a quirk of our own language one may say indeed
that it means substance, but only, I repeat only, in the sense in which a rich man
�is called a man of substance.
You may safely allow your daughter to marry him
because you know where he will be and what he will be doing tomorrow and twenty
years from now.
Ousia meant permanent property, real estate, non-transferable
goods:
possessions we are always using up or consuming but those that
not the
remain--land, houses, wealth of the kind one never spends since it breeds new
wealth with no expense of itself. ·When Socrates asks Meno for the ousia of the
bee he is not using a technical philosophical term but a metaphor:
what is the
estate of a bee that each one inherits simply by being born a bee?
A man of
substance who has permanent wealth is who he is because of what he owns.
A bee
is to his permanent and his variable characteristics as a man is to his permanent
and his spendable wealth.
virtue:
The metaphor takes a second step when applied to
the varying instances of virtue in a man, a woman, a slave, and the
rest must all have some unvar1'ing core which makes them -virtues.
There must be
some single meaning to which we always refer when we pronounce anything a virtue.
This is the step Socrates continually insists that Meno must take.
But remember,
in the slave-boy scene, Socrates twice entices the slave-boy into giving plausible incorrect answers about the side of the double square.
of virtue?
Is there an ousia
Socrates uses the word not as the result of an induction or
abstraction or definition, but by stretching an already strained metaphor. People
have disposable goods which come and go and ousiatic goods which remain; bees
have some characteristics in which they differ, and others in which they share;
the virtues differ, but are they the same in anything but name?
are, must it be a definition that they share?
only a few men do.
Even if they
Not all men have ousia.
Ordinarily
The rest of us work for them, sell to them, marry them, gather
in the hills to destroy them, but do not have what they have.
Perhaps there are
only a few virtues, or only one.
The word ousia, as Plato's Socrates handles it, seems to be a double-edged
weapon.
It explicitly rejects Meno's way of saying what virtue is, but implicitly
suggests that the obvious alternative may fail as well.
If virtue is not simply
a meaningless label used ambiguously for many unconnected things, that does not
mean that it must
names.
unambiguously name the same content in each of the things it
Since ousia is our metaphor, let us ask what wealth means.
If a poor
man has a hut and a cow and some stored-up food, are they his wealth?
·certainly not wealthy.
He is
On the other hand, King Lear says that "our basest
beggars Are in poorest thing superfluous"; no human life is cut so fine as to
lack anything beyond what satisfies bare need.
The beggar, like the family on
welfare, does not have the means to satisfy need, but need not for that .reason
�-7forego those possessions which give life comfort or continuity.
is derived from the wealth of others.
His wealth
The small farmer may maintain something
of the independence a wealthy man enjoys, but one bad year could wipe him out.
He will either accumulate enough to become wealthy himself, or his life will
remain a small-scale analogy to that of the wealthy.
Wealth means, first of
all, only that which a few people have and the rest of us lack, but because it
means that, it also, at the same time, means secondarily something that all of
us possess.
There is an ambiguity at work in the meaning of the word "wealth"
which is not a matter of a faulty vocabulary and not a matter of- language at
all:
it expresses the way things are.
Wealth of various kinds exists by
derivation from and analogy to wealth in the emphatic sense.
Indeed Meno, who
spontaneously defines virtue by listing virtues, is. equally strongly inclined
to say that the power to rule over men and possessions is the only virtue there
is.
He cannot resolve the logical difficulties Socrates raises about his
answers,but they are all resolvable.
Meno in fact believes that virtue is
ousia in its simple sense of big money, and that women, children, and slaves
can only have virtue derivatively and ambiguously.
Socrates' question is one
of those infuriatingly ironic games he is always playing.
The ousia of virtue,
according to Meno and Gorgias, is ousia.
When the word ousia turns up in texts of Aristotle, it is this hidden history
of its use, and not its etymology, which is determining its meaning.
First of
all, the word fills a gap in the language of being, since Greek has no word for
thing.
The two closest equivalents are ~ ~ and to chrema. · To ~ simply means
whatever is, and includes the color blue, the length two feet, the action walking,
and anything at all that can be said to be.
To chrema means a thing used, used
up, spent, or consumed; any kind of possession, namely, that is not ousia.
ousia holds together, remains, and makes its possessor emphatically somebody.
In the vocabulary of money, ousia is to ta chreri\ata as whatever remains constant
in a thing is to all the onta that come and go.
Ousia also carries with it the
sense of something that belongs somehow to all but directly and fully only to a
few~
The word is ready-made to be the theme of Aristotle's investigation of
being, because both the word and the investigation were designed by Plato.
For
Aristotle, the inquiry into the nature of being begins with the observation that
being is meant in many waysr
subjected to
It is like Meno's beginning, and it must be
the same Socratic- questioning. ·-
Suppose that there is· some ·one core of meaning ·to which we refer whenever
we say that something is.
What is its content?
Hegel says of being as being:
�-8-
11
it is not to be felt, or perceived by sense, or pictured in imagination ••• it
is mere abstraction ••• the absolutely negative ••• just Nothing."
right, as Parmenides was before him?
Leave aside all those characteristics in
which beings differ, and what is left behind?
being is not a universal or a genus.
And isn't he
To Aristotle, this means that
If being is the comprehensive class to
which everything belongs, how does it come to have sub-classes?
to be divided with respect to something outside itself.
It would have
Beings would have to
be distinguished by possessing or failing to possess some characteristic, but
that characteristic would have to be either a class within being, already
separated off from the rest by reference to something prior, or a non-being.
Since both are impossible, being must come already divided:
or ultimate classes of things must be irreducibly many.
the highest genera
This is Aristotle's
doctrine of the categories, and according to him being means at least eight
different things.
~·
The categories have familiar names:'quality, quantity, relation, time,
place, action,
be~ng-acted
upon.
The question Socrates asked about things,
What is it?, is too broad, since it can be answered truly with respect to any
of the categories that apply, and many times in some of them.
describe something to you:
.
For example, I'll
it is backstage now; it is red; it is three feet
high; it is lying down and breathing.
I could continue telling you what it is
in this fashion for as long as I pleased and you would not know what it is.
It is an Irish setter.
What is different about that last answer?
To be an
Irish setter is not to be a quality or quantity or time or action but to be a
whole which comprises many ways of being in those categories, and much change
and indeterminacy in them.
The redness, three-foot-high-ness, respiration and
much else cohere in a thing which I have named in its thinghood · by calling it
an Irish setter.
Aristotle calls this way of being ousia.
Aristotle's logical
works reflect upon the claims our speech makes about the world.
The principal
result of Aristotle's inquiry into the logical categories of being is, I think,
the claim that the thinghood of things in the world is never reducible in our
speech to any combination of qualities, quantities, relations, actions, and so
on:
that ousia or thinghood must be a separate category.
What·happens when I
try to articulate the being of a thing such as an Irish setter?
a dog with certain properties.
But what then is a dog?
I define it as
It is an animal with
certain properties, and an animal is an organism with certain properties, and
an organism is a thing with the property life.
At each level I meet, as dog,
animal, organism, what Aristotle calls secondary ousia or secondary thinghood.
�-9-
I set out to give an account of what makes a certain collection of properties
cohere as a certain thing, and I keep separating off some of them and telling
you that the rest cohere as a whole.
At my last step, when I say that an
organism is a living thing, the problem of secondary thinghood is present
in its nakedness.
Our speech, no matter how scientific, must always leave
the question of the hanging-together of things as things a question.
Thus the logical inquiries bequeath to the Metaphysics its central
question, which we are now in a position to translate.
The question that was
asked of old and will always be asked by anyone who is alive enough to wonder
about anything is, What is being?
What is the thinghood of things?
al+?
in the sense, What is a thing? in the sense,
What makes our world a world of things at
We are here at the deepest postulate of Aristotelian philosophizing:
the integrity of the world as a world and of anything in it which endures
as itself for any time at all, is not self-explanatory, is something to be
wondered at, is caused.
We are taught that a moving thing, if nothing disturbs it, will continue
moving forever.
Do you believe that?
It is certainly true that a heavy
thing in motion is as hard to stop as it was to set in motion, and that we
cannot step out of moving automobiles without continuing, for a while, to
share their motions.
But these are evidences of persistence of motion, not
at all the same thing as inertia of motion.
There is no evidence of the latter.
In principle 'there cannot be, because we cannot abolish all the world to
observe an
u~disturbed
moving thing.
There is a powerful and in its way,
beautiful, account of the world which assumes inertia, appealing to those
experiences which suggest that motion at an unchanging speed is a state no
different from that of rest.
The hidden premise which leads from that step
to the notion of inertia is the assumption that rest is an inert state.
If
it is not, the same evidence could lead to the conclusion ,that an unchanging
speed is a fragile and vulnerable thing, as unlikely and as hard to come by
as an unchanging anything • . How can a balloon remain unchanged?
It does so
only so long as the air inside pushes out no harder and no less hard than the
air outside pushes in.
Is the air inside the balloon at rest?
at rest as long as it is performing a . task?
air inside it cannot be?
Can it be
Can the balloon be at rest if the
It can certainly remain in a place, like other
apparently inert things, say a table.
If you pulled the legs from under a table
�-10the top would fall, and if you removed the top the legs would fall.
Leave
them together and leave them alone and they do not move, but is the table
at rest?
Surely no more so than a pair of arm wrestlers, straining every
muscle but unable to budge each other, can be said to be resting.
we find an inert thing anywhere in the world?
rock?
But can't ·
How about a single lump of
But if I throw it in the air it will return to find a resting place.
It seems to rest only when something blocks it, and if I let it rest on my
hand or my head, something will make me uncomfortable.
nothing?
Can the rock be doing
And if we cannot find inertia in a rock, where could it be?
An,
animal is either full of circulating and respirating or it is rotting, and
the same seems true of plants.
But what in the world is not animal-like,
plant-like, rock-like, or table-like?
The world contains living and non-living
natural beings·, and it contains products of human making, and all of them are
busy.
