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Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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formallectureseriesannapolis
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What is a question?
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on October 16, 2015 by Daniel Harrell as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
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Harrell, Daniel
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Annapolis, MD
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2015-10-16
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<a title="Typescript" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/325">Typsecript</a>
Friday night lecture
Tutors
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Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
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00:37:03
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What Is a Philosophic Question?
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on April 28, 1989, by Samuel S. Kutler as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
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Kutler, Samuel S.
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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1989-04-28
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Aristotle. Metaphysics
Philosophy
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English
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LEC_Kutler_Samuel_1989-04-28_ac
Friday night lecture
Tutors
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PDF Text
Text
WHAT IS A BOOK?
EVAT. H. BRANN
Dean's Lecture
St. John's College, Annapolis
August 30, 1991
�It is our tradition that the first lecture of the year should be dedicated to
our freshmen. They have newly joined a community whose program of
learning centers on the scheduled reading of a pre-set list of books and
on the twice-weekly discussion which takes place in the seminar. They
have come to us chiefly because that is what we do here. I have read
each of their applications, and I can vouch for the fact.
Then what sort of impression will I be making on them if I ask an
absurd question like "What is a book?" - and in public? Don't we,
known to the world as a Great Books College, know what a book is,
even what a great book is?
I was friends once with a little boy (we are still friends, but he is a .
big strapping lawyer now, a public defender, no less) who told me he
was making a rocket to send into space. In the proper adult spirit of
annoying little children I asked him "What do you mean, space?" He
looked at me in big-eyed amazement (he was used to grown-ups having
more answers than he had questions) and said incredulously; "Don't
you even know what space is-you know, outer space?" So don't I
even know what a book is, a great book?
Well, I do and I don't I don't say that to create confusion. Contrary
to what some of your upperclass colleagues may try to tell you,
confusion is not our business, but rather clarification, an10ng other
things because clear-headedness is one condition of open-mindedness.
A slowly developing, limited clarity of mind does seem to me to be our
business.
Nor, for that matter, is reading books our primary activity, or even
thinking about them. Our primary purpose is, in my opinion - I say
"in my opinion" because not everyone agrees-to reflect, which means
literally "to bend (our thought) back" - on itself and on ou·rselves.
When you leave us in four years you may well have chosen a career.
The word "career" is related to "car" and connotes taking off on a track, straight, speedy- and upward, we hope. The years immediately before
you are, on the contrary, years of leisure, of slow progress in a rising
circle (such as is called a spiral), of reviewing your points of origin1
�2
one of which is yourself-from different vantage points. It is significant that we never ask you to "take a course" but always to "be in a ·
tutorial." We invite you not to course along a set track of organized
knowledge, but to be active in a community protective of learning
wherever it goes, even in circles. That, incidentally, is why your
teachers are not called professors but tutors. These are both Latin words.
A professor is "one who speaks out assertively in public," but a tutor is
"one who safeguards and watches" over things. A tutorial, then is a safe
haven for learning with fifteen or so members, one of whom is the
special guardian of learning.
It is often said that there is yet another presence in the tutorial or
the seminar, the one that brings us together, the true guide and teacher,
namely the great book being studied. We often say that, and I think it
is true. Not for nothing does our college seal display seven books.
Let me take out a minute here for an interjection. You may be
surprised by my vehemence, butl want to warn you of what seems to
me a very bad blight. Countries, congregations, colleges - all have
their verities, truths they keep telling about themselves. When a truth
has been told and heard very often, it loses, by a very natural process,
its sap and its savor. Then there is a type ·o f person who concludes that
because the truth has lost its savor for them, it is unsavory, and they
affect ennui and disdain toward it. They think the truth is flat and
falsified when it is their souls that have gone flaccid. I am not speaking
of those who vigorously oppose the truthfulness of the truth: They are
the tonic that keeps truths healthy. I am speaking of people- ourselves
in certain 11\oods- who let the soul slip from the words they speak and
then blame the words. The cure for this condition seems to be to
cultivate the habit of reverence. By reverence I here mean the disposition to grant at least provisional significance to words and sayings from
which the meaning seems for the moment to have withdrawn and to .
�3
have become remote. The next step is then the effort to recover that
meaning.
In that spirit I say thatgreat books are our teachers, and this lecture
is one attempt to recall the meaning of this truism.
There is a man- you will spend much of your year arguing with
him - who intimates that it is foolish to talk about the quality and
purpose of a thing before asking what it is. In the manner of this man
Socrates let me then put my title question, to which we all know some
obvious answers that tum increasingly unobvious under reflection:
What is a book?
Books as Bodies
A book appears to be, to begin with, a bodily thing. In an old college
film, which I hope you get to see sometime, there is a dorm sequence
ofa student shouting upstairs to her friend: "Throw me down my Iliad."
Down comes the Iliad. Or it might have been her Paradise Lost, I've
forgotten. Is the Iliad then a thing subject to gravity, gaining distance
as the square of the time? Is it her Iliad or Homer's Iliad or Achilles'
Iliad? Where is the place of this Iliad? In a book, in the mapsode 's literal
line-by-line memory, in the student's impressionistic memory, nowhere, in Troy, in Hades? I say Hades, because as you will soon read
in the Odyssey, it is to the blood-drained invisible underworld that you
must go to learn the great tales on which poetry works. Again, when is
a book's time of being? When the story called the Iliad happened, in
the twelfth century B.C.7 When it was told, in the eight century B.C.7
When an Athenian commission first produced an official written version in the sixth century B.C.? Or whenever Johnnies read their seminar
in the twentieth century, or, for that matter, in 1808 when the freshmen
of this college (then called the "noviate class") first read Homer - in
Greek? (T. F. Tilghman, The Early History of St. John's College in
Annapolis, p. 36). Or whenever Homer's poem is at work influencing
lives, as the vision of Achilles once, in the fourth century B.C., drove
Alexander the Great to the deeds that made him so?
Or whenever the Iliad stands on a shelf waiting to be opened? In
that most thought-provoking of children's books, Michael Ende's
Neverending Story, the boy Sebastian, about to open the magical book
he has stolen, says to himself:
�4
I would like to know what actually goes on in a book as long
as it's closed.... One has to read it to experience it, that's
clear. But it's already there beforehand. I would like to
know,how7
These are tricky perplexities that push themselves forward when
you approach this book-thing with questions such as: whose possession,
in what place, at what time? Let me nonetheless stick for a while with
the crudest set of solutions, those that take a book as a physical object.
Paul Scott, the author of the Raj Quartet, the work I think of as the
most considerable novel of the time between the Second World War
and our present, was much impressed by the following prosaic account
of what it is to be a book:
A small hard rectangular object, whose pages are bound
along one edge in.to fixed covers and numbered consecutively.
(On Writing and the Novel, p. 211, quoting Bergonzi).
As I flesh out this bare-bones definition of a bound paper book, do,
please, compare what it means to read such a book with the unrolling
of a papyrus scroll on the one hand, and the scrolling of a computer
display on the other.
Books, says the passage, are small and hard, which means they are
safely carried hither and thither and can even be thrown down the
stairwell. As sophomores you will read Augustine's autobiography in
which he confesses first his life of sin and finally his conversion to faith.
He tells how his landlord let him use the garden of the house Augustine
was renting, and there he and his friend one day carried a book, or codex,
as Augustine calls it, which means a set of wooden tablets, a sort of
proto-book. It was not just any book, but a codex apostoli. It was a part
of the The Book, to bib/ion, in English, the Bible. (Let me take out a
minute to say that the Greek word bib/ion means a thing made of biblos,
which is the word for papyrus, while papyrus itself comes into English
as paper.)
Augustine was, at that time, in great agony over his sins and his
doubts. Suddenly, in the garden, he heard a child's voice saying over
and over in a sing-song voice: "Tolle lege, tolle lege," "Take it and read
it, take it and read it." So he took the book and read what he found, and
at that moment it was, as he says in his beautiful Latin:
�5
Quasi luce securitas infusa cotdi mea, omnes dubitationes
tenebrae diffugerunt (Confessions VIII, 12).
"As if a light of assurance had poured into my heart, all the shadows
of doubt fled away." If the book had not been in the garden there might
have been no voice, or if there had been a voice, Augustine would not
have heeded it, or if he had heeded it, he would have had nothing to take
up and read. And he would have missed the moment that made him, his
conversion. It is because books are portable that the ready reader can
sometimes come on the word fitly spoken
To descend from the solemn to the ordinary: The bound paper book
can be carried about more conveniently than can most other containers
of valuables except wallets: in a pocket, handgrip or knapsack, to bed,
bathroom, beach or waiting room. How many of you spent months in
high school carrying around a book until the time was ripe, and you
took it and read it?
Besides being small and hard, the book of the definition is normally
rectangular. Its rectangularity betokens the self-effacement of the visible lay-out of the text. Let me explain.
There is something called pattern poetry. An example is the
Mouse's saci Tale in Alice in Wonderland, which looks like what it
sounds like, a tail. You see here only the tail end of the tale:
' Such a
trial
dear sir,
With no
. jury or
Judge,
would be
wasting
our breath.'
'I'll be
judge,
I 11 be
jury,'
Said
cunning
old Fury:
'I'll try
the whole
cause,
and
.condemn
you
to
death.'
�6
This sort of innocent typographical game, a kind of printed calligraphy, has, I should tell you, recently been used as a jumping off place
for grave reflections on the latest of intellectual revolutions. A famous ·.
French intellectual has said:
Thus the calligram aspires playfully to efface the oldest
oppositions of our alphabetical civilization: to show and to
name; to shape and to say; to reproduce and to articulate; to
imitate and to signify; to look and to read.
(Michel Foucault, This is Not a Pipe, p. 21).
The traditional book, it is true, suppresses the looking in favor of
the reading. It is rectangular because it breaks the narrative into optically convenient and semantically arbitrary stacks of lines. In some
traditions these are arranged horizontally, in some, like the Chinese and
Japanese, vertically; some are read from left to right, and some like
Hebrew, from right to left so that the book begins where an English
book ends. The earliest Greek writing is sometimes read back and forth,
which is called boustrophedon, meaning ox-turning, as. in plowing. I
am sure that all these conventions carry significance with them. For
instance the fact that Western reader's eyes survey the page in the plane
of the horizon back and forth, while Oriental readers nod vertically there must be some meaning in that.
Next, Scott's quotation says that the pages of a book are numbered
consecutively. This pagination is, so to speak, the street address of the
narrative. That address system makes it possible to revisit locations in
a book. For worthy books are meant to be read in a double way, so that
the first reading is somehow already the second reading. One way is to
follow the stacks of lines and the sequence of pages straight through.
Of course, while we are barging on with the inexorable clock- say it
is 6:30 on a seminar night- the time of the narrative warps back and
forth. For example, the centerpiece of the Odyssey, Books IX-XII where
Odysseus turns poet and tells of the ten years when he seemed losrto
the world, is all flashback; it is only with Book XIIl that we return to ·
the present of the story.
But there is a second way to scramble the time of reading. It is made
possible by the fact that a book is a bound stack of numbered pages.
That means you can put slips of paper or fingers in the pages you have
passed. As a visible, weighty, numbered thing, a book is all there at
once, and we can treat all its tale or argument as simultaneously
accessible.
�7
Literary theorists have in fact invented a word for the writing that
fully exploits the non-linear property of the book format They call it
"spatial" prose. (l Frank in Spatial Form in Narrative, 1977.) It is
spatial because it depends on continual back-reference, on always
holding the text present, as if it were all there simultaneously just as
space is - while time is al ways either gone or yet to come. It seems to
me that the physical format of the bound book invites the writer to make
spatialist demands on the reader. That does not mean that authors who
may not have been writers at all, like Homer, or who wrote in scrolls
that show only one place at a time, did not compose spatially: All great
texts demand continual back- reference, but book texts make it mechanically easier. The theorists I have mentioned thought that the so-called
"Modernist" writers, above all James Joyce, were peculiarly spatial, but
you will see that every Platonic dialogue (for example) requires you to
refer back all the time - a demand which you cannot, of course, fully
meet until you have studied your way through the text once. We might
conjecture, on the other hand, that a people that values time and its
sacred cyclical order might keep its scripture in scrolls, as do the Jews
their Torah.
The other place where events that are strung out in time are kept
simultaneous is memory. A book ' is indeed a memory analogue: an
external memory. This seems to me a wonderful thing.
The last dialogue and the last book you will read this year - in
May when all reading is a drag- is called the P haedrus. In it Socrates
will claim that any written text is pernicious because it can't answer
back when questioned, and also because it acts as a pharmaceutical
pacifier: It keeps you passively reminded and prevents you fTom being
actively mindful (275). Readers of dialogues might point out to Socrates
that the texts in which he appears do answer back, and readers of books
might say that a paginated book does keep us actively casting back and
forth.
Finally, a book, in Paul Scott's quotation, is bound along one edge
between fixed covers. This physical fact means that books have spines;
they are upright vertebrates. They normally stand on shelves next to one
another. (I can't help telling you that in my private library at home only
the books I respect stand up; the indifferent ones have to lie prone on
the top shelves.) Only the spine shows, so a book is known by its
backbone. That fact in turn means that a book is identified by author
and title. In ·antiquity titles were evidently not always given by the
author. Who knows whether Homer would have called his song about
�8
the wrath of Achilles after the name of Hector's city? Or what Aristotle
would have called his lectures on being, later called by the ambiguous
title Metaphysics, meaning either "the book that follows the Physics"
or "the subject matter beyond nature"?
In modem times, on the other hand, titles are almost always
carefully crafted announcements of the author's intention, and they are
the first thing to think about as soon as you have finished the book once.
Some titles reveal, some retract, some complement the contents of the
book. For example, as a rising senior you will spend a glorious summer
with Tolstoy's fourteen hundred page novel entitled War and Peace, of .
which 1340 are devoted to war and sixty to peace. What did Tolstoy
mean by his title? Did he mean that those last pages of peaceful family
life, the so-called First Epilogue, have as much gravity, as much cosmic
significance, as all the tunnoil that went before? I think so, but you may
find that your seminar divides around that question, which is made more
interesting by the fact that the Russian word for "peace" also means ·
"world."
******
That concludes my unpacking of the definition of a book as a small
hard rectangular object, made of paginated leaves bound along one
edge. So far the answer to the question "What is a book?" has amounted
to this: A book is the kind of artifact we call a medium. It is made to
mediate a text to us.
In his I' hysics Aristotle will observe a fundamental two-foldness in
the human world. Some things in it grow, or at least move by themselves, and these, he says, are natures. Other things are made by a human
being out of some material according to a plan, and these we call .
artifacts. (I might say, incidentally, that one of our modem perplexities
is our capability for turning natures into artifacts.) Now to figure out
what a natural being or what a given artifact truly is- a house, a marble
image, a tool - is complicated enough. But to think about the kind of
artifact called a medium requires special subtlety. For a medium is
meant to come between the receiver and the source in such a way as to
convey a message while being itself overlooked. Telescopes, telephones, television sets, whose names mean respectively things for
scanning objects that are far off, for hearing voices that are far off, for
seeing images produced far off, are not the focus of the user's interest
when they are transmitting, and go dead or empty when not in use. But
�9
as the book is not a mediwn that plays or replays some performance far
off in space or even in time, so it is not like a tape or disk that goes
inactive after it's been played. Sebastian's question, What goes on
inside a book when it is closed?, is not purely phantastic; even an unread
book seems to have a sort of secret vitality just because its text is all
latent significance - imageless squiggles. I ask the seniors if there has
been a single seminar book in your three years here that would gain
very much from being illustrated. The solemn last paragraph of Hegel's
Phenomenology of the Spirit speaks of Spirit in time as presenting a
languidly moving "gallery of pictures." Ask yourselves, when you
come to it, whether you would wish someone to take Hegel at his word
and to produce an illustrated Phenomenology.
In the image-smashing disturbances of late antiquity, the iconoclastic opposition to depictions of God and Christ was countered by the
notion of a "Pauper's Bible." Religious images, the iconophiles argued,
are scripture for the illiterate. Perhaps they should have conceded that
for those who can "take up and read" the written word is antagonistic
to depiction because pictures fix the narrative in its flow, specify its
intimations to the imagination, and rivet the eye on the page. In short,
illustrations turn a book from a medium into a presentation. They
capture the imagination and thereby drain the word.
I have only mentioned book-illustrations to set off the peculiar
wonder of the verbal book as a mediwn-body, a mediwn that harbors
its content without presenting it- I mean, as I said before, that we are
not caught by images, and we read right past the print presented on the
page. To me there is something elusive and mysterious about this
unpresented yet ever-present life of books which makes the question
what happens within them permissible and plausible. Of course, I am
too much of a coward seriously to propose that arguments go on
developing and characters go on conversing all over my library- and
yet! And yet - they do seem to have done just that from reading to
reading. The mystery here is that of mental life encased in a hard
rectangular object.
A book, then, is a peculiar kind of medium, a mediwn not unlike a
vessel of the spirit - that is what makes it understandable that people
might kiss a book or swear on it or carry it always along. Yet although
it is a peculiar medium, it is still a medium. Being a medium means that
it mediates between senders and receivers, in this case, between the
writers and the readers. Let me start with the readers, since that is what
we are - and there are, thank heaven, more of us than of them.
�10
Readers as God-Parents
I call this section of the lecture "Readers as God-Parents" because ·
I will later liken writers to parents. A god-parent is the sponsor of a rite
of spiritual regeneration; a reader sponsors the rebirth of the bookbody's soul. The first step toward this revival is, of course, to tum the
spatially all-present text back into real, live, passing time.
There are many perplexities and complications to the conscious
reading of a book. The study of these problems is called "hermeneutics," named after Hemes, the ,god of messages. It seems to me far more
important to read books than to engage in this study. I once offered a ·
preceptorial on it which left us all unclear whether anyone could in fact ·
read a book. Let me proceed on the sensible hypothesis that books are
readable.
Then the first practical observation to be made is that there are
different kinds of books, and that they should be read differently. It
would be plain eccentric not to quote from Frances Bacon's essay "Of
Studies" here:
'
Some Books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and
some few to be chewed and digested; That is, some Books
are to be read only in parts; others to be read but not
curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.
Let me give you examples. Some people will be outraged right
away and that was part of my pleasure in writing this lecture.
1. Mysteries. When you are about to invest a portion of your life in
reading one - on the hypothesis that you will get to be eighty and that
it takes three hours to read the mystery, that would be .0000042 of your
life, but these things add up-do the following. Turn to the denouement
and find out whodunnit If you still care to read the book, start at the.
beginning. Otherwise, forget it.
2. Scholarship. Read the preface. If it is clear what will be proved
and why, go on. Otherwise, forget it.
�11
3. Minor novels. Apply the sortes Biblicae, an old mode of reading.
Sortes is a Latin word for "chances." ''The chance of the Bible" is
exactly what Augustine was bidden to take when he was told to "take
up and read." If the passages you find at random are entrancing, begin
at the beginning. Otherwise, forget it.
Notice that these kinds of books are not the ones you will read
for seminar, though it is true that one of the novels on our list is,
among other things, also a murder mystery- Dostoyevsky' s Brothers
Karamazov; however it is scarcely a minor novel.
Notice also that the books we do read for seminar all have one thing
in common: None that I can think of has an index, at least not one made
by the author. Why do great books have no index? Because you are
bidden to read them whole and as a whole at least once, from their
pregnant beginning to their well-delivered end. Because you are not to
look up subjects that interest you or follow through topics you specialize
in. Because understanding is not an encapsulated result but a way, the
way through the book. Because a book of stature, be it philosophy or
fiction, is not about - round-and-about - something, but is the
presentation of a matter most adequate to it in the author's judgment. (I
might say, incidentally, that Hegel gives similar reasons for arguing, in
the long and famous Preface to his Phenomenology, that prefaces are
impossible.)
·
When you are reading a book for the second time you may want to
do the following to the text, provided you own the book bodily. You
may want to take a marker of the color children use when they draw the
sun, and highlight passages. How is highlighting compatible with
reading the whole well? It seems to me to be permissible for four
reasons:
1. Some writers occasionally stop to put their whole meaning in a
nutshell. Whether you have come on such a nugget, you cannot really
know until you have read the whole book. If you mark such a nutshell
for yourself, then when you come on it you can crack it and re-develop
for yourself the argument, which grows as an oak from this acorn. An
example of such an acorn is Kant's epigram, in the Critique of Pure
Reason (B75): "Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without
concepts are blind." Whenever you recall that sentence, you can recover
the whole Critique for yourself.
�12
2. Often you will notice, some time into the book, that a motifkeeps
recurring and that you must at some point collect its incidences and
figure out its meaning. An example is the returning vision of large
blueness in War and Peace.
3. A third case of occurrences inviting highlighting is the significant
mystery. A book will say things that you don't yet understand, that are
pregnant enigmas for you, and that you want to talk about in seminar.
One example for me is the second half of the fourth line of the Iliad:
t'tW(E'tO Pou A.ft
... Dios d'eteleieto boule
. . . and the plan of Zeus was fulfilled.
. • • dtOc; li'
What plan? When fulfilled? That is the puzzle dominating the epic.
4. Last among the occasions for highlighting I can think of, are the
passages of personal import - those that penetrate to your heart and
that you want never to lose, the ones you keep to yourself or show to
close friends. I won't give an example now, but I will tell some, if asked.
Let me say again: Highlighting, whether in sky-blue ink or in
sun-yellow marker, is for the second reading. I think that though the
books may look defaced when you are finished, the writers are rejoicing
in your reading of them, be they still on earth or in either of the other
places. That brings me to the author.
Writers as Parents
We speak of"Homer's gods." "Homer's gods," we might say; "are
frivolous creatures -just compare the lightness of their invulnerable
immortality to the gravity of his death-expectant heroes." Homer's
gods, Homer's heroes, Homer's Iliad: How is the author related to the
book? Auetor means literally "progenitor, parent" And like a child, the .··
book goes forth into the world, sometimes falling into hands the parent
may shudder at.
But like a good parent, the author knew that this would happen and
gave the offspring what it needs in order to be on its own: self-sufficiency, a certain replet~ness. Here is what I mean.
�13
In the course of the year you will be writing at least five small papers
in your language tutorial and several more in your other classes. On
some of these you will have conferences with your tutors. Your tutor
will ask: "What are you saying here, what did you have in mind?" And
you will tell all the things that you thought but failed to say in your
paper. That is what distinguishes an accomplished writer: the ability to
make the book independent, to tum it loose, to find a way to get the
reader to ask not "What was the author thinking?" but "What is the book
saying?" Ailllie Dillard, a very fine contemporary writer, who has
thought much about composing a book, says in her essay The Writing
Life (p. 4): "Process is nothing; erase your tracks." She is attacking a
current school of writing teachers who exalt process over product,
writing exercises over perfected expression. Here you will almost never
be asked to write merely for the sake of writing. We take a leaf, so to
speak, from the books of real writers and ask you to think about a matter
that really does make you think, and then to say on paper, as perfectly
as possible, what you have thought. That is what the authors of our
books have done - they have thought and found the right words.
"Thought" is a noun, but it is also the past form of the verb "to think."
Thought is thinking that has been done, thinking perfected. So Annie
Dillard should not have said "Erase your tracks" but "Absorb your
tracks; make your product point the reader to your tracks." For writing
is thinking frozen in its tracks by speech, speech crystallized so as to
make the point of origin visible within. A book is a translucent product
containing its process. That is how Homer's Iliad can become our Iliad.
It preserves within it the world that Homer meant with each word he
said. (Incidentally, it is because we want you to write papers somewhat
as real writers write them - first think, then say - that you will have
such a devilish hard time writing, but at least the task will dignify rather
than degrade you.)
So no more than we ask your parents what they meant by producing
you, need we ask what Homer meant in his epics. The off-spring in both
cases are amply provided to speak for themselves. Or rather, you are
amply provided to read it. Even the Iliad, the one that is not a material
thing to own, is yours, the reader's. You bring it to life, melt its frozen
state. Again I quote from Bacon, this time from his Advancement of
Learning (Bk.I):
But the images of men's wits and knowledges remain in
books, exempted from the wrong of time, and capable of
�14
perpetual renovation. Neither are they fitly to be called
images, because they generate still, and cast their seed in the
minds of others, provoking and causing infinite actions and
opinions in succeeding ages: so that, if the invention of the
ship was thought so noble, which carrieth riches and commodities from place to place, and consociateth the most
remote regions in participation of their fruits, how much
. more are letters to be magnified, which, as ships, pass
through the vast sea of time, and make ages so distant to
participate of the wisdom, illuminations, and inventions the
one of the other?
Now the notion that you bring the book to life seems to be close to
the claim of a currently very busy school of thought: that the reader is
the author. But what I mean is in fact a world apart from the notion that
you may tease the text into any meaning your brilliant wit devises.
On the contrary: It is the book's will, not yours that is to be done. ,
There is a book by Joseph Conrad (whose novella 'The Heart of
Darkness," to my mind the greatest short story of our century, you will
read as seniors). The book is called The Mirror of the Sea. It tells of the
difference between going to sea in sailing vessels and on steam boats.
A steam boat plows through the water; it conquers the ocean. Its
progress is mechanical, though its route is wilful. The sail ship on the
other hand respects its element and responds to its every indication.
From departure to landfall, it is engaged in a fierce and loving battle ..
with the sea. Its course is contingent and its arrival uncertain. A great ·
writer, to extend Bacon's nautical figure, provides a book that is more
like a sea for sailing than an ocean for steaming.
And that brings me to my final reflection, on the greatness of books . .
Before I finish let me say that I know full well that I have been speaking
in similes and metaphors and that I expect to be held to a more literal
account in the question period.
�15
Greatness in Books
St. Jolm's is known as a "Great Books College," and, as I said early
on, I know from your applications that you came because you want to
read books that raise you rather than demean you.
Mr. Curtis Wilson, a retired tutor who was twice dean ofthe college,
used to wish that we would stop talking of "the hundred great books,"
and instead speak of "some very good books." I agree with "some," but,
though I see his point - greatness is not a very sensible sort of
classification - I can't quite agree to dropping "great," not at this
moment in America.
To begin with, I want to prognosticate that the more books you read,
the more you will find that there is greatness, that it is an emergent
quality that some books just have, and that each reading confirms. The
community that has in common the reading of these books and the
acknowledgment of their greatness is bound by two powerful bonds:
first, the fact of a shared judgment, competently come by and continually confinned, and second the fact of a practical willingness to reverence what is high as expressed in a daily schedule of study.
Some of you may know that nowadays these are fighting words in
academe. How, they ask, can any communal judgment have been fairly
atrived at when we are a people divided by a diversity of hopelessly
opposed interests - who are playing, as they say, a zero sum game?
How, again, can any one human expression be higher than another,
when every text is a testimonial to some human condition, and the
tradition of chosen books merely represents the winner?
In other words, the present trend is to want democracy without
commonality and equality without excellence. To me the wish seems
outrageous - and again I am yours to question in the question period
- but doubly outrageous because it contains the seed of a fair dream.
The fair dream is that the human being in us should be universally
respected and that all our works should be universally appreciated. The
forced version is that we should live in a society in which, without
admitting a common humanity, every last group discrimination based
on extrinsic properties, such as race and sex, is outlawed, while all
intellectual discriminations based on intrinsic criteria of quality are
proscribed as having ulterior motives.
�16
Let me offer two rules for choosing books to read that take some
account of what is fair in the desire for universal appreciation.
Here is Law One of the Discriminating Reader: Devour everything
you can swallow with relish, indiscriminately. Test texts as I recommended before, but give everything a try. There are dozens of wonderful genres and fine works within them: Science fiction, utopias and .
fanstasy; children's, ethnic and women's literature; Westerns, adventures and thrillers, book reviews, political flyers and literary criticism.
(If you come to see me in my office I will be delighted to tell you my
loves and hates in each category. I also know a lot of rather pleasing
trash, including comic books.)
Law Two of the Discriminating Reader then goes as follows: Read
only a limited number of books, perhaps a hundred and twenty or so;
discriminate severely; while attending to a text allow a little voi~ on ;
the sidelines to say: "1bis is great and worthy of my best time; that is .
not"
Far from being at odds, Law One and Law Two are complementary. .
Obeying the first shows you to be a lover of books, a bibliophile;
obeying the second makes you a student, a reader.
But how will you judge that a book is great? I had a teacher, forty
years ago in Brooklyn College, who said that some books made her hair
stand on end, and they were great Much as I like this criterion, which,
I have since discovered, was not original with her, I see some flaws in
it. But there are many other diagnostic marks, signs and indices of
greatness, that people have listed, and we might talk about them in the
question period. Let me add to that multitude one observation of my
own, which does not so much pick out greatness as distinguish greatness
in woiks of fiction from greatness in woiks of reflection:
)
In a great epic or drama or novel, if any word were different, the
tale told would be other than it is; in a great philosophical treatise, every
sentence could be paraphrased and the truth told would be the same.
To make myself clearer, let me take the counter-example, that of
lesser books: A mediocre novel tells a tale coarse-meshed enough, with
characters gross-grained enough, to be equally presentable in language
only approximately equivalent A mediocre piece of philosophy, on the
other hand, can't be told to its advantage in other tenns: It is all
idiosyncratic jargon and its ordinary language paraphrase puts it to
shame. That is why trying to say exactly what the book says in another
�17
way is the useful initial exercise in seminar when the work is philosophical, but is love's labor lost when the work is fictional. And that is why
it is usually harder to read a novel than it is to read a philosophical text
- except perhaps when that text is also a drama. I am referring to the
Platonic dialogues, the first of which you will be reading right after
Homer. They are the hardest of all, since they are philosophical plays
- you will decide whether tragedy or comedy.
Let me end, if not conclude. My question for myself and for you
was: "What is a Book?" My answer was: It is a special kind of body
made to be inhabited by a curious kind of frozen but fusible soul, a body
fitto mediate its own peculiar life. It has a parent, the author, who equips
it with all it needs to live on its own, and god-parents, readers, who can
revivify its printed life. The books that realize their book nature most
perfectly may be called "great", and it is from these that we at St. John's
College have selected a number for study. Both because it is a strenuous
and wearing business to be constantly in their presence, and for reasons
of inclusive humanity, it is good to read many lesser books as well.
Have I answered the question I post>.d for us? Not remotely. Let us
try again in the question period.
�
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What is a book?
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1991-08-30
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Typescript of a lecture delivered on August 30, 1991 by Eva Brann as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
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Brann, Eva T. H.
Deans
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
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PDF Text
Text
, QUX
®
~n RH
A FORMAL LECTURE
DELIVERED AT
ST JOHN'S COLLEGE
by
Eva
13rann
JS' tr ~OD~
x·s s · r
?
�What la a Body in Kant's Syat. .1
1.
*
The reason for this inquiry.
I think it. is ray first duty to explain why I have chosen
to inquire into the place and meaning of body in Kanta' syst•••
I would like to begin by
calll~
on an eaaay by Kant
entitled •concerning the Noble Tone of Late Raised in Phlloaopaay.•
In this essay Kant points to Plato and Pytha8oras aa the partly
unwltti~
progenitors of those who philosophize in a certain
elevated and enthusiastic mode.
•the philosophy of Ariatotle,
on the contrary, is work• he goes oa to observe in sober pra1...
And he calls Aristotle an extremely prosaic philosopher,•
adding that •at bottom, after all, all philosophy la prosaic.•
What characterizes Arlatotle'a philoaophical work la that it la
an acute and serious analytic and synthetic labor performed by
the pure intellect, resulting in a uaable product, such •• a
preli•inary table of categories, (B 107), which provides the
materials for a later worker to employ ayste. .tically (B 107).
*
furt
Rta1on, First Edition (1781),
Aa
Critiqyt
Ba
Critique of P\Jre Re11on, Second Edition (1786).
FHMa
a(
Foundatione of th! Metaphysica of Morale (1785).
HFSN1
MetaphY!lCfl Foun4tt1ons of Netural Scienc1 (1786),
tr9ns. James Ellington (Library ot Ltberal Arta, 1~7u)~
MFDR1
Hetaphxeical Foundations ot the Doctrine ot Right (1797)"
OP1
KOP1
K.ant'a Ooya PoatU!UJI by Erich Adickea (Berlin
1920~
�2
I have begun by citing this essay
becaue~
my inquiry will
unavoidably issue in the questU>n whether phtlosopy should be
prose and work or perhaps something else.
And furthermore I
feel obliged to set off the spirit of llY present uadertaking
from that of philosophical work.
For I came on my question
concerning body not at all in the orderly progress of finding
and accomplishing a task, but in a most unsystematic or anti-
aysteaatic waya
by attending to certain particular sections
and sequence• in Kant's work which struck me with a sense of
aaazement and revelation as well as a conviction that through
these passages there
of Kant's edifice.
m~ht be
access to the unfounded foundations
As a result it now seem• to me that the
11arvel of Kant's thought lies in this very circumstance -· that
in the naae of systematic co11pletene1s it throws open depth
upon dizzying .depth of inquiry.
Let
11e
begin by setting out the items of my conviction and by
showing how they all implicate body in the crux of Kant's effort.
2.
The ends of the Critique of Pure Reason.
The f irat of such clues comes out of the very plan and the
iap1ied end& of that enco•passing systematic edifice, the Critique
of Pure Reaaon.
This firat of Kant's three critiques has two great enda.
The central end is "critical~ l n the proper, ordinary senaea
human reason ie exposed as a faculty
system of illusions.
f~r
a definite and inevitable
In etriki.ng these down, Kant aakes a
�3
clearing for the poaaibillty of d11illu1loned human actlon,
performecl in tile face of tbe defecta of humaa r•aoa..
Thi•
po a a ibll ity ls worked out 1n the second crlt ique, the
Crltiqyt of fr19tlcal Reaaon.
The encoapaaaing taak, however, la bnt'a review of tbe
grounds of human knowledge.
Suoh a revlev la called a •critique•
ln a 1enee aore peculiar to Kallt• and lta deter11laed end la the
certlflcatlon of what we call, eiaply a.S grandly, •aelenee•,
and ln particular, of pbx1ic1, aa tbe al.ngle trutll•prMuelng
effort.
To say the ,.., thing ln other vorda; tbe poaltlve
critical enterprise la the e1tabllalment of •experience.•
Experience la the jolalq of the graap of understanding witb
so• •empirical• -tter,
-•ing
to•thlmg whleb
co•• to ua,
in part, adventltlouely, · ao•thlng nloh 11 glvea to ua.
Thia
product, a graapecl give• thlag, - t • preclaely bat:'• quite
traditional . .tlon of truth aa •adaequatlo iatellectua rei,•
the fitting of thought to thing (I 82).
I aall bave to retura
to thie definition of truth.
The Cr1tigut gf Psgt &••op, then,
not only clear• tbe
deck• for the practleal uae of our reaaon, .,_. alao provl•e&
th• foundations for lta theoretical u . . , and thla latter part
aeataina the great positive dlscoverl••
~
tile book. · It waa
in eonaldert.ns thia two•fold poaltlve aat negative end of the
work that I hM a flrat f"llng of havlllS oo• oa an •l&M·
Let •
nplain.
The flrat critical 1yat. . , tbat nl.C!b uaderllea theory.
1• aald to be perfectly oomplete.
lta ..-tapbyaloal 1uper•atuotUE"e
la a .... work of neablllg out, to be lef't: largely to pup1l•·
�4
Philoao~
ia essentially finished (B 884).
The second
critique, the er1tique ot fractical R911on, 110st explicitly
contains no nev truth• nor any proaiae of new truth•• it
ller9ly toraulatea the full meaning of what, according to Kant,
we all know even before any philosophical intervention•
that
ve auat do as ve ought rather than as ve want if we are to
respect ourselves (FHM,
sec. I).
therefore its effact on our
llvea la not to give them a content but only a forma
whatever
ve do, ve 11Uat do it as beings whose reason ls a ruler.
Hence
neither of theae two critical systems presents in itself a
vorklng project for hUllAll reason.
w'vl : c.~ 1 !>
1
The theoretical enterprl1e founded in the first critique,
·'
"
doee, on the other hand, provide our lives with an infinite and
legitl-te bu1lnea1, naaely physical science.
Nov having expended
a truly enor110u1 effort on well-founding such work and oft
showing that reaeoa baa no other, does Kant glory ln its beauty,
praiee lta pleasures, deund that its aodes infora public and
private life?
In Plato's TiMeus, for instance, which, anacbro?
-
niatically and la.accurately apeaking, also containa a theory of
acience, the eaterpriae la acceptetl by Socrates as •a feast of
accounta• (27 b) and a celebration.
So ooapletely does Kant
o•it all com1ent on the human significance of this single vast
peraiaaible use of the human understanding that hi.a omlasion
arouses auapiclon 'of an ieaue too deep in the foundations of the
syatea for pa111.ng explanation.
I 1hall atate right away that I "9lleve there to be
evidence, not peripheral and flnlcking, but bold and central,
that la
I.ant'•
•Y•t- phyaica •• the
aclence of bo41iea do••
�5
indeed play a central human role,
12£....it
the one access
~
have .tQ .S2.J.lr .Q.!m souls, and provides all the self•knowledge
~
£!!.n
~·
~
I cannot tell why Kant never explicitly drew attention
to this circumstance in all lts pathos, except by noting that
all great philosophical works that I know have these telling
lacunae, junctures too sensitive, d"ep and dangerous to bring
out in words.
3.
The grand design for the deduction of physics.
Let me now adduce somewhat more external evidence for the
overwhelming importance which the science of bodies has in Kant's
system by sketching out the intention not of one work, but of a
sequence of three works which largely occupied his later years.
This sequence contains a grand design for the deduction of
empirical physics, an apparent contradiction in terms, which the
setti~
out of the design will be only partly able to reconcile.
The first of the texts in question ls again the Critique of
Pure Reason
and within lt the section called the "Principles of
the Understanding."
understanding isa
One form of the principal proposition of the
"The conditions of the possibility of experience
ln general are at the same time conditions of the possibility !lf
the oblects _of experience." (B 197).
That is to say, the
foundations of science are simultaneously the conditions of its
objects, namely bodies, so that physics and bodies are established
together.
Both are the ultimate result of the same long deduction.
The "Principles of the Understand i1'lg" only establish experience
and its objects in general.
"from the first"1 objects
By "in general" Kant
are~
means~
priori insofar as they
have fro• the very first a form of which we ourselves are
the source and which precedes any empirical addition.
priori,
�6
Such general objects are called things, and in their proper
coaplex of lawful relations, they are called nature. -The next work in the sequence, which i.s in the grand
critical 'esign parallel to the work on the metaphysics of morals
t\~ed
Metaohvsical Foundations of the Doctrine of Ri.&ht and
Virtue
(5), la called the Metaphysical Foundations of the Sclence
of Natµre.
In this work the outline of the metaphysics of phyeics
is laid down.
By a •metaphysics• Kant means the plan of a
completed system of pure rational cognition proceeding by
specification fro• the critical preparatloa.
The metaphysics of
nature (or or physics -· again, the object has the same foundation
I
as lta acience) is therefore the specification of the •general
object• established in the first Critique by the introduction
of an empirical concept, namely !ftter understood as the •11avable
in space•.
And so we have a •metaphysics of corporeal nature•
or a •doctriae of body• (MFSN 469), a pure science resulting
froa the application of the transcendental principles to an
e11pirical concept.
(Here a note oa the terms
and •transcendental• seeas appropriate.
and mean respectively only this•
~
•pure•, •a priori",
All three are privative
2'·
before, and beyond
all sensation.)
I shall give the contents of the Metaphysical Foundations
ln brieflest outline and return to the work later.
In it
. .tter, the movable in apace, is treated under four headi:Dgaa
1.
insofar as it is aerely aovable, 2.
apace, 3.
insofar
insofar as it 110vea other utter, 4.
a1
i.t fills
aot aa lt is
an object of exper_ence 1 but as it ls related to a knower, a
i
subject, and his faculties of knowledge.
�7
I should add that the ti,le of thl1 work, of which a
reasonable alternative translation i1 the •Hetaphy11Gal
Principle• of Natural Science,• also iadlcates a corrective
purpose beside thAt positive sy1temat1c one.
It is intended to
oppose the implications of the title N.vton gave to the
work in which he presented the very physics Kant 11 groundings
the Hatbelllltlcal Principle1 of Natµral Pb1101oplly.
Kant will
contend . e11phatically that it is not aatheaatics whloh furnl1be1
the principles of philosoJ*y, but, in a carefully liaited aenae,
the conver1e •• mathematics la not usable in natural science
without a l'letaphy1lcal foundation.
(OP 21, !!.!A•• 72).
When we coae to the third work in the critical deaign, there
is no longer a parallel text dealing with the 11etaphysica of
morals.
Thia ls in a moat general way quite understandable,
for the theory of practice by its very natures comea
t:o
an end
in deeds, whereas the theory of experience issues in further
theory.
In any case, ln his old age Kant was preoccupied
principally with ...king notes for what he expected to be bla
aoat laportant work (KOP, 3), the completion of the deduction
of experiaental physics.
Thta enor11aue agglomeration of notes,
including also much other ..terial, became known as the Qm!!
Po•tUllUll•
Kant called his projected work the •Transition from
the Metaphysical Foundation of Natural Science to Physics.•.
Hia great concern was that there should be no jump or discontinuity
in the syste.,tlc deduction of the empirtcal investigation of
corporeal nature.
(I ahould note here tbat the word •deduction'
la lllJMt• ..c i.t•a, and that I aa using lt, legltl.aately, I
�8
think, ia tba
Mn•• in which one •llbt apeak of the deduotion
ef EuelidMll ..... projective geoaetry, -nln& a apec1f1oatlon
of general prl.naiple1 to yleld a .,re partlaular 1y1t... )
Wllat bat intended to provide in thia •transition• vu an
antlolpatton of all tbe possible finding• of pby1lca, an
aatl.clpatlon which be considered •••ible bY virtue of lt1
1y1t...tlc character, and neceaaary to, lta
preaervat~.
Thia 11 certat.nly die place to interject th• long-deferred
expoanat ion of what hat -n• by a • •Y•t-·.
hnt' a aetaphor
for a ayat. . la that of a work of architecture, in which
th• foundations, the Aroundvork, deteralne a unified superstructure.
The non-metaphorical description la ln ter11s of prlnclple1 and
their rullag powers a ayat.. le a universe ptryaaively formed
by it1 funda. .atal lava, which deteralne at once the nature of
it• parts !ml their re lat ioaa.
I vhould add that for Kant
thought la such that to tbink and to -.Ile ayateaa are one and
the aaae operation.
Io return to the •transition to Pby•1oa•.
The anticipation
of phy1lcal inquiry amounts to an exhaustive claaaiflcatlon of
all conceivable forces, forces being the ultlllate ooncern of
phy1lca, •• we ahall see.
Such a •topic• of forces ls intended
to direct and regulate all future lnveatlgatlon (OP 21, A!&•, 640).
I 1hall not go into thla claaalflcatlon very far, because there
le a aeft89 of failure over the whole unwieldy enterprlae, due
both to
IC.a•'•
falling powers and, again •• ,,. shall .... to tbe
lnberently llalCl••• and aelf·•efeatlng ab&raoter of the atteapt
to direct •perlmentatlon .! priori.
�9'
Aside froil corroborat 1ng that the illpulre and coacern of
Kant• a ayat• really la the acience of bodiea, the Opu1 Pg 1
t,.,_
i• aoat lntrlquiag for the telling gliap••• it glvea of tbe
wotlye1 of thl• concern.
\\
,,
The critical aapecta of th• '2lz!.ll. are
doainatecl by the theae of 11lf•d1tenirwt1pp, 11lf•tff11tion, aad
11lf•knowleclg1, by the way in which I ayaelf become the •preprl.etor
and originator• of ay world.
Kant hillaelf •keil an elliptical
statement concerning this matter well worth quoting (OP 22, 73)1
Fl.rat the conacioueneea of oneself aa a faculty of
representation, second the determination of oneaelf
aa a function of oneaelf, namely a force (via) of
representation. Thtd the appearapee of oneself
ae a phenomenon, ae a 11&nifold of representation•
a thoroughgoing deteraination of ·o -.11' 1 but only
aa appearance and not aa a thlng in itaelf s
· objectively ·• x, but as the aubject 11 affected by
the understanding• 1tnowledge 2! ongelf tbrough
1,1lf•dtttr1ination in space IDSl ~·· (ay italic•)
The importance of this passage to
my
•position
beoo••
clear if I anticipate myself by stating that aelf•deterat.nation
in apace l!lsl ti.lie is preclaely physlce •• the 11ince
~
science 2'
2' l!slll 11
llll•
r ·ahall however baae ay argument for tbia atateaent not on
the opus Pootuma, but on the vigorous and completed works
publiahed by Kant bilulelf.
4.
The lllportance of body in the Crltiaue•
Raving aketched out in a Vf.ry external way the deduction of
phyeica through three worka, I llU8t now return to the t.aportance
of body witbla the critique of Pure Rea19n.
to -ke ay
~
I aaat give a very brief rnlev of certain f\lltd-tal critical
)<,
�10
Ia accordance with the not lon of truth set out before, the
great faculttea.
When I aay •1 thlnk•,
I
I - n Chat I perfora a flxed nU11ber of deflnlte functlo•••
(
v
Tbe
ayatem ef these operationa of dla•@t't, which Kant teraa •categorlea•,
la called the •understanding", vhlch gra9ps or conceives an
object.
\~
It la the first faculty.
second faculty is receptlve1
provldes the form under which what la given to be graaped
can be received.
ln
The
~t•a
It la called the •aenslbllttf• and yields,
term, "lntultlona•, sights.
ICaftt's aost crucial critical discovery.
Thia paaalve faculty ls
It is not strictly
apeaking a "faculty• at all but a formal receptacle for •aeasatlon•,
which la Kant'• tera for whatever la adventitious in hllllan
experience.
a
But, agaln paradoxically, it also contains an
ptlori given, a •pure intuition• or transcendental material,
a pura-acruature of relatlona, aa it were.
The aensiblllty, in turn, bas two aspects or faces, an
outer and an inner aense.
I ahall leave the outer sense, which
Kant teraa •apace•, for later and now describe briefly only the
lnner, which Kant terms •ttae•.
Tl. . la nothlag but our capabillty for receiving our own
original tranaoendental self, that ls, our thinking aelf, as
an appearanoe.
It la •the intuition of ourself and our inner
eeaditicm". (B 49).
•Every
act of atttntion can provide ua an
example• (B 157) of the act of aelf•affection la which ve
appear to ouraelvea.
And when we exaaine the character of our
intuition of ouraelvea aa originators of thought ve find it to
have the fora of a flow of •nova•a coaac1.ouaneas la precisely the
�11
stream we
c~ll
time1 to appear to myself aeans to activate or
determine my sense of tlme.
Here I must interject a note on the particular text which
I am going to deal with.
The part of the Critique which is the
prime source of what follows is that section called the
"Analytic of Principles" of the understanding.
Here those two
totally disparate faculties. the understanding and the sensibility,
are brought together by a third power, hidden and mysterious
(B 181), which Kant terms the "iru.ginat1on."
By means of this faculty
casts
~lnto,
~he u~~i:ng
grasps, or
the pure formal material available in the
sensibility •• but only into its inner sense, only
~ ~·
The products of this injection of thought into ti.lie are called
"schemata". Thus schemata are thought•inforaed structures of
time, or, equally, temporallzed operations of thought.
The
example of a few scheaata will make immediately plausible the
claim tat they are nothing but the pattern under which our
thinking appears to ourselves.
For instance, our consciousness
is understood by us to be fuller or emptier down to vacancy
lere we have the appearance in time of that function of the
Jnderstand1ng called the category of reality, which is the thought•
function corresponding to a given object1 the resultant temporal
thought structure is the scheru. of aomethlng insofar as it fills
time. the
waxi~
(B 1R2).
So also our consciousness itself subsists•
and waning materiality of our consciousness
•Tiae
itself does not run out, but in it the existence of what ie
mutable runs on" (B 183) ·- here we have the appearance of
the category of substance in t 1Jne, and the
~~·esul tant
schema io
�12
that ot
.,JJftll,,,.
t:be
peraanence of 10-thing real in ti-·
In a like
tboee f-11 tar and t11e¥ltable pattern• of our· temporal
thtdf\na by wbleh ve d1aoover la nerythlng ve conaider
ae~tlou of 110Hnt1 of attention, namely ftU!lber, and
tf ,.rJ'.)r.,,
cante_.&MOua autual actloa, nuely aiault19tty, and rule-
v-rl'IN
s(;V\
sc»veJ1ned· 1ucceaa1on, naaely cauoe and effect.
With the ach...ta aet out, the prlnctplea of the understanding
are then si~ a aet of fund~tal rule•.
Thew• rulea d-nd
that, and alao tall hov, tbeae time-involved categoriea Mlat
now in
tura be 1ntroduoed into 1MCe, ae that aa object of
•nperl-••, 111bleh - n a of truth or M science, uy ari.ae.
they are ttaea, ln accord••• with the prinoiple of prlnc1plea
quoted before, at the • - tlae tbe rulea for t:be conatltutlon
of tbe objeota of experience am for any poaalble true acoount
of tbell.
Thia peculiar aequence, ill which the categories are (\rat
brought together with ti.lie and only then vitb apace, iadlaatea
that tlae ia the een& of aeaaea, the priury fora in vblch
utryth1M chat presents ltaelf to us at all ftrat appeara1
•aut el.,e all repreaentation1, vtiletber they have
outer thlags a1 object• or aot, belong ln Cbemaelvea,
•• ••teralnatloaa of the · aoal, to dle l ...r atate,
while ~hta inner atate belo~•·••to tt .. , it follova
that t l • la an a · priori conclltio• of all appearance
la general, tbat is• the l~ late cond lt ion of the
1tmer appearance (of MUl) and beoauae of thla alao
tba ..cit.ate condlttoD of outer appearaaaea.• (1 ~-50).
And 19t Chere l•
110
aclence of the aouL ·:appearing in
aa th_..- t.a a aolence of the body appearing in apace.
t
1-
Noalaally,
the •iAlllOe of uture, as the atudy of all appearano••• lRcludea
�13
both, but hnt Mk•• it very elear tllat there 1• not now and
never can be a sclenoe of 10ul, a .payehology,
Tbe reaaoa la not
111trely that otb• th1ak1ng subjects will naturally not aumlt to,
or lf they do, vlll aot reuin unaffected by, our 1aveat1gatlona,
rather it 11 inherent both in the poverty of
t 1-
lteel f and of
tbe lawleaa variability of its contents (A 381).
IC.ant c\at•e.(ve shall aee later vby) that 1clenoe la auell
only inaofar aa there ia Mtheutlce in it, preferably g•-.try.
Nov the geoaetric iaage of t lme is the flowing 1 iae of a lag le
di•eaeioa, whieh ehova how poor fsychology auat be . .t1'ellat1cally
when compared to three d 1.Jlenat.onal apace (MFSN 471).
It follow•
tbat no self •knowledge of interest can come through the study
of soul
u
~
apD!ars.
I aust add that Kant forcefully proves
that lt is an illusion of reaaon to think that the soul caa know
itaelf y
,1'
11. lD it1elf
(B
399ff.).
Self •kpovledge
1eea1 ,t2
/"<
lm alygether preclu4td.
And now we auat look at two sections Kant added to the
"Analytic Prlnclplea" in the aecowi edition of the Cr1t19ue,
the "lefutatlon of ldealiaa• and the "General Note to the Syat. .
of Priaclplea•.
In theae additt.ona I.Cant endeavor• to aupply a
pla09 where we aay look to aH ouraelvea fully
mi• aatiafyingly.
'Ehle place ia the outer sense, IHCI•
The outer sense ls the aecond face of our senaibility, a
receptive fora for all Jlhat is other than ourselvea, for all
co-a froa the outalde to affect us, for
-
•••tion proper.
.
outer ..... is also. in inexplicit but apt refiectlon
of
~t
But
thi•
�14
purpose, the source of the most telling feature of all the objects
within it, which is that they have their parts outside and beside
one another and are extended in three dimensions.
Thus it is the
very structure of the f or11 of outer sense which not only guarantees
but even requires that spatial objects shall be subject to geometry
hence Kant's requirement that natural science be geametric is
really the same as his claim that it can only arise in space.
(It is of course also numerical, since all the contents of outer
sense appear in inner sense or title as well, and number> it will
be remembered, is a time schema.)
To return to the additions to the text with which Kant decided
to conclude the section on the application of the temporalized
categories to space.
Here he says that it ts noteworthy that
"in order to understand the possibility of things according to
categories, and so to display the objective reality of the latter,
we need not only intuitions, but even always outer intuitions"
(B 291).
So, for instance, in order to give objective reality to
the concept of substance, we need an intuition in space, namely
11atter, because that alone determines permanence, while ti11e ls
in constant flux.
Even to grasp our own changing consciousness
we need to
it as a line in space and "the real reason for
i11a~ine
this is that all alteration presupposes something permanent in
the intuition, but that in inner sense no permanent intuition at
all is to be 11etwith."
(B 292). And Kant concludes/a
"This whole
observation is of great importance ••• ln order to indicate to us
the limitations of the possibility of such knowledge whenever there
is talk of self-knowledge out of mere inner consciousness and
the determination of our nature without the aid of outer empirical
intuitions: (B293).
�15
Outer empirical intuitions are, as we shall see, bodies.
Kant ls therefore saying that bodies are the necessary conditions
of our steady presence before ourselves.
where
appear !2 ourselves !!!S! in
~
*
~
They~~
sole place
lies our substance.
It should be noted that this strange outcome is at least
consonant with Kant's peculiar understanding of outer appearance.
For when sensation comes to us from what might
be
called the
absolute outside to fill our sensibility, the resulting appearance
tn no way belongs to the alien source of that sensation and is
quite incapable of indicating anything concerning the nature of
that source which Kant ·calls the "thing in itself".
It is rather
the case that the appearance, the shaped sensation, is entirely
formed by
but the
USJ
~
one might say that sensation itself adds nothing
of our being affected, the mere activation of t:he
subject (B 207).
5.
*
The use of the term body.
At this point I would like to interject an observation on
the word 'body' which I have used in posing my questions
ts a body in Kant• s systera7
What
Kant himself cal l _ the science
s
founded in the Metaphysical Foundations of the Science of Nature a
"doctrine of bodies", so the word seems perfectly appropriate.
And yet it ls not a weighty word, or one of consequence, in the
Kantian text.
(HFSN 525)1
Let me give its definition in the Foundations
"Body ls a matter between determinate boundaries
(and such matter therefore has a figure)."
A quantity of moving
..
lllltter ts called a mass, and so a 11ass of determinate shape is
�16
also called a body (537).
Body is therefore a mere delimiation
of matters a110rphous matter 1.s the basic, pervasive object of
interest, whose concept is to be expounded.
Nonetheless I want to hold on to the word body, for the sake
of displaying a consequence of the insistence on founding the
science of bodies metaphysically.
This is the starting, non-
plussing disappearance of that inert lump which move·s by effort,
that shapely solid, that handy repository of trust, that constant
object of our most solicitous care, that terminus of an attraction
or revulsion (wholly different from the forces of si.railar name
into which Kant will resolve matter), that whole which antecedes
all distinction of form and matter, that possible seat of soul
which most of us mean when we say 'body' and which first excites
the inquiry into bodily nature called physics.
*
A note to point up the omission of body in its immediate
organic sense from Kant's system.
I here mean that body which is
a living, sensate center of interpretation of other bodies as alive
or dead.
Kant never, to my knowledge, treats the relation of such
a body as mY Q!!!1
a little work in
to the transcendental outer sense, to space.
~hich
In
the relation of body and soul is indeed -
discussed, the letter on the "Organ of the Soul", he says1
"For if I am to make the place of my soul, that ls, my
absolute self, intuitable anywhere in space, I must
perceive myself through that very same sense through
which I also perceive the matter which surrounds me,
just as happens when I want to determine my place in the
world as human being, namely that I must observe my
body in its relation to other bodies without me. -Now the soul can perceive itself only through inner .
sense, but the body, be it internally or externally,
only through outer senses and so can simply determine
�17
no place for itself, because for this purpose it would
have to make itself an object of tts own outer intuition
and would have to place itself outside itself, which is
self-contradictory."
Let me first comment on this passage insofar as it seems to
contradict the "Refutation of Idealism" in the Critiaue.
For in
that too there is no indication that I am to determine myself as
a human being in a certain place within outer sense or space, but
rather the outer sense !!.
~
whole contains the stuff which makes
my self-appearance possible.
But further, note the problem which Kant evadesa
Hy body
as an outer appearance has a very special character -- it is a
kind of sink hole of sensationr all sensation streams toward it
and all existence or non-existence is controlled from it (as when
I close my eyes) e
This is a difficulty for Kant's outer intuition,
s·ince it, like Newton• s d ivi,ne "sensory• of infinite space
(Optics, Qu• 28) ought to be homogeneous, isotropic (the same in
al 1 direct ions) , and cont iJ1uous, while 11y body and its instrument1 ike sensory organs represent a point of discontinuity, of
preference, and a warping of space.
Hence it does appear to
behav~
like a seat of soul, and this consideration cannot be acco1111<>dated
in Kant's system.*
6.
The constitution of body.
Let me go on now to describe Kantian body as it ts developed
from the "Analytic of Principles" of the Critique through. the
Metaphysical Foundations of the Science of Nature•
is not, of course, temporal, but merely critical.
This genesis
�18
The functions of the
on
nothi~
understandi~,
insofar as they operate
given, enclose in thelr grasp, that is, conceive, an
empty object, a mere
x.
It is only when, next, these concept
functions operate on the pure content of the sensibility that
a material object arises, and such an object of pure material is
a pure object of experience, a thing !!l general.
a.
"Thing" in the Critique.
Let me briefly recount the principles by which a "thing" is
established.
There are four of them, in accordance with the
number of basic concept functions of thought termed "categories".
Two of these are constitutive and are called "mathematical"
because they assure that all things shall be so constituted as
to be extensively and intensively measurable.
are called "dynamic", because they
re~ulate
The other two
the relations which
all things by their very nature as things must have with each
other, and they assure that all things whatsoever shall be
enmeshed in one dynamic system, a system of mutual influence.
The first principle is called an axioma
it is axiomatic
that all things have extension, that all are spatial intuitions
and hence measurable.
The second principle is called an anticipationa
it is to be
anticipated that everywhere in space things will have some degree
of perception, that is, measurable intensity of sensation.
Third comes a group of three principles called analogies•
we may infer by analogy that even things not immediately available
to observation are bound to each other by definite relations,
�19
which are spatial applications of the time
t.
sch~ata,
as followsa
Time itself as duration is to appear in space as substance
so that all things whatsoever will have a steady substrate, a
permanent existence.
2.
Time as connected succession is to
appear in space as cause and effect, so that all things are to
be similarly related as causes and effects.
3.
Time as simultaneit)
ls to appear in space as the mutual relation of interaction, so
that all things are in a like way to affect each other conteaporaneously.
The fourth principle is called a postulate and adds nothing
to the nature of things objectively but only determines their
subjective relation to the faculty of knowledge.
Let me review ina little more detail the nature of a thing
as it emerges from the so-called "Anticipations• and the first
"Analogy", for these are the principles most directly relevant
to the bodily nature of things.
They provide, in effect, the
foundation of •reality" and "substance• in Kant's system of nature.
In the first
analo~y,
in one of those amazing junctures which
make Kant's system so suggestive, substance is established as
~
spatial representation .Q! consciousnesea
" ••• There must be in the objects of perception, that is,
appearances, that substrate which represents time 1n general, and in which all alteration or si11ultaneity
can be perceived by 11eans of the relation of appearances
to the same. Now the substrate of all that is real •••
is substance.... It follows that the permanent, in
relation to which all time relations of appearance can
alone be determined, is substance in appearance, that
ls, the real in appearance, which, as substrate of all
alteration, always remains the same." (B 225).
When we recall that time as the pure content of the inner sense
�20
l• ayeelf l.n appearance, the state•nt that 1ub1tapce i i
•Mtiallztd aelf la corroborated.
And thus a truly novel
...nift8 baa been attacbed to an 014 ter11 algnlfyl.ng self•
•• Subatanee la now the three dt.eu-..1
eube1at11'18 bel.ag.
appttrtnpt of soul to itself.
In tbe •Anticipations• the alterationa
to be
predicated
of eubetanee are founded, or rather a guarantee la given
~
cbaqea 1n con•olouaneea vlll occur, even though lta qualltt.ee
••ftN)t M
eetabllebed A priori.
That we -Y anticipate that
•ubatance will always be in varying degree aenee-activated, that
things will alwaya be ••naatioa•fllled, that neither ti.M nor
epace· w111 ner be co111>letely eapty -·this ls the critical
requtr....-nt of rglitys re.a llty la the deterainatlon of a
'
'
eubatance ae having giatence, that ia, •• being a thing there and
then (B 225).
bnt'a ayatea requires that the things of nature
be . .de quick with aen•ation, that they materialize.
b.
-
Wxl!tJA.--_
Mtt100y1ical Found&tione of the -seience
of
tyre
In th• Metaphysical fqJlldation1 the transcendental structure
la realized by the introduction of an •eapirlcal eoacept•, the
concept of Mtter.
By an ••pirlcal oonaept" Kant actually
aeana a •concept of soaetbing eaprlcal", tbat la, a concept which
is la
118
vay tbe re•ult of ob..rvatloa (though to clal.a existence
for it would require experience), but rather simply a closer
conceptual deteraination or specification of the transcendental
"thi118" eetabllabed ln the Grltiaue•
concept ia
~ ;..a.ut
The aetaphysica of such a
it.- ful 1 ex pl teat ion.
Kant presents the
concept of matter aa lf he had chosen one of a l\Ullber of
�21
poas ible 1natance1 or specifications of a natural thiag ( 4 70) ,
But 1n fact, it 1eeas to •• ao other
~botce
wae po11lble,
et.nee utter turne out to be the tmt.que and nece11uy flrat
empirical ooaeept of the aclence of nature.
Matter la the na• •• ironically choaen if anyone expects
to be presented with .0- sol id stuff -- of tbe concept of the
"movable i.n apace•.
It t.s poaat.ble to reooaatruct the lit.aet.ag
reason why the JIOVable in apace t.a the basic concept of the
acienee of nature froa tbia sentence•
"Ibe funda11ental deterain•
ation of a 1011ethlng that le to be an object of the external
senses must
be
110tlon, '51£ tblreby UlX
affected" (476, ay italica).
aa
theat
11p111
lll
The .,vable ia aiaply that which
can excite aenaatien, aeaaation beirg appropriately undtratood
by Kant aa tut vho1e very uture it is to be movi..tg am 11&alfold.
It r-in• to 1upply another oat.1s1on by conjecturing what
epeciflcatlon of the tranacendental I.ant 11 actually perfor111ng1
the 110vable appear• to be
nothi~
but the real aubatance of tht
Critique, but now_ specifically 0Pn11dert4 ill
11R'ratelx
~
G laa•
any otber, truly
!WW
~
DSl
•ace
~
At leaat it 11 difficult to 4lacover
deteralnatlon in the conoept of -tter.
The Mtt!Phvt1cal Found!t\ont ooaee in four ·parta which are
eo11pletely parallel to the "Analytic of Princlplea• aad are
pretenttd in the fora of propo1itlona and proofa follow1Jla fro•
those principlt••
the ft.rat part. vblcb derive• froa tbe principle of extmalve
quantity (tire Axlolq of Intuition), eatabl ishea tbe geo-trle
treatlleDt of polnt •tl.ou.
motion• la ter11a of
It deals with the 0011po1t.tion of
_..t.ng ooordlnate •Y•t••• or •1paoe1•, and,
in refuting Newton's notion of abaolute apace, provld•• a
�22
metaphysical foundation for so-called Newtonian relativity.
(This is the principle that when bodies interact or are all
subject to the same accelerative forces, they constitute a
space for which absolute motion or rest are not internally
discriminable.
Principia, Axioms, Cors.
v, VI).
The second part derives from the principle of intensive
quantity (the
~Anticipations
of Perception"), which requires
some degree of sensation in things and hence their reality.
Thie part is headed "Dynamics" because it shows that the essential
qualities of matter are forces, and dynam1s
misappropriated by physicists for force.
is the Greek word
Tnis part is the most
important to my purpose precisely because it deals with the
most intimate nature of body.
The third part, which derives from the principles governing
the relations of things (the Analogies of Experience), is
called "Mechanics" since in it are deduced the laws
~overnlng
the
interactions of bodies in systems, trose "laws of nature" by
. which bodies are held in systems.
In this part Newton's
"Axioms or Laws of Motion" are, with certain suggestive variations,
completely deduced as propositions.
Here also Kant draws the
physical consequence which follows from his understanding of
substance as the steady spatial substrate of all alterations
it is the law of the conservation of matter.
*
A note correlating the Propositions of Mechanics of the
Metaphysical Foundations with the Axioms of Motion
of the
Principia Mathematica.
Proposition 21
"First Law of Mechanics", the law of the
conservation of matters proved, as just noted, by an application
�23
to matter of the first Analogy concerning the permanent in
space, or substance.
It has no explicit counterpart in the
Principia but is an implicit consequence of the corpuscular
view of matter set out in the •Rules for Philosophizing• which
introduce the third book of the Principia and contain the
application of the previous mathematical results to the world of
matter.
For the hard impenetrable atoms there posited can neither
come into nor go out of being.
Proposition 31
•second Law of Mechanics•, a fora of the
law of inertia, namely that every change of matter demands an
external cauae1 proved py an application of the second analogy
concerning cause and effect.
Its counterpart is Newton's
Axiom of Motion I, that every body continues in its state of
rest or unifora 110tion unless forces are applied.
Proposition 41
"Third Mechanical Law•, laying down that
in all coll18Unication of motion action and reaction are always
equal to one another1 proved by an application of the third
Analogy concerning interaction.
Corresponds to Newton's Axiom
of Motion III, the law of equal and opposite action and reaction
of bodies.
Proposition 1 establishes as the operable quantity of Kantian
physics the quantity of matter as measured by its •quantity of
110tion•, that is matter compounded with velocity (momentlDI •av).
This proposition is formally parallel to Newton's Axiom of
Hation II, in which the basic operable quantity la defined as
force, coapounded of mass and acceleration (F-raa).
Force aa
seen in acceleration or change of velocity la simply absent from
�24
Kant'• foundation of physics, and this omission coastitutes the
aoat
·~•lflcant
technical difference between Kantian and Newtonian
physic••*
Finally, the fourth part, which derives from the principle
concerning the relation of things to the faculty of knowledge
(the Postulates of Empirical Thlnklng).prescrlbes what
propositions of physics are to be asserted as possible or aa
necessary.
.
To returR to the •Metaphysical Foundations of Dynamics•,
which deals vith aatter insofar as it fills apace.
It ls in
filling space that utter asserts its "reality", its power to
affect the aenaea.
The universal principle of dynamics isa
•Atl that is real in the objects of our external senses ••• must
be regarded aa a llOVing force." ( 523).
"The concept of matter
iareduced to nothing but 11<>ving forces1 this could not be
expected to be otherwiae, because in apace no activity and no
change ean be thought of but mere 110tion: (524).
Force is
the condition of possibility of matter whose possibility la not
itself, in turn, explicable and whose concept ls not itself
derivable fro• anotner.
As
~ant
puts it, force itself cannot be
aade conceivable (513).
IC.ant provea that matter ia in fact nothing but force by
ahowing that all the appearances of spatial objects are accounted
for by forcea and only by forces.
In the course of these proofs
i . abollabea solidity, understood as the ability of matter to
occupy apace by reason of . .re existence (498) •• an implicit
�25
part, I think, of the ordinary view of body.
And he attacka
a view he regards as the consequence of positing solidity,
Descartes• corpuscular or atomic theory which asserts the
l'lystery of mathematical and . .chanical iapenetrability, and
requires mere blocks of extension to 110ve each other externally
(502, 533).
Hatter requires two original forcesa
a repulsive or driving
force and an attractive or drawing force, corresponding to the
two possible directions of interaction between point centers of
force (497).*
The prlaary repulsive force is the force 11<>re inti.J'lately
associated with our sensing of extended things.
"Hatter fills
space not by its mere existence, but by a special moving force•
(497, which in resisting penetration is the cause of palpability.
It is, hence, a •superficial" force, a source of surfaces and
contacts, which nonetheless conetltutes matter throughout so
that it is infinitely divisible -- there is always a new surface.
On one force alone, however, matter could not fill apace
but would,: by repelling itself to inflnt.ty, become dissipated
and vanish•
Therefore, 1.n order that body might become mncrete,
as it were; 4 cotmtervailing original force it wanted.
This
seeond f orce cannot be imaediately sensed or even located in a
body, out can only be notice<! in its effects.
It is a penetrating
force which does not need the agency of other matter but acts at
a distance even to infinity and precisely where it is not
(512).
Whereas repulsion provides matter with its outside, so to speak,
attract1.on gtYes it its inner cotEs:wace and ._.,. !!tie aegaeata
crit:lqm of . 1.ant•a ~ltt la glvea - Hegel
(Science of LggiC, Bk 1, See. I, cb. 3, para. 6, a, Mote).
.
* .A p'll-oH•l•l
�26
of aatter close or dense. _ It - is therefore the force which, as
it binds a body to . itself. also holds body to body in a system,
such aa the planetary system.
*
The•e two forces equally and simultaneously constitute
-tter -- a body b
not as in Boecovitch' s Theory of Natural
Philotophy (1763) a region in space where attractive and repulsive
forces alternate> wit. the repulsive force prevail·ing and going
h
off to infinity near the center of the body while the attractive
force similarly prevails but goes off to zero away from that
center.
Instead two field-like expanses of force are super-
imposed and together give rise to regions of various density
variously delillited, which correspond to bodies.*
Let Kant himself concludea
•tf we revlew all our discussions of the metaphysical
treataent of aatter, we shall observe that in this
treataent the following things have been taken into
considerationa first, the real in space (otherwise
called the solid) in its filling of space through
repulsive forces second, that which with regard to
the first as the proper object of our external perception
ta negat1ye, namely attractive force, by which, as
far as may be, all space would be penetrated, that is,
the solid would be wholly abolisheda third the
1111.tation of the first force by the second and the
consequent perceptible determination of the degree
of filling of space: (523).
Thia last •perceptible determination• is matter, while body is
but aatter shaped between boundaries and therefore nothing but
a figure inacribed into the continuous expanse of mattera
body ••• is . .tter between determinate
boundaries~
(525).
•A
Self-
determining solid bodies are simply incompatible with Kant's system.
That -tter does fill all of space and fills it continuously,
ao that there la no empty space, is a possiblltty df such
�27
consequence to physics that Kant concludes the Metaphysical
Foundations with its consideration.
Within this work the
dynamic plenum remains merely a powerful posslbllty, and the
ether as a special pervasive · "external" matter Which reali.mes
it remains a physical assu11ption (523, 534, 563 ff.).
But
it seems to me that the fullness of space ts co11pletely deducible
metaphysically
from the very constltut ton of appearance. For i.t
follows both from the continuities of nature requi.red by the
principles of the understanding (.B 281), and from the fact that
space, as the receptive form of sensation, can never in itself
appear, which ls to say -that there can be nothing i.n appearance
corresponding to
~mpty
space
(~,
.B
261).
I note here only
in passing that if a plenum does require an ether, it may, as
an ultimate reference system, well be incompatible wi.th the
previously established
prlnclpl~
of relativity.
But this very
inconsistency is proof that Kant's metaphysics of nature does
not merely ground Newton's physical results retrospectively -on the contrary it looks forward not only to a physics of force
fields, but also to the great - ether debate which ended only with
the momentous negative experiments performed just a century after
the publication of the Metaphysical Foundati.ons.
Its sequel, the "Iransition ••• to Physics", shows that Kant
was also concerned about the loss of independent body i.n the
spread of dellmitable stuff.
In the very pages in which he now
undertakes to show that an ether of some sort ts indeed not 11erely
a reasonable assumpti.on but a deductive necessi.ty of the system,
he also tri.es to establish i.ts very contrary, na11ely natural, organic
body
(~,
OP 21, 21R).
The effort here i s to lntroduce a body
�28
whlch ls not merely_, by a regulative fiction of reason) subjectively
interpreted aa organized to serve an end, but which ha&- an
objective principle of
self-determinat~on
(OP 21, 209 ff.),
an "1nner force" or proper principle of motion, and may therefore be termed "a self-limiting quantum of matter having a
certain
fl~ure"
(170)~
Kant regards thls task as properly
belonging to the "Transition".
But he also concedes that such
bod 1es might wel 1 be "inconceivable" ( 570), that is, not
derivable in the systems therefore, it seems to me, this effort
must fails
the system of well-founded matter called nature
cannot, as Kant himself has shown in the letter on the organ of
the soul, yield bodies fitted by reason of their self-contained
unity to be the seat of life or soul. -- Indeed, how could nature
contain such places, being itself the epiphany of soul1
7.
The excesses of the system.
Kant considers that the metaphysical foundations of matter
and 1ts science have been laid, and the possibility of
understood as experience ls forever guaranteed.
knowled~e
Henceforth
eaplrical physics may be safely and infinitely pursued -safely because its principles lie !. priori in myself so that all
experience ls self-experience, and infinitely because all of
its occasions are excitations which flow to us, with ever fresh
adventitiousness, from an alien source.
But at this juncture a difficulty arises.
In order for the
systematic character of physics promised by its principles to be
preserved throughout the enterprise, a regulative framework
of investigation must be laid down.
The great preoccupation of
�29
Kant's later years was to assure the •rational coherence• (MFSN 534)
of the science of nature by an ever-closer explication and
specification of its basic concepts.
soul as IUlture seems to require that
The representation of the
!ll aasuaptl"ODa and
hypotheses either be soon converted into deductions or discarded.
Less and less is left to observation.
To give a prime exaaplea
the law of the force of attraction,
naaely that it varies inversely as the sqU4re of the distance
between the centers of two bodiea, ia a specification,
~
observation, of innuaerable aathematical posaibilltiea antecedently
set out in Newton's Princloia (III, i•vlii, particularly land ii).
Kant too state• that •no law whatever of attractive or of
repulsive force may be risked on a priori conjectures• (534).
And yet Kant deduce• the inverse square law from the mode of
diffusion essential to his attractive force together with a
fact of Euclidfan geometry, namely that the surfaces of concentric
spheres increase as the squares of their radii (519).
This ever-growing regulation of observation insofar as lt
ls attributable to the richness of the system in deductive
consequences, might be ai.Jlply a credit to it.
And so it would
be, were it the case that nature, when arraigned before Kantian
reason, the •appointed judge who coapela the wltneasea to
answer questions which he has himself formulated• (B xiii)>
always willingly and plausibly responded in the required terma.
But the fact of the matter, worth far more consideration than
has gone into this passing remark, aeeaa to be that phyaiciats
have largely by-passed Kant's •topic• of forces and have super-
�30
ceded bu -tapbyalce •• for ·exa111>le, its
conatlt~tlonally
Euclidean apace aa well aa the categories of causality and
si11Ultaneity •• preauraably coapelled thereto by nature herself.
And yet it la this very excess of doctrinal consequence which
ult• the study of Kant's 11etaphyslcs of physics the indispensable
pbllo1oph4.ctl CoJIDle11nt to the study of classical aechanics.
For in attempting to account completely for all that ls found
therein, Kant, even as he falls, unfailingly aide reflection'
on the terms of physics.
In any case, the failure to preserve the adventitiousness
of nature and hence to become a viable guide for experlaental
physics la only a derivative difficulty of the systea.
.
Hore
radical and revealing questions arise about it, beginning with
the excessive lllportance attached to physics as the sole self•
atudy and ending only in questions concerning the nature of
philosophy itself.
Let . . conclude with the briefest formulation of auch
questions by returning to the work with which I began, to Kant's
essay
invel~hlng
against the "noble tone• in philosophy of
which Plato la the unwitting progenitor.
particularly Kant unalstakably alludes
To one d1.alogue
(.su.&,:.,
1ft mentioning
Mttypa, cf. Ti-eus 50 ca.) as the embodlaent of all that he 11Ust
disavow in Plato's view of raatheaatlcs, of the world of appearances,
of
truth•telll~
itself -· the Ii.Jlaeu••
It ls al.,st as if the
treatise on the Hetaphya1cal foundations of the Science of Nature
were a specific response to the dialogue •• not, however, in the
110de of •i111>le di...trlc contradiction which Kant reserves for
his closer opponents like Deecat:t. . , but by way of that aoat
�31
radical contrariety which characterizes true alternatives.
A parallel study of these two texts would raise the aforesaid
questions in some such termsa
Kant destroys bod ie@ to preserve the reality · :<~ .
~'Qpearances,
and gives up the self-deter111ining coherence of 1 •, a i~ld· al natures
for an assured perceptibility of nature
• thi~s.. •
understoo·.,~
"> ...a
system of
But may not the articulated and .. d·t:st: inct.,. beauty of
natural bodies and configurations require the intellect to forego
sensation-filled dynamic reality as well as ultimate 1.mpenetrability
in favor of Timaeus' mathematical solidity (53 c ff .)7
Does not
the inexhaustible originality of this mathematicised nature coapel
us to reconsider whether our sensibility can possibly be the sole
source of her f orms7
Kant denies the soul a seat in nature in order to preserve
nature herself as the appearance of the soul and the · repreaentation
of its rational operations.
Thus nature becomes a system, an
edifice founded on principles and constituted as well as soverned.
throughout by laws derivative from the functions of thotJ8ht.
But IWAY not the curious complex of regularity and irrationality
which is the visible world suggest yet a third relation of soul
to body, expressed by Timaeus as the girdling of body by soul
(36e)7
Thus body would arise not as Sll!I. own outer appearance,
but as the inner effects of
~world
which is indeed intelligible,
but not wholly so.
Kant regards the continuing study of palpable 11tµre, the
science of body, as the most serious hU11an theoretical activity,
and its secure foundation in our own faculties as a COllpleted
philoaophical labor.
But uy it not be that the account of the
�32
visible world ts, as in Timaeus' phrase, only .a . •1tkely story•
..
(e1.kon mythos, 29 d), and that physics thrives on just those
hypotheses., analogies, and likelihoods which Kant disavows in
his essay?
Then may not this perpetually tentative and open
physics be a sort of high amuse11ent with useful effects rather
than humanity's central study, and a model-making project -- the
•story of likenesses•, to which Timaeus' phrase alludes-- rather
than a well-grounded system~
Hence a metaphysics of physics may
finally have to yield to an inquiry into the nature and being of
models, which may require the playful poetry of mere philosophy
as exemplified in Plato's noble dialogue, rather than the working
prose of Kant's ayot!!lftic philosophy.
�- 33 -
Addendum_ to p. 24, top:
ThP reason for Kant's substituti8n of mv for ma is,
however, not merely a tPchnical matter.
Kant's Proposition 3
begins with the words :"Everj change of matter has an external
cause" (543).
But, as I have noted, this cause is "motion"
or "momentum," rather than the force of Newton's Law II.
ThP reason
forces Kant
~or
this substitution is as follows.
~as
The two
posited in the section on dynamics constitute
matter, but do not cause changes Q.f.
™'
which is
·~' O
say that
thev do not affect the motion of "matter in motion."
Now for
Kant the causes of motions can only be other motions, since a
cause is nothing but an appearance wh:i.ch determines another
appearance later in time (B 234) -and
the same kind as its effect.
must therefore be of
:But since effect is a change
in space of a mass-, the cause must equally be such an
"external" change, namely motion.
Consequc-ntly in the
context of the section on mechanics the dynamic forces
function only as mediating mechanisms for the communication
of motions.
These latter momenta alone are Kant's "motiTe
forces o"
This explanation was deTeloped by the members of my
preceptorial on the Foundations.
�
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What is a body in Kant's system?
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1974
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Deans
Friday night lecture
Tutors
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What does music mean? Examples from Bach, theory from Kant
Matthew Caswell
Is music about anything? Can music represent anything at all? That is, can it mean
something besides itself?
Much of our music may seem to bear meaning unproblematically, since it consists of
sung lyrics. Indeed, the association of musical tones with speech is primeval and enduring:
the oldest poems and prayers were at the same time songs, we are told. But if music as
music can represent, it doesn't do so in the manner of its ancient companion, speech. Like
musical tones, words are sounds, but these sounds are taken by us as tokens of concepts,
universals which we put to use in judgment, predicating the concepts of one another. There
has been great controversy across the ages over how exactly strings of words in a sentence
manage to mean something, but no one doubts that words have meaning. (It would be difficult
to articulate such a doubt to yourself, or to anyone else, for obvious reasons.)
We are less sure about tones. Since music is not a language of signs, it cannot be
translated or decoded into prose in a way that carries over its power as music. At the same
time, many of us would resist the claim that music is meaningless. Beethoven inscribed on his
Missa Solemnis: "from the heart, may it reach other hearts." The composer wasn't merely a
deft technician able to incite feelings in others; he took himself to be a thinker- that is,
someone with a communicable inner life. What is in our hearts as we make music, and what
do our hearts receive upon listening? In order to begin to answer these questions, we will first
survey three of the ways music can be thought to mean, or to represent, using as our
sourcebook of examples Bach's St Matthew Passion. In the second part of the lecture, we
will turn to the account of the meaning of beautiful art offered by Immanuel Kant, perhaps the
greatest modern theorist of the beautiful. As we shall see, Kant's deep metaphysics of
representation may be especially well-suited to making sense of the beautiful representations
of music. 1
1 Kant is thought not to have been a music-lover. Nevertheless, his brief remarks on music in the Critique of
Judgement are insightful. He argues that music is only beautiful in so far as it pleases through our reflection
1
�I.
BACH
At least three different species of musical representing can be found in the Passion. In
many of the oratorio's passages, combinations of these categories are mixed and blurred; our
analysis will to some extent abstract from this highly multifarious character of Bach's work.
Furthermore, our examples will all be taken from the recitative portions of the work, Bach's
setting of the scripture text. The recitatives, while ornate and dense with musical invention,
involve less complicated poetic and musical structures than do the song-like arias, chorales,
and choral numbers, making our task of analysis and organization a bit easier.
Type 1: Sound Imitation
Perhaps the simplest way for a musical sound to point beyond itself is by resembling
some other sound from the wider world. Think here of a timpani rolling in imitation of thunder,
or of a bassoon muttering in imitation of your grandfather's voice. Like a portrait of a friend is,
among other things, a likeness of our friend, the timpani roll sounds something like thunder,
and can therefore represent as a stand-in. This is the model of representation scrutinized by
Socrates in Book 10 of the Republic: representation here stands to thing represented as
image to original. Obviously, the objects artificially imitated by sound can only be things that
are already audible.
Let's first listen to a brief recitative passage, and then focus on an instance of sound
imitation within it. The Gospel text, recounting the disciple Peter's betrayal of Christ, in
English, is as follows:
on its "forms"; that is, melody, harmony, and even tone itself for Kant are not mere sensations but structured
objects of reflection. Even his critique of music's essential intrusiveness, and thus lack of "urbanity" (he
compares the inescapable spread of sound to the spread of an odor) is perceptive. Artists like Bach were
surely aware that much of their power lay in the audience's inability to "turn [its] eyes away" (KU, 330).
2
�And Peter remembered the words of Jesus to him, "Before the rooster crows, you will deny
Me three times." And he went out and wept bitterly. (Passion, §46, measures 5-12)
Now take a look at a moment about a quarter of the way through that selection- it's the
first example on your handout. In the second measure, the Evangelist hops through an
arpeggiated triad on the word "kraehen" or "crow", the sound of his voice recalling the sound
of a rooster's crow.
[see example #1, handout: §46, measures 7-8]
Directly mimetic moments like these are rare in the Passion. The tones, whose native tongue
is melody, are here compelled to play the part of mere noise. Though they point to something
by reminding us of it, they seem to mean little; they are not a language giving utterance, but
an auditory reminder. There is also something humorous in these moments: it is the comedy
of Bach's noble tones momentarily throwing on the low dress of inhuman, unspiritual sound.
One of the most charming things about this technique is that the dress can be thrown off as
easily and as quickly as it is put on.
At the same time, it should be noted that this imitative dress is still music's own. We
are not fooled into thinking a rooster has snuck into the church; Bach has pointed to the
animal's call from well within his musical world. After all, the sound here hear is a dominant
triad, and real roosters don't sing chords. 2 The tonal material of this imitation thematizes its
artful distance from its referent, ensuring that it is heard as an imitation. 3
I also will note here that there are more complicated and richer uses of sound imitation
in the Passion, but because they are not merely imitative, I'll return to their investigation a bit
later.
cf Kant's discussion of bird-song, and its imitation: KU, 302.
Any other sound imitations in the Passion? See the alto aria "Buss und Reu": "die Tropfen meiner Zaehren"
[the drops of my tears] are accompanied by a drip-dropping in the flutes (Passion, §1 0, measure 70).
2
3
3
�Type 2: Tone-painting
Can music point to anything besides other sounds? Consider the following recitative
section from earlier in the Passion. The Gospel text is as follows:
"And they sang the hymn and went out to the Mount of Olives. Then Jesus said to them: All of
you will be made to fail me in the course of this night. For its is written: I will strike the
shepherd, and the flock of sheep will be scattered. But after my resurrection, I will lead the
way for you into Galilee." (Passion, §20)
In the first verse of this passage we find a second species of musical representation. This is
the second example on the hand-out. Just as the disciples' motion up the mountain will be
narrated in the text, the cello accompaniment steps up the degrees of the scale, marked
staccato, through an octave.
[see example #2, handout: Passion, §20, measures 1-3]
The term of art for this technique is "tone-painting,"- there are in fact several of them in this
section- and they each involve a deceptively simple analogy. For the tones do not actually
"rise" in space. Perhaps because we feel the so-called "higher" tones more in our head, and
the "lower" in our chests, we associate the change in pitch with the up-down direction. More
fundamentally, tones in a melody constitute a heard order, and so are strongly analogous to a
set of discrete "places" or topoi to which one might move. This fact underlies the analogical
sense of our talk of musical "steps": because the scale, a determinate set of discrete pitches
in order, is already implied by the melodic or harmonic context, we hear the "rising" sequence
here not simply as a change in position, but as a step-by-step motion from one place to
another, without skipping any places along the way. Moreover, since tones recapitulate their
melodic function at the octave- as when men and women sing a tune together, they sing
exactly an octave apart- , we hear that our steps have taken us as far as we can possibly go-"all the way" to top of the mountain, so to speak. 4
There are in fact two 'arrivals' at the summit here: first the accompaniment leads us from C# to the C# in
the voice on the downbeat of the next measure, then the voice extends the climb to A, the root of the
dominant seventh chord pointing to a resolution in D. Together, both climbs make up a harmonic "?-station",
4
4
�This sort of tone-painting is knowing and witty. While the sound imitation of the
rooster's crow made use of an auditory resemblance, the tone-painting does not resemble,
but analogizes. We notice the analogy between the tonal motion and the locomotion noted in
the text, and smile at Bach's artistry in coordinating the two. One could imagine an entire
Passion oratorio composed this way, with the text continually illuminated or decorated with
musical analogies of the action. This would be an amusing, arch, and civilized work, but would
suggest that music's representational power is of a decidedly second-order nature. For the
musical "ascent" here tells us no more than the text already does on its own: its delight is in
the artistry-the cleverness, I want to say-- used in contriving the analogy. Indeed, like
musical sound imitation, tone painting is always heard as artifice. To take the melodic ascent
as a representation, one must intellectually connect the two sides of the analogy, which are in
themselves alien to each other. 5
Type 3: Musical ideas
What about this passage, a few moments later in the Passion? Jesus is speaking to
his disciples at Gethsemene, and says to them "sit you here, I will go go there and pray." This
is the third example.
[see example #3, handout: Passion, §24, measures 4-6]
Bach has Jesus stretch out the word "bete"-- "pray", as the strings execute a beautiful
cadence in the accompaniment. Is this measure of music a representation?
Let's take a closer look at the music. The first three syllables of Jesus' address spell
or "return" passage.
5 Tone painting typically makes use of the sort of spatial analogies music is ripe for, and therefore
often (I suspect always) involves a musical analogue of locomotion. These analogies are aided by the
conventions of the graphics of score-writing: when you look at the score for the above passage, you see the
signs for the tones arranged up an incline. Or look at the tone painting from a moment later, where Jesus
speaks of the scattering of the flock (§20, measures 8-1 0). We know that Bach did in fact devote special
attention to the appearance of the St. Matthew Passion score. The fact that this visual duplication of the
analogy is really only available to the musical insider with score in hand underscores tone-painting's
cleverness and humor.
5
�out a triad in B-flat, with a deep B-flat chord held in the strings. But as he lands on his fourth
syllable, "hier", the strings add an A-flat to this same triad, generating a mild dissonance, and
leaning unmistakably forward towards the next chord. The strings then resolve the
dissonance, drawing out a long, rich, major triad on E-flat, into which Jesus begins to speak
the word for prayer. 6 He leans through a dissonant F on the downbeat of the measure, and
then holds an E-flat through the first syllable, resting in the tonal home or center of this
passage. The accompaniment here begins to cycle through a series of chords, each casting a
different light on and around that same E-flat. Jesus' bass voice allows his words to be set in
the middle of the pitch-range of the accompanying strings. He is thus surrounded by the
chords which seem fo emanate from him. This effect is often called Jesus' "halo" of strings.
The effect through the first half of this 'bete' measure is of a slowly beating oscillation
of different gestures away from home. Then, just as Jesus finishes speaking, the strings
finally move more dramatically to a dominant seventh chord on B-flat, rooted on the fifth
degree of the scale, and featuring a poignant tritone dissonance between the top and middle
voices. The dissonant chord is resolved to the home triad, completing the periodic harmonic
journey.
The strings form this harmonic period in four voices, the top two moving contrarily
towards each other, and the bottom two moving contrarily away from each other. Contrary
melodic motion helps maximize the individuality of the voices, without frustrating their
harmoniousness. Indeed, the string voices in this passage seem to act on their own for the
sake of each other: gracefully making way for one another, or pausing to offer friendly
resistance. Here Bach compounds contraries within contraries, intensifying the harmonious
diversity of the motion. The crucial dominant seventh chord, unlike the other chords in the
sequence, is articulated across several overlapping rhythms, prolonging the tension in that
chord as we hear each voice move into place within the leaning whole of the chord. Bach
postpones the appearance of the tritone dissonance until the last possible moment. The
whole passage is balanced, natural, gentle, and whole. It is a graceful motion that has its end
in sight as it begins, but whose particular trajectory is not exactly determined, but rather full of
rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic contingency along the way. (Let's listen again.)
The whole passage seeks its home in E-flat. This home was established in the immediately preceding
chorale, "lch will hier bei dir stehen", which begins and ends in E-flat major. The Evangelist narration then
picks up with an F-chord, which functions as a secondary dominant. The F gets its seventh with the word
"Gethsemene", resolving to 8-flat, which will go on to serve as the dominant seventh in Jesus' prayer
passage.
6
6
�Is this a representation of prayer? Obviously, no sound imitation, as we saw in Type 1,
is at work here. Unlike our Type 2 tone-painting, the musical motion here does not resemble
some locomotion, by means of an analogy between tones and place. After all, a prayer is
neither a noise, nor is it a locomotion. And for this reason, we detect none of Bach's ironic
authorial cleverness in the connection between prayer and this cadence. We do not smile at
the artful touch: rather, we are moved by what may seem to be a glimpse of a true nature.
The lack of isomorphism connects the music and the thought more intimately: we are not
hearing something that sounds like a person praying, and we are not hearing prayer
illustrated or decorated, we are hearing prayerfulness made audible. Here, the music-- the
tones in time Jesus sings-- and the object-- a prayerful inner disposition-- are not thoroughly
alien to each other, but seem rather to be of a piece.
To say that the cadence "means" or "represents" prayer might be misleading. It would
not be possible, without the text, to deduce what in the world the cadence was "about." At the
same time, the things in the world it would be the perfect setting for are not limitless. This is
not Aeneas sinking his sword into Turnus' chest; it is not Hamlet castigating his mother; it is
not even Socrates cooling his feet in the stream. Although we can't spell out the rule
according to which, given either the thought or the music, we could derive or compose the
other, we might have the curious impression that no other moment than this one is as well
captured by this particular cadence in the strings and voice. In its contingency with respect to
any rule, it is particular, unlike the two previous Types of representation.
The text makes the notion of prayer explicit for the listener. There are other concepts
we might reach for in an attempt to articulate the meaning of the passage: above, I used the
words 'graceful,' 'gentle,' 'natural,' and 'whole.' But none of these words, and not even the
leading notion 'prayer' seem to get the music just right. Our concepts may be appropriate, but
they do not exhaust. This feature of conceptual inexhaustibility was also missing in the sound
imitation and tone painting examples. The sound imitation and the actual call of a rooster both
involve a quick rising figure: to some extent, they both bear the same sound. The motion of
the tones and the motion of the disciples are analogues: they are both step-wise changes in
place. Here, the act of prayer and the motion of the phrase are both .... something. We need
not remain silent about what that something is, but we know we won't be able to spell it out
satisfactorily.
There is also marked difference in the response of the listener at moments like these,
compared with the cases of sound imitation or tone-painting. While we might delight in the
7
�cleverness of either of the former, pleasure is more deeply involved in our apprehension of
the third type of representation. "Pleasure" is in fact not the whole story: there is a complex of
pleasures and pains in our hearing this passage- pains of longing, pleasures of
consummation. No one has ever been moved to tears by a sound imitation, nor by a
tone-painting.
Speaking of tears, I'd like to note another, more complicated case of musical
representation in the Passion, one in which the first and third types are brilliantly combined.
For not all imitable sounds are as cheeky as a rooster crowing. What about the sounds of the
human voice, especially that voice when it is involved in the inarticulate expression of
emotion- the laugh, the sigh, the sob--? Some have thought that musical meaning as such
derives from the refined imitation of emotionally expressive vocal sounds. I don't think musical
meaning can possibly be accounted for on such terms, but Bach will sometimes allude to
expressive sound imitation, at the same time that he transcends it. Take this passage, from
the close of the episode of Peter's betrayal we looked at above. It's the fourth example on
your hand-out.
[see example #4, handout: §46, measures 9-12]
"He went out, and wept bitterly'' -- Bach sets the last two words to a weaving, sinuous melody
in f-sharp minor, the key of the famous subsequent aria. On the word "weinete"-- "wept"-- the
line sinks from the tonic f-sharp through the upper half of the minor scale, landing on a
chromatic non-scale tone b#. This unexpected tone arrests our motion down the scale,
leaning sharply back up towards the scale-tone 5 (c#) which we have just descended through.
The Evangelist takes the opportunity of this unstable, hanging arrest to leap up almost an
octave, and to wind even more torturously than before back to the tonic and the fifth, framing
the final cadence. No one has ever wept so melodiously. Holding key tones over the beats,
and making bold moves between the beats, the cry becomes a passionate dance. As the
exquisite articulation of the melody takes over, and takes on a life of its own, the sound that
reminded us of crying becomes something else: not an imitation of an audible sign of anguish,
but a representing of the anguish of regret and penitence itself: sorrowful anguish made
audible. As in Jesus' prayerful harmonic period, we here get a glimpse of the otherwise
invisible. As in the earlier example, our apprehension is a complex of delectable pleasures
and pains. And in both cases, the fully musical idea, unpredictable according to any thinkable
8
�rule, moves us.
In the foregoing descriptions, I have in several places referred to the leaning tendency
of particular tones and chords, naming the former by their scale degree, and the latter by the
technical vocabulary of 'tonic, dominant, etc.' Analysis of the tonality of a piece is a crucial
task in attempting to make its particular meaning clear in speech. In this sense it is similar to
the analysis of the meter of poetic verse, the grammar of a sentence, or the logical figure of a
proof. The phenomenon of tonality, of the heard relational structure of tones, is all-important
to music, and so theoretically interesting, we might be led to say that the meaning of music is
simply tonal function. In Zuckerkandl's terms, the meaning of a tone or chord would then just
be its "dynamic quality." Simi·larly, music's rhythmic order in time unfolds through the cycling
of upbeats and downbeats, and we might add rhythmic quality- a tone's position in the
time-wave which it itself generates- as another element of musical meaning. On this
interpretation, music would not represent anything beyond itself, and our thinking about a
piece of music, if it were to remain non-fanciful, would be confined to reflection on the
movement and structure of the musical sounds themselves.
There is something incomplete in this conception of musical meaning, however. To be
sure, music cannot make Peter's anguish present to us without the means of tonality and
rhythm. 7 But I take it that an essential element of our understanding of such a passage, and of
our pleasure in it, is that something not exclusively musical is being made present. The
moving syntactic relations in time and tone enable music to 'make sense', as it were, but they
do not, on their own, make it beautiful. As Zuckerkandl is well aware, a tune may establish a
tonic center perfectly adequately and yet bore us to tears. In his treatment, the question of
music's meaning is separated from the question of music's beauty or greatness; and thus, the
word "beautiful" hardly appears in Zuckerkandl's wonderful guide into musical phenomena,
The Sense of Music. An alternative approach, which we will see is Kant's, would understand
the pleasure in judging the beautiful as itself the reception and contemplation of a particular
sort of meaning. Accordingly, we might understand the tedium or vapidity of some music, like
the sort we are subjected to in elevators, as an emptiness of meaning; while they are
rhythmically and tonally intelligible, these unbeautiful tonal utterances seem to say little or
nothing to us, and their deficiency of representational power is essentially linked with their
What about "atonal" music? We'd have to investigate case by case to see if such music deserved the title
"atonal," strictly speaking. Some allegedly atonal music may involve the search for new, non-diatonic
"dynamic qualities." Some may depend upon frustrating expected tonal structures at every turn, and thus
presupposing tonality as an implicit background (cf "non-Euclidean geometry").
7
9
�deficiency in pleasure.
To summarize: Deep pleasure in the apprehension of a representation whose meaning
is conceptually inexhaustible, a form in sound that seems to be the natural manifestation of an
inaudible truth- these are the features of what I want to call a musical idea in the fullest sense.
How does music achieve this representational power? What in us is at work as we perceive
it? And why does it feel so good? That is, why is it beautiful, and what does its beauty mean?
Maybe Kant can help.
II.
KANT
Kant's inquiry into taste and beauty makes up the first half of his third Critique, the
Critique of Judgment. Towards the close of the investigation, the question of beauty's
meaning leads Kant to a surprisingly expansive treatment of the ways in which representation
can happen. Namely, he finds himself required to rethink the relation between the poles of his
famous dualism of intuition and concept. The first Critique of Pure Reason developed this
Kantian duality, according to which spontaneous intellectual acts (the concepts) must be
brought together with given sensible forms (the intuitions) to make knowledge possible.
Concepts without intuitions are "empty"-- they are mere thoughts, unable to pronounce truths
or falsities about the world. Intuitions without concepts are "blind"-- they cannot be taken to
represent anything, and so strictly mean nothing. Everything we can know is articulable in a
judgment in which intuition and concept are thought together.
What Kant now points out is that the exhibition in an intuition of a concept, the "making
sensible" of a thought, is possible in two rather different ways (KU, 351). 8 The first way,
familiar to readers of the first Critique, he calls "schematic:' Here we take the intuition as
bearing the "monogram" or calling card of the concept, and accordingly take the particular
given intuition to be an "example" of the universal concept. 9
The second way of exhibiting pure concepts Kant here calls "symbolic." He cautions
the reader to observe that people usually use the word "symbol" incorrectly: the designation of
a concept by a sensible sign is not an exhibition, a making sensible, of the concept at all, but
a "mere characterization." In the latter, Kant writes, "the signs contain nothing whatever that
belongs to the intuition of the object." The only thing linking the sensible articulation and the
8
9
References noted 'KU are to Kant's Critique of Judgement, Akademie page numbers.
To be precise, in an empirical judgement, the intuition is an "example", in a priori, a "schema".
10
�referent concept, in this case, is the arbitrary or conventional act of our own intellect. The
so-called "symbols" of algebra are in truth mere 'characters' or tokens in this sense.
But a genuine symbol, according to Kant, is an intuition that represents by being
thought in an analogous way as that which it is the symbol of. Kant offers the following
example: a hand mill is a symbol of an absolute monarchy, while an organism is a symbol of a
constitutional monarchy. The rules according to which we reflect on the relations in each pair
are the same: the parts of the hand mill move through the mechanical force imposed by an
external impulse, as the members of the absolute monarchy are coerced by fear of the king;
while the parts of the organism are self-moved, according to an idea of the whole animal, as
the members of the constitutional monarchy act according to their systematic roles in the legal
idea of a constitution. (How much longer and more awkward that is to spell out, than it is to
present in the unexplained analogy!)
The hand mill and the animal allow us to see, they "submit to inspection", the different
sorts of monarchy, if we are willing to take them symbolically. It may help to be annoyingly
precise here, since the enmeshed relation between thing and appearance is especially knotty
where analogy is concerned: There is something about the monarchy which is is also present
in the handmill. It is that 'third' thing-- a sort of power relation-- that is directly 'made visible'
here; in other words, both the monarchy and the mill are examples of external force. At the
same time, the monarchy itself is indirectly made visible in the handmill, in so far as they both
bear the relevant power relation. Thus, the one is a symbol of the other.
Symbolic representation or meaning abounds in our language: a "sub-stance" doesn't
literally "stand under" anything 10 , but the spatial and causal relation articulated in an empirical
'standing under' is analogous to the metaphysical relation between a thing and its accidents;
just as that which "de-pends" on a cause doesn't literally "hang from" it (KU,352). It is striking
that Kant's examples of symbolic language (which work in German as well as English) come
from his Table of Categories, the "pure concepts of the understanding." Apparently we are
unable to speak these non-sensible thoughts except by analogizing them to sensible items
around us, although for most of us the symbols have petrified, and we are rarely aware of
their symbolic character. If this is true, it is likely that no speech is merely "characteristic,"
outside of the rarified realm of modern mathematics.
Kant's notion of symbolic representation will turn out to be crucial in his culminating
investigation of the beautiful as the symbol of the good, even later in the Critique. But for our
10
I know this etymology is spurious.
11
�purposes, I want to direct our attention to how Kant begins the thread of aesthetic meaning a
bit earlier, in his discussion of "fine" or beautiful art. There, Kant is occupied with articulating
the subtle role of concepts in fine art. We don't think a work of art is beautiful because we
recognize what concept it should be subsumed under. To judge that a poem is an Italian
sonnet, or that a painting is an impressionist rendering of an orchard, or that passage of
music contains a perfect cadence, all this tells us nothing about these works' beauty. These
judgments are "schematic," for they determine the given object as an example of the class, in
accordance with a rule. But judgments of beauty-- what Kant calls judgments of taste-- do not
use concepts this way. The beautiful object seems ideally suited for thinking over, for
contemplating, without it ever being decided once and for all what it is. It excites our minds
into a maximal activity, what Kant calls "free harmony," in which our imagination traces every
detail and our understanding ranges through a "wealth of thought," each activity propelling the
other. This harmony is "free" in that it is not in the service of rendering a determinate
sentence. Kant takes this "quickening," rather than being exhausting, to be self-strengthening,
a becoming-more-alive. He often relies on the term "play" to capture the leisure, spontaneity,
and energy of judging the beautiful. In Kant's conception, the beautiful is not relaxing, but
stimulating. We are not transfixed by beauty, but "linger" over it. It doesn't strike at a moment,
but unfolds across time in the extended activity of our reflection. 11
In this connection, it is worth noticing one of reasons Kant cites for ranking music
below the other arts. He writes that while the visual arts are "lasting," in so far as their forms
endure in space as we reflect on them, music is inevitably "transitory." Indeed, he observes
that we tend to find musical passages which do manage to endure by "involuntarily" lodging
themselves in our memory "annoying." But this criticism might be turned on its head: because
musical forms vanish as we linger over them- indeed they must do so to be present to us at
all- to have them in the ear is to be immediately aware that they pass us by, slip away, and
evanesce. This may, after all, be the source of beautiful music's particularly heart-breaking
power. Music makes intimately manifest the mortality of the "feeling of life" through which we
enjoy the beautiful.
Now, Although judgments of taste are free from conceptual determination, they are in
fact often rich with concepts, since they always involve the understanding. A beautiful
11 Much art, and much music in particular, has the effect of transfixing us in an overwhelming moment.
According to Kant, this is not art of the beautiful, but art of the sublime. Perhaps "Sind Blitze, sind Donner"
(Passion, §33, measures 104 ff) provides an example of the sublime in the Passion.
12
�landscape brings to mind the interdependence of the ecological whole and the efforts of
human cultivation. A beautiful horse may bring to mind the natural purposes of power and
speed, or the human purpose of war. And in the case of art, the artifice of the object always
gives some concrete conceptual direction to our reflection. After all, we only know it is art
because someone purposefully made it (KU, 303). Of course, many artificial expressions are
not beautiful. The representations of men and women on restroom doors point to a
determinate purpose, we quickly see what they mean, and our grasp of their meaning is what
allows us to see them as artificial in the first place. But they are not thereby beautiful, and in
fact the determinate nature of their meaning prevents the free harmony through which we
judge beauty from getting off the ground. Thus, beautiful art, in so far as it is beautiful, cannot
have a determinate meaning, for it cannot be read as an exhibition of an example according
to a specifiable rule. In his attempt to say what it is an exhibition of, to account for the in
principle unaccountable, Kant introduces his notion of "aesthetic idea" (KU, 314).
Readers of the first Critique know that "ideas", for Kant, are concepts of reason, in
which a totality or whole is thought The world, as the cosmic whole, is an idea; as is God, as
the highest being. Ideas are never given in experience, which is to say, experience always
falls short of them. An "aesthetic idea" is a totality for the senses; that is, a given sensible form
for which no concept is adequate. Kant describes how
the poet ventures to make sensible the rational ideas of invisible beings, the realm of the
blessed, the realm of hell, eternity, creation, and so on. Or again, he takes things that are
indeed exemplified in experience, such as death, envy, and all the other vices, as well as
love, fame, and so on; but then, going beyond the limits of experience by means of an
imagination that emulates reason by reaching for a maximum, he ventures to make these
sensible with a completeness that no example in nature affords. (KU, 314)
Now, by supposition, the mode of representation here cannot be "schematic," since the
intuition is not definable as a case of a rule. It must, rather, be "symbolic": in our judgment of
the given form, we take its elements to be related to one another in a way analogous to the
relation among the elements of the non-sensible ideal. Kant quotes a minor poet: "the sun
flowed forth, as serenity flows from virtue" (KU, 316). I don't know if this is really all that
beautiful, but let's give Kant some slack. It is not simply the case that the sun is to its rays as
moral contentment is to moral goodness. This would be a symbolic representation, but a
determinate one, like the handmill and the autocracy, in which the rule instantiated on each
side of the analogy could be discursively articulated. Kant's claim is that in running through
13
�the image of the sun, we find that no determinate articulation is adequate to capture the way
in which it is like virtue. Rather, we range through boundless partial characterizations,
stimulated towards further contemplation of the image. This is the free play of taste in the
presence of the beautiful, and it feels good.
Note that in this example, the poet has quite explicitly directed our reflection towards
what the image is to mean. But this is not necessary for symbolic representation in aesthetic
ideas. It may even be the case that the less explicit the directing of our reflection, the more
stimulating that reflection will become, since its scope will be less circumscribed. On the other
hand, to give too little direction risks disengaging the understanding altogether, falling back
into meaninglessness. The great artist strikes this balance perfectly, convincing us that the
sensible form means something, but letting that meaning escape any final determination.
Kant gives an interesting example of meaningless aesthetic experience earlier in the
Critique. "The changing shapes of the flames in a fire or in a rippling brook" are not beautiful,
according to Kant, even though they pleasantly engage the imagination (KU, 243). These
scenes, however, fail to call the understanding into activity, and so the play is one-sided. We
can easily call to mind musical versions of this formless flickering and babbling. One sign of
their one-sidedness is that these sorts of experiences are relaxing, they put us at ease by
releasing tension. They are a sort of massage for the mind. The beautiful, on the other hand,
wakes us up. For in the beautiful, the understanding is maximally active, striving to make
sense of the given form, to apprehend its meaning. Recalling Kant's famous formulation in the
first Critique, without concepts our aesthetic reflection is blind.
Once Kant interprets the forms of fine art as "aesthetic ideas", it becomes possible to
think of beautiful nature as meaningful in the same, subtle way. The real sun's streaming rays
give us far less conceptual direction than the poet's somewhat pedantic metaphor, but as we
take them up in a judgment of taste, our understanding is stimulated into the same sort of
harmonious activity. Even though we know the sun is no work of art, we reflect on it in taste
as if it were the expression of some meaning that escapes determination, as if some truth was
made sensible and submitted to our inspection in the concrete appearance. The intense
pleasure afforded by fine art, and by beautiful nature, lies in this delicate balance of
significance and ineffability: we feel it means something, we know its meaning can't be
articulated. Kant often tries to capture this tension in aesthetic judgment as such with his
claim that the judgment is one of "Zweckmassigkeit ohne Zweck''
("purposiveness-without-a-purpose," or, perhaps, "fittingness without a fit"). In light of the
14
�account of aesthetic ideas, aesthetic pleasure can be recast as a delight in this
'meaningfulness-without-a-meaning.' 12
If beautiful forms as such are aesthetic ideas, and aesthetic ideas always "strive
toward something that lies beyond the bounds of experience," the meaning of a beautiful form
must always point beyond the sensible, towards the supersensible. That is, through symbolic
representation art and nature both render the supersensible, sensible. When supposedly
"empirical" items like death and love are taken up by fine art, their representation directs us
towards an unconditioned principle, and thus towards the unseen supersensible ground of
these familiar features of life. Of course, we don't gain knowledge of these grounds by means
of art. Rather, our reflection is directed towards them, as we take the beautiful form to be a
glimpse of the unknowable.
Some readers have thought Kant's account of fine art as the exhibition of aesthetic
ideas puts so-called non-representational art beyond the scope of his theory. Instrumental
music, at least in so far as it could not be reduced to sound-imitation or tone-painting, might
seem to be a clear case of art that depicts nothing at all. But Kant's account is in fact a
challenge to many familiar models of what "representation" is in the first place. If we think of a
representation as an isomorphic stand-in, where the thing and its representation are related
as original and image, then it is certainly true that much beauty, including beautiful music, is
non-representational. 13 Indeed, nothing, according to Kant, is beautiful by virtue of its service
as an imitative copy. However, a thing-as-it-appears is not related to that thing-as-it-is-in-itself
as original to image. The appearance is not a copy. Rather, things have sensible
manifestations by appearing to us. The two aspects are not distinct beings, but rather
complementary standpoints. In the case of beauty, we take something supersensible as if it is
appearing. The form present to our senses is not an imitation of some absent thing, but a
present manifestation of the unseen, and in this Kantian sense a 'representing,' a Vorstellung.
Precisely because we can't fill in the content of the reference of the appearance though
aesthetic judgment, we can never say adequately what is being presented. But in our
reflection, the perpetually out-of-reach reference is always pointed to, sometimes with less
and sometimes with more guiding direction. In this way, all beauty is representational and
One great irony of the third Critique is that while its analysis of beauty begins by privileging nature over
art, Kant surprises his readers late in the book by revealing that all beauty, understood now as the exhibition
of aesthetic ideas, is a sort of art.
13 Alternatively, in a more modern mood, if we think of a representation as an arbitrary token signifier, beauty
is also non-representational.
12
15
�non-representational at the same time.
The notion of an aesthetic idea can help us make sense of the powerful and puzzling
way in which Bach's music has meaning. Jesus' cadential prayer passage is a symbol in
Kant's technical sense: in our contemplation of it, we sense that our reflection on its audible
elements is analogous to a reflection on the elements of an inaudible reality involving piety,
gentleness, and loving sound-mindedness. In other words, Bach has found a way to make the
holy, inner character of the speaker sensible, he has submitted that character to our
inspection. While we might well be provoked into articulating the meaning of the passage in
words, we know that just what Bach has articulated in tones will escape us. We can be told
that Peter wept, we can witness a depiction of Peter weeping, but Bach's recitative measures
make the invisible and inaudible interior of Peter's soul present to us in tones. This art of
aesthetic ideas promises to deliver truths to its listener; we feel we are close to understanding
something perhaps otherwise unknowable in listening. Because there is no rule according to
which these musical passages could be constructed and classified, we are unlikely to call
them "artificial", even though they are art. Rather, the sounds seem to arise from a
non-sensible principle as if they were natural. Accordingly, we sense that the connection
between representation and meaning is not a contrivance linking alien things, but a union of
what belongs together.
Our delight in the fittingness of the contingent, understood as meaningfulnesswithout-a-meaning, may help make sense of poetic pleasures and meanings as such. In a
great sculpture, the posture of the figure seems just right, so very just right as to be an
expression of an impossible-to-define principle. In his interview with the diabolical
Smerdyakov at the bench outside their father's house, Ivan Karamazov notices his
half-brother carefully drawing ,one foot along side the other, playing with the toe of his boot,
and then shifting the position of his feet back again, throughout their chilling, obscurely
conspiratorial conversation. Dostoevsky has worked his typical magic here: we couldn't have
predicted Smerdyakov would do this, and we don't know why Smerdyakov is doing this or
what it means, and yet in its unanticipatable contingency it seems so perfectly fitting that it
must have its source in the unseen nature that is Smerdyakov's character. We are moved by
indeterminate meaningfulness of the aesthetic idea. 14
The frozen gesture of the sculpture and narrated gesture of character have a power
14
Regarding Smerdyakov, see Kant's discussion of "the beautiful representation of the ugly."
16
�that trades on their indeterminately symbolic function: indeed, this is the way of gesture as
such. In his Doctrine of Right, Kant suggests that a handshake is an attempt to make the
intelligible act of a meeting of wills in a contract visible, in a symbolic gesture depicting the
two-sided unity of the agreement. He goes so far as to say that the parties thereby "manifest
the perplexity" of the intelligible act (MdR, 272). 15 Similarly, kneeling and bowing one's head
are not natural indications of humility and supplication; they represent the latter by means of
some analogy between the arrangement in space of our embodied selves and the attitude
(so to speak) of our minds. We thereby make our supplication visible. Bach's music can
similarly be seen as an audible gesture, a sequence of meaningful movements, giving Jesus'
piety the sensible form of a heard symbol.
The difference between mere motion and symbolic gesture16 helps capture the
difference between tone-painting, and what I've called musical ideas. The motion of bowing
one's head or taking one's knee takes place in space and time. However, Jesus' prayer
cadence does not analogize this motion (that would make it a tone-painting) 17 , but symbolizes
the same inner change manifested in the bodily gesture, but in tone and rhythm. Where the
pitch-painting takes place in the dynamically bare axis of up-and-down, the tonal gesture's
motions occur within a matrix of home, away, tension, and rest. The "fall" referred to in the
term "cadence" (Latin: cadere) is not a descent in pitch, but a falling-to-rest in the tonal field of
dynamic quality. Indeed some of the string voices in our prayer passage rise in pitch as they
"fall" to home. The tonal-rhythmic field gives us access to a symbolic gestural power that far
outstrips mere pitch-relation, and may far outstrip the material resources of every other fine
art. Because music is so rich with tensions and resolutions, pullings, failings, holding still,
balancing, imbalancing, and coming to rest, and because these motions and forces are
distilled and disembodied in tonal and rhythmic forms, music is perhaps the most intensely
and exquisitely gestural form of representation available to us. For this reason, whenever we
most want to make something spiritual manifest to ourselves, we will want to hear it in music.
January, 2015
MdR = Doctrine of Right, Akademie page number
Note that symbolic gesture can include non-motion (striking a posture), just as music can include silence.
17 Could the "lowering" of the soprano and bass voices in the second half of the "bete" measure be a subtle
painting of taking one's knee?
15
16
17
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.
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What does Music Mean?'Examples from Bach, Theory from Kant
"Appearances are a glimpse of the unseen."
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The poet ventures to make sensible the rational ideas of invisible beings, the realm of the blessed, the
realm of hell, eternity, creation, and so on. Or again, he takes things that are indeed exemplified .in
experience, such as death, envy, and all the other vices, as well as love, fame, and so on; but then, going
beyond the limits of experience by means of an imagination that emulates reason by reaching for a
maximum, he ventures to make these sensible with a completeness that no example in nature affords.
Critique of Judgment §49, 314
�
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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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What does music mean?
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Caswell, Matthew
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St. John's College
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2015-01-16
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Annapolis, MD
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text
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pdf
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Music, Philosophy and aesthetics
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English
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Bib # 82004
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Typescript of a lecture delivered on January 16, 2015 by Matthew Caswell as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/a01ab61d333e6ca848160c3be8e4bccf.mp3
467cae9f49777b5db231d907c5eb1b0e
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Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
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audio cassette
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00:51:59
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What Does Mathematics Have to Do with the Way We Lead Our Lives
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on November 7, 1997, by Samuel S. Kutler as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
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Kutler, Samuel S.
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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1997-11-07
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sound
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mp3
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English
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LEC_Kutler_Samuel_1997-11-07
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Mathematics
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/f7fe94bafdd022d99723e9c0c00c622a.mp3
1f4ce3433a83047357c2b6e828b8d191
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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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01:05:41
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Brubaker, Lauren
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Wealth, Virtue and Corruption: Adam Smith's Moral Philosophy
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2011-01-21
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mp3
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on January 21, 2011, by Lauren Brubaker as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
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Annapolis, MD
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sound
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Smith, Adam, 1723-1790. Theory of moral sentiments.
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English
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LEC_Brubaker_Lauren_2011-01-21
Friday night lecture
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fae7eb4ec5c8d2f182676ad1d12c01d6
PDF Text
Text
Friday Night lecture
Parents' Weekend
November 2, 2001
Eva Brann
WAYS OF NA YSA YING
No, Not, Nonexistence, Nonbeing, Negativity, Nothing-these \vords, the guideposts of
my lecture, may seem like a dismal parade for Parents' Weekend. There's an old post-World
War II song that goes: "You gotta accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative," and
accordingly the more pessimistic particles, adjectives, nouns, have a bad name in our assertively
optimistic country. But that aversion is a misapprehension. Almost nothing in our mental
capacity is more life-affirming than our power of naysaying, and you might almost say that
where there's No there's Hope.
So when our dean, Mr. Flaumenhaft, asked me to give a sort of higher book report on a
'fht.
volume I've completed fairly recently, called/Vays of Naysaying: I c.heerfully assented, thinking
that it needn't spoil your evening. For the human capacity for negation does turn out to be a large
territory-full of fascinatingly knotty intellectual problems but also of plain familiar human
charm.
Now the book contains about sixty thousand words, while I won't keep you here even
sixty minutes, so I'll have to pick and choose my negations. It will be hard, because all of
naysaying has come to seem to me close to \vhat I think of as the human center.
• Rowman and Littlefield, 2001 .
�To explain what I mean by the human center I have to use a very unfashionable word,
unfashionable at least among those who now write academic books about human beings. The
word is "soul." Oddly enough the word is more acceptable in its Greek version "psyche." With
the word "soul" comes, very naturally, the notion of a lay-out, a spatial topography. We speak of
surface emotions and deep feelings, for example. A number of the authors we read at this
college-Plato, Augustine, Freud-speak of the soul as a sort of territory with its
O\Vn
geography. And so I will feel entitled to use a similar figure and give our inner being a spatial
expression. In my image, the soul has an outer margin, a front, where it is open to the outside
world and its facts of sense, be they human or natural. And it has a background, deep behind,
whence arise truths of thought. As we must not only deliberately keep our eyes open to see
(though it is not the eyes that see but we ourselves) so we must go deep into these inner places to
learn things the outside can't teach us. On reason why the Platonic dialogue Meno is so central to
our program is that it tells a story and gives a demonstration about the way to that deep inner
region where live not only mathematical but also moral truths.
Now I sketch for myself a middle territory where whatever comes through the senses up
front and whatever thought we can dredge up from the depths behind meet, and where,
incidentally, our feelings live most familiarly; it is where we come in those "sessions of sweet
silent thought" Shakespeare sings of. This middle territory is a strange non-spatial space, a quasispace. You .c an't measure its extent, but you can pace or fly through it. You won't find solid
weighty objects there, but nothing is more lasting than its contents. In it is whatever you've seen
or heard, except that it is not really there; and it contains besides much that you've never seen or
heard, except that it is as if you had; and it contains above all the many scenes and people that
are now far a\vay or gone altogether, except that they are present in there. I've never read a more
2
�accurate description of this middle-soul than Augustine gives in his Confessions. He tells how he
"comes into the fields and spacious palaces of memory" where he finds everything he's ever
sensed and much more. "There," he says, "I have in readiness the heaven, the earth, the sea,"
though "not the things themselves but their images."
We are speaking of course of the imagination and that part of it which is time-affected,
memory. In fact I thought I could show that the memory is the origin of our sense of time (and
incidentally that there is no objective natural time beyond that inner time). It is when we flip
through the files of our memory, so to speak, that time arises-the thicker the file, the longer the
time. Now in_
meditating on the nature of the imagination and time, those inhabitants of our
soul's center, I kept coming on "not" and "non-," on negative particles and prefLxes. The
imagination is full of presences of absent things; things that are there but not there themselves.
These images are beings and also non beings, because when we say of a picture, "Tpat's him all
right," we also know that it really isn't. Images and imagining have their satisfactions, but who
doesn't fly to embrace the friend in the flesh?
So too with time. What is a memory a memory of but what was once but is not no\v or
not here? What is that forward-directed memory called expectation but dreams and fears of the
"not yet"? Time consists altogether of what is no longer and is not yet, and these surround a
vanishing now, the elusive present. Nothing in thinking about time hit me with a greater shock
than the realization that time, which consisted of what was no more and is not yet, really didn't
leave much time for anything to be present, to stand out of that stream of no longer and not yet.
For this "standing-out," translated into Latin, is "existence," and so we seemed to exist on the
cusp of tv,:o converging negations.
3
�So having done a lot of scribbling first about imagination and then time, I seemed to be
driven into tonight's subject. Imagination and time began and ended as enigmas and mysteries
and here appeared a third, which seemed to emerge in thinking about both.
Let me take a little detour here to talk about enigmas and emergences, something
particularly relevant to an audience ofstudents and teachers devoted to tackling mysteries and
making questions emerge, and to the parents who underwrite this strange enterprise. \\'hat is an
inquiry of the sort we are most committed to? Does it begin with a problem, which is a brisk
formulation of a topic to be attacked, and end in a resolution so that the problem goes away and
the topic becomes untopical, no longer interesting? No such thing. It begins with some muddled
thoughts and some talk that leads to an increasing unease, a sense of being at once stuck and at
loose ends. Students quite often ask to have a conversation about something, but when we sit
down together the topic isn't quite clear to them, neither the place they're at nor where we're
intended to go. So first we figure out what we want to be talking about. Then people who are
serious read up on the subject, and in this study they find different approaches and a whole slew
of prepared problems and solutions. And then comes the real thinking, the kind that makes the
question emerge, and new topics, new places to be. Now mere problems tum into true
emergences and mysteries-I ' ll have something more to say about these at the end.
One question that can really only be answered late in the inquiry arose pretty soon: Is
there something negation everywhere and always, and so to speak, essentially, is? Is there
fundamental naysaying? It is a question to be answered, if at all, only through collecting the
kinds, the ways of naysaying, though there is one linguistic fact that did encourage the
expectation that all naysaying is at bottom one. This is the fact that no, not, non, nothing,
negation, denial, denigration, and dozens of other refusing words all have the same root, ne. :t\c
4
�one knows what that root signifies, but there is a plausible if unprovable conjecture that goes
back to Darwin, who was much interested in the signifying origins of human gesture. He thought
that negation was expressed by putting up or wrinkling your nose at something in refusal or
disgust, as infants do when they don't \Vant their bottle, saying "nenenenenene" through
. clenched gums-and also as modern Greeks do when they want to express "no." To the
confusion of the tourist they give a slight upward jerk of the head, as if raising their nose at the
idea.
A related question was whether negation was essentially linguistic: Was language the
locus of naysaying, as it seemed on the face of it? Could there be negation only for thinking and
speaking beings?-for I accepted it as given that speech expresses thought. To be sure, there is
mindless jabber and rote opinion, and conversely there is thought yet seeking expression. But
when things are working right, we have a sense of the word neatly clicking L·nto the thought. So
if naysaying is primarily a verbal phenomenon, perhaps everything in the natural \vorld is
positive-as some people have certainly thought-and we humans (plus whatever spirits have
speech besides us) alone say "no." And of course, I asked myself how negation got into our inner
life, our imagining and our remembering, and our living through time by means of memory. Did
it come from the nether parts of our soul's topography as an expression of our capacity to think
negatingly, or was that middle part itself somehow receptive to nonexistent objects? And there
was the same question only asked from within about the world without: Are there ghost
presences, like our Liberty Tree, that half-millennium-old tulip poplar on our front campus,
which fell victim to a hurricane in 1999 and which is still somehow visible in its absence, like
Robert Frost's memory house
... that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
5
�And in a to\\'n that is no more a town.
Are there nonexistences that walk the earth alongside or even in the same place as all the
assertively solid, weightily positive beings that inhabit nature? Physicists talk a lot about
negative forces and particles. It is said that when in 1747 Benjamin Franklin assigned the
adjective "negative" to electricity gotten by rubbing a rubber rod with fur, while when a glass
rod was rubbed with silk the electricity was called positive, he was being arbitrary. But is that
true of all the oppositions of physics? Are they all arbitrarily positive and negative? Are there,
furthermore, in that vivid, feeling-filled field of the imagination half-beings without physical
weight but with all the gravity that belongs to human matters? And finally, does the region of
thought contain non beings, objects of thought whose nature it is not to be?
These may seem to you weird-if perhaps wonderful--questions to ask. I have a certain
justification for asking them in the fact that they are frequently answered without even being
asked. For example, the tribe of logicians is frequently positive-minded; it comes to them
naturally to think that the world is full of positive facts and objects, and that negation is a formal
operation, which flips a positive proposition into its opposite. Then there are philosophers who
define negation as opposition, a word that pits position against counter-position, this posited
thing against that. The notion of opposition too is a kind of positivism.
In fact, about five years ago my friends and fellow tutors, Eric Salem and Peter
Kalkavage and I studied and translated the Platonic dialogue that deals with these matters more
deeply than any work I.know (except for the Hegelian Logic, some of which our seniors used to
read-and should again). It is the Sophist. A sophist then and now is a professor, someone who
professes to have teachable, usually trendy, wisdom but who has never gone deeply into
6
�anything. In Plato's dialogue, it is a f}pe whose nature the participants pursue, not a particular
person.
The chief speaker is a stranger from the town where Parmenides taught. Parmenides was
the first of those who wanted to think about Being, about that one nature displayed by everything
whatsoever that comes to our attention. For whatever else it might be, everything is, when it
might so easily (we sometimes think) be otherwise, when it might not be. Or if it seems ·
unthinkable that certain beings could not be, these people who attended to Being wanted know
why not. This inquiry, which Parmenides initiated, is called ontology, Greek for "the story of
Being," and I will now boldly claim that there can't be many human beings who haven't come
up against the question of Being in some way. They might just soberly have noticed that almost
every sentence either has "is" or "are" or "am" in it or can be made to have it: "What is she
talking about?", "Why are we sitting here?", "I am feeling sleepy." Or they might have felt that
the things of this world are fleeting and deceptive and wondered what, if anything, is behind
them.
Now this Parmenides, when he was the age of a college freshman, took a number of
blazingly wild rides right into the heart of truth where a goddess spoke to him. She told him that
there are two ways to thin\<. And she said
One way says: "Is" and that "Is not" is impossible.
This is the road of conviction, for it follows truth.
The other says: "Is not" and that it is fated that "Is" not be. ·
This path I show you as altogether unlearnable.
For neither could you knov,: Nonbeing, since it is unattainable,
Nor could you show it to anyone
7
�For Is-not cannot possibly be said or thought.
So this is the message the youth was to bring to all human beings: Speak only Being, and,
moreover, know that Being has no divisions, no limits, no time, no discernible distinctions at all .
But you can hear and discern right away that the goddess is asking the impossible: to
speak without making attributions and distinctions, and above all without saying "not" or "non-."
For thinking and speaking is altogether articulating and bringing together differences. In every
sentence this is said to be that or not that. If I say, as I must, that "Being is a mystery," you can
and should puzzle from now till doomsday whether I am separating the mysteriousness out from
Being or putting it together with Being. In fact the goddess herself uses these particles and
prefixes all the time. She does worse: She puts into the human vocabulary a brand-new word,
"Nonbeing." So she manages to accomplish what earnest prohibitions so often do, to name a
proscribed thing and so to make it infinitely fascinating. This effect falls in the class of
unintended consequences. Unintended consequences are best known in the realms of economic
and social policy. They occur when you intend a very good thing and get a very sorry side-effect,
such as trying to prevent inflation by hiking interest rates and causing a slow-down, or closing a
number of all-black schools in the interests of integration and losing a large percentage of black
principals. So here we have it in the realm of thought: This goddess wants to drive out all
negation from thought and speech but incidentally lets -loose among us the thought called
Nonbeing.
So Parmenides and his pupils spend the rest of his life puzzling out what one could say
without disobeying the goddess. At the time the dialogue takes place Parrrienides is dead and one
of these pupils, a stranger, arrives in Athens, and Socrates draws him into a conversation about
8
�sophists as a type, and then he says no more. I think he knows perfectly well what mischief he is
stirring up. The Sophist, a false or pretended or negatively wise man, who is himself a mere
image of wisdom and a maker of mere images, can't be caught in speech without reference to
Nonbeing. Nonbeing is, one might say, the ideal cause in thought of an incarnate negation like
the Sophist; it is, taken in itself, the very thought of Non and Not, the thought we get hold of as
an object to wrap our mind around when we think of the opposite of Being.
Now this stranger rises to the occasion by doing something wonderful and terrible that he
himself gives a name to. He commits parricide; he kills Father Parmenides in spirit by sho\l,.ing
that his goddess was wrong: Nonbeing is after all. He does this deed by thinking the thought I've
already mentioned: The opposite of Being is indeed Nonbeing, but that Nonbeing is not an
unthinkable and unspeakable nullity but just other being. ¥/hen I say the real Sophist is not a
genuine lover of wisdom, or to put it into Greek, is not a philosopher, I am not saying he is
n·owhere to be found and a nothing, not to be grasped.-That is exactly what the clever Sophist
would like me to think, because then I can't catch him in my understanding. I am saying he is
other than, diverse from}he philosopher. (In fact, he's in some ways pretty close.) This is the
stranger's tremendous thought: Nonbeing is Otherness, and coversely, Otherness is Nonbeing. If
,,....
.
you 're tempted to think that this is mere wordage, ask yourself what is the most potent political
sentiment in our country at this moment. I say it is what we all call "diversity," the idea that who
and what we are not has as much proper Being as we do; what is other is only other, not less.
And this powerful thought is first articulated in Plato's Sophist.
But here's the rub. This parricidal Stranger doesn't quite succeed with his reinterpretation
of Nonbeing. For though the Sophist is now unable to escape capture by going to ground in utter
nothingness, he's still not the genuine article, still a faker, still the mere image of the honest
9
�thinker. So ifNonbeing is just Otherbeing, how will we account for true inferiority, truly mere
images, a true decline and fall from what we usually call reality? For an image isn't just other
than its original-it really is not quite up to that particular original, though in a way it is, namely
insofar as it has its looks. An image is usually hopelessly less than its original; few people prefer
a photograph to its sitter or a fake to the genuine article.
Do notice that all I've just reported is really a very deep treatment of the question I posed
before, asking whether negation is just something we think and say or whether there is real,
genuine, true negation in things themselves, be they thinkable or visible. Thus for me
Parmenides' goddess with her rejected Nonbeing was at the center of the \i,·hole inquiry, and that
is where she appears in the book I'm telling you about. Notice too how important the practical
consequences of the answer are. Those theologians who make most sense to me all think that
evil, in the world and in the soul, is the effect of an infirmity of Being, of an inferior or lesser
existence. When we meet badness incarnate, face to face, it may appear as positive, even vital
evil, but when we try to think our way as best we can into the badness of a soul we ahvays find
something missing, a lack, a poverty, a kind ofNonbeing. But if we deny this analysis then evil
is either perspectival or positive.-It is either the effect of our subjective v.:ays of naysaying
rejection or a powerful and therefore possibly respectable and often fascinating way of positive
being. You can see that to me it is important that the external and internal world should not just
be a tissue of positive facts-as the school called positivism in fact claims. But I'm not one
hundred percent convinced I can have it my way, though as I will shortly show, I've got another
good reason, even closer to my heart, for wishing to acknowledge non-existent objects.
Let me now return to one of my many questions, the first one, which was to be answered
only toward the end, after having gone some way into the inquiry. The question was: Is all
10
�negation fundamentally one? The mere etymology of all the no and neg- words in terms of
turned-up noses doesn't get us very far, so the next thing is to try to discern the kinds of
naysaying and nayspeaking there are, and then to see what they might have in common. I'll
hurtle through them, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if in the question period you will add
some I left out.
I began where our life as persons begins, with toddlers, those two-year-old terrors of
negativity. This propensity of the terrible twos for naysaying will ring a bell with parents. It's
No! to everything, often for the sheer compulsion to negate. I once minded (in both senses of the .
word) a little fellow who actually said to me: "I want not to want .... "Or ask a kid in the throes
of negativity: "Do you want some of my baloney sandwich?" ''No!" he says, and he gets on your
lap and takes it away from you.
Now at least in our Western world there are three great crises of individual development:
One is the mid-life crisis, which ought to seem very remote to students; the second is
adolescence, of which they come as accredited experts; and the earliset is the "terrible twos,"
which they have probably totally blanked out. But this was when they first grew from lovable
animals into respect-demanding persons. In its rebellious assertiveness it is very similar to the
second transition into independent humanity, the one that occurs in adolescence . The momentous
happening for babies is the discovery of their will, the negative will that repels the outside and
defines the child as a separate human being. The briefest, most independent kind of naysaying,
just ''No!'', is here willful, and it is an open question for me whether human negativity doesn't
always preserve a trace of self-assertion. I might add that from naysaying babies I go in the first
chapter by a natural and easy transition to negating devils and demons \Vho are in permanent
rebellion against their divinity.
11
�Whatever the case of personal naysaying may be, there is an opposite kind of denial,
expressed by the particle "not," which can be as impersonal and objective as human rationality is
capable of being. This is the negation of the logicians, the negation that is tied to sentences,
statements, and propositions. There are many deeply interesting questions to be asked oflogical
negation, for example, how what is known as the Law of Excluded Middle got built into the
·
fundamental standard logic-the law that says that there is no third possibility between
affirmation and denial. Or whether positive and negative are logically coequal, or the positive is
always the original position.
But let me propose to you a preliminary question not quite so deep but just as interesting:
Where in a sentence does the "not" properly come? Let me give you the possibilities. You might
say (I hope):
1. "This lecture is-not boring." Here the not is attached to the copula "is." The thoughtcoupling or connection between my lecture and boredom is broken by the operation of negation.
Or 2. "This lecture is not-boring." Here the "not" goes with the boredom, and puts the
lecture into the infinitely large class of non-boring speeches. This is not so much a negative
operation as a positive classification into a negative class, a class that is itself a negative object.
Or 3. "It is not the case that this lecture kboring." Here the negation is to the who le
proposition. The curious possibility of denying a proposition lock, stock, and barrel led to a new
logic early in the last century. This is symbolic logic, for which the sentence itself shrinks into
the symbol p or q, one whose relations of implication can be studied quite apart from any
sentential meaning. Here negation is nothing more than a flipping function. If p is true, then notp is false and the reverse, if p is false then not-p is true. It is the most colorless negation there is.
Its definition is nothing more than the rule just stated; no one really \Vants to say what true and
12
�false, T and F, means in this formal context, though in ordinary speech negation and falsity seem
to be closer than negation and truth. Thus those Houyhnhnms in Gulliver's Travels, which the
Juniors read about, call "saying the thing which is not" a lie, though it might \.vell be the trutlr--if
the thing really is not.
There is a fourth possibility: 4. "This non-lecture is boring." This sentence suddenly has
an altogether different quality. ("Quality" is the term used of the positivity or negativity of a
proposition). It is not a negation at all, but the affirmation that a predicate belongs positively to a
subject, though the subject is itself negative.
So here we are back to the question raised before. Are there non-subjects, non-beings that
can be subjects of assertions, at least in thought? Here is a way to think ofthis puzzle. Almost
everyone agrees that when you think you are thinking about something. I say "almost everyone"
because there are alternatives: There might not be separable objects for thought and speech to be
about, but thinking and speaking might just be about themselves. But let that be, and let me here
suppose that the question "\\'hat are you thinking about?" makes sense. Then one might argue
that the sentence "This non-lecture is boring" is nonsense, but it isn't straightforward nonsense.
Or one might e;ven argue that it is straightforwardly false. There are, that argument would go, all
sorts of non-existent objects that make a sentence false when you try to make them the subject,
since you can't talk of non-beings and shouldn't try. There are golden mountains that happen not
to exist, though they might; there are round squares that can't exist because they are selfcontradictory in concept; there are unicorns that are imaginable but not as an existing part of
nature. All these are nonexistent objects; add-to them the legion of human beings who live in
epics and novels, for example, Odysseus who lives in Homer's Odyssey.
13
�Now, however, let me introduce to you Mrs. Pringle, an acquaintance of one
philosophically inclined logician. Mrs. Pringle teaches high school; it is a good school because
they read the Odyssey. She wants to test if you've read carefully, so she asks: "What is the color
of Odysseus' hair?" If you have in fact read carefully you know Odysseus has auburn, reddishgold hair, and that when he comes home to Ithaca it's a little silvery and a little thin. That's all in
the poem. So ifyou say "auburn" on the test she marks it T and if"brov.11" it's F for falssand
your grade is Fas well. So it's clearly not the case that all sentences about the fictional,
imagined, nonexistent Odysseus are false-not to Mrs. Pringle, who's not to be fooled.
The Englishman Bertrand Russell, one of those who think that the world is composed of
positive particulars and also the man who was the co-discoverer of symbolic logic, made the
claim, clearly connected to these opinions and discoveries, that propositions about nonbeings are
just false. He had an opponent, whom he respected highly and who wrote at about the same time,
the beginning of the last century, the Austrian Alexius Meinong. He squarely faced the fact so
clear to Mrs. Pringle, that sentences about nonexistences and nonbeings can be both true and
false, and moreover he took it as a basic feature of thought that it always is about something, that
without fail we intend something when we think. So he made the follov.:ing paradoxical but
unavoidable claim. He said: "There are objects of which it is true that there are no such objects."
It was a way of saying that there must be objects, objects that we think of or imagine, that are
indifferent to existence, that are outside of existence. Meinong says that such objects have
"Beyond-being." Among them are the mathematical objects, the theories \Ve have in mind, and
also beings like Odysseus, Penelope and Telemachus, Circe, Calypso, Nausicaa and even
unicorns. So the standing of the creatures of the imagination seems to be saved and we can talk
14
�about them. They can be subjects of sentences. They don't exist but they have a kind of Being,
Beyond-being.
But here's the trouble: Recent logicians have blamed Meinong for making a "slum" of
nonexistents, a ''breeding ground of disorderly elements"-though that's their problem, not
mine. My trouble is that Meinong's Beyond-being is more the acknowledgement of a need than
the solution of a problem. Beyond-being is a courtesy title for objects that it is very easy and
natural to be acquainted with and very mystifying to get to the bottom of The beings that arise in
our imagination, or that transmigrate from someone else's imagination into ours by way of a
work of fiction, don't exist, to be sure, at least not in their full specificity. They are not flesh and
blood and yet they are more vital and more vivid than much that has respectable existence in the
)
real world. Fictions coinhabit our lives as models and companions and they have more staying
· power than human beings-Odysseus is, after all, well over three thousand years old. Their
power seems to derive from the mysterious way in which an airy nothing has assumed a .
habitation and a name. The term Being both does and doesn't apply to them, and Meinong's
Beyond-being is a brave acknowledgement of that fact, but no more.
Now I have given examples of willful No, logical Not, the Nonbeing that arises
unwittingly with the inquiry into Being, and the Nonexistence that concerns philosophically
inclined logicians. There are two more ways of naysaying that I'll dispose of quickly. One is
Negativity itself, considered not, as is negation, in terms of a fixed positive judgment pitted
against a negative judgment \.vhere one says: "I say this lecture is not boring;'' and the other,
whose understanding is the opposite, says: "Yes, it is." This more fluid negativity was
discovered by Hegel; it is known to the seniors as it appears at work in the Phenomenology of the
Spirit. This late in the lecture is no time to talk seriously about that kind of negativity, but let me
15
�describe it briefly and give an example-perhaps it would be better to say, let me try to induce a
taste of it.
Summarizing once-more, I've spoken of the negation that is the expression of an act of
repelling will, and the negation that is an operation of logical thought and the negative object that
thought is about. Hegelian negativity is neither an operation of the mind nor a mental object that
holds still for thought. It is instead the life of thought in which the activity of thinking and the
stable object that thinking is about meld and fuse together. Thus the object is, as it were,
animated, while the thinking is not yours or mine but emanates from the thing itself. Assuming
that the word Being has some meaning for you, hold it in your mind and receptively watch it;
immerse yourself in it. Being will reveal itself, just as Parmenides's goddess says it must. But
what it will reveal about itself is that it has no shape, no weight, no limit. It has no features, and
the thought of Being is altogether negative, a tissue of no's and not's. So in being thought and in
animating ·· thought, Being turns out to be Nothing or Naught. The story of Hegelian negativity
begins here, for Nothing under this scrutiny of thought, or thought under the influence of
Nothing, turns into yet another, a third thought-object, namely Becoming. Hegel calls these
animate thoughts "concepts" and the whole universe of subjectively active thought and stable
thought-substance develops as an organic whole. Hegel's name for this development is dialectic.
It became more and more a problem to me why it begins with Being rather than Nothing, for
Nothing seems even more rudimentary than Being, and, when watched thoughtfully, it too turns
into its opposite, namely Being.
But leaving that problem aside, I was next confronted with what seemed to me the most
final and absolute kind of negation, the thought of Nothing. Nonbeing was always relative to
Being, the negation of and alternative to Being. But Nothing is independent and absolute. Indeed
16
�the Nihilists, the "nothingists," as they call themselves, do deny reality and being, do seem to
negate all that is and say that everything is nothing, comes to nothing, is worth nothing. But that
is only because they find themselves in an illusory world, and so they begin by opposing the
naive and deluded believers in this world. Thus it turns out that they do acknowledge something,
even if it is something illusory. What they really maintain is the absolute primacy of Nothing. So
the great question becomes why there is anything at all and not only nothing,
~w that small
stain of illusion appears upon the vast pure plain of Nothingness. Nihilist passion can be
powerfully political and nihilist metaphysics deeply subtle, but, to tell the truth, I don't know
what to make of it: The fly in the nihilist ointment seems to be the nihilist himself thrashing
about in a very positive way.
The object of this hurtling race through the various negations that I discerned was to ask
what they might have in common. What, if anything, do willful No, logical Not, fictional
Nonexistence, ontological Nonbeing, dialectical Negativity, and absolute Nothing have in
common? Well, the first thing that came to mind is also the last. What they all have in common
is that they start from a position, a place maintained, and develop from that an op-position, a
denial of that place. Willful No opposes what I want to what I repel, sometimes just because it's
not my idea. Logical Not rises above my subjective position to see a field of propositions that are
affirmed and couples itself with these as their denial, their negation. Nonexistence is a ghostly
doppelganger that opposes its own related Existence, where that term is used of what is posited
as here in place and now in time. Nonbeing is what opposes Being, where Being means all that
is, in or even out of place, in and even out of time. Negativity is the movement of thought as it
'Natches its object develop into its opposite. And finally, Nihilism is the claim that the natural
human position, which is in the positive, in Reality, Existence, Being, and in Yeasaying, must be ·
17
�reversed and that Nothing is the original affirmative position to which Something is negatively
opposed.
That negation is fundamentally opposition is not news: many books on the subject say so
quite incidentally and smoothly. But when this understanding arises not as an obvious and easy
assumption but as a haltingly thought-out conclusion it comes as a revelation. Mine and thine,
this and that, here and there, now and then are discernible, discriminable, distinguishable not as
mere diversities and differences but as related position and counterposition, as bonded opposites.
Each kind of naysaying is a specific response to what first comes to sight or to mind; all
naysaying is parasitic on and shows up the configuration of a positive object, the sense of an
affirmative thought which it cancels and yet somehow keeps. It is slightly less obvious that there
might be things that are in themselves negative which are inferior by reason of their nonexistence
or nonbeing. And it is a very unobv_ous reflection that some nonexistences and nonbeings are
i
more potent and more important to us than the most positive reality.
It's, as I say, no great news, and yet it is a revealing insight with which to live, this ability
of ours to keep and cherish what absence, passage oftime, inherent nature, circumstantial
impossibility or opposing thought has canceled.
And so I want to end with a little disquisition on the results and uses of inquiries ofthis
sort, the kind we encourage at this college. The chief question, the one that drove me into the
investigation, led me only to mystery upon mystery, as I will show in a minute. By hard-nosed
standards I got no results to which a well-informed reader of philosophical and logical books
couldn't say either: "Well, we knew that to begin with" or "That's against common sense ." And
the only use these results seem to have is to make everyday occurrences strange and confusing.
18
�But you might as truthfully say that they make dully ordinary mundane things remarkable
and wonderful. Indeed, the discovery of a mystery is least of anything the sowing of confusion.
A mystery is not an unsolved problem awaiting expert resolution in the course of progress. But
neither is it a swampy indeterminacy that sucks in all attempts at clarification. Nor is it one of
those notorious unanswerable questions from that deep pit about which we think we know, by
some magical insight, that it has no bottom. A mystery in my meaning is a beckoning question to
which one can discover very precise approaches and very definite answers, only to find that there
are ever new routes of inquiry and that each solution contains new questions. In the course of this
enterprise the mystery develops specificity, and we develop the conviction that there is really
something stupendously wonderful there for .us to pursue-something to which all serious
attempts at inquiry do bring us closer, but that we can never simply undo and discard as a
question in the way we resolve and leave behind a problem. Moreover, we acquire the faith that
our inability to finish the question off for good does not lie in the murky bottomlessness of the
mystery but in the insuperable finitude of our thinking. In sum, here is what I think: The pursuit
of a mystery is the prescription for a pretty interesting life.
And now to the real end of this lecture. My main question was: How do we account for
our strange and wonderful ability to live by and with things that are no longer and things that
never were, these being the formulas for our temporal and imaginative life? Well, the truth is that
I've come on a number of ways to ask the question, and a number of ways to ans\.ver it, but no
one way or one answer. Instead I have developed a powerful conviction that there is an
articulabl~ mystery at our human center. Out of the background of our soul come discerning
thought and its distinction-making language, which is always explicitly or implicitly a kind of
naysaying; they inject themselves into the broad fields and beautiful palaces of our strangely
19
�spatial middle soul. There thought and speech meet the deliverances of our physical fa9ade
which come by way of our frontal senses, especially sight and hearing, by which we face and
confront the external world. And between these two, sense and thought, on the field of our
imagination, there arise presences that are also absences: existences that are nonexistences too,
beings that are nonbeings as well. Among these are the memories of what once was in time but
no longer is, the remembrances from which our past, our histories are made. Among these are as
well the present images of what is absent in space, the imagined completion of our sensually
limited world. And among them are, finally, the enchanting visions of what never yet was but
might yet be in the real world, the hopeful images that spur and guide our actions. I commend
this middle mystery to you as a good companion for life, both to cultivate as an experience and
to pursue as an inquiry.
20
�
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
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Ways of Naysaying
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2001-11-02
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Typescript of a lecture delivered on November 02, 2001 by Eva Brann as part of the Formal Lecture Series (during Parents Weekend).
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lec Brann 2001-11-02
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Annapolis, MD
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St. John's College
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text
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Ways of naysaying
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on November 02, 2001 by Eva Brann as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
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Negation (Logic)
Nonbeing
Nothing (Philosophy)
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“Walking the First Steps of His Camino with John of the Cross –
An Exploration of the Dark Night of Sense”
Robert Druecker
INTRODUCTION
John outlines a road, or camino, which one could walk who is seeking to arrive at union with
God, insofar as it is possible in our present life. According to John what is possible in this life is a union of
my powers and faculties with God, but not a permanent one (AMC II.5.2). The camino is known as the
Dark Night of the Soul. It has two major aspects—the Dark Night of Sense and the Dark Night of Spirit.
This lecture deals with the first of these.
According to John a verse from one of the Psalms (46:10) is saying to us: “Learn to be empty of
all things, that is, both internally and externally, and you will see how (cómo) I am God” (AMC II.15.5).
External things are things the soul experiences through its senses, feelings, and imagination. As the soul
moves into this first dark night, it actively works at releasing its hold on all particular things. Then at
some point, it notices that, independently of its wishes and efforts, it is being led away from its efforts
to let go into an experiencing of its tight grip gradually turning into a relaxed open hand. The soul is then
entering the passive dark night of sense. It begins to experience God as flowing into it. Correlated with
this sensed inflowing is the soul’s awakening to ways in which God is manifesting his divinity in the
world.
The lecture will be in four sections, with a conclusion. For the most part I’ll be taking you along
with me as I begin walking the camino.
Section I: THE STRIPPING OF OUR ATTACHMENT TO THE SENSES
1
�In the active dark night of sense, we “strip” ourselves of our attachment to the senses. John uses
the following analogy, in order to clarify the meaning of this stripping:
AS night deprives the eyes’ sight of the light which allows visibles to be seen by it, SO
the dark night deprives the senses’ apetito of the savor, or liking, which allows things to attract it
(based on AMC I.3.1&4).
John’s word apetito here means something like our word “dependency,” as in a drug dependency, or
“addiction” – an immoderate desire for something. 1
According to the analogy, my soul still has things, but is empty of them, in the sense that it is not
preoccupied with them. As John puts it: “Although it is true that the soul cannot help hearing and seeing
and smelling and tasting and touching, this is of no greater import, nor …, is [the soul] hindered more
than if it saw it not, heard it not, etc.” (AMC I.3.4). When the light of my preferred flavors is turned off,
my personal preferences for and concerns with things are deactivated. I now use things simply for their
practical value and to satisfy my true needs.
By being detached from my preferences and likings, I don’t fill my soul with images or memories
of things, with hopes and wishes for them, with plans to get them, and so on. The reason, the inner
logic, for turning off the light is precisely in order that my soul not become already filled up. For then
there would be no “room,” no “space,” for my soul to become filled with G’s “light” in becoming
enlightened (AMC I.4.1).
The way it works is that if I’m not occupying myself with enjoying and pursuing particular things,
then I’ll be filled with “food” that will allow me to taste “all” things. (AMC I.5.4), in a newly experienced
state, called “loving awareness” (AMC I.5.7). For dependencies and enlightenment are contraries, as are
closing tightly and opening loosely. The dependency orients me toward what is finite, determinate,
particular, limited, thing-like, creat-ed, being (ens, that which is) (AMC I.4.2). This orientation makes it
John of the Cross: Selected Writings, ed. Kieran Kavanaugh, O.C.D. (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), p. 61, and San Juan de la Cruz, Obra
completa, I, ed. Luce López-Baralt and Eulogio Pacho (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, S.A., 1991), pp. 125-26.
1
2
�difficult for me to become transformed into what is in-finite, in-determinate, general, un-limited, nothing, creat-ing, act of be-ing, of “is-ing,” (esse = ser, the is of that which is)—as I must if I am to realize
union with God (AMC I.4.3).
So, dependencies lead me, ineluctably, to turn toward the creaturely and, simultaneously, to
turn away from the creative (AMC I.12.3). John says that when you turn toward some thing you stop
“casting yourself on the all.” Moreover, if you are to hold the all, you have to hold it without wanting
anything (AMC II.13.12). Thus, the deadening of my preferential likings allows me eventually to turn
toward “the all” and to do so without wanting to get something out of it.
Note that it is not the particular characteristics of the thing or of the liking that are relevant
here. Even likings for religious and devotional activities and objects can bind me to and fill my soul with
determinate, particular things, in the same way (AMC I.5.2).
The way John sees it, there is a deepening sequence of involvements—from savoring and liking
(gustar) to tasting and knowing (saber can mean both at once), from there to possessing (poseer), and,
finally, to being (ser) (AMC II.13.11)—so that the light of gusto comes to anchor me—my understanding,
my sense of self, and my will—in being like the creaturely (AMC I.4.2).
Section II: THEOLOGICAL REFLECTION ON TYPES OF UNION
In order to help us better understand the background for the contraries of closing and opening
or of emptying and filling, John shares a theological reflection on union with God. There are two major
sorts of union. One is the substantial union of God’s dwelling in each creature. This union is always
there. The other is a union-by-likeness of the soul with God, a union that arises through a transformation
of the soul. This second union is there only when there is a likeness of love, that is, when God’s and the
soul’s wills are “con-form in one,” when the soul is transformed into God through love (AMC II.5.3).
There are two varieties of the second union, first, a union with respect to my acts of will and,
second, a union with respect to my habitual disposition of will. Union-by-likeness-of-act and union-by3
�likeness-of-disposition are the two versions of the second type of union. Hence, in order to live one or
the other kind of the second union, I must strip myself of my creature-focused acts or dispositions of
understanding, liking, sensing, and willing (AMC II.5.4).
What continues throughout is an ongoing sense of the substantial union, one which does not,
however, become thematic for me, one which I do not consciously register. It, nevertheless, contributes
to motivating my entry onto the camino. Then as I go on walking, my recognition of the substantial
union grows.
John uses another light analogy in order to illustrate this theological reflection. A smudgy and
dirty window on which the sun is shining appears dark, as we look through it; the sun lights it up only
fairly dimly. A clean and pure window on which the sun is shining, on the other hand, appears bright,
completely illuminated by the sun. In this second case the ray of light will transform and en-lighten the
window, so that, according to John, the latter will “appear to be the same ray and will give the same
light as the ray,” even though its nature is other than that of the ray. John says that the window is light
“by participation.” The soul is the window; the light is the divine “light of God’s esse (ser),” God’s act of
be-ing, or “is-ing,” 2 which is always “shining” on the creature (AMC II.5.6).
Perhaps we might say that substantial union refers to God’s dwelling in, lighting up, or is-ing
forth, the creature in each instant. Then when my soul becomes cleansed, it is able to become aware of
this indwelling, of God’s continual creating of me; and, simultaneously, it can allow this creative activity
to show itself clearly in the world.
Section III: FOUR SHIFTS IN THE WAY OF LIVING A SPIRITUAL LIFE
John introduces the word modo, in order to refer to the way I am walking along the
camino, or, more broadly, the way one is living one’s spiritual life. My mode includes my ways of
In many languages other than English, the form of the word itself shows whether it is referring to a being, a thing which is, or to an act of being, of “is-ing”—for instance, ὂν : εἶναι :: ens : esse :: étant : être :: Seiendes : Sein. In these cases one can immediately see whether the referent
is the “is-ing one,” the “is-er,” on the one hand, or its “is-ing,” on the other.
2
4
�apprehending, feeling, liking, enjoying, sensing, acting, responding, etc., my “how,” as I am walking.
Many religious people think that the modo appropriate to the camino is just any kind of self-reformation
or withdrawal from the world. But what they are actually seeking subconsciously is, according to John,
to have a feeling of delightful communication with God and of consolations from God. They are, in fact,
pursuing themselves in God, rather than searching in God in himself (AMC II.7.5). But John tells us that
as I walk I will not only eventually leave behind my beginner’s ways but will also abandon every such
personal mode, or way, as I come to “possess all modes,” when I “pass beyond the limits of my nature.”
Only if I accomplish this, will I become able to “enter what has no mode,” namely, God (AMC II.4.5).
John focuses on at least four prominent ways in which I may be living the devotional life as a
beginner—I rely on my faculty of imagination; I center my practice on discursive meditation; I make an
effort to keep on working hard, in order to make progress along the spiritual path; and, finally, I relate
myself to God in a way that reflects my earlier relation to my parents and significant others. I, as
beginner, am expected, at some point on the camino, to notice the indications that I need to move on
and to leave behind these four ways of practicing my religious life. If I follow through and do so, I’ll
change from being a beginner to being a proficient, in John’s vocabulary. This shift will coincide with my
transitioning out of the active Dark Night of Sense into the passive Dark Night of Sense.
It is important to note that for John “the imaginative faculty and the fantasy” are each an
“internal bodily sense” (AMC II.12.1). They are the primary senses that are active in meditation. For in
John’s vocabulary, meditation is “a discursive act through the medium of images, forms and figures,
made up and imagined by” the imagination and fantasy. It is discursive in that it involves a mental
running about (dis-cursus), going from one religious image or devotional object to another (AMC II.13.4).
5
�In discursive meditation, for instance, I may imagine and meditate on “Christ crucified” or “God
seated on a throne.” In doing so I wish to become inspired by thoughts and feelings that may arise in
response to that object (AMC II.12.3). In The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, 3 we read:
FIRST EXERCISE …. seeing the place. Here it is to be noted that, in a visible contemplation or meditation—as, for
instance, when one contemplates Christ our Lord, Who is visible—the composition will be to see with the sight of
the imagination the corporeal place where the thing is found which I want to contemplate…, as for instance, a
Temple or Mountain….
John’s directive, though, is that “the soul will have to empty itself of these images.” For it can
fantasize or imagine only what it has previously sensed through the external senses, namely, created
things. But created things “can have no proportion to God’s esse (ser)” (AMC II.12.4). That is, meditating
and imagining ultimately orient me toward and preserve my similarity to what is limited, particular,
determinate, and creat-ed—even though it is true that, at first, they had motivated me to step onto the
camino (AMC II.12.5).
I may be engaging in devotional work with my imagination when I am meditating discursively.
Or, alternatively, I may perform a daily ritual or recite particular prayers, such as saying the rosary. In
these ways, too, I am working at generating the proper emotions and motivations for leading me to turn
to God more often and to deepen my love for God. Although I see myself as working, in these ways, to
gain “spiritual sustenance,” John tells me that such nourishment “does not consist in working (trabajar)”
of any sort. At this stage I am not being “fed” through imagining, meditating, reciting prayers, or doing
spiritual reading. I must rather “allow the soul to be in quietude and repose” (AMC II.12.6).
Unbeknownst to me an opposition has arisen between what I think I’m doing and desire to be
doing, on the one hand, and what I am actually doing, on the other. For it turns out that even my initial
project of stripping away my preferences and likings (DN I.7.5)—or, in fact, any aspirations, or efforts
3
Trl. Fr. Elder Mullan, S.J. (NY: P.J. KENEDY & SONS, 1914), trl. modified; [45] - [47], italics added.
6
�(pretensiones), to please God or to have a more intense sense of God—is actually distracting and
drawing my soul away “from the peaceful stillness and sweet ease” (DN I.10.4).
A beginner who once or twice lets herself go and rests in such inner calm often reacts by forcing
herself to get back to work on the devotional project. In John’s view this betrays a misunderstanding of
her current location on the camino. Because she has not made the shift of modes, she thinks that in not
meditating she is being idle and lazy (AMC II.12.7). She may subconsciously have what has been called “a
gaining idea,” 4 an egoistic expectation of spiritual gain. She thinks she is here and God is there, and she
is making an effort to get there. Her sense that she was getting closer to gaining the sought-after
closeness to God used to give her emotional support (arrimo). But, now, when her devotional life has
lost its “juice” (DN I.7.5), she feels negligent or sinful (DN I.9.6; 10.4 & 2). She thinks, If I don’t feel I’m
working, that must mean I’m not doing anything at all (DN I.10.1).
However, in my enjoyment of the new state of “stillness and idleness, or ease (ocio) (DN I.10.1),
I may, instead, feel that there is no progress for me to make. I may gradually realize that if I let go of my
sense of myself as the doer, gave up caring (descuidado) about any inner or outer works, and stopped
“trying to do anything” (DN I.9.6), then I would be where I thought I was heading.
The shift in modes to which the beginners are being invited at this point is the major shift from
the active dark night of sense to the passive dark night of sense. In the latter, John says, “their faculties
are at rest and do not work (obrar) actively but rather passively, by receiving what God is working (obra)
in them” (AMC II.12.8). The difference is like that between continuing to labor at the work (obrando) of
4 S. Suzuki, in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (NY: Weatherhill, Inc., 1973), p. 41: “We say our practice should be without gaining ideas, without
any expectations, even of enlightenment. This does not mean, however, just to sit without any purpose. This practice free from gaining ideas is
based on the Prajñā Pāramitā Sūtra. However, if you are not careful the sutra itself will give you a gaining idea. It says, "Form is emptiness and
emptiness is form." But if you attach to that statement, you are liable to be involved in dualistic ideas: here is you, form, and here is emptiness,
which you are trying to realize through your form. So ‘form is emptiness, and emptiness is form’ is still dualistic. But fortunately, our teaching
goes on to say, ‘Form is form and emptiness is emptiness.’ Here there is no dualism. When you find it difficult to stop your mind while you are
sitting and when you are still trying to stop your mind, this is the stage of "form is emptiness and emptiness is form." But while you are practicing
in this dualistic way, more and more you will have oneness with your goal.”
7
�walking the camino, on the one hand, and enjoying (gozar) that walking as a resting in the end-state, on
the other (AMC II.14.7).
John points to three “signs” that I am now being invited to accept and experience this major
shift. One is that, to quote a song by the Rolling Stones, from a while back,
I can't get no satisfaction
'Cause I try and I try and I try and I try.
Precisely because I continue in my mode of trying, I find that I no longer feel satisfied after engaging in
my activities of fantasy and imagination and of discursive meditation. A second sign I notice is that I
even feel disinclined to take them up again. The third sign is that I now actually like to remain alone in
inner peace (AMC II.13.2-.4). My familiar devotional life has become “arid.” I experience life-giving water
only when I am at rest, not at work, not meditating, not imagining.
John highlights typical reactions that beginners may have when their familiar devotional modes
become “tasteless” to them. Some may become irritable and peevish, like a spoiled child; others may
blame themselves for the loss of taste and feel angry at themselves; yet others may “kill themselves,”
figuratively, by performing physical penances (DN I.5.1 & .3; 6.1).
When I consider what I now prefer and compare it with what I used to like to do, I notice
something very interesting. Remaining in inner peace is something I cannot do, or, rather, something I
can do only by not doing (wéi wú wéi 為無為, Dao De Jing 63). I can enjoy it only if I don’t seek to enjoy
it. As John says: “It is like the air which escapes as soon as one wants to grasp it in one’s fist” (DN I.9.6).
If I want to do anything on my own, I will only end up blocking the refreshing idleness (DN I.10.5). If I
come to notice what John says is there in my experience, I may vaguely sense that instead of having to
work to attain my goal I am already there.
According to John all the changes in mode are the result of God’s taking my soul out of the state
of beginner and placing it in that of proficient, making me a “contemplative,” instead of a meditator (DN
I.1.1).
8
�John proposes an analogy that can serve to characterize all four modes, and especially the last
one, which we’ll look at now. The beginner’s sense of self-in-relation-to-God has been like that of an
infant in relation to its loving mother. She “warms her infant with the heat of her breasts, nurses it with
good milk and tender food, and carries and caresses it in her arms” (DN I.1.2).
Based on its experience the infant has formed a complex of feelings, attitudes, dispositions,
images, memories, behaviors, etc., in relation to its mother. We shall borrow a term from Carl Jung and
call such a complex an imago. Then we could say that the infant had formed—and was still forming—its
Mom-imago. In going beyond John’s analogy, we might introduce a parallel Dad-imago, a voice of
authority, forbidding and judging, punishing and rewarding. According to Jung, even much later in adult
life, when the parents are dead, the individual still experiences them as powerfully present in their
imagos, “as important as if they were still alive.” His or her “love, admiration, resistance, hatred, and
rebelliousness still cling” to those imagos, which often bear little resemblance to the way the parents
actually were, so transfigured are they “by affection or distorted by envy.” 5
My beginner’s religious experience of God has been characterized not only by feeling comforted
and nurtured, giving rise to an analogue of the Mom-imago, but also by feelings of prohibitions, of
rewards, of reprimands, and of forgiveness, generating an analogue of the Dad-imago. My complex
sense of who-God-is-in-relation-to-who-I-am will be referred to as my God-imago.
As is the case with Jung’s parental imagos, my God-imago is not limited to a visual image or to a
representation or concept of God, but includes the emotions I feel and the memories and attitudes I
have developed in relation to God. From the cradle on I have been unwittingly fashioning this Godimago from strong feelings, attitudes, and meanings, originally called forth in me by my everyday
exchanges with my parents, and other family members, neighborhood and school friends, and so on.
5
C. G. Jung, Jung Contra Freud: The 1912 Lectures on the Theory of Psychoanalysis, trl. R.F.C. Hull (Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 52.
9
�These real and fantasized interactions have made their contributions to my God-imago. I, as beginner,
have come to sense God as a living entity whose experienced “communications” to me I interpret as
they show up my thoughts and feelings and in the events of my life. 6
At the beginning of the camino, my initial love of God was needed in order for me to become
capable of taking the initial steps of working at stripping my dependencies of the liking for sensory and
temporal things (AMC II.7.2; 14.2). But the feeling of God’s presence led me to relate to God as to an
actual individual entity (ens), though an invisible, non-worldly one. This, in turn, led me to desire
consolations and rewards or to fear reprimands and punishments from the “God” that I’d projected. I
tried to “manage” my relation to God in a transactive way. But the God-imago to which I have oriented
myself cannot be similar to or proportionate to God (AMC II.4.3). For no creature bears a likeness to
God’s esse (ser), although there are “traces” of God in creatures (AMC II.8.3).
For this reason John’s analogy implies that a shift away from my God-imago is needed. He
depicts it as follows:
As the infant grows bigger, the mother gradually takes away the pleasure of her caress, and, hiding her gentle,
delicate love, puts bitter aloe juice on the sweet breast, and putting the infant down from her arms, makes it walk
on its own feet, so that, by losing the attributes of an infant, it may give itself to more important and substantial
things (DN I.1.2; cf. 1 Cor 13:11).
Just as the mother’s weaning induces the infant to alter its Mom-imago, so does God’s intervention of
“weaning” bring on the new experience of distaste and aridity. I hear this tastelessness as a “call” to set
aside my old God-imago, which accompanied my previous devotional practices. Now I leave behind i)
feelings of dejection when God seems no longer to be consoling me, ii) concerns to obey God by
This understanding of the formation of the child’s God-imago follows the view of Ana Maria Rizzuto, first presented in “Critique of the
Contemporary Literature in the Scientific Study of Religion” at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (1970).
“God-imago” is used above instead of her term “image of God.” Rizzuto says she introduced her notion of the image of God, in order to
distinguish it from the philosophical-theological concept of God. In contrast to the image of God, “the concept of God comes to us through
whatever teachings, readings, liturgies, etc. have been presented to us.” “Although concept and image may converge in some respects, they
may also diverge significantly in others.” Rizzuto later expanded her account in the book The Birth of the Living God: A Psychoanalytic Study
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
6
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�following spiritual maxims, or iii) feelings of closeness from meditating on my favorite religious images
(DN I.3.1).
In walking on its own feet, my soul reorients itself away from looking off to its God-imago, as
Comforting, Prohibiting, Rewarding Parent. Instead, it becomes sensitive and responsive to the way in
which it is now taking each step on the camino on which it is walking. What I used to feel as the
disobedience of prohibitions I now re-experience as a barrier to beginning to live a life beyond the
natural.
Ideally my soul soon comes to realize that its previous mode was motivated by “fondness for
itself and for all things” (DN I.Exposit.1). It senses that, at bottom, as John puts it, it wanted God to want
what it wanted. So, what it did not enjoy was not God’s will and what it liked was God’s will. It was
measuring God by itself (DN I.7.3). Now God is weaning it “from the breasts of all these enjoyments and
likings” (D I.7.5), and from its God-imago in toto.
Section IV: INTO WHAT DO THE FOUR CHANGES OF MODO SHIFT?
Having considered the four modes out of which I, as beginner, need to pass, in order to become
a proficient and to enter the passive dark night, we now look at the into-which. There is a single mode
into which God is leading my beginner’s soul. That one mode has been referred to above as the inner
peace of contemplative, loving awareness.
John writes that the state of contemplation is one of “attention,” of “awareness (noticia)” 7
which is, first of all, “general …, without particular intellectual insights (intelligencias) and without
When speaking about contemplation, John of the Cross doesn’t regularly use the ordinary words (conocimiento, conocer, saber) that are
translated as “knowledge” or “know.” Instead, he uses a word, noticia, which is the Spanish translation of the Latin notitia, derived from a verb
meaning become or be acquainted or familiar with, be aware of. He seems to have in mind the sense in which Augustine notitia in his
Confessions.
Augustine first used the verb in Book VII.x.16 in reference to an experience in which he entered into what is innermost (intima) in
him and “by some sort of eye of [his] soul … saw … unchangeable Light.” He then says: “One who has become aware of (novit) the truth has
become aware of this Light, and one who has become aware of this Light has become aware of eternity. Love has become aware of this Light.”
Eternity is not the sort of “thing” of which we can acquire knowledge, whether cognoscentia or scientia. But, as least briefly, he and his mother
7
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�understanding (entender) what [the attention and general awareness is] about,” and, second, “amorous
and tender (amorosa)” (AMC II.13.4).
It is general not in the usual, conceptual sense, according to which a genus is more general than a
species. Or it is not that I’ve turned from imagining this or that individual devotional image on my wall to
recognizing a group of them as particular instances of a certain kind of religious object. 8 Rather when my
mind is not focused on objects, either sensory or conceptual, it is turned toward “the all,” in a state of
“clear and simple” awareness.
Contemplation might be experienced as “amorous and tender” in being like a look of warmth and
mutual understanding between two friends, in contrast to an objectifying gaze. It would be analogous to
an affectionate caress, as opposed to a medical palpation. 9 An artist recognized her periods of amorous
awareness, when,
by the way in which one looked at a thing, it was possible to bring about an intense feeling for and belief in its
living reality. … a complete transfiguration of the common sense, expedient view where … people and things
existed mainly in terms of their usefulness; it brought a change to a world of living essences … offering a source of
delight simply through the fact of being themselves. In short, it was a transfiguration comparable in a small way
to the transfiguration of falling in love. 10
My amorous and tender awareness, then, would be “a transformation of the world,” 11 in which I
experience people and things as more alive and more real, in the way a lover or an artist does.
became aware of, or “touched,” “the Wisdom by which all things were made,” which is “eternal” (IX.x.24). Thus, our experiencing eternity
much more like touching than grasping or grabbing, as in conceptual knowledge.
Later in Book X (xix.28 – xxiii.23) he uses both verb and noun in conjunction with his desire to come in contact with God and to
remain attached to Him. He realized that in order to pursue that desire he had “to pass beyond memory” (xvii.26), to awareness.
Here Augustine used notitia to refer to awareness of the following things:
1) of the blissful life, which he was seeking, in seeking God, and which all human beings want: “Where have they become aware of
(noverunt) it? … I don’t know how they became aware of it and so have it in I-know-not-what notitia.”
2) of numbers, which human beings have in a different kind of notitia, than that of the blissful life.
3) of eloquence, which even some who were never eloquent wished, from an inner notitia, to have, when they happened to
experience others being eloquent.
4) of joy, the notitia of which stuck so fast in his memory that he could be mindful of it, even when he was sad. All human beings
have had an experience of joy, and that’s what they call the blissful life. It is the notitia of that which they have in mind, when they want the
blissful life.
The above examples suggest that John of the Cross may be using noticia to refer to a preconceptual, undifferentiated sort of
familiarity, an awareness that is obscure in that sense.
8 Here John is not using “general” to refer to knowledge by concepts—as in “the concept of body includes heaviness”—as opposed to
particulars known by perception—for instance, “this book is heavy.”
9 The two examples in this sentence come from Erwin Straus, who offers a wonderful discussion of the contrast between detached and involved
awareness in Vom Sinn der Sinne (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1956), pp. 329-350.
10 M. Milner (Joanna Field), On Not Being Able to Paint (Madison, CN: International Universities Press, 1957), p. 21, italics added.
11 This is how J.-P. Sartre characterizes the way emotions alter our experiencing of the world. See his The Emotions: Outline of a Theory (NY: The
Philosophical Library, 1948), pp. 52-58.
12
�Moreover, in the state of contemplation, I do not experience an object of consciousness, do not
encounter anything as if it were standing opposite to me, the subject of consciousness. Contemplation is
“pure” in the sense that it is “pure of object-plus-subject.” My awareness is one with that of which there
is awareness, in a unity out of which both subject and object subsequently emerge. As a state of mind
without “yet a subject or an object,” it is prior to the correlation of subject with object: 12 “The moment
of seeing a color or hearing a sound … is prior not only to the thought that the color or sound is the
effect of an external object or that one is sensing it, but also [prior] to the judgment of what the color or
sound might be.” 13 In this sense contemplation would be an immediate experience. 14
At the very beginning of each moment of awareness,
there is a fleeting instant of pure awareness just before you conceptualize the thing, before you identify it…. It is
that flashing split second just as you focus your eyes on the thing, just as you focus your mind on the thing, just
before you objectify it, … and segregate it from the rest of existence…. just before you start thinking about it—
before your mind says, “Oh, it’s a dog.”
Instead of focusing on what I perceive, imagine, or think, in order to cognize it, label it, and think about
it, in contemplation I “experience a thing as an un-thing … experience a softly flowing [instant] of pure
experience that is interlocked with the rest of reality.” 15 Understood in this sense contemplation can be
seen to open me to what is in-finite, in-determinate, un-limited, un-thing, and, thereby, to prepare me
for selfaware union with the divine creating, God’s esse, or is-ing, as was stated in Section I.
CONCLUSION
My soul is “holding” its “direction-toward (advertencia) God together with [its] loving God.”
John analogizes this holding-together to my holding my eyes open, in order to allow the light “to be
communicated passively” to me, just as God “is being communicated passively to the soul.” This “divine
12 William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism and A Pluralistic Universe, “DOES 'CONSCIOUSNESS' EXIST?” (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1971),
p.5. Also: “The relation itself is a part of pure experience; one of its 'terms' becomes the subject…, the other becomes the object.”
13
NISHIDA Kitaro, An Inquiry into the Good, tr. M. Abe and C. Ives, modified (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 3-4; italics added.
14 Such selfawareness is not to be confused with self-consciousness—the reflective I think which “must be able to accompany all my
presentations” (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B132)—in which pure contemplation first splits into subject and object. “Selfawareness” is an
attempt to translate into English Sartre’s “conscience (de) soi,” which he uses to refer to the pre-reflective I think. See his “L'Être et le Néant:
Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique (Paris : Éditions Gallimard, 1943), p. 20.
15 Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, Mindfulness in Plain English (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2011), p. 132; italics added. One way to
sense what this instant of pure experience is like would be to compare “what you see with your peripheral vision as opposed to the hard focus
of normal or central vision” (p. 132).
13
�light” “is being poured” into my soul (se le infunde), in a way beyond the natural (AMC II.15.2-3).
Thereby my will “is changed into life of divine love” (LFL 2.34). Now my soul experiences what God
stated in the Psalm referred to in the introduction: “you will see how (cómo) I am God” (AMC II.15.5).
My soul sees how God is God in seeing the world in a fresh way, beyond the natural.
In order to convey how God is God, John (LFL 4.6) turns to the depiction of Wisdom in the Book
of Wisdom (7:24-27): “‘Wisdom is more mobile than all movable things’ … because she is the origination
and root of all movement; and … ‘remaining within herself stable and permanent, she makes all things
new (innova; καινίζει).’” He says that this means that “Wisdom is more active than all active things.” In
this movement, according to John, my soul is the moved. It has been “awakened from the dream of
natural vison to vision beyond the natural.” From its new perspective—from which it is seeing how God
is God, how Wisdom is Wisdom—it has the loving, general awareness (noticia) of that stable divine life
as originating and as making all things new, each instant. Each instant it experiences creatures’
movements as being in tune (armonía) with God’s moving (LFL 4.6), as emanating from “God’s being-atwork (ἐνεργείας)” (Wis 7:26).
Key to Abbreviations
AMC – Ascent of Mount Carmel
DN – Dark Night
LFL – Living Flame of Love
14
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
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pdf
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14 pages
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Walking the First Steps of His Camino with John of the Cross: An Exploration of the Dark Night of Sense
Description
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Typescript of a lecture delivered on November 11, 2022, by Annapolis tutor Robert Druecker as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Druecker describes his lecture: "According to John a verse from one of the Psalms is saying to us: Learn to be empty of all things, both outward and inward, and you will see how I am God. Outward things are things the soul experiences through its senses, feelings, and imagination. As the soul moves into this first dark night, it actively works at releasing its hold on all particular things. Then at some point, it notices that, independently of its wishes and efforts, it is being led away from an active doing into a receptive undergoing. Its tight grip is gradually becoming a relaxed open hand. The soul is entering the passive dark night of sense. It begins to experience God as flowing into it. Correlated with this sensed inflowing is the soul’s awakening to ways in which God is manifesting his divinity in the world."
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Druecker, Robert
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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2022-11-11
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A signed permission form has been received stating: "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a copy of my typescript available online"
Type
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text
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pdf
Subject
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John of the Cross, Saint, 1542-1591. Noche oscura del alma. English
Mysticism
Purgative way to perfection
Language
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English
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LEC_Druecker_Robert_2022-11-11
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/785cbc59f7ea97ccf71c972147cdefd2.mp4
9e136c955992d09c6c2954de8e62da68
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Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
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mp4
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00:58:49
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Vital Exuberance: Goethe on What Plants Want
Description
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Video recording of a lecture delivered on September 15, 2023, by Daniel Carranza as part of the Formal Lecture Series.<br /><br />The lecture conducts a close reading of Goethe's poem on the "Metamorphosis of Plants" by situating it within Goethe's larger scientific endeavor to understand what it means for a being to be a specifically living being, in particular what the kind of wholeness exhibited by the organism, whether plant, animal, or human, looks like. Particular attention will be paid to the philosophical resources upon which Goethe draws in his scientific investigation of nature, in particular Aristotle's four causes, the fourth, formal one of which is decisive for Goethe's morphology or study of living forms, and Spinoza's conatus, which Goethe understood as the organism's own endeavor to persevere in and more fully realize its own being.<br /><br />Professor Carranza is an assistant professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures at Harvard University.
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Carranza, Daniel
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St. John's College
Coverage
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Annapolis, MD
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2023-09-15
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A signed permission form has been received stating: "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: make a recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John’s College Greenfield Library; make a recording of my lecture available online; make typescript copies of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John’s College Greenfield Library; make a copy of my typescript available online."
Type
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moving image
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mp4
Subject
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Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1749-1832--Knowledge--Botany
Plant morphology
Spinoza, Benedictus de, 1632-1677
Aristotle
Language
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English
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LEC_Carranza_Daniel_2023-09-15_ac
Friday night lecture
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/f727c3af49e6189da435e07c2bf803ed.mp3
b68a444242017856e1a17281af33fe4b
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Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
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wav
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01:15:48
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Visual epistemology: a humanist perspective
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on March 23, 2018 by Johanna Drucker as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
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Drucker, Johanna, 1952-
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Annapolis, MD
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2018-03-23
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A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audio recording of my lecture available online. Make typescript copies of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a copy of my typescript available online."
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sound
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mp3
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English
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lec Drucker 3-23-18
Friday night lecture
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/4cf2d001991ea4fced6e2ff9f66e25c0.mp3
c39b5cf879c26518d77b0f616d64de74
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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
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Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
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audiocassette
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00:50:31
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Virtuality Is Its Own Reward
Description
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on September 12, 1997, by Sven Birkerts as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
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Birkerts, Sven
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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1997-09-12
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Permission has been given to make this available online.
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sound
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mp3
Subject
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Digital media--Social aspects
Literature and technology
Books and reading--Technological innovations
Internet--Social aspects
Language
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English
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LEC_Birkerts_Sven_1997-09-12_ac
Friday night lecture
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/fa16d7096db6ebc206f05779755ce843.mp3
d8c94f9ed2229b6d17b6bb4f85f531a0
Dublin Core
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Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
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wav
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00:47:13
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Vergil's Aeneid and Augustine's Confessions: Reading, Writing, Being Human (Steiner Lecture)
Description
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered by Sarah Ruden, author, poet, and visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, on January 17, 2020, as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Dr. Ruden describes her lecture topic as: “talking about the great book as a means for both readers and writers to regain some sense of the individual self in a modern society--that is, one in which power has become distant, inexorable, and incomprehensible. Vergil and Augustine were creatures of early modernity, and their struggles for self-expression and communication have interesting and inspiring commonalities.”
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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2020-01-17
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Virgil. Aeneis
Augustine, of Hippo, Saint, 354-430. Confessiones
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Ruden_Sarah_2020-01-17
Friday night lecture
Steiner lecture
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Two Good Men in Aristotle’s Ethics, or Does a Liberal Education Improve One’s Character?
Joseph C. Macfarland
A lecture given at St. John’s College, Annapolis, MD, August 26, 2016,
and at St. John’s College, Santa Fe, NM, September 9, 20161
Introduction
Does a St. John’s education lead one to become a more virtuous human being? Does it
improve one’s character? Early in my tenure as a tutor I recall this being discussed by the faculty.
I don’t recall what prompted the discussion or the details, but I vividly recall two things. First,
one tutor drew our attention to the “Statement of the Program”—at the time, the principal
document used to inform prospective students about the College—this tutor drew attention to the
statement as evidence that we, as a community, professed that a liberal education has moral
consequences, that it prepares students to be good citizens. The statement begins:
St. John’s College is a community dedicated to liberal education. Liberally educated
human beings, the college believes, acquire a lifelong commitment to the pursuit of
fundamental knowledge and to the search for unifying ideas. They are intelligently and
critically appreciative of their common heritage and conscious of their social and moral
obligations. They are well equipped to master the specific skills of any calling, and they
possess the means and the will to become free and responsible citizens.2
If our liberal education supplies both “the means and the will” to free and responsible citizenship,
wouldn’t this mean that liberal education renders free and responsible citizenship inevitable?
Would not the attainment of this free and responsible citizenship tacitly presuppose not merely
an awareness of social and moral obligations, but a conduct of life based on that awareness?
The second thing I recall is that, when this came up in the faculty meeting, several tutors
responded with pronounced skepticism: they were reluctant to assent to the claim that a liberal
1
This version is the one given in Santa Fe; it briefly expands and clarifies a few arguments from the version given in
Annapolis. The need for these clarifications became apparent in the course of the Annapolis question period.
2
From the 2009-10 statement. The 1993-94 Catalog puts it somewhat differently: “Liberal education should seek to
develop free and rational men and women committed to the pursuit of knowledge in its fundamental unity,
intelligently appreciative of their common cultural heritage, and conscious of their social and moral obligations.
Such men and women are best equipped to master the specific skills of any calling and to become mature, competent
and responsible citizens of a free society.” The 2009-10 statement appears to make the “pursuit of fundamental ideas”
primary, and consciousness of “social and moral obligations” secondary, whereas the 1993 statement appears to put
them on the same level, or, at the very least, it introduces them simultaneously. I suspect that our claims to the
practical benefits of a liberal education have become slightly weaker over time, but to be sure one would have to
undertake a wider study of how the college describes itself.
Two good men: the virtuous and the decent, page 1
�education prepares one to be a good citizen or a moral human being. This skepticism was not
surprising: one can see that the Statement of the Program itself hedges on its claim. The
Statement stops short of claiming that the attainment of free and responsible citizenship comes as
a consequence of this awareness of moral obligations. And to say that liberally educated persons
are “conscious of their… moral obligations” is not the same as saying that they will act on them.
This reluctance to claim a moral outcome for liberal education arises partly from an
uncertainty about the connection between our primary activity, the intellectual activity of reading
and asking questions about what we read, and the practical conduct of our lives. Our founding
document, the Meno, begins—of course—with Socrates asserting that he does not know how
virtue is acquired, whether by teaching or learning, by practice or by nature… because he does
not know what virtue is. If, contrary to this, we were to give the Statement of the St. John’s
Program an unguarded, robust interpretation, as a tutor I would appear to be in the position of
saying: unlike Socrates, I know what virtue is, I know how it is acquired, and the “means and the
will” to practice virtue and good citizenship are acquired through liberal education as I practice it.
I would be laying claim to an expertise that Socrates claimed to lack; I would be implying that
Socrates was either naïve or ironically deceitful. And if in seminar I were to ask, “what is virtue?”
I would be asking questions only for the sake of drawing out answers, and not because I had a
real question that I was puzzling over. More troubling still, if we tutors knew what virtue was,
and how it is acquired, we might be expected to possess virtue, and to exhibit it in our lives, both
professional and private. Or, at the very least, we might be expected to have an argument ready
at hand for why—when knowing what virtue is—we preferred the alternative.
Faced with this difficulty, one option would be to disavow any practical consequences for
liberal education, and put the emphasis on liberal education as an intellectual pursuit. We could
ask, “what is virtue?” and “how is it acquired?” we could formulate plausible answers and test
them in the crucible of our conversations, with no expectation that anyone should become more
virtuous on account of this activity. The questions could have no more import for how we live
than answering the question of whether light is a wave or a particle.3 We could imitate Socrates
from the Apology, who denies that he has the “art” of making those around him better human
3
Alternatively, if a liberal education does improve one’s character, and if asking whether light is a wave or a
particle is an integral part of a liberal education, it might be incumbent upon us to say why it is that asking whether
light is a wave or a particle ultimately contributes to improving one’s character (regardless of how one answers the
question).
Two good men: the virtuous and the decent, page 2
�beings and better citizens; who calls anyone who has this art, “blessed” (20c). But this would be
a little disingenuous, insofar as Socrates denies he provides a service to the youths who follow
him, whereas tutors do, I believe, think of themselves as providing a service.
So we navigate awkwardly—although in good faith—between the extremes of making
too bold a claim for the practical import of a liberal education, and making none at all. We are
wary of professing a fullness of knowledge that would recommend one specific way of life, but
neither do we want to confess an ignorance that is utterly impotent. I have framed this problem in
terms of where it puts the tutors, as those who offer or who serve a liberal education, but the
question stands for all members of our community, students and staff, who devote themselves to
this education: what, if any, are the practical and especially the moral consequences of this
activity?
To address this question, I would like to turn to Aristotle’s Ethics. Aristotle, unlike
Socrates, says what virtue is, and says how it is acquired. The Ethics looks like it may be an
easier place to get one’s footing. The Ethics seemed promising for a second reason as well: a
long time ago it was brought to my attention that, if you were to consider what a “good man” is,
the English word “good” might translate at least three words in Greek: agathos, spoudaios, and
epieikês. A fine translation may distinguish these three words, but the words do sometimes seem
synonymous. Agathos is the word most frequently and naturally translated as “good.” I will not
dwell on it because it poses no difficulties on the surface, and if I tried to penetrate that surface in
order to give a precise account of the “good,” I would never get around to the other two.
Spoudaios and epieikês are more foreign to us and harder to render well. It is possible that
spoudaios and epieikês are two ways of talking about the same human type; the two words often
share the same opposite, phaulos, meaning “petty” or “base.”4 But I think they point to different
ways of being “good,” different forms of human goodness. For reasons I will get into soon,
spoudaios could be translated as “virtuous,” whereas epieikês might be translated as “decent.”
My enterprise will be to travel about the Ethics probing passages where the “virtuous” and the
“decent” appear, with a view to teasing them apart. To put it bluntly, the hunch that I want to
explore is: is it possible that a liberal education could never be expected to render you spoudaios,
or virtuous, but it might be expected to render you epieikês, or decent? So I will draw portraits of
4
Passages where spoudaios and epieikês seem to be used synonymously include 1.13.1102b7 and 9.2.12165a7,
9.8.1169a16. For passages in which spoudaios and epieikês have the same opposite, phaulos: compare 3.4.1113a25
with 3.5.1113b14.
Two good men: the virtuous and the decent, page 3
�these two human types, and then say something about how one becomes either kind, and whether
what we do here is conducive to that end. To be honest, I admit now that this will mean
committing the sin of evading, or at least skirting, the central question about the relation of
knowledge, ignorance, and virtue, but perhaps this diversion will position us to better address
that question another time.5
The virtuous (spoudaios)
The Ethics begins by asking what is the good for man (agathos); the answer—easily said,
but not well understood—is that the good for man is “happiness.” In the effort to understand
what happiness is, Aristotle’s starting point is to assume that we know the difference between
someone who does something passably well, and someone who does it very well: we recognize
the difference between a guitarist and a “good” guitarist. The good guitarist is distinguished by
his virtue as a guitarist. The word “good” in this passage here translates spoudaios: what sets
apart the good guitarist, one serious about his activity, is his virtue. When this connection
between virtue and spoudaios is first introduced, neither appears to have a moral connotation.
The initially amoral character of the inference is apparent when Aristotle says that it is the virtue
of the eye that makes the eye function well and be a good eye, that is, a spoudaios eye (2.6
1106a18).6 If the spoudaios guitarist is one who plays the guitar well, then the good man, one
who is simply spoudaios, does well whatever it is humans beings characteristically do.
This connection between being spoudaios and having virtue is sufficiently strong that one
might simply translate spoudaios as “virtuous.” In English, the noun “virtue” has an adjective
derived from it, that is, “virtuous”: if a man has “virtue,” then you would say, he is virtuous. In
Greek, surprisingly, there is no corresponding adjective derived from the word for virtue, arête:
if a man has arête, then you would say, he is spoudaios.7
5
I recognize that in many respects my reading of the Nicomachean Ethics is not original. I have been much
influenced and educated by colleagues and friends over the years, especially in a graduate course taught by Leon
Kass, and as a teaching assistant to Amy Kass, both at the University of Chicago between 1989 and 1993. More
recently my reading of the Ethics was much informed by Eric Salem’s In Pursuit of the Good: Intellect and Action
in Aristotle’s Ethics (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2010) and Ronna Burger’s Aristotle’s Dialogue with Socrates
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Joe Sachs’s translation (Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing, 2002)
has proven useful to me, as my notes show.
6
Interestingly, in this passage as Aristotle switches his object from the eye, to a horse, and then to a human being,
he changes from spoudaios to agathos: a spoudaios eye, a spoudaios horse, and an agathos human (2.6.1106a23).
7
In Aristotle’s Categories: “Sometimes, moreover, the quality possesses a well-defined name, but the thing that
partakes of its nature does not also take its name from it. For instance, a good man [ho spoudaios] is good from
Two good men: the virtuous and the decent, page 4
�Yet spoudaios indicates not only the acquisition of the virtue belonging to a given
activity, it also highlights the attitude and the effort that is the precondition for acquiring that
virtue. The most immediate translation of spoudaios may be “earnest” or “serious”; it is an
adjective derived from a noun, spoudê, which means “haste, zeal, or effort.” Spoudaia things are
“weighty” and “worth serious attention.” How does one become a good guitarist? Virtue or skill
does not belong to us by nature; practice and application, effort and zeal are the conditions for
obtaining it. One becomes a spoudaios guitarist by taking the guitar seriously and playing it often.
Taking something seriously is itself an action, expressed by the verb spoudazô. One can take any
number of things seriously; examples mentioned by Aristotle include honor, wealth, and
offspring (7.4 1143a30). What you are serious about shapes not only what you do, but insensibly,
over time, it shapes who you are: if you take wealth very seriously, too seriously, then you will
become ungenerous, illiberal, or unfree (4.1 1119b30). The man having all the ethical virtues, the
great-souled man, is serious about only few things: he does not take minor setbacks seriously,
and he does not “take to heart” things that cannot be avoided (4.3 1125a10-15 ff., Loeb trans.);
but his gait and voice show that concerning a few things, he is the most serious of all.8 The man
having all ethical virtues is ho spoudaios, the serious one. Sachs translates this as “the man of
serious stature” or “serious worth.”9 I will prefer the simple English word “virtuous”: so that
whenever this lecture refers to the “virtuous” man, I mean very precisely the one Aristotle calls
spoudaios.
How does one become virtuous? Ethical virtues, like skills, are acquired by practice, you
have to work at them.10 You become just by performing just actions in transactions with others;
you acquire courage by acting as a courageous man would in dangerous situations. To a young
adult, the vicious action may be pleasurable and the virtuous action may be painful; punishment
is generally required to deter us from one and steer us towards the other. How you are raised and
habituated from childhood makes all the difference (2.1 1103b25). Correct penalties and rewards
possessing the quality, virtue [arête]. We do not, however, derive the term, ‘good’ from the other term, ‘virtue.’ Yet
this is seldom the case” (10b6-10, Loeb translation). Passages in the Ethics in which to have the virtues is to be
spoudaios: 6.12 1143b22-30; 6.12 1144a11-18.
8
From the statement that he takes only a few things seriously, one might have inferred that he is a buffoon, but the
statements about his slow gait and low voice suggest that he is uncommonly serious about those few things. Later,
Aristotle speaks of the one who strives (spoudazô) to acquire the noble for himself (9.8 1168b25): this seems to be
the spoudaios man in the full sense.
9
In his translation of the Poetics, Benardete and Davis similarly translate spoudaios the “man of stature” (Aristotle:
On Poetics, trans. Seth Benardete and Michael Davis [South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2002]).
10
Ethics 2.1 1103a32. Sachs’s translation points to the root referring to work (energesantes).
Two good men: the virtuous and the decent, page 5
�are meted out first by the parents and later by the laws. It is not enough to be well-cared for and
guided in your youth, you have to pursue correct actions in adulthood in order to establish this
disposition as part of your character.
All of this you already know. The upshot for the present is that the work of the classroom
seems to contribute little to becoming virtuous. Aristotle points this out periodically through the
Ethics. He says that knowing what the virtues are does not help the virtuous man to act
virtuously, since virtuous action arises not from what he knows, but from his character.11 And
Aristotle derides people who, thinking that they are philosophizing, expect to become virtuous
(spoudaioi) merely by making speeches rather than by doing what is right.12
Yet Aristotle also says that his inquiry is not merely for the sake of knowing what virtue
is and thinking about it, but for the sake of becoming good (agathos), for the sake of acquiring
virtue and exercising it.13 We seem to be left with a paradox: the inquiry into happiness and
virtue aims at making one good, but the completion of this inquiry, knowing what happiness is,
and what virtue is, seems insufficient to make one good.
To think about this disjunction between knowing the good and becoming good, we have
to go back almost to the beginning of the book. In the early chapters Aristotle considers the
opinion, expressed in the Republic, that if one knew the good in itself, on the basis of knowing
the “universal good,” one would also know the particular goods, the things that are good for man,
and knowing them, one would also choose them. Against this Aristotle argues that “good”
(agathos) is meant in several ways, so there is no “common good that is one and universal”
(Sachs trans., 1.6 1196a28). Even if there were some one thing good-in-itself, it would not be
something that could be possessed and enacted by a human (1.6 1096b30). Aristotle relents
somewhat in this critique and admits that there may well be an underlying reason we use the
11
6.12 1143b23-25. “We are not rendered any more capable of healthy and vigorous action by knowing the science
of medicine or of physical training.” This is said to bring into question whether prudence is necessary to be virtuous;
it is possible that the statement is retracted or qualified in the subsequent course of the argument. As it turns out,
prudence is necessary to being virtuous in the complete sense, but this intellectual virtue still may not require a
theoretical understanding of what virtue is.
12
Ethics 2.4.1105b13. Burger, p. 55. Compare 10.9 1179a5, where it is said that speeches are not sufficient to make
men decent (epieikês), discussed briefly below.
13
2.2 1103b26; 10.9 1172b1. The context in 10.9 implies that it is not sufficient to know what virtue is, one must
bring it into being, and because this requires a good upbringing and practice into adulthood, bringing virtue into
being requires a political science that can prescribe good laws. But this would imply that the one who inquires into
and learns what happiness is is himself not made virtuous by it, but only learns how to frame laws that might lead to
the happiness of others. The passage in 2.2 seems to indicate that coming to know what virtue is should be good not
only for others, but also good for oneself.
Two good men: the virtuous and the decent, page 6
�word “good” in the related ways that we do, but he still denies that this underlying connection
between the different ways of saying “good” could form the basis of how knowledgeable men
seek the good in their lives (1.6 1196b26).
In this way Aristotle descends quickly from the good-in-itself to the good-for-man or to
happiness. But even asserting that the good is “happiness” does not advance his inquiry very far,
because, as we noted, the word “happiness” requires explication. This brings us to where we
began: Aristotle explicates happiness by ascertaining the work characteristic of a human being,
and in this context he observes that the difference between the guitarist simply and the good
guitarist, or the spoudaios guitarist, is that the good guitarist has the virtue of playing guitar. The
movement of the argument is from the good-in-itself, which either does not exist or cannot be
known, to the good-for-man, which is our end but whose form is often debated, to the good
human being, the spoudaios human being, whose goodness is recognizable. The good-in-itself is
hidden or obscure, whereas the virtuous man is a form of goodness recognizable to us.
Thus, the virtuous man takes the place of the good-in-itself as a paradigm for recognizing
and attaining the human good.14 Whereas we mostly find virtuous actions painful, the virtuous
(spoudaios) man finds them pleasurable. What the virtuous man finds pleasant is pleasant by
nature (1.8.1099a7-24). Whatever seems good to the virtuous man is good in fact.15 There is no
science of the good-in-itself to distinguish the true good from the merely apparent good, but
there exists a human being for whom what appears and what is are the same. When judging what
is pleasurable and what is noble, the virtuous man serves as our measure (metron). Aristotle
defines virtue, but you cannot become virtuous simply by acting from your comprehension of the
definition; you must look toward a virtuous human being and act the way he acts. The fact that
the spoudaios man is the measure for us is therefore a sign of the limit to which knowing whatvirtue-is can be the means for becoming virtuous.16
14
In the chapter on the good as such (1.6), Aristotle entertains the view that one might have the good simply as a
pattern, paradeigma, by which one might know the various goods that can be possessed or carried out, but he then
observes that those skilled in the arts or sciences (epistêmai) do not in fact look to the good in itself in order to
produce a good product (1.6 21097a1-13). The spoudaios man seems to take the place of the good in itself as the
pattern or model by which we know good particulars. To be clear, Aristotle does not say he is a paradigm; that is the
inference I have made in connecting 1.6.21097a1-13 with 3.4.1113a25 (below).
15
3.4.1113a25; cf. 10.5.1176a17. In the first passage Aristotle uses spoudaios three times in short succession,
suggesting that this more than anything else characterizes him. Later, Aristotle says, “as has been said, virtue and the
virtuous [spoudaios] man seem to be the standard in everything” (9.4.1166a13, Loeb trans.).
16
Perhaps I am simply saying that, according to Aristotle, it is not sufficient to say, “virtue is knowledge,” as
Socrates often implies in Plato’s dialogues. See Ronna Burger on this question.
Two good men: the virtuous and the decent, page 7
�Given this disjunction between knowledge and practice, if the primary aim of a liberal
education is “fundamental knowledge” and “unifying ideas,” there seems to be little prospect that
it will lead to us to acquire a virtuous character. To acquire virtue requires serious application
and repeated practice of noble actions. It is true, to flourish in a liberal education requires an
analogous discipline and zeal. Not accidentally, the English word “student” is derived from a
Latin word, studeo, which means, “to be zealous and diligent,” and “to apply oneself” to
something; it is a fine translation of spoudazô. In fact, in at least one medieval Latin translation
of Aristotle’s Politics, spoudaios is translated as studiosus: in its origin, a “student” is someone
zealous and serious about learning, someone who exemplifies the seriousness of the good man.
And perhaps this is fitting: as a necessary condition of our liberal education, we have to
get serious about it and subject ourselves to the rigors of Greek paradigms and Newtonian
theorems. We have strange conventions by which we impose an unusual discipline on ourselves:
we attend seminars on weekday evenings and lectures on Friday evenings, times usually reserved
for recreation. We thereby draw no strict divide between recreation and the serious, if leisured
pursuit of knowledge. Because we impose these rigors upon ourselves jointly, they become a
kind of law for us: we disapprove in varying degrees of anyone who shirks these responsibilities.
This unusual discipline may aid students and tutors in becoming spoudaios readers of Greek and
spoudaios geometricians, and the discipline itself may distract us from a variety of temptations,
but the discipline alone does not make us spoudaios simply. Subjecting oneself to discipline in
these matters does not necessarily lead to virtue as such: the disciplined musician or athlete may
become a first-rate guitarist or swimmer and still have a dubious character, and same seems true
of the studious.
The decent (epieikês)
Let us turn from the virtuous man to the decent one. The broadest translation of epieikês
might be “fitting” or “suitable,” although “reasonable” and “fair” are common. Epieikês is
derived from a verb, eioka; “to seem likely” or “to befit.” Epieikês thus refers to what is fitting or
fair, perhaps especially insofar as what is fitting or fair is apparent.17 Within the context of the
Ethics, epieikês is most frequently translated “equitable,” a translation justified by the discussion
of the quality in Book 5. There Aristotle describes the “equitable” man as one who may appear
17
The related word eikôn means “image” or “semblance.”
Two good men: the virtuous and the decent, page 8
�unjust when he chooses something contrary to the law, but who is nevertheless just because he
chooses as the lawgiver would have chosen. I will say more about this in a moment. “Equitable”
is no doubt the appropriate English word to describe this quality in its legal context; this
adjective comes from the noun, “equity,” a term in jurisprudence that refers to the practice of
considering the “reason and the spirit” of a statute under unusual circumstances.18 The word
epieikês, however, appears intermittently and often throughout the Ethics with no allusion to its
jurisprudential sense. Sachs translates epieikês as “decent,” on the grounds that it is not primarily
a legal term, but a common way to name human goodness.19 In fact, Aristotle himself points out
that the epieikês are praised so highly, that the word is sometimes used synonymously with
agathos, or good.20 As a translation for epieikês, “decent” also has the advantage of being
derived from the Latin, decere, a word that also means “to be fitting” or “becoming”: consider
the word “decorous,” which comes from the same root. In other words, as a translation of
epieikês, “decent” has the advantage of being a word whose Latin origin is very similar to the
root of the Greek word it is translating.21 The obvious disadvantage of “decent” is that the word
is rather faint praise in English: the epieikês man is genuinely good, not merely satisfactory.
Why should we turn from the virtuous man to the decent one? Why should we pry them
apart in the first place? One of the sources of this for me was Aristotle’s Poetics, which I will
touch on in passing. Epic and tragedy can have as their subject virtuous (spoudaios) men and
“things of stature”; Homer is the poet par excellence of the virtuous man.22 In tragedy one sees
the protagonist, a man of serious stature, make an error of some kind and pass from good fortune
18
OED online, “equity, n.,” II.3.
Sachs also points out that “equitable” is a poor translation for epieikês because “equitable” has as its root, the
“equal,” whereas Aristotle points out that the epieikês man, in making a proper judgment not in accord with the law,
goes beyond what is equal ([to ison] Sachs translation, p. 203; cf. 1130b13, where the “just” is associated with the
ison, the “fair” or the “equal”). Bartlett and Collins also choose “decent” and “decency,” but they employ “equitable”
and “equity” in the chapter that deals with the jurisprudential context (Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Robert
Bartlett and Susan Collins [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011]). It is useful to note that the English
adjective “equitable” is derived from the noun, “equity,” whereas, conversely, the Greek noun epieikeia is derived
from the adjective, epieikês. In Greek, the jurisprudential term is derived from the primary phenomenon, the decent
man; in English, the reverse seems to be the case.
20
Ethics 5.10 1137b1. More precisely, the comparative of epieikês is used in place of the beltion, “better.” To my
knowledge, Aristotle does not say anything analogous about the relation of spoudaios to agathos: is epieikês closer
than spoudaios to agathos?
21
The kinship between “decent” and “seemly” is more apparent in their negations: “indecent” is clearly “unseemly”
or unbefitting.
22
Ch. 2 1448a1; ch. 3 1448a26; ch. 4 1448b35; ch 5 1449b10. Tragedy is distinguished from comedy by treating
what is spoudaios rather than phaulos. Interestingly enough, Aristotle says that poetry is “more philosophic and
more spoudaios” than history.
19
Two good men: the virtuous and the decent, page 9
�to bad; in viewing this turn of events we experience pity and fear.23 In contrast with this,
Aristotle somewhat surprisingly says, to show the decent man changing from good fortune to bad
would be “loathsome.”24 If is appropriate for the decent man to appear in tragedy, he must not be
the central figure. This distinction in the Poetics provoked me to wonder, what is the difference
between being virtuous and being decent? Why is the fall into misfortune loathsome for the
decent man, but pitiable for the virtuous one? Is the virtuous man susceptible to error in a way
that the decent is not?
Given this distinction between the virtuous man and the decent with respect to tragedy,
and returning to the Ethics, perhaps it is not a coincidence that the decent man makes two brief
appearances in the chapters treating virtues in conversation: truthfulness, wit, and tact.25
According to Aristotle, whoever is truthful when nothing is at stake seems to be decent, since he
seems to be a “lover of truth” (philalêthês; 4.7 1127b2). Habitually truthful speech is no
guarantee of decency, but it appears to be an important sign of it. The subject comes up again in
the immediately following discussion of wit and tact: wit is distinguished from the vices of
buffoonery and boorishness, going to excess in trying to make people laugh, and never saying
anything funny (4.8 1128a5-17). Superadded to the virtue of wit is tact: the tactful person will
say to others, and he will allow others to say to him, only things that are fitting for a “decent and
liberal” person (1128a19).26 If we are infer that the decent man is witty no less than tactful, and if
wit is understood as somehow opposed to seriousness, then the decent man emerges as somewhat
distinct from the virtuous man: escaping the boundaries of the serious, he indulges in playful
speech, nevertheless without saying what should not be said. The decent, witty, tactful man is
23
Ch. 13 1453a7.
Benardette trans., ch. 13 1452b31. It is “loathsome” (miaros), that is, repugnant, foul, or unclean. I take loathsome
to be opposed more to pitiable than to fearful: an outcome being pitiable is connected with its being undeserved (ch.
13 1453a5); to be loathsome seems similar in this respect. Aristotle says that the subject of the tragedy is neither
epieikês nor wicked (poneros), but “in between”; he is not distinguished in virtue or justice, although he enjoys fame
and good fortune (1453a7). In the Poetics the epieikês appears to be the higher type than the subject of tragedy, the
man of serious statue, whereas in the Ethics the spoudaios man often appears to be the higher type. See Burger 9091.
25
On the association of these three virtues as conversational, 4.8 1128b5. So far as I know, these are the first
appearances of epieikes in the Ethics, although I suspect that this only means I have inadvertently passed over earlier
instances.
26
“Wit” translates eutrapelos, or “easily turning” (Bartlett/Collins, note, p. 87), and “tact” translates epidexiotes,
also meaning clever or handy (the word literally means “on the right side,” like the English word “dexterous”). Both
qualities point to agility of thought.
24
Two good men: the virtuous and the decent, page 10
�liberal as well; he has the virtue characteristic of a free man.27 He is free, if not great; he avoids
ironic condescension as well as boasting.
It is in the following book, on justice, in which decency (epieikeia) first takes center
stage; to understand its appearance, it necessary to remind ourselves of a few things about
Aristotle’s treatment of justice. He observes that we typically use the word “unjust”
ambiguously: we say it, first, about someone who breaks the law and, second, about someone
who is unfair (anisos) and takes more than his share (5.1 1129a33). “Just,” like unjust, has two
senses: in the first sense, “to be just” is to be lawful. This is justice inasmuch as it comprehends
the ethical virtues, and so stakes a claim to being the comprehensive virtue: when the law is well
framed, it prescribes a variety of actions, all in accord with the several virtues (1129b29). To be
just in this sense means to practice all the virtues. Now “justice” in its second sense means to be
“fair” and not to take more than one’s due; even though this second sense is the principal subject
of book 5, it is justice in the comprehensive sense that concerns us here.
Since the lawfully just is virtue as a whole, and since the virtuous (spoudaios) man is the
one who has all the virtues, it is fitting that the lawfully just extends over whatever the virtuous
man cares about (5.2 1130b5). This is not to say that the virtuous man is merely lawful; he
chooses lawful actions not because the law commands them, but because they are noble (6.12
1144a15-18). But the life of the virtuous man, seeking the noble and its concomitant honors,
moves within the ambit of the law. This connection between the virtuous man and the law is
echoed in the Politics: here Aristotle asks whether the virtue of a “good man” is the same as the
virtue of the “good citizen”; more precisely, he asks whether the virtue of an agathos man (anêr)
is the same as the virtue of a spoudaios citizen.28 Goodness simply is associated with being a
man simply; what is suitable for a citizen depends on the regime, so that the goodness pertaining
to a citizen depends in large measure on the law.29
27
Liberality more properly corresponds to magnificence, but I have contrasted it with greatness of soul because I
have not had the occasion to mention magnificence. The chapter plays on the etymological connections between
childish pastimes, jesting, and being educated (all involving the paid- root). Although I suppose the truly spoudaios
man must have all the virtues, it is difficult to imagine the “man of serious worth” as witty. Late in Ethics Aristotle
points the absurdity of laboring and striving (spoudazein) for the sake of amusement (paidia; 10.6 1176b27).
28
Ethics 3.1.1276b22, 3.2.1277b32, 1278b1.
29
What it means to be a virtuous citizen depends on who is a citizen; who is a citizen depends on the type of regime:
men who would be citizens in a democracy might be excluded from citizenship in an oligarchy or polity (3.2
1276b32). In these passages Aristotle at least once replaces agathos with spoudaios, thus comparing the spoudaios
man with the spoudaios citizen (3.2 1276b33): what is a spoudaios citizen is regime dependent; spoudaios taken
Two good men: the virtuous and the decent, page 11
�This equation between the just and the lawful supposes that the laws are well framed.
Later Aristotle draws a distinction between what is [politically] just according to law and what is
[politically] just according to nature (5.7 1134b18). He thereby pries open a space between the
lawful and the just; this opening between justice and the law prepares us for the introduction of
decency (epieikeia). The thematic discussion of decency begins with a problem: it sometimes
happens that a good or decent man, whom we are inclined to say is “just,” does what is not
lawful. This problem turns out to be not especially vexing: Aristotle explains that the law is
always a general statement, but in particular circumstances application of the general statement is
not just. The decent man does what is outside the law as a correction to the law; he remains
congruent with the judgment of the lawgiver. The decent man is therefore more just than he
would have been had he simply followed the law. The solution of the problem leads to paradox:
the lawfully just concerns whatever the virtuous man cares about; decency sometimes contradicts
what is lawfully just; nevertheless, the lawfully just and decency are both “virtuous,” they are
both spoudaios according to Aristotle, and yet decency is better.30 Decency is virtuous, but it is
something more than that as well.
This treatment of decency coming at the end of the discussion of the moral virtues
prepares us for the intellectual virtues (dianoetika), and especially for the intellectual virtue of
prudence. This seems fitting, since we first noted it as associated with the virtues of
conversation: truthfulness, wit, and tact. Decency is that by which one chooses not to follow the
general or categorical statement of the law, but to make an exception; prudence is that by which
one selects the particular action that leads to the correctly desired end. Both qualities involve the
correct apprehension of particulars, as distinguished from obedience to general statements. In
Book 6 Aristotle says that one judges what is decent by the faculty of “consideration” (gnome);
by having consideration for others (suggnome), the decent man is forgiving.31 Consideration, this
simply may not be. Only a few men can be entirely virtuous, but the lawgiver would strive for all citizens to be
spoudaios as citizens: to be a spoudaios citizen is something lower or less accomplished than to be spoudaios simply.
Still in these chapters of the Politics, as in the opening chapters of Ethics 5, spoudaios seems to be understood as
lawful. Another interesting passage on this question appears in book 10: the care that citizens have for one another
in common is epieikês whenever the underlying laws happen to be spoudaioi (1180a35).
30
Ethics 5.10 1137b10. There appears to be a paradox here: if the lawfully just is concerned with spoudaios things,
and decency, in contradicting the lawfully just, is also spoudaios, then it is clear that spoudaios takes on different
valences.
31
Ethics 6.11.1143a19-24. Sachs points out the etymological connection between what I am calling “consideration”
as a faculty (gnome) and being considerate or forgiving towards others ([sun-gnome], Sachs’ note, p. 113). Sachs,
Two good men: the virtuous and the decent, page 12
�faculty by which we are decent, is closely allied with intellect and astuteness (sunesis); all three
capacities appear to be natural (1143b8). All three capacities converge with prudence as a
perception of a particular choice-worthy action.
Still consideration, this natural faculty that lies at the basis of decency, is not equivalent
to prudence. The prudent man is one who deliberates well about what is advantageous for him
and about living well as a whole (6.5 1140a24). Knowing how to live well in this way is not
separable from knowing the good for one’s city and how to attain it (6.8 1142a7-10). From this it
is clear that prudent deliberation requires very extensive experience. Prudence must be acquired;
consideration appears to be natural.
So decency, grounded in consideration, helps us trace the transition from the ethical
virtues to the intellectual virtues.32 Decency, as a correction to what is lawfully just, is the first
suggestion that the moral virtues are incomplete. It thereby points to the perfection of the moral
virtues by the intellectual virtue of prudence without presuming for itself possession of prudence.
Decency permits one to judge against the law but in agreement with the lawgiver; prudence in
the full sense is the wisdom necessary to be a lawgiver.
From what I have said, it would appear that the decent man is a higher type than the
virtuous man, but other passages bring this into doubt.33 First, although we have said that
decency points towards the intellectual virtue of prudence, Aristotle later says that having virtue
is a condition for being prudent, since it is having virtue that leads one to aim at the right end;
without virtue, one is not prudent, but merely clever.34 Perhaps not all spoudaioi men are prudent,
but every prudent man is spoudaios. A second reason for doubting the superiority of decency is
found in the Politics: when discussing aristocratic regimes, Aristotle speaks as if decent men
incidentally, prefers the words “thoughtfulness” and “compassion,” respectively. This passage suggests that the
exceptions to the law discussed in the chapters on equity were intended to refer above all to cases where punishment
under the law is reduced or waived. Having forgiveness or consideration is the most common sense intended by
epieikês in Plutarch’s Lives.
32
The idea that the chapter on wit and tact in book 4 initiates or anticipates the turn toward the intellectual virtues of
book 6 was first brought to my attention by Leon Kass.
33
The passages from the Poetics also admit of diverse interpretations on this point: is it loathsome for the decent
man to suffer a reversal of fortune because he is somehow a higher type than the virtuous man? Or might it be
inappropriate because he is more common, less high?
34
6.12.1144a13-23. The word “clever” here is not that same as “astute” above. In the Politics, when Aristotle asks
whether the virtues of the agathos anêr and the spoudaios citizen are same, he says they are the same only in the
person of one who has prudence and who rules (3.3.1278b1-5; the connection to prudence appears at 3.2.1277b26).
At Ethics 7.10 1152a8, Aristotle says that whoever has prudence is virtuous, i.e., spoudaios.
Two good men: the virtuous and the decent, page 13
�were more common than wholly virtuous ones.35 Finally, as I mentioned before, whenever
Aristotle notes that the good man is the measure of our desires, our pleasures, and our actions, he
refers explicitly to the spoudaios man, and never to the decent. If both types of men are good in
some sense, the spoudaios is the unique measure of the class, while decency admits of degrees.36
Rather than contriving a relative ranking for the two, I would say that calling someone “decent”
points to something different than calling him “virtuous.” To call a man “virtuous” points to his
character, to his desires and pleasures, to his heart and his gut, to what he takes most seriously.
To call him “decent” points to his habits of mind, to his work and leisure activities, and to what
he thinks and says in the company of others.37
It is in the books on friendship where the decent man stands most often in the foreground,
even if the virtuous man is much in evidence here as well. Since the word epieikês is sometimes
used synonymously with agathos, as we noted, it should not be surprising that the good
friendship is sometimes referred to as a decent friendship. Men and women who enjoy good
friendships are said to be decent.38 We might expect decency to emerge more fully in the
discussion of friendship once we realize that friendship, like decency, is similar to justice but
superior to it. Justice demands precision; it demands equality; if equality is not appropriate, it
demands proportional compensation. In seeking justice, you ensure that you do not get less than
you deserve, and your counterpart does the same. Decency loosens this precision: the decent man
waives the strict calculation of the penalty in order to attain the end intended by the lawgiver.
35
If the decent men rule the city, many inhabitants will be excluded from having a share in rule, but if the most
virtuous man (spoudaiotatos) rules, still more inhabitants will be excluded (3.6.1281a29). The use of the superlative
in the second case allows for a reading in which “decent” and “virtuous” are synonyms, and Aristotle is
distinguishing the rule of many decent-virtuous men from the rule of the single most decent-virtuous man. But the
use of spoudaios with the superlative may also suggest that being “virtuous” is an extreme in a way that being
“decent” is not.
36
Ethics 9.8.1167a33; cf. 9.12.1172a11, discussed below.
37
Aristotle says that, although the unrestrained man does not do what he ought to and his character is bad, his choice
(prohairesis) is “decent” (7.10.1152a18). Earlier he says of the restrained man, although he is not good or virtuous,
his self-restraint itself is a good disposition (spoudaia hexis; 7.8.1151a28, cf. 7.1.1145b9, 7.9.1151b28). Your
thoughts and activities may be epieikês; the disposition of your character may be spoudaios. In the same context,
Aristotle speaks of pleasures as being spoudaios: these are the pleasures rightly preferred by the spoudaios person
(7.14.1154b2, cf. 7.4.1143a23).
38
Aristotle calls the durable friendship of parents and children, under auspicious circumstances, epieikês (8.6
1158b23). He also says that the friendship of husband and wife will be not merely one of pleasure or utility, but
based on virtue, if they are decent (8.12 1162a26). The equivalence of epieikês and agathos, at least in reference to
friendship, is implied at 8.4 1157a17. “The friendship of decent people is decent” (9.12 1172a10, Sachs trans.). On
decent men and women, see the afterword.
Two good men: the virtuous and the decent, page 14
�Similarly, in a good friendship each wishes for the good of his friend more than for the good for
himself. Friendship is a more generous, more liberal arrangement than justice.39
Not only does decency share a kinship with friendship, towards the end of the discussion
of friendship, decency looks like the ground for the possibility of friendship at all. Aristotle
observes that the things we attribute to friendship are also things we observe in the way the
decent man behaves towards himself. Aristotle makes four arguments on this point; I will
mention only two. First, a friend wishes for and seeks to bring about the good of his friend for
the sake of that friend, but the decent man does this same thing for himself, and he does it
especially for the part of himself that is most for the sake of itself; this is the thinking part
(dianoetikos, 9.4 1166a3; 1166a15). The thinking part has this status because no one would wish
for all the goods in the world on the condition that he become someone entirely different, so that
the thinking part seems to be most of all what each person is. Now for the second argument:
friends wish to spend time together, but the decent man wishes to spend time with himself, for
his mind is well furnished with things to contemplate, such as memories and hopes.40 This
analogy between being a friend to another and being a friend to oneself underwrites the inference
that the capacity of a decent man to be friends with another rests on his capacity to be a friend to
himself. It is because he is a friend to himself, and stable in this friendship with himself, that he
also serves well as a friend to another. In explaining how decency is the ground of friendship,
Aristotle permits us to peer into the soul of the decent man: the good friendship of two persons
turns out to be the soul of the decent man writ large. To be a friend to oneself means to be a
friend to the thinking part of oneself, since this is authoritative part, the part that seems to be the
39
A friendship based merely on utility may exhibit the exact calculation appropriate to justice. Aristotle says that the
friendship of pleasure is closer to the good friendship than is the friendship of utility, for there is more “liberality” in
it (8.6 1158a22). He notes the view, as well, that when men are friends, there is no need of justice (8.1 1155a27;
Burger, however, raises important questions about this statement).
40
(9.4 1166a8, 1166a23. In paraphrasing the arguments, I have exaggerated how often Aristotle specifically names
the decent man: he mentions decency at the opening and the closing of this four-part argument, but not in between
(9.4 1166a11, 1166a31). In between he does mention the virtuous man once in typical fashion, noting that virtue and
the virtuous man is the standard of each (1166a13). Aristotle raises a question about whether one can be a friend to
oneself; it may be possible insofar as he is dual or composite (1166a35). Aristotle has said that human nature is not
simple (7.14 1154b22).
Two good men: the virtuous and the decent, page 15
�whole.41 In viewing friendship as the soul writ large, we find a soul that obeys the intellect, but
not in the way that the subjects of a city obey a despot or even a monarch.42
By way of contrast, a base man, one lacking decency and subject to strong passions, is at
variance with himself. At odds with himself, it is difficult for him to be a reliable friend to others.
What passes for friendship depends on the circumstances; when circumstances change,
friendship vanishes. Aristotle even goes to far as to say that base men have friendly feelings
toward themselves insofar as they presume themselves to be decent and are thus satisfied with
themselves (9.4.1166b5). The false presumption of decency looks like the condition for
sustaining friendship in those who are not decent at all.
Let me take a step back here for a moment to say something too cursory about the decent
man and virtuous man in these chapters: I have emphasized the appearance of the decent man in
the chapters on friendship, while the virtuous man also appears woven through the same
passages. But in these chapters decent men come in degrees, some are more decent, some less;
the virtuous man, by contrast, is an extreme, he is the standard and measure. Epieikês is a
comparative, spoudaios a superlative.43 As a result Aristotle brings up the virtuous man in limit
cases: to take one example, he asks: if the virtuous man is self-sufficient and leads a blessed life,
does he need friends at all?44 Can one be so virtuous that one has no need of other human
beings? To take a second example: we find generally that the virtuous and the decent both seek
what is noble, but of the decent, Aristotle says that he does what is best and obeys the intellect;
of the virtuous, he says, he will give up wealth, offices, and all the goods that men strive for,
41
9.8 1168b32-1169a4. Above my phrase “thinking part” translates dianoetikos; here, it translates nous. I have
preferred “thinking part” to “intellect” to preserve the etymological connection between the two Greek words, at the
price of not distinguishing them in this lecture.
42
Ethics 9.8 1169a16: “for intelligence always chooses for itself what is best, and the good man (epieikês) always
obeys his intelligence.” Cf. 10.9 1180a5-19. I say that this soul is not a monarchy or tyranny because it seems
important that the soul is “writ large” in a friendship of two rather than in a city of many (as in the Republic): there
cannot be friendship where inequality is very great, whereas cities, of course, permit very great inequality. Compare
Politics 1.2 1254b6: the rule of intellect over the desires is not despotic but “kingly or political”. I take the “kingly”
rule of the intellect over the desires to refer to the soul of the contemplative; in the soul of the decent I take the rule
of the intellect over the desires to be only “political.”
43
Epieikês is literally a comparative at 9.3 1165b23. Also consider 10.5 1175b25, although the subject here is
activities, not persons. Burger makes an analogous observation about the difference between the decent and the
virtuous (“serious”) in the context of discussing friendship (p. 172).
44
9.9 1169b2ff, see especially 1169b14, 1170a8, 1170a14, 1170b19. This chapter focuses on the spoudaios;
epieikeis is used once to refer to his practices (1170a3), as often happens. Aristotle does seem to use epieikês
synonymously with spoudaios at 1170a28 (both are said to be “blessed” in this chapter). Aristotle’s conclusion is
that even the spoudaios man will have friends, for he will attain his end more readily with them than without them.
Two good men: the virtuous and the decent, page 16
�even his life, for the sake of what is noble.45 Recall that the virtuous man, unlike the decent, is a
fitting subject for tragedy.
How does one become decent? And what, if anything, would this have to do with a
liberal education? At the close of the Ethics Aristotle points out a difference between the decent
man and most men: the decent may be persuaded by speeches to do what is noble; most men are
not susceptible to persuasive speech, but must be threatened with punishments (10.9 1180a8). As
Aristotle jokes, if speeches were sufficient for making men decent, “then justly ‘would [these
speakers] take many large fees.’”46 From this passage, it would seem that a liberal education
could hardly make one decent. Within this context it seems one is made decent the same way one
is made virtuous: by the law, that is, by thoughtful speech armed with penalties and rewards.
Rather than draw this conclusion, I would like to try out an alterative: that friendship is
another, in fact, superior means to becoming decent. I want to propose briefly the possibility that
the connection between decency and friendship that I touched on before operates in both
directions: if the decency of an individual is the ground of his being friends with others,
conversely friendship with others may be a means of his becoming decent. The upshot of this
would be that it is easier to be a friend to another—and to find another to be a friend to you—
than for you to be a friend to yourself. As Aristotle says, the company of good men (agathoi)
may be a kind of training in virtue.47
Let’s frame the question a little differently: in the multiplicity within oneself, how do the
parts come to be in harmony with, and harken to, the thinking part? There does not appear to be
any knowledge of the good-in-itself, or even any knowledge of the human-good, that invests the
thinking part with sufficient authority over the rest of the self. There does not appear to be any
45
9.8 1169a15-25. Aristotle’s comment in this passage that the spoudaios would give up many years of life to live
nobly for one year reminds one of Achilles, which may be appropriate, if Homer, according to the Poetics, is the
poet of the spoudaios.
46
Sachs trans. Aristotle moves from saying that the “decent” may be persuaded by speeches, to saying that the “free”
or “liberal youths” and “the well-born” may be persuaded as well. Does he widen the category? Are there “free
youths” who are not yet decent, but nevertheless can be persuaded to pursue the noble?
47
9.9 1170a12. Note, however, that this passage does not mention decency, and the context is the spoudaios and
whether he needs friends. The application of this passage to decency is perhaps legitimated by the conclusion of the
books on friendship, where it is said that the friendship of decent men is itself decent, and the decency of this
friendship is augmented by the friends being together (9.12 1172a11). Also note that the passage about the company
of good men is attributed to Theogonis; also attributed to Theogonis is the observation about the high fees that one
could claim if one could make men good by speeches alone (10.9 1179b7). The coincidence connecting these two
passages suggests that Aristotle, too, may think of friendship as a means to make men decent, in lieu of speeches
simply.
Two good men: the virtuous and the decent, page 17
�direct way to give the thinking part the “strength” to overcome desires and passions.48 We noted
before that those who think they philosophize and talk about virtue do not become virtuous by
doing so. What if the so-called “strength” or “weakness” of the thinking part lies not in the
thinking part at all, but in the rest of the soul, in whether and how the other parts harken to the
thinking part? On this supposition, the so-called strength of the thinking part would be a function
of the soul as a whole. On this supposition, friendship may be a way to prepare desires and
passions to harken to the thinking part.
I will say a few words on behalf of this conjecture. The first condition for friendship is
thinking-well (eunoia) of someone else, thinking him to be decent.49 Friendship begins with how
one frames another human being within one’s mind. But simply thinking well of someone else is
not friendship: to this goodwill there has to be added affection (philesis) and reciprocity (8.2
1156a2). The person you think well of must know you think well of him, and he must think well
of you. We seek this respect from others because we seek confirmation from others about what
to think about ourselves (8.8 1159a22). It is harder to recognize decency in oneself than to see it
in another.50 Recognizing it in another, and acknowledging that another has seen it in us, seems
to be a training for recognizing it in oneself, by oneself. This mutual recognition must include
affection as well: because of the connection between internal friendships and external friendships,
when you love what you think well of in another, the passionate part of your soul becomes a
little more obedient to its own thinking part.
If this conjecture is correct, if friendship is a means to becoming decent, the question
remains, what does this have to do with liberal education? On this point, beginning from the
Ethics, I can say only a little. You might think well of a virtuous stranger by observing his deeds
from a distance; you may take him to be the measure of your own actions and emulate him, but
this is not friendship. The first stages of friendship, a pleasurable friendship, begin with the
48
Aristotle implies that spiritedness (thumos) does hear reason more than desire does, but that it mishears it (7.6
1149a25). It does not seem sufficient simply to ally spiritedness to reason. Michael Grenke, however, pointed out
that in Politics 7 Aristotle says friendship has its origin in thumos.
49
Ethics 9.5 1166b30, 9.5 1167a19, 9.11 1171b2. Aristotle says goodwill is prompted by “virtue and some kind of
decency” (epieikeia tina; 9.5 1167a19).
50
9.9 1169b34. This would be an appropriate moment to reflect on the etymology of epieikês, and its connection
with seeming and befitting.
Two good men: the virtuous and the decent, page 18
�conversational virtues of wit and tact; they presume familiarity.51 The core of friendship lies in
sharing with a friend the awareness of one’s existence; this shared awareness is attained most of
all by sharing speeches and thoughts.52 As a friendship becomes closer, as each knows the other
as a second self; more and more the characteristic activity of this friendship becomes
conversation. I would venture that these friendships are “liberal,” and that they make you more
liberal—at least in Aristotle’s sense of the word. We have already seen that friendship, in
contradistinction with justice, is concerned with giving freely rather than receiving what is due
(cf. 8.13 1162b26). You no longer act under the compulsion of the law; you act for the sake of
what is noble as it is made manifest for you in the figure of your friend. Decency, understood as
doing what the lawgiver intended, rather than what the law prescribes, likewise points to this
freedom. It may be telling that it is precisely in the chapter on the seemingly trivial
conversational virtues of wit and tact that Aristotle says the tactful, liberal man is a “law unto
himself” (4.8 1128a33).
At the close of the chapters on friendship, Aristotle emphasizes that friends should live
together in order to share whatever activities they take pleasure in, whether it is partying, playing
games, athletics, or philosophizing (9.12 1172a3). It is a little disappointing that Aristotle does
not distinguish these activities in terms of their worth, although it becomes clear in the end that
the last activity is more “serious” than the others (10.6 1176b32). If my starting point is
Aristotle’s Ethics and the differences between spoudaios and epieikês, this is as far as I can go in
arguing that friendship, especially a friendship grounded in truthful, witty, and philosophical
conversation, can make one a decent human being.
As a postscript, let me say that, even if the conversation of decent friends touches on
philosophy, I do not mean to draw the conclusion that the path to decency requires passing
through the contemplative life as Aristotle describes it. The contemplative life is solitary and
divine, suitable for a simple being, while we are composite (7.14 1154b21). I admit that, if being
friends with another is the finest way to learn to see oneself more clearly, then the self-reflective
friendship of the decent does appear to anticipate the continuous activity of the divine intellect,
thought thinking itself. Towards the end of the Ethics, one suspects that the reflective activity of
51
8.4 1157a6, 8.6 1158a30, By “first stages of friendship,” I mean the friendship of pleasure, which might become a
good friendship with time. If I understand these passages, wit would come into play before tact does.
52
9.9 1170b11. Here I only assume what is the conclusion of an elaborate, lengthy argument, analyzed in some
detail by Burger (p. 181).
Two good men: the virtuous and the decent, page 19
�the simple intellect somehow provides the underlying potential for the decent man to be friends
with himself and with others. Yet even if the activity of the intellect somehow underwrites the
friendship of the decent, it need not follow that one must first achieve and then sustain the
contemplative life in order to attain the goodness belonging to the decent. I suggest rather that a
friendship anchored in conversation, even if not always occupied with conversation, may be the
surest means for us to attain at least one form of the human good. If our liberal education
improves our characters at all, I maintain it is not by enacting the intellect’s solitary activity of
contemplation, but by means of the friendly conversations with one another that imperceptibly
strengthen our friend, the intellect, within us.
An afterword on the gender of spoudaios and epieikês.53 Both words are adjectives; in Greek,
adjectives are turned into nouns by adding a definite article; the definite article shows the gender;
so far as I can recall in the Ethics, the gender is always masculine. So I generally refer to ho
spoudaios as “the virtuous man” and epieikês as the “decent man.” Since no noun is present, one
might infer that the implied noun is anêr (a real man) or anthropos (a human being). In the
Politics Aristotle asks whether the virtue of a good man, agathos anêr, is the same as the virtue
of the good citizen, spoudaios politês (cited above). Using the word anêr, Aristotle clearly
understands the spoudaios citizen to be male; citizens of Greek cities were, of course, uniformly
male. Since in some cases spoudaios and epieikês are used in a manner that suggests they are
synonymous and refer to the same person, one might be tempted to think of the epieikês as
equally masculine. In a few cases, however, epieikês is used in contexts that refer to women as
well as men. In the discussion of marriage, Aristotle says that the friendship of husband and wife
is generally based on pleasure and utility, but the friendship may be one of virtue if they are
epieikês (8.12.1162a24-26). In a similar passage, Aristotle says that the friendship between
children and parents, if conducted well, will be enduring and epieikês ([8.6.1158b23] the
consequence seems to be that the children and parents in these friendships, male or female, will
also be epieikês). Based on these considerations, I am inclined to hold that spoudaios is
implicitly, exclusively predicated of men, while epieikês is applied to men and women.
53
This paragraph was not read in the two lectures, but prepared in anticipation of the subsequent question periods.
Two good men: the virtuous and the decent, page 20
�
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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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Two Good Men in Aristotle's <em>Ethics</em>, or Does a Liberal Education Improve One's Character?
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Typescript of a lecture given on August 26, 2016 by Joseph Macfarland as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
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Macfarland, Joseph C.
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2016-08-26
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Aristotle. Nicomachean ethics
Deans
Friday night lecture
Tutors
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Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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Trial in Berlin
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on November 28, 1973 by Beate Ruhm von Oppen as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
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1973-11-28
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lec Ruhm von Oppen 1973-11-28
Friday night lecture
Tutors
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Text
TRIAL
IN
BERLIN
Beate Ruhm von Oppen
A FORMAL LECTIJRE DELnrnRm AT ST JOHN-ts COLLEGE
�The place of the trial was Berlin, the time January 1945; the court
the so-called People's Court, the highest court for political crimes, such
as treason. It was meeting in a requisitioned building, the court building
having been destroyed by bombs. The presiding judge was Roland Freisler,
the same that had tried and sentenced some rebellious students in Munich
in
1943~
He had tried many cases since. The present one now was one of his
laste Three weeks later he was killed in a massive air raid on Berlin. The
chief defendant in this trial in the last winter of the war was a thirtyseven year old lawyer and landowner by name of Moltke, Count Moltke. He
had a whole string of names. The court only used the first, Helmuth.
The war was approaching its end. The British and Americans had sustained and defeated Hitler's last gamble, a winter offensive in the West, in
the Ardennes. The Russians were about to enter Germany on a broad front in
the East.,
The trial in Berlin was a treason trial@ But, as the defendant wrote
to his wife,
'~his
affair is really somewhat better than the celebrated Huber
case. For even less actually happened. We did not so much as produce a
leaflet~"
What hs meant by "the celebrated Huber case" was the case of those
Munich students and their Professor, Kurt Huber, who had been sentsnced to
death for writing and spreading leaf lets against the Nazis. The group had
chosen "The White Rose" as its
of years
ago~
name~
I lectured about it in Annapolis a couple
In the subsequent discussion the name of the group and the
students who chose it were referred to as rather too "exquisite" and concentration on leaflets as a way of fighting the Nazis was criticized as unrealistic:
why didn't they rather gather arms. My response was to ask what a handful of
students could be expected to do against the kind of regime I had tried to
describso I had probably failed to set it off clearly enough against a mare
police stats, let alone pre-revolutionary America, or, for that matter,
Richard Nixon's. Incidentally, thoss students had, in fact, carried arms, for
strictly tactical purposes: when they went out at night to write slogans on
walls and expected to have to shoot their way out if the police arrived@
That question "why didn't they?" and the counter-question "what could
they do?" stand for a whole range of "why didn't they" questions, question•
of methods and purposes, means and ends. And together they raise the question of
�-2-
what is sometimes called "realism,."
Why did the defendant in the Berlin trial two years later consider
his case "even better" than the case of the White Rose? Because, he said oddly
enough, "even less actually happened."
We shall have to see what in fact did happen. And then we might try to
discuss whether we agree or disagree that such a case was "better." The
discussion may be difficult and should be delicate; it muat be conducted with
some awareness of the prevailing circumstances -- which there is now no time
to describe. When I say that the Nazi system went beyond a mare police state
I mean that its legal and extra-legal methods and instruments of persuasion and
of coercion were more comprehensive and more
dreadful~
It was a one-party
state in which all rival parties and organizations were forbiddene The press,
the media, !11 publications were strictly controlled, and so were the pulpits,
though the regime did not dare go all out in a frontal onslaught on the
churches. But National Socialism had the character of a counter-religion. It
was especially intent on the indoctrination of the young~ Ta have any kind
of career at all presupposed membership in the Hitler Youth, which was officially
compulsory, though some managed to escape it. The Nazi Party, or, to give it
its full name, the National Socialist German Workers' Party, was not only a
party, but a Movement, one which swept much before it that had seemed quite stable
before. Once in power it engendered and exploited psychological pressures among
the people that ware unprecedented in modern
society~
or, for that matter, in
any society. There was, in addition to new laws, prisons and the legal administration of justice, the whole universe of concentration camps, even in peace
time; during the war they proliferated and once Hitler had decided on tha destruction of the Jews of Europe, death camps
we,re
added in the East. Their
existence and operation was secret, a State Secret. Rumor was always rife -and always punishable -- and reliable and comprehensive information impossible
to coma by. In peace-time the unauthorized getting and spreading of information
could be punished as defamation of the state or of the Party or Movement; in
war-time it might rank as treason@ Anyone resisting the system had a hard time and
a short expectation of life.
!
I
iJ
�-3-
For someone who had opposed the Nazis from the beginning, the
defendant in that trial in Berlin in January 1945 had had a surprisingly
long life. But then Helmuth James van Moltke, who achieved the age of
thirty-seven, bore a name that 1JJas renowned in the annals of German
history; and he was a trained lawyere Hitler hated lawyers. He knew
why~
The defendant's great-grand-uncle Helmuth von Moltke was the
general who had enabled the Prussian chancellor Bismarck to beat the
Austrians and the French and to unite the German states in the second
German Reich. The name of Moltke still had some magic in Hitler's Third
Reiche The family estate Kreisau, in Silesia, which had been the old
Moltke 1 s reward for his services to the fatherland, had passed to his
great-grand-naphewe In fact Helmuth James had had to take it on, quite
suddenly and not at all enthusiastically, in 1929, at the age of
22~
during
the world economic crisis produced by the Wall Street crash, which coincided
with the discovery that Kreisau was very heavily in debt, with bankruptcy
quite probable. He sat to work with a will, and within a year he had, by
dint of great skill, extremely hard work and negotiations, made Kreisau
solvent once more,
The defendant's mother was of British-South-African
James Rose Innes
descant~
her father, was a famous chief justice in South Africa,
renowned for his liberalism
His grandson Helmuth James van Moltke's legal
flair and training may have been a factor that prolonged his life. In the
end it did not save it,
it enabled him to go exhaustively into all the
possibilities of defence against the charges brought against him. He even had
the effrontery to argue in mitigation the fact that he had never made a secret
of his critical attitude, but on the contrary had, as he thought it was his
duty and that of any servant of the state, warned against policies and practices
he saw as dangerous and
harmful~
The court's reaction to this line of defence is not recorded. In fact all
we have on the course of the trial is Mcltke 1 s own fairly full account and
comment which he smuggled out to his wife in three letters between being tried,
sentenced, and hanged; and the official Top Secret text of the sentence, with
reasonso
�-4-
What were those reaeone? That the defendant had had knowledge of
a plot to overthrow the government, declined to join it and warned his
friends against it, but did not report it to the authorities. And that
he himself formed a circle to seize power, in case of a German defeat,
with people who were not National Socialists.
These reasons were spelled out in greater detail, as follows:
The accused was administrator and finally owner of the family estate
Kreieau in Silesia. He was also a lawyer, specializing in international
law and admitted at the British Bar. His membership in Nazi Party organizations was minimal, just enough to allow him to carry on his farming and
legal practice. In the war he was employed as legal advisor to the Supreme
Corrmand of the Armed forces. He always took -- the official account now adds
somewhat suddenly and incongruously
-- an interest in religious and ec-
clesiastical questions, iri the relationship between church and state and the
question of "rechristianization", as well as in agrarian policy and the
decentralization of administration.
Around 1941, the official account goes on, he began to think about
the future in case the war should be lost, and started discussing it with
friends and acquaintances, none of whom were National Socialists and some of
whom had since been convicted as traitors. In 1942 and 1943 there were two
longer meetings at Kreisau, the first dealing with re-christianization and the
relations of church and state. The Jesuit father Alfred Delp -- who was a
co-defendant at this trial and also sentenced to death
spoke about the
Catholic view on social policy, with special reference to the papal encyclical
Quadrageeimo Anno. And Moltke later checked with a Catholic Bishop that the
hierarchy still endorsed that document. The second Kreisau meeting dealt with
questions of administration and the relationship of the states and the Reich.
There was also a search for people who would be suitable and willing to carry
out the policies that were discussed.
Meanwhile there had been contact with the conspiratorial circle of
Carl Goerdeler, the former Mayor of Leipzig, to which Moltke was opposed because
�-5-
he considered it reactionary, (while he, let me interpolate, was
interested in establishing common ground between socialists - many
of them
and
v~ry
anti-clerical - as wall as conservatives and liberals
Christians~
between trade unions and the churches of both de-
nominations; the Protestant church being far more to the Right in
Garmany than the Catholic.)
The official document summed the case up in the following words:
"All Count Moltke did constitutes treason: high treason in the midst
cf warw He cannot lessen its gravity by saying that he
thinking and did not
procs~d
w~s
only
to carrying out planse For he did more
than think : he also gathered a circle for the discussion and deuelcpment
of plans; and finally he looked for msn to carry them 01.rtu,, 11 The reasoning
of the sentence gees en ta argue that auen thinking about the case of
defeat is criminal; and that the definition of trsaacn cannot be limited
to a man out to rob us of our way of life
his own exercise of
force~
In
peace that might be en acceptable limit. But in War the outer enemy counts
on the internal opponent and vice
versa~
Moltke 1 s treason must be regarded
as a particularly grave case. He spread defeatism and helped the enemy@
At this point twc articles cf the penal code were adduced: paragraph
83 (on organizational cohesion) and paragraph 9lb (on aiding an
; in
addition, paragraph 5 of ths Special Penal Ordinance for War which dealt
with activities or utterances detrimental to the national def enca or to
to Moltke's defeatism end its
morale, and which was evidently made tc
inf ectiaus effects or potential
But, the
cf the sentence went on, this was not all~ From
1940 onward Moltke heard about and mambara of his circle wera in contact with
the gr·oup of
Carl
Goerdelar~
Beck
This group was plotting to overthrow the gauarnmente Maltke
was against itl' on the
Lo~don
former chief of general staff) end of
~
inteir
alia~
that
h~
knew from his visits to
before ths war that Goardeler 1 s British contacts were
confin~d
to
right-wing reactionariesg Yet finally he agreed to a meeting of the two groups
at which he explained his opposition to
Goerdeler~
The meeting broke up in
�-6-
acrimony. Moltke continued to warn his associates against the Goerdeler
group. Yet he did not report it to tha authorities. This omission alone
would be punishable by death under paragraph 139 of the Penal Code. But
the real point was that all these things were part of a whole and meant
that Moltke made himself into a servant of the enemy and therefore had to
be punished by death.
~
So much for a summary of the sentence.
Actually the death penalty was not mandator¥ under any of the laws
that were adduced. Much therefore depended on the judge and his impression
of and reaction to the accused. Ths judge was Roland Freisler, the most
radical and ruthless of the Nazi judges
Hitler himself once referred ta
him as a 'Bolshevik' in his Table Talk@ He
was~
as I have said, the same
judge that had presided over the court that sentenced the l"lunich sh1dents,,
But that was nearly two years earl!Gr, in February
1943~
During
the last
winter of the war and after the initial rage and vengeance against all who
ware connected with the plot of July 1944 was spent, after thousands of
arrests and hundreds of executions, during the winter of the Russian advance
on Germany and the last German offensive in the West, it was observed that
the Pecpla 1 a Court wee perhaps
a bit more lenient in its
sentences~
Therefore Moltke, whc had been cpposad ta asaassination, indeed ta any
attempt ta overthrow the regime by force, and who had baen under arrest
since January 1944, six months before Stauffenberg planted his bomb and
failed ta kill Hitler, on 20 July 1944, Moltke had, it would seem, a chance
of getting away with a prison sentence@
The official arguments 1 for all their harping on . .hi-a education .and
elevated position and the greater responsibility these carried with them, were
not very convincing on the naad to kill him and Delp, but not Eugen Gerstenmaier,
a Protestant cleric, or church official, anoths:r Kreisauer and c:o-defem::ant
who, unlike the other twc 1 was actually arrested at Stauffenberg 1 s conspiratorial headquarters in the war ministry in Berlin in the evening of 20 July 1944,
and who nonetheless got af f with a seven year jail sentence@
There
~~,of
course, plenty of other things
Moltk~
had dona that the
court did not know about and that would have laid him open to severe punishments
In the absence of such knowledge and of convincing arguments in the aff icial
�-7-
explanation of the sentence, we must now turn ta the trial itself@
Moltke's own account of it is reliable and has been preserved
-- I am tempted to say "as by a miracle" or a whale series of miracles.,
first the very fact that he was able to write it, able not only psychologically but physically. Usually those condemned to death were hauled
straight off to the gallowse Moltke was taken back to his prison
Then, the Protestant prison chaplain, Harald Pcelchau, was a friend af
his and
bean a member cf his circle, a fact that was never found out
in the year of investigation. This
to his wife and back
He also
to
it out af
to
trial,. /:\nd shB
to
letters from Moltke
out tha account cf the
he hands of the
all his other letters and the Kreiseu
Silesia became a theatre cf war end ia now
Whan we turn to Moltka's awn account, we find that all these flat
in the official sentence about
away amang other t
Moltke~s
interest in
of
and decentralization
like
that
even the mention of Kr9isau discussions of Catholic views on social
concealsd rather then ravealad ths drama
the trial, and cancasled it
reason, the same reason that made Moltke urge his wife to
account cf the trial to
known. Three times he
steted it in his latt9rs
The f
2t time
caHsd ::1.t the
of the tLrhole
the third time the drama or
What was that crux
and
the way the trial had
him to death? It
the trial
t
however much their actions
cf the offic!sl sentence were flat, tortuous, and unconthe document
put in
what
wa~
Top Secret, th® court did not dare
bean elicited from the mouth cf the judge, farced from
him by the complete and inccmtr·mJertibla non-violence of the dsfendant, a
defendant who was able and willing to take his stand on principle, willing to
�stake his life, able to manage his defense in a way that did not permit
his accusers to pervert the cause of his condemnation as was commonly
done.
Let me give you those three places in Moltks's own
words~
trans-
lated: I am canuinced they are an accurate reproduction of what went on in
that court. He had a lawyer's memory.
The first. After the discussion of the charge of defeatism and of
preparations for the time after the Nazis, Moltke goes on to FreislerWs
diatribe:
But now came the crux of the whole thing. "And who was
present? A Jesuit father! Of all people a Jesuit father!
And a Protestant minister, end three ethers who were later
sentenced to death for complicity in the July 20 plat!
And not a single National
So~ialistl
eey: that doss remove the
!
No~
not ons$ I must
A Jesuit father, end
of civil
disobedience! And you also knew the Drovincial Head of the
ans of the
off foials of
• ha uieits Count Moltke
not
s most.
Kreisau! And you are
no decent German would touch
who have been excluded
f r:om all
service bacauae of their attitude
If I
there is a Provincial of the Jesuits in a town, it is
almost enough to keep ms out cf that town altogether! And
the other rauerend gentleman. Whet was he after there? Such
psapla should confine their attentions to the hereafter and
leave us here in peace! And you went visiting Bishops! looking
far something you had last, I suppose! Where do you get your
orders from? You get your ordere f rcm the Fuehrer end the
National Socialist Party! That goes fer you as much as for any
other German; end anyone who takes his orders, no matter under
�-9-
what camouflage, from the guardians of the other
world, is taking them from the enemy, and will be
dealt with accordingly."
"And so it went on," commented Moltke, "but in a key which made the
earlier paroxysms appear as the gentle rustlings of a breeze." After this
climax, he added, the end came in about five minutes.
He summed up this first account of what went on in court in these
words:
This concentration on the chur.ch aspect of the case
corresponds with the intrinsic nature of the matter
and shows that Freisler is a good political judge
after all. It gives us the inestimable advantage of
being killed for something which (a) we really have
done and which (b) is worthwhile.
A bit later in the same letter he commented:
The best thing about a judgment on such lines is this:
It is established that we did not wish to use force; it
is further established that we did not take a single
step towards setting up any sort of organization, nor
question anyone as to his readiness to take over any
particular post
though the indictment stated other-
wise. We merely thought ••• And in face of the thoughts
of ••• three isolated men, their mere thoughts, National
Socialism gets in such a panic that it wants to root out
everything they may have infected. There's a compliment
for you •••• We are to be hanged for thinking together.
Freisler is right, a thousand times right; and if we are
to die, I am in favour of dying on this issue.
But he hoped that their death could be turned to some immediate account and
added:
I am of the opinion -- and now I am coming to what has got to be
done
that this affair, properly presented, is really
somewhat better than the celebrated Huber case. For even
less actually happened. We did not so much as produce a
�-10-
leaflet. It is only a question of men's thoughts
without even the intention to resort to violence •••
All that is left is a single idea: how Christianity
can prove a sheet-anchor in time of chaos. And just
for this idea five heads ••• look like being forfeited
tomorrow 9 •• Because he made it clear that I was opposed in principle to large estates,
tf-1at
I had no
class interests at heart, no personal interests ~t ~li,
not even those of my outfit, but stood tor the cau·P
of all mankind, for all these reasons Freisler has
unwittingly done us a great service, insofar as it may
prove possible to spread the story and make full use of
it. And indeed, in my view, this should be done both
at home and abroad. For our case histories provide
documentary proof that it is neither plots nor plans
but the very spirit of man that is to be hunted down •••
All this was written after the prosecutor had asked for the death
sentence for Moltke and four co-defendants, but before the court had pronounced. The next day, January 11, brought the decision: Moltke and Delp
and one other were to die, Gerstenmaier got off with a prison sentence. On
that day Moltke once more returned to the drama of the 10th when he wrote:
The following, as it turned out was the really dramatic
thing about the trial. During the procedings all factual
charges had proved to be untenable and were dropped •••
Schulze (the prosecutor) in his summing-up expressly
stated that this case "differs radically from all parallel
cases, for in the conversations there was no mention of
violence or organised opposition" -- whereas the question
under discussion was the practical demands of the Christian
ethic, nothing more. And it is for this alone that we stand
condemned.
Moltke continues:
In ona of his tirades freisler said to me: "Only in
�-11-
one respect does National Socialism resemble
Christianity: we demand the whole man. I
do~'t
know if the others sitting there took it all in,
for it was a sort of dialogue between Freisler
and me -- a dialogue of the spirit, since I did
not get the chance actually to say much -- in the
course of which we got to know one another through
and through. Freisler was the only one of the whole
gang who thoroughly understood me, and the only one
of them who realized why he must do away with me.
There was no more talk of me as a "complex character"
or of "complicated thinking" or of "ideology," but:
"the figleaf is off." But only so far as Freialer
was concerned. It was as though we were talking to
each other in a vacuum. He made not a single joke at
my expense, as he did
agai~t
Delp and Eugen. No, in
my case it was all grimmest earQest. "From whom do
you take your orders,
fr~m
the other world or from
Adolf Hitler? Where lie your loyalty and your faith?"
Rhetorical questions, of course. At any rate Freisler
is the first National Socialist who has grasped who I
am.
Then there was a pause during which the Catholic prison chaplain visited
Moltke and he was shaved and given some coffee and something to eat, and
then he resumed the letter:
The decisive phrase in the proceedings was: ".... Cmietiufty
has one thing in common with us National Socialists, and
one thing only: we claim the whole man."
And later this letter, which supplements and
amplifies his earlier report,
goes on to describe how the Christian component of the case came to be singled
out, by the providential elimination not only of all connections with plans
for a violent overthrow of the regime but also of co-defendants and charges
and motivations that would have enabled the court to pin blame on individual
�-12-
or sectional interests. "And so finally I am selected," Moltke writes,
as a Protestant, am attacked and condemned primar.ily
because of my friendship with Catholics, which means
that I stood before Freisler not as a Protestant, not
as a big landowner, not as an aristocrat, not as a
Prussianj not as a German
elimin~ted
~-
all that was definitely
earlier in the trial •• ~No, I stood there
as a Christian and as nothing else@ "The figleaf is
off," says Freisler.
Yes~
every other category had
been removed.
Yau can read those letters in a
little.book~•
There is also a full-length
**
biography that gives some of the historical and sociological context of the
life that culminated in this trial@ The question is
figure very prominently in that biography
~~
~
though i t doss not
whether there is a real and
necessary connection between the Christian convictions of this political
convict end his life end actions up to that final
dialogue~
I think there is@
Moltke himself certainly thought there was.
*
*
*
It was in the summer of 1940, when France had fallen, Russia was still
neutral and in
with
, and Hitler was at the pinnacle of his
power and seemed invincible, that Moltke had started,
, to collect
the secret standing seminar cf ccnasruatives 1 liberals, socialists, Protestants
and Catholics, far the discussion af a human
order ta supersede the
Nazis' so-called New Order. One of the first things the group found itself in
agreement on
and that included the socialists
~~
was the need to
rechristian~
ize Germany if it was to be re-humanizeda This did net mean a clericalization
cf politics or education. It meant a restoration and defence of the freedom of
religion and of conscisnceg
*A German of the Resistance .. The last Latters of Count Helmuth James van
Third Edition® Berlin: Henssel
**Michael Balfour and Julian
Verlag~
Frisby~
1972~
Helmuth von liJoltke; A Leader Against
Hitler. London: Macmillan, 1972 9 and NGw York: Ste Martin's Press, 1973.
l"loltke~
�-13-
Thi9 experience of the rediscovery of the central political
relevance of Christianity during the years of Nazi rule is described
at greater length in a chapter of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Ethics. I
hava often been struck by the way Bonhoeffer's writings era exemplified
or paralleled in Moltke's life. The two men knew each other. They even
travelled together to Scandinavia on a wartime mission, in the spring of
1942, for the Abwehr
or Counter-Intelligsnce department, the "outfit"
Moltke referred to in his prison letter, a hotbed of conspiracy against
the Nazis, whose heads, Canaris and Oster, were later executed too. Otherwise Moltke and Bonhosffar had little contact and they did not see eye to
eye on the desirability of assassinating Hitler. But more of that anon©
What matters hers is the discovsry both men and many others mads in the Nazi years
that there was a close connection between Christianity and civilization and
between apostasy and barbarism,
Bonhaeffsr put it, that
or~as
11 R~ason~
culture,
all these concepts which until
had served as battle
ver::y
the
Jesus Christ himself 1 had
Ch:r
come very near indaed ta
'?
also in
lJ~consc1ous
which deeiree not to fall victim to
the Antichrist to take
comment an the truth cf both statements
that "He that is not
is not with me
It could, or course
is
ove:r~
be
9
is
e.nci often is :i
could be restored and defended without religious
that
Moltke himself
sanction~
ht so in the earlier phase of the Nazi regimso But subse=
quent experience taught him otherwise® During the war, in the spring af 1942 1
in a long letter en the German situation which he managed to get ta a friend
in England 1 he wrote:
Perhaps you will remember that, in discussions before the
war, I maintained that belief in God was not essential for
coming to the results you arrive at* To-day I know that I
wee wrong, completely wrong. Yau know that I haue fought
the Nazis from the first day, but the amount of risk and
readiness for sacrifice which is asked from us now, and that
which may be
aak~d
from us tomorrow, require more than right
�-14-
ethical principles, especially as we know that
the success of our fight will probably mean a
total collapse es a national unit. But we are
ready to face this.
This last consideration must have been a very serious one. Among
his oppositional friends and associates Moltke was probably unique in not
only not being a nationalist but not even a patriot. The others felt that
in opposing Hitler they were the real patriots, however much the Nazis
might arrogate a monopoly of patriotism to themselves. But Moltke was above
even those considerations and the consolations and conflicts they gave rise
to. Yet he knew that the fight against the Treaty of Versailles had been
Hitler's trump card at home and abroad and that the threat of another such
treaty or a worse one made domestic resistance a desperately lonely undertaking.
In such an undertaking one needed a faith to sustain one, faith that
fortified one against being overwhelmed by the historic events of the moment
and their massive psychological effects, and faith that had indeed a connection
with "another world'' from that dominated not only by the Nazis but by all
those who thought like them elsewhere: or those who, at any rate, could not
free themselves from the coils of collective thinking.
This, of course, is natural enough in time of war, even one that, like
the second world war, has an aspect of international civil war about it. Even
in peace people find it difficult or even undesirable to think of themselves
and others except as parts of collectivitiesQ In fact nowadays that is how
"identity" tends to be defined: in terms of menbership of this or that collective:
black, white, red; racial, religious, national, or sexual. But in war the need
to feel one belongs to some group or other becomes even stronger. And
nations~
naturally, lay claim to their nationals and require them to perform services
and observe loyalties.
Moltke, incidentally, did at one time think of emigrating, leaving his
Silesian estate -- to which he was very much attached
leaving his law practice
in Berlin, leaving his German roots and connections, and trying to make a go of
�-15-
it in England where he qualified as a lawyer by virtually commuting
across the Channel in the late
193~!e;but
he had understandable
hesitations, and when the war broke out, he was in Germany.
He then worked as a legal advisor to the German High Command and
did his utmost to persuade his superiare of the benefits of international
law. He laboured to prevent or reduce breaches of it by the Germans, even
to interpret infractions by the other belligerents in ways that favoured
them. In human terms this meant, for instance, getting people classified
as prisoners of war whose status under the Geneva Conventions might be rather
dubious, or arguing against the slave trade that foreign labour should not
be forcibly drafted to Germany but that people should rather be allowed to
man their own industries at home in the occupied countries, or it might mean
fighting against Hitler's order that any captured Russian political Commissars
should not be treated as prisoners but were to be shot at once.
Moltke was indefatigable in this work and achieved an amazing amount of
success considering his relatively junior rank. Some of his successes might
not be lasting -- but even just prolonging someone's life or liberty was worth
the effort. His powers of persuasion must have been prodigious. What he ascribed
them to himself, apart from hard work (he was always in command of his facts),
was the appeal he could make, beside all arguments of expediency he might
marshal, to the residual decency in people, who might even be relieved, on
some occasions, to hear someone say things that had once been generally accepted
as true and good, but which were now as generally relegated to the status of
sentimentality or worse.
In the pursuit of such "sentimentality," or one might call it "justice"
or "humanity", he had to keep and use his head. Theatrical gestures would have
helped no-one. But this need to keep his head worried him at times, when he
wondered whether he was getting hardened, just as he had already worried earlier
whether the mere fact of staying and carrying on might not help maintain the
facade behind which the Nazis did their devilish work. The strain of this sometimes became almost unbearable.
�-16-
A latter of October 1941 may give you an idea of
this~
It was
written at a time when Russia was but America was not yet in the war.
In his official position Moltke had access ta classified information,
the kind of thing that never got into the
press~
He writes:
The day has been so full of ghastly news that I
can't write collectedly although I came back at
5 and have had tea= What I mind most at the moment
is the inadequacy of the reaction of the military.
Falkenhausen and Stuelpnagel [they wars the generals
in charge of Belgium and France] have returned to
their places instead of resigning after the latsst
incidents,
n~w
and
horribl~
orders are going out
and nobody seems to care@ Haw can one bear oneYa
share of guilt?
In one part of Serbia two villages have been reduced to ashes and of the inhabitants 1,700 men and
240 women have been executed® This was called the
"punishment" for the attack on three German soldiers@
In Greece 240 men were shot in one village® The
uillaga was burnt down, the women and children were
left on the apct to mourn their husbands and fathers
and hcmsso In France extensive shootings are going on
as I writs© In this way c9rtainly mora than a thousand
and thousands more
Germans are being habituated to murder® And all that is
child's play compared to what is happening in Poland
and Russiae Is it right for me to learn of these things
and yet sit at my table in a
wall~haated
room and drink
tea? Do I not thereby make myself into an accomplice?
What shall I say when I am asked: "And what did you do
during this time?"
I
!
I
�-17-
Since Saturday they have been herding the
Berlin Jews together. They are collected at
9.15 in the evening and shut into a synagogue
overnight. Then they are sent, with what they
can carry to Lodz and Smolensk. The authoritues
want to spare us the sight of how they are left
to perish in hunger and cold and that is why it
is done in Lodz and Smolensk. A friend of Kiep's
saw a Jew collapse in the street; when she wanted
to help him get up, a policeman intervened, prevented~her
and kicked the body as it lay on the
ground, so that it rolled into the gutter. Then he
turned to the lady with a last vestige of shame and
said: ''Those are our orders."
How can one know of such things and still walk
about a free man?
His actions gave the answer. It was not a question of the "right" to refrain
from an instant reflex. It was a case of duty. There were things he could do
or could try to do, and those he did, accepting the risk of arrest, but not
courting it.
Hatching or joining a plot to kill Hitler was not among those things.
This was not because he lacked the courage but because, unlike Bonhoeffer, he
judged it to be wrong, for several reasons. One of them was his conviction that
the assassination of Hitler -- even if it succeeded, and he had his doubts
about that -- would not cure the Germans of Hitlerism but might, on the contrary,
make a martyr of him and give rise to another legend, worse than the one that
had vitiated politics after the first world war, when it was said and widely
accepted that the undefeated German army was stabbed in the back by traitors at
home. Moltke was convinced that the only cure for the German disease was a clear
military defeat -- not the whole cure, of course, but a necessary part. And the
Nazis would have to be in charge until that def eat was accomplished so that the
responsibility for it should be unmistakably theirs.
This does not mean that he was enthusiastic about the Allied policy of
�-18-
demanding "Unconditional
Surrender~"
especially about the way that slogan
affected propaganda. It was launched by Roosevelt and accepted by Churchill
at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, at a time when the Russians
were bearing the brunt of the war and clamouring for a second front in the
Westo The battles at Stalingrad and in North Africa were, at last, turning
the tide of the war, and Roosevelt probably got carried away by historic
echoes, by the elation of
Amarica~s
growing power, and by the desire to assure
the hard-pressed Russians, and more particularly the ever-suspicious Stalin,
that the Western allies would never conclude any kind of negotiated peace with
whatever kind of German regime* Whenever Germans opposed to the Nazi regime
tried to establish contact with the West, Roosevelt refused to have anything
to do with these "East German junkers" as he called them and the British
government rejected all such fselars as aiming at a "soft peace" or a split in
the coalition between the Wast and Soviet Russia" When Stauffsnberg finally
tried and failed to kill Hitler and remove his regime, the official mood in
London was one of relief at the failure; the reason given was Moltke 1 s: that
the plot, if-it had succssdad, would only have meant another stab=in-the-back
legendQ Publicly Churchill made a scathing comment, in the House of
Commons~
on
the German top-dogs now being at each other's throats. Much later, after the
war, he mads amends for this and paid tribute to the plotters.
But there was another reason for the unwillingness in London and
Washington to consider any oppositional German approaches" It was the feeling
that Germany needed a thoroughgoing social revolution or re-construction and
that this would have to be brought about or facilitated by Allied occupation,
by American, British, and Russian occupation (the Franch were included at a
later stage, at de Gaulle's insistence). The Russian part has, actually,
happened.
Moltke and his friends had their own plans for social change -- including,
incidentally, the nationalization of some key industries. They proposed to take
mining, iron and steel, the basic chemical industries and fuel and power into
public ownershipo They also had their own plans for the purgation of the body
politic and the punishment of war criminals and of Nazis who had committed
crimes in Germany. They were convinced that punishment J2y Germans in conjunction
�-19-
with the International Court at The Hague, rather than by the victors1 was
not only desirable and possible, but would also be more efficacious.
Others of the Kreiaau discussions and proposals still have a
curiously prophetic ring about them, especially those concerned with the
need to create smaller social and political units, units in- which people can
once more feel they belong and amount to something, feel responsible. The
plans for a federal structure of Germany and for a united Europe anticipated
some actual later developments. The need for the re-christianization of
Germany that they felt so strongly in the hell of the Nazi counter-religion
may have found some counterpart in the growth of Christian Democratic parties
in Western Europe; and it is probably no accident that it was the Christian
Democrats in France, Germany, and Italy who made the first bold moves after
the war to get away from the stranglehold of nationalism and the nation state,
to found some kind of European unity.
These developments may not quite have taken the form that was or
indeed could be envisaged by the internal opponents of Hitler's Fortress
Europe, but their recognition of the dangers of totalitarianism in all its
forms and of the manipulability of mass societies, their search for remedies,
retains its relevance to the problems of our day.
The People's Court in Berlin knew of the Kreisau discussions and their
outcome only in vaguest outline. The incriminating evidence was very sparse.
Moltke and his associates had been extremely careful and circumspect while at
liberty, and brave and resourceful
under interrogation, some of it -- though not
in Moltke's own case -~accompanied by torture. The court did know of the
selection of Regional Commissioners that were to take over after the removal of
the Nazis and of the instructions that the Kreisauers had drafted for them. But
the chief emphasis in the trial was on their temerity in thinking of and providing
for a German defeat; not on working for it, but on thinking about it. Freisler
knew as well as Moltke what narrow limits are set to effective action against
a totalitarian regime. He had no inkling of Moltke's effectiveness within those
limits. But he sensed and said what was the basis of that effectiveness and the
real danger to the regime: the faith that was opposed to the Nazi faith.
�-20-
The Christian faith had, since the Reformation, split Germany
into mutually hostile Protestant and Catholic factions and had been subject
to erosion in the decades before Hitler, exploiting the split and the loss of
faith, offered himself as the new Saviour.
It must have been this realization that made Moltke, the Protestant,
so determined and methodical in his contacts with the Catholics, not only
with the Jesuits, but also with layman and with the Catholic Bishop of
Berlin, Count Preysing, who happened to be the most clear-headed and recalcitrant member of the German hierarchy as far as the Nazis ware concerned.
(Incidentally, Preysing had written a rather interesting article on Thomas
More on the occasion of MoreYs elevation to the sainthood, in 1935,
lJillim
and at a time when such a canonization had clear
political overtones.) Moltke saw Preysing quite regularly for the discussion
of current problems and what could be done about them, right down to the
content and style of pastoral
letters~
Moltke had the reputation -- rightly or wrongly -- of being incapable
of telling a lise He was certainly capable of telling less than the whole
truth. In the conduct of his court case he withheld as much incriminating
information as hs could, and that was a lot. Ha was very
careful~
as were
his associates, to limit tha damage, and blame what could not be denied on the
dead or on those who were for other reasons beyond the reach of the regime.
The prosecution never learnt of the third Kreisau meeting (one concerned with
foreign policy, the punishment of Nazi criminals, and the instructions to ba
given to the post-Nazi Regional Commissioners)© It did not know what want on
at countless smaller meetings in Berlin, at meetings with resistance leaders
abroad or with representatives of the German occupation
SS
~on
~
military or even
whom Moltke got to work to reduce the harm they were doing and ta
increase the good. He did not volunteer information to his interrogators about
his part in the rescue of the Norwegian Bishop Beraqrav or of the Danish
Jews~
So what he says in his letters about his trial is true: he was
condemned not for what he had dona but for what he ~· His widespread and
energetic and dangerous activities on behalf of victims of the regime, his
�-21-
efforts to foil and counteract the purposes of the Nazis and to prepare for a
human political order to supersede theirs (and that very preparation, those
discussions, were, of course, invaluable for the preservation and fortif ication of mental health in Hitler's madhouse) - all these activities were
the expression of tte kind of man he was, a man who took his Christianity
more and more seriously. George Kennan, who only knew him in the early
stages of his clandestine activities, described him, in his Memoirs, as "the
greatest person, morally, and the largest and most enlightened in his concepts" that he met on either side of the battle lines in the second world
war.
I did not know him at all. I have only read hundreds of his letters,
letters in which he is very much alive, in his integrity, his intelligence,
his seriousness, and his caustic wit. They give a picture rather different
from that in the literature about him. On the basis of my knowledge of the
period and of those letters I would even suggest that he was a realist.
�
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Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
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Trial in Berlin
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Typescript of a lecture delivered on November 28, 1973 by Beate Ruhm von Oppen as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
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Ruhm von Oppen, Beate
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Annapolis, MD
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1973-11-28
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English
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lec Ruhm von Oppen 1973-11-28
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<a title="Sound recording" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3599">Sound recording</a>
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/c55939f48eb4e36d5d146b1eb3df74de.mp3
9d41ceddff1d392378398bf91574f4cd
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
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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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Translating the Odyssey Again: Why and How (Steiner Lecture)
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Wilson_Emily_2018-10-19
Friday night lecture
Steiner lecture
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Aristotle's Poetics is a much-disdained book. So unpoetic a soul as
Aristotle's has no business speaking about such a topic, much less telling
poets how to go about their business. He reduces the drama to its
language, people say, and the language itself to its least poetic element, the
story, and then he encourages insensitive readers like himself to subject
stories to crudely moralistic readings, that reduce tragedies to the childish
proportions of Aesop-fables. Strangely, though, the Poetics itself is rarely
read with the kind of sensitivity its critics claim to possess, and the thing
criticized is not the book Aristotle wrote but a caricature of it. Aristotle
himself respected Homer so much that he personally corrected a copy of
the Iliad for his student Alexander, who carried it all over the world. In
his Rhetoric (III, xvi, 9), Aristotle criticizes orators who write exclusively
from the intellect, rather than from the heart, in the way Sophocles makes
Antigone speak. Aristotle is often thought of as a logician, but he regularly
uses the adverb logik6s, logically, as a term of reproach contrasted with
phusik6s, naturally .or appropriately, to describe arguments made by
others, or preliminary and inadequate arguments of his own. Those who
take the trouble to look at the Poetics closely will find, I think, a book that
treats its topic appropriately and naturally, and contains the reflections of
a good reader and characteristically powerful thinker.
The first scandal in the Poetics is the initial marking out of dramatic
poetry as a form of imitation. We call the poet a creator, and are offended
at the suggestion that he might be merely some sort of recording device.
As the painter's eye teaches us how to look and shows us what we never
saw, the dramatist presents things that never existed until he imagined
them, and makes us experience worlds we could never have found the way
to on our own. But Aristotle has no intention to diminish the poet, and in
fact says the same thing I just said, in making the point that poetry is
more philosophic than history. By imitation, Aristotle does not mean the
sort of mimicry by which Aristophanes, say, finds syllables that
approximate the sound of frogs. He is speaking of the imitation of action,
and by action he does not mean mere happenings. Aristotle speaks
extensively of praxis in the Nicomachean Ethics. It is not a word he uses
loosely, and in fact his use of it in the definition of tragedy recalls the
discussion in the Ethics.
Action, as Aristotle uses the word, refers only to what is deliberately
chosen, and capable of finding completion in the achievement of some
purpose. Animals and young children do not act in this sense, and action is
not the whole of the life of any of us. The poet must have an eye for the
emergence of action in human life, and a sense for the actions that are
worth paying attention to. They are not present in the world in such a
way that a video camera could detect them. An intelligent, feeling, shaping
human soul must find them. By the same token, the action of the drama
1
�itself is not on the stage. It takes form and has its being in the imagination
of the spectator. The actors speak and move and gesture, but it is the poet
who speaks through them, from imagination to imagination, to present to
us the thing that he has made. Because that thing he makes has the form
of an action, it has to be seen and held together just as actively and
attentively by us as by him. The imitation is the thing that is re-produced,
in us and for us, by his art. This is a powerful kind of human
communication, and the thing imitated is what defines the human realm.
If no one had tbe power to imitate action, life might just wash over us
without leaving any trace.
How do I know that Aristotle intends the imitation of action to be
understood in this way? In De Anima, he distinguishes three kinds of
perception (II, 6; III, 3 ). There is the perception of proper sensibles-.colors, sounds, tastes and so on; these lie on the surfaces of things and can
be mimicked directly for sense perception. But there is also perception of
common sensibles, available to more than-one of our senses, as shape is
grasped by both sight and touch, or number by all five senses; these are
distinguished by imagin,ation, the power in us that is shared by the five
senses, and in which the circular shape, for instance, is not dependent on
sight or touch alone. These common sensibles can be mimicked in various
ways, as when I draw a messy, meandering ridge of chalk on a blackboard,
and your imagination grasps a circle. Finally, there is the perception of
that of which the sensible qualities are attributes, the thing--the son of
Diares, for example; it is this that we ordinarily mean by perception, and
while its object always has an image in the imagination, it can only be
distinguished by intellect, nous (III,4). Skilled mimics can imitate people
we know, by voice, gesture, and so on, and here already we must engage
intelligence and imagination together. The dramatist imitates things more
·remote from the eye and ear than familiar people. Sophocles and
Shakespeare, for example, imitate repentance and forgiveness, true
instances of action in Aristotle's sense of the word, and we need all the
human powers to recognize what these poets put before us. So the mere
phrase imitation of an action is packed with meaning, available to us as
soon as we ask what an action is, and how the image of such a thing might
be perceived.
Aristotle does understand tragedy as a development out of the child's
mimicry of animal noises, but that is in the same way that he understands
philosophy as a development out of our enjoyment of sight-seeing
(Metaphysics I, 1). In each of these developments there is a vast array of
possible intermediate stages, but just as philosophy is the ultimate form of
the innate desire to know, tragedy is considered by Aristotle the ultimate
form of our innate delight in imitation. His beloved Homer saw and
achieved the most important possibilities of the imitation of human action,
2
�but it was the tragedians who refined and intensified the form of that
imitation, and discovered its perfection.
A work is a tragedy, Aristotle tells us, only if it arouses pity and fear.
Why does he single out these two passions? Some interpreters think he
means them only as examples--pity and fear and other passions like that-but I am not among those loose constructionists. Aristotle does use a word
that means passions of that sort ( toiouta), but I think he does so only to
indicate that pity and fear are not themselves things subject to
identification with pin-point precision, but that each refers to a range of
feeling. It is just the feelings in those two ranges, however, that belong to
tragedy. Why? Why shouldn't some tragedy arouse pity and joy, say, and
another fear and cruelty? In various places, Aristotle says that it is the
mark of an educated person to know what needs explanation and what
doesn't. He does not try to prove that there is such a thing as nature, or
such a thing as motion, though some people deny both. Likewise, he
understands the recognition of a special and powerful form of drama built
around pity and fear as the beginning of an inquiry, and spends not one
word justifying that restriction. We, however, can see better why he starts
there by trying out a few simple alternatives.
Suppose a drama aroused pity in a powerful way, but aroused no fear at
all. This is an easily recognizable dramatic form, called a tear-jerker. The
name is meant to disparage this sort of drama, but why? Imagine a well
written, well made play or movie that depicts the losing struggle of a
likable central character. We are moved to have a good cry, and are
afforded either the relief of a happy ending, or the realistic desolation of a
sad one. In the one case the tension built up along the way is released
within the experience of the work itself; in the other it passes off as we
leave the theater, and readjust our feelings to the fact that it was, after all,
only make-believe. What is wrong with that? There is always pleasure in
strong emotion, and the theater is a harmless place to indulge it. We may
even come out feeling good about being so compassionate. But Dostoyevski
depicts a character who loves to cry in the theater, not noticing that while
she wallows in her warm feelings her coach-driver is shivering outside.
She has day-dreams about relieving suffering humanity, but does nothing
to put that vague desire to work. If she is typical, then the tear-jerker is a
dishonest form of drama, not even a harmless diversion but an
encouragement to lie to oneself.
Well then, let's consider the opposite experiment, in which a drama
arouses fear in a powerful way, but arouses little or no pity. This is again
a readily recognizable dramatic form, called the horror story, or in a recent
fashion, the mad-slasher movie. The thrill of fear is the primary object of
such amusements, and the story alternates between the build-up of
apprehension and the shock of violence. Again, as with the tear-jerker, it
3
�doesn't much matter whether it ends happily or with uneasiness, or even
with one last shock, so indeterminate is its form. And while the tearjerker gives us an illusion of compassionate delicacy, the unrestrained
shock-drama obviously has the effect of coarsening feeling. Genuine
humart pity could not co-exist with the so-called graphic effects these films
use to keep scaring us. The attraction of this kind of amusement is again
the thrill of strong feeling, and again the price of indulging the desire for
that thrill may be high.
Let us consider a milder form of the drama built on arousing fear.
There are stories in which fearsome things are threatened or done by
characters who are in the end defeated by means similar to, or in some
way equivalent to, what they dealt out. The fear is relieved in vengeance,
and we feel a satisfaction that we might be inclined to call justice. To work
on the level of feeling, though, justice must be understood as the exact
inverse of the crime--doing to the offender the sort of thing he did or
meant to do to others. The imagination of evil then becomes the measure
of good, or at least of the restoration of order. The satisfaction we feel in
the vicarious infliction of pain or death is nothing but a thin veil over the
very feelings we mean to be punishing. This is a successful dramatic
formula, arousing in us destructive desires that are fun to feel, along with
the self-righteous illusion that we are really superior to the character who
displays them. The playwright who makes us feel that way will probably
be popular, but he is a menace.
We have looked at three kinds of non-tragedy that arouse passions in a
destructive way, and we could add others. There are potentially as many
kinds as there are passions and combinations of passions. That suggests
that the theater is just an arena for the manipulation of passions in ways
that are pleasant in the short run and at least reckless to pursue
repeatedly. At worst, the drama could be seen as dealing in a kind of
addiction, which it both produces and holds the only remedy for. But we
have not yet tried to talk about the combination of passions characteristic
of tragedy.
When we turn from the sort of examples I have given, to the
acknowledged examples of tragedy, we find ourselves in a different world.
The tragedians I have in mind are five: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and
Euripides; Shakespeare, who differs from them only in time; and Homer,
who differs from them somewhat more, in the form in which he composed,
but shares with them the things that matter most. I could add other
authors, such as Dostoyevski, who wrote stories of the tragic kind in much
looser literary forms, but I want to keep the focus on a small number of
clear paradigms.
When we look at a tragedy we find the chorus in Antigone telling us
what a strange thing a human being is, that passes beyond all boundaries
4
�(lines 332 ff.), or King Lear asking if man is no more than this, a poor, bare,
forked animal (III, iv, 97ff.), or Macbeth protesting to his wife "I dare do
all that may become a man; who dares do more is none" (I, vii, 47-8), or
Oedipus taunting Teiresias with the fact that divine art was of no use
against the Sphinx, but only Oedipus' own human ingenuity (Oed. Tyr. 39098), or Agamemnon, resisting walking home on tapestries, saying to his
wife "I tell you to revere me as a man, not a god" (925), or Cadmus in the
Bacchae saying "I am a man, nothing more" ( 199), while Dionysus tells
Pentheus "You do not know what you are" (506), or Patroclus telling
Achilles "Peleus was not your father nor Thetis your mother, but the gray
sea bore you, and the towering rocks, so hard is your heart" (Iliad XVI, 3 35). I could add more examples of this kind by the dozen, and your
memories will supply others. Tragedy seems always to involve testing or
finding the limits of what is human. This is no mere orgy of strong feeling,
but a highly focussed way of bringing our powers to bear on the image of
what is human as such. I suggest that Aristotle is right in saying that the
powers which first of all bring this human image to sight for us are pity
and fear.
It is obvious that the authors in our examples are not just putting things
in front of us to make us cry or shiver or gasp. The feelings they arouse
are subordinated to another effect. Aristotle begins by saying that tragedy
arouses pity and fear in such a way as to culminate in a cleansing of those
passions, the famous catharsis. The word is used by Aristotle only the
once, in his preliminary definition of tragedy. I think this is because its
role is taken over later in the Poetics by another, more positive, word, but
the idea of catharsis is important in itself, and we should consider what it
might mean.
First of all, the tragic catharsis might be a purgation. Fear can obviously
be an insidious thing that undermines life and poisons it with anxiety. It
would be good to flush this feeling from our systems, bring it into the
open, and clear the air. This may explain the appeal of horror movies, that
they redirect our fears toward something external, grotesque, and finally
ridiculous, in order to puncture them. On the other hand, fear might have
a secret allure, so that what we need to purge is the desire for the thrill
that comes with fear. The horror movie also provides safe way to
indulge and satisfy the longing to feel afraid, and go home afterward
satisfied; the desire is purged, temporarily, by being fed. Our souls are so
many-headed that opposite satisfactions may be felt at the same time, but
I think these two really are opposite. In the first sense of purgation, the
horror movie is a kind of medicine that does its work and leaves the soul
healthier, while in the second sense it is a potentially addictive drug.
Either explanation may account for the popularity of these movies among
teenagers, since fear is so much a fact of that time of life. For those of us
a
5
�who are older, the tear-jerker may have more appeal, offering a way to
purge the regrets of our lives in a sentimental outpouring of pity. As with
fear, this purgation too may be either medicinal or drug-like.
This idea of purgation, in its various forms, is what we usually mean
when we call something cathartic. People speak of watching football, or
boxing, as a catharsis of violent urges, or call a shouting match with a
friend a useful catharsis of buried resentment. This is a practical purpose
that drama may also serve, but it has no particular connection with beauty
or truth; to be good in this purgative way, a drama has no need to be good
in any other way. No one would be tempted to confuse the feeling at the
end of a horror movie with what Aristotle calls "the tragic pleasure," nor to
call such a movie a tragedy. But the English word catharsis does not
contain everything that is in the Greek word. Let us look at other things it
might mean.
Catharsis in Greek can mean purification. While purging something
means getting rid of it, purifying something means getting rid of the worse
or baser parts of it. It is possible that tragedy purifies the feelings
themselves of fear and pity. These arise in us in crude ways, attached to
all sorts of objects. Perhaps the poet educates our sensibilities, our powers
to feel and be moved, by refining them and attaching them to less easily
discernible objects. There is a line in The Wasteland, "I will show you fear
in a handful of dust." Alfred Hitchcock once made us all feel a little
shudder when we took showers. The poetic imagination is limited only by
its skill, and can turn any object into a focus for any feeling. I suppose
some people turn to poetry to find delicious and exquisite new ways to feel
old feelings, and consider themselves to enter in that way into a purified
state. I have heard it argued that this sort of thing is what tragedy and
the tragic pleasure are all about, but it doesn't match up with my
experience. Sophocles does make me fear and pity human knowledge
when I watch the Oedipus Tyrranus, but this is not a refinement of those
feelings but a discovery that they belong to a surprising object. Sophocles
is not training my feelings, but using them to show me something worthy
of wonder.
I believe that the word catharsis drops out of the Poetics because the
word wonder, to thaumaston, replaces it, first in chapter 9, where Aristotle
argues that pity and fear arise most of all where wonder does, and finally
in chapters 24 and 25, where he singles out wonder as the aim of the
poetic art itself, into which the aim of tragedy in particular merges. Ask
yourself how you feel at the end of a tragedy. You have witnessed
horrible things and felt painful feelings, but the mark of tragedy is that it
brings you out the other side. Aristotle's use of the word catharsis is not a
technical reference to purgation or purification but a beautiful metaphor
for the peculiar tragic pleasure, the feeling of being washed or cleansed.
6
�The tragic pleasure is a paradox. As Aristotle says, in a tragedy, a
happy ending doesn't make us happy. At the end of the play the stage is
often littered with bodies, and we feel cleansed by it all. Are we like
Clytemnestra, who says she rejoiced when spattered by her husband's
blood, like the earth in a Spring rain (Ag. 1389-92)? Are we like Iago, who
has to see a beautiful life destroyed to feel better about himself ( Ofh. V, i,
18-20)? We all feel a certain glee in the bringing low of the mighty, but
this is in no way similar to the feeling of being washed in wonderment.
The closest thing I know to the feeling at the end of a tragedy is the one
that comes with the sudden, unexpected appearance of something
beautiful. In a famous essay on beauty (Ennead I, tractate 6) , Plotinus
says two things that seem true to me: "Clearly [beauty] is something
detected at a first glance, something that the soul...recognizes, gives
welcome to, and, in a way, fuses with" (beginning sec. 2). What is the
effect on us of this recognition? Plotinus says that in every instance it is
"an astonishment, a delicious wonderment" (end sec. 4). Aristotle is
insistent that a tragedy must be whole and one, because only in that way
can it be beautiful, while he also ascribes the superiority of tragedy over
epic poetry to its greater unity and concentration (ch. 26). Tragedy is not
just a dramatic form in which some works are beautiful and others not;
tragedy is itself a species of beauty. All tragedies are beautiful.
By following Aristotle's lead, we have now found five marks of tragedy:
(1) it imitates an action, (2) it arouses pity and fear, (3) it displays the
human image as such, (4) it ends in wonder, and (S) it is inherently
beautiful. We noticed earlier that it is action that characterizes the
distinctively human realm, and it is reasonable that the depiction of an
action might show us a human being in some definitive way, but what do
pity and fear have to do with that showing? The answer is, I think,
everything.
First, let us consider what tragic pity consists in. The word pity tends to
have a bad name these days, and to imply an attitude of condescension
that diminishes its object. This is not a matter of the meanings of words,
or even of changing attitudes. It belongs to pity itself to be two-sided,
since any feeling of empathy can be given a perverse twist by the
recognition that it is not oneself but another with whom one is feeling a
shared pain. One of the most empathetic characters in all literature is
Edgar in King Lear. He describes himself truly as "a most poor man, made
tame to fortune's blows, Who, by the art of known and feeling sorrows, Am
pregnant to good pity" (IV, vi, 217-19). Two of his lines spoken to his
father are powerful evidence of the insight that comes from suffering
oneself and taking on the suffering of others: "Thy life's a miracle" (IV, vi,
SS), he says, and "Ripeness is all" (V, ii, 11), trying to help his father see
that life is still good and death is not something to be sought. Yet in the
7
�last scene of the play this same Edgar voices the stupidest words ever
spoken in any tragedy, when he concludes that his father just got what he
deserved when he lost his eyes, since he had once committed adultery (V,
iii, 171-4). Having witnessed the play, we know that Gloucester lost his
eyes because he chose to help Lear, when the kingdom had become so
corrupt that his act of kindness appeared as a walking fire in a dark world
(Ill, iv, 107). There is a chain of effects from Gloucester's adultery to his
mutilation, but it is not a sequence that reveals the true cause of that
horror. The wholeness of action that Shakespeare shapes for us shows that
Gloucester's goodness, displayed in a courageous, deliberate choice, and not
his weakness many years earlier, cost him his eyes. Edgar ends by giving
in to the temptation to moralize, to chase after the "fatal flaw" which is no
part of tragedy, and loses his capacity to see straight.
This suggests that holding on to proper pity leads to seeing straight, and
that seems exactly right. But what is proper pity? There is a way of
missing the mark that is opposite to condescension, and that is the excess
of pity called sentimentality. There are people who use the word
sentimental for any display of feeling, or any taking seriously of feeling,
but their attitude is as blind as Edgar's. Sentimentality is inordinate
feeling, feeling that goes beyond the source that gives rise to it. The
woman in Dostoyevski's novel who loves pitying for its own sake is an
example of this vice. But between Edgar's moralizing and her gushing
there is a range of appropriate pity. Pity is one of the instruments by
which a poet can show us what we are. We pity the loss of Gloucester's
eyes because we know the value of eyes, but more deeply, we pity the
violation of Gloucester's decency, and in so doing we feel the truth that
without such decency, and without respect for it, there is no human life.
Shakespeare is in control here, and the feeling he produces does not give
way in embarrassment to moral judgment, nor does it make us wallow
mindlessly in pity because it feels so good; the pity he arouses in us shows
us what is precious in us, in the act of its being violated in another.
Since every boundary has two sides, the human image is delineated also
from the outside, the side of the things that threaten it. This is shown to
us through the feeling of fear. As Aristotle says twice in the Rhetoric, what
we pity in others, we fear for ourselves (1382b 26, 1386a 27). In our
mounting fear that Oedipus will come to know the truth about himself, we
feel that something of our own is threatened. Tragic fear, exactly like
tragic pity, and either preceding it or simultaneous with it, shows us what
we are and are unwilling to lose. It makes no sense to say that Oedipus'
passion for truth is a flaw, since that is the very quality that makes us
afraid on his behalf. Tragedy is never about flaws, and it is only the
silliest of mistranslations that puts that claim in Aristotle's mouth.
Tragedy is about central and indispensable human attributes, disclosed to
8
�us by the pity that draws us toward them and the fear that makes us
recoil from what threatens them.
Because the suffering of the tragic figure displays the boundaries of
what is human, every tragedy carries the sense of universality. Oedipus or
Antigone or Lear or Othello is somehow every one of us, only more so. But
the mere mention of these names makes it obvious that they are not
generalized characters, but altogether particular. And if we did not feel
that they were genuine individuals, they would have no power to engage
our emotions. It is by their particularity that they make their marks on
us, as though we had encountered them in the flesh. It is only through the
particularity of our feelings that our bonds with them emerge. What we
care for and cherish makes us pity them and fear for them, and thereby
the reverse also happens: our feelings of pity and fear make us recognize
what we care for and cherish. When the tragic figure is destroyed it is a
piece of ourselves that is lost. Yet we never feel desolation at the end of a
tragedy, because what is lost is also, by the very same means, found. I am
not trying to make a paradox, but to describe a marvel. It is not so strange
that we learn the worth of something by losing it; what is astonishing is
what the tragedians are able to achieve by making use of that common
experience. They lift it up into a state of wonder.
Within our small group of exemplary poetic works, there are two that
do not have the tragic form, and hence do not concentrate all their power
into putting us in a state of wonder, but also depict the state of wonder
among their characters and contain speeches that reflect on it. They are
Homer's Iliad and Shakespeare's Tempest. (Incidentally, there is an
excellent small book called Woe or Wonder, the Emotional Effect of
Shakespearean Tragedy, by J. V. Cunningham, that demonstrates the
continuity of the traditional understanding of tragedy from Aristotle to
Shakespeare.) The first poein in our literary heritage, and Shakespeare's
last play, both belong to a conversation of which Aristotle's Poetics is the
most prominent part.
In both the Iliad and the Tempest there are characters with arts that in
some ways resemble that of the poet. It is much noticed that Prospero's
farewell to his art coincides with Shakespeare's own, but it may be less
obvious that Homer has put into the Iliad a partial representation of
himself. But the last 150 lines of Book XVIII of the Iliad describe the
making of a work of art by Hephaestus. I will not consider here what is
depicted on the shield of Achilles, but only the meaning in the poem of the
shield itself. In Book XVIII, Achilles has realized what mattered most to
him when it is too late. The Greeks are driven back to their ships, as
Achilles had prayed they would be, and know that they are lost without
him. "But what pleasure is this to me now," he say~ to his mother, "when
my beloved friend is dead, Patroclus, whom I cherished beyond all friends,
9
�as the equal of my own soul; I am bereft of him" (80-82). Those last
words, as our dean once pointed out in a lecture, also mean "I have killed
him." In his desolation, Achilles has at last chosen to act. 1'I will accept my
doom," he says (115 ). Thetis goes to Hephaestus because, in spite of his
resolve, Achilles has no armor in which to meet his fate. She tells her son's
story, concluding "he is lying on the ground, anguishing at heart" (461).
Her last word, anguishing, axrnwv, is built on Achilles' name.
Now listen to what Hephaestus says in reply: "Take courage, and do not
let these things distress you in your heart. Would that I had the power to
hide him far away from death and the sounds of grief when grim fate
comes to him, but I can see that beautiful armor surrounds him, of such a
kind that many people, one after another, who look on it, will wonder"
( 463-6 7). Is it not evident that this source of wonder that surrounds
Achilles, that takes the sting from his death even in a mother's heart, is the
Iliad itself? But how does the Iliad accomplish this?
Let us shift our attention for a moment to the Tempest. The character
Alonso, in the power of the magician Prospero, spends the length of the
play in the illusion that his son has drowned. To have him alive again,
Alonso says, "I wish Myself were mudded in that oozy bed Where my son
lies" (V, i, 150-2). But he has already been there for three hours in his
imagination; he says earlier "my son i' th' ooze is bedded; and I'll seek him
deeper than e'er plummet sounded And with him there lie mudded" (III,
iii, 100-2). What is this muddy ooze? It is Alonso's grief, and his regret
for exposing his son to danger, and his self-reproach for his own past crime
against Prospero and Prospero's baby daughter, which made his son a just
target for divine retribution; the ooze is Alonso's repentance, which feels
futile to him since it only comes after he has lost the thing he cares most
about. But the spirit Ariel sings a song to Alonso's son: "Full fathom five
thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his
eyes; Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea change Into
something rich and strange" (I, ii, 397-402). Alonso's grief is aroused by
an illusion, an imitation of an action, but his repentance is real, and is
slowly transforming him into a different man. Who is this new man? Let
us take consel from the "honest old councilor" Gonzalo, who always has the
clearest sight in the play. He tells us that on this voyage, when so much
seemed lost, every traveller found himself"When no man was his own" (V,
i, 206-13). The something rich and strange into which Alonso changes is
himself, as he was before his life took a wrong turn. Prospero's magic does
no more than arrest people in a potent illusion; in his power they are "knit
up In their distractions" (III, iii, 89-90). When released, he says, "they
shall be themselves" (V, i, 32).
On virtually every page of the Tempest, the word wonder appears, or
else some synonym for it. Miranda's name is Latin for wonder, her
10
�favorite adjective brave seems to mean both good and out-of-the-ordinary,
and the combination rich and strange means the same. What is wonder? J.
V. Cunningham describes it in the book I mentioned as the shocked limit of
all feeling, in which fear, sorrow, and joy can all merge. There is some
truth in that, but it misses what is wonderful or wondrous about wonder.
It suggests that in wonder our feelings are numbed and we are left limp,
wrung dry of all emotion. But wonder is itself a feeling, the one to which
Miranda is always giving voice, the powerful sense that what is before one
is both strange and good. Wonder does not numb the other feelings; what
it does is dislodge them from their habitual moorings. The experience of
wonder is the disclosure of a sight or thought or image that fits no habitual
context of feeling or understanding, but grabs and holds us by a power
borrowed from nothing apart from itself. The two things that Plotinus says
characterize beauty, that the soul recognizes it at first glance and
spontaneously gives welcome to it, equally describe the experience of
wonder. The beautiful always produces wonder, if it is seen as beautiful,
and the sense of wonder always sees beauty.
But are there really no wonders that are ugly? The monstrosities that
used to be exhibited in circus side-shows are wonders too, are they not?
In the Tempest, three characters think first of all of such spectacles when
they lay eyes on Caliban (II, ii, 28-31; V, i, 263-6), but they are incapable
of wonder, since they think they know everything that matters already. A
fourth character in the same batch, who is drunk but not insensible, gives
way at the end of Act II to the sense that this is not just someone strange
and deformed, nor just a useful servant, but a brave monster. But
Stephano is not, I think, like the holiday fools who pay to see monstrosities
like two-headed calves or exotic sights like wild men of Borneo. I recall an
aquarium somewhere in Europe that had on display an astoundingly ugly
catfish. People came casually up to its tank, were startled, made noises of
disgust, and turned away. Even to be arrested before such a sight feels in
some way perverse and has some conflict in the feeling it arouses, as when
we stare at the victims of a car wreck. The sight of the ugly or disgusting,
when it is felt as such, does not have the settled repose or willing
surrender that are characteristic of wonder. "Wonder is sweet," as
Aristotle says.
This sweet contemplation of something outside us is exactly opposite to
Alonso's painful immersion in his own remorse, but in every other respect
he is a model of the spectator of a tragedy. We are in the power of another
for awhile, the sight of an illusion works real and durable changes in us,
we merge into something rich and strange, and what we find by being
absorbed in the image of another is ourselves. As Alonso is shown a
mirror of his soul by Prospero, we are shown a mirror of ourselves in
Alonso, but in that mirror we see ourselves as we are not in witnessing the
11
�Tempest, but in witnessing a tragedy. The Tempest is a beautiful play,
suffused with wonder as well as with reflections on wonder, but it holds
the intensity of the tragic experience at a distance. Homer, on the other
hand, has pulled off a feat even more astounding than Shakespeare's, by
imitating the experience of a spectator of tragedy within a story that itself
works on us as a tragedy.
In Book XXIV of the Iliad, forms of the word thambos, amazement,
occur three times in three lines (482-4), when Priam suddenly appears in
the hut of Achilles and "kisses the terrible man-slaughtering hands that
killed his many sons" (478-9), but this is only the prelude to the true
wonder. Acl).illes and Priam cry together, each for his own grief, as each
has cried so often before, but this time a miracle happens. Achilles' grief is
transformed into satisfaction, and cleansed from his chest and his hands
(513-14). This is all the more remarkable, since Achilles has for days been
repeatedly trying to take out his raging grief on Hector's dead body. The
famous first word of the Iliad, menis, wrath, has come back at the
beginning of Book XXIV in the participle meneain6n (22), a constant
condition that Lattimore translates well as "standing fury." But all this
hardened rage evaporates in one lamentation, just because Achilles shares
it with his enemy's father. Hermes had told Priam to appeal to Achilles in
the names of his father, his mother, and his child, "in order to stir his
heart" (466-7), but Priam's focussed misery goes straight to Achilles' heart
without diluting the effect. The first words out of Priam's mouth are
"remember your father" (486). Your father deserves pity, Priam says, so
"pity me with him in mind, since I am more pitiful even than he; I have
dared what no other mortal on earth ever dared, to stretch out my lips to
the hand of the man who murdered my children" (503-4).
Achilles had been pitying Patroclus, but mainly himself, but the feeling
to which Priam has directed him now is exactly the same as tragic pity.
Achilles is looking at a human being who has chosep. to go to the limits of
what is humanly possible to search for something that matters to him. The
wonder of this sight takes Achilles out of his self-pity, but back into
himself as a son and as a sharer of human misery itself. All his old
longings for glory and revenge fall away, since they have no place in the
sight in which he is now absorbed. For the moment, the beauty of Priam's
terrible action re-makes the world, and determines what matters and what
doesn't. The feeling in this moment out of time is fragile, and Achilles feels
it threatened by tragic fear. In the strange fusion of this scene, what
Achilles fears is himself; "don't irritate me any longer now, old man," he
says when Priam tries to hurry along the return of Hector's body, "don't
stir up my heart in its griefs any more now, lest I not spare even you
yourself'' (560, 568-9). Finally, after they share a meal, they just look at
each other. "Priam wondered at Achilles, at how big he was and what he
12
�was like, for he seemed equal to the gods, but Achilles wondered at Trojan
Priam, looking on the worthy sight of him and hearing his story" (629-32).
In the grip of wonder they do not see enemies. They see truly. They see
the beauty in two men who have lost almost everything. They see a son a
father should be proud of and a father a son should revere.
The action of the Iliad stretches from Achilles' deliberate choice to
remove himself from the war to his deliberate choice to return Hector's
body to Priam. The passion of the Iliad moves from anger through pity
and fear to wonder. Priam's wonder lifts him for a moment out of the
misery he is enduring, and permits him to see the cause of that misery as
still something good. Achilles' wonder is similar to that of Priam, since
Achilles too sees the cause of his anguish in a new light, but in his case this
takes several steps. When Priam first appears in his hut, Homer compares
the amazement this produces to that with which people look at a murderer
who has fled from his homeland (480-84). This is a strange comparison,
and it recalls the even stranger fact disclosed one book earlier that
Patroclus, whom everyone speaks of as gentle and kind-hearted (esp. XVII,
670-71), who gives his life because he cannot bear to see his friends
destroyed to satisfy Achilles' anger, this same Patroclus began his life as a
murderer in his own country, and came to Achilles' father Peleus for a
second chance at life. When Achilles remembers his father, he is
remembering the man whose kindness brought Patroclus into his life, so
that his tears, now for his father, now again for Patroclus (XXIV, 511-12),
merge into a single grief. But the old man crying with him is a father too,
and Achilles' tears encompass Priam along with Achilles' own loved ones.
Finally, since Priam is crying for Hector, Achilles' grief includes Hector
himself, and so it turns his earlier anguish inside out. If Priam is like
Achilles father, then Hector must come to seem to Achilles to be like a
brother, or to be like himself.
Achilles cannot be brought to such a reflection by reasoning, nor do the
feelings in which he has been embroiled take him in that direction. Only
Priam succeeds in unlocking Achilles' heart, and he does so by an action,
by kissing his hand. From the beginning of Book XVIII ( 2 3, 2 7, 3 3),
Achilles' hands are referred to over and over and over, as he uses them to
pour dirt on his head, to tear his hair, and to kill every Trojan he can get
his hands on. Hector, who must go up against those hands, is mesmerized
by them; they are like a fire, he says, and repeats it. "His hands seem like
a fire" (XX, 371-2). After Priam kisses Achilles' hand, and after they cry
together, Homer tells us that the desire for lamentation went out of
Achilles' chest and out of his hands (XXIV, 514). His murderous, manslaughtering hands are stilled by a grief that finally has no enemy to take
itself out on. When, in Book XVIII, Achilles had accepted his doom (115),
it was part of a bargain; "I will lie still when I am dead," he had said, "but
13
�now I must win splendid glory" (121 ). But at the end of the poem, Achilles
has lost interest in glory. He is no longer eaten up by the desire to be
lifted above Hector and Priam, but comes to rest in just looking at them for
what they are. Homer does surround Achilles in armor that takes the sting
from his misery and from his approaching death, by working that misery
and death into the wholeness of the Iliad. But the Iliad is, as Aristotle
says, the prototype of tragedy; it is not a poem that aims at conferring
glory but a poem that bestows the gift of wonder.
Like Alonso in the Tempest, Achilles ultimately finds himself. Of the
two, Achilles is the closer model of the spectator of a tragedy, because
Alonso plunges deep into remorse before he is brought back into the
shared world. Achilles is lifted directly out of himself, into the shared
world, in the act of wonder, and sees his own image in the sorrowing
father in front of him. This is exactly what a tragedy does to us, and
exactly what we experience in looking at Achilles. In his loss, we pity him.
In his fear of himself, on Priam's behalf, we fear for him, that he might
lose his new-won humanity. In his capacity .to be moved by the wonder of
a suffering fellow humap., we wonder at him. At the end of the Iliad, as at
the end of every tragedy, we are washed in the beauty of the human
image, which our pity and our fear have brought to sight. The five marks
of tragedy that we learned of from Aristotle's Poetics--that it imitates an
action, arouses pity and fear, displays the human image as such, ends in
wonder, and is inherently beautiful--give a true and powerful account of
the tragic pleasure.
14
�Excerpts from Aristotle's Poetics
Ch. 6 A tragedy is an imitation of an action that is serious and has a
wholeness in its extent, in language that is pleasing (though in distinct
ways in its different parts), enacted rather than narrated, culminating, by
means of pity and fear, in the cleansing of these passions... So tragedy is an
imitation not of people, but of action, life, and happiness or unhappiness,
while happiness and unhappiness have their being in activity, and come to
completion not in a quality but in some sort of action... Therefore it is deeds
and the story that are the end at which tragedy aims, and in all things the
end is what matters most... So the source that governs tragedy in the way
that the soul governs life is the story.
Ch. 7 An extended whole is that which has a beginning, middle and end.
But a beginning is something which, in itself, does not need to be after
anything else, while something else naturally is the case or comes about
after it; and an end is its contrary, something which in itself is of such a
nature as to be after something else, either necessarily or for the most
part, but to have nothing else after it. ..It is therefore needful that wellput-together stories not begin from just anywhere at random, nor ~nd just
anywhere at random...And beauty resides in size and order... the oneness
and wholeness of the beautiful thing being present all at once in
contemplation.. .in stories, just as in human organizations and in living
things.
Ch. 8 A story is not one, as some people think, just because it is about
one person ...And Homer, just as he is distinguished in all other ways, seems
to have seen this point beautifully, whether by art or by nature.
Ch. 9 Now tragedy is an imitation not only of a complete action, but also
of objects of fear and pity, and these arise most of all when events happen
contrary to expectation but in consequence of one another; for in this way
they will have more wonder in them than if they happened by chance or
by fortune, since even among things that happen by chance, the greatest
sense of wonder is from those that seem to have happened by design.
Chs. 13-14 Since it is peculiar to tragedy to be an imitation of actions
arousing pity and fear ... and since the former concerns someone who is
undeserving of suffering and the latter concerns someone like us... the story
that works well must... depict a change from good to bad fortune, resulting
not from badness but from some great error of someone like us, or else
better rather than worse ... One must not look for every sort of pleasure
from a tragedy, but for the one native to it. And since it is the pleasure
�that results from pity and fear that makes the work a tragedy, and the
poet needs to provide this pleasure by tne, ns of imitation, it is evident
a
that it must be artfully embodied in the actions (and not rely on visual
effects).
Ch. 16 The best sort of revelation in a tragedy is one that arises from
the actions themselves, the astonishment coming about through things that
are likely, as in the Oedipus of Sophocles. {A revelation, as the word
indicates, is a change from ignorance to knowledge, that produces either
friendship or hatred in people marked out for good or bad fortune. The
most beautiful of revelations occurs when reversals of condition come
about at the same time, as is the case in the Oedipus.--Ch. 11}
Chs. 24-5 Wonder needs to be produced in tragedies, but in the epic
there is more room for that which confounds reason, by means of which
wonder comes about most of all, since in the epic one does not see the
person who performs the action; the events surrounding the pursuit of
Hector would seem ridiculous if they were on stage ... But wonder is
sweet... And Homer most of all has taught the rest of us how one ought to
speak of what is untrue ... One ought to choose likely impossibilities in
preference to uhconvincing possibilities ... And if a poet has represented
impossible things, then he has missed the mark, but that is the right thing
to do if he thereby hits the mark that is the end of the poetic art itself, that
is, if in that way he makes that or some other part more wondrous.
�
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Tragic pleasure
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1994
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Typescript of a lecture delivered in 1994 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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Towards "a new birth of freedom" --Tragedy and Comedy, 1786:
Schiller's Don Carlos and Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro
Gisela Berns
St. John's College, Annapolis
To the memory of Oskar Seidlin
The year is 1786. In Annapolis, delegates from different states, among them
James Madison from Virginia and Alexander Hamilton from New York, convene to
discuss matters of commerce under the Articles of Confederation, with the possibility for
h
larger issues left open. Like the rehearsal for the performance of a great play, what _ as
come to be called the Annapolis Convention concludes with a recommendation for a
Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia the following year (Morris, 161-9; Kammen,
19-22). Conscious of the enormity of the task before the Founding Fathers, Madison, in
Federalist 14, asks:
Is it not the glory of the people of America, that, whilst they have paid a decent regard to
the opinions of former times and other nations, they have not suffered a blind veneration
for antiquity, for custom, or for names, to overrule the suggestions of their own good
sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of their own experience? To
this manly spirit, posterity will be indebted for the possession, and the world for the
example, of the numerous innovations displayed on the American theatre, in favor of
private rights and public happiness.
In the same spirit, Friedrich Schiller, in his Prologue to Wallenstein, speaks of the
struggle for freedom at the end of the century as a time where "actuality itself becomes
poetry" and "art, upon its shadow stage I May strive for higher flight, indeed it must, I Or
yield in shame before the stage oflife" (WP, 61-9). That these lines, from 1798, have in
mind not only the French Revolution, of which Schiller, in 1792, had been made an
honorary citizen, but also the American Revolution, is clear from two interesting facts:
one, to this day a large lithograph of the Battle of Bunker Hill hangs at the entry to
l
�Schiller's study in Weimar. The other, in a letter of 1783, possibly meant to confuse the
authorities, Schiller toys with the idea of emigrating to America. Undecided whether,
once there, he would practice medicine, get involved in politics, or teach philosophy, he
concludes: "But tragedies, for that matter, I shall never cease to write - you know my
whole being hangs on it" (To Lempp, June 19, 1783).
Living in political exile, under the constant threat of persecution for his
revolutionary ideas, Schiller, in 1783, turns from the stormy prose of his earlier plays to
the noble iambic pentameters of a dramatic poem in grand style, the tragedy of Don
Carlos. In tune with the political events of the New World, the completion of Schiller's
pan Carlos coincides with the Annapolis Convention of 1786, its first performance in
.
\
Hamburg with the Philadelphia Convention of 1787. (An added nice touch: On this date,
September 17, 1787, the Convention came to agree on the new Constitution to be sent to
the States for ratification) (Farrand, 641-9).
*
*
*
Set in the historical world of 16th century Spain, under the iron hand of the
Inquisition, Schiller's Don Carlos presents the clash of two worlds, the world of Philipp
II, despotic ruler over a vast empire, and the world of Don Carlos, his heart aglow with
the dream of liberating mankind from such unnatural rule. Serving the King's world,
Count Lerma represents the court, Duke Alba the military, Domingo the church. The
inspirat)on for the Prince's world, Marquis Posa, his childhood friend, emerges as the
mastermind behind an intricate plot, using all major characters of the play in his grand
cosmopolitan scheme for the creation of a new paradise on earth. Not a historical figure,
Marquis Posa, in the play a knight of Malta, might have been modeled on the Marquis de
Lafayette, in 1776 fighting for the Independence of the United States of America
(Dokumente, 121). Spanning the years between the two friends, Schiller, at the outset of
2
�the play, was more Carlos's, at its completion more Posa's age. In the Prince's appeal to
his father for the command of the army to Flanders: "23 years, I And nothing done for
immortality!" (DC II, 2, 1148-9). Heinrich Heine, in his
T~e
Romantic School, fills out
the picture by speaking of Schiller as "himself that Marquis Posa, who is, at the same
time, prophet and soldier, who fights for what he prophecies, and, under the Spanish
cloak, carries the most beautiful heart that ever loved and suffered in Germany" (Heine,
148). Vowing to use the "portrayal of the Inquisition" to "avenge prostituted mankind"
and "strike to the soul of a type of man the dagger of tragedy, so far, has only grazed"
(Dokumente, 134), Schiller begins and ends his Don Carlos with the title hero in conflict
with the religious authority, at the beginning with Domingo, the King's confessor, to be
present at every tum of the dramatic action, at the end with the Grand Inquisitor, blind to
all human feeling and demanding the death of the King's son in the name of the sacrifice
of God's only son on the cross. (Due to the censorship of Schiller's own time, both the
Grand Inquisitor and Domingo had to be omitted in some of the early performances of
Don Carlos) (Dokumente, 158-63).
One character to heighten the tension between the play's two worlds is Elizabeth
of Valois, the King's young Queen. Once betrothed to Don Carlos and in her heart still
his, she also shares his political dreams and sympathizes with Marquis Posa's plans for
him.
To complicate matters, the King has his eye on Princess Ebo Ii, one of the Queen's
Ladies in Waiting. She, however, is secretly in love with the Prince. Unbeknownst to
Philipp, Domingo, his solicitor, and Alba, his henchman, use the King's love affair to
further their own political ends.
*
*
*
In a discussion of different genres of poetry, Schiller, in his On Naive and
3
�Sentimental Poetry, considers the characteristics of tragedy and comedy and their
relationship to each other. Of the opinion that, in tragedy, a great deal of interest is
created simply by the subject matter that, in comedy, has to be supplied by the art of the
.
.
poet, Schiller reflects:
Not the sphere from which the subject matter is taken, but the forum before which the
poet brings it, makes the same tragic or comic. The tragic poet must beware of calm
reasoning and always interest the heart. The comic poet must beware of pathos and
always entertain the mind. ... If tragedy, therefore, takes off from a more significant
point, one has to concede that comedy heads for a more significant goal and, if it ever
were to reach it, would make all tragedy superfluous and impossible. Its goal is one with
the highest man strives for, to be free of passion, always to look about and into himself
clearly and calmly, to find everywhere more chance than fate and to laugh more about
absurdity than to rage or weep about malice (Schiller, V, 724-6).
*
*
*·
With a comparable constellation of characters, but the one clearly a tragedy, the
other, at least on the face of it, a comedy, Schiller's Don Carlos and Mozart's
The Marriage of Figaro, both completed in 1786,
in~ite
a closer look at the differences
between them.
Both set in Spain, but Don Carlos in the 16th, The Marriage of Figaro in the 18th
century, Schiller's historical tragedy, affecting the life of mankind as a whole, takes place
at the court of Philipp II, Mozart's comic opera, affecting but a few individual lives, at the
castle of Count Almaviva. Thus, the difference in atmosphere, Don Carlos remote and
grand, The Marriage of Figaro contemporary and intimate, contributes to the one being a
tragedy, the other a comedy. Against the background of these differences of time and
space, the comparability of the two sets of characters appears even more striking. King
Philipp and his Queen have their counterparts in Count Almaviva and his Countess,
Carlos, the young prince, in Cherubino, the young page, Marquis Posa, the political
mastermind, in Figaro, the domestic mastermind, Princess Eboli; the King's favorite, in
4
�Susanna, the Count's favorite, Count Lerma, the court councilor, in Bartolo, the lawyer,
Duke Alba, the defender of the realm, in Antonio, the gardener, and last but not least,
Domingo, the King's confessor, in Basilio, the priest masquerading as the Count's music
master. The only figure in Don Carlos with no counterpart in The Marriage of Figaro is
the Grand Inquisitor.
Given the difference between tragedy and comedy, what this list suggests is
outrageous! How could one ever compare these two sets of dramatic characters? Yet,
that is exactly what I intend to do in this lecture. The result, I hope, will be a deeper
understanding of both tragedy and comedy.
*
*
*
A clue to both Don Carlos and The Marriage ofFigaro, their opening scenes
contain already the whole plot to unfold in the rest of each work. Highlighting its title,
Schiller's Don Carlos, opening in the royal gardens at Aranjuez, presents the title hero in
conversation with Domingo. In his unsuccessful attempt to pry into the Prince's thoughts,
the priest touches on Carlos's troubled relationships with his father, with his new mother,
and with the political world around him. The scene ends with Carlos's dire premonition
of doom and the role of "suspicion's venomed serpent sting" (I, 1, 122-7) in bringing it
about. Highlighting its title, Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, opening in a room
between the Count and the Countess's apartments, presents the title hero with Susanna,
the couple to be married, in a lively duet, each singing in the same key, but Figaro's
music more plodding, accompanying his measuriilg the space for their bed, Susanna's
music more fluid, accompanying her showing off her wedding cap. A delightful school
for marriage, this duet, after an orchestral introduction of equal eight measures for both
Figaro and Susanna, has Figaro sing twelve, Susanna only six measures. Trying to get
Figaro's attention, Susanna starts singing his music, but at her speed, only to move him to
5
�switch over to her music. Like in a good marriage, they end up complementing each
other in a merry medley of parallel, oblique, and contrary motion, and yes, they do sing
her music. Even so, there are obstacles. The Count, intent.on seducing Susanna,
Marcellina, Bartolo's old servant, intent on holding Figaro to a marriage contract for his
unpaid debts.
While the opening duet was in G Major, the opera's key of marriage (I, 1), the
duet spelling out the obstacles is in B-flat Major, its key of intrigue (I, 2). In order to get
from G Major to B-flat Major one has to darken G Major tog minor, its parallel minor,
and then to brighten g minor to B-flat Major, its relative Major. The first operation keeps
the tonal center, but changes the key signature, the second operation keeps the key
signature, but changes the tonal center. The intricate musical path from G Major to B-flat
Major, one of the most frequent moves in this opera, points to the weight of the obstacles
to be overcome. Like Schiller's opening of Don Carlos, Mozart's opening of The
Marriage of Figaro ends on a note of warning about the venom of suspicion.
*
*
*
Our glimpse of the intricacies of Mozart's opening duet invites a moment of
reflection on the difference between opera and drama due to the element of music. More
stylized than drama, opera enriches the spoken word by multiple layers of meaning
through the musical elements of melody, counterpoint, and harmony. Within these,
different articulations of time and space, that is, different rhythms, working with or
against different meters, provide added insights into dramatic characters and situations.
Consonance and dissonance, used in various combinations, are powerful means for
underscoring dramatic tension and resolution. The correlation of dramatic themes with
musical keys, separated from and connected with each other through the circle of fifths,
allows for interesting cross-references not only between different dramatic characters, but
6
�Key to the Keys in
Mozart's TheMarriageofFigaro
The opera's overall key is D-Major
�also between different dramatic moments in the operatic plot. The Major or minor mode,
either dominating a whole scene or the one marking critical points within the context of
the other, throw light or shadow over the opera's musical
l~ndscape.
As befits a comic opera, Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro is mostly in Major.
The two pieces in minor, the openings to acts three and four, are tinged with comic irony
and thus belie their dark shadows. The opening of act three, at the same time the opening
of the second half of the opera, overlays one line in minor with another in its relative
Major, only to let its parallel Major win out for both lines. We shall come back to the
details of this at a later stage.
*
*
*
Before embarking on the comparison between Schiller's Don Carlos and Mozart's
The Marriage ofFigaro, a word ought to be said about Beaumarchais's play of the same
. title. A sequel to his The Barber ofSeville, Beaumarchais's The Marriage ofFigaro
provides the opera's dramatic plot. First performed in 1784, the play is a highly charged
attack on the social and political mores of the day. Even more aggressive than Schiller's
vow to "avenge prostituted mankind" and "strike to the soul of a type of man the dagger
of tragedy, so far, has only grazed", Beaumarchais's Preface speaks of the theater as "a
giant that wounds to the death all it strikes." Seeing the vices of human nature disguised
"in a thousand forms under the mask of the ruling mores", he asserts: "to rip off this mask
and show them naked, that is the noble task of the man who devotes himself to the
theater". Labeling his The Marriage ofFigaro as "more infamous and more seditious"
than his The Barber ofSeville, Beaumarchais, sarcastically, exclaims: "Oh, how I regret
-
not having made this moral subject into a rather bloody tragedy" (Beaumarchais, 27, 28,
30).
7
�*
*
*
The difference between Beaumarchais's play and M_ozart's opera is, however, not
only due to the element of music. Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart's librettist, certainly follows
the play's main line, but changes its tone from a highly political to a deeply personal one.
Personal thoughts and feelings, brought to the fore by omissions, additions, or simply
alterations of style, create an atmosphere where the characters' expression of themselves
is at least, if not more, important than their dramatic interaction.
With a rather checkered career, from ordained priest in the Veneto, to Court poet
in Vienna, to teacher ofltalian language and literature at Columbia College in New York,
Da Ponte, as librettist of Mozart's The Marriage ofFigaro, adds a nice touch by poking
fun at himself in the figure of Basilio, always played in clerical garb, but with the role of
music master at the castle of Count Alma viva.
*
*
*
To pick up the thread back into our comparison, let us remember that Schiller's
Don Carlos presents us with the conflict between centuries, portrayed in Philipp II and
Marquis Posa, Mozart's The Marriage ofFigaro with the conflict between classes,
portrayed in Count Almaviva and Figaro. In the one we are given the political goal of
liberating mankind from the oppressive rule of a mighty monarchy under the iron hand of
the Inquisition, in the other the personal goal of pursuing a marriage without the
interference of a lecherous aristocrat bored with his wife. The one stuff for tragedy, the
other stuff for comedy. A note at the outset: since there are five acts of Schiller's Don
Carlos to be compared with four acts of Mozart's The Marriage ofFigaro, it seems more
fruitful to go back and forth between comparable clusters of scenes rather than to adhere
strictly to the more formal boundary of acts.
8
�Even though both works start early in the morning and end late at night, Don
Carlos starts in a garden and ends in a closed room, The Marriage of Figaro starts in a
closed room and ends in a garden. Implicit in the theme of the garden is, of course, the
story of the Garden of Eden. Imbued with the awareness of Good and Evil, and the selfknowledge arising from it, the theme of forgiveness, in Don Carlos finally denied, in The
Marriage of Figaro finally granted, is a powerful and moving reminder of that story.
A latter day Garden of Eden, complete with the fall of man and God appearing in
judgment, the royal gardens at Aranjuez, reminding the Queen of her native France (I, 3),
. become the setting for a passionate rendezvous with Don Carlos. Not willing to accept
the fate of having lost her to his father, he falls at her feet: "Let them, from here, come
drag me to the scaffold! I One moment, fully lived in paradise I ls not atoned too dearly
for with death" (I, 5, 638-40). The King, arriving shortly thereafter, finds the Queen
alone, without her Ladies in Waiting. Bearing out Carlos's earlier warning about
"suspicion's venomed serpent sting" (I, 1), Philipp, in the presence of his courtiers,
questions his wife's virtue. Alba's staunch: "Like God's own cherub before paradise I
Duke Alba stands before the royal throne" (I, 6, 879-80) only aggravates the emotional
tension of the scene.
Having been caught with Barbarina, the gardener's daughter, Cherubino, the "little
cherub", stumbles in on Susanna to ask the Countess to intercede for him with the
angered Count (I, 6). Flustered by Susanna's presence, the young page, in E-flat Major,
the opera's key of unhappy love, gives voice to the first stirrings of his heart. Aflutter for
all women, he confesses speaking of his love to nature, to the mountains, to the meadows,
to the winds, and finally to himself. Compared to the unhappy rendezvous between Don
Carlos and the Queen, past, present, and future weighing heavily on their hearts, and
presaging tragedy for both of them, this charming interlude between Cherubino and
Susanna is the more charming, as the Countess is not there and, therefore, there are no
constraints on the boy's outpouring of feelings. The transfiguration from Beaumarchais's
9
�prose text to Da Ponte's rhyming verse pulsates with shimmering light in Mozart's
music: the breathless first stanza (the experience oflove) repeated after the second stanza,
climaxing on the word "desire", and the third stanza (the experience of love taken out to
nature and back to the self) trailing off dreamily.
A farcical version of the King's coming upon his wife, with Don Carlos fled from
the scene only minutes before, the Count's coming upon his wife's chamber maid, with
Cherubino taking refuge behind a chair, leads to a series of hilarious moments:
Interrupted in his amorous advances to Susanna by the arrival of Basilio (the nominal
"King" of the place), the Count has to hide behind that same infamous chair, with the
young page barely able to jump into it from behind, the Countess's gown spread there
coming in handy as protective cover. Roused from his hiding place by Basilio's
suspicions about Cherubino and the Countess, the Count, in a dramatic B-flat Major, the
opera's key of intrigue, calls for the boy's dismissal from the castle (II, 7). The
subsequent discovery of Cherubino in the chair, and the Count's realization that the "little
serpent" (p. 96) must have overheard his courting of Susanna, make him convert the boy's
dismissal into a pardon to join the army.
All fired up by Marquis Posa's grand plans for him, Don Carlos vows to ask his
father for the
comm~nd
of the army to Flanders (I, 9). Like a parody of this solemn
scene, both at the end of act I, Figaro's send-off-march for Cherubino, in C-Major, the
opera's key of resolve, makes mockery of the page turned soldier against his will. The
irony is that neither Don Carlos nor Cherubino ever reach their destination. Don Carlos,
because Philipp, suspicious of his motives, denies the Prince's request, Cherubino ,
because Figaro, teeming with intrigue, means for the page, dressed up as Susanna, to go
to a rendezvous with the Count in her stead.
*
*
*
10
�After his unsuccessful audience with the King (II, 2) the Prince follows a secret
invitation to what he mistakes for the Queen's apartment. A counterpoint to his meeting
with the Queen, in the royal gardens, this meeting with Princess Eboli, in the royal palace
(II, 8), comes close to an expulsion from paradise. Believing Carlos to be in love with
herself, the Princess tries to elicit a confession from him, only to have him own his secret
love for another. Disappointed in Carlos's love, and an object of Philipp's lust, Princess
Eboli confides in Domingo, the King's solicitor with her (II, 11 ). The plan hatched
between the two of them, with Duke Alba in the wings, is for her to break into the
Queen's jewelry box in the hope of finding letters there from the Prince (II, 12).
Like a release of the Queen's unspoken sorrow, in act I of Schiller's Don Carlos
(I, 3-4), the Countess's first aria, in act II of Mozart's The Marriage ofFigaro (II, 10),
strikes a tragic note. Echoing Cherubino's E-flat Major, the Countess calls on the god of
love to restore her loss or to let her die. The orchestral accompaniment's constant
slipping in and out of harmony with her tune painfully expresses the vulnerability of her
feelings.
In his earlier attempt to see the Countess Cherubino had entrusted Susanna with a
canzonetta of his (I, 6). In contrast to the young prince who stumbl.es from one tragic
encounter, with the Queen, to another, with Princess Eboli, the young page, trembling but
happy, gets to sing his canzonetta before the Countess (II, 11). That he is here to be
dressed up in Susanna's clothes to go to a rendezvous with the Count --this brainchild of
Figaro's, of course, taking place in G Major (II, 12)-- will make for uncomfortable, but
also rather comical moments. Like a come-down from tragedy to comedy, Susanna
accompanying Cherubino on the guitar is a comical version of Princess Eboli
accompanying herself on the lute awaiting Don Carlos. A far cry from the hopeless,
wavering harmonies of the Countess's aria, Susanna's playful upward figures on the guitar
fully support the boy's melody. Now part of an intrigue, however innocent, Cherubino's
encomium on the painful bliss of love, is in B-flat Major, the dominant not only of his,
11
�but also the Countess's (II, 10) first aria. Listening to Cherubino's lovely song, the
Countess is lost in her memories of the young Count, from their early days of courtship.
Like the King's appearance in the royal gardens, with Don Carlos barely fled from
the scene (I, 5), the Count's arrival at his wife's locked door, with Cherubino barely
escaped into a closet, unleashes a storm of suspicions (II, 13). Singing in C Major, G
Major, and back to C Major (with Susanna's counterpoint from the sidelines), husband
and wife engage in a battle of wills over the opening of the closet, the Countess
protesting Susanna, the Count suspecting the Countess's lover to hide there. The flare up
of temper is the more ludicrous as the Count, not too long ago, had found himself in the
same compromising situation as Cherubino now (I, 7).
The Count's idea of leaving the room, to fetch some tools for breaking into his
wife's closet, but relocking the doors against any escape, gives Susanna and Cherubino a
· few precious minutes to find a way out. With more than one marriage at stake, their
frantic little duet is sung in a hilariously funny G Major (II, 14). Instead of Don Carlos
fleeing out of the garden, leaving footprints and losing his handkerchief, noticed by the
gardener and later reported back to the King by Duke Alba (III, 3), Cherubino, ready to
jump even into the fire to save the Countess, finally jumps from the balcony into the
garden. A fall indeed, but a fall to undo the Fall!
A follow-up on the King appearing in the gardens of Aranjuez, the confrontation
between Philipp and Elizabeth, coming to demand justice for the break into her jewelry
box and the removal of letters and a medallion of the Prince, ends with her finding them
in the King's possession and, after a deadly argument over her rights, swooning and
bloodying herself in the fall (IV, 9).
Very much in the same vein as these scenes from act IV of Schiller's Don Carlos,
the Finale of act II of Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro (II, 15), echoing some of the
more menacing strains of the Overture, moves at a high pitch of emotions. With a
noticeable exchange of F Major for G Major, it progresses from E-flat Major (unhappy
12
�love) to B-flatMajor (intrigue) to G Major (marriage) and via C Major (resolve) through
F Major (standing one's ground) to B-flat Major (intrigue) and back to E-flat Major
(unhappy love). As if modeled on the tense altercation between King and Queen:
King: Then blood may flow for all I care -Queen: So far it's come -- oh God!
King:
I know
Myself no more, no longer pay
Respect to custom and the voice
Of nature and the pacts of nations (IV, 9, 3785-9),
the Count, with his sword drawn, is ready to kill the page hiding in his wife's closet.
Demanding the key for it, he threatens the Countess with expulsion from his house. To
an insistent call of horns in the background, the opening of the closet door, revealing
Susanna, throws not only the Count, but also the Countess into confusion.
Shifting from E-flat Major to B-flat Major, this second stage of the Finale brings
the Count down on his knees, asking for his wife's forgiveness. A more genuine version
than his earlier pardon for Cherubino, the Count's confession of guilt, over an altered
seventh chord on E-natural, containing G-flat, giving way to his expression of
repentance, over a plain seventh chord on E-natural, containing G (mm. 303-6, p. 187),
dramatically prepares for the arrival of Figaro and the musicians to play for his wedding
with Susanna. With the move heard most often in this opera, back and forth, Figaro's
arrival, once more, turns the music scene from B-flat Major to G Major.
Taken to task for his anonymous letter about the Count's upcoming rendezvous,
Figaro, echoing his own music from the opening duet with Susanna, but now in a pivotal
C Major, deftly avoids the issue by pointing to the theater practice of ending a farce with
a wedding. The sublime trio of Figaro, Susanna, and the Countess, begging the Count to
fulfill their wishes, is undercut by his counterpoint, calling for Marcellina to insist on her
marriage contract from Figaro.
To make matters worse, the gardener, showing up with a crushed flower pot,
13
�bitterly complains about the fall of a man from the balcony. To save the day, Figaro,
exchanging F Major for G Major, claims to have jumped from there himself and, in the
fall, musically expressed by a painful chromatic descent, to have sprained his ankle. An
ironic reminder of Figaro's earlier F Major stunt (I, 3), offering to teach his master to
dance, the Count cries out: "Enough of this dance!" (mm. 581-2, p. 211).
Yet, like Don Carlos, fleeing out of the garden, Cherubino, falling into the garden,
had lost something. Now in B-flat Major, Figaro, with a bit of help from the women,
identifies the papers found in the garden, as Cherubino's commission still in need of the
official seal.
Returning, once more, to E-flat Major, the Finale comes to a furious climax, with
Marcellina, Bartolo, and Basilio joining the Count in his opposition to Figaro, Susanna,
and the Countess, over the contested marriage contract between Marcellina and Figaro.
Providing no way out, on either side, the first half of the opera ends with all the voices in
unison on E-flat, and all the instruments, except for the flute and the clarinet, on E-flat or
G. The flute and the clarinet, with their B-flat, the dominant of E-flat, seem rather weak
over and against the clamor of all the others on E-flat and G. Translated from the musical
into the moral language of the opera: "Intrigue", however dominant throughout, is likely
to get lost in the final struggle of "unhappy love" for the fulfillment of "marriage".
*
*
*
Bearing out Schiller's claim that the tragedy of Don Carlos would have to tum on "the
situation and the character of King Philipp" (Dokumente, 142), the King, after the
judgment of his wife in the royal gardens (I, 6) and the rejection of his son in the royal
palace (II, 2), more and more emerges as a tragic figure. An older Carlos , warped in the
harsh school of political life, he feels exploited by schemers like Alba and Domingo (II,
10-13; III, 3-4). Appealing to Providence for a human being, for a friend that would give
14
�him truth, Philipp, in the center of act III, which, at the same time, is the center of the
play as a whole, comes upon the name of Marquis Posa, specially noted for his services
to the crown (III, 5).
In a riveting sequence of scenes, Medina Sidonia, the admiral returning from the
loss of the Armada, is shunned by all the courtiers except Don Carlos (III, 6). The King's
entry, ignoring his son, but after a long silence, pardoning the admiral with: "God is over
me -- I've sent you I To contend with men, not storms and rocks -- I You're welcome in
Madrid" (III, 7, 2878-81 ), presents us with a moving answer to his own appeal. A variant
to his earlier rejection of Don Carlos, asking for the command of the army to Flanders:
"You speak like one within a dream. This office I Requires a man and not a youth -- "
countered by the Prince's: "Requires merely a human being, father" (II, 2, 1174-6),
Philipp's overlooking his son who, together with himself, seems to be the only human
being in the room (III, 7), constitutes the tragic core of the play.
Farthest from their conscious mind: "You see two hostile stars that through I The
course of time do touch but once I In shattering head-on collision I And then forever flee
apart" (I, 2, 541-5), this kinship between father and son, nevertheless, shows itself in
many ways. Both Philipp and Carlos lay claim not only to the love of the same woman,
but also to the friendship of the same man. Throughout the play, in crucial moments of
decision or recognition, they both use the same characteristic formulations.
Called to a special audience with Philipp, Marquis Posa, envisioning himself as
sculptor to impart life to the rough stone, reflects on the opportunity of using the King for
his own political purposes (III, 9). With Philipp as strangely impressionable listener, the
Knight paints a picture of mankind, free from oppression and ready to govern itself:
"Man, sure, is more than you supposed. I The bonds of his long slumber he shall break I
And once again demand his holy right." (III, 10, 3186-8). Despite the revolutionary tone
of Posa's political panegyric, the King is captured by the spectacle of a man who
fearlessly speaks his mind. That, in the end, he will insist on employing him as spy for
15
�both the Queen and the Prince is sad proof of an inhuman world under the iron hand of
the Inquisition (III, 10).
With his eyes on the future of mankind, and his own role in bringing it about,
Marquis Posa, losing sight of the present, plays a dangerous game. Using Don Carlos
and the Queen, but also, unbeknownst to them, the King, as pawns in his grand plan for
the liberation of Flanders, the Knight betrays his own ideals (IV, 3-6; 12-13). On his first
introduction, the Queen had welcomed him with:
Many courts
You've come to in your travels, chevalier,
And many countries and men's customs you
Have seen -- and now, they say, you have a mind
Within your fatherland to .settle for yourself,
A greater prince in your own quiet walls
Than is King Philipp on his throne -- a free man,
A philosopher!" (I, 4, 512-9).
True to the first part, the invocation of Homer's Odyssey (Od. I, 1-3, (Berns, Greek
Antiquity, 21 and 115, note 4), but not to the second, the closing myth of Plato's Republic
(Rep. X, 620c-d), Posa's cosmopolitan moves smack of the idealist who, for the sake of
his cause, turns fanatic and ruthlessly tramples over lives (Schiller, Briefe iiber Don
Carlos; Seidlin, 34-40).
Acting like a god, accountable to no one but himself, Posa, now the King's trusted
minister, shares his plans neither with the Prince (IV, 6) nor fully with the Queen (IV, 3).
In his growing desperation, Carlos confides in Princess Eboli and, in the act of asking her
for access to the Queen (IV, 15), is arrested by the Knight himself (IV, 16). Confronted
with the choice of killing Eboli or sacrificing himself, Posa, after a moment's hesitation,
chooses the latter (IV, 17).
In his farewell to the Queen (IV, 21 ), he counters her "I fear you play a risky
game" with "I've lost it... I've lost it for myself1' (IV, 21, 4213-7). A tell-tale sign of the
difference between the two friends, Carlos, on hearing of Posa's influence with the King,
16
�had uttered: "Now I have lost him ... I have I Lost him. Oh! Now I am all forsaken" (IV,
13, 3973, 3977-8). His mournful: "He loved me, loved me dearly ... That I I know. Yet
should not millions, should I The fatherland not be more dear to him than one?" (IV, 13,
3963-8) will resurface in Philipp's reaction to Posa's betrayal of himself: "I've loved him,
loved him dearly ... like a son .. .This youth I For me brought up a new, more glorious
morning ... I He was my first, my very first love .. ." (V, 9, 5048-52).
Planning for the Prince to escape that very night, Posa, in his farewell to the
Queen, entrusts her with his legacy for him. With more and more overtones from the
Passion of Christ, he describes his vision of a future paradise on earth, a world worthy to
have died for. The Queen's rejoinder: "No! No! I You threw yourself into this deed I You
call sublime ... A thousand hearts I May break, but what is that to you, as long I As you
may feed your pride?" (IV, 21, 4379-87) leaves him utterly stunned. Too late, his last
words to her: "My Queen! -- Oh God! but life is beautiful" (IV, 21, 4393-4) throw a new,
richer light into the soul of this stem idealist.
Hoping to confound the King, long enough for Carlos to escape, Posa had written
to William of Orange, confessing his love for the Queen and his fear of being discovered
before he could get away to Brussels (V, 3, 4672-96). Well aware of the King's order to
intercept all letters to Flanders (II, 15, 2465-8), he had counted on Philipp's belief in the
villainy of human nature (V, 3, 4676-8). What he did not know, however, is the King's
reaction. As if in answer to Carlos's earlier: "Oh, force those eyes I That never yet shed
tears, to learn to do so, I While you still have time, or else -- or else I You may need to
make up for it in some I Dark hour to come" (II, 2, 1080-3, MacDonald, 337), Philipp, on
learning of Posa's betrayal, is said to have wept (IV, 23). This scene, in perfect symmetry
to Carlos's warning, is the more breathtaking, as it is witnessed but from outside the
closed doors of the King's chamber. The stupor of the courtiers assembled there, is
broken by Princess Eboli, rushing in, demanding to tell the King the truth about the
Prince's letters (IV, 24). With Alba and Domingo gaining the upper hand, however, the
17
�truth comes too late.
*
*
*
Compared to the tragic figure of the King, in Schiller's Don Carlos, the figure of
the Count, in Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, is no more than a comic braggadocio.
While Philipp's affair with Princess Eboli remains off-stage, in the hands of Domingo (II,
10-13), the Count, taking things out of Basilio's hands, courts Susanna more and more
openly (I, 2, rec., pp. 38-40; 6, rec., pp. 76-77; III, sc. 2, pp. 249-50; 16, rec., p. 257). In
striking contrast to Figaro and Susanna's G Major duet, at the beginning of the opera (I,
1), the duet between the Count and Susanna, at the beginning of the opera's second half
(III, 16), overlays the Count's a minor with Susanna's C Major, both using the same key
signature, but different tonal centers. A rare event in this opera, the Count's minor,
already undercut by Susanna's Major, is openly contradicted by her text, however much it
rhymes with his. Their final agreement on a rendezvous, in a triumphant A Major, the
opera's key of selfish passion, uses the Count's tonal center, but a new key signature for
both of them. To make matters worse, it is further compromised by Susanna's utterly
. confusing "Yes!" and "No!" answers to the Count's arixious questions.
Reminiscent of Philipp, brooding over suspicions, roused by the Prince's letters
(III, 1-4; 1O; IV, 7-10), Alma viva, by himself, vents his innermost feelings (III, 17).
Singing in D Major, the key ofrevenge, but also the overall key of the opera, the Count,
in a stormy recitative and aria, echoing the more majestic strains of the Overture, rages
about the audacity of his servant, up-staging him in a conquest of love. A match for each
other, his fury recalls Figaro's earlier posturing in F Major, the opera's key of standing
one's ground. Professing a more playful art form than Posa who, in anticipation of his
audience with the King (III, 10), had envisioned himself as sculptor, imparting life to the
rough stone (III, 9), Figaro, reacting to Susanna's news about the Count's intentions, had
18
�vowed to teach his master to dance to his music (I, 3). Unlike Posa's visionary plan for
rebellion (IV, 3), Figaro's fancy of overturning all machines by using the art of "punching
here and teasing there" sounds like fun as well.
A farcical variant to Philipp's distraught remark about Count Lerma, the old court
councilor, likely to find his wife in his son's embrace (III, 2, 2518-44 ), Figaro's discovery
of Bartolo and Marcellina, the old councilor and his former servant, to be his parents (III,
sc. 5, pp. 271-2; 18) barely avoids the fate of Oedipus and gives rise to an incredulous
merry-go-round with the terms "mother" and "father" throughout the different voice
ranges (III, 18). The sextet, like Figaro's earlier and Susanna's later arias, in F Major,
clears the way not only for the marriage of the young, but also of the old couple. Much
toned down from Beaumarchais's play, where Marcellina's bitter harangue over men's
exploitation of women still meets with Bartolo's sarcasms, Mozart's opera, even though in
g minor, falling short of G Major, brings the case to a more or less satisfactory conclusion
(p. 295). One by one protesting their happiness, the scene ends with a flourish of
dissonances gloating over the Count's defeat (mm. 17-9, p. 296).
Apprised of the Count's offer of a dowry for Susanna's favors, the Countess, once
more, laments the loss of her love (III, 19). Transcending her earlier E-flat Major, the
opera's key of unhappy love (II, 10), to C Major, its key of resolve, this beautiful aria, at
first, C Major encompassing a core of emotions moving from g minor to G Major,
reminisces about the past. But, unlike the Queen, who, in her rendezvous with the
Prince, had evaded his insistent questions concerning her love (I, 5, 712-20), the
Countess, in the final part of the aria, trusts her hope in the future. A reflection of the
Count's a minor overlaid by Susanna's C Major (III, 16), the Countess, after an initial
wavering between C Major and c minor, on the words "to change the ungrateful heart",
twice overshoots her C Major triad, landing on A, only to cadence with that triad, the A
yielding to the dominant G, and finally, on the word "heart", coming home to a
triumphant C.
19
�A happier version ofPrincess Eboli's theft of letters from the Queen, the Countess
and Susanna, together, write a letter, secretly to be given to the Count during Figaro and
Susanna's wedding (III, 20). Superseding Figaro's plot of sending Cherubino, dressed up
as Susanna, to the rendezvous, the Countess has decided to take on that role herself. At
the rallying point for the opera's finish, the little duet between the Countess and Susanna,
an exquisite moment of friendship, has one goal, the Count's change of heart, and
therefore one music, though still in B-flat Major, the opera's key of intrigue (III, 20).
Stating time and place for the rendezvous in the garden, the Countess leads, Susanna
follows. After gradually closing the gaps between giving and taking dictation, the two
women, on the words: "well, and the rest he'll understand", start singing together. With a
partial reversal of roles, but now overlapping in the process, Susanna and the Countess
read over their letter. By singing the same music, but in staggered lines, that is, in
different places at the same time, or in the same place at different times, they, as it were,
enact the rendezvous with the Count.
Compared to Princess Eboli's desperate attempt to open the King's eyes to the
truth about the letters she stole from the Queen (IV, 24), Susanna's slipping the letter,
written together with the Countess, into the Count's hands during the wedding ceremony,
intends to do exactly the opposite. Adding to the contrast, Marquis Posa's lie about his
love for the Queen, confided in a letter meant to be delivered into the King's hands, will
be the cause of the Knight's murder (V, 3), Figaro dancing with Susanna and laughing
about the Count pricking his finger on the needle used to seal the letter, in the end, will
teach the schemer not to consider himself fool-proof (III, 22). Sung in C Major, the
opera's key ofresolve, the wedding ceremony, at the end of act III, officially seals the
marriages of Figaro and Susanna as well as Bartolo and Marcellina, but leaves the
problems between the Count and the Countess unresolved.
*
*
*
20
�After the Prince's precipitous arrest, in act IV of Schiller's Don Carlos, Marquis
Posa visits him in prison to account for his action (V, 1). Shocked by Carlos's
assumption of having been sacrificed for the greater political cause, Posa, too late,
realizes his arrogance in using a friend like a pawn in a game. With a pentameter, short
by one foot, he confesses: "My edifice I Collapses -- I forgot your heart" (V, 1, 4524-5).
In counterpoint to Posa, it is Carlos who, all through the play, speaks and acts most often
from the heart. Reminiscent of the pathos of Christ, in the garden of Gethsemane:
"Come, let us sit down -- I I'm weary and feel weak" (V, 3, 4114-5, cf. Matthew 26, 38),
the Knight outlines his plans for the Prince's escape, to fight for the cause of humanity
from Flanders. A conclusion to Carlos's earlier: "Now I have lost him," (IV, 13, 3973)
referring to his friend, and Posa's: "I've lost it.. .I've lost it for myself'(IV, 21, 4214-7),
referring to his political power play, their exchange in prison:
Carlos:
God! Then I'm lost!
Marquis: You, why you?
Carlos :
Unhappy man, and you
Are lost with me. This monstrous
Fraud my father can't forgive.
No! That he never will forgive!
Marquis :
Fraud?
Who would tell him
It was fraud?
Who, can you ask?
Carlos:
Myselfl
(V, 3, 4701-8)
leads to the Knight's solemn: "Prepare yourself for Flanders! I Your calling is the
kingdom. I To die for you was mine" (V, 3, 4717-9). Carlos's:
No!No! ...
I want to take you to him.
Ann in arm we'll go to him.
Father, I'll say, a friend has done this
For his friend. It'll move him. Trust me!
He's not without humanity, my father.
Yes, sure, it'll move him.
21
�His eyes will shed warm tears, and you
And me he will forgive -- (V, 3, 4718-28)
is answered by a shot through the prison's wrought-iron door and Posa's death. Part of
the tragedy is that neither Posa nor Carlos know that the King, to the awestruck horror of
his courtiers, did weep -- but at the discovery of the Knight's betrayal of himself. (IV,
23).
*
*
*
At the start of act IV, the last act of Mozart's opera, to be mostly compared with
act V, the last act of Schiller's dramatic poem, Barbarina, the gardener's daughter, in love
with Cherubino, but here on an errand for the Count, laments the loss of the pin that had
sealed Susanna's letter (IV, 23). In confirmation of the rendezvous, later that night, the
seal was supposed to be returned to the letter writer. Sung in f minor, the darkest key in
the opera, and the only other minor besides the Count's a minor, at the start of act III, the
opening of the opera's second half, the little girl's "I've lost it..." bewails more than the
loss of that unfortunate pin. Echoing the Countess's earlier "Where are the beautiful
moments ... " (III, 19) Barbarina's sobbing "ah, who knows where it might be" is set in
mock tragic style. Compared to the tragic loss Marquis Posa and Don Carlos mourn, this
is, at best, tragicomedy. Figaro, coming upon the scene with Marcellina and being told of
the Count's commission, quickly finds a pin in Marcellina's bonnet and sends the girl on
her way. His reaction to the disturbing news: "Mother -- I am dead .. .I am dead, I say"
(rec. p. 342) not only sounds like a comical take-off on Marquis Posa's death, but also
like a re-enactment of the scene between Achilleus and Thetis, in book I of Homer's Iliad
(I, 348 ff.). Outdoing Achilleus, who complains to his mother about Agamemnon having
taken his girl, Figaro is angered with Susanna as well as with the Count. In Bartolo's
phrase, from his earlier revenge aria (I, 4), Marcellina's "the case is serious" (p. 342)
22
�advises Figaro of his right to be on his guard and entertain suspicions, but no more. Her
use of" a right", recalling the Count's "right of the first night" to be acted on presently
with Susanna, has an ominous ring in this opera. Yet, the fact that Bartolo's aria, in D
Major, was in its overall key as well, suggests caution in taking the theme of revenge too
narrowly.
A late repercussion of Beaumarchais's play, Marcellina's aria in act IV, defending
Susanna against Figaro's suspicions, pits the free and easy lovemaking of animals against
the cruelty of men (IV, 24). A revision of her cat fight duet with Susanna, in A Major,
five numbers from the beginning of the opera, this aria, in G Major, five numbers from its
end, not only makes G Major, the opera's key of marriage, triumph over A Major, its key
of selfish passion, but also adds a human touch by letting Marcellina express her feelings
in coloraturas reminiscent of Handel, the style in vogue when she was young. Her
insistent rhyme between "liberty", for the animals, and "cruelty", for men, whether true to
life or not, hints at the tragedy hidden behind the comedy.
Unaware of the women's change of plan, from Cherubino to the Countess,
dressed-up as Susanna, to go to the rendezvous with the Count, Figaro swears to take
revenge for all husbands (I, 26 cf. p.343). With an aria in E-flat Major, the opera's key of
unhappy love, and the call of horns in the background, the newly-wed husband rails
against the heartlessness of women.
As if to give the lie to this tirade, Susanna, in F Major, the opera's key of standing
one's ground, sings a beautiful aria about her expectation of the fulfillment of love.
Unlike Princess Eboli who, after her theft of letters from the Queen, and her affair with
the King, had been punished with exile to a nunnery, Susanna, after writing a letter
together with the Countess, changing clothes with her, and fooling the Count about
agreeing to a rendezvous, revels in the loveliness of the evening (IV, 27). Reminiscent of
Cherubino's first song (I, 6), his heart aflutter for all women, and speaking of his love not
only to nature, but also to himself, Susanna's aria, describing the romantic resonance
23
�between herself and the balmy night, more maturely, is meant for but one beloved. Even
so, I suspect that her words have more to do with her own feelings than with Figaro.
*
*
*
In his devastation over the betrayal of Marquis Posa, the one man from whom he
expected truth (V, 9), the King is further crushed by his son's confession that he and Posa
were friends, nay brothers: "Yes, Sire, we two were brothers, brothers by I A nobler bond
than nature's crafting" (V, 4, 4791-2). Taunting Philipp with his paltry attempt at
friendship with a man in love with the whole of mankind, Carlos exclaims:
Oh no -- that was no man for you!
That he himself knew well, when he
Rejected you with all your crowns.
This finely stringed lyre broke
Within your iron hand. You could
Do naught but murder him (V, 4, 4816-20).
With a deeper understanding of Posa's character than Carlos could fathom, Philipp's
disappointed love turns to savage hatred: "Let him have died a fool. And let his fall I
Bring down his century with his friend ... I He sacrificed me to his idol, mankind, I Let
mankind, therefore, pay for him" (V, 9, 5075 - 86).
No match for these dark scenes with the King, in act V of Schiller's Don Carlos,
the Count's flare-up of temper, vowing to be revenged on Figaro for upstaging him in a
conquest of love, lies as far back as the early scenes in act III of Mozart's The Marriage
of Figaro (III, 17). In keeping with tragedy, Schiller's play, towards the end, turns darker
and darker, in keeping with comedy, Mozart's opera lighter and lighter.
A farcical counterpart to Domingo, the King's confessor, present at every turn of
the dramatic action, Basilio, the meddling priest, masquerading as music master at the
castle of Count Alma viva, finally gets to confide his own personal Credo (IV, 25).
Rather unmusical, with plain quarter notes stalking all over the place, and cheap sound
24
�effects thrown in here and there, his aria, no surprise, is in B-flat Major, the opera's key
of intrigue. Created in the image of Mozart's learned librettist, Basilio recounts a
dantesque scene, where Lady Flemma, his Muse (alias Vergil) presented him with the
smelly hide of a donkey to ward off the vicissitudes of life, be they stormy weather to
hide from, or wild beasts to repel with the nasty cover. That cover I take to be Basilio's
clerical garb.
Emerging from the cover of Domingo, the Grand Inquisitor, at the end of
Schiller's Don Carlos, asserts his authority (V, 10-11 ). A perverted form of Teiresias, the
blind prophet in Sophocles's Antigone (Berns, "Idealism us'', 71-2; "Idealism", 51-2), who
urges Kreon to restore the dead to the dead and the living to the living, the Grand
Inquisitor demands the dead to be called back to the living and the living to be
surrendered to the dead. In his outrage over the murder of Marquis Posa, a sacrifice to
mere passion rather than the greater glory of the church, the Grand Inquisitor condemns
Philipp's illicit involvement with this heretic. The reason behind the summons of the
Grand Inquisitor had been the King's indecision whether to let Carlos escape or have him
die. His question: "Can you create for me a new religion I That would defend the bloody
murder of a child?" (V, 10, 5265-6) the old priest silences with: "To expiate eternal
justice I The son of God died at the cross" (V, 10, 5267-8). Philipp's retort: "I outrage I
Nature -- this mighty voice as well I You want to stifle?" elicits only: "Before the faith I
No voice of nature counts" (V, 10, 5270-4). The King's final: "He is my only son - for
whom I Pray, have I gathered?" meets with the Grand Inquisitor's inhuman: "For
moldering decay rather than I Freedom" (V, 10, 5276-8).
In order to facilitate his escape, the Queen had asked Carlos for a final farewell, in
which she could impart Marquis Posa's legacy to him. Midnight approaching, he _
was
supposed to come in the mask and monk's attire of Charles V, whose ghost the guards
had seen more than once and let pass reverently (V, 6; 9). As if in keeping with his
earlier notion of political life as a masked ball, the masks of conventional inequality
25
�belying the natural equality of the faces hidden beneath (I, 9), Carlos had agreed to play
this role chosen for him by the Queen. Their meeting, holding each other in a solemn
embrace, comes to a close with the Prince reaching for his i:nask. In the background,
without their notice, the King, together with the Grand Inquisitor and some of the
courtiers, had entered the dark room. The Prince's: "I go to challenge Philipp I To open
combat... I Let this have been my last I Deceit" is answered by Philipp's: "It is your last!"
and the Queen's dead faint in Carlos's arms (V, 11, 5361-6). The play ends with the
King's (coldly and quietly to the Grand Inquisitor): "Cardinal! I've done my part. Do
you do yours".
*
*
*
Even though both works start early in the morning and end late at night, Schiller's
Don Carlos starts in a garden and ends in a closed room, Mozart's The Marriage of
Figaro starts in a closed room and ends in a garden. Beginning and ending in D Major,
the key of revenge, but also the overall key of the opera, the Finale of act IV is, at the
same time, the Finale of the work as a whole (IV, 28). With a symmetrical sequence of D
Major, G Major, E-flat Major, B-flat Major, G Major, D Major, yet with the middle
apparently disturbed, the Finale of act IV, gives us a panoramic review of the opera. Two
by two, its major characters pass before our eyes, with the others hidden in the shadows
of the garden, ready to emerge at more or less opportune moments.
Instead of Don Carlos, asking Princess Eboli for access to the Queen, and, in the
r
process, being arrested by Marquis Posa (IV, 15-16), Cherubino, on his way to Ba_barina,
stumbles in on Susanna, or so he thinks, sitting in the evening breeze under the pine trees,
as agreed upon in the famous rendezvous letter. The lady sitting there is, of course, the
Countess, dressed up as Susanna. Unlike Don Carlos who, at the end, appears in the
mask of Charles V, the historical exponent of the Holy Roman Empire, Cherubino, at the
26
�end, is himself again. Even when dressed up as a girl, at various points in the opera (II,
12; III, 21 ), it was never his face that was disguised. Deathly afraid that the Count would
find her in this compromising situation and still tum the co!11edy, in Beaumarchais's
words, into" a rather bloody tragedy", the Countess tries to repel the amorous advances of
the young page who, taking her for Susanna, complains: "And why can I not do what the
Count, shortly, will do with you?" (p. 384). In hilarious, multiple confusion, the kiss
meant for Susanna, is intercepted by the Count showing up at this moment, the slap in the
face to pay for it, by Figaro, sticking his head in to see what is going on. Different from
the tragic consequences of Princess Eboli stepping in for the Queen, or Marquis Posa for
Don Carlos, the Countess, stepping in for Susanna, or Figaro for Cherubino, has
uncomfortable, but never more than comic consequences.
Changing from D Major, the overall key of the opera, to G Major, its key of
marriage, the dalliance between the Count and the Countess, the husband taking his
wife's soft skin for that of her chambermaid and meaning to further his affair by slipping
a diamond ring on her finger, is more heartrending than apparent to either eye or ear.
With a drastic switch from G Major to E-flat Major, the opera's key of unhappy
love, the scene turns to Figaro musing on his role of the new Vulcan of the century, lying
in wait to catch Venus and Mars in his net. Coming upon Susanna, dressed up as the
Countess, he means to lead her to the compromising scene as well. Doing better than the
Count, with his wife's soft skin, Figaro catches on to Susanna's voice, but, for the fun of
it, takes advantage of the dark and proceeds to court his lady. After a sally of slaps in the
face from Susanna's hand, and his confession of having recognized her voice, their E-flat
Major, happily, but still cautiously, slips into B-flat Major. As if in answer to the Count's
earlier: "What is this comedy?", meaning Figaro's appearance with the musicians to play
for the wedding (I, 8, p. 100), the young couple, expressing their newly won delight in
each other, finish with a frolicking "Let's put an end to this comedy, my darling" (p. 411).
For the last time returning from B-flat Major to G Major, Figaro's act of
27
�shamelessly courting the Countess is stopped in its track by the irate Count. Deaf to the
entreaty of the whole cast, emerging from the bushes, he, with a dozen savage "No"s,
bluntly refuses any pardon for Figaro. More genuinely thai:i in the Finale of act II, the
Count is brought to his knees by the quiet voice of the Countess, once more speaking in
her own person. His plea for forgiveness, with an unstable rising 6th, from
'5' to .~
followed by an even more unstable rising 7th, from S'to ~is answered by her stable
I\
A
rising fifth, from 1 to 5, which, even more stable for being sung twice, comes to a
cadence on words reminiscent of the marriage vow.
Compared to Schiller's Don Carlos, where the only moment of forgiveness,
Philipp's pardon for Medina Sidonia, the admiral returning from the loss of the armada, is
tucked away in the very center of the dramatic poem (III, 7), Mozart's The Marriage of
Figaro, from act to act, presents us with more and more genuine forms of it. A touching
reminder of the serpent in the Garden of Eden, Cherubino, cursed by the Count as "little
serpent" (p. 96), but made fun of by Basilio as "little cherub of love" (p. 79), in the end, is
openly paired with Barbarina, the little girl who wanted him for a husband, and in return
for the favor, promised the Count to love him like her kitten (III, 21, rec.). In contrast to
the close of Schiller's Don Carlos, with the Queen in the arms of Don Carlos, in a dead
faint, and the King collaborating with the Grand Inquisitor, all the characters in Mozart's
The Marriage ofFigaro, except for Basilio, by the Finale, are paired more or less
happily. Basilio, a far cry from Domingo, grown to monstrous height in the figure of the
Grand Inquisitor, at the end of the opera, simply has melted into the crowd. Count and
Countess reunited, at least for now, the confusion felt by everyone gives way to a
sublimely beautiful chorus of universal contentment.
Very different from the last scene of Schiller's Don Carlos, where the icy silence,
surrounding the Grand Inquisitor, fills the dark room more and more with horror, the last
scene of Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro erupts into a happy rush of revelers, off to a
grand feast, the fireworks in the background lighting up the night over the dark garden.
28
�A moment of suspense, the transition between the solemn G Major of the Count and
Countess's reunion and the exuberant D Major of the happy crowd at the end, once more
reminds us of the pain lived through to reach this point.
W~th
a halting descent,
pianissimo and in unison, except for the flute and the oboe, hovering above, a dominant
7th chord on A, over the words "this day", lands us in d minor instead of D Major. A
scream of dissonances, however fleeting, an inverted 9th chord on G-sharp, the seventh
degree of A, highlights the grammatical link "of' in "this day a/torments, of caprices,
and of madness", expressed again in a tensed minor. The completion of the sentence:
"only love can end in happiness and joy" finally allows for the transition from the darker
d minor to the brighter D Major.
Like the effect of a Deus ex machina, in Greek tragedy, forcing a solution to
unsolvable human predicaments, this transition makes for the happy ending, but does not
do away with the painful personal and political problems of the opera. A skeptical
reminder of the contrary to fact condition in Schiller's: "If comedy ever were to reach its
goal, it would make all tragedy superfluous and impossible," the all-too-happy rush from
the dark garden to the lit up castle, musically expressed in hurtling towards a cadence,
has a hollow ring to it. Knowing full well that "his whole being" was set on "writing
tragedies", Schiller himself (with the possible exception of Wallenstein's Camp) never
wrote a comedy. More in tune with Socrates's notion, at the end of Plato's Symposium,
that a poet of tragedies should be able to write comedies as well, Mozart, in this comic
opera, subtitled "The Mad Day", lets the serious shine through the ludicrous, and thus
creates a sublime version of that rare marriage between tragedy and comedy.
A lecture (with music) delivered September 17, 2004 at St. John's College, Annapolis,
Maryland.
29
�REFERENCES
Schiller, Friedrich. 1974 5 . Samtliche Werke, ed. Gerhard Fricke und Herbert G. Gopfert,
Hanser, Milnchen.
_ _ _ .Don Carlos, Vol. II, pp. 7'.'"219.
_ _ _ . Briefe iiber "Don Carlos", Vol. II, pp. 225-67.
____ . Uber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, Vol. V, pp. 694-780.
Schiller, Friedrich. 1976. Don Carlos, Erlauterungen und Dokumente, ed. Karl
Pornbacher, Reclam, Stuttgart.
Schiller. 1998. Five Plays, translation by Robert David MacDonald, absolute classics,
London.
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus. 1979. The Marriage of Figaro (Le Nozze di Figaro) in Full
Score, Dover, New York.
Beaumarchais. 1977. Le Mariage de Figaro, ed. Pol Gaillard, Bordas, Paris.
Heine, Heinrich. Die romantische Schule (1833), in Samtliche Werke, Vol. VII, Hesse,
Leipzig.
(Unless otherwise noted, translations are my own.)
30
�Berns, Gisela N. 1985. Greek Antiquity in Schiller's "Wallenstein", Studies in the
Germanic Languagers and Literatures, Vol. 104, Universitv of North Carolina
Press, Chapel Hill.
- - - -. 1990. "Moderner und antiker 'Idealismus': Schiller's Don Carlos und
Sophokles' Antigone", in Zeitschrift far deutsche Philologie, Vol. 109,
Sonderheft: "Schiller Aspekte neuerer Forschung", ed. Norbert Oeller, pp.
41-76. (An earlier English version: '"Idealism'; Ancient and Modem:
Sophocles' Antigone and Schiller's Don Carlos", in The St. John's Review,
Vol. 39, Number 3 (1989-90), pp. 51-9.
Jamison Allenbrook, Wye. 1983. Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart: Le Nozze di Figaro and
Don Giovanni, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp. 71-94.
Farrand, Max, ed. 1966. The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, Vol. II, Yale
University Press, New Haven.
Kammen, Michael, ed. 1986. The Origins of the American Constitution, A Documentary
History, Penguin, New York.
Morris, Richard B. 1985. Witnesses at the Creation: Hamilton, Madison, Jay and the
Constitution, New American Library, New York.
Seidlin, Oskar. 1960. "Schiller, Poet of Politics'', in A Schiller Symposium, ed. Leslie
Willson, University of Texas, Austin, pp. 31-48.
31
�NOTES
For the deepest commentary on Don Carlos see Schiller, Briefe iiber Don Carlos, and
Oskar Seidlin, "Schiller Poet of Politics".
For a beautiful, comprehensive study of Mozart's The Marriage ofFigaro, see Wye
JamisonAllanbrook.
32
�
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Towards "a new birth of freedom" - Tragedy and comedy, 1786 Schiller's Don Carlos and Mozart's The marriage of Figaro.
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Typescript of a lecture delivered on September 17, 2004 by Gisela Berns as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
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Schiller, Friedrich, 1759-1805. Don Carlos
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 1756-1791. Nozze di Figaro.
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