3
20
387
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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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00:59:45
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From Ancient Agony to Contemporary Ecstasy: The Gospel at Colonus
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on January 18, 2008, by Theophus "Thee" Smith as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
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Smith, Theophus Harold
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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2008-01-18
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sound
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Gospel at Colonus (Choreographic work)
Religion and drama
African American Pentecostal churches
Tragedy--Greek influences
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English
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LEC_Smith_Theophus_2008-01-18_ac
Alumni
Friday night lecture
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ade347419384b68d6e591be897954869
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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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01:51:05
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Form and Figure in Greek Art: Ideal Beauty, Individualism, and Political Space in Greek Architecture and Sculpture
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on February 16, 2007, by Camille Paglia as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
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Paglia, Camille, 1947-
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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2007-02-16
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sound
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mp3
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Architecture, Greek
Sculpture, Greek
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English
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LEC_Paglia_Camille_2007-02-16_ac
Friday night lecture
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https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/183cd0fe79202198a9f2578b8412c32f.pdf
7f4619dc22798d76a2a293414d431ed8
PDF Text
Text
THE POWER & GLORY OF PLATONIC DIALOGUE
In Book One of his A1emorabilia, Xenophon reports Socrates conYersing \vith the
sophist Antiphon. Towards the end of their comrersation, Socrates speaks of sharing
wisdom with one's friends:
... just as someone else takes pleasure in a good horse or dog
or bird, so I take even more pleasure in my good friends, and
should I possess anything good I teach it, and I recommend
my friends to others from whom I believe they \vill receive
some benefit regarding \'Utue. And the treasures of the wise
men of old that they have left written down in books,
unfolding the scrolls, I carefully go through them in common
with my friends; and should we see anything good, we single
it out, and we consider it great gain should \Ve [thus] become
helpful to one another. (1.6.14)
Xenophon comments: ''\Vhen I heard these things, he certainly seemed to me a
supremely happy man and someone to conduct those heeding him into a good and noble
life." Xenophon's testimony to the ,·alue of books in their relation to friends is striking,
gi\·en his upright character and worldly competence-a man fully capable of successfully
leading others in the grimmest of life and death circumstances. He must have had rather
special books in mind.
\Vhat, then, is im,olved in reading Plato's dialogues together as friends, carefully
turning their pages, seeking out the treasures that hmre been written down by a wise man of
old? What ought 1.ve be after? What \voul<l Plato ha\·e us find? \Vhat would he ha\'e happen, as
the result of our reading? The ans\ver to such questions cannot be straightforward, but the
dialogue form of Plato's writings-graciously and thankfully-makes unm·oidable our
consciousness of what it means to read them. Looked at a little more carefully, they also
make unavoidable the question of what it means to speak, ,-1:rite, or read in the name of
philosophy, and-from another angle-they encourage meditation on what it means to
speak, read, or write at all. To presume that we already know what a dialogue is for, \vhat
philosophical speech really aims at, and what we should be getting out of reading Plato, is
therefore to ignore, perhaps even to violate what I shall be suggesting to you are Plato's wise
and manifold purposes. In particular, your single greatest practical failing as readers of
Platonic dialogue \vill regularly be the assumption that you can remain spectators of its
dialectical drama, disinterested onlookers, that you can remain aloof from its proceedings to
pick and choose among the thoughts you imagine the drama to be presenting to you. Your
single greatest theoretical failing \Vill regularly be to suppose that you know the nature of the
philosophical life. I do not doubt that Plato both understood and allO\ved for the fact that
many people would easily make both these sorts of mistake, each in his O\vn way, but that
should not lessen your resolve to be counted among the readers he most wished for.
�CARL PAGE
THE POWER &
GLORY OF PLATONIC DIALOGUE
PAGE-:!
Tonight I want to assemble some reminders to help stop you falling short of Plato's
potential friendship. I hope to do that, principally by recalling hO\v thoroughly strange the
dialogues are and by reflecting a little on why that might be. From the n:ry start, therefore,
you can see that my speech \Vill be far more practical and erotic, i.e., aimed at nudging your
habits and ideals, than it \Vill be doctrinal and theoretic-which is to say, aimed at informing
you of something. Jn this respect, my speech about Platonic dialogue reduplicates the
central character of the dialogues themselves.
A few procedural obsetTations. First, my main design is to present a vie\v of Plato
and his philosophical activity, rather than to justify my interpretation of them. I confine
myself to presentation, partly because of ti.me, but mostly because I think justification comes
up as a serious question only after one is convinced that something is interesting enough to
warrant that sort of effort-should circumstances require. It is the interest I would like to
pro,-oke first. My second note is a confession. Although much of \vhat follO\vs could be
called methodological, I often find myself impatient and ungenerous with such reflections,
with abstract worries about how one ought to do things instead of getting on with doing
them. Methodology, critique, and meta-theory tend to be airy and undisciplined, they lend
themsefres to indecisi,-e, apparently endless bickering, they e:acourage an odious sort of
intellectual smugness, and their attention to matters of form is frequently at the cost of
return to the concrete content (whose understanding they were originally supposed to serve).
N e\-ertheless, any serious \vell-directed \vork does need orientation, does need some
understanding of what it's about, and this is especially important for those who have only
just begun. In philosophical matters, the Delphic injunction to know oneself looms as large
over Socrates as it does over Kant, notwithstanding their disagreements over how best to
fulfill the responsibility. It seems, therefore, one must at some point or other run the risks
of transcendental narcissism for the sake of self-knowledge. Third, some of the topics I
shall explore \Vill sound like nriations on the familiar, perhaps eYen tired old Straussian
themes of esotericism, noble lies, persecution of philosophy, and the rest. But not e\·eryone
here has heard these important refrains. I intend to repeat my \Trsions of a few of them
eloquently and incisively, along with a couple of riffs I hope no one has heard before. I
deliberately refer to "my \'ersions" of these refrains because I disagree with an underlying
assumption commonly at work in their interpretation: that philosophy is by nature politically
alienated and must therefore exercise a condescending accommodation, compelled by
necessity, to the city and to ordinary human life. Some of my reasons for this deep
disagreement are \VOYen into \vhat follows, though I do not make them thematic. One last
introductory word. I shall not hesitate-rather shamelessly perhaps-to speak on
philosophy's behalf. By my acknowledging this presumption in advance, you can at least see
that I appreciate what might be questionable about my immodesty.
THE ODDITIES OF PLATONIC DIALOGUE
A moment ago I hinted that there is something important in the very fact of Platonic
dialogues, something that goes beyond and maybe even upsets the conventional meanings
�CARL PAGE
THE POWER
&
GLORY OF PLATONIC DIALOGUE
PAGE-3
typically associated with philosophy books and their academic study. This needs to be made
explicit.
PU.TONIC ANONYi\IITY. The dialogues arc fully dramatic, i.e., they portray logoi in
action and deeds of speech but never disembodied assertions. This form is unusual and was
noted by Aristotle near the beginning of the Poetics, \vhere he speaks of "the Socratic
conversation,'' classing it together \vith the mimes of Sophron and his son Xenarchus
(1447b10). Sophron was a fifth-century Syracusan writer, reputedly admired by Plato. His
mimes were dramatic renderings in \'erse of everyday people, designed to be revelatory of
their characters. Plato's dialogues are either directly performed, simply narrated, or narrated
within a performed frame, but in all cases not a \vord is said in Plato's own voice, except the
titles. The dialogues not directly performed permit external comment by their narrators, but
there is neYer-unlike the passage from Xenophon with \vhich I began-any authorial
comment from Plato himself.
In this respect, the Platonic corpus is like the body of Shakespeare's plays. Just as \Ve
must wonder exactly how far Prospero, for example, can be taken to speak for the Tempest's
author, or I Iamlet or Lear, so too must we wonder hO\v far Socrates or Parmcnides or the
Eleatic Stranger or Timaeus or the Athenian Stranger can be taken to speak for Plato. This
question was known to Diogenes Laertius in the third century A.D., though many
contemporary readers seem to have forgotten it. Despite the unremitting anonymity,
hO\vever, it must be added that the dialogues are known to be Plato's and were circulated
from the start under his authorship. We arc therefore meant to notice that the dialogues
contain no direct word of Plato's O\vn. He addresses us, but he does not declare himself.
Ancient rumours of secret Academic teachings notwithstanding, in his own time Plato was
just as reticent about his ultimate insights and purposes, providing almost no other clues but
the dialogues themseh'es. They are like "the lord, \vhose oracle is at Delphi,'' that "neither
reveals nor conceals, but gives a sign" (Heraklcitos, Frag. 93) and, like the sibyl herself, '\vith
ra\·ing lips, uttering things unlaughable, unbeautiful, and unperfumed, they reach \Vith their
\"oice across a thousand years, because of the god" (cf. Herakleitos, Frag. 92). So, Plato
whispers an intriguing name into our ears-Phaedms (\vhom e\·eryonc knows to be very
beautiful), Theaetetm (whom everyone knmvs to be very clever), Afeno (whom everyone knows
to be very bad); either such names or sometimes a provocative title-Socrates' Defense Speech,
An Intimate Drinking Par!J, Cizilized Order, Reg11lations,-then he draws the curtain back, to
disappear, not off-stage but behind the masks, bringing life to each and every one of his
drama/is personae-the personae Platoms.
LOGICAL DERANGEMENT. The god-inspired oracle at Delphi uttered things
"unlaughable, unbeautiful, and unperfumed," the very same qualities we meet with in Plato's
oracular dialogues. Before fully realizing that strange fact, an experienced and competent
reader might well approach the dialogues assuming that philosophy is meant to be or at least
ought to include the art of telling, insightful speeches, that a philosopher's discourse should
be more accurate, more illuminating, more comprehensive, and more self-conscious than
any of our other ways of talking. Plato's dialogues, ho\vc\•er, present quite a different face,
despite their being finished works and despite how plainly philosophy is their centre of
l l
:!I)
/ I) 8
�CARL PAGE
THE POWER &
GLORY OF PLATONIC DIALOGUE
PAG E -4
gra,·ity. Individually and as a whole they are, at first sight, if not a conceptual chaos at least a
tangle of conflicting and unrcsoh'ed accounts, often at cross-purposes with one another, and
sometimes in ways their speakers seem not even to appreciate, let alone understand. I list
the most ob,·ious features.
Many of the dialogues are aporetic, i.e., they lose their way and never seem to find it
again, no matter how serious the resoh·e with \vhich they began. One tends to get used to
this, but the failure of comfortable closure~,·cn in the manifestly great works, such as the
Rep11b/ic-reliably irritates any classroom of first-time readers; as, indeed, it should. Some of
the dialogues that seem more doctrinally committed, more like "proper" philosophy, e.g.,
Parmenides, Sophist, are experienced by many competent readers, at least initially, as rather
boring through much of their length, occasionally to the point of unreadability. A good
handful of dialogues hardly seem like dialogues at all, if "dialogue" be understood as an
earnest effort at inquiry in common. At crucial points in almost all of them, the
philosophical argument relics on images and metaphor, conwntionally the tools of poetry.
Worse still, poetry itself seems regularly to be denounced, while nonetheless used
throughout. fa·en writing itself is declared some sort of mistake. Also at crucial points, the
speech will sometimes turn with utter logical seriousness to myth, to what are acknowledged
within the com·ersation as fanciful talcs (Repuhlzi.~ Gorgias, Phaedo, Phaednd). And yet, all these
myths and images rub cheek by jowl with the most abstruse forms of technical
argumentation and intricately developed analyses, sometimes lasting for pages and
pages-pages that cause painful conceptual squinting, e,·en for the most discursi,·ely facile
of readers. Yet again, logical precision can at almost any moment gi,·e \vay to outrageous
fallacy, blatant non-sequitur, and shameless ad hominem attack. Occasionally, the whole show
seems a logical farce-as in the Crary/11s, the E11th)'demm, and parts of the Protagoras for
example-yet everyone in the dialogue keeps a completely straight face. There seems to be
no overall plan to the dialogues as a totality; one more or less would not seem to ruin their
effect, and there is no single dialogue that might count as their culmination or key.
Nevertheless, many are linked dramatically \vith one another, both temporally and topically.
Worse still, some topics seem to be treated inconsistently across different dialogues, and
worse again, the topical coherence of individual dialogues has seemed to many readers to
lea,•e much to be desired (Rep11blzi.· and Phaedms have gi,·en this impression for centuries).
Neither can one help but wonder at the apparent naivete with which the interlocutors so
often proceed, only infrequently stopping to "define their terms"-as \VC like to say--often
plainly making large and questionable assumptions, sometimes agreeing not to pursue deeper
investigations, and so on, all the while talking about precision and whether we really know
what we think we know, how different knowledge and opinion are from one another, and
what indispensable value there is in self-knowledge.
Finally, as if it were n ot sufficient that \VC never hear directly what Plato himself
thinks, the character of Socrates-clearly a protagonist, though not for that reason
equinlcnt to Plato-is depicted \vithin the dialogical drama as notorious for hir irony. Let
me say straightaway, ho,ve,·cr, that Socrates' irony docs not mean that he isn't serious in
what he does say or that he says the opposite of what he thinks, either for amusement or
�CARL PAGE
T H E POWER &
GLORY OF PLATONI C DIALOGUE
PAGE-5
social co1wenience. Socrates' irony is that he kno\vingly ne,·er says all that he has in mind,
and that he will on occasion knowingly let his speeches and his deeds contradict one
another, both in the present and across dramatic time. Plato's irony is similar, if not
identical, in spirit. It is an irony that Aristotle described as "graceful and generous," an
a,·oidance of pretension, especially in matters that are " unclear and apt to cause no small
impediment" (Nicomachean Ethics 1127b22-31).
In sum, the logical or account-gi,·ing, truth-telling face o f the dialogues presents a
confusing, sprawling, eclectic, thoroughly unsystematic gallimaufry of irritatingly teasing
hints at philosophical depth and meaning. Beware of becoming blind to this obtrusive fact.
Everyone has heard that the whole of Western philosophy is nothing but footnotes to Plato,
so the dialogues must be magnificently crafted speeches. Right? Well, they are, but not in
the way you might expect. Their ,·cry ugliness, their rebarbati,·e outward appearance is itself
a manifestation of the greatest craft. It is great, because we haYe all-by which I mean all
serious readers since Plato wrote-kept coming back in amazement and expectation to these
astonishingly ugly things. You \vill often hear it said that Plato is a master stylist, and indeed
he is. He is a master stylist because he can and regularly does with facility and com·iction
imitate eYeryone else perfectly, from Aristophanes' humour, to G o rgias's nai\·e urbanity,
from Lysias's oratory to Protagoras's logic, from Hippias's vanity to Alkibiades' disarmingly
attractiYe hubris. Yet the dialogues themselves remain lopsided, ungainly, "unbeautiful and
unperfumed." They are nothing that we expect, either as ordinary readers or as readers with
m ore sophisticated views about the nature and tasks of philosophy. Plato's intensely ironic
dialogues, then, are just like the ironic Socrates, \Vhom Alkibiades describes for us in the
Symposium. Completely ugly on th e outside- short, snub-nosed, goggle-eyed-yet
nonetheless suffused with a hidden harmony. Like the Silenus figures Alkibiades goes on to
mention, the dialogues are cleverly contrived statuettes, ugly satyrs of undisguised desire on
the outside but on the inside filled with images of gods. Alkibiades saw the gods in Socrates,
but on account of his hubris tic ambition to command Socrates' eros, he failed to make those
gods his own. Like\visc, the reader of Platonic dialogues must abandon the urge to possess.
Blundering, thoughtless lonrs, groping after the satisfaction of their O\Vn, preconceived
lusts, \Vill get nowhere.
Socrates seems to b e a sort of
conversational vulture, always hanging around to see if he can tum the carrion of ordinary
conversation into a philosophical feast. More particularly, he seems to be a sort of psychic
vampire as well, circling around all the promising young men, always whispering with some
one o r a few of them off in a corner, as Kallikles fo r example accuses him in the Gorgias. In
both cases the hope and promise seem ne,·er fulfilled. There is simply no Platonic dialogue
between two mature philosophers; Zeno and Parmenides happen to be present together with
an immature Socrates in the Parmenides, while the mature Socrates is present but does not
engage the Eleatic Stranger in the Sophisl and Stalesman. As for any dialogue that acti,·ely
engages truly potential philosophers, one might look to the Republic but Plato's dialogues
furnish no clue as to the later fate of either Glaucon or Adeimantus, while in the case of the
Parmenides, the promising Socrates is for the m ost part an onlooker-th o ugh he is
THE ABSENCE OF :tl!ATURE PHILOSOPHY.
l l / ;! I) / 9 8
�CARL PAGE
THE POWER & GLORY OF PLATONIC DIALOGUE
PAGE-6
undoubtedly educated both by what he sees and by the brief exchange that crushes his
fledgling account of Ideas. It is fair to say overall, then, that while Socrates is forever
interested in getting philosophy going and that as a mature philosopher he is clearly superior
to all those he actively questions, \Ve ne\'er really see philosophic conversation underway in
full sail, top-gallants flying. Moreover, this omission is explicitly brought to our attention in
the Sophist, whose intriguing prologue leads the eager reader to expect a third dialogue
Philosopher once Sophist and Statesman arc done. The apparent promise, however, remains
unfulfilled. There ne\'er was such a dialogue published, and we are provoked to wonder if it
ever could have been written. We are also invited to think about why sophist and statesman
should be the topics to eclipse so bright a sun as that.
The common spectacle of the Platonic dialogues is at least the deferral of fully
realized philosophy and more often than not the outright failure of philosophy even to show
signs of a healthy beginning. On the other hand, Plato himself is standing somewhere
beyond that absence and failure, a position he underlines for us by \vriting himself out of a
scene in which everyone would most have expected him to appear-and where he was no
doubt present in fact-namely Socrates' swan-song and death, the scene that Plato
dramatized in the Phaedo. Whate\'er else, therefore, that Plato takes his own philosophizing
to be, it cannot be what is represented in the drama of his dialogues. In particular, philosophy
as Plato means it to be understood cannot be a simple equivalent to "Socratic conversation."
I mean that last assertion to be a little shocking. The dialogues are often thought to
be mirrors or representations of real, li,·ing communications, or at least of some idealized
version of foring, philosophic communication. i\foreover, this mirror image is by itself
somehow supposed to dra\v us too into the same sort of living communication, as if the
imitation became the deed in us by our seeing it. But Plato did not seek to encode the living
communication of philosophy by imitating it via the drama that is constructed in and as the
dialogue. This is worth stating bluntly: Plato did not write dialogues because he thought that
the proper form of philosophy \Vas the Socratic flim-flam that takes up so much of them.
The dialogues are designed to make up for the fact that Plato cannot be here to talk with us
as he would most desire. They are the monological half of a philosophical communication
that must compensate for the fact that one of the interlocutors, perhaps the wisest one, is
absent. The dialogue is first and foremost a logos, Plato's logos. That it is dramatic and so
on, is all internal to the fact of its having been written dO\vn and published as an artfully
contrived speech by one man to the entire world.
This does not sit well with a common contemporary view that there is nothing else
that should emerge from Socratic inquiry except more Socratic inquiry, that the full, mature
form of philosophy--disappointingly but somehow only accidentally missing from the
dialogues-would be a conversation between Socrates and his equal in logical refutation. To
cut a very long and depressing story short, current intellectual orthodoxy claims that the best
reasons available to human beings are ahvays and in principle immanent to the contingent
circumstances of their inquiries, that our deepest thoughts cannot but be fully conditioned
by tradition and circumstance in \vays that make them inevitably finite and parochial, that all
insight can never be more than a single perspective, a point of vie'v taken from within a
11 / :!(1 / 9 8
�CARL PAGE
THE POWER & GLORY OF PLATONIC DIALOGUE
PAGE-7
limited horizon. This posture has the following peculiar result: to the extent that there is
nothing absolute available in the contingent play of opinions, to that extent it starts to seem
absolutely better to be able to refute an opinion than to assert or maintain it. Human life on
the practical le\Tl no doubt calls for provisionally acceptable conclusions, but on the
philosophical or theoretical level all assertions turn out to depend on the critically
complacent failure to have discovered their refutations, \vhich if not around today surely will
be tomorrow--or so the fallibilist predicts and insists with alarmingly fanatical, not to say
incoherent conviction. It thus also follows that the theoretically open mind ought to be an
empty mind, a mind fortified with a sturdy arsenal of techniques for preventing any opinion
from lodging within it. To ha\'e any opinion at all is to risk the embarrassing accusation of
intellectual naivete. Whatever its own merits, this is not the view represented by Plato's
Socrates or his dialogues. Although Socrates claims to lack \visdom-in the teeth of the fact
that no one, either inside or outside the dialogues, belie\·es him when he does so-it is still
\visdom that he loves, not the lack of it. Contemporary critical thinkers love the lack, and
this tempts them into making a fetish of transcendental detachment and to indulge an
infinite, unfalsifiable suspicion for what Socrates in the Apology calls his "human wisdom"
and \vhich elsewhere turns out to be the science, note that word, the science of erotics.
There is, hmvever, a more substantial point of comparison. Although both Socrates
and the contemporary critical thinker agree that most people are unhelpfully opinionated
(which is by no means the same as to say that all their opinions are \vrong), the critical
thinker imagines that the fitting response is to work hard on disinterested mind-skills for
keeping all tempting beliefs up in the air, for keeping the naivete of commitment at arm's
length. For Socrates, on the other hand, the fact that most people are opinionated is a much
deeper, murkier problem, tied up \vith what souls most deeply want and what they most
deeply fear they can't get. The examination of genuine opinions, i.e., the deep-seated
convictions you ha,·e about what is true, good, and beautiful, the com·ictions \vhose belief is
not a matter of choice, the examination of those sorts of opinions is a far more delicate
matter than testing for reasonableness----e,·en if self-styled logicians kne\v precisely what that
really is, which they obviously don't. I say that so confidently because I have never yet heard
of a logician helping anyone understand Plato, or Hegel, or Nietzsche, for example-all of
whom I take to be entirely reasonable thinkers. They haven't done much for Aristotle either.
Plato makes the need for something else especially clear by having his Socrates talk about
two unusual and hitherto unrecognized arts: psychic midwifery in the Theaetetus and
philosophical rhetoric in the Phaedms. The reader is also meant, of course, to notice how
often those same arts are portrayed at \vork throughout the dialogues, both by the characters
and by Plato himself. Philosophical inquiry turns out to be a far more complex acti,·ity than
tying people in argumentative knots or never being at a loss for a clever or merely correct
reply. It includes a moral, soul-tending dimension that pays attention to pedagogical,
rhetorical, ethical, and political matters as well, in addition to the surface dimensions oflogic,
analytic technique, and epistemic responsibility.
TRA...:"JSITION. I have briefly considered Plato's artfully contri\·ed anonymity, the
constant baffling of our logical expectations, and the dramatic absence of philosophy in a
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mature form. These obsenrations, together with the phenomena of irony, both Platonic and
Socratic, plus a glimpse into certain soul-tending arts, all point to the partially hidden yet
systematically intrusive presence of philosophizing in a more complex, shadowy form than
Socrates' public \vrestling matches or the Eleatic Stranger's diacritical gymnastics. Plato
speaks through indirection and means to indicate that philosophy cannot and ought not to
speak as straight as one might at first suppose. This initially unsettling conclusion finds
several well-known echoes in the Platonic epistles. "There is no composition by Plato, nor
will there e,·er be one, but those now said to be his belong to a Socrates grown young and
beautiful" (314c). And then in a great and famous passage from the Seventh Letter.
But this much I can certainly declare concerning all these
writers, or prospective writers, who claim to know the
subjects which I seriously study, whether as hearers of mine
or of other teachers, or from their own discoveries; it is
impossible, in my judgment at least, that these men should
understand anything about this subject. There does not exist,
nor will there e\·er exist, any treatise of mine dealing
therewith. For it does not admit of verbal expression like
other studies, but, as a result of continued application to the
subject itself and communion therewith, it is brought to birth
in the soul of a sudden, as light that is kindled by a leaping
spark, and thereafter nourishes itself (341 b)
Nevertheless, Plato wrote dialogues all his life, taking astonishing pains m·er their
intricate construction. He cannot therefore ha,·e thought them superfluous or trivial, despite
his recognition of their necessary limits. By all normal standards of truth-telling coherence
the dialogues are manifestly deranged; my task now is to address the partly hidden method in
their apparent madness.