From Aristotle's wondering and wonderful perspective, everything in
the world is busy just continuing to be itself.
Aristotle's~
This is not a "theory" of
it is a way of bringing the world to sight with the questioning
intellect awake.
Try that way of looking on for size:
'
to lose for ceasing to be taken for ~ranted.
the world has nothing
Consider an analogy.
Ptolemy
is content to say that Venus and Mercury happen to have the same longitudinal
period as the sun and that Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn all happen to lag just
as far behind the sun in any time as they have moved in anomaly.
Copernicus,
in the most passionate and convincing part of his argument, shows that these
facts can be explained.
Lucretius {whom we may substitute for Aristotle's
favorite materialist, Empedocles) thought that cats and dogs and giraffes
just happened to come about by accumulation, like the sands on the beach.
Lucretius' failure to wonder at a giraffe, his reduction of the living to
the blind and dead, is,from Aristotle's standpoint, a failure to recognize
what is truly one, what is not just a heap, what is genuinely a thing.
The least thoughtful, least alert way of being in the world is to regard
everything which remains itself as doing so causelessly, inertly.
To seek
a cause for the being-as-it-is of any thing is already to be in the grip of
the question Aristotle says
mu~t
always be asked.
To seek the causes and
sources of the being-as-it-is of everything that is, is to join Aristotle in
his Copernican revolution which regards every manifestation of persistence,
order, or recurrence as a marvel, an achievement.
That everything in the world
�-11-
disclosed to our senses is in a ceaseless state of change, most of us would
grant.
That the world nevertheless hangs together enough to be experienced
at all is a fact so large that we rarely take notice of it.
But the two
together--change, and a context of persistence out of which change can
emerge~-force
one to acknowledge some non-human cause at work: for whichever
side of the world--change or rest, order or dissolution--is simply its uncaused,
inert way, -the other side must be the result of effort.
Something must be
at work in the world, hidden to us, visible only in its effects, pervading
all that is, and it must be
e~ther
a destroyer or a preserver.
That much seems to me to be demonstrable, but the next step is a
difficult one to take because the world presents to us two faces:
and the non-living.
the living
The thinghood of living things consists in organized
unity, maintained through effort, at work in a variety of activities characteristic
of each species; but a rock or a flame or some water or some dirt or some air
is a thing in a much different way, unified only by accidental boundaries,
indifferent to being divided or heaped together, at work only in some one
local motion, up or down.
Which is the aberration, life or non-life?
For
Aristotle the choice need not be made, since the distinction between the two
forms of being only results from a confusion.
Flesh, blood, bone, and hair
would seem inorganic and
ina~imate
if they were not organized into and
animated as, say a cat.
But earth, air, fire, and water, all of it, is always
organized into and animate as the cosmos.
The heavens enclose an organized
body which has a size, a shape, and a hierarchical structure all of which it
maintains by ceaseless, concerted activity.
You may think that in believing
this, Aristotle betrays an inn9cence which we cannot recover.
But not only
Aristotle and Ptolemy, but also Copernicus and Kepler believed the visible
heaven to be a cosmos, and not only they, but also, amazingly, Newton himself.
In our century, Einstein calculated the volume of the universe, and cosmology
has once again become a respectable scientific pursuit.
Moderns, for whom
the spherical motion of the heavens no longer indicates that the heavens have
boundaries, draw the same conclusion from the fact that there is darkness.
Anyone who would take the assertion that his outlook is modern to include
the denial that there is a cosmos would make a very shallow·claim, one having
more to do with poetic fashion than with reasoned conviction. · The question
of the cosmos has not been made obsolete, and the very least we must admit is
�-12-
that the appearance of an inorganic, inanimate nature is not conclusive and
would result from our human-sized perspective whether there is a cosmos
or not.
If the world is a cosmos, then it is one more instance of the kind of
being
that . belong~~?
evei;Y
~nimal
and plant in it.
And if that is so, there
is nothing left to display any other kind of being.
What is there?
Try it:
take inventory.
The color red is, only if it is the color of some thing.
Color itself is, only if it is some one color, and the color of a thing.
The
relation "taller than" is, only if it is of two or more things. What has being
but is not a thing must depend on some thing for its being.
But on the other
hand a mere thing, mere · matter as we call it, using the word differently than
Aristotle ever does, is an impossibility too.
Relatively inert, rock-like
being is the being of a part of what comes only in wholes--cosmos, plant, or
animal.
And all man-made things must borrow their material from natural
things and their very holding-together from the natural tendencies of the
parts of the cosmos.
To be is to be alive; all other
be~ng
is borrowed being.
Any comprehensive account of things must come to terms with the special being
of animals and plants:
for Lucretius, living things are not marvels . but a
problem which he solves by dissolving them into the vast sea of inert purposelessness.
For Aristotle, as for Plato, wonder is not a state to be dissolved
but_ a beckoning to be followed, and for Aristotle the wonderful animals and
plants point the way to being itself, to that being qua being which is the
source of all being, for we see it in the world in them and only in them. ·
Thus when Aristotle begins in Book 7 of the Metaphysics to ask what makes
a thing a thing, he narrows the question to apply only to living things.
other being is, in one way or another, their effect.
cause.
All
He is asking for their
At that point, his inquiry into the causes and sources of being itself,
simply as being, merges with the inquiry in Book 2 of his Physics, where the
question is, What is nature?
The answer, 'as well, must be the same, and just
as Aristotle concludes that nature is form, he concludes that being is form.
Does the material of an animal make it what it is?
entire or even principal cause.
sum
Yes, but it cannot be the
If there is anything that is not simply the
of its parts, it is an animal .
~tis
continually making itself, by
snatching suitable material from its environment and discarding unsuitable
material.
Add some sufficiently unsuitable material, like arsenic, and the
�-13-
sum of parts remains, but the animal ceases to be.
The whole which is not
accounted for by the enumeration of its parts is the topic of the last section
of
~he
Theaetetus, where Socrates offers several playful images of that
kind of being:
a wagon, a melody, the number six, and the example discussed
at most length, which Aristotle borrows;• the syflable.
Aristotle ·insists that the syllable is never the sum of its letters.
Socrates, of course, argues both sides of the question, and Theaetetus agrees
both times.
Let's try it outselves.
Take the word "put", p-u-t.
letters separately, as well as you can, and say them in
as you can.
Voice the
successio~,
as rapidly
I think you will find that, as long as you attempt to add sound
to sound, you will have a grunt surrounded by two explosions of breath.
When
you voice the whole syllable as one sound,· the u is already present when you
begin sounding the p, and the t sound is already shaping the u.
Try to
pronounce the first two letters and add the third as an afterthought, and you
wi!l get two sounds.
I have tried all this, and think it's true, but you
must decide for yourself.
Aristotle says that the syllable is the letters,
)
plus something else besides; Socrates calls the something else a form,
while Aristotle calls it the thinghood of the thing.
-
,·
an~~ t~,
When I pronounce the
syllable "put", I must have in mind the whole syllable in its wholeness before
I can voice any of its parts in such a way as to make them come out parts
of it.
Now a syllable is · about as transitory a being as. one could imagine:
it is made of breath, and it is gone as soon as it is uttered.
works the same way as a maker of syllahles.
But a craftsman
If he simply begins nailing and
gluing together pieces of wood, metal, and leather, he is not likely to end
up with a wagon; to do so, he must have the whole shape and work of the wagon
in mind in each of his joinings and fittings.
Even so, when he is finished,
what he has produced is only held together b1 nails and glue.
As soon as it
is made, the wagon begins falling apart, and it does so the more, the more
it is used.
All the more perplexing then, is the animal or plant.
It is
perpetually being made and re-made after the -form of its species, yet there
is no craftsman at work on it.
It is a composite of material and form, yet
it 1s the material in it that is constantly being used up and replaced, while
the form remains intact.
The form is not in any artist's imagination, nor
can it be an accidental attribute of its material.
In the Physics, nature
�-14-
was traced back to form, and in the first half of the Metaphysics all being
is traced to the same source.
or is it caused?
But what is form?
Where is it?
Is it a cause
Most important of all, does it have being alone, on its own,
apart from bodies?
Does it emerge from the world of bodies, or is a body a
thing impossible to be unless a form is somehow already
prese~t
t:or it t _ have?
o
Or is there something specious about the whole effort to make fo:rm either
secondary to material or primary?
Are they perhaps equal and symmetrical
aspects of being, inseparable, unranked?
Just as ultimate or first material,
without any characteristics supplied by form, cannot be, why should not a
pure form, not the form of anything, be regarded as its opposite pole and as
equally impossible?
questions?
Or have we perhaps sturilbled on a nest of unanswerable
If form is the first principle of the science of physics, might
it not be a first principle simply, behind which one cannot get, to which one
may appeal for explanation but about which one cannot inquire?
Aristotle
says that if there were not things apart from bodies, physics would be first
philosophy.
But he calls physics second philosophy, and half the Metaphysics
lies on the other side of the questions we have been posing.
It consists
in the uncovering of beings not disclosed to our senses, beings outside of
and causal with respect to what we naively and inevitably take to be the
whole world.
Aristotle marks the center and turning poipt of the Metaphysics with
these words:
impasse.
"One must inquire about (form), for this is the greatest
Now it is agreed that some of what is perceptible are things, and
so one must search first among these.
what is better known.
For it is preferable to proceed toward
For learning occurs in all things in this way:
what is by nature less known toward the things more known.
through
And just as in
matters of action the task is to make the things that are good completely be
good for each person, from out of the things that seem good to each, so also
the task here is, from out of the things more known to one, to make the things
known by nature known to him.
Now what is known and primary to each of us
is often known slightly, and has little or nothing of being; nevertheless,
from the things poorly known but known to one, one must.try to -know the things
that are known completely."
(1029a 33 - b 11)
The forest is dark, but one
cannot get out of it without passing through it, carefully, calmly, attentively.
�-15It will do no good to move in circles.
The passage just quoted connects
with the powerful first sentence of the Metaphysics:
"All human beings
are by nature stretched out toward a state of knowing."
Our natural condition
is one of frustration, of being unable to escape a task of which the goal is
out of reach and out of sight.
Aristotle here likens our frustration as
theoretical beings to our condition as practical beings:
unhappiness has
causes-7we achieve it by seeking tjlings--and if we can discover what we were
seeking we might be able to make what is good ours.
Similarly, if we cannot
discern the goal of wisdom, we can at least begin examining the things that
stand in our way.
The next section of the Metaphysics, from Book 7, Chapter 4 through
Book 9, is the beginning of an intense forward motion.
These books are a
painstaking clarification of the being of the things disclosed to our senses.
It is here that Aristotle most heavily uses the vocabulary that is most his
own, and everything he accomplishes in these bpoks depends on the selfevidence of the meanings of these expressions.
It is these books especially
which Latinizing translators turn into gibberish.
Words like essence,
individual; :·and actuality must either be vague or be given arbitrary definitions.
The words Aristotle uses are neither vague nor are they conceptual constructions;
they call forth immediate, direct experiences which one must have at hand to
see what Aristotle is talking about.
They are not the kinds of words that
books can explain; they are words of the kind that people must share before
there can be books.
That is why understanding a sentence of Aristotle is so
often something that comes suddenly, in an insight that seems discontinuous
from the puzzlement that preceeded it.
one's gaze.
It is simply a matter of directing
We must try to mak- sense of Books 7-9 because they are crucial
e
to the intention of the Metaphysics.
Aristotle has an argument independent
of those books, which he makes in Book 8 of the Physics and uses again in
Book 12 of the Metaphysics that there must be an immortal, unchanging being,
ultimately responsible for all wholeness and orderliness in the sensible
world.
And he is able to go on in Book 12 to discover a good deal about that
being.
One could, then, skip from the third chapter of Book 7 to Book 12,
and, having traced being to form, trace form back to its source.
Aristotle
would have done that if his whole intention had been to establish that the
sensible world has a divine source, but had he done so he would have left no
�-16-
foundation for reversing the dialectical motion of his argument to understand
the things in the world on the basis of their sources.
Books 7-9 provide that
foundation.
The constituents of the world we encounter with our senses are not
sensations.
The sensible world is not a mosaic of sensible qualities
continuous with or adjacent to one another, but meets our gaze organized into
things which stand apart, detached from their surroundings.
I can indicate one
of them to you by the mere · act of pointing, because it has its own boundaries
and holds them through time.
I need not trace out the limits of the region of
the visual field to which I ref er your attention, because the thing thrusts
itself out from,holds itself aloof from .what is visible around it, making that
visible residue mere background.
is
~object
My pointing therefore has an object, and it
because it keeps being itself, does not change randomly or
promiscuously like Proteus, but holds together sufficiently to remain the very
thing at which I pointed.
.
This way of being, Aristotle calls being a. "this".
If ·I want to point out to_ you just this red of just this region of this shirt,
I will have to do a good deal more than just point.
A "this" as Aristotle
speaks of it is what comes forth to meet the act of pqinting, is that for which
•
I need not point and say "not that or that or that but just this," but · need do
nothing but point, since it effects its own separation from what it is not.
A table, a chair, a rock, a painting--each is a this, but a living thing
is a this in a special way.
It is the author of its own thisness.
It appropri-
ates from its surroundings, by eating and drinking and breathing, what it
organizes into and holds together as itself.
This work of self-separation from
its environment is never finished but must go on without break if the living
thing is to be at all.
hmnan being.
Let us cons1der as an example of a living this, some one
Today his skin is redder than usual, because he has been in the
sun; there is a cut healing on his hand because he chopped onions two days ago;
he is well educated, because, five years ago, his parents had the money and
taste to send him to Harvard.
belong to this human being.
All these details, and innumerably many more,
But in Aristotle's way of speaking, the details I
have named are incidental to him:
he .is .not sunburned, wounded on the hand, or
Harvard-educated because he is a human being.
He is each of those things
because his nature bumped into that of something else and left him with some
mark, more or less intended, more or less temporary, but in any case aside from
what he is on his own, self-sufficiently.
What he is on his own, as a result
of the activity that makes him be at all, is:
two-legged, sentient, breathing,
�-17-
and all the other things he is simply as a human being.
There is a difference
between all the things he happens to be and the things he necessarily is on
account of what he is.
Aristotle formulates the latter, the kind of being that
belongs to a thing not by happenstance but inevitably, as the "what it kept on
being in the course of being at all" for .a human being, or a duck, or a rosebush.
The phrase
ti esti?
ti~
einai is Aristotle's answer to the Socratic question,
What is a giraffe?
Find some way of articulating all the things
that every giraffe always is, and you will have defined the giraffe.
of them is throughout its life, is the product at .any
them, of the activity that is causing it to be.
the question What is a giraffe?
giraffe? are the same.
~nstant
What each
for any one of
That means that the answer to
and the answer to the quest:i,c::>n What is this
Stated generally, Aristotle's · claim is that
a this,
which is in the world on its own, self-sufficiently, has a what-it-always-wasto-be, and is just its what-it-always-was-to-be.
This is not a commonplace
thought, but it is a comprehensible one; compare it with the translators' version,
"a
per-~
individual is
identic~l
with its essence."
The living thing as it is present to my looking seems to be richer, fuller,
more interesting than it can possibly be when it is requced to a definition in
speech, but this is a confusion.
All that belongs to the living thing that is
not implied by the definition of its species belongs to it externally, as a result of its accidental interactions with the other things in its environment.
'l,'he definition attempts to penetrate to what it is in itself, by its own activity
of making itself be whole and persist.
There is nothing fuller than the whole,
nothing richer than the life which is the winning and expressing of that wholeness, nothing more interesting than the struggle it is always waging unnoticed,
a whole world of priority deeper and more serious than the personal history it
must drag along with the species-drama it is constantly enacting.
The reduction
of the living thing to what defines it is like the reduction of a rectangular
block of marble to the form of Hermes:
less is more.
Strip away the accretion
of mere facts, and what is left is that without which even those facts could not
have gained admittance into the world:
the forever vulnerable foundation of all
that is in the world, the shaping, ruling form, the incessant maintenance of
which is the.only meaning of the phrase self-preservation.
Indeed even the
bodily material of the living thing is present in the world only as active, only
as forming itself into none of the other things it might have been but just this
one thoroughly defined animal or plant.
to the question, What is form?
definiteness of kind.
And this, finally, is Aristotle's answer
Form is material at work according to a persisting
Aristotle's definition of the soul in De Anima, soul is
�·-18-
:he being-at-work-staying-the-same of an organized body, becomes the definition
~f
form in Book 8 of the Metaphysics, and is, at that stage of the inquiry, his·
definition of being.
Book 9 spells out the consequences of this clarification of form.
Form
cannot be derivative from or equivalent with material, because material on its
own must be mere possibility.
It cannot enter the world until it has achieved
definiteness by getting to work in some way, and it cannot even be thought
except as the possibility of some form.
is a subordinate way of being.
Books 7-9 demonstrate that materiality
The living body does not bring form into the
world, it must receive form to come .into the world.
Form is primary and casual,
and the original source of all being in the sensible world must be traced beyond
the sensible world, to that whic.h confers unity on forms themselves.
If forms
had no integrity of their own, the world and things could not hang together and
nothing would be.
At the end of Book 9, the question of being has become the
question of formal unity, the question, What makes each form one?
In the woven
texture of the organization of the Metaphysics, what comes next, at the beginning
of Book 10, . is a laying out of.all the ways things may be one.
Glue, nails,
and rope are of no use for the problem at hand, nor, any longer, are natural.
shapes and motions, which have been shown to have a derivative sort of unity.
All that is left in Aristotle's array of possibilities is the unity of that of
which the thinking or the
kn~wing
is one.
This thread of the investigation, which we may call for convenience the
biological one, converges in Book 12 with a cosmological one.
The animal and
plant species take care of their own perpetuation by way of generation, but
what the parents pass on to the offspring is an identity which must hold together
thanks to a timeless activity of thinking.
different way:
The cosmos holds together in a
it seems to be literally and directly eternal by way of a
ceaseless repetition of patterns of locomotion.
An
eternal motion cannot result
from some other motion, but must have an eternal, :unchanging cause.
Aristotle lays out all the possibilities.
undergoing a motion?
think of a third?
Again,
What can caus.e a motion without
A thing desired can, and so can a thing thought.
Aristotle says that there are . O~Y.
over, the first reduces to the second.
these . ~,
Can you
and. that, more-
When I desire an apple it is the fleshy
apple and not the thought of it toward which I move, but it is the thought or
imagining of the fleshy apple that moves me toward the apple.
object causes motion only
~
an object of thought.
The desired
Just as the only candidate
left to be the source of unity of form amorig the animals and plants was the
activity of thinking, so again the only possible unmoved source for the endless
�circlings of the stars is an eternal activity of thinking.
Because it is
dE\athless and because the heavens and nature and all that is · depend upon it,
Aristotle calls t,his activity God.
Because it is always altogether at work,
nothing that is thought by it is ever outside or apart from it:
thinking, simply.
it is ever
it is of
Again, because it is always altogether at work, nothing of
left over outside of or apart from its work of thinking:
thinking, simply.
it is
It is the pure holding-together of the pure holdable-
together, activity active, causality caused.
The world is, in all its being
most deeply, and in its deepest being wholly, intelligible.
So far is
Aristotle from simply assuming the intelligibility of things, that he requires
twelve books of argument to account for it.
All being is dependent on the
being of things; among things, the artificial are derived from the natural;
because there is a cosmos, all natural
t~ings
have being as living things;
because all living things depend on either a species-identity or an eternal
locomotion, there must be a self-subsisting activity of thinking.
The fact that there are a Book 13 and a Book 14 to the Metaphysics indicates
that, in Aristotle's view, the question of being has not yet undergone its last
transformation • . With the completion of Book 12, the question of being "
becomes:
What is the definition of the world?
What is the primary intelligible structure
that implies all that is permanent in the world?
Books 13 and 14 of the
Metaphysics examine the only two answers that anyone has ever proposed to that
question outside of myths.
They are:
that the divine thinking is a direct
thinking of all the animal and plant species, and that it is a thinking of the
mathematical .s ources of things.
negative.
The conclusions of these two books are entirely
The inquiry into being itself cannot come to rest by transfering to
the divine source the species-identities which constitute the world, nor can
they be derived from their mathematical aspects.
of the question of being is into a question.
Aristotle's final transformation
Books 13 and 14 are for the sake
of rescuing the question as one which does not and cannot yield to a solution
but insists on being faced and thought directly.
Repeatedly, through the
Metaphysics, Aristotle says that the deepest things must be simple.
speak the truth about them, nor even ask a
have no parts.
which thinks.
~estion
One cannot
about them, because they
They have no articulation in speech, but only contact with that
The ultimate question of the Metaphysics, which is at once What
is . all being at its roots?
and What is the life of God?, and toward which the
whole Metaphysics has been designed to clear the way,takes one beyond the limits
of speech itself.
The argument of the Metaphysics begins from our direct encounter
with the sensible world, absorbs that world completely into speech, and carries
�its speech to the threshold of that on which world and · speech depend.
The
shape of the book is a zig-zag, repeatedly encountering the inexpressible
simple things and veering away.
By climbing to that life which is the being-
at-work of thinking, and then ending with a demonstration of what that life is
not, Aristotle leaves us to disclose that life to ourselves in the only way
possible, in the privacy of lived thinking.
incomplete work:
The Metaphysics is not an
it is the utmost gift that a master of words can give.
�
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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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21 pages
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paper
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An outline of the argument of Artistotle's <em>Metaphysics</em>
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1980-04-11
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Typescript of a lecture delivered on April 11, 1980 by Joe Sachs as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
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lec Sachs 1980-04-11
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Annapolis, MD
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St. John's College
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text
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pdf
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Sachs, Joe, 1946-
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/731d8053cd04d8bb043b470c8f865ab5.pdf
546df9b467fc77d12b7f4ecd5b505c14
PDF Text
Text
ST
JoHN's CoLLEGE
ANNAPOLIS. MARYLAND 21404
fouNmo lh% A'i K1r--1e> Wullr\M';
.IJrHOO
FORMAL LECTURE/CONCERT SCHEDULE - 1980-1981
September 12
Mr. Edward G. Sparrow, Dean
St. John's College, Annapolis
"What Shall I Do?"
September 19
Mr. Scott Stripling, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
What St. John's College
Owes Rene Descartes
September 26
Dr. William J. Bennett
National·Humanities Center
An American Scholar:
The Young James Madison
october 3
Professor John Hollander
Yale University
Miltonic Origins
october 10
Long Weekend
No Lecture
october 17
Mr. Christopher Bruell
On The Original Meaning
of Political Philosophy
Department of Political Science
Boston College
october 24
Mr. Thomas Mark, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
Spinoza's Theory of
the Human Mind
october 31
Mr. Michael H. Hart
Trinity University, Texas
The Abundance of Life
in the Universe
November 7
Mr. Leo Raditsa, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
Persians in Asia Minor
November 14
Felger Consort
Concert
November 21
Professor Richard Mitchell
Glassboro State College
Underground in Outer Space:
A Report to the Academy
November 28
Thanksgiving Holiday
No Lecture
December 5
King William Players
Play
December 12January 4
Winter Vacation
No Lecture
January 9
Mr. Mortimer Adler
Institute for Philosophical
Research
Liberty,
Justice
January 16
Emerson Quartet
Concert
January 23
Mr. Charles L. Kent
Chevy Chase, Maryland
Ethics in the Practice
of Law
*
Title to be announced
TELEPHONE -iOI- J(o3- l :\71
Equality, and
�PAGE TWO
FORMAL LECTURE/CONCERT SCHEDULE - 1980-81
January 30
Mr. Bruce Venable, Tutor
Ste John's College, Santa Fe
Proclus on Prayer
February 6
Long Weekend
No Lecture
February 13
Mr. John Blackmore
Alexandria, Virginia
Galilee:
The Fighting
Physicist
February 20
Mr. Douglas Allanbrook, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
Truth-telling and the Iliad
February 27
Mr. Michael Littleton, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
March 5 -· 16
Spring Vacation
Chasing the Goat from
the Sky -- An Approach to
Dante 1 s Divine Comedy
No Lecture
March 20
Mr. Michael Campbell, piano
Concert
March 27
All-College Seminar
No Lecture
April 3
Mr. Charles Price
Theological Seminary
Alexandria, Virginia
Kiekegaard as Antithesis
April 10
Professor Hippocrates G. Apostle
Grinnell College, Iowa
Ancient and Modern
Definitions of Mathematics
April 17
Professor V.Jilliam J. Quirk
School of Law
University of South Caroline
Is the United States
Seriously Thinking of Going
Back on the Gold Standard?
April 24
Professor Oleg Grabar
Department of Fine Arts
Harvard University
Islamic Ceramics:
A Case
Study from Eastern Iran
May l
Professor William Kristol
University of Pennsylvania
,The Federalist on
Self-Government
May 8
Mr. Peter Arnott
Winchester, Massachusetts
Presentation of the Bacchae by
Euripides done with Marionettes
May 15
Commencement V.Jeekend
No Lecture
*
Title to be announced
�
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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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3 pages
Original Format
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paper
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Office of the Dean
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Formal Lecture/Concert Schedule - 1980-1981
Date
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1980-1981
Description
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Schedule of lectures and concerts for the 1980-1981 Academic Year, including Summer 1981.
Identifier
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Lecture Schedule 1980-1981
Coverage
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Annapolis, MD
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St. John's College
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text
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pdf
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Sparrow, Edward G.
Stripling, Scott Randall
Bennett, William J. (William John), 1943-
Hollander, John
Bruell, Christopher, 1942-
Mark, Thomas
Hart, Michael H.
Raditsa, Leo
Mitchell, Richard
Adler, Mortimer Jerome, 1902-2001
Kent, Charles L.
Venable, Bruce
Blackmore, John
Allanbrook, Douglas
Littleton, Michael
Campbell, Michael
Price, Charles
Apostle, Hippocrates George
Quirk, William J.
Grabar, Oleg
Kristol, William
Arnott, Peter
King William Players
Friday night lecture
Lecture schedule
-
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d425b771607a247ec9d57240f79ec733
PDF Text
Text
Dhe Fury of Aeneas
]OE SACHS
a lecture given in
Santa Fe, September 18, 1981
and in
Annapolis, October 2, 1981
�The Fury of Aeneas
ll
he story Homer tells in the Iliad begins with the eruption of the
anger o.f Achilles. As the twenty-fourth book of the poem opens,
that anger has reached its greatest intensity. Achilles "let fall th~ swelling
tears, lying sometimes along his side, sometimes on his back, and now
again prone on his face; then he would stand upright, and pace turning in
distraction along the beach of the sea ... (At dawn,) when he had yoked
running horses under the chariot he would fasten Hektor behind the chariot; so as to drag him, and draw him three times around the tomb of
Menoitios' fallen son, then rest again in his shelter, and throw down the
dead man and leave him to lie sprawled on his face in the dust . . . So
Achilleus in his standing fury outraged great Hektor." (24. 9-22) The
wrath which has withstood the events of twenty-three books has swollen
into a rage which denies Achilles sleep, food, or the cessation of his tears,
a rage which breaks forth in monotonous acts of revenge which do not
relieve but frustrate and provoke. Achilles now walks the circular path at
the center of anger in which it is quenchless, infinite.
But the Iliad is not finally the story of the victory of anger over Achilles, because Zeus has one last scheme. He arranges for Priam to visit
Achilles, to stand before him risking his wrath, to ask in person for pity.
Priam kills the anger of Achilles by displacing it with the grief of Achilles,
which can meet and merge with the grief of Priam and come to rest in
mutual comforting. Here is Homer's description of that last and leastexpected turning point in the Iliad: as Priam ends his words to Achilles,
saying, " 'I put my lips to the hands of the man who has killed my children."' Homer continues, "So he spoke, and stirred in the other a passion
of grieving for his own father. He took the old man's hand and pushed
him gently away, and the two remembered, as Priam sat huddled at the
feet of Achilleus and wept close for manslaughtering Hektor and Achilleus
wept now for his own father, now again for Patroklos. The sound of their
St. John's Lecture Series
l
�mourning moved in the house. Then when great Achilleus had taken full
satisfaction in sorrow and the passion for it had gone from his mind and
body, thereafter he rose from his chair, and took the old man by the hand,
and set him on his feet again, in pity for the grey head and the grey beard,
and spoke to him and addressed him in winged words ." (24 . 506-17)
Book twenty-four ends with one last Homeric dawn, in which the
doomed people of Troy celebrate the burial of their beloved Hector with
fitting ceremonies and a glorious feast. Such was the burial of Hector,
breaker of horses, only because, between his wrath and his own imminent
death, Achilles rejoined the human community. The climax of the Iliad,
then, is the moment when Achilles remembers his father. That moment,
which pierces his heart and lets the anger drain from it, will not add a day
to his life or to the survival of Troy, but it does make supportable the
enormous weight of grief which was built in Achilles, in Priam, in the
Trojans, and in the hearer or reader of the poem.
Virgil's Aeneid is, above all else, a reply to the Iliad and Odyssey and a
rejection of the kind of comfort Homer offers . I have set before you at
length the moment into which Homer puts a power which counterbalances all the horror and pain of the Iliad because · Virgil frames the
Aeneid with two echoes of that moment. Twice in the Aeneid, in scenes of
battle, the image of Aeneas' father comes into his mind . On the first occasion, Aeneas is looking at Priam, and the memory of his father stirs him to
action . The scene is in Book two, but it is a flashback to the beginning of
Aeneas' story, and the memory of his father marks the beginning of his
undertaking of the deeds to which he has been called. On the second occasion, Aeneas has just watched a young man die whom he killed, and
whose father he is about to confront . The two characters, Lausus and
Mezentius, evoke memories of Hector and Priam for the reader, and in
Aeneas a memory of his father which occasions a moment of understanding. This scene is in Book ten, but it is a direct preparation for the understanding of the concluding lines and action of the Aeneid. Thus the climactic moment of the Iliad is present in the first and last events in Virgil's
story, and in both cases it is put in a perspective in which its power is
acknowledged but its weight is lessened.
In Book two of the Aeneid we watch alongside a helpless Aeneas while
Achilles' one deed of comfort and kindness is desecrated by Achilles· son.
Listen as this third generation speaks to the first: "'Carry off these tidings;
go and bring this message to my father, son of Peleus; and remember, let
him know my sorry doings, how degenerate is Neoptolemus. Now die.'
This said, he dragged him to the very altar stone, with Priam shuddering
and slipping in the blood that streamed from his own son. And Pyrrhus
with his left hand clutched tight the hair of Priam; his right hand drew his
glistening blade, and then he buried it hilt-high in the king's side. This
was the end of Priam's destinies . . . Now he lies along the shore, a giant
trunk , his head torn from his shoulders, as a corpse without a name." (2.
547-58) As Neoptolemus sinks back into the horror from which his father
had emerged, the words "This was the end of Priam" overtake and destroy
the calm of the words "Such was the burial of Hector."
2
The Fury of Aenea~
�Aeneas can do nothing for Priam, since he watches trapped on a roofbeam of the wrecked and burning palace. But as he watches Priam die, he
remembers his own father, and all his helpless loved ones whom he has
left at home while he fights a useless battle to vent his rage at the conquering Greeks. It seems that the memory of his father will recall Aeneas to the
deeds the ghost of Hector has asked of him: to let Troy fall, and carry
himself and Troy's holy things across the sea. Like Achilles, Aeneas has
been wasting himself in the effort to exact the satisfaction of revenge from
his enemies, and like Achilles he is restored to himself in remembering his
father. But just as we begin to expect Aeneas to return to save his father,
wife, and son, and leave revenge behind, his eye lights on Helen. In that
sight his father's need of him is forgotten, and a blind fury to destroy the
cause of so much evil overwhelms even his capacity to keep that evil from
reaching those dearest to him . As Aeneas' sword is about to fall on Helen,
his goddess-mother grabs his arm. Venus sends him to save his family,
after showing him that not Helen but the gods are responsible for the
destruction of Troy. But the violent arresting of Aeneas' arm when it has
been set in motion by the strongest longing in his heart leaves behind a
feeling of frustration which is not released until the last lines of the poem.
That is the beginning of the story of Aeneas' journey . Let us try to understand how it speaks to Homer.
The healing of Achilles' anger is the last event in his story, and nearly
the last in his life. It is enshrined forever by the structure of Homer's story,
which makes it the resolution of twenty-three books of tension. Achilles'
story moves out of anger, through pity, to a peace in the midst of war . But
does Homer's framing of that story reveal or distort? Does his emphasis
convey the true weights of things? Virgil carries Homer's story beyond
Homer's ending, to submerge Achilles' humanity in the brutality of his son
and Hector's glorious funeral in the hideous, headless, nameless corpse of
his father. But more important, Virgil appropriates the climactic moment
of the Iliad to make it a fleeting mood which has no lasting effect, none in
the world and none in the heart of Aeneas . The Iliad ends with a frozen
picture of a pendulum at the top of its swing: the picture is beautiful but
that of which it is a picture is unstable. If only the dualities in our lives
could be laid to rest by our embracing of their wholesome sides, if only the
death of anger could be an overcoming, once and for all, of its power over
us, then the world might be a turbulent but finally a simple good place,
and evil our own fault. But dead anger rises again; the self-destructive
passions can be seen for what they are and still reassert their power over
us. The poet Homer can show us things that make us glad, but is that seeing what we need? The anger of Aeneas recurs throughout the Aeneid,
and both its ebb and its flow are destructive. · One of the principal
teachings of the Aeneid is that rage is ineradicable from the human heart,
because its cure is worse than the disease. Let us watch as Aeneas' eyes are
opened to this ugliest of truths, in Virgil's second echo of the climax of the
Iliad. .
.
The worst man in the Aeneid is undoubtedly Mezentius, a tyrant who
tortured his subjects for sport until they rebelled and he escaped. Thou-
St. John's Lecture Serla
3
�sands of those subjects unite with Aeneas in his Italian war, solely for the
chance to kill Mezentius . Without any good reason, as Virgil puts it,
another thousand remain loyal to Mezentius, among them his son Lausus,
called breaker of horses. When Aeneas wounds Mezentius with a spearcast, Lausus, his valor awakened by his love for his father, prevents
Aeneas' sword from falling, giving his companions the chance to save
Mezentius and drive back Aeneas . Fury rises in Aeneas as he is once again
thwarted on the point of killing a thing of evil, but as he waits in shelter
for all his enemies' javelins to.-be thrown he calms down, and shouts at
Lausus to be sensible and withdraw. When Lausus insists on fighting him,
a greater anger surges in Aeneas, and in that rage he kills Lausus.
At whom is Aeneas angry? Can it be at Lausus, whom he has no desire
to fight and for whom he has nothing but admiration? As Aeneas looks at
Lausus' dying face he sees the image of his own love for his own father,
and gives the dead Lausus to his companions for honorable burial. It is at
this moment that the transformation in the heart of Achilles resonates
most strongly in the Aeneid, but Aeneas felt his pity before Lausus was
dead, and would have spared him had he not been driven to a resurgence
of his dead anger. To uhderstand the killing of Lausus is, I think, to be
halfway to understanding the killing of Turnus, which would be equivalent to understanding the whole Aeneid. Let us keep trying.
Lausus loves a father whom no one could respect. His motive is therefore pure, irrational love, with no other support . By painting Mezentius
as unrelievedly, monstrously evil, Virgil makes the central choice of
Lausus' life be between love and everything that makes sense. Even further, the circumstances of the battle force Lausus to measure the strength
of that love, since after he has saved his father's life he could retreat
honorably, and must decide whether to do so or to throw away his life.
Unrestrained love and loyalty are, for Lausus, consistent only with what
is wild and reckless: to attack Aeneas and die. Both Lausus and Aeneas
have a long time to think about this before it happens. There is an irrational and inescapable logic at work in the scene: the better a man Lausus
is, the more is it necessary that he die in a bad cause, and the more fully
Aeneas recognizes his goodness the more necessary is it that he kill him,
· and not do him the insult of refusing his self-sacrifice. The rage which
supplies the motive power for the killing Aeneas has no heart to commit is
a rage brought about by his recognition of the way in which both Lausus
and he are trapped .
Achilles and Priam , suffering the worst private grief, could draw
together in mutual recognition and give each other what each needed
most. Priam gave Achilles deliverance from his anger, and Achilles gave
Priam the means and the time to unite with his city and his dead son in
one last civic festival. In the corresponding Virgilian recognition scene, it
seems that Lausus can give Aeneas nothing, and Aeneas can give Lausus
only death. With the image of his own father in mind, Aeneas asks the
dead Lausus, "Miserable boy, what can I give you now? What honor is
worthy of your character?" (10. 825-6) He gives to the corpse the weapons
in which it found its only happiness, and gives the corpse itself back to its
4
The Fury of Aeneas
�own people, to be mingled with the ashes and shades of its ancestors,
wondering aloud if that will matter to anyone. Finally, he dedicates to
Lausus the only gift in his power which can solace such a miserably
unhappy death: the resolve to make his own greatness such that there will
be no shame in having fallen beneath it. Thus Lausus has given something
to Aeneas-the burden of another obligation to the dead. The Homeric
comfort of the sharing in human community is not available either to
Lausus or to Aeneas. Lausus, whom Virgil introduces in Book seven as a
young man worthy to be happy, had the wrong father, and he cannot but
be the son of his father. Aeneas likewise cannot escape being the man on
whom Trojans, Italians, and gods depend to stand divided in war from
Lausus, and be his killer. The Homeric world, whatever divisions may be
within it, makes a whole; the Virgilian world is too full of purposes too
deeply crossed to be composed, ever.
Arn I going too far in reading in an intensely painful but small tragic
event a vision of a tragic world? Is not Virgil's theme the bringing of law
to the world? Are not the tragedies of Lausus and Turnus and Camilla
and Nisus and Euryalus and Pallas and Evander and Amata and Dido and
Palinurus the events which Virgil shapes into the transformation of the
world into a place in which such things will no longer happen? It is true
that the bringing of the world to peace under law is the theme of the
Aeneid, but we must not let anyone but Virgil tell us what Virgil thinks
about that subject.
We hear of it first, early in Book one, from Jupiter . He tells Venus that
Aeneas' Roman descendents will be the lords of all things, without limits
in time or place, that one of them, meaning Augustus, will carry his empire to the Ocean and his fame to the stars, and in doing so allow the
rough ages of the world to become gentle under law. And here are
Jupiter's last words: "The gruesome gates of war, with tightly welded iron
plates, shall be shut fast. Within, unholy Rage shall sit on his ferocious
weapons, bound behind his back by a hundred knots of brass; he shall
groan horribly with bloody lips. " (293-6) Forty lines devoted to triumph
and glory seem to dissolve in four lines of ugliness. One's gaze is turned
not outward, to a world finally free of the source of war, but to the struggling caged being confined within . The last words of this first picture of
Rome are not of victory or victors but of a victim, Furor , and of the sights
and sounds of his pain. Why is rage presented as a person? Why is a reader
who is incapable of enjoying a description of torture made to sympathize
with the cause of war?
Three lines after this ghastly and troubling portrait we hear for the
first time in the poem the name of Dido. One third of the poem of the
founding of Rome is the story of Dido, and more than a third of its impact
is carried by Virgil's presentation of her . One famous commentator has
said that Virgil was "no master of the epic art" because he allowed such
things as the sufferings of Dido to overwhelm his efforts to glorify Rome.
Another has said that the Aeneid is the first wholly successful epic ever
written, because it is the first to have the unity attained previously only in
dramas, a unity evident primarily in ·the complete merging of the Dido
St. John's Lecture Series
5
�story into that of the triumph of Rome. Each commentator is half-right.
The Aeneid is unified, but not around the figure of Augustus; Dido is the
most powerful figure in Virgil's composition, but not by accident . The
theme of Rome's bringing of a new age of law to the world enters the
poem, modulates to a strange sadness, and passes over into the story of
Dido. Dido's story is deeper than Rome's, and illuminates it.
Dido is, to begin with, in the same situation as Aeneas, and she has
handled that situation so well that everything about her gives hope to
Aeneas at a time when he has none. She too has been driven out of her
own country and been responsible for the lives of a band of fellowrefugees. She too has had to find a new life in the strange and unknown
lands of the West. She has won a place for her people by winning the
respect of neighboring rulers, and under her leadership, her subjects are
building the conditions of a healthy communal life: fortifications , houses,
a harbor, a theater, a senate. Already built, in the center of the city, is a
temple to Juno, filled with scenes of the Trojan War. The work under
way is to Aeneas a vision of happiness, and the completed work feeds his
soul. One of the other Trojans sees in Carthage a city with the power to
impose justice on the proud and a ruler with the goodness to spare the
defeated . We will hear almost the same words spoken in Book six as an exhortation to Rome. The story of Dido, smaller only in geographical scale,
begins where the story of Rome aims .
Dido's Phoenician Carthage, where Aeneas tells the tale of his long
wanderings, is, like the Phaiakian Scheria of Alkinous and Arete, a city
ruled by virtue and strong intellect . Dido herself, like Penelope, is a
woman with the dignity to keep arrogant suitors at a distance. And the
hospitality, the capacity to permit another to be at home in a place that is
not his own, that is so beautifully depicted in the Odyssey , is enjoyed by
Aeneas nowhere but in the home of Dido. In Virgil's re-casting of Homer's
story of Odysseus, almost all its places and people are condensed into the
story of Dido. Like the Iliad, Homer's Odyssey is a story of the recovery of
human community. Its culmination is the restoration of political order to
Ithaca . But Dido's story reverses the Odyssean motion from anarchy to
order, from savagery to serenity. In the midst of his journey Odysseus is
cursed by a one-eyed monster, a non-human being who lives outside all
law. At the end of his stay in Carthage, Aeneas too is cursed by a being
who is outside all law and community, and that monster is Dido herself.
Why was Dido so successful as a ruler? I think Virgil's briefest answer
can be found near the end of Book one: because her soul was in repose,
because in turn her heart was out of use (resides animos desuetaque corda,
l. 722). Since the death of her first husband, she tells her sister, Aeneas
alone has caused her judgment to bend and her soul to totter. (4. 20-3)
The empty pathways which the flame of love once burned through her
have not closed or healed. The ancient flame is still within Dido, just as
the living rage is still behind the gates of war which Augustus closes with
force and with law. In Latin, the name of Augustus' victim and that of
Dido's conqueror are the same, juror. Virgil's one brief portrait of a
happy city is of Carthage under the rule of Dido for only so long as the
6
The Fury of Aeneas
�furious love within her is out of use. In the Odyssey , political community
is displayed as the natural and the only life which realizes what it is to be
a human being. In the Aeneid, political life is presented as depending
upon the inhuman constraint that Dido practices upon herself and
Augustus exerts on the world. Carthage thrives on Dido's serene control,
and collapses into disarray when she falls in love.
Many readers have seen in the fate of Dido a dangerous example
which Aeneas must see and learn to avoid. Such readers see the foundations of the political life in Aeneas' rejection of her. Like an oak tree in the
Alps shaken by the North wind, Aeneas suffers from love and care for
Dido, but he withstands their fury. Reason holds firm against passion and
duty vanquishes desire. One pities Dido, but rejoices that Aeneas does not
let his own pity become a morass in which the hopes of his son and of the
world would be lost. But Aeneas is bound to Dido not just by his love for
her, which is his to control if he can, but by the fact that he has allowed
her to love him . That is not passion but choice, and to reverse it is not duty
but betrayal. In the simile of the oak tree, it is Aeneas' mind which overcomes the care in his breast , but that is merely the overcoming of the last
obstacle to a choice he has already made. The widespread interpretation
according to which Aeneas' rejection of Dido is a victory of the rational
and political over the passionate and personal does not stand up to a moment's scrutiny. He has already told Dido that he loves her less than he
loves the remnants of Troy which he had been bidden to carry to Italy.
(4 .340-7) His choice is personal through-and-through . And in setting out
for the city he will build in Italy, Aeneas knows that he is leaving Carthage in wreckage. (4. 86-9) His choice is political through-and-through as
well . Aeneas cannot choose otherwise than he does. He has gotten himself
into a fix from which there is only one way out . But he cannot pretend
that what he does is not a betrayal. Aeneas does not understand his destruction of Dido as he will later understand his destruction of Lausus, but
we need not be fooled .
But if Aeneas' abandonment of Dido cannot be praised as an act of
Stoic virtue, must it not be given its due as an act of piety? Twice Aeneas
tells Dido that his leaving her for a bride and kingdom in Italy is not by his
own will but in accordance with what is fated, and we have known from
the second line of the poem that Virgil is writing of a man whose deeds are
compelled by fate . But what is the nature of that compulsion? What does
Virgil understand fate to be? He tells us that Dido's death was not only
undeserved but unfated (4. 696), and, narrating a battle in Book nine, he
tells us that if Turnus had hesitated a moment to break the bolts on one
gate, Rome would never have come to be (9. 757-9) . In order to understand what Virgil has written, we must conceive a fate that is both limited
and fallible.
The Latinfatitm contains all the meanings of our word fate, but in it
they are derivative meanings. Never absent from the Latin word is its
primary sense of a thing spoken or uttered. And Virgil does not present
the speech which is fate as an irrevocable decree, but uses the word with
verbs meaning to call or to ask. The source of fate is a mystery in the
St. John's Lecture Series
7
�Aeneid, but the nature of its action is evident. Fated outcomes are known
to some among the gods and the shades of the dead, but are brought about
only by human beings who must be lured , persuaded, or tricked. Every
device of rhetoric must be used, because fate in the Aeneid remains
always and altogether subordinate to human choice.
The fall of Troy in Book two, for example, is a fated event. The destruction of the city is completed by Neptune, who shakes the walls and
uproots the foundations from the earth, but neither he nor any other god
acts so directly until the conquest of the Trojans by the Greeks is an accomplished fact. First, an indecisive war has been carried on for ten
years. Second, the Greeks have concealed their best fighters in a counterfeit religious offering left on the beach of Troy. Third, a lying story told
by a Greek has aroused the pity of the Trojans and inclined them to bring
the fatal horse into their city. But beyond all the strength, cleverness, and
rhetorical skill of the Greeks, one more element was necessary, without
which, Aeneas says years later, Troy would still be standing: The minds of
the Trojans had to be made left-handed (2.54-6) ; they had to be brought
confidently to trust that the divine purpose was opposite to what it truly
was. One respected Trojan leader, Laocoon, priest of Neptune, would
have held Troy against all the resources of Greeks and gods, had he not
been made to seem to be profaning a sacred offering . Laocoon had
pierced the horse with a spear, before Sinon had told the Trojans that
their prosperity would depend on treating the horse with reverence. At
that moment a pair of gigantic snakes came across the sea and the land,
making straight for the small sons of Laocoon, and killing them and him.
That horrible supernatural spectacle was the call of fate which the Trojans answered to their own ruin .
That which is fated must be recognized, interpreted, assented to, and
carried out by human beings, who may be mistaken or may have been
deliberately deceived. Aeneas is responsible not only for his choice to
answer his fate, but also for the judgment that what fate calls him to is
good. The half-understood future that could be brought about by Aeneas'
deeds does make a powerful claim upon him, but so does the life of Dido,
which he has allowed to become dependent upon him . No one but he can
make the final decision that the former claim is more worthy of respect
than the latter. That Aeneas is not comfortable with his choice is obvious
when he begs Dido's ghost for understanding and absolution . Her stony
refusal and undying hatred make it forever impossible for anyone to say
that his choice was right . And the unforgettable example of Laocoon
makes it equally impossible to take any comfort in the reflection that
Aeneas' choice was fated.
There is a powerful presence in the Aeneid of the inescapable, but it is
not the same as nor even entirely compatible with the fated . The divine
call which pulls one toward the future may be refused or defeated, but the
human entanglements which grasp one from out of the past cannot be
escaped . Aeneas can abandon Dido, but he can never be free of the pain
of the knowledge that he has betrayed the love and trust he had once accepted from her. The true fatalism of the Aeneid is not a sense of the inevi-
8
The Fury of Aeneas
�table triumph of what is to be, of a healing and elevating future, but a
sense of the sad burden of all that has been , of past choices and rejections
that one has not gotten beyond.
Readers are sometimes puzzled by a character in the Aeneid who is
mentioned repeatedly but to whom Virgil seems deliberately to have
given no human features or qualities. He is the closest companion of
Aeneas, but we never hear either speak to the other. He is the true or
trusty Achates, whose name has become an idiomatic label for a devoted
friend, but he seems to be nothing more than a label; we do not know who
Aeneas' friend is or what he is like. But Virgil often gives his characters
names which are descriptive in Greek. A Greek soldier whom Aeneas encounters on Sicily and whose story he trusts is called Achaemenides, "still
a Greek." An aging boxer who rouses himself to win one last fight is called
Entellus, "mature" or "at an end." A monster who seems to delight in evil
itself is called Cacus, "the evil one. " As a Greek word, Achates would
name "one who grieves," one whose special or characteristic business is to
grieve. Never absent from the side of Aeneas in anything he does is the
true or trusty grieving one; never, in the Aeneid, does hope overcome
grief.
The burden of grief which one feels through the last two-thirds of the
poem is thus explicitly figured in the person of Achates as Aeneas' second
self. The inescapability of the past is also figured by Virgil in one of the
great central images of the poem , that of the labyrinth . We hear of it first
in Book five, in connection with an intricate display of horsemanship by
the Trojan children, but the words are too strong for their immediate occasion. The sons of Troy are said to be entangled in "an undiscovered and
irretraceable wandering" (5 .591) as in the dark and ambiguous Labyrinth
of ancient Crete. Aeneas soon sees a carved image of that Labyrinth on
the walls of the Sibyl's cave, when be begins his journey in Book six to the
land of the dead . The Sibyl tells him that it will be easy to enter that land,
but to retrace his way to the upper air, "this," she says, "is work; this is
labor." (6.126-9) We are made to think of the Trojans' journey to Italy as
labyrinthine, and to expect Aeneas' return from Hell to be especially so.
We are startled, then, at the end of Book six, when Aeneas' return to the
upper world is no trouble at all. Notoriously, that return is through the
gate of false dreams. Great ingenuity has been expended by many interpreters to remove the taint of falsity from Aeneas' mission , but it cannot
be done. Aeneas returns to earth with his soul burning with the love of
coming fame, and that is a false exit from the land of the dead, the place
of Dido. The Labyrinth image is still with us, the sense of betrayal of
Dido's love has not been left behind, and the Sibyl is right: what lies
before Aeneas is the true labor. He has not left the place of the dead; he
will carry it with him wherever he goes.
The war in Italy which occupies the last third of the Aeneid has a
labyrinthine structure . When Turnus enters the Trojan camp in Book
nine, he is pressed back to the walls and carried back to his comrades by
the Tiber before there is any decisive outcome. In Book ten, when Turnus
has killed Pallas, he and Aeneas fight toward each other, but Juno lures
St. John's Lecture Series
9
�Turnus away from the battlefield with a phantom-Aeneas made of wind.
In Book eleven, when there is a truce, Aeneas and Turnus are both eager
to submit to single combat when a double misunderstanding makes the
war resume; the two men finally catch sight of each other across a plain,
just as night falls. In the last book, Turnus' goddess-sister, disguised as his
charioteer, keeps carrying him away when Aeneas catches sight of him. It
is only in the last lines of the poem that Aeneas reaches the center of the
maze. The monster he finds there is not Turnus, now humble, resigned to
death, and gracious in defeat. What is the meaning of Aeneas' last furious
act of violence? What does the maze of war and frustration that stands
between Aeneas and his final confrontation with Turnus have to do with
the false exit from the land of the dead by which Aeneas seems to have
entered his labyrinth?
The strange and abrupt ending of the Aeneid collects into itself all that
has gone before it. It is a vivid culmination of the theme of the labyrinth,
but that image in turn takes its meaning from a chain of connected images
of which it is part. The first of these images is Aeolia, the vast cave of the
winds in which, we are told, angry tempests rage in indignation at the
mountain which confines them (l.53-6). Unrestrained, those winds
would destroy the seas, the lands, and heaven itself. Therefore Jupiter,
here called the omnipotent father, confined them and gave them a king
skilled to know when to loosen, when to draw in, their reins. Can the
word omnipotens be intended seriously in this context? It seems that it
cannot mean more than "stronger than anything else" so that even the
winds can be brought under the control of the strongest one. If Jupiter
were truly able to do anything, he could change the nature of the winds,
or destroy them and replace them with others just as useful and not as
dangerous. Could it be that one with the power to choose otherwise
would judge it good to design a world in which hurricanes must sometimes be unleashed? The single word omnipotens leaves that question
hanging over the poem .
The second image in the poem which picks up the theme of caged fury
is one we examined earlier: Furor, rage itself, removed from the world
and imprisoned behind the iron gates of war. What we found strange in
that picture was the presentation of rage personified as an object of pity.
We saw then that the image of Furor led directly into the story of Dido,
and that her story was of the unleashing of juror within her . It is in the
story of Dido that the two earlier images begin to make sense. Dido is
ruined because she is capable of loving without restraint. The years of her
self-denial make possible the existence of Carthage, because the chiefs of
the surrounding countries respect her fidelity to her dead husband, and
because it gives her reign a dignity and stability under which her subjects
thrive. But her sister, who loves her·, does not want Dido to continue that
life. Royalty does not fulfill the longings caged within Dido.
When Venus wants to bind Dido to Aeneas by means of lust, she
begins by arousing in Dido tenderness for a small child. Once Dido falls in
love with Aeneas, her ruin is assured, but she only becomes vulnerable to
falling in love by first feeling a loving response to a child. Would· Dido
10
The Fury of Aeneas
�have been better off if a child sitting in her lap could arouse no irrational
longing in her childless heart? - if intimate contact with a child left her
feeling no more than the general benevolence she had for all her subjects?
If not, if a cold, loveless life is never choiceworthy, then the omnipotent
father was right to leave the furious and destructive things in the world,
and Virgil was right to grieve over the imposition of law on the earth. For
even a mother's love is potentially furious, as we see it in the mothers of
Euryalus and Lavinia. And the loving, irrational desire to have a child of
one's own is inseparable from all the raging loves and hates within us. It is
not the political life which fulfills us, if Virgil is right, but the loving attachments to particular other people, which also make us vulnerable to
frenzy, madness, and war.
Virgil uses the cave of the winds and the gates of war as images of the
human soul, which always encloses irrational longings and loyalties
capable of furious emergence into the world. Madness, as of Lausus,
anger, as of Aeneas, rage of battle, as of Turnus, passionate love, as of
Dido, prophetic frenzy, as of the Sybil, and poetic inspiration, as of Virgil
himself: these are the meanings my small Latin dictionary gives for the
word juror, the name Virgil gives to the being at the center. And what is
the labyrinth which surrounds the center? It is, I think, Virgil's picture of
any life which ignores or denies the furious things at the center. Aeneas
leaves the land of the dead glorying in his vision of the Roman future, only
to find in Italy the same intractable opposition he has left behind in Dido,
and finally to yield to it in himself. And Augustus subdues the proud of all
the world, only to become a monster of pride himself.
In Book eight a fourth image joins the winds, the gates and the labyrinth. In the land of King Evander Aeneas sees the rock on which the
Senate of Rome will one day stand, and learns that it once enclosed the
home of a murderous, fire-breathing, half-human monster named Cacus.
From the "proud doorposts" of this senseless killer there had always hung
rotting, severed heads of his human victims . (8.195-7) Evander tells how
Hercules killed the monster and exposed his dark cavern to the light of the
sun. Commentators routinely take the triumphant Hercules as a "symbol"
for Aeneas, who overcomes the monsters of unreason, Dido and Turnus,
and for Augustus, who will overcome war itself. One who reads Evander's
account not as a symbol but as a story, though, must feel some unease as
Hercules, before he can kill Cacus, must become a thing of fury and
frenzy himself. Hercules' triumph is not an example with which one can
be quite comfortable. Book eight ends with a hundred lines describing the
future glories of Rome depicted on Aeneas' shield, culminating with Au:
gustus sitting in triumph over conquered peoples from all the nations of
the earth. In a characteristic stroke, Virgil says that Aeneas rejoiced in the
images, ignorant of the things, so that once again a portrait of Rome just
fails to come into focus as a sight at which one could be glad. The attentive reader will have seen that Augustus on the shield hangs the spoils of
all the world on his "proud doorposts," a phrase used only of him and of
Cacus. The same spot is still the home of a monster, but the new one
ravages the whole world.
St. Johns L ecture Series
11
�There are two kinds of motion in a labyrinth. The outward motion is
an illusion of progress away from something. It is the more pitiable,
because the more ignorant, of the two kinds. It characterizes the march of
imperial Rome outward over the world. It is seen in what Virgil calls in
Book six the."proud soul of Brutus the punisher," expeller of the Tarquins,
the first to rule as consul, who, for the sake of beautiful freedom" put love
of country and praise ahead of everything else and killed his own sons.
Virgil calls him "unhappy father, no matter what posterity may say of his
deed." (6.817-23) And Augustus cannot escape the same human vulnerability that Brutus tried to deny. A few lines later in Book six, the entire
spectacle of the shades of the heroes of Rome is immersed in grief over
Marcellus, the young man Augustus adopted and named as his heir, but
who died when he was twenty. No political order holds any answer for or
relief from human troubles. It is after Aeneas hears the infinity of grief
over Marcellus in his father's voice, that he looks back over the soul of his
triumphant offspring, recovers his own love of fame, and returns to the
world through the gate of false dreams.
But Aeneas is no Augustus. He is too aware of the losses and pains of
others for his own proud illusions ever to last for long. Aeneas for the most
part moves in the other direction, inward in the labyrinth. This is the
direction of "if only". If only Helen were dead; if only Dido could be
made to understand; if only Lausus would see reason; if only Turnus
would surrender. Aeneas never used his quest for political glory as an excuse to turn his back on a human being in distress, but he cannot relinquish that quest, on which so many others depend, and he can never quite
find his way to the center of the source of distress to remove its cause. At
the beginning of Book eight, the last in a long succession of divine apparitions comes to Aeneas. The old god of the Tiber tells him that his troubles
are near an end, and that home and rest await him. He must fight and
win a war with the Latins, but for once help will be available. Inland
along the Tiber live Arcadian Greeks ruled by King Evander. They will
happily join Aeneas in his fight and he can put an end once and for all to
the troubles he has carried with him for so long and in which he has involved so many others.
Aeneas does find welcome and help in Evander's city, Pallanteum. As
in Carthage, he finds too much welcome and too much help. It turns out
that Evander once met Aeneas' father, and adored him with youthful
love. The gifts Anchises gave him seem to be the only signs of wealth
Evander has allowed to remain in his city. (8.155-69) History repeats
itself in Pallanteum, in a double sense. As with their fathers, Pallas is fired
with a loving admiration for Aeneas. As he joins with him, we see in one
brief, lovely scene, a greater closeness between the two than we ever see
between Aeneas and his own son. (10.159-62) But Aeneas' recent Carthaginian history repeats itself at the same time: from Evander and from
Pallas, Aeneas has again accepted the loving gift of a human life, entrusted to his care. Pallas seems to think Aeneas can answer the deepest
questions of his life, but the two men know each other only for a day.
When Pallas arrives in Latium he begins to fight, and two hundred lines
12
The Fury of Aeneas
�later he is dead. Like every young man in the Aeneid, excepting only
Iulus, who is deliberately kept out of the fighting, Pallas dies at the moment of his greatest valor. That is the theme of Book nine, in which, in
Aeneas' absence, only young men are fighting. It is embodied in the figure
of Euryalus, whose longing for glory leads him to put on the shining
helmet of one of his victims, immediately to become a victim because'that
shining makes him an easy target. (9. 359-66, 373-4) It is embodied, too,
in the similes of Book nine, which liken the young warriors to beasts of
prey which, if they are daring and successful predators, become a danger
to men and an easy prey. Pallas cannot escape the Virgilian logic of glory
and death.
The saddest words of this saddest of poems are spoken by Aeneas to the
corpse of Pallas: "The same horrible fate of war calls me from here to
other tears; hail from me eternally, dearest Pallas, and eternally
farewell." (11. 96-8) In the last lines of the poem, Aeneas recognizes that
there is no such thing as an eternal farewell. The dead live as sources of
obligation, and neither death nor any ceremony can cancel such debts. If
Dido can be assimilated to a larger purpose, then she did not live. If
Lausus' decision to throw away his life were not acknowledged as binding
his adversary, then Lausus would not be recognized as the source of his
own choices. And if Pallas can be forgotten for the sake of the living, and
the greater number, then Pallas himself is accorded no worth at all.
Human worth does not fit in any scales. Its claims are unconditional.
We admire Aeneas in the war books of the last third of the poem
because he always seeks the sanest and most sensible solutions for his
enemies as well as for his own people. We rage along with him when
trivial, irrational causes produce and prolong the slaughter . Aeneas longs
for peace and for harmony with all the tribes in Italy. And what does Turnus fight for? For wholly selfish reasons and for the joy of fighting . Must
he not be cut down like the Irrational thing he is, so decent citizens might
get on with the business of living in co-operation? To see that this is not
how Virgil regards Turnus, listen to this simile with which Turnus goes
out to fight: "He is delirious with courage, his hope already tears the
enemy: just as a stallion when he snaps his tether and flies off from the
stables, free at last to lord the open plains, will either make for meadows
and the herds of mares or else leap from the stream where he is used to
bathing and, wanton, happy, neigh, his head raised high, while his mane
sweeps across his neck and shoulders." (11.491-7) Turnus is young,
strong, brave, and handsome. He is not made for submission to a
foreigner who arrives saying he is destined to marry his fiancee and be his
king. In the line following the simile of the stallion, Virgil brings Camilla
into the poem, to fight beside Turnus. She is an instant and complete communion with Turnus. The freedom and the lordship of Italy is theirs by
birth and by nature. Each of them is crushed by what Aeneas has brought
to Italy, but each dies with the sentiment that something unworthy has
happened.
At the end, when Turnus lies wounded at Aeneas' feet, we begin to
hear again the familiar echoes of the end of the Iliad , but this time they
St. Johns Lecture Series
13
�are like a deceptive cadence in a piece of music. Turnus asks Aeneas to
remember his own father and to return him, alive or dead as he prefers, to
his father. But as Aeneas begins to relax, and we expect the gesture of
reconciliation that Aeneas has tried so hard and so often to make to come
finally as a healing ending to the poem, Aeneas instead remembers Pallas,
and kills Turnus in fury. Why? It is his seeing the belt of Pallas, which
Turnus is wearing as spoil, that precipitates the deed. What does Aeneas
see when he looks at the belt? I think it is not too much to say that he sees
in it everything that has happened to him through the eight years and
twelve books that have gone before.
The belt is carved with a legendary scene of fifty bridegrooms killed
on their wedding night. It recalls the spectacle Aeneas watched from the
roof of Priam's ruined palace, with its fifty bridal chambers for his sons.
(2.503-4; 10. 497-9) It must, too, re-open the wound of the memory of
the bridal chamber he himself shared so briefly with Dido. And as showing men cut down in their youth, it must remind him of much that has
happened around· him in the war just fought. But more than anything
else, it brings back to him Pallas, to whom he could not succeed in saying
good-bye. As he kills Turnus, Aeneas calls Pallas "my own ." His acceptance of the call of fate prevented Aeneas from dying alongside his own
people in his own city of Troy. It prevented him from remaining loyal to
his own lover, Dido. But the gods have now left Aeneas alone. The last act
of the poem is the first one that is unequivocally Aeneas' own, and on his
own, though inclined toward a characteristic and politically sound act of
kindness, Aeneas commits a furious and painful murder out of love. Turnus dies rightly feeling that his death is unworthy of him. But Aeneas,
finally at the center of the labyrinth of his own life, could not let Turnus
live and be worthy of the gift of Pallas' life and death. In the inevitable
conflict of unconditional claims, one can only cling to one's own.
Pnnted at· the St. /ohni College Print Shop In Annapolis
�
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Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
formallectureseriesannapolis
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
Number of pages in the original item.
15 pages
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
The fury of Aeneas
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1981-10-02
Description
An account of the resource
Typescript of a lecture delivered on October 2, 1981 by Joe Sachs as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
lec Sachs 1981-10-02
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
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Sachs, Joe, 1946-
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/a7119724811165e3d68725d77e98425b.pdf
3015c6ca97f32941d9099aa500699382
PDF Text
Text
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FORMAL LECTURE/CONCERT SCHEDULE - 1981-82
September 18, 1981
Mr. Edward G. Sparrow, Dean
St. John's College, Annapolis
Poet's Word, Poem's Silence
September 25
Mr. Daniel 0. Vena
Princeton University
On Contemporary General
Relativistic Cosmology
October 2
Mr. Joe Sachs, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
The Fury of Aeneas
October 9
Professor Rom Harre
Oxford, England
Romantic Science and the
Origins of Field Theory
October 16
Long Weekend
No Lecture
October 23
Dr • Leon Kas s
The Hippocratic Oath:
Thoughts on Medicine and
Ethics
University of Chicago
October 30
Brother Robert Smith, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
Proof and Pascal
November 6
Professor Ralph Lerner
University of Chicago
Franklin, Spectator
November 13
Professor Thomas Banchoff
Brown University
The Fourth Dimension and
Computer Animated Geometry
November 20
The Madison Trio
Concert
November 27
Thanksgiving Recess
No Lecture
December 4
Mr. William Mullen, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
The Dance of the City
in Plato's Laws
December 5
&
6
King William Players
December 18 January 3
Winter Vacation
January 8, 1982
All College Seminar
Murder in the Cathedral
January 15
An Evening of Music by
Douglas Allanbrook
Concert
January 22
Mr. Thomas May, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
Augustine's Final Pilgrimage:
Athens to Jerusalem
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No Lectures
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�FORMAL LECTURE/CONCERT SCHEDULE - 1981-82
Page Two
January 29
Mr. Mortimer J. Adler
Institute for Philosophical
Research, Chicago
Beauty
February 5
Mr. William Darkey, Tutor
St. John's College, Santa Fe
The Darkling Singer
February 12
Long Weekend
No Lecture
February 19
Mr. Thomas Slakey, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
The World of Thomas Aquinas:
Man in Place
February 26
Mrs. Gisela Berns, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
March 5
Mr. Kent Taylor, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
Schiller's Drama- Fulfillment
of History and Philosophy in
Poetry
The Power to Think Nietzsche's
'Eternal Return'
March 10-21
Spring Vacation
No Lectures
March 26
Professor Donald Gray
Manhattan College
Creation or Evolution:
Must We Choose Between Them?
April 2
Paul Tobias, cello and
Elizabeth Moschetti, piano
Concert
April 9
Mr. Michael Platt
University of Dallas
Sonnet 94
April 16
Mr. William O'Grady, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
On Almost Seeing Miracles:
Thoughts on King Lear
April 23
Professor Richard Rorty
Princeton University
Heidegger Against the
Pragmatists
April 30
Mr6 Burton Blistein
Artist-in-Residence
St. John 1 s College, Annapolis
What is the Use of
Art Anyway?
May 7
Professor Gordon Feldman
Johns Hopkins University
The Language of
Modern Physics
May 14
Mr. Paul Roche
University of Notre Dame
Portrait of Sappho
May 21
Commencement
�
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.
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
2 pages
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Office of the Dean
Title
A name given to the resource
Formal Lecture/Concert Schedule - 1981-82
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1981-1982
Description
An account of the resource
Schedule of lectures and concerts for the 1981-1982 Academic Year (duplicate pages included).
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Lecture Schedule 1981-1982
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
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Sparrow, Edward G.
Vona, Daniel O.
Sachs, Joe
Harré, Rom
Kass, Leon
Smith, Brother Robert
Lerner, Ralph
Banchoff, Thomas
Mullen, William
Allanbrook, Douglas
May, Thomas
Adler, Mortimer Jerome, 1902-2001
Darkey, William A.
Slakey, Thomas
Berns, Gisela N.
Taylor, Kent
Gray, Donald
Tobias, Paul
Moschetti, Elizabeth
Platt, Michael
O'Grady, William
Rorty, Richard
Blistein, Burton
Feldman, Gordon
Roche, Paul
King William Players
Relation
A related resource
October 2, 1981. Sachs, Joe. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3723" title="The fury of Aeneas">The fury of Aeneas</a> (typescript)
February 26, 1982. Berns, Gisela. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/1083" title="Schiller's drama">Schiller's drama</a> (audio)
February 26, 1982. Berns, Gisela. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/1089" title="Schiller's drama">Schiller's drama</a> (typescript)
Friday night lecture
Lecture schedule
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