PHILOSOPHY IN THE IRONICAL MODE
According to the reports of antiquity, Aristotle wrote Platonic-style dialogues in the
earlier part of his career. They are, regrettably, lost-all the more regrettably, seeing that
Cicero praised them as golden (though what else should we expect from someone \vho spent
the greater part of his early years in the Academy teaching rhetoric?). What we ha,·e from
Aristotle are documents that may reasonably be thought of as treatises or at least notes to
treatise-like expositions. As it happens, there is nothing in the Aristotelian corpus as we
have it that can confidently be taken as published "\vriting in the manner of Plato's dialogues
and it is certainly the case that much of what we do have presents an aporetic, tentative, less
than declarative face. Even so, and with all due allmvance for hints at even Aristotelian
indirection in what seem to be far more straightforward texts, the Aristotelian writings bear
witness through much of their bulk to an expository, more recognizably academic style of
philosophical speech than the baffling Platonic form. The comparison shO\vs that Plato
perfectly well understood what it would mean to write philosophy in that more
straightforward mode-and that Aristotle kne\v perfectly well \Vhat it would mean to write in
the ironic, self-deprecating dialogical mode. In neither case, then, is the form a stylistic quirk
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or an historically dictated necessity. Moreo,·er, for both Aristotle and Plato it was a
conscious decision to write at all, since Socrates, just as self-consciously did not.
DIALOGUE YS. TREATISE. What is at stake in this stylistic difference between
dialogue and treatise? At first glance, the Aristotelian style of telling, philosophical speeches
gives one reliably direct ways of talking about and thinking about the ordered, eidetic
structure of things, both human and non-human. E\Tn if one accepts none of his specific
metaphysical results or if one prefers to emphasize the open-ended, aporetic character of
certain of his inquiries, Aristotle's noetic tools and categories have proven themseh·es of
permanent worth. The notions of substance, essence & accident, form & matter, actuality &
potentiality, together with Aristotle's interpretative specifications of aitia, arche, kinesis, p!Jche,
phronesis, epzsteme, and praxis are all ingenious and Yirtually indispensable devices for anyone
interested in the peculiar business of philosophical articulation. Aristotle's insights
constitute a huge fraction of our philosophical patrimony, and amount to a legacy we should
receive \Vith both gratitude and respect. While at least equally deserving of gratitude and
respect, Plato's ironic form of philosophical telling does not emphasize in the same way the
ordered structures that may be seen and understood. Rather, Plato points to \Vhat it is like to
be seeing structure, what it is like to be moved by truth, to be astonished by beauty, to aim at
and hope for the good. Not only that, Plato also indicates the manifold \Vays in \vhich
human beings variously fail and fall short in their attempts to be knowing and wise.
Actuality and achievement rule in Aristotle's philosophic art, eros and lack in Plato's. The
one emphasizes what may be understood, the other the fragile, unsteady soul that does the
understanding. Aristotle is thus the philosopher of detachment, Plato the philosopher of
integrity. Correspondingly, the danger of Platonic philosophizing is self-obsession and the
narcissism of intelligent desire, while the danger of Aristotelian philosophizing is selfforgetfulness and the indulgence of theoretical hubris. Strange as it may seem, although
Aristotelian exposition puts a premium on truth-telling, in the end it is more guarded.
Aristotle tends to suppress the erotic, the madness of self-transcendence and the nuances of
self-knowledge. In particular, he muffles what is dangerous about philosophy, whereas Plato
is comparatinly open about it. Aristotle prm·ides many theoretical insights for which one
can be very thankful, yet it is \VOrth recalling that on the death of Alexander he had to flee
Athens, pursued by an indictment for impiety. For help in understanding that disturbing
fact, one will find more extensive guidance in Plato.
In distinguishing an eidetic emphasis from an erotic one, I do not mean to say that
the two modes are rigidly correlated with dialogues and treatises, as if Plato never really
presented a philosophical idea or Aristotle never worried about the integrity of thinker and
thought. Platonic dialogues can in places be as expository as Aristotelian treatises can in
places be ironic and full of finesse. Both modes have their relative purposes and merits.
Sometimes, one is simply ready to hear an idea, to be told how it is \vith things, to be shown
where the joints of the world are. At other times, and for different reasons on different
occasions, one needs to understand the circumstances of such truth-telling. "Aristotelians"
and "Platonists" have quarreled over these matters for centuries and \vill, doubtless, brawl
for centuries more. As a matter of temperament, different human beings find themseh·es
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favouring one emphasis rather than the other, but both dialogue and exposition are equally
flexible in the hands of masters. In fact, I am quite sure that philosophic masters need to be
masters of both. Let me just state then that masterful philosophical articulation, in thought
or in speech, requires equal command of \Vhat I shall call eiddics and erotics. As just
suggested, eidetics correspond to the objects of contemplation, the intelligible nature,
structure, and wholeness of things. The dimension of erotics includes how the soul is
disposed to think and to act, and how responsible it remains to itself and its conditions as it
engages both. As it happens, i.e., just as a matter of historical fact, the artful irony of Plato's
dialogues as we have them communicates far more about philosophical eros-and its
failings-in relation to the truth than do the Aristotelian writings we have. No doubt
Aristotle could have told us more, and has probably told us more than is usually realized, but
I think that the matter of fact rests on a matter of principle, namely, that Platonic dialogue is
truer to the manifold needs and realization of lucid, philosophical existence. In particular, it
is Platonic dialogue that can more reliably save us from ourselves, since it is \vith respect to
the erotic dimension of human endeavour that \Ve keep getting in our own way, that we are
the originating sources of our O\Vn unnecessary wanderings and corruption. Eidetics tend, in
comparison though by no means mindlessly, to take care of themseh-es--one sign of \vhich
is that they're more teachable.
Plato hides, though not with complete invisibility, behind his
characters. Chief among them is a character, namely Socrates, not only notorious among his
fellow players for his irony but plainly to us his spectators coy, manipulative, and far from
even-handed. Taking courage from the apparent straightforwardness of Aristotelian
exposition, we can hardly forbear an exasperated cry: Why all the fuss? Why the teasing, not
to say irritating indirection? What prevents philosophy from speaking forthrightly, from
saying all she means? Must philosophy ahvays play false, or perhaps play games, with our
truth-telling hopes and ambitions? In short: what, if anything, calls for Platonic irony? If we
cannot answer such questions, then Plato can be left to his idiosyncratic, sibylline whimsies.
Unsurprisingly, the dialogues themselves furnish many clues to a more generous
understanding. Gi\Tn that writing dialogues cannot be all there is to the philosophical life, it
\Vill be helpful to consider such writing in light of that li"\·ing \Vhole. As I read the dialogues,
actual philosophical life has four principal domains of responsibility: work, pedagogy,
guardianship, and civics. By work I mean master-work, the full, unimpeded realization of
philosophical insight. By pedagogy I mean the husbandry of potential and apprentice
philosophers. By guardianship I mean the preservation of philosophy against both external
assault and internal corruption. By civics I mean philosophy's citizenly life and duty within
the larger human community that gives it birth. All four domains suggest good reasons for
philosophical indirection, for less than unqualified truth-telling, though I shall not here be
able to pay full attention to them all.
ORIGINS OF IRO:t\TJ:'.
The most common initial excuse offered for Platonic irony, for \vhy the dialogues
seem so ugly and manipulative and confusing, appeals to pedagogy, to the requirements, as it
is commonly formulated, of getting readers to think for themselves. Certainly, in any
worthwhile education and a fortiori any philosophical education, mere instruction is not
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sufficient for understanding. Instruction alone leaves us, as Nietzsche put it, with a bellyful
of undigested knowledge-stones; enough to calm our hunger for a while perhaps, yet
ultimately unable to nourish and satisfy. To the extent, therefore, that the dialogues aim at
guiding and training potential philosophers, it can safely be expected that they do more than
instruct, that they challenge when we get lazy, inspire when we are daunted, and that they
somehow aid proper noetic digestion. As usually understood, however, this encouragement
"to think for oneself'' is interpreted as the development of critical thinking skills, skills that
may permit you to grind down those knowledge-stones but which do nothing to help you
assimilate whatever truth they may have contained. One must also be wary of supposing that
such pedagogical aims, even when understood in the best sense, exhaust the possible reasons
for dialogical irony, that teaching determines the boundary of Plato's communicative intent.
It does not.
There is another, deeper difficulty with the idea of thinking for oneself. Namely,
that everyone already does; it's part of the problem, not the solution. To quote from
Herakleitos once more: "though the logos is common, the many live supposing themselves
to have a special understanding" (Frag. 2). At the most important level, then, irony or
stimulating indirection is a proper part of philosophical pedagogy not so much because
young learners need tricky help with the hard work of assimilation-which they certainly
do-but because we human knowers are constantly prone to collapse into that state of
consciousness Hegel identified as self-certainty. Once in such a state, we can usually only be
levered out again with well-meaning, i.e., noble, lies. Being in the know, the natural
condition of the human soul, is so obviously our greatest adaptive advantage that we keep
getting entranced by partial realizations of our wonderful capacity, we keep generalizing our
local insights into global wisdoms. But how is such self-satisfied conviction to be m oved,
led out of itself, educated? How does one come to recognize that one does not know?
Hegel's dialectic, to the extent that it may be thought of as containing a pedagogical response
to the problem, is a logical bludgeoning that has turned out to be all but useless, except in
the case of a uniquely motivated not to say perverse few. Socrates, in contrast, seduces many
a complacent soul-though not every one--out of its proclivity to noetic self-satisfaction
with all manner of charms and deceits, as does Plato in tum at another level of refinement.
The essential psychagogical trick in most cases is to make the higher truth look somehow
attractive within the perspective of the lower, more confined horizon. Plato's Eleatic
Stranger classifies such tricks as belonging to that species of the image-making art that works
with phantoms (fantastics) rather than with likenesses (eikastics). The distinction is made in
a dialogue entitled Sophist (236c).
Philosophy's strictly educative concerns, however, have definite limits, since not
every soul is capable of fully realizing her promise. We moderns do not like to hear things
like this, partly because we tend to think that reason ought by and large to be perfectible by
methods universally available to all and partly because we h ate to think that possibilities are
limited or that freedom alone might not suffice for realizing the good. Plato is more hardheaded. Serious attraction to philosophy is no guarantee at all of its fulfillment, as may be
seen, for example, in Apollodorus of the Symposi11m, who was at least wise enough to know
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this fact about himself. Furthermore, while Socrates will converse with whoever comes his
way, he does not undertake to teach everyone. Some souls he passes on to others, often
guided by the admonitions of his daimonion, his "divine sign." His daimonion, of
course-his little daimonic thing-is an inflection of the daimon eros, in whose affairs he is
expert. So Socrates will sometimes help and sometimes tum aside those who will never be
able to manage all that philosophy requires. As with most serous matters, it is a risk-y sort of
discrimination, easily incurring public odium. In Socrates' case, that risk is the essential
meaning of the historical accident that wrapped his erotic daimonion up into the civic charge
of impiety, of importing new-fangled gods, an innovation partly responsible for his
execution. As a final point it needs to be noted that infatuations with philosophy are not
always so benign as Apollodorus's. The tyrannical ambitions of Alkibiades and Kritias, for
example, both gifted intellectually, were blamed on their association with Socrates, while
Plato's Seventh Letter--from which I have already quoted--exists principally on account of
the havoc wreaked on philosophy's public, indeed international, reputation by Dionysius the
Younger, Tyrant of Syracuse, in his efforts to make Plato's wisdom his own.
My guiding question is whether or to what extent the irritating indirection of Platonic
dialogue can be understood as exercising philosophical responsibility. The particular
demands of teaching provide some plausible grounds, but there are others. Some of these
are rather easy to overlook, once inside the comforts provided by contemporary academic
freedoms. But not only are those freedoms hard-won and in need of constant maintenance
(a task for which philosophy, in virtue of its disciplinary competence regarding the relation
of theory to practice, is the proper guardian), neither is peace the uniform condition within
our necessarily parasitic Republic of Letters. Academic politics is notorious for its pettiness
and intolerance-itself a hardly accidental fact-but more significant are the manifold
theoretical disputes over demarcation, hierarchy, and methodology across and between the
various disciplines. Regarding these foundational and procedural reflections, philosophy's
competence and even presence is held in deep suspicion by the positive disciplines. Within
the so-called university, faction it would seem is the norm-no matter what ideals one might
prefer or hope to see there.
Not everyone can be fully philosophical, you might think that's a shame; not
everyone wants to be philosophical; well, that's their choice; but not everyone wants
philosophy around. That's dangerous. Hence the need for what I called philosophical
guardianship. Both philosophy and what is philosophically best in all of us cannot rely on
being left alone. In either the personal or the political case, there are several intrusive
challenges to philosophy's well-being within its larger community: the psychic community of
manifold desires on the one hand; the civic community of individual agents on the other.
The fights in both cases depend on a hunger fo~ wisdom. The Platonic dialogues emphasize
two main sources of intrusive challenge, and though I shall discuss them mostly in terms of
the civic paradigm, the Rep1Jb!ic's own brilliant likeness of city to soul should keep the psychic
paradigm equally in mind. According to Plato's dialogical imagery, then, the challenges come
(1) from the other men of logoi, of whom the two main classes are poets and sophists, and
(2) from the men of the city, who share with philosophy an ambition for the noble but
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disagree on the location of its highest form. The latter challenge also has two arms : that
philosophy subverts decent, conventional politics (Anytus, Kleitophon), and that philosophy
is adolescent, laughable, and unmanly (Kallikles, Thrasymachus). Adeimantus, who stands
for what is necessary and best within the large yet still limited horizon of the city, bluntly
restates these two accusations in the middle of the Rep11blic: philosophers are either useless or
depraved. They therefore deserve no place in human community, let alone to be enthroned
as its only competent kings. Perhaps the clearest overall Platonic symbol of the political
challenge is the dialogue entitled Socrates' Defense Speech, while an emblem for the challenge
from the men of logoi may be found in that gigantomachy mentioned in the Sophist, that
never-ending battle between the hard-headed, aggressive "motion men"-whose general, so
we learn in the Theaetet11s, is Homer-and the gentler, more generous "friends of the forms."
Plato's implied account of the nature and grounds of these several challenges, I
cannot examine in detail here but it is, I think, tolerably clear that the predicaments are, in all
cases, serious and abiding ones. Astute Protagorean prudence, Hippian technical
competence, and effective Gorgian rhetoric all seem far more beneficial-both in
themselves and certainly to their practitioners-than Socratic elenchus could ever be.
Socrates' wisdom appears only to numb people and make them angry or unhappy. Homer,
Sophocles, and Aristophanes all seem more inspiring and companionable than philosophy's
austere explanations and deflations, from which the gods are missing and in which, if the
divine be mentioned at all, it seems aloof and indifferent to human concerns. Too much
talk, and talk for talking's sake are indeed shameful and unmanly, while delving too deeply
into the origins of things does indeed run risk of undermining civic loyalty, familial respect,
and even the self-confidence that is a necessary condition for any worthwhile deed. All these
tensions have a symbolic focus in that disturbing scenario at the end of the Rep11blic's most
memorable image: the philosopher returning to the Cave would be set upon and killed by
those still shackled there, if they could get hold of him. Their opinions are not so true as
they imagine them to be, formed as they are by the shadows cast from artifacts and statues
of real things carried above and behind them by poets, sophists, and politicians, and they
would react with hostile fear if they knew. Yet the lesson is not that the Cave-dwellers are all
contemptibly ignorant and wicked; it is that pure wisdom is unbearable to the incompletely
enlightened soul. I say "incompletely enlightened" because too bright a light is unbearable,
only to those who can already see. There is both a fire and muted daylight in Plato's Cave.
Athens that prided itself on its freedom of discourse, its accomplishment in tragedy and its
welcome to the sophists, nonetheless executed Socrates and indicted Aristotle. Philosophy
cannot be an unqualified human good, because it is not unqualifiedly safe to tell the truth.
We all know this already. Frankness is a gift and honour reserved for close friends, and even
there it's difficult. Nor should we be surprised to learn that the truth is dangerous, if-as we
hear so often-that knowledge is power. Socrates let himself be executed to vivify these
sorts of unsettling facts for all thoughtful souls to come, knowing that Plato was there to
write about it in a way that would keep the recognition safe within the memory of
subsequent generations.
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The several differences between what is philosophical and what is not are none of
them merely qualitative; they are fraught with threat and anxiety of an order that civility
alone cannot control because their roots lie deeper than the city. Furthermore, Plato's
sustained attention to the various assaults on philosophy suggests that none are to be
regarded as accidental, that there are good if incomplete reasons why philosophy should
suffer from them and it is therefore incumbent upon those pursuing her to understand the
justice within such fates. To the extent that the assaults are not accidental, the need for
irony in dealing with them is more than politic accommodation. Philosophy needs to make a
peace with politics and poetry, with the healthy decency of civic life and with the consoling
charms of comedy and tragedy, but such peace is at best a very unstable friendship of
unequals. Moreover, the instability is reproduced within the individual soul as well. Each of
us must make his uneasy peace both with the needs of practical life and with the
enchantments of art, if we are to live as thoughtfully as possible. The ironical Socrates in
Plato's ironical dialogues can be seen constantly negotiating these inequalities and their
attendant dangers. Budding philosophers can be thankful for the tips.
Guardianship and pedagogy deal, respectively, with the privations and the potentials
of philosophizing. Actual or fully-fledged philosophizing remaius. Insofar as irony entails in
some sense a playing false, it might seem that irony could at best be only conducive to and
never constitutive of philosophy's focal activity-which might for the moment be
characterized as consorting with the truth. Yet irony belongs here too, I think, at the heart
of philosophy's defining concern.
Philosophical account-giving or truth-telling has to be ironical to the extent that what
philosophy is obliged to mean cannot in principle be given all at once. Philosophical
comprehensiveness entails primacy, universality, and lucidity, i.e., its truth-telling must be a
self-illuminated knowledge of ultimate principles in relation to what is. Among other things,
this implies that any philosophical account aims at simultaneous knowledge of the
conditions that make possible and justify its thematic claims; it must not only tell the truth,
but somehow also tell the truth of its telling as well. These conditions for the possibility of a
speech, however, cannot be given along with the content of the speech-at least not in the
same, linear, thematic way. Hence the logical necessity for a two-faced mode of speaking:
one aspect to declare what one wants to say, the other aspect to show that one knows
exactly how and why one can say it. Such a two-faced mode of speech is properly called
ironic because it cannot state all that it means at once, though it is not thereby prevented
from evoking the wholeness of the understanding it articulates--on the condition, that is, of
a generous listener with an eye for reading between the lines. Failure to appreciate that
philosophy requires at least this sort of irony easily leads to measuring its discourse by a
mathematical standard, since the latter is a reasonable measure for interim, though never for
primary, insightfulness. Similar failures have also been responsible for many a foolish trek
across the transcendental desert in search of presuppositionless beginnings. One further
consequence is that philosophical speech, because both primary and comprehensive, cannot
be univocal in principle. This is the deep ground of philosophy's ancient quarrel with poetry
and why metaphorical speech is so emphatically integral to the texture of Plato's dialogues.
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I have just argued that fundamental speech, and this would be in whatever situation we
find ourselves moved to give it, has to be two-faced. It follows that univocal speech-i.e.,
the speech that gives the appearance of managing to say all that it means-is not only
secondary but also contingent upon that primary equivocation. Univocal speech is therefore
radically unstable, bounded and made possible in its qualified way by a tacit agreement not to
press inquiry beyond a certain point. Part of our human experience of this fact is the
disturbing discovery that plausible arguments can apparently be made on both sides for
virtually anything-the so-called dissoi logoi of the ancient sophists-and that almost no one
is ever persuaded by rational, i.e., purely univocal, words alone. In the absence of
philosophy or fundamental speech, any assertoric stand thus depends as much on the will to
maintain it, on agreement to abide by the axioms that make it possible, as it does on the
content of those axioms themselves. Perversely, then, it becomes possible to take a stand in
words without the corresponding insight and so too without the corresponding resolve or
choice that deemed the axiom worthy--or, rather, one takes a stand with an alternative,
unspoken resolve. That's why Aristotle said that the difference between the sophist and
philosopher lies in their resolve, their proairesis, not in the arguments they give. Yet note that
even philosophy cannot logically repair the breach caused by any such willful detachment of
speech from the soul's orientation and insight. In other words, philosophy cannot in words
alone compel the sophist to come out of hiding. This is an important lesson of Plato's
Sophist and it is also the reason Thrasymachus blushed. That is, Thrasymachus eventually
had to betray his sophistry once he had committed himself to the theoretical probity of
"precise speech." It was a noble and educative blunder. In sum, therefore, human logoi can
never by themselves reveal the soul that makes them-and so we must pay as much
attention as we can to deeds as well. One of the most important resources of Platonic
dialogue is, I suggest, their ability to let us see how speeches are anchored in a soul's resolve,
despite the fact that a soul's true love cannot in principle be deduced from the things it says.
TRANSITION. Philosophical insight depends on a complex of conditions, both
extrinsic and intrinsic, to which I have pointed under the topics of work, pedagogy,
guardianship, and civics. In their light, I have sketched several ways in which irony is native
to how philosophy must deal with what is non-philosophical, with what is potentially
philosophical, and with the truth itself. Unlike Athena, human wisdom does not actually
spring fully formed from the head of Zeus-though what the myth means to say is that
wisdom, once she has arisen, cannot be fully explained in terms of genealogy alone. Also
unlike Athena, human wisdom has no nectar and ambrosia with which to fortify itself against
the many forms of mortal decay. This means that no matter how like a goddess, pure
theorizing on its own is by definition irresponsible. It also follows that no part of erotics can
be set aside on the plausible yet mistaken grounds that eidetics are philosophy's only proper
concern. Socrates' erotic science may be shady and ironic, yet it nevertheless belongs to
philosophical life quite as essentially the rest. With this granted, however, it will always
remain to consider when and to what extent one need or ought to talk out loud about such
things. I accept, therefore, that my entire speech, no matter how correct it may be, remains
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vulnerable to being judged either tactless, or trivial-to the extent that it does not emphasize
eidetic content.
WHY PLATO WROTE DIALOGUES
Philosophical truth-telling,. the sustaining activity of philosophical life, has to be twofaced. Hegel's impressive dialectical logic is a concerted effort to smooth out this
acknowledged need for irony, an attempt to resolve self-illuminating insight into a special
sort of discursive linearity, into a proof that manages to demonstrate its axioms as it deduces
its theorems. His experiment in philosophical discourse is weak, however, on two main
counts. First, the logic of Hegel's proof is in the end not as methodical as hoped for, indeed
required. Ingenuity is still needed in order to make the crucial transitions, an ingenuity that
Hegel from time to time facilitates with quite remarkable philosophical poetry. A further
sign of this same weakness is his embarrassment over giving introductions, which he knows
he should not in all strictness use but which he writes anyway. Moreover, since the
introductions are where Hegel encodes the suppressed erotics of his philosophic art, i.e.,
what he means to be doing as a man here and now in love with philosophy, that's exactly
\vhy everyone finds them so intriguing and often more interesting than what follows. Plato
avoids the dialectical inconsistency of such introductions, remaining truer to Hegel's own
insight that philosophy cannot ever in principle begin to prove itself, that it cannot put itself
on trial before the tribunal over which it presides as judge. Perhaps Hegelian dialectic comes
as dose as philosophical discourse ever can to an exhaustive, rationally systematic, univocal
self-explicitation. The question, though, is when or whether we really need such a thing.
Plato wrote a defense speech for philosophy, but he quite deliberately named it after
Socrates, not himself. The second major weakness of Hegelian dialectic is it's being so
forbidding and dull. This is an important criticism. It says that H egel's philosophy by and
large fails, as I noted earlier, to seduce, fails to enflame theoretical eros, fails sufficiently to
help us make insight our own. Platonic dialogue, in contrast, is remarkably seductive-the
unattractive patches notwithstanding. In fact, part of its seductiveness is to make itself
confusing and exciting by turns, whereas Hegelian dialectic plods along in the same old
difficult way page after page. Knowing that Plato can be wonderfully lucid and inspiring
from time to time, forces the reader to seek a reason and so too a meaning for the times
when the text is experienced differently. There is nothing more inspiring than the suspicion
of a hidden life, 1me vie inconnue, half-hidden depths in which we might swim if only we can
prove strong enough.
Platonic dialogue is a complex three-dimensional speech, rather than a linear,
discursive one. Its axes are drama, argument, and character, all three of which follow their
independent but mutually interpenetrating logics. Take book one of the Republic. Why does
Polemarchus interrupt? How does his account of justice follow up on the account his
father, Cephalus, seemed to give? What is the relationship between Polemarchus and
Cephalus? Who is the better man and why? What things seems good and best to
Polemarchus? What things most noble? What is there in a man like Polemarchus that
inclines him to think of justice and friendship in the way he does? H ow exactly did he get
1 1 / 20 / 98
�CARL PAGE
THE POWER &
GLORY OF PLATONIC DIALOGUE
PAGE-17
talked into agreeing that justice is trivial and base? Are his mistakes consistent with the
partial goods for which he stands? What do Socrates' examples tell us about Polemarchus's
mistakes? What is Socrates trying to do for Polemarchus? To what extent, if any, is he
successful? Why does he care about Polemarchus at all? Why does Socrates argue so
fallaciously in proving that justice does no injury? What did he understand about
Polemarchus to know he could get away with the fallacy? Why is Polemarchus so
enthusiastic in his final agreement to be a "partner in battle" with Socrates? How does all
this relate to Polemarchus's action at the very beginning, when he waylays Socrates and
Glaucon? How does it fit with his later interruption, in book five, when he objects to
women and children in common? What is Plato showing 11s about the limits of
Polemarchus's understanding of justice? About its merits? Why is Polemarchus there,
between Cephalus and Thrasymachus? And so on. Not until you have some reasonable
answer to all of these sorts questions, and scores besides, can you have begun to understand
Plato's meaning, his logos, in these four or five pages. You need to become proficient in a
multivariable calculus that simultaneously integrates along the three dimensions of drama,
argument, and character to produce a shimmering hologram of meaning. This dimensional
complexity allows the dialogue to mean more than what it says in its arguments and to reveal
more than its narrative depicts. It opens up a maximum of triangulation between uncertain
souls and their shifty speeches.
Aporia, then, is superficial. It belongs to only one or two of the relevant dimensions
and is therefore only an aspect of the whole. The characters may be in perplexity, and
maybe the reader is too, but Plato is not. His pictures of perplexity are too finely drawn to
be themselves expressions of the depicted anxieties; they are too precisely located and
elaborated not to be the subject of a higher-order interpretation. What foolishness would
impel Ol!JOne to spell out ignorance and error so intricately, and with such great pains at so
great a cost of time, if he did not have a view of what they meant? For all the reasons
examined above Plato conveys his interpretations obliquely, but that does not mean the
dialogues bear out no logos. On the other hand, Plato's logos is a delicate and subtle thing,
not easily separable from the theatre it animates. It is a sure sign of having failed to
understand Plato fully when one is forced to leave or dismiss any single part of the dialogue
as incidental, as wrapping, as form rather than content. Plato does not dress up otherwise
independent, philosophically sober propositions in gaudy, entertaining dramatic garb, as if
through some aesthetic quirk he liked to do it that way. There is indeed the thing that he
means to say, but it is not captured by the naked propositional bodies you might take to be
under the theatrical fancy-dress. As I have just indicated, for example, the philosophical
meaning of Polemarchus is more than the partially correct proposition that justice is doing
good to friends and harm to enemies. Among other things, he casts significant light on how
and why the proper discipline of spiritedness is integral to philosophy, and why friendship is
the soul of justice. Quite in accord with a principle Socrates announces in the Phaedms,
everything in the dialogue is meaningful and everything serves the overall meaning Plato
would communicate.
11/20/98
�CARL PAGE
THE POWER & GLORY Of PLATONIC DIALOGUE
PAGE-18
This raises yet another matter of philosophical tact. According to what I have just
said, it should be possible to spell out Plato's meaning in non-dramatic terms. To be a
correct translation, part of such an exposition would have to be ironical and it would have to
encompass at least the sense of all the implied erotic elements as well as the eidetic ones.
Nothing obvious prevents such a gloss, yet even if correct, it remains to ask whether such a
flattened out account could do all or even much of the work Plato intended and which the
dialogues have, in fact, done and continue to do. The answer would have to be, I think, no.
In one sense, Ideas-by which I mean the fundamental an:hai and intelligible structure of all
things-are just not a problem; the predicament is that human souls for the most part fail to
be ruled by them. That's something no amount of theory can fix.
I asked the question: what, if anything, calls for the strangeness of Plato's dialogues,
what could justify their indirection? A natural instinct, on first hearing such a question, is to
look for reasons that might force or compel the response, reasons why things could not be
done in any other way. In the present case, however, the instinct is misleading. The serious
grounds for Platonic indirection I have considered do not, I think, necessitate the dialogue
form. Without being necessitated, however, Plato's dialogues are a beautifully effective
response to the many things philosophy always finds needing to be done. In my own view,
they are the most beautifully effective response we have yet witnessed.
A beautiful, noble, and effective response to abiding necessities is certainly grounds
for praise, but this is not all there is to admire. By the ambiguous testimony of his letters
and by the seamless consistency of his dialogical irony, Plato could not have been writing as
an intellectual to express his thoughts or as a scientist to circulate his results. Perhaps it is
hard to imagine there could be any reason for writing left, besides vanity or madness. Yet,
Plato worked at something, and no one has ever doubted, despite the derangement and
indirection of the texts, that they are all somehow for the sake of philosophy. I add: for the
sake of keeping philosophy alive and well. Plato wrote for the love and care of philosophy,
for its realization and well-being in living souls as well as in real cities. He saw clearly in
what senses its husbandry, preservation, defense, and even its central truth-telling activity
called for-though without necessitating-something like his two-faced books. Among
other things, he aimed at philosophy's survival as a cultural entity in the tradition we think of
as Western civilization. In this he was successful. Unbelievably successful, as may be seen in
the fact that two-and-a-half thousand years later: here we all are, still vitally interested in what
Plato had to communicate, in what a man like Plato understood the life of wisdom to be.
Moreover, we keep being affected by his enigmatic communication, both directly as we study
and through myriad historical reverberations at work behind the scenes of our own present
educations. Even after all this time, we keep taking good things away from his amazing gift.
The dialogues, then, are the instruments of Plato's mega!opsuchia, the unhurried means of a
rare but great and noble deed, the sort of deed yearned for by all men of the highest human
excellence. Plato's great-souled project was to create the real, on-going world in which we
are all now able to carry on with philosophy; he cleared the space, he gave the laws, he holds
up the firmament.
ll /2 0 i 98
�CARL PAGE
THE POWER & GLORY OF PLATONIC DIALOGUE
PAGE-19
As a great-souled man, all honour and praise are Plato's due but we cannot expect
him to be impressed by such external rewards. His ambition was for a deed large, beautiful,
and impressive in itself. The reward for such deeds is the overwhelming pleasure of actually
doing them, though that too is hardly the central reason for which they are undertaken. No
great-souled deed can be great, if it cannot be described in terms of a single-minded
devotion that transcends selfish purpose. Yet it does not follow from this that devotion to
such an end is purely selfless. The great-souled man is himself fi1!filled by his devotion to
what transcends ordinary ambition. Thus, Plato wrote not only for others. He also wrote
for the love and care of philosophy in regard to himself, in regard to his own glories and
satisfactions as a wise, superior, and fortunate man. He also wrote his dialogues as an
exhibition of prowess, and for the sake of joy in the exhilarating exercise of his own powers
and command. In the end, Plato wrote dialogues for the same reason God created the
world: because he co11/d. No one, absolutely no one, has come anywhere near matching him
since.
11 /2 0 / 98
�
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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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19 pages
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The Power and Glory of Platonic Dialogue
Description
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on November 20, 1998, by Carl Page as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
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Page, Carl, 1957-
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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1998-11-20
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text
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pdf
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Plato. Dialogues
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English
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LEC_Page_Carl_1998-11-20
Friday night lecture
Tutors
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https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/1176638aef26848076e4450c2e331fc9.mp4
fb1925d797cb535111e69991a235216a
Dublin Core
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Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
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00:46:55
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Difference and Belonging in the Histories of Herodotus
Description
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Video recording of a lecture delivered on October 14, 2022, by Angel Parham as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Ms. Parham is an associate professor of Sociology and Senior Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia.
She offers this description of her lecture: "One of the great gifts of antiquity is that its writers provide a window for us into ways of seeing the world that differ from what we take for granted today. In this lecture we consider how the chronicles and stories of Herodotus frame ways of thinking about difference and belonging that provide insight into human societies both past and present."
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Parham, Angel Adams
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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2022-10-14
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moving image
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mp4
Subject
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Herodotus. History
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English
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LEC_Parham_Angel_2022-10-14_ac
Friday night lecture
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/4cf2d001991ea4fced6e2ff9f66e25c0.mp3
c39b5cf879c26518d77b0f616d64de74
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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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00:50:31
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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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sound
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mp3
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Digital media--Social aspects
Literature and technology
Books and reading--Technological innovations
Internet--Social aspects
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English
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LEC_Birkerts_Sven_1997-09-12_ac
Friday night lecture
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PDF Text
Text
HOW OPERA BEGAN (AND WHY IT BEGAN IN FLORENCE)
Note: Numbers in red refer to the accompanying powerpoint slides; the symbol [+] indicates an
addition to the preceding slide.
[ 1] My goal today is to acquaint you with the circumstances leading to the advent of opera and to
discuss the culture and events that surrounded its origins in Florence around the year 1600. But, in
addition to summarizing HOW opera began (a subject which has already been very well documented
in print), I should also like to explore a question that is less often asked - [2] that is, WHY opera
began. And more specifically, [+] Why did it begin in Florence? and [+] Why did it begin when it
did, at the end of the Renaissance?
[3] The Florentine composer Marco da Gagliano (maestro di cappella to the Medici court
from 1609 until his death in 1643) provides a useful and accurate outline of "how." [+] In the preface
to his opera La Dafne, performed and printed in 1608, he relates the circumstances ofthe genre' s
experimental beginnings.' La Dafoe was Gagliano' s own first effort in the new genre, examples of
which he called, simply, spettacoli. (The word opera, which means "work" in Italian, only came into
use later.) [4] His Dafne was a reworking and expansion of an earlier Dafoe, from the previous
decade-the first completely sung musical play. Gagliano relates how that first Dafne came about.
He says that, after a great deal of discussion took place concerning the way the ancients had
performed their tragedies and about what role music had played in them, the court poet Ottavio
Rinuccini began to write the story ([avo/a) of Dafoe, [+] and the learned amateur Jacopo Corsi
composed some airs on part of it. In order to see what effect a completely sung work would have on
the stage, [+] Rinuccini and Corsi approached the skilled composer and singer Jacopo Peri, who
finished writing the music and probably premiered the role of Apollo at the first performance.
Gagliano tells us that it took place at "an evening entertainment" during the Carnival season of
1
�1597/8. In the invited audience on that occasion were Don Giovanni de' Medici and (he says) "some
of the principal gentlemen" of Florence?
[5] Let me quickly fill in the events between 1598 and 1608. Encouraged by the success of
the experiments that resulted in La Dafne, [6] in 1600 Rinuccini and Peri collaborate on a second
production, which is first performed during the festivities honoring the maniage of Maria de' Medici
to Henry IV ofFrance? [+] Rinuccini ' s libretto for this work, L 'Euridice, is printed first, probably as
a souvenir of the occasion, and it tells the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. [+] In his preface (dated 4
October), Rinuccini explains that the work was partly motivated by the belief of some scholars that
the ancient Greeks and Romans sang their tragedies on stage in their entirety. We understand from
this (and other things he and Peri say) that they are interested more in the manner of performance of
the new genre- its rhetorical delivery- than in reproducing the content of the ancient plays. We also
recognize that their ambition is no less than the revival on stage of the ancient manner of
declamation. Now another singer-composer also has a hand in composing L 'Euridice for the
wedding celebrations-namely Giulio Caccini, the protege of Count Giovanni dei Bardi; and he has
already been promoting a new rhetorical singing style since the meetings of Bardi's Camerata in the
1580s, decades earlier. The rivalry between Caccini and Peri becomes so intense that, [+] at the first
performance of L 'Euridice (October 6), Caccini does not allow his pupils to perform any music
composed by Peri. The result is that Peri, in the role of Orfeo, sings music that he wrote while his
bride, Euridice, sings Caccini's music! (Not a very good start to a marriage patinership! No wonder
Orfeo couldn't keep his bride!) [7] Meanwhile, around this same time, Emilio de' Cavalieri,
supervisor of the Florentine festivities, [+] publishes his score of the Rappresentazione di Anima e di
Corpo) [+] performed earlier that year in Rome; and by the way, take special note of the generic
title- Rappresentazione- which I' ll come back to) . But despite Cavalieri' s claims of primacy, this
2
�work is usually discounted in nanatives of opera' s origins because, even though it is sung throughout,
its style is far from Peri's declamatory recitar cantando (the Italian expression for what we now call
recitative- a style of singing midway between speech and song) and it has a spiritual subject (a
4
dialogue between the Soul and the Body). Such subjets later became the purview of oratorio. [8] A
few days after L 'Euridice, [+] Caccini' s opera Il rapimento di Cefalo is premiered (set to a libretto by
another prominent com1 poet, Gabriella Chiabrera). This work is, by all accounts, the blockbuster
event of the weeklong festivities, but its grandness is not well suited to Caccini's intimate style of
solo singing, so it is not favored with publication and is now lost except for the libretto. [9] Not to be
outdone, however, [+] Caccini quickly finishes his setting of L 'Euridice and rushes it into print a
month before [+] Peri's score gets published early in 1601. 5 [10] But Caccini' s completed version
doesn't premiere [+] until late in the following year (1602), after his collection of solo songs, [+] Le
Nuove musiche, puts him on the map as a composer.
Then, Rinuccini goes to France in the entourage of Maria de' Medici, Cavalieri stays in
Rome, and Peri and Caccini remain in Florence, which soon takes a back seat in operatic
developments. But their personal rivalries, fueled by the printers who quickly published their works,
and the public competition among p1inces to garner attention with their patronage, are some of the
factors that fostered the endurance of the first completely sung musical tales and their spread to other
urban centers- Mantua, Rome, Venice, and elsewhere, both inside and outside the Italian peninsula.
[11] Within the decade, the masterful madrigal composer Claudio Monteverdi (156?-1643) [+] makes
his debut in the field with Lafavola d'Orfeo (1607), in Mantua, the first opera to achieve a place in
the modern repertory. [1 2] The following year, Rinuccini, by this time back from France, collaborates
with Monteverdi to create [+] L 'Arianna-now lost except for the Lament, which was destined to
become the most famous piece of music of the seventeenth century. L 'Arianna completely eclipses
3
�L 'Orfeo; judging by all the descriptions of its performance, it is the work that brings the development
of opera to its first great peak after only one brief decade, and makes all previous efforts look pale by
comparison. [An aside: I don't know how many of you saw NY Times critic Anthony Tommasini's
list of his top ten classical composers published in the Times earlier this year, but Monteverdi didn't
make it onto the list; no composer before Bach did. In an effmi to placate some outraged readers,
though, Tommasini conceded Monteverdi' s greatness, saying "Though Monteverdi did not invent
opera, he took one look at what was going on in Florence in 1600 and figured out how this opera
thing should really be done."] [13] Let's now hear the opening section of Monteverdi ' s Lament of
Arianna, the only surviving piece from the opera. Listen especially to the way Monteverdi allows the
phrases of text to dictate the contours and rhythms of the melody-expanding the range of the second
phrase for emphasis; and in the next phrase, how he makes the melody rise Gust as in speech) to
express Arianna 's rhetorical question (Who can console me); and on the return ofthe opening words,
how Monteverdi rubs our noses in what was for its time a very strong dissonance between voice and
bass to express the rawness of Arianna' s emotion. [Play] The Lament continues for another 7 or 8
minutes, during which Arianna conveys a gamut of emotions ranging from anger and scorn at
Theseus ' s betrayal to tenderness and resignation.
[ 14] So now, having seen that Florence was the birthplace of opera, let' s ask why. [1 5] Why
Florence? [+] First of all, Florence had a long tradition of musical theater in the sixteenth century,
principally in the productions known as intermedi that were staged between the acts of spoken plays.
Intermedi were only one of many types of theatrical entertainment produced by courts all over
Europe. [+] But the Medici outdid all the rest in 1589 by staging the most magnificent and
extravagant spectacle ever seen in order to celebrate the marriage of Grand Duke Ferdinanda of
Tuscany to the French Princess Christine of Lonaine, a union that had been in negotiation for nearly
4
�a year. The intermedi that were produced for this event climaxed a monthlong sequence of public
and courtly pageantry that combined all the intellectual, artistic, and administrative forces of Tuscany
at the height of its wealth, power, and cultural prestige. One court chronicler wrote, "Their splendor
cannot be described, and anyone who did not see [the production] could not believe it."
[ 16] Next, unlike other cities, Medicean Florence also had a particularly rich history of
[+] "civic humanism" 6-which means that its more educated citizens were involved in a network of
formal and informal academies that were engaged in studying the Greek and Latin texts of the
ancients. [1 7] Bardi' s so-called Florentine Camerata, where Caccini was groomed, was only one of
many such groups. Bardi was also a member of the Alterati, to which Rinuccini and Corsi belonged,
and Corsi probably also had his own circle, the group that ultimately produced the first Dafne . We
can think of them as satellite courts, surrounding and drawing inspiration from the brlliant Medici
rulers. And their members all interacted in the planning and production of the 15 89 intermedi, which
was largely Bardi' s brainchild but which required everyone else to contribute their efforts as well.
[18] Finally, as Gary Tomlinson and others have suggested, [+] Florence was the center of a
particular Renai ssance worldview that saw music as having a "magical" role in the cosmos and in
mankind 's interaction with it. 7 This particular worldview was rooted in Platonic thought, which held
that the individual was connected to the entire universe through harmony. [+] Therefore, it followed
that the best way to express this connection was by giving voice to song. So, in the court culture of
Florence during the late fifteenth century and throughout the sixteenth, singing-and especially solo
singing- took on very special significance.
Before moving on, I want to look more closely at each of these three elements- intermedi,
humanism, and musical magic- in order to see how they came together at the end ofthe sixteenth
century and resulted in Florence becoming the birthplace of opera.
5
�[19] The Florentine intermedi were lavishly produced pageants involving sumptuous
costumes, special effects, instrumental music, dance, and song. They were produced as entr' actes to
comedies or pastoral plays at court and served to separate the divisions of the spoken drama, since
there was no curtain to be dropped. The 1589 intermedi were planned and rehearsed months in
advance, and their cost and impact dwarfed that of the main drama [Bargagli 's play La Pellegrina] ,
so that absolutely no doubt remained in the minds of the invited guests about their host's wealth,
. an d power. 8
generosity,
[20] A huge team of artists, artisans, poets, musicians, architects, and technicians was
assembled under the intellectual guidance of the prominent Florentine aristocrat and military leader
[+] Giovanni de ' Bardi (1 53 4-1612), who formulated the underlying conception of the inte1medi,
9
served as stage director, and coordinated all the thematic and antiquarian aspects of the project. As
the moving spirit behind the program, Bardi worked closely with the court poets, [+] principally
Ottavio Rinuccini ( 1562- 162 1), who wrote most of the text of the intermedi and later wrote the verse
for the first opera libretto, La Dafne. 10 [+] Emilio de ' Cavalieri (c.1550-1602), the recently appointed
superintendent of music at the ducal court who had been in F erdinando ' s retinue while he was still a
cardinal residing in Rome, became the show's musical director. [+] The court architect-engineer
Bernardo Buontalenti (c.1531-1608), who had constmcted for the Medici the first permanent indoor
theater with a modem proscenium arch only a few years earlier, remodeled it for the occasion, and
designed the sets and costumes. 11 [ +] The music was largely composed by court organist Cristofano
Malvezzi and madrigalist Luca Marenzio, with individual contributions by the young composersinger Jacopo Peri (1561 -1633), by Bardi' s protege Giulio Caccini (15 5 1- 1618), and by Bardi
himself, among others.
6
�[21] Bardi conceived the set of six intermedi as "a sort of mythological history ofmusic,"
12
very suitable for a wedding celebration because it depicts the descent of Harmony as a gift from the
gods and predicts a new Golden Age to be inaugurated by the newlyweds. Moreover, the individual
tableaux are loosely unified by the literary theme of the power of music, a topic of longstanding
interest to the Florentines, as we shall see. The opening intetmedio contemplated the harmony of the
spheres. The next, by representing a song contest between the Muses and their rivals the Pierides,
dwelt on the virtues and virtuosity of song. [22] The third enacted the combat between Apollo and
the Pythic serpent, prefiguring the opening scene from Rinuccini ' s and Peri ' s first opera, La Dajne.
So it actually introduced the first operatic hero, [23] Apollo-god of music and of the sun, and,
according to some accounts, father of the legendary musician Orpheus, who became in tum the
protagonist of several early opera libretti. (That' s Apo llo swooping down to attack the dragon.)
[24] The fifth intetmedio gave a prominent role to Jacopo Peri, who composed and performed his
first piece for solo voice to portray another poet-musician of antiquity, Arion; according to myth,
Arion was saved from drowning by a dolphin attracted by the dazzling power of his song. [25] In the
concluding intetmedio, harmony and rhythm are given to mere motials, represented by the nymphs
and shepherds of Arcadia, who are instructed by the gods in the mi of dancing during an elaborately
choreographed ballo.
[26] The 1589 intermedi had many of the same players and almost all the ingredients of
opera-gorgeous costumes and scenery, [27] stage effects (for example, the life-size fire-spitting
dragon slain by Apollo), 13enthralling solo singing, colorful instrumental music, large concerted
numbers, dance-everything except a unified action and the rhetorical style of dramatic singing yet to
be created. It remained for a few pioneering individuals to shape these elements into opera, a new
7
�and quite "noble style ofperfmmance" 14 that, by emulating ancient theater, would revive the power
of modem music to move the emotions.
[28] Now let' s turn our attention to the second of the three elements that contributed to
making Florence the birthplace of opera: [+] HUMANISM. In its narrowest sense, humanism was
an interest in the culture and texts of antiquity on the part ofthe city' s more educated or elite
citizens- those who joined the network of academies I mentioned earlier. As we' ve seen, the first
opera librettist, Rinuccini, maintained that his joint experiments with Corsi and Peri were motivated
by the belief of some scholars that the ancient Greeks and Romans sang their tragedies on the stage in
their entirety. 15 In fact, Renaissance scholars disagreed among themselves about the role of music in
ancient tragedy, but what matters in our narration is that Rinuccini and his associates gave credence
to the idea.
[29] A modem scholar of musical humanism (Gary Tomlinson) has called attention to three
different but related types of humanism. There was philological humanism, which fostered the
transmission, translation and interpretation of ancient texts. [+] The person who comes to mind in
this regard is Girolamo Mei, the very erudite philologist who transmitted his ideas about language
and ancient music to Bardi and became a sort of mentor to the Florentine Camerata. [+] Then there
was rhetorical humanism, modeled on the principles of persuasive oratory, which Renaissance men of
letters adapted to their own debates and writings. [+] An example of this type of humanist might be
Vincenzo Galilei, who wrote his treatise for the Camerata (Dialogo della musica antica e della
moderna, 1581) in the conventional Renaissance fmm of a dialogue-a conversation between two
friends (one of whom is named after Count Bardi) debating the merits of ancient and modem music .
(More about this in a moment.) [+] And finally, there was what Tomlinson calls " ordinary-language
humanism," - a view that underlay "the whole late-Renaissance exaltation of music 's affective
8
�powers"; 16 and, in one way or another, this view accounts for the great importance that all of
Renaissance musical culture placed on expressing the meaning of the text. Ordinary-language
humanism credited language itself- the very sound and shape of the words rather than the eloquence
with which they were arranged-with the ability to communicate meaning and emotion. Now, it
must have been possible to subscribe to all three types of humanism, and no doubt someone like Mei
did. [+] But it seems to me likely that the court poet Rinuccini, and his collaborators Corsi and Peri,
who did not know Greek or Latin and were not trained as scholars, nevertheless adopted this
ordinary-language humanism as their type of Greek revivalism, and one that motivated them to create
the first opera.
Where did these ideas come from? [30] Rinuccini belonged to the Alterati Academy- its
very name (Academy of the Altered Ones) acknowledged the ability of ideas to effect change in
human beings. The Alterati membership included the widely read and accomplished Count Bardi,
already a member of long standing by the time Rinuccini was initiated in 1586, three years before
they collaborated on the elaborate wedding intermedi. Another member was the remarkable scholar
Girolamo Mei (1519-94), who was Florentine by birth, but worked in Rome and made known the
results ofhis research into Greek music in his letters to Bardi and the other academy members. A
brilliant philologist, Mei promoted theories about language that were in fact as central to the genesis
of the new dramatic style of singing as his convictions about Greek music were essential to the
origins of opera; for Mei believed not only that poems and plays were always sung in ancient times,
whether by soloists or chorus, but also that they were sung monophonically- using one melody at a
time, without competing lines-so that the words as sounding structures could act on the listeners'
souls. And finally, the Alterati also counted among its members another Florentine nobleman,
Jacopo Corsi (1561-1602), 17 the enthusiastic amateur who partially composed, and fully sponsored,
9
�the production of the first completely sung play, La Dafne, in 1597/8. 18 [+] So it is with good reason
that the Alterati of Florence have been called by one modem scholar (Claude Palisca) "pioneers in
the theory of dramatic music." 19
[3 1] Now, Count Bardi also had his own circle of friends with similar humanist and musical
interests, a more informal academy that met in his palace and came to be known as the (Florentine)
Camerata. 20 As the coruiier chiefly responsible for organizing entertainments for the Grand Duke,
Bardi naturally became interested in theatrical or dramatic music and eagerly cultivated his
relationship with Mei.21 [32] These two, then, were key players in both the Alterati Academy and the
Camerata, and it is obvious that both groups shared a concern with musical humanism. Bardi 's inner
circle also included the singer-lutenist-composer Giulio Caccini (whom he involved in the 1589
intermedi) as well as Vincenzo Galilei (ca. 1530-9 1), another talented singer-lutenist-composer in his
employ. Galilei, father of the revolutionary thinker and astronomer Galilee, had studied with the
most famous counterpoint teacher of the age, Gioseffe Zarlino, and had already published a text on
how to arrange polyphonic music for so lo voice and lute til Fronimo, 1568), a medium that became
increasingly popular during the last quarter of the century.
22
Under the influence ofBardi and Mei,
[33] Galilei wrote his Dialago della musica antia e della moderna, 1581 ,23 which soon became the
Camerata' s radical manifesto, for it ruiiculated the principles of ordinary-language humanism in the
most radical way imaginable for a sixteenth-century musician: do away with vocal counterpoint
altogether and revert to a type of nonpolyphonic composition combining words, melody, and simp le
accompaniment (which we now call monody).
Galilei reasoned that only monody was capable of imitating nature- that is, the "natural
language" of speech, through which a person's character and states of soul are reflected. Mei, his
mentor, taught that ancient music had always presented a single affection embodied in a single
10
�melody.24 He believed that melody alone could convey the message of the text through the natural
expressiveness of the voice-via the register, rhythms, and contours of its utterance-and it could do
this far better than the contrived delivery of a polyphonic texture? 5 Like Mei , Galilei was convinced
that counterpoint was ineffective because it presented contradictory infmmation to the ear. When
several voices simultaneously sang different melodies and words-pitting high pitches against low,
slow rhythms against fast, rising intervals against descending ones- the resulting web of sotmds was
incapable of projecting the semantic meaning or emotional message of the text. Only by returning to
an art truly founded on the imitation of human nature rather than on contrapuntal artifice would it be
possible for modem composers to realize the acclaimed effects of ancient music.
Plato had taught that song (melos) was comprised of words, rhythm, and pitch, in that order.
From that concept followed two important humanist ideas. First, music and poetry were two sides of
a single language; second, song arose from an innate harmony within the words that was muted in
normal speech but manifest in heightened speech. [34] For this reason, Galilei advocated the art of
rhetoric as a model for modem musicians, urging them to imitate the manner in which successful
actors delivered their lines on stage:
Kindly observe in what manner the actors speak, in what range, high or low, how loudly or
softly, how rapidly or slowly they enunciate their words ... how one speaks when infuriated
or excited; how a married woman speaks, how a girl, how a lover ... how one speaks when
lamenting, when crying out, when afraid, and when exulting with joy?6
For Galilei, it is clear that "how one speaks" (or declaims) the words reveals their underlying
emotion. For the composers of monody and theatrical song, by extension, it then became a question
of" how one sings" the words to disclose their innate significance? 7
(35] In order to see the important role that singing had in Florentine culture, I want to return
to the third element in my discussion of why Florence was the bitthplace of opera: [36] Musical
11
�Magic. More than a century before the first experiments in opera, [+] Angelo Poliziano had
dramatized the myth of Orpheus for the Florentine cultural elite. His Orfeo (1480), the earliest
secular play in Italian, received numerous editions during the sixteenth century and became, in effect,
a Medici literary classic, popularizing through the Orpheus legend the marvels of ancient music and
musicians. 28 [+] The musicianpar excellence of antiquity, Orpheus had been able to tame the beasts
of nature and charm the infernal gods into allowing him to lead Eurydice out of the Underworld-all
by means of the power of his spellbinding incantation. [37] Poliziano himself was a member ofthe
Neoplatonic circle (+] sunounding Lorenzo de' Medici (known as the "Magnificent" because ofhis
brilliance and erudition). The main intellectual figure in his informal academy was [+] another
erudite Florentine, Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), a humanist well versed in Platonic thought. As early
as 1489, Ficino postulated a "music-spirit" theory which explained the peculiar power of music by
the fact that sound, unlike other sensual stimuli, is canied by air and is therefore similar to spiritus,
the substance that mediated between body and sou1. 29 Ficino also believed that the human voice,
through music, provided the link between the earthly world and the cosmos.
Because Platonic thought held that the individual was connected to the entire universe through
harmony, it followed that the artful singer could express psychological and moral reality through his
voice and could use his rhetorical powers to make that reality present to others. 30 By employing
certain patterns of conespondence between micro- and macrocosm, between the motions of the
human soul and the hidden harmony of the cosmos, the singer could manipulate the listener's
responses- a notion very much in keeping with the Aristotelian concept of imitation or mimesis.
The composer-singer, then, in the guise of the legendary Orpheus, became the expressive agent of
that artistic power. And Florentine Neoplatonism, in the artistic manifestation ofPoliziano' s Orfeo-
12
�a spoken drama with interpolated song3 1-helped to stimulate a century-long fascination with the
expressive powers of music.
So, in the court culture of Florence during the late fifteenth century and throughout the
sixteenth, singing-and especially solo singing- took on very special significance and it is easy to
understand how Mei, Bardi, Caccini, Peri, and Rinuccini, being products of a culture steeped in
Neoplatonic musical thought, were heirs to these Renaissance ideas about the magical effects of song.
Mei shared some of Ficino ' s "music-spirit" theories, particularly those which held hearing to be
superior to the other senses in its ability to act on the soul ' s passions. 32 As we have seen, Bardi' s
program for the 1589 intermedi revolved around the power of song while his protege, Caccini,
revitalized the Renaissance ideal of incantatory solo singing for the Camerata in his madrigals for
solo voice he later collected and published as Le nuove musiche (1602). 33 ln creating the first opera
libretto, Rinuccini, under the weight of Florentine and Medicean tradition, [+] looked back to
Poliziano 's fable of Orfeo. Not only was Orpheus a fitting protagonist for a completely sung music
drama aiming to demonstrate the power of song, but also, as Tomlinson points out, the fable ' s
outcome and that of the other earliest tales of opera [quote] "vindicated the occult harmony of the
cosmos . . . : [38] in the answer to Daphne' s just prayers by her magical transformation [into a laurel
tree] , [39] in the alleviation of Ariadne' s woes by the miraculous descent of Bacchus, [40] and in the
transformative power of song in . .. [the] Orpheus librettos." 34 Like Ovid' s tales of metamorphoses
from which they were drawn, these early opera were fabrications or fables (favole) and, by focusing
on timeless myths involving love and loss, they sought to dramatize, externalize, or represent human
sentiment. And what better way was there of realizing the transformative power of song and Orfeo' s
vocal magic than through musical speech? This was at the heart of the notion of the representational
style (stile rappresentativo). Peri' s invention of the dramatic and rhetorical style of singing known as
13
�recitative, then, was rooted in the conviction that musical speech was capable of transmitting an
inner, emotional reality and could therefore represent human affections on stage.
The communication of affections on stage in opera by singing and acting bodies can only be
experienced in the presence of both actors and listeners; and it can only be explained in the context of
the location and the actual moment of the performance- the rappresentazione. The defining nature
ofthe location or space makes the listener a component part of the musical process. In this way,
early opera depended on both the sense of sight and hearing as no other musical art form (except the
intetmedi and court ballets) had done before. In fact, only a few years before the 1589 Florentine
intermedi, [41] the court architect-engineer Bemardo Buontalenti had constructed for the Medici the
first petmanent indoor theater with a modem proscenium arch. This is significant because the
proscenium arch not only frames a view into the illusionary depths ofthe representation, but also
allows the performance taking place to be directly addressed to the viewer. And this is precisely what
painting had been striving to do since the advent of perspective in the Renaissance. All of which
finally brings me to the last of my concerns: [42] why opera began when it did- f+] around the year
1600, at the end of the Renaissance. The short answer (but one that r will elaborate upon in the
remaining time) is this: it was the consummation of an idea that reigned supreme during the
Renaissance- namely, that the sister arts of painting, music, and poetry all had the ability, through
imitation, to portray some sort of psychological and moral reality; what's more, they all had the
power-even the obligation-through rhetorical means to make that reality present to others. This
view had long been held about the verbal arts, but the rivalry between poetry and painting during the
sixteenth century, deriving from Horace's famo us simile ut pictura poesis (as painting is, so is
poetry), led painting to acquire the status of a liberal art, one that deserved equally serious
consideration as that given to poetry. [43] Roger de Piles (1635-1709), one of the most influential art
14
�theorists of the next century, was unequivocal in this matter: "One must think of painting as a kind of
stage on which each figure plays its role." He also tells us that the "principal end" of the painter is
"to imitate the mores and actions of men. "
35
And we have seen that humanism demanded no less
from composers and musicians.
A moment ago, I remarked that the communication of affections on stage, in opera, by singing
and acting bodies, can only be experienced in the presence ofboth actors and listeners or viewers,
and now I want to concentrate on the viewers. For, if the aim of the sister arts was to communicate
the affections or passions-to imitate or represent affections in order to stimulate passions in the
viewer-then the audience was clearly an important part of the process. It seems to me that painting
offers a very instructive example of how all the arts, but especially opera at the beginning of the I i
11
century, defined themselves by the effect they had on the spectators.
[ 44] In a book about The Origins of the City of Florence and Its Famous Citizens (De origine
civitatis Florentiae et eiusdem famosis civibus, 1381 -2), the Florentine humanist and chronicler
Filippo Villani describes the many-faceted accomplishments of Florentine culture. His main theme
was that this culture had declined in his own age (late 14th century), and that Florentines needed to be
reminded of the greatness of such earlier citizens as Dante and Giotto and others of their generation.
But Villani also included an entire chapter on painters and what I find noteworthy is that his remarks
about Giotto make clear his belief that painting should aspire to the condition of theater:
[+] Images formed by [Giotto 's] brush agree so well with the lineaments of nature as to seem
to the beholder to live and breathe; and his pictures appear to perform actions and movements so
exactly as to seem from a little way off actually speaking, weeping, rejoicing, and doing other things,
not without pleasure from him who beholds and praises the talent and skill of the a11ist.
[45] Villani could have been talking about this painting from the series by Giotto in the Arena chapel.
15
�Two generations later, in Florence, Leon Battista Alberti wrote a famous treatise on painting
(Dellapittura, 1435-6), which reveals that his conception ofthe art grows directly out ofrhetorical
humanism. [46]He bases his theory of pictorial composition-the way in which a painting can be
organized so that each plane surface and each object plays its pmi in the effect of the whole--on the
model of rhetorical compositio, or the way that a sentence is built up from a hierarchy of elements.
Words are fitted together to make phrases, phrases to make clauses, and clauses to make sentences. In
pictorial composition [use pointer], the pmis of the nanative are bodies, the parts of the body are
members, and the members are made up of plane surfaces. Compositio, according to Alberti, is that
method of painting which composes or puts all these interdependent elements together in the work of
mi. And again, his way of speaking of the work suggests a theatrical performance: [47] "In my
view," he says, " there is no painted nanative so filled with so great a variety of events that nine or ten
persons will not be capable of acting them out quite fittingly." 36 Alberti hirnselfrefers his readers
back to Giotto 's work, but the mid-fifteenth-century painter perhaps most influenced by Alberti [48]
was Andrea Mantegna, who produced the finest visual models of Alberti ' s ideas about composition.
One of them is this engraving of the Entombment. The maximum ten figures are evident. Their
planes or gatherings of drapery are formed into members- their various limbs or body parts; the
members are hmmonized to create bodies or whole figures ; and the ten different bodies are
intenelated to form the nanative.
Now, it was also the Florentine school of painting that worked out the principles of linear
perspective, and their fust theorist was again Alberti. [49] Here ' s a medieval Last Supper, a
manuscript illustration from about the year 1200. Its two-dimensional style of spatial representation
makes the picture face the viewer like a flat wall, generally excluding us from what appears as a selfcontained, closed world. [50] With central perspective, however, the relation to the viewer changes.
16
�In Leonardo 's Last Supper, painted in the last decade of the fifteenth century, the figure of Christ is
placed in the center of the composition, which is at the same time its vanishing point. The frontally
oriented table and back wall support the majesty and stability of the principal figure, whereas "the
side walls and ceiling swing outward, as though in a gesture ofrevelation." 37 [51] A modem diagram
of the painting's perspective makes it clear that the principal structural lines are a system of beams
coming from a focus within the picture space and breaking through the frontal plane as they move
forward, opening the picture like a flower toward the viewer. This explicit acknowledgment of the
viewer is the visual expression of the fact that the world represented in the picture is being sighted.
In other words, the image presents a world seen from the viewpoint of an individual observer, and
therefore changes the pictorial conception of space in a way that invites a new level of awareness on
the part of the spectator.
[52] The Renaissance architect Palladia detennined that the vanishing point should be placed
in the center in order to give any picture maesta and grandezza, and indeed the symmetry of
Leonardo' s painting lends a certain gravitas to its style and subject. But as the stylistic outlook
changes in the later sixteenth century, so does painting's relation to the viewer.
Perhaps the painter most emblematic of the style changes that took place in the early
seventeenth century was Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571 -1610). [56] Among his very
early works, Boy Bitten by a Lizard dates from approximately the same years as Peri' s and Caccini's
first operas, La Dafne and L 'Euridice. Scholars explain the picture mainly as a study of extreme
expression, and essentially realistic in its intent. Indeed, the painting should more appropriately be
called Boy Being Bitten by a Lizard because [57] it depicts the very instant when the lizard emerges
from the fruit on the table to bite his finger and, at the same time, demonstrates the artist's skill in
representing (and I use that word very purposefully) the fleeting moment of the boy's reaction, as his
17
�expression registers the surprise and sharp pain ofthe lizard ' s attack. [58] The painting is therefore a
study of both physical action and psychological reaction- as are many Baroque representations that
portray instantaneous and violent action as well as the expression of the emotions resulting from that
action. We need only think of Eurydice' s death by snakebite and Orfeo' s subsequent stunned
reaction to fmd fitting parallels. Just as Caravaggio captured the immediacy of the boy' s reaction,
Peri, Caccini, and (of course) Monteverdi in their footsteps, managed to convey Orfeo's intense
emotion in the expressive recitative which he sings ("Non piango, e non sospiro ") in reaction to
Eurydice's death. Modern commentators have stressed the forcefulness with which Caravaggio's
paintings at all stages of his career thematize or otherwise draw attention to their relation to the
viewer. I suggest that the early operas similarly thematize or draw attention to their relation to the
listener-by representing both action and reaction, making them present to the listener via the new
musico-theatrical device of recitative. It is as though atiists and musicians are exploring the whole
issue of spectatordom in both painting and music at precisely the same historical moment, around the
year 1600.
[59] Another work from this period that calls attention to the depiction of action and reaction
as well as to the issue of spectatordom is Judith Beheading Holo.f§r_nes (ca. 1620) by Artemisia
Gentileschi (1593-1653). In the destabilizing flow and counterflow ofthe painting, Judith's
maidservant (in the center) struggles with the victim' s thrusting arms as Judith herself concentrates
on her deadly action; she performs the deed at arm's length as though she were at the same time
reacting by distancing herself in disgust from her victim 's gushing blood. [60] Notice how similar
are Judith' s features to Artemisia' s, which we see in the painter' s self-portrait. That allows us to
think of Judith-the-executioner as a stand-in for Artemisia the painter-not only because they look
alike but also because they are both initiating their actions (Judith is slaying Holofernes, Artemisia is
18
�painting her own portrait). [6 1] We also see how Holofemes is looking out at us, as though pleading
with us to intervene as we try to avoid being splattered with his blood. In this way, we viewers are
being drawn into the action as well. What I'm suggesting, therefore, is that the work itself masterfully
evokes both the making and the viewing of the picture, both for the benefit of the spectator. And in
this way, by so forcefully merging their subjects with the viewer's environment, early modem artists
sought to act upon and move the emotions of the spectator.
The key phrase here is "merging the subj ect with the environment," creating the illusion that
the spectator is part of the action or even part of the scenery. [62] The court architect Buontalenti had
already achieved this when he completed in the 1580s and 90s the spectacular grotto for the Medici
princes in the Boboli gardens behind their apaJtments in the Pitti Palace. f63 ] Here, a decade before
opera began, is a bucolic fantasy land, a retreat full of partly sculpted and partly frescoed images
replicating the pastoral grottoes of Tasso 's Aminta or the Pastor jido (the Fait~fitl Shepherd by
Guarini). [64] The spectator enters through the fa9ade, under the Medici coat of arms, and [65] steps
into a mythical world fabricated for the imagination, in which the viewer becomes a faithful shepherd
or a sylvan nymph, surrounded by the companions of Arcadia. [66] He or she is completely
contained within an illusory world. [67] As far as I know, the grotto was never used as a theater;
rather, it was a playground for the courtiers and their guests, who could take refuge from the f68]
garden ' s midday sun and refresh themselves in the grotto' s cool shade.
[68] In his important book From Art to Theatre, George Kernodle states that "modern theatre
grew out of the desire to see and hear with living actors the romantic stories and allegorical fancies
already portrayed by the painters." 38 [69] If we substitute (+] the words early opera and [+] singing
actors, we can understand how the new favola tutta in musica was also an entirely logical outcome of
the whole development of Renaissance rut and music in Florence. In other words, opera was the sonic
19
�realization in three dimensions of the fonns and conventions of its painting, sculpture, poetry, and
song. The Florentine school had worked out the principles of linear perspective in two dimensions;
[70] Renaissance architects like Baldassare Peruzzi (whom Vasari credits with the development of
perspective scenery) reproduced the effects of painting in three dimensions, bringing the settings and
backgrounds of the pictures to life on stage. The resulting illusionistic set designs, when framed by
the new proscenium arch, reproduced a spectacular and complex unified painting through which the
action could be addressed directly to the viewer. An exact relation, unknown before, was established
between audience, actor, and setting which promoted the spectator's sense of being surrounded by or
merging with the theatrical setting, an effect that Buontalenti later realized in the Boboli grotto. And
when the scenery enclosed actors who were presenting the new recitative forged by Florentine
composers and singers-that sui generis style of solo singing that heightened the delivery of speech
but was more naturalistic than song-they realized Galilei's ideal of the actor who delivered his lines
so as to reveal the emotions that lay behind the words, engaging the listener as never before. So, the
integration of the sister arts in this way invested the new art fmm with a rhetorical power that could
not be matched by any ofthem individually.
[71] Since we don' t have any sets that survive from the earliest court operas, I'd like to close
by looking at a much earlier painting sometimes attributed to the young Titian, and dating from the
early 16111 century, but depicting the same subject as that which interested the early opera poets and
composers. Eurydice appears in the foreground, having been stopped in her tracks by the serpent' s
venomous bite. [72] I suggest that the shepherd in the middle ground is Aristaeus, from whom
Eurydice was fleeing in Ovid's original story. Further to the right is perhaps one of Eurydice' s
companions, who is running off to tell Orpheus about his sudden reversal of
20
�fortune. Of course, [73] the bucolic scene presents an entirely different problem in terms of
perspective than an urban setting. Titian tried to create a sense of depth by duplicating a series of
similar forms on successive planes of the picture, one behind the other. So the central cavernous
structure which seems to be inhabited by ghostly heads is repeated further back, where its fiery
opening certainly suggests Hades and behind that one, another furnace-like structure smokes in the
distance. Did Titian imagine that Orpheus would have to go through a series of Underworld
landscapes to retrieve his bride?
Granted, Titian's painting is not a stage set; but if you were trying to reproduce it or any sort
of pastoral setting in the theater, you can see the problems that might present themselves. [74] The
absence of a single strong focal point of the sot1 that court architects could devise for their street
settings, which brought the viewer into the actors' illusory world-the absence of such a focal point
might lead you to rely more urgently on the sense ofhearing than the sense of sight in order to
sunound the viewer. [75] Therefore, the representation of an entirely sung play in an Arcadian
setting (such as La Dafoe or L 'Euridice) may in part have been motivated by the desire to surround
the spectators with a sonic environment-a rappresentazione tutta in musica- that helped to bridge
the gap between reality and the mythical world they were being invited to experience.
In conclusion, I want to leave you with the idea that opera was, from its beginnings in
Florence around the year 1600, a socially shared experience irt which acting and singing-and
particularly singing in the new, recitative style, about love and loss-was the culmination of a certain
rhetorical type of speaking picture that had long been nurtured by the Renaissance imagination. Its
aim was to revive the humanist ideals of incantatory singing so admired by the Florentine
Neoplatonists and the style of theatrical declamation believed to have been so effective in ancient
drama. It brought the spectator into a new relationship with the stage, heightening the immediacy of
21
�its illusions and acting on the emotions through the sense of hearing as well as seeing. With
Monteverdi, it spread to Venice and then throughout the Italian peninsula as well as elsewhere in
Europe and the Americas.
The collaborators of the first operas believed they were creating a geme in which music and
poetry, in order to serve the drama, were fused into an inseparable whole, a language that was in a
class of its own-midway between speaking and singing. Looking ahead, briefly, to the decades and
centuries that followed, an increasing separation between recitative and aria (or between musical
declamation and outright song)-with recitatives becoming more perfunctory and arias more
elaborate-the balance between these elements repeatedly shifted to favor music and singing at the
expense of text and dramatic integrity, only to be brought back into relative equilibrium by various
"reforms." But in the main, opera as it was envisioned at the dawn of the seventeenth century by a
few Florentine noblemen and musicians has endured, uninterrupted, in Western culture for 400 years
and counting.
Barbara Russano Hanning
March 25, 2011
' Marco da Gagliano, preface to La Dafne (Florence, 1608; facs. Bologna, 1970). The translation used
here is based on that of Carol MacClintock, Readings in the History of Music in Performance
(Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1979); see 188.
2
Gagliano, ibid; see MacClintock, 188-89. The full text with an English translation (by Tim Carter)
may be seen in Composing Opera: From "Dajne" to "Ulisse errante," ed. Tim Carter and Zygmunt
Szweykowski (Cracow: Musica Iagellonica, 1994), 46-67.
22
�3
Claude V. Palisca, "The First Performance of Euridice," in the Twenty-fifth Anniversary Festschrifl
(193 7-62) [of Queens College], ed. Albert Mell (New York: Queens College of the City University of
New York, 1964), 1-23; repr. with a new introductory headnote in Palisca, Studies in the History of
Italian Music and Music Theory, 432-51 . Further on Euridice see, inter alia, T. Carter, " Jacopo
Peri 's Euridice (1600): A Contextual Study," The Music Review 43 (1982) 83-103, repr. in Carter,
Music, Patronage, and Printing; Kelley Hamess, "Le tre Euridici: Characterization and Allegory in
the Euridici of Peri and Caccini," Journal ofSevententh-Century Music 911 (2003) http://sscmjscm.press.uiuc.edu/jscm/v9no 1; Bojan Bujic, " Figura poetica molto vaga": Structure and Meaning
in Rinuccini 's Euridice," Early Music History 10 (1991), 29-62; and Gaspare de Caro, Euridice:
Momenti dell ' Umanesimo civile fiorentino.
4
La rappresentazione di anima, et di corpo novamente pasta in musica dal sig. Emilio del Cavalieri
per recitar cantando (Rome, 1600). This judgment of Cavalieri's work was suggested by the
Florentine man of letters Giovanni Battista Doni (1595-164 7), perhaps the first historian of early
opera. Further on Cavalieri see Claude V. Palisca, "Musical Asides in the Diplomatic
Correspondence of Emilio de' Cavalieri," Musical Quarterly 49 (1963), 339-55, repr. in Palisca,
Studies in the History of Italian Music and Music Theory, 389-407. For a defense of Cavalieri' s
contribution to the creation of opera, see Warren Kirkendale, Emilio de' Cavalieri, 'Gentiluomo
Romano ': His Life and Letters, His Role as Superintendent ofAll the Arts at the Medici Court, and
His Musical Compositions (Florence, 2001 ), 185-212.
5
L 'Euridice composta in musica in stile rappresentativo da Giulio Caccini detto Romano (Florence,
1601 ; facs. Bologna, 1968). In the dedication to Bardi, Caccini lays claim to "having been the first to
give to the press like kind of songs, and the style and manner ofthem, .. . composed by me more than
fifteen years ago at various times, since I have never used in my works any other a11 than the
imitation of the sentiments of the words, ..." (referring to his new score as well as to the monodies
yet to be published in Le nuove musiche). The dedication is printed and translated in Carter,
Composing Opera, 35-41 , and trans. in Strunk, Source Readings, 606. Caccini' s complete score,
however, was not performed in its entirety until 1602. (The 1600 performance had been largely of
Peri' s music.)
6
The concept of civic humanism was elaborated in Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian
Renaissance, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1955; rev. 1966) and Eugenio Garin's Italian Humanism :
Philosophy and Civic Life in the Renaissance, trans. Peter Munz (New York, 1965); see Gary
Tomlinson, "Renaissance Humanism and Music," European Music, 1520-1640, ed. James Haar
(Woodbridge, UK; Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2006), 1-19, esp. 9-10. Also see the more recent
study of Florentine civic humanism as it concerns the birth of opera: Gaspare De Caro, Euridice:
Momenti dell 'Umanesimo civile fiorentino (Bologna: Ut Orpheus edizioni, 2006).
7
Gary Tomlinson, " Pastoral and Musical Magic in the Birth of Opera," Opera and the
Enlightenment, eds. Thomas Bauman and Marita McClymonds (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1995), 7-20. Also see D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella
(London: The Warburg Institute, University of London, 1958) and Ruth Katz, Divining the Powers of
Music: Aesthetic Theory and the Origins ofOpera (New York: Pendragon Press, 1986), esp. 87ff.
23
�8
James M. Saslow, The Medici Wedding of 1589: Florentine Festival as "Theatrum Mundi" (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), 2. For a summary account of the intermedi, see
Alois M. Nagler, Theatre Festivals of the Medici (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964, 58-69.
The relevant documentation is also illustrated in a recent exhibition catalogue: Maria Adelaide
Bartoli Bacherini, "Per un regale evento ": Spettacoli nuziali e opera in musica alia corte dei Medici
(Florence, 2000). For an edition, see Les Fetes du marriage de Ferdinand de Medic is et de Christine
de Lorraine (Florence, 1589), I: Musique des intermedes de "La Pellegrino," ed. D.P. Walker
(Paris, 1963 ).
9
Further on Giovanni de' Bardi, see Tim Carter, "Per cagione di bene, et giustamente vivere: Some
Thoughts on the Musical Patronage of Giovanni de' Bardi," Neoplatonismo, musica, letteratura nel
Rinascimento: I Bardi di Vernia e l'Accademia della Crusca; atti del Convegno lnternazionale di
Studi, Firenze-Vernio, 25-26 settembre 1998. Edited by Piero Gargiulo, Alessandro Magini and
Stephane Toussaint (Paris: Societe Marsile Ficin, 2000) 137-46; Claude V. Palisca: "The Musical
Humanism of Giovanni Bardi," Poesia e musica nell'estetica del xvi e xvii secolo, ed. H. Meyvalian
(Florence, 1979), 45-72; and Wanen Kirkendale: The Court Musicians in Florence during the
Principate oft he Medici (Florence, 1993).
10
On Ottavio Rinuccini see, inter alia, Barbara Russano Hanning, Of Poetry and Music's Power:
Humanism and the Creation of Opera (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1980), esp. chap. I (119): "Rinuccini and the Power of Music"; and Hanning: "Glorious Apollo: Poetic and Political
Themes in the First Opera," Renaissance Quarterly 32 (1979), 485-513.
11
Detlef Heikamp, "Il Teatro Mediceo degli Uffizi," Bolle tina del Centro lnternazionale di
architettura Andrea Palladia !6 (1974), 323-32; Nino Pin·otta and Elena Povoledo, Music and
Theatre from Poliziano to Monteverdi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982; Italian orig.,
Turin, 1969, rev. 1975), 365-83.
12
The phrase is Richard Taruskin's; see his Oxford History of Western Music, 6 vols. (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2005).
13
The pythic creature is described as greenish-black and covered with sparkling minors. It "was
constructed in separate units of papier-mache modeled over clay forms and assembled on a wooden
framework," and it was operated by a stagehand from inside (Saslow, 231-32).
14
Rinuccini's phrase ("si nobil maniera di recitare"), from the dedication (to Maria de' Medici) of his
libretto L 'Euridice (Florence, 1600); Italian text and translation in Carter, Composing Opera, 16-17.
15
Le musiche di Jacopo Peri sopra L 'Euridice (Florence, 1600 [but 1601, modern style]), facs.
Rome, 1934 and Bologna, 1969; performing edition, ed. Howard Mayer Brown (Madison, WI: A-R
Editions, 1981 ).
16
Tomlinson, "Renaissance Humanism," 18.
17
On Jacopo Corsi see Tim Carter, "Music and Patronage in Late Sixteenth-Century Florence: The
Case ofJacopo Corsi (1561-1602)," iniTatti Studies: Essays in the Renaissance I (1985), 57-104,
24
�repr. in Carter, Music, Patronage and Printing in Late Renaissance Florence (Variorum Collected
Studies Series), (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000).
18
William V. Porter, "Peri and Corsi's Dajne: Some New Discoveries and Observations," Journal of
the American Musicological Society 18 (1965), 170-96.
19
Claude V. Palisca, "The Alterati of Florence, Pioneers in the Theory ofDramatic Music," in
William W. Austin, ed., New Looks at Italian Opera: Essays in Honor of Donald J Grout (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1968), 9-38; repr. in Palisca, Studies in the History of Italian Music
and Music Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 408-31.
2
°
Claude V. Palisca, The Florentine Camerata: Documentary Studies and Translations (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1989); esp.l-11.
21
Mei's correspondence to the Camerata is published in Claude V. Palisca, Girolamo Mei (15191594): Letters on Ancient and Modern Music to Vincenzo Galilei and Giovanni Bardi: A Study with
Annotated Text (Musicological Studies and Documents, American Institute of Musicology, 1960,
2/1977).
22
Claude V. Palisca, "Vincenzo Galilei's Arrangements for Voice and Lute", in Essays in
Musicology in Honor of Dragan Plamenac on His 701h Birthday, eds. Gustav Reese and Robert .T.
Snow (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1969), 207-32; repr. in Palisca, Studies ... , 36488.
23
Vincenzo Galilei, Dialogo della musica antica e/ della moderna (Florence, 1581 ); repr.
Monuments of Music and Music Literature in Facsimile, second series, no. 20 (New York: Braude
Brothers [1967]); English trans. with introduction and notes, by Claude V. Palisca (New Haven: Yale
University Press, c.2003).
24
Mei had definitively established that the ancient Greek modes were different from the church
modes by being essentially the same arrangement of tones transposed higher or lower on the Greek
gamut; thus, depending on their register, some modes were more relaxed, others more intense, much
like our modern scales. See his "Letter to Vincenzo Galilei, 8 May 1572," in Palisca, The Florentine
Camerata, 66-67.
25
Further on Mei's theories, see Hanning, OfPoetry and Music's Power, 31-41.
26
Translated excerpts from Galilei's Dialogo may be found in Oliver Strunk, ed., Source Readings in
Music History, rev. ed. by Leo Treitler (New York and London, 1998), and in Piero Weiss and
Richard Taruskin, Music in the Western World: A History in Documents (New York: Schirmer,
1984), 166-68. The passage quoted above is taken from the latter, 167-68.
27
Compare the following passage from Bardi's Discourse on Ancient Music and Good Singing
(Sopra Ia musica antica e 'l cantar bene) addressed to Caccini: "Those great philosophers and
connoisseurs of nature understood well that in the low voice is slowness and sonmolence, in the
25
�medium quiet, majesty, and magnificence, and in the high shrillness and lament. Now who does not
know that the drunken and the somnolent usually speak in a low tone and slowly, and that men of
great affairs converse in a medium voice, quiet and magnificent; ... that in the rhythms are the
portraits of anger, mildness, strength, temperance, and of every other moral virtue, as well as of all
those qualities which are their contraries, ... " (quoted and translated in Hanning, Of Poetry and
Music's Power, 37-38). The entire discourse is printed and translated in Palisca, The Florentine
Camerata, 90-131. Further on Caccini' s relations with Bardi, see Claude V. Palisca, "The Camerata
fiorentina: A Reappraisal," Studi musicali I (1972), 203-36.
28
Pirrotta, "Orpheus, Singer of strambotti," in Music and Theatre, 3-36.
29
See D.P Walker, "Ficino's Spiritus and Music," Annates musicologiques I (1953), 131-50. For a
more extensive treatment of these ideas, see Gary Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward
a Historiography of Others (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), esp. I 01-44.
°Ficino wrote: "Remember that song is the most powerful imitator of all things.
3
For it imitates the
intentions and affections of the soul ... "; quoted and trans. by Walker from the third book ofFicina's
De triplici vita in "Ficino's Spritus and Music," 139.
31
On the precise role of music in Poliziano's Oifeo, see Pirrotta, "Orpheus," 19-36.
32
Hanning, Of Poetry and Music's Power, 27.
33
Giulio Caccini, Le nuove musiche (Florence, 1601 [1602, modern style]), facs. Rome, 1934; critical
and performing edition, edited with a translation ofCaccini's important Preface by H. Wiley
Hitchcock in Recent Researches in the Music of the Baroque Era, vol. 9 (Madison, WI: A-R Editions,
1970).
34
Tomlinson, "Pastoral and Musical Magic," 17. Tomlinson also argues that "early opera was not a
specific version of pastoral drama"; rather, both genres "arose from a culture whose world still
offered magical realms' and grew out of 'the esotericism that burgeoned in Renaissance thought in
the wake of the fifteenth-century revival ofNeoplatonism" (Joe. cit.).
35
Quoted in Christopher Braider, Refiguring the Real: Picture and Modernity in Word and Image,
1400-1700 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 156.
36
Leon Battista Alberti, Dells Pittura [On Painting], trans. John R. Spencer (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1966/R\971); see especially 72-76.
37
Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye, the New Version
(Berkeley: Univsity of California Press, 1974/R 2004), 295ff.
38
George R. Kernodle, From Art to Theater: Form and Convention in the Renaissance (Chicago
and London: University of Chicago Press, 1944), 216.
26
�HOW OPERA BE6AN
Agostino Carracci, Orpheus and Euridice
1594-97
HOW OPHRA BH6AN
AND
WHY OPHRA BH6AN
Florence -why THERE?
ca.1600 - why THEN?
�Marco da GAGLIANO
1608:
Wrote Preface describing opera's origins
3
1597/98:
Favola by Ottavio RINUCCINI (conrt poet)
Music begun by Jacopo CORSI ("learned
amateur")
Completed by Jacopo PERI ("skilled composer
and singer")
1608:
Marco da GAGLIANO
Expanded original libretto
Composed new music
Wrote Preface describing opera's origins
4
�1597198:
Rinuccini I Peri I Corsi
La Dafne
1608:
Gagliano I Rinuccini
La Dafne
5
1597198:
Rinuccini I Peri I Corsi
La Dafne
1600
Marriage of Marie de' Medici
Oct. 4 Rinuccini, L 'Euridice libretto printed
(Preface)
Oct. 6 Peri I Caccini, L 'Euridice first performed
1608:
Gagliano I Rinuccini
LaDafne
6
�1597198:
Rinuccini I Peri I Corsi
La Dafne
1600
Feb.
Cavalieri's La Rappresentatione di anima et di corpo in Rome
Oct. 4
Rinuccini, L 'Euridice libretto printed
Oct. 6
Peri I Caccini L 'Euridice first performed
Oct. 6? Cavalieri's Rappresentatione score published
1608:
Gagliano I Rinuccini,
La Dafoe
1597198:
Rinuccini I Peri I Corsi
La Dafne
7
1600 Feb. Cavalieri's La Rappresentatione di anima et di corpo in Rome
Oct. 4
Rinuccini, L 'Euridice libretto printed
Oct. 6
Peri I Caccini L 'Euridice first performed
Oct. 6? Cavalieri's Rappresentatione score published
Oct. 9
1608:
Caccini, II rapimento di Cefalo performed
Gagliano I Rinuccini,
LaDafne
8
�1597198:
Rinuccini I Peri I Corsi
1600 Feb.
Oct. 4
Oct. 6
Oct. 6?
Oct. 9
Rinuccini, L "Euridice libretto printed
Peri I Caccini L 'Euridice first performed
Cavalieri's Rappresentatione score published
Caccini, II rapimento di Cefalo performed
La Dafne
Cavalieri's La Rappresentatione di anima et di corpo in Rome
1601 Jan. Caccini L 'Euridice score published
Feb. Peri L 'Euridice score published
1608:
Gagliano I Rinuccini,
LaDafne
1597198:
Rinuccini I Peri I Corsi
La Dafne
9
1600 Feb. Cavalieri's La Rappresentatione di anima et di corpo in Rome
Oct. 4
Oct. 6
Oct. 6?
Oct. 9
Rinuccini, L 'Euridice libretto printed
Peri I Caccini L 'Euridice first performed
Cavalieri's Rappresentatione score published
Caccini, II rapimento di Cefalo performed
1601 Jan. Caccini L 'Euridice score published
Feb. Peri L 'Euridice score published
1602
Feb.
Caccini, Le nuove musiche
Dec. 5 Caccini, L 'Euridice first performed
1608:
Gagliano I Rinuccini,
LaDafne
10
�1597/98: Rinuccini I Peri I Corsi La Dafne
1600 Feb. Cavalieri's La Rappresentatione di anima et di corpo in Rome
Oct. 4
Oct. 6
Oct. 6?
Oct. 9
1601 Jan.
Feb.
1602 Feb.
Dec. 5
Rinuccini, L 'Euridice libretto printed
Peri/ Caccini L 'Euridice first performed
Cavalieri's Rappresentatione score published
Caccini, 11 rapimento di Cefalo performed
Caccini L 'Euridice score published
Peri L 'Euridice score published
Caccini, Le nuove musiche
Caccini, L 'Euridice first performed
1607
Monteverdi I Striggio, Lafavola d'Orfeo
1608:
Gagliano I Rinuccini,
LaDafne
11
1597/98: Rinuccini/ Peri/ Corsi
LaDafne
1600 Feb. Cavalieri's La Rappresentatione di anima et di corpo in Rome
Oct. 4
Oct. 6
Oct. 6?
Oct. 9
1601 Jan.
Feb.
1602 Feb.
Dec. 5
1607
Rinuccini, L 'Euridice libretto printed
Peri/ Caccini L 'Euridice first performed
Cavalieri's Rappresentatione score published
Caccini, II rapimento di Cefalo performed
Caccini L 'Euridice score published
Peri L 'Euridice score published
Caccini, Le nuove musiche
Caccini, L 'Euridice first performed
Monteverdi/ Striggio, L '01jeo
1608
1608:
Monteverdi/ Rinuccini, L'Arianna
LaDafne
Gagliano I Rinuccini,
12
�Lasciatemi morire,
Let me die,
lasciatemi morire;
e che volete voi che mi
conforte
in cosi dura sorte,
in cosi gran martire?
Let me die!
And who do you think
could console me
in so dreadful a fate,
in such great torment?
Lasciatemi morire,
Lasciatemi morire.
Let me die!
Let me die!
13
WHY FLORENCE?
14
�WHY f'LORENC£?
1. Long tradition of musical theater - INTERMED I
15
�WHY f'LOR£NC£?
1. Long tradition of musical theater- INTERMEDI
2. Network of academies- CIVIC HUMANISM
Bardi's
Camerata
0
Alterati
Academy
Medici
court
Corsi's
circle
0
17
�1589 INT£RSM£DI
The Team:
Giovanni de' Bardi, artistic director
Ottavio Rinuccini, poet
Emilio de' Cavalieri, musical director
Bernardo Buontalenti, costume and stage design
Music by Cristofano Malvezzi and Luca Marenzio,
with contributions from Jacopo Peri,
Giulio Caccini, and Giovanni de' Bardi
20
�1lNT£RM£DI
'1
(1:
1lNT£RM£DI
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24
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26
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27
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--,----,---------,-,----,----,---,------.. -..
--
----,--------~---,-
----------------------------- -c--·- - " -·--'-----'---·-- -----'--
---~------;-------.--,-,--------,--,
-,------"--------.-.
-"c-=
... - ..
---,----------~-------.--
----c=-~--
�HUMANISM
Gary Tomlinson, "Renaissance Humanism and
Music," European Music, 1520-1640
1. Philological humanism
Girolamo Mei
2. Rhetorical humanism
Vincenzo Galilei
3. Ordinary-language humanism
Rinuccini, Corsi, and Peri29
HUMANISM
Alterati
(Academy of the Altered Ones)
Giovanni de' Bardi
Girolamo Mei
Ottavio Rinnccini
Jacopo Corsi
"Pioneers in the theory of dramatic music"
3o
�HUMANISM
Camerata
Giovanni de' Bardi
Girolamo Mei
Vincenzo Galilei
Giulio Caccini
31
HUMANISM
Camerata
Vincenzo Galilei
Giulio Caccini
32
�ViNCENZO 6ALII.m,
DIALOGO D£l.J..A MUSICA ANTICA E D£l.J..A MODERNA, t5e 1
Do away with vocal counterpoint.
Adopt monody (melody with simple accompaniment).
Imitate nature (by following the patterns of speech)
33
ViNCENZO 6ALII.m,
DIALOGO D£l.J..A MUSICA ANTICA E D£l.J..A MODERNA, 1581
"Kindly observe in what manner the actors speak,
in what range, high or low,
how loudly or how softly,
how rapidly or slowly they enunciate their words ...
how one speaks when infuriated or excited;
how a married woman speaks, how a girl, how a lover ...
how one speaks when lamenting, when crying out, when afraid,
and when exulting with joy."
34
�WH1f FLORENCE?
I. Long tradition of musical theater -INTERMEDI
2. Network of academies- CIVIC HUMANISM
3. Particular Renaissance worldviewMUSICAL MAGIC
35
MUSICAL MA6IC
Angelo Poliziano, Orfeo (1480)
36
�MUSICAL MAGIC
Neoplatonism
Lorenzo de' Medici (The ~nu.5.u.u•
Marsilio Ficino (1433-99)
"music-spirit theory"
Angelo Poliziano, Orfeo (148
�Titian
Bacchus descending
to rescue the
abandoned Ariadne
from her fate
1522-23
�41
HOW OPERA BE6AN
AND
WJn1 OPERA BE6AN
Florence -why THERE.?
ca.1600 -why THEN?
�Roger de Piles,
Abrege de Ia vie des peintres
(1699)
"One must think of painting as a kind of stage
on which each figure plays its role."
43
Filippo Villani, DE ORI6J.NE (1381-2)
Images formed by [Giotto's] brush agree so
well with the lineaments of nature as to seem
to the beholder to live and breathe; and his
pictures appear to perform actions and
movements so exactly as to seem ([when
seen] from a little way off) actually speaking,
weeping, rejoicing, and doing other things,
not without pleasure from him who beholds
and praises the talent and skill of the artist.
44
�Giotto, Lamentation (1303-6), fresco from the Arena Chapel, Pad11a
ALBERTI'S COMPOSJTJO
from Della pittura, 1435-36
Period
/\
Clause + Clause
PhrAase
Aord
Picture
Bod~y
1\
11ember + 11ember
Plan/.\ane
46
�Alberti: "In my view, there is no
painted narrative so filled with
so great a variety of events that
nine or ten persons will not be
capable of acting them out quite
fittingly."
~Della pittura
47
�The Last Supper, ca. 1200
Psalter illumination (Musee Conde, Chantilly)
49
ILeon:ardo da Vinci, The Last Supper, 1495-97 (Milan, Santa Maria delle Gn1zie:)l
after restoration, 1997-2001
50
�after restoration, 1997-200 I
52
�Jacopo Tintoretto, The Last Supper, 1592-94
53
(San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice)
54
�55
Michelangelo Merisi
da Caravaggio
Boy Bitten by a Lizard,
c. 1597
(London, National Gallery)
�Boy Bitten
by a Lizard,
detail
58
�Artemesia Genti1eschi
Judith Beheading
Holofernes, c. 1620
(Uffizi Gallery, Florence)
Artemisia Genti1eschi
SelfPortrait as
La Pittura, c. 1630
�61
Nympha<:um (1583-93), by Bernardo Buontalenti,
Florence
��66
�67
George Kernodle, ?W#t ~to 7~
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944.)
"Modem theatre
grew out of the desire to see and hear
with living actors
the romantic stories and allegorical fancies
already portrayed by the painters."
68
�Frank Kernodle, ';'UJ#t ,rt.a ta
7/eeattze
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944.)
"Early opera
grew out of the desire to see and hear
with singing actors
the romantic stories and allegorical fancies
already portrayed by the painters."
Baldassarre Peruzzi (!481-1537), stage design
69
����
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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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64 pages
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How Opera Began (And Why It Began in Florence)
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Typescript of a lecture delivered on March 25, 2011, by Barbara Hanning as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
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Hanning, Barbara Russano, 1940-
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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2011-03-25
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text
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pdf
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Opera. Italy. Florence. History and criticism.
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English
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LEC_Hanning_Barbara_2011-03-25
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<a href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/30" title="Audio recording">Audio recording</a>
Friday night lecture
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/a5a902579fa049466a7a84dc7bca7452.mp3
0309ed0d979e41620c6c41738efeb698
Dublin Core
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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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01:09:43
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Politics According to Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky (with Emphasis on The Brothers Karamazov)
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on March 31, 2000, by Donna Orwin as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Note: the audio cuts out briefly at 00:45:47.
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Orwin, Donna Tussing, 1947-
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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2000-03-31
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Tolstoy, Leo, graf, 1828-1910--Political and social views
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 1821-1881--Political and social views
Political science--Philosophy
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 1821-1881. Bratʹi︠a︡ Karamazovy
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LEC_Orwin_Donna_2000-03-31_ac
Friday night lecture
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/d34aed13624e9834bdf439cb45e0126d.mp4
9922934162c7493bde007b90830be93b
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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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01:17:48
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Reading Genesis Chapter Three
Description
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Video recording of a lecture delivered on September 2, 2022, by William Braithwaite as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Mr. Braithwaite offers this description: "The Garden of Eden story, about Adam and Eve, what they did and how they were punished for it, is the authoritative source for the Christian doctrine of original sin. Before St. Augustine and St. Paul appropriated it for this purpose, however, the story belonged to the Hebrew Scriptures of the ancient Israelites, and Judaism has no dogma of original sin. But even before ancient rabbis put the story in writing many centuries ago, it may, some scholars suggest, have circulated orally.
If we try to imagine who first told the story, and to whom, and with what end in mind, what would we take it to be about, and what truth might we find in it? What does the story say to those who are not Christians or Jews, whether of another faith, or even atheist or agnostic? Seeking reliable speculations on such questions is the work behind this lecture."
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Braithwaite, William T. (William Thomas)
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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2022-09-02
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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."
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moving image
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mp4
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Bible. Genesis
Eve (Biblical figure)
David, King of Israel
Parables
Solomon, King of Israel
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English
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LEC_Braithwaite_William_2022-09-02_ac
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/568ad47ae544caa11b62da037a979e81.pdf
cde1daa212da77f14795c8731c3144fe
PDF Text
Text
1
"YOU ARE THAT!"
The Upanishads Read Through Western Eyes1
© Robert Druecker, February, 2008
The original title of this lecture-"'You Are That! "'-was a quotation, from the
Chandogya Upanishad, of an exclamation made several times by a man named "Uddalaka" to
his son Svetaketu. The "That" refers to a realm or state of being, known as "Brahman." One
who experiences it is called a "knower of Brahman" (brahmavid). Uddfilaka was a knower of
Brahman, speaking to his son out of his direct experience.
The classical Upanishads are expressions of and invitations to this direct experiencing.
So, understanding them is a matter of understanding what that experiencing is like, not a matter
of believing or knowing some truths about the world. Thus, the lecture, in elucidating the
meaning of its title, will convey a sense of the experience of Brahman, which is what the
Upanishads as a whole are about.
But, of course, their ultimate aim is not simply to produce understanding in this sense, but
rather to eventuate in the actual experiencing of the Brahman-realm. Even Sankara, the most
highly esteemed expositor of the Upanishads, a man noted for his theoretical acumen, wrote: .
One should consider theoretical reflection as 100 times more efficacious than
oral instruction, and meditation as 100,000 , times more efficacious than
theoretical reflection. As for [the direct experiencing of the Brahman-realm],
it has consequences which defy all comparison. ·
The revised title of the lecture is: '"You Are That!': The Upanishads Read Through
Western Eyes." For I have followed Aristotle's recorrimendation to begin with the things .best
.
.
.
.
known to us; where 'us,' in this case, ~efers to the St John's community. Thus,Part One will
give a sense of what the Brahman-realm is like by elaborating on an analogous experience in
Homer and Aristotle. Part Two, much of which will be delivered on Tuesday afternoon in the
Conversation Room, will elucidate the experiencing of Brahman in a more direct way.
�2
Finally, many of the writings in the Upanishads are dialogues involving a knower of
Brahman. Yajfiavalkya is the central figure in the conversations in the oldest Upanishad. In
working on this lecture, I have asked him, as a knower of Brahman, for some help. So, during
the lecture Yajfiavalkya will be providing us with his sense of what it is in Homer or Aristotle
that is analogous to the Brahman-realm.
�3
Part One: vos1v and Jl.w:iul (Conjunction)
A.Homer
Homer frequently refers to human beings or gods waking up to, or realizing, the full
significance of a situation (voEtv) or to their ability to do so (v6oc; in some uses). 2
Paradigmatically the verb in the aorist expresses an individual's sudden flash of insight.
Resisting his parents' entreaties, Hektor has held his position, as he watches Achilleus coming
toward him. He is pondering what might happen should he retreat or should he offer to return
Helen; but then Achilleus closes upon him: "And trembling took hold of Hektor when the
realization suddenly struck him [what single combat against Achilleus really meant], and he
could no longer stand his ground there, but ... fled, frightened ... " (I, 22.136-37). 3 When the
progressive aspect is used, it conveys the process of pieces gradually fitting together to form a
wholly new picture, as when Theoklymenos tells the suitors that the ·realization is dawning upon
him that there is an evil on the way which they will not be able to avoid (0, 20.367-70).
Because of the intensity of the character's involvement in the situation, the experienced
shift in significance is often accompanied by strong emotion, as seen in the Hektor-example
earlier. When the insight concerns an individual object, instead of a situation, then the
realization is always accompanied by such emotion; it is as if the shift in the meaning of the
situation were compressed into a single thing or person. So, Menelaos, having caught sight of
Paris, leaps down from his chariot. Then "when [Paris] realized the full significance of
· Menelaus standing there among the champions, the heart was shaken within him'~ (I, 3 .29-31~
the full significance being that Menelaus is drawing near, full of an overwhelming desire to kill
Paris.
�4
'Realization of significance' has a variety of meanings that spread over a directional arc. 4
A character begins in a situation in which he has already seemingly recognized (ytyvrocnct::tv) the
surrounding things or people as definite individuals that are familiar. Then their real significance
is awakened to, a corresponding emotional impact is experienced, and a way of dealing with the
newly perceived situation comes to light and the will to do so arises. Thus, the present naturally
extends itself into the future. When the primary meaning is at either end of this arc, the other
parts of the arc are co-present. Thus, when the emphasis is on present clarity of mind, as when
Kirke tells Odysseus that no magic can work on his ability always to realize what is the real
meaning of the situation in which he finds himself, the insightful character of his future aims,
plans, and actions is also on her mind (0, 10.329). Or when the accent is on willing an action in
the future, it iilVolves a clear vision in the present (e.g., I, 144-49).
The realization of significance may or may not be prepared for by a thought process. But
when it is, it itself is distinct from the preceding reasoning, in the same way as 'seeing' one of
Euclid's proofs is different from figuring out how it is justified in terms of previous propositions.
Yajfiavalkya now observed to me that realizing Brahman, too, could be characterized as
including an emotional response, joy (ananda), and a way of acting, calm responsiveness to the
whole situation.
The realization may penetrate to great depth and extend {ar in space and time, like
Theoklymenonos's referred to earlier or like that involving Athena when she speaks to Achilleus
as he is drawing his sword to kill Aga.inemnon-the breadth and depth of which took a whole
Dean's Lecture to elucidate a couple of years ago.
The more intense the situation and the deeper and broader the realization, the more likely
it is that the characters are raised above their ordinary abilities, so that they are able to see almost
�5
all the implications and consequences of the situation with unusual clarity and to act with
extraordinary foresight. This experience of being raised above the ordinary is a divine
manifestation. 5
Homer most often mentions Athena and Apollo in such moments. For instance,
Odysseus's sudden realization of the true meaning of return-its being the right time to reveal
himself to Telemachos-is the presencing of Athena (0, 16.155ff). And Hektor's sudden
waking up to danger when he was about to oppose Achilleus is Apollo's manifesting himself (I,
20.375ff). These two examples point to the difference between the two gods. Athena remains
untroubled and serene in the midst of action while she is discerning at every juncture what the
instant requires, is planning the deed with precision, and is poised and ready to bring it about
energetically. Apollo, on the other hand, is associated with a cognitive attitude of stately
objectivity and a ranging gaze, distance and freedom, clarity and good form. He is the god of the
saving, or preserving, awareness (crcocppocruvri) expressed in the Delphic dictum, "Know
thyself," meaning, 'Realize what human beings really are, that is, how great a distance separates
them from the omnitemporal gods' (HG, 216-17, 215, 52, 57, 59, 78-79, 66). Yajiiavalkya
remarked that such traits as serenity in the midst of action, the freedom of a ranging gaze, and
saving, or preserving, awareness pertain to the Brahman-realm as well.
In a manifestation of Athena or Apollo, the god is revealed as the very essence of the
realization. That is, the realization's ultimate meaning is that it is a ray of the divine illumining
· human life. Homer realizes that the complete lucidity in which we sometimes act Is a connection
. with something superior to us, even though we think of it as a quality of our own minds. In
decisive moments what a warrior realizes is both himself and the deity together (HG, 7, 247, 174,
184-85) . .Yajiiavalkya commented that in the Upanishads, this non-separateness of the human
�6
and 'divine' is known as "non-duality" (advaita; BU, N.3,32): "Whoever meditates on a
divinity that is other (anyiim) [than himself], thinking, 'This [god] is one (anyah), I am another
(anyah),' does not know ['I am Brahman']." (BU, 1.4.10).
Homer's recognition of moments in which the divine and the human are non-dual is
sharply opposed to a view that would see Athena and Apollo as external 'causes' of the events he
is narrating (HG, 213). Yajiiavalkya said that, somewhat similarly, we are invited to awaken to
Brahman not as an external cause but rather as what is most profound in our experience.
When the god is present in moments of non-duality, the warrior's ego and personality
recede into the background (HG, 241f). That sort of impersonality, which also characterizes our
moments of experiencing the truth of a Euclidean proposition, is inherent in the Brahman-realm,
according to Yajiiavalkya.
The divine coming-to-presence has been said to occur at "the critical moment when
human powers suddenly converge, as if charged by electric contact, on some insight, some
resolution, some deed." Lightning comes forth from the clouds to strike buildings or trees which
have risen from the earth; so, too, the divine suddenly emerges from the background to shock an
individual only when the individual has gone forth from himself toward the background (HG, 6,
210, 195). Yajiiavalkya noted that the instant1of recognition of the Brahman realm is _also
compared to "a sudden flash oflightning" (BU, 11.3.6; cp. KeU, IV.4). Moreover, he thought
that the going-forth toward the background might be, in some way, analogous to a 'movingtowards' Brahman, going-forth involved either in practicing meditation or in coming to wonder,
'Who aml?'
While, in the examples given so far, the divine manifestation has come _in an awakening
to significance or in an elaborating of a plan, this should not lead us to think that deity is
�7
encountered in the inward turn. The appearance of the goddess is not, for instance, Achilleus' s
pondering whether to kill Agamemnon or to check his anger (I, 1.193 ), but rather the resolution
of his introspection in a flash of certitude (HG, 174, 48). Yajfiavalkya agreed that introspection
neither characterizes the Brahman-realm nor is a means thereto. However, there is, he said, a
different sort of inward turn which can facilitate its realization.
There are many instances in which a god is there, at a moment when none of the
characters is aware of it. But at times, when awakening to the full significance of his situation, a
warrior may realize that his very awakening is itself the manifestation of a god. An interesting
example occurs when Poseidon appears to the Aiantes in the likeness ofKalkas. At first neither
brother is aware of the presence of a god; but, after Poseidon departs like a hawk, Aias son of
Oi:leus realizes that some god, whom he does not recognize, has addressed them, while
Telemonian Aias notices only his own increased strength and energy (I, 13.43-80). On other
occasions the human being recognizes the god by name--sometimes only after the encounter, but
sometimes already at its inception (HG, 207-08).
A god may be especially 'close' to a particular individual in that the human being
regularly displays the qualities of the particular god, as Athena acknowledges Odysseus does (0,
13.330-32; HG, 192-95). There is even one person who seems to be fully awake to
divin~
presence-Homer himself, who
sees events through and through even when the participants see only the
surface. And often when the participants sense only that a divine hand is
touching them the poet is able to name the god concerned and knows the
·
secret of his purpose. (HG, 195-96)
According to Yajiiavalkya this variation, .among human beings, in the frequency with which, and
degree to which, they notice the divine presence in moments of waking up to meaning matches a
corresponding variation in noticing Brahman.
�8
So far in Homer we have emphasized cognition. This is appropriate in that cognition in a
broad sense is the way in which we come to realize Brahman. However, it gives a distorted
picture of the world as Homer depicts it. For there are many gods-Ares, Aphrodite, Poseidon,
Hera, and others-who manifest themselves in the world in addition to the two who are
especially associated with realizing significance. Moreover, the appearance of a deity often
involves an inner phenomenon other than awakening, as when Hektor's body is "packed full of
force arid fighting strength" (I, 17.211-12) or when Athena puts "courage into the heart" of
Nausikaa (0, 6.140). Yajfiavalkya said that these phenomena of enlivening, energizing, and
strengthening were included, along with realization, in what the Upanishads call the "Inner
Controller" (antaryamin; BU, III.7.1). 6 Also, that Homer realized that they, too, were divine
manifestations shows that he did not think of non-duality as limited to cognition.
Second, a deity often manifests itself by affecting a character from outside. Most
notably, Patroklos's aristeia was put to an end by Apollo, who "stood behind him, and struck his
back and his broad shoulders with a flat
~troke
of the hand so that his eyes spun" (I, 16.791-92).
Yajfiavalkya pointed out that events like this might be echoes of Brahman as "pouring forth," or
"emitting," all things (MuU, I.1. 7). He added that just as Homer recognizes the one Apollo both
in his striking of Patrdclus and in Hektor's realization referred to earlier, so the Upanishads
express the realization that the inner controlling and the outer emitting are one, in stating: "This
Self is ... Brahman" (BU, II.5.19).
�9
B. Aristotle and Averroes
Now for help in thinking through the experiences highlighted by Homer, we turn to
Aristotle. In moments ofrealization, we are in a state of what he called "being-at-work," what
I'll call 'activity.' Activity is "complete over any time whatever"; it is not a temporal
phenomenon. In distinction from it, a motion "is in time and directed at some end ... and is
complete when it brings about that at which it aims" (NE, 1174a15-21). For example, whereas
the activity of dancing is 'all there' at each moment, the motion of learning to dance is complete
only when you've actually become a dancer.
Homer's gods Athena and Apollo are manifested in activities of ours which would be
"choiceworthy in themselves" (NE, 1144al) even if they didn't make anything in addition. The
active state of our ability to awaken to significance is what is best and most powerful in us and is
"either divine itself or the most divine of the things in us." When it is directed toward the most
divine, timeless things, it is a pure beholding (NE, 1177a13-21).
One living in this state of activity would be living a life that "is divine as compared with
a human life." Hence, Aristotle said, "one ought to immortalize" (NE, 1177b25-34). That is,
one ought to be as much as possible in this best state of activity, that of the immortals, like
Athena, in Homer or that of the impersonal divine in Aristotle. Wlien we are in that state, we are
for a period of time in the same state as the divine itself is in, over the whole oftime. 7 Moreover,
"each person would even seem to be_this [best state of activity]" (NE, 1178al). "[A]nd so the
person who loves and gratifies this is most a lover of self' (NE, l 168b33).
Yajfiavalkya commented that the Brahman-realm, too, has the characteristics of not being
a temporal phenomenon, of being a sort of pure beholding, and of being our true self. Moreover,
it, too, is impersonal, not divided up into essentially different Athena-moments and Apollo-
�10
moments. Finally, knowers of Brahman, living the life of their true self, are leading a life that
transcends the human. Thus, most of us live in ignorance of our true self.
But whereas Aristotle agrees formally with the implication of Apollo's "Know thyself,"
that we are ignorant of our true self, yet Aristotle's recognition of the true self as divine seems to
contradict Apollo's insistence on the separation between the human and the divine. Yaj:fiavalkya
said that when a similar contradiction is voiced in his tradition, the response offered is that the
contradiction is only apparent. Someone who took the "You" in "You are That!" to refer to his
ordinary sense of self, would be engaging in self-inflation. Students are encouraged to ponder
'Who am I?' as a practice, in order to shift them from the ordinary to the true sense of self. So,
Yaj:fiavalkya said, he and Aristotle could both take "Know thyself' in a double sense: 'With
respect to your ordinary sense of self, think mortal thoughts, but recognize that the true you is
divine activity.'
In On the Soul Aristotle began to sketch what might be entailed in realizing the
Aristotelian analogue to "You are That!" namely, the immortalizing involvement in the best
activity. One of Aristotle's foremost interpreters, Averroes has worked out a detailed portrait in
color, which fills in Aristotle's black-and-white sketch in a way that has interesting parallels to
'the Upanishadic picture. To that portrait'we now turn.8
We shall now refer to this best state of activity by its customary name in philosophical
texts, "intellection." In Aristotelian fashion Averroes began his account of intellection with what
is clearer to us and ended it with what is clearer by nature. There are three main figures in his
initial portrait-the "material intellect," the "disposed intellect," and the "agent intellect."
Averroes followed Aristotle's comparison of intellection to the action of a craft, in which
some material, like clay, receives a form, say, that of a bowl (OS, 430al0-14). When I acquire a
�11
simple intelligible, such as, 'straight line,' it is received as form by the material intellect-which,
not being corporeal, is material only in the sense that it serves as material-for. My disposed
intellect, 9 now having the acquired intelligible as an active disposition ('€~t~), is in what Aristotle
calls a first state of maintaining itself(' sxciv) in (' f,\I) its completed condition (r€A.o~), with
respect to this intelligible. Henceforth, we shall misleadingly say that it is 'in first actuality.'
The accomplished dancer, when not actually dancing, is a dancer in first actuality. When she is
actually dancing, she said to be a dancer 'in second actuality.' So, too, when I am actively
contemplating the intelligible 'straight line,' perhaps in the course of a demonstration, my
intellect is in second actuality.
According to Aristotle, "the soul never engages in intellection without an appearance"
(43 la24), which Averroes takes to mean imaginative appearance. 10 Thus, when I am led up to
(' cnayroyft) a particularly suggestive instance, say a good image of a straight line, that image is
what specifies that the material intellect will receive the intelligible 'straight line.' Averroes said
that the material intellect, as so determined by my imagination, 11 is "conjoined" with it and that
my disposed intellect is precisely this conjunction of the material intellect with my imagination.
One of the unusual features of Averroes's interpretation is that according to him there is
only one material intellect. My disposed intellect and your disposed intellect are the results of its
conjunctions with the different images in our respective imaginations; we actualize it differently.
In this way the one material intellect is said to be incidentally many. 12 Moreover, since my
imagination is corporeal, therefore, the intelligibles of mundane things in me and, consequently,
my disposed intellect itself are generable and corruptible. 13 Yajiiavalkya observed that one
might also say that the one Brahman is incidentally many individual selves (jfvatman).
�12
Now, before the intelligible 'straight line' can be received by the material intellect, what
is irrelevant in the image in which it is 'embodied' must be taken away ('acpmpsro). This
abstraction brings it into the state of actual intelligibility. To elucidate this act of abstraction,
Averroes referred to another of Aristotle's comparisons: The passage from potential to actual
intelligibility is like a color's transition from potential visibility to actual visibility when the
lights in a room are turned on. The 'light' that illumines the darkness of the image, producing
the abstraction of the latent intelligible, is the agent intellect.
However, this picture of the agent intellect as shining from the outside onto a potential
intelligible embedded in an image is only the way it first appears to us. Averroes said that if we
consider its role in the intellectual insights we have when we draw conclusions from the
intelligibles that we have acquired-perhaps, that one and only one straight line may be drawn
between two points-we come to a deeper view. In reality the agent intellect is related to the
intelligibles of my disposed intellect as form to material. It is somewhat as though the agent
intellect were a light 'full' of Color itself. What really happens when it shines on an image is
that the image's conjunction with Color itself draws out of the latter a particular color, one which
)
had been potentially within Color itself. Then that particular color is received by the material
intellect. Even in my acts of intellecting simple intelligibles in the world, the agent intellect is
incidentally in partial conjunction with my imagination. 14 I am to a degree intellecting it, so that
it, then, is at work as the form of my disposed intellect. 15
For Averroes this understanding of the agent intellect meant that it is itself the source of
the intelligibility of the corporeal world. For since the image arose on the basis of sense
perception of things in the world, the potential intelligibles in my imagination are due to the
potential intelligibles in the things in the world. Consequently, he took the agent intellect to be
�13
Aristotle's unmoved mover from the Metaphysics (1072b18-30; 1075a5-11). Hence, there is
only one agent intellect; and it is its very activity of unchanging, eternal self-intellection.
Correlatively the potential intelligibles of things in the world are their actualities, their being-atwork maintaining themselves in their respective states of completeness. The agent intellect is
responsible for their potential intelligibility in the following sense. For each of them its state of
completeness is the closest state to the agent intellect's self-intellection that its materials are
capable of attaining. 16 Yajiiavalkya noted that the agent intellect as responsible for all
intelligible being is somewhat analogous to the one source of all existence in his tradition.
But how can the self-directed intellection of the agent intellect be responsible for our
intellection of the intelligibles in things outside of itself in the world, when it and the object of its
intellection are absolutely one? As reflexively turned toward itself, it is not aware of the
multiplicity of the potential intelligibles of mundane things as such. Yet it nevertheless does
comprehend them, somewhat in the way that the craft of pottery-making, in a sense,
comprehends the forms of all the bowls for which it could be responsible. But to be actively
responsible for the intellection of this intelligible on this occasion, the agent intellect must also
be 'turned outwards,' as it were, away from itself, in order to shine on the appearances of
mundane things, in hu'man beings' imaginations.
As outward-turned, prior to illuminating the appearance, it seems to be lacking any
intelligible. And yet any one of them can be brought into focus from itself by an image. Thus,
surprisingly, the agent-intellect-as-turned-outward is pure potentiality, pure material-for; it is the
material intellect.
Ill order to appear as such, that is, as empty of intelligibles of mundane things,
it must become "temporarily ignorant of itself." 17
�14
This self-forgetfulness is concretely realized by its conjunction with our imaginations.
By virtue of that conjunction, the agent intellect becomes 'ignorant' of being the self-intellecting
source of all intelligibility; it appears, instead, in each of us in a double form-first, as our
partially actualized receptivities for intelligibles (our disposed intellects) and, second, as light
eliciting those intelligibles by abstraction from our images. At this point Yajfiavalkya interjected
that the agent intellect's ignorance of itself seems to be in amazing agreement with the role of
ignorance in the Upanishads: A knower of Brahman "knows knowledge and ignorance, both of
them, together" (IU, 11). For Brahman, too, turns outward, so that ignorance, that is, awareness
of multiplicity, is one of its aspects. 18 But Brahman is both knowledge and ignorance; the two
are inseparable. 19
From the human point of view, as I learn more, the agent intellect becomes the form of
my disposed intellect to an ever greater degree. In this way my three principal differences from
it will decrease. First, in acquiring more intelligibles, my disposed intellect becomes less and
less a partial view of the agent intellect. Second, in advancing to intelligibles which are less and
less referred to the corporeal world, my disposed intellect becomes more pure.
20
Third, in
coming to ever more encompassing intelligibles, it approaches the agent intellect's unitary
VlSIOn.
Ultimately, while still "in this life,"21 I may arrive at the point where I have acquired all
the intelligibles. 22 Then I will have achieved a state of complete conjunction23 with the agent
intellect. My disposed intellect will have lost all traces of individuality, 24 which are what made
it my disposed intellect; it will have perished as such. All of me that is not intellect is "cut off'
from my intellect, which is identical with the agent intellect. 25 In this sense the state of complete
conjunction has been said to involve an "existential break" from the world.
26
Once again
�15
Yajfiavalk:ya was surprised to recognize in this existential break an analogue in the Aristotelian
tradition, at such a deep experiential level, to a prominent feature of the realization of Brahman.
In complete conjunction I experience myself permanently27 as shining forth intelligibility,
but this 'myself is not the self! used to think I was. For the conjunction removes what had been
preventing my recognition of the ag~nt intellect as being my form. 28 Averroes said that then the
agent intellect, united with us as our form, functions as our sole operative principle. 29
We
might wonder what life in this state of conjunction would be like. One suggestion is that I might
experience it as "a wakeful loss of rationality," a loss of consciousness of my humanity. 30 I
would not be engaged in thinking things out; I would not be conscious of myself as an
individual, as a member of the human species.
Alternatively, guided somewhat by his own experience, Yajfiavalkya proposed that
perhaps I might be aware of myself (what Aristotle in the Ethics poi.rited to as my true self)
engaged in self-intellection, while simultaneously being aware of experiencing my ordinary self
involved in its everyday activities against this backdrop. Yajfiavalkya mentioned two
possibilities, the second of which was not analogous to his own experience. First, in each
instance of intellection, I could perhaps experience the agent intellect as transitioning from
unitary self-intellection to the offering of an aspect of itself to my imagination. Second,
analogous to the end of the path outlined in the Yoga-Sutras (that is, kaivalya), 31 it could be that
engaged in self-intellection I ignore and desist from everyday activities, and so, ultimately,
wither away and die_. 32
�16
1
NEH-supported lectures given at St. John's College, Annopolis, on February 15 and 19, 2008 and
dedicated to the memory of Ralph Swentzell, who did so much to further the study of Eastern Classics at St. John's
College.
2
This and the following few paragraphs are based on K. von Fritz, "NOO:E and NOEIN in the Homeric
Poems," Classical Philology 38. (1943), 79-93.
3
The translations from Homer are based upon those listed in the bibliography.
4
This "directional arc" is analogous, at a higher level, to Merleau-Ponty's arc intentionnel on ~e level of
sensing (Merleau-Ponty, 158).
5
The following few paragraphs are based on W. Otto, The Homeric Gods: The Spiritual Significance of Greek
Religion (New York: Pantheon Books, 1954).
6
The Inner Controller is depicted mythologically as follows:
He entered in here right to the tips of the nails, as a razor slips into a razor-case ....
When he breathes he is called 'breath'; when he speaks, 'speech'; when he sees,
'eye'; when he hears, 'ear'; when he thinks, 'mind.' They are just the names of his
actions. Whoever meditates on any one of these does not know [the Self], for [the
Self] is not completely active in any one of them. One should meditate on them as
[being] simply the Self (BU, 1.4.7)
7
Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1075a7-l l: "So, the condition the human intellect .. . is in at some period of time
... is the condition the intellection that intellects itself is iii over the whole of time." Cf.: "For the gods, the
whole of life is blessed, and for human beings it is so to the extent that there is in it some likeness to such a
state of activity" (NE, l l 78b25-26).
8
I am indebted to my colleague, Michael Blaustein, for a: very fruitful recent conversation about Averroes.
This section is based upon the works of Altmann, Black, Blaustein, Hyman, Ivry, Leaman, and Zedler
listed in the bibliography. Leaman and Zedler have been particularly helpful for the early part, but I have
taken most of it from Black. In the later part I have relied heavily on Blaustein's working out of the details
of the relation between agent and material intellects and have made significant use of Altmann and lvry,
especially the latter's thoughts about conjunction while we are still alive. However, responsibility for any
.
errors that there may be in the interpretation of Averroes is mine alone.
9
OSl...11 Y ~('aql bi al-ma/aka), which means intellect in natural disposition, aptitude, faculty; intellectus
in habitu.
10
Also: "the intellective [part of the soul] intellects the [intelligible] looks in appearances" (43 lb2).
I accept Nussbaum's (1978) suggestion about the meaning of <pavwia. It is based on such
passages as the following 428al, 7, 14ff, & 29ff; b30fi), wherein the link between <pav•o"ia and <paivi::cr0at
seems compelling.
11
In fact, for Averroes the imagination or, more properly, the cogitative power-which, together with the
imagination and memory; prepares what is given in sensation, so that, when illumined by the agent
intellect, the intelligible look can appear through and in-form the material intellect-is a fourth intellect, the
passible intellect (LC, 449.174, cp. 409.640).
"The cogitative power has the following functions : it can make an absent object appear as though
present; it can compare and distinguish the re-presented_objects with each other; it can judge whether a
given re-presented object bears a relation to a directly presented sense intention" (Zedler, 1954, 441).
12
Zedler, 1951, 175.
13
Yet because the human species is eternal, the succession of human souls in which intellection ofintelligibles of
mundane things occurs ensures the continuity ofintellection in the material intellect and the omnitemporality of the
intelligible looks of mundane things as such. Through the repeated presentation of potential intelligibles in
imaginative appearances, this succession "provides a replica in time and in matter of the eternal" intellection of the
agent intellect (Zedler, 1951, 173). It is possible that the belief that souls migrate into different bodies in succession
is a reflection in the form of popular myth of the truth of the omnitemporal unity of the material intellect in the
multiplicity of disposed intellects (Altmann, 82).
14
The agentintellect in this incidental connection would be what Aristotle referred to as the intellect that enters
from outside the door": "It remains then that intellect alone enters additionally into [the seed of a human being]
from outside the door (0upa0ev) and that it alone is divine, for corporeal being-at-work has nothing in common with
its being-at-work" (De Gen. 736b27). Cf:
�17
But the intellect seems to come to be in [us] while being an independent thing, and not to be
destroyed... . [I]ntellecting or contemplating wastes away because something else in us is destroyed,
but it is itself unaffected (without attributes). But thinking things through and loving or hating are
affections (attributes) not of the intellect but of that which has intellect, insofar as it has it. For this
reason, when the latter is destroyed, the intellect neither remembers nor loves, for these acts did not
belong to it but to the composite being which has perished; the intellect is perhaps something more
divine and is unaffected (OS, 408bl8ff).
What Averroes actually says is that the incidental connection constitutes a "disposition" [ ..il~I
(Isti'dad), which means readiness, willingness, preparedness, inclination, tendency, disposition, propensity;
dispositio] of the agent intellect, but one located within human souls. It is a disposition to receive the
intelligible looks of mundane things. Thus, the material intellect is in reality the agent-intellect-as-havingsuch-a-disposition-in-human-beings.
15
"[T]he material intellect is perfected by the agent intellect and intellects if' (Blaustein, 285; italics
added).
16
Based on Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1072bl2: "[I]t is beautiful and in that way a source."
17
Blaustein, 214-15.
18
Aurobindo, 61-62 and 94.
19
Aurobindo, 58 and 72.
20
When my disposed intellect is actively engaged in intellecting an intylligible look, it is also intellecting
itself, since, as Aristotle points out, the intellect is one with what it intellects, in that the second actuality of
both is identical, as lumber's being built is one with the activity of building. In contemplating itself as
informed by the intelligible look, my intellect is also directed toward the image, which specified which
look was to be received, in the same way in which, when we look at a painting, we are directed toward the
scene which we see in it. However, since the mundane thing toward which the intellect is directed via the
image is not pure intelligibility, therefore, the disposed intellect's self-intellection is not pure selfintellection; its act ofintellection is not absolutely one with its object ofintellection (Blaustein, **). In this
way it differs from the self-intellection of the agent intellect. For the object of the agent intellect's
intellection does not point beyond itself.
21
lvry, 83.
22
What had been my intellect would now be either fully (Blaustein, 272, 283) or partly assimilated to the
agent intellect. That is, either 'I' would be engaged in intellection of everything intelligible or, having
abandoned all the contingent aspects of my intellection, I would be focusing solely on its formal aspects,
which are supplied by the agent intellect, so that I would be participating in an aspect of the formal
governing source of the whole (Leaman, 101-03).
23
Ji......wl (ittisal) = connectedness, unitedness, union; juncture, conjunction, link; connection; contact [from
J.,..._, (wasala) =to connect, join, unite, combine, link, attach]. Continuatio =a following of one thing after
another, an unbroken series, a connection, continuation, succession [from continuare =to join together in
uninterrupted succession, to make continuous]. Wasala may be a reformulation of Aristotle's 0\St~.
Altmann (83) states that the notion reflects Plotinus's cruvfut-rEtV [=(tr.) join together; II (intr.)
border on, lie next to; combine, be connected with]. Consider: "[W]e lift ourselves up by the part [of the
soul] which is not submerged in the body and by this conjoin at our own centres to something like the
Centre ofall things .... [W]e must suppose that [our souls conjoin] by other powers, in the way in which
that which is engaged in intellection naturally conjoins with that which is being thoroughly intellected and
that that which is engaged in intellection ... conjoins with what is akin to it with nothing to keep them
apart" (Plotinus, VI.9.8.19-30).
Altmann (83n) also mentions that Plotinus refers to his experience of union as a contact ('acpi]).
However, in Averroes "conjunction" is to be distinguished from "union": ..ib.wl (ittihad)= oneness,
singleness, unity; concord, unison, unanimity; combination; amalgamation, merger, fusion; union [from ..i:.._,
(wahada) =to be alone, unique; II to make into one, unite, unify; to connect, unite, bring together,
amalgamate, merge]. In Greek the corresponding word is 'tvmcru; = combination into one, union.
24
In its perfected state as engaged in intellection of the agent intellect, the disposed intellect is called the
"intellect that has arrived" (intellectus adeptus).
25
Blaustein, 272.
26
Altmann, 74, characterizing the position of Averroes' teacher.
27
Ivry, 83.
�18
28
Blaustein, 284. Cp. further: "[T]he material intellect's awareness of itself even when it is not thinking of
any intelligible form .... is itself kind of actuality, however empty. Averroes claims that this kind of selfawareness is in fact the obverse of the [agent] intellect's fully conscious awareness of itself; the material
intellect's awareness of its own potentiality is a dim awareness of its actuality as the [agent] intellect."
29
It is interesting to note that with respect to conjunction, the agent intellect exercises all four kinds of
responsibility that Aristotle describes in the Physics. It is responsible for my attainment of conjunction in
functioning as my end (tf:A.oi;). Moreover, it is responsible for the motion oflearning, by which I approach
conjunction; for my learning is really its producing intelligibles in me by revealing itself to me as the form
of my disposed intellect (Blaustein, 276-77). Since the agent intellect is what I am more and more coming
to intellect and, so, to be, it is also responsible for conjunction in the way a form is. Finally, it is also
responsible as material, since the material intellect is ultimately identical with it. The same could be said of
Brahman, with the key difference that its responsibility is not limited to the realm of intelligibility.
30
Blaustein, 272.
31
Patafijali, IV.34; see also Feuerstein's comment (p. 145). Kaivalya is "the aloneness" of seeing.
32
Finally, as far as Averroes' position with respect to individual immortality goes, there are two interesting
possibilities. He may have thought that the only immortality was the impersonal immortality of the state of
conjunction and that philosophers were orienting their lives accordingly. The belief in personal
immortality on the part of ordinary people would then be the closest approximation to the truth of which
they were capable. On the other hand, he may have held that while a few intellects may attain conjunction
of, all souls are immortal (Zedler, 1954, 451-52). There is a somewhat similar divergence in the
Upanishadic tradition between Sankara's position that the individual self is in a sense unreal and
Ramanuja's view that individual selves, while not independent, are real.
a
�19
Part Two: Cit (Pure Awareness)
To begin the final section, we return to Aristotle. In the Nichomachean Ethics, he states:
[O]ne who is seeing is aware ('mcr8cive-rat) that he is seeing, and one who is hearing
[is aware] that he is hearing, ... whenever we are perceiving [we are aware] that we
are perceiving and whenever we are engaged in intellection (vocoµev) [we are aware]
that we are engaged in intellection (l l 70a29-3 l). 1
To what aspect of experience is Aristotle pointing here? The prevalent view has been that he
means that, say, perceptual consciousness is accompanied by a reflection on, or a thought about,
that consciousness:2 'I know that I'm looking at you seated there before me.' However, this
seems to occur only intermittently. Hence, an alternative interpretation has been proposed3 that
perceptual consciousness is always selfaware, aware (of) itself,4 but not conscious of itself,
although, at any given time, we may notice selfawareness to a greater or lesser degree.
Yajfiavalkya emphasized to me that it is only through diligent practice that I could learn to
recognize the difference between reflective consciousness and selfawareness in my own
expenence.
To clarify the difference bet_ween selfawareness and reflective consciousness, we shall
draw upon some descriptions of experience by the philosopher J.-P. Sartre. 5 Consciousness is
necessarily always aware (of) itself, but precisely as being conscious of an object beyond itself.
"[T]his awareness (of) consciousness ... is not positional; that is, consciousness is not for itself
its own object. Its object is outside or'l.t by nature .... We shall call such a consciousness
'consciousness of the first degree' ... " (S, 23-14). In this lecture 'consciousness' will always
-mean positional consciousness, consciousness of ari object.
Let us take as an example of first-degree consciousness my perceptual consciousness-ofthe-microphone-on-the-lectern-say, in the mode of staring-at. 6 That perceptual consciousness
is not an object for itself, whereas the mike-on-the-lectern is an object for it. But in each such
�20
act of consciousness, there lives an attentive presence by virtue of which the consciousness is
aware (of) itself. When, as is usually the case, the attentive presence goes unnoticed, we
experience only a dim awareness (of) consciousness.
Yaj:fiavalkya interjected that in his tradition this awareness is called the "witness" (sakshz;
SU, Vl.12-14) and the selfaware quality of consciousness is called "self-luminousness"
(svajyotir). He added that this is what he was referring to when he said: "'You cannot see the
seer of seeing; you cannot hear the hearer of hearing; you cannot think of the thinker of thinking;
you cannot perceive the perceiver of perceiving'" (BU, IIl.4.2). And: "'It is the unseen seer, the
unheard hearer, the unthought thinker, the unperceived perceiver. Other than this there is no
seer, ... hearer, .. . perceiver"' (BU, 7.23). I responded that Sartre seemed to agree with him that
this awareness cannot be the object of consciousness: This sphere "is a sphere of absolute
existence, that is, of pure spontaneities, which are never objects ... " (S, 77).
As opposed to this selfaware, first-degree consciousness-of-objects, which makes up
most of our waking lives, there arises from time to time "a consciousness directed onto [the firstdegree] consciousness, [that is,] a consciousness which takes [the first-degree] consciousness as
its object." Sartre calls it a "second-degree" or "reflecting consciousness." Whereas in the
previous case there was no duality at all to synthesize, here "we are in the preserice of a synthesis
of two consciousnesses, of which one is consciousness ofthe other." When I think, 'Staring at
this mike on the lectern is wasting time,' this act of reflective consciousness involves a synthesis
of the thinking consciousness and the reflected-upon consciousness-of-the-microphone.
Moreover, just like a first degree consciousness, second-degree consciousness, here, my
thinking, is selfaware (S, 28-29).
-
When the thinking consciousness posits the previously unreflected-upon staring
consciousness as its object, it is not its own staring that it is positing. What the reflecting
�21
consciousness exclaims about the staring, concerns not itself, but the staring consciousness,
which is reflected upon. Hence, what reflecting consciousness is turns out to be selfaware
consciousness of another, prior, selfaware consciousness, which, in tum, is consciousness of an
object that is not a consciousness. It is truly re-fleeting, that is, bending backwards, to look at an
earlier moment of consciousness.
The fact that it is not its own staring that the thinking consciousness posits in reflecting
on the staring consciousness raises the question whether the I that seems to be thinking "is that of
the consciousness reflected upon" and not, in fact, an I supposed to be "common to the two
superimposed consciousnesses." Indeed, one suspects that the reason why every reflection
possesses a sense of self is that the reflective act itself gives birth to the sense of self in the
consciousness that is reflected upon (S, 28-29). 7 Sartre offers an example in order to test this
hypothesis:
... I was absorbed just now in my reading. I am going to seek to recall the
circumstances of my reading. . . . Thus I am going to revive ... also a certain thickness
. of un-reflected-upon consciousness, since the objects were able to be perceived only
by that consciousness and remain relative to it. That consciousness must not be
posited as the object of my reflection; on the contrary, I must direct my attention onto
the revived objects, but without losing sight of the un-reflected-upon consciousness,
while maintaining a sort of complicity with it and making an inventory of its content
in a non-positional way. The result is,,not in doubt. While I was reading, there was
consciousness of the book, of the heroes of the novel, but the I was not inhabiting that
consdousm;ss ... (S, 30; second set of italics added)
Here Sartre reawakens the original selfaware consciousness and dwells in the awareness.
That awareness is also a precondition for reflection. Should he reflect, 'I was absorbed in
my reading,' then, instead of dwelling in the awareness-component of the original consciousness,
he would, as it were, transform it into an act of consciousness, the object of which is the original
consciousness, (of) which the awareness was aware. An I is present to that second-order
consciousness. 8 So, we m~y call it 'self-consciousness.'
�22
Sartre goes on to propose how, based upon this I
of self as
or reflection, I go on to construct a sense
aunity, first, of states, like, for example, my hatred of Peter, then, of actions, like my
playing a piano sonata or driving to DC, and, finally, of qualities, like my spitefulness. For
instance, let us suppose a first-order consciousness of disgust and anger, together with the
perception of Peter. If the self-consciousness reflected only on what was appearing in the firstorder consciousness, it would be thinking, 'I feel disgusted with Peter.' But instead, the angry
disgust at Peter appears as a profile, or perspectival view, of a disposition, 'hatred of Peter,'
similarly to the way in which a house will show itself to me in different profiles, depending upon
where I am standing. The hatred appears to be showing a 'side' of itself through the momentary
experience of angry disgust. For the self-consciousness the angry disgust appears to be
emanating from the hatred. On a later occasion, perhaps, the hatred will itself appear to
refledion as an actualization of a quality of spitefulness, which is in Me (S, 45-46, 51, 53). But
in neither case does the self-consciousness realize that the hatred or the spitefulness is arising in
the moment of reflection; rather it supposes that the state or the quality was already there in the
first-order consciousness. 9
This process resulting in a sense of self leads me to say things like "my consciousness,"
when in fact "[t]he I is not the owner of consciousness; it is the object of consciousness" (S, 77).
Yajfiavalkya noted that a process of construction of the sense of self (aham-kara) figures
prominently in the Upanishadic tradition, too. It leads to the arising of many fears and desires,
which, in turn, function as barriers to the realization of Brahman by keeping us 'glued' to
objects. I responded that here, too, there is a remarkable agreement with Sartre, who wrote:
"But perhaps the essential role [of the sense of self] is to mask to consciousness its own
spontaneity. . . . Hence, everything happens as if consciousness ... were hypnotizing itself over
that sense of self, which it constituted" (S, 81-82).
�23
Usually we do not notice the awareness-aspect of consciousness because we are so taken
up with what is appearing to consciousness. Yet on occasion awareness may stand out in our
experience. For instance, some people are engaged in a heated discussion at an outdoor cafe. A
nearby car suddenly backfires. Several of the participants may be so caught up in the
conversation that they don't even notice the loud sound. Others may be startled and shift their
attention to the street. But someone who was anchored in awareness would notice, but not be
jarred by, the sound.
Another example: On a good day the football quarterback Joe Montana, at the top of his
game, would experience a pass play as follows. 10 He was conscious of the linemen rushing at
him, of his receivers running downfield, and so on. But instead oflooking with hurried, anxious
glances, he experienced an awareness spread over the whole unfolding scene. All the players
seemed to be moving in slow motion, and everything appeared with great clarity and
distinctness. He was keenly aware of his own body, the motions of his limbs and an overall
sense of relaxation, as his arm drew back and the ball headed toward the receiver. 11 Taken by
itself this example may mislead us into thinking that awareness is dependent on the attainment of
a certain l~vel of skill, in this case, that of an MVP quarterback. But the previous example and
the following one make it clear that this is not the case.
A third illustration: Some automobile drivers-when they are not too distracted by their
thoughts--experience freeway traffic as follows: 'First, one driver cuts me off; then a slowpoke
is holding me up. My consciousness narrows to focus on the offending driver; and, irritated, I
react by honking or suddenly changing lanes.' Another driver may perceive the same cars on the
beltway as if they were moving in a force field. She is aware of that field as calling forth the
alterations in her driving required in order to maintain a smooth flow of traffic.
�24
A fourth instance: "Surgeons say that during a difficult operation they have the sensation
that the entire operating team is a single organism, moved by the same purpose; they describe it
as a "ballet" in which the individual is subordinated to the group performance ... ~· 12
The following story shows a transition out of awareness into consciousness:
Suppose a woman is engaged in sewing something. A friend enters the room and
'begins speaking to her. As long as she listens to her friend and sews in [awareness],
she has no trouble doing both. But if she gives her 'attention to her friend's words and
·a thought arises in her mind as she thinks about what to reply, her hands stop sewing;
if she turns her attention to her sewing and thinks about that, she fails to catch
everything her friend is saying, and the conversation does not proceed smoothly. In
either case . . . . she has transformed [awareness] into thought. As her thoughts fix on
one thing, they're blank to all others, depriving the mind of its freedom. 13
This example enables us to avoid the misconception that awareness is incompatible with words.
For it was a shift in the way in which she attended to speech, or to her sewing, that led to the
woman's loss of the ability to attend to both simultaneously.
A final case, as described by Merleau-Ponty (1945): Being most of the time in the
consciousness-mode, we live in a world that "only stirs up second-hand thoughts in us." Our
mind is taken up with "thoughts, already formulated and already expressed, which we can recall
silently to ourselves and by which we give ourselves the illusion of an interior life. But this
supposed silence is in reality full of words rattling around." However, occasionally we may
"rediscover primordial silence, J.nderneath the words' rattling around." Then we pass from the
mode of consciousness-of-objects to dwell in awareness. We experience "a certain emptiness,"
"a certain lack which seeks to fill itself," to be transformed into speech (213-14). Then there can
emerge "an authentic word, one which formulates something for the first time"-such as "that of
the child who is pronouncing her first word, of the lover who is discovering his feeling" (207..,
08), or of "the writer who is saying and thinking something for the first time" (214). In the mode
of awareness, we can live through a sort of original emergence.
�25
Words usually serve to keep our thoughts moving within already formulated articulations.
They could be said to function like "preciptitates" (Niederschlage) 14 of previous 'chemical
reactions,' whether our own or others'. However, when awareness becomes prominent, it acts as
a catalyst, which facilitates a fresh chemical reaction.
All the examples manifest an awake, keen involvement in experience together with an
absence of the sense of self and of self-focused emotions and motivations from the foreground.
And each of them foregrounds a different property of awareness in turn-'unstuckness' to
objects, 'spaciousness,' not merely in the spatial and the temporal senses, responsiveness to
dynamic qualities of the surrounding field, organic connectedness with who or what 15 is in the
field, moving out of awareness with the arising of a directing I, and a sense of emptiness out of
which newness arises spontaneously.
We might say that a good seminar could give evidence of some of these signs of
increased awareness. If over time the participants have developed seminar skills, as the surgical
team developed surgical skills, it could become experienced as a ballet. Along with the
development of those skills, some of the members may have cultivated their awareness to some
degree, paralleling the range of levels of awareness in the operating team. That cultivation may
e_nable them to experience "a certain emptiness," from which an "authentic word" may emerge
with greater frequency.
Such characteristics of awareness as those listed above have-led people in certain
pursuits, such as martial arts, to seek to cultivate it, so that it will become reliably foregrounded.
In developing a painterly vision, 16 for instance, one must learn to forget what things are, in order
to see how they are actually appearing to the eye, which means, how they are coming into being
before our eyes. As Merleau-Ponty says of Cezanne: "It is the mountain that he interrogates
�26
with his gaze. What exactly does he ask of it? To unveil the means, visible and not otherwise,
by which it is making itself a mountain before our eyes." 17
We might expand on this account in the following way. As a potential painter's
awareness becomes more prominent, she no longer sees things as already 'finished off,'
but~
instead, as having a potential for greater 'aliveness.' It is as if they were calling to her to join in
their emergence. Then she may heed the appeal and begin to paint. Now it is this particular .,
piece of fruit before her that she captures "coming into being before [her] eyes" in such a way
that it can do so later before our eyes. 18
Another example of the cultivation of awareness is found in psychoanalysis. Freud, in
his recommendations on the proper attitude to be adopted by the analyst, counsels a state of mind
characterized by, first, the absence of reasoning or
deliberate attempts to select, concentrate or understand; and [second] even, equal and
impartial attention to all that occurs within the field of awareness. . . . This technique,
says Freud, " .. . consists simply in not directing one's notice to anything in particular
and in maintaining the same 'evenly suspended attention' (as I have called it) in the
face of all that one hears ... " 19
That is, the analyst deliberately withdraws from consciousness-of-objects and dwells in the
awareness component of consciousness. This open attentional attitude is to be distinguished, on
the one 1hand, from a merely passive attention, in which the mind wanders freely from object to
object, and, on the other, from a focal attentional attitude, searching for a particular meaning. 20
Partly because evenly suspended attention was criticized as unattainable,21 Freud's prescriptions
to practice it did not become integrated into psychoanalytic training programs.
However, Wilfred Bion, probably the most thoughtful psychoanalyst of the latter part of
the twentieth century, forcefully advocated this practice in the following terms:
[T]he capacity to forget, the ability to eschew desire and understanding, must be
regarded as essential discipline for the psycho-analyst. Failure to practise this
discipline will lead to a steady deterioration in the powers of observation whose
maintenance is ~ssential. The vigilant submission to such discipline will by degrees
�27
strengthen the analyst's mental powers just in proportion as lapses in this discipline
will debilitate them.
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
To attain to the state of mind essential for the practice of psycho-analysis I
avoid any exercise of memory.. . . When I am tempted to remember the events of any
particular session I resist the temptation.... If I find that some half-memory is
beginning to obtrude I resist its recall.. ..
A similar procedure is followed with regard to desires: I avoid entertaining
desires and attempt to dismiss them from my mind. For example, ... it interferes with
analytic work to permit desires for the patient's cure, or well-being or future to enter
the mind. Such desires .. . lead to progressive deterioration of [the analyst's] intuition.
[There is an aspect of ultimate reality] that is _currently presenting the unknown and
unknowable [in the consulting room]. This is the 'dark spot' that must be illuminated
by 'blindness' [that is, ignorance]. Memory and desire are 'illuminations' that destroy
the value of the analyst's capacity for observation as a leakage of light into a camera
might destroy the value of the film being exposed. 22
The effect of not following this discipline is to interpret what the patient says in terms of
what the analyst wishes or already 'knows,' thus closing her off from what may be emerging for
the frrst time in the current hour. Bion's psychoanalytic state of mind is comparable to Socratic
ignorance. Both represent an opening of oneself, in a conversation, to notice possibilities
springing up that would otherwise remain unthought.
Another area in which a practice has been advocated for the enhancement of awareness is
philosophy. In the early twentieth century, Edmund Husserl proposed pursuing wisdom by
following a path that he called "phenomenology." By this he meant an account of the things
I
appearing to you precisely in the way in which they actually appear.
Philosophy students sometimes think that studying phenomenology entails mainly
reading books. However, learning to see the things appearing to you precisely in the way in
which they actually appear takes practice. Martin Heidegger, Husserl's best known student, had
great difficulty at the beginning of his study of phenomenology.
It concerned the simple question how thinking's manner of procedure which called
itself "phenomenology" was to be carried out.~ .. My perplexity decreased slowly ...
only after I met Husserl personally in his workshop .. .. Husserl's teaching took place
in a step-by-step training in phenomenological "seeing" which at the same time
demanded that one relinquish the untested use of philosophical knowledge.... I
�28
myself practiced phenomenological seeing, teaching and learning m Husserl's
proximity after 1919.23
The phenomenological seeing that one would practice is founded on an act called "the
phenomenological reduction." While it was instituted in the service of phenomenological
philosophy, Husserl was aware of the effect it could have by itself upon the person practicing it:
Perhaps it will even turn out that the total phenomenological attitude, and the
[reduction] belonging to it, essentially has, first of all, the vocation of effecting a
complete personal transformation, which would, in the first place, be comparable to a
religious conversion, but which beyond that contains within itself the significance of
being the greatest existential transformation to which humanity as humanity is
called.24
Yajiiavalkya noted that the designation "greatest existential transformation"-like the earlier
"existential break" associated with conjunction in Averroes-fits the experience of "waking up
to" (pratibodham) Brahman as well (KeU, II.4).
In characterizing the phenomenological reduction, I shall borrow the descriptions of the
later Husserl's closest collaborator, Eugen Fink, because they are vivid and strongly suggestive
of awakening to Brahman.
25
The phenomenological reduction is a two-part act (F, 41). Husserl
called the first component of that act a "disconnection" (Ausschaltung), or an "epoche," a
suspension ('s7toxft), of the "natural attitude," the attitude in which we take things for granted, or
as a matter of course (selbstverstdndlich).
Disconnection means that you deliberately abstain from all beliefs; you inhibit your
accepting of all the things you take as what 'counts' (Geltendes) for you (F, 3 9-40). You cease
living in acts of positional consciousness in Sartre's sense. As we observed Sartre doing, while
remaining disconn.ected you turn your attention from the objects of consciousness to the
consciousn~ss-of-objects.
You are not caught up with objects, but are attentively.'spread' over
the whole of consciousness~of-objects, without positing that as
an object. And you alter your
mode of attention from an active searching-for to a receptive letting-things-come. You are
�29
learning to do something involuntary, somewhat like preparing to receive "the visitation of
sleep," which comes in the way as the god Dionysus visits his followers, when they no longer are
distinct from the role they are playing. 26 You are not gradually acquiring things in the way the
disposed intellect acquires intelligibles.
The disconnection includes the "nullification" of the sense of yourself as an empirical
human being-it "un-humanizes" (entmenschlicht) you-in that it "lays bare the ... onlooker"
"already at work" in you, into which you now "fade away" (F, 40). In the terminology of this
lecture, you disidentify with your sense of self; and you pass into awareness rather than in
consciousness. Yajfiavalkya interjected that, involved in the realization of Brahman, there is a
similar correlation of the "de-construction of the sense of self' (nir-aham-kiira) with a fading
away into the onlooker, that is, the "witness," which was already at work.
You are now in a position to notice precisely what appears to you in just the way in
which it appears. As with Freud's evenly suspended attention, all the phenomena are treated
equally; none is assumed in advance to have priority over the others. As in the case of painterly
vision, you are not imposing your knowledge on your experiencing; you are operating 'prior' to
your identification of things or events. Your going backwards involves a sort of reversal of the
outward-turning action ofthe~agent intellect. For, viewed on one level, the agent intellect
elicited intelligibles from their latent state in the appearances, while the disconnection goes back
behind those intelligibles, which, due to language, are already at work in our ordinary experience
of the appearances. In its receptive attentiveness the disconnection has an 'empty' relationship
to experience, perhaps somewhat like the agent intellect in its 'empty' state as material intellect.
The second component of the phenomenological reduction is a leading-back, the reducing proper. 27 In it, "while explicitly inquiring backwards behind the acceptednesses ... with
respect to your belonging to the world," the onlooker blasts open (sprengen) with insights your
�30
"being held captive by your captivation" (Befangenheit) with the world. You experience this as
a "breakthrough" (Durchbruch; FK, 348). As a result you discover for the first time that
underlying all of your experiences has been a primordial conviction (Urdoxa in Husserl), an
unformulated, implicit acceptance of the world and of yourself as belonging to it (F, 40-41 ).
Here "world" refers, not to the collection of all things, but to what is originally given as a
universal background, i:h the way a horizon is given for vision. While particular beliefs of yours
may have occasionally broken down, that did not shake your implicit acceptance of the horizon.
You are now sharing in the onlooker's awareness of the world, which is the "universally
flowing and continuing [world-]apperception," the "underground" (Untergrund) out of which
every act of consciousness springs up.
In this sense phenomenology is said to make the
ultimate ground of the world available to an experience (FK, 349, 352, 340),28 one in which we
experience "how ... the world is coming about for us."29
Yajfiavalkya accepted that painterly vision, evenly suspended attention, and the
phenomenological reduction are at least partial Brahman-experiences, ones that go beyond the
spontaneously arising Brahman-moments on the football field or on the highway. However, he
pointed out two differences. First, they are cultivated in the service of other ends, painting,
healing patients, or pursuing wisdom, whereas realization of Brahman is the supreme end (BU,
IV.3.22), pursued for its own sake. Second, in the other contexts awareness is to be actualized
only on particular occasions, before the canvas, in the consulting room, or in the
phenomenological "workshop," whereas one remains continually in the Braliman-realm.
I responded that, according to Husserl, in going about the course of ordinary life, the
phenomenologist has the epoche as "an active-dispositional30 attitude to which we resolve
ourselves once and for all" and which "can be actualized again and again,"31 like the dancer's
repeated re-actualizing of the dancing that she has as a first actuality. I told him that this raised
�31
the question for me whether the knower of Brahman could be said to be Brahman in this
dispositional sense.
In the Upanishadic tradition you may engage in a meditative practice, in which you could
pass through several stages. At the beginning you deliberately concentrate and turn your
consciousness inward, whil~ endeavoring to dwell more and more in awareness. 32 You need to
keep reminding yourself to notice the awareness, which is always there. Initially you cannot
accomplish this while you are doing something else, because a thing or event always captures
your attention.
After a while you will be able to maintain this centering of yourself in awareness. While
· your mind gradually has become dominated by awareness, you still occasionally experience
moments of conscious reflection on the immediately preceding moment of awareness. 33 You are
now "allowing the mind to fluctuate." 34 The following analogy may convey some sense of what
that is like. "Suppose a neighbor were to ask you to look after her children .... When the
children come you could take one of three different courses of action." You could abandon
responsibility by telling them that they can do whatever they want as long as they don't bother
you. Or you could try to control them by telling them what to do and not to do. Or, finally, you
could~
allow the children to play. This "allowing" is not active, since you do not interfere. It
is not passive, since you are present with the children ... in a total way. It is like a cat
sitting at a mouse hole. It appears to be asleep, but let the mouse show but a whisker
and the cat will pounce. It is only by allowing that one truly understands what
allowing means.
'Allowing' brings awareness to the fore in a way that pushing away and controlling do not. 35
You are aware of movements from focused to unfocused consciousness, of shifts from perceptual
to thinking consciousness, of fluctuations from consciousness-of to empty awareness, and so
�32
forth, as well as of the reversals of all these. "Allowing is ... , so to say, what fluctuating
awareness is 'made of.'"
Eventually no reflection is experienced any more; this total wakefulness, completely
purifies one of the 'sleepiness' which is what the 'habit' of consciousness really is. 36 To be
aware you don't have to be conscious ofsomething; nor do you need to be someone, much less
someone special. 37
Positional consciousness-of-objects, which was first for us, here shows itself to be, in
fact, a derivative of non-positional awareness, which is what is first in itself. Initially
consciousness seemed to have the component of awareness; but now we may say that awareness
sometimes manifests itself partially in the form of consciousness-of-objects, while in itself it is
pure awareness (cit). Again, this is quite analogous to what Averroes said of the agent intellect.
In itself it is pure, having no reference to the world; but, through its outward turn, it conjoins
itself to our imaginations, resulting in the emergence from it of particular intelligibles.
Upon emerging from this absolute silence, you may be so forcefully struck by something
in the world that you consciously recognize that you are just pure awareness.3 8 You
momentarily become conscious of this objectless being "present with the children ... in a total
way" as yourself. You are now conscious of havib.g arrived in the Brahman-realm.39
Yajiiavalkya interjected that this recognition is what is expressed in the words: "I am Brahman!"
(BU, I.4.10). He added that this experiencing of pure awareness is what he was referring to
when he had said:
· "Though then he does not see [any thing], yet he does not see while seeing. There is
no cutting off of the seeing of the seer .... But there is no second (dvitfyam), no other
(anyad), separate from him, that he could see .... When there is some other (anyad),
then one can see ... the other." (BU, IV.3.23 & 31)
�33
I said to Yajfiavalkya that, according to this account, pure awareness seemed to be empty.
He responded that while it is empty of objects, it is full in the sense that it is an experiencing of
the moment-to-moment "going forth of things in different directions" (vyuccaranti), like "sparks
from a fire" (BU, 11.1.20). Alternatively it is an experiencing of the whole's springing forth
(sambhavati), which is like a spider's emitting (srjate) of a thread of its web or like plants'
springing up from the earth (MuU, 1.1.7). It is as if in pure awareness we had 'gone backwards'
to a point just 'before' things, self, and world emerge. I told him that what he'd said reminded
me of a passage in Sartre: "Thus, each instant of our conscious life reveals to us a creation ex
nihilo .. .. this inexhaustible creation of existence of which we are not the creators" (S, 79).
Yajfiavalkya continued by pointing out that what he had just said about pure awareness
being full is conveyed by the traditional name for the Brahman-realm, 'saccidananda.' The
three parts of the one word express the oneness of pure existence (sat), pure awareness (cit), and
pure joy (ananda).
Since there is no 'of,' as in 'consciousness-of,' awareness is pure sat rather
than being conscious of it. I said that Fink seemed to be giving voice to the same experience
when he referred to the unique identity of the onlooker and the universally flowing worldapperception (FK, 355). As "there is ... no other (anyad), separate from him, that he could see,"
so there are no objects to separate the onlooker from the flowing world-apperception.
Yajfiavalkya's report about the oneness of existence and awareness brought to my mind
something in the Thomistic branch of the Aristotelian tradition, which could make that oneness
partly understandable to me. I mentioned it to Yajfiavalkya: Thomas understood each of us to
·exist by virtue of a separate act of is-ing (esse), which is other than our essence, our humanity. A
human being is, not by virtue of being human, but by participation in, or reception of, is-ing
from, absolute Is-ing, just as a piece of wood that is afrre is so by participation in Fire (ST, Q.3,
A.4r). Absolute Is-ing is like the Sun, and a human being is like some part of the air. Each
�34
individual instantiation of the intelligible human essence remains illuminated, that is, continues
is-ing, only as long as absolute Is-ing is shining on it (ST, Q.8, A.Ir). That is why Thomas states
that what we ca// 'creation' is, in fact, an ongoing "flowing out, arising, springing out"
(emanatio) (ST, Q.44, A.Ir) from absolute Is-ing. This much ofThomas's view can help us to
understand how the Upanishadic experience of cit is an experience of sat.
Jacques Maritain applied Thomas' s understanding of the distinction between esse and
essence to interpret the experience of the knower of Brahman in the following way. 40 In
reflecting consciousness we experience our soul in its acts. What we experience in reflection is
not our intelligible essence but rather our self "prisoner of the mobility, of the multiplicity, of the
fugitive luxuriance of the phenomena and the operations which emerge in us from the night of
the unconscious-prisoner of the apparent self'(I45-46). But, as we have seen, the cultivation
of awareness, instead of consciousness or reflecting consciousness, enables those on the path to
realizing Brahman to pass from ordinary self-conscious experience "to an exceptional and
privileged experience, emptying into the abyss of subjectivity, ... to escape from the apparent
self, in order to reach the absolute Self'(I46). These practitioners "strip themselves of every
image, of every particular representation, and of every distinct operation to such a degree that ...
they reach not the essence df their soul but its existence, substantial1 esse itself'(I 48), "by an ...
annihilating connaturality"(I46), in the absolute silence of total wakefulness.
[F]rom the fact that existence is ... limited only by the essence that receives it ... one
can understand that this negative experience, in reaching the substantial esse of the
soul, reaches, at once, both this existence proper to the soul and existing in its
metaphysical profusion and the sources of existing, according as the existence of the
soul . . . is something that is emanating and is pervaded by an inflow from which it
holds everything.... It is the sources of being in his soul that the human being reaches
in this way." (153-54)
Thus, through practice, in experiencing pure awareness (cit), the knower of Brahman
has come to experience herself as the inflow of is-ing flowing out from abso.lute Is-ing
�35
(sat). One might say that the transition from experiencing myself as witness to
recognition of pure awareness is like going from having my finger on the pulsing of
the world to recognizing my finger as the pulsing of the world. Yajfiavalkya added
that Maritain's interpretation at least clearly distinguished the Sun of Averroes's
outward-turned self-intellection of intelligible essences from the Sun of outflowing
selfaware existence.
Now we are in a position to say that when Svetaketu realizes "You are That," he is
experiencing himself as the outflow of sat and recognizing as his true self pure awareness (of)
the moment-to-moment flying out of sparks, which are 'on the way' to becoming things-and
that this recognizing is that very going forth. Moreover, in this recognition Svetaketu is what is
recognized: "One who knows the supreme Brahman becomes that very Brahman" (MuU, IIl.2.9;
cp. BU, IV.4.13) and "becomes this All" (BU, I.4.10).
As earlier we wondered what the daily experience of the state of complete conjunction
would be like, so now the analogous question arises with respect to the Brahman-realm. In the
discussion of the phenomenological reduction, I had raised the possibility that we could acquire
pure awareness as a first actuality, in the sense of an active disposition. The knower of Brahman
would then alternate between pure awareness and consciousness-of, in the way that I can 'turn
on' my contemplation of the Pythagorean Theorem as I wish. This suggestion would parallel
Aristotle's experience that we are for intermittent periods of time in the same state as the divine
itself is in over the whole of time. The difference would be that instead of turning from one
mode of consciousness, say, perceiving or thinking, to a different one, intellecting, the knower of
Brahman would alternate at will between two different ways of total experiencing, between
consciousness and pure awareness. It would be somewhat analogous to looking at the.well. known duck-rabbit ambiguous figure and seeing it now as a duck, now as a rabbit.
�36
However, Yajfiavalkya said that living in the Brahman-realm is, instead, like a
hypothetical double seeing of both the duck and the rabbit at once, rather than like a seeing of
them in altemation. 41 The knower of Brahman is engaged with consciousness-of while
simultaneously remaining in the realm of pure awareness. The following analogy conveys
something of this:
The ordinary person only sees the reflection in the mirror but the realized person sees
the reflection as well as the mirror. "For instance you see a reflection in the mirror
and the mirror. You know the mirror to be the reality and the picture in it a mere
reflection. Is it necessary that to see the mirror we should cease to see the reflection
in it?" Similarly, the realized one continues to experience the world in his realized
state. Thus the realized person appreciates ''the distinctions" of sound, taste, form,
smell etc. "But he always perceives and experiences the one reality in all of them."42
Brahman-knowers' experiencing of the everyday world inthe mirror of purified awareness
enables their keen yet calm involvement in that world. In the analogy we could take 'seeing the
reflection' to stand for consciousness of the world, and 'seeing the mirror,' for pure awareness.
When I see the mirror along with the reflections, the latter are not being viewed 'from outside,'
as they are in the mode of consciousness, but rather as emerging out of awareness. One might
also apply the analogy to the self by saying that knowers of Brahman experience their ordinary
selves, too, as being virtual images cast by the mirror.
,
1
The mirror analogy may be applied to the modes of experiencing other than those
encountered specifically in meditative practice. Consciousness-of-objects-whether perceiving,
sensing, emoting, evaluating, thinking, and so on-and self-consciousness, too, are like a vision
of things in the virtual space of the mirror. There are two fundamentally different modes of
consciousness-of-objects, depending upon whether or not the object in question is an object in
the true sense. When it maintains itself throughout a succession of acts of consciousness of it, it
is an object in the etymological sense that it is something set or put (-jectum), before or over
against (ob-) the act of consciousness. This setting-over-against is what is meant by 'subject-
�37
object duality.' Such an object shall be referred to henceforth as an "Object." It has an identity,
to which we may return again and again.
The following example illustrates the different layers that may arise in perceptual
consciousness-of-Objects. It begins with the emergence of an hnplicit Object from the
background, continues with a prepredicative explicating of it, and goes on to various layers of
predicative development in the following way. While I am engaged in seminar, someone's
coffee cup may emerge from the margins of my consciousness and may attract my attention and
become an explicit object of consciousness. My attention may travel from its color to a figure on
the side, and then to its overall shape, and so on. 43 Then my interest may awaken sufficiently, so
that I think, 'The cup has a circular figure on the side.' This shift represents a transition from the
cup's just previously having become implicitly determined as having a circle on its side to its
being grasped in an active identification as determined by the circle on its side. 44 Then I may
think, 'The fact that the cup has that circular figure on its side is puzzling. I wonder what it
stands for.' My thought may subsequently be led to such Objects as 'the circular,' 'shape in
general,' and 'property.' 45
'Prior' to such perceptual consciousness of Objects and its developments, there is a
sensory consciousness of objects, which has beer\. vividly described by Erwin Straus. 46 We sense
objects in the same way in which we respond to the dynamic quality of a tone, which is "a state
of unrest, a tension, an urge, almost a will to move on, as if a force were acting on the tone and
pulling it in a certain direction."47 We are in a symbiotic relation (200) with the 'tones,' to which
we respond with incipient movements as we do to dance music (239). This pre-linguistic,
flowing realm is the ground from which Objects emerge (204). We live simultaneously in the
. Objective and the sensory and may experience the tension between them, as the latter resists
being fit into the former. Some people may be especially attracted to the loss of their stance
�38
over-against Objects, of their self-consciousness, and of the sharp distinctness within the
Objective realm (284, 275). Precisely because of its lack of subject-Object duality and selfconsciousness, sensory consciousness is occasionally mistaken for awareness by beginners.
However, it is just another mode of vision of the reflections in the virtual space produced by the
mrrror.
All of the above are distinctions that can be clearly seen in the vision of that virtual space.
In addition to seeing these, the knower of Brahman sees the virtual space and its reflections as
emanating from the mirror. This second sort of seeing is pure awareness. While awareness is
never totally absent from our experience, we notice it to varying degrees.
Usually the degree to which we notice it is very minimal as when we seem to be, in
Sartre's words, "hypnotized" by what we are conscious of. This is our 'default' mode of
experiencing. When we are reading, thinking, conversing in seminar, dancing, gazing at a
sunset, or "even stretching out a hand to open the door," we are absorbed in that moment's
action.
48
When we are self-conscious, we are also absorbed in the self-consciousness. In
absorption, awareness seems to have gotten lost; but it has only receded into the deep
background.
In some special moments, which have been called moments of "flow," 49 awarenes~
becomes prominent in an incidental way. We have not deliberately pursued it; it just happens.
The flow experience may be spontaneous, as in the earlier examples of the driver and the woman
sewing; or it may be skill-related, as in the examples of Joe Montana and the surgeon. One
might say that, in the case of the skill-related flow experience, through practice the body's usual
resistance to intended action is overcome. As a result consciousness as over against the body
disappears, allowing awareness to become prominent. We move out of flow when the over-
�39
againstness arises as the 'I' becomes active either in reaction-'Wow! This is so exciting!'--or
in action-' If I bear down, I can keep this going.'
As we saw in relation to painting, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology, prominence of
awareness may be deliberately cultivated in order to be able to engage in some pursuit. Here
awareness is practiced, so that the practitioner comes to experience the witness as a disposition.
Having it as a.first actuality, he or she can then activate it when engaging in the activity for the
sake of which it was developed.
Finally, in the double seeing of the knower of Brahman, pure mirror-awareness is
permanently prominent as a second actuality; and there is a 'loose,' 'unstuck,' clear
consciousness-of-objects as well. This is said to be the state of one "freed while alive"
(jfvanmukta; cp. BU, IV.4.7).
In virtue of the oneness of sat and cit, this double seeing is one with the out-flowing of
existence. Thus, the freedom manifests itself in that one's awareness is active, or creative, with
respect to the world, on the one hand, and one's action is responsive, or receptive, with respect to
it, on the other-a reversal of the usual receptivity of consciousness and activity of action. 50 In
the realm of action, this freedom is freedom to respond without a 'hitch' to the vectors in the
field of experience, wliich are analogous to the directional arc involved in realizing the full
significance of a situation mentioned in Part One. These field vectors include what Yajfiavalkya
takes Aristotle to be referring to when he speaks of feeling feelings or performing actions as
required (8c:i), in the required cases, with respect to the required people, in the required way, and
for the required reasons (NE, 1106b 17-2 7).
Another way of putting this is to say that the freedom of the knower of Brahman
manifests itself in the ability to be able to move freely through the world with grace and
effortlessness, which is called 'saving awareness,' crocppocruvri: 51
�40
For crocppocruVT) is precisely the virtue of general and unself-conscious self-possession,
of universal grace and effortless command neither specified by particular action,
which would transform it from crocppOcrUVTJ to some particular virtue, nor checked by
any opacity, which would translate it into a mode of self-control. What could work
better for its model than a pure [awareness ]?52
Knowers of Brahman have no inner barriers, which could get in the way -of their spontaneously
allowing what is called for by the current moment to emerge.
In conclusion, we note certainformal parallels between the role of Brahman in the
Upanishads and that of the agent intellect according to Averroes. First, each is the sourceBrahman, of all existence, and the agent intellect, of all being, that is, of all intelligibility.
Second, both are "self-luminous" and are responsible for 'seeing' in some sense. Third, the nondual relation between the individual self and Brahman is like that between the disposed intellect
and the agent intellect. Fourth, a 'self-forgetting' 'outward turn' 'occurs' in the case of each of
them. Fifth, both the experiencing of Brahman and the experience of intellection could be said to
involve a breaking-free from my ordinary captivation by the images on the walls of a cavelike
dwelling, an engagement in a practice, and, ultimately, an existential breakthrough to
"immortalizing." In that breakthrough, in both cases, I deconstruct my ordinary sense of self and
discover my true self as being both non-private (that is, not mine alone) and non-dual with
respect to the true self of others.
However, there are fundamental differences in other respects. Whereas in the one case
the captivation is by opinions and by the perceptual world and is broken through in becoming
free for intelligibles, involving a gradual movement of theoretical study, in the other case it is
captivation by the mundane way of experiencing objects, whether in sensory, perceptual, or
intellectual consciousness; and it is broken by a sudden shift from involvement in consciousness,
whether first-degree or reflective, to pure awareness, a shift which may be experienced on a path
of cultivation of awareness. Moreover, the nature of the one, impersonal, true self of us all, in
�41
which we share non-dually in our immortalizing, which for Averroes is the self-intellection of
the agent intellect, is pure awareness according to Yajfiavalkya. Finally, on the one hand, the
material intellect may realize conjunction with the agent intellect, which is the source of all
intelligibility in the world. On the other hand, in the Brahman-realm pure selfawareness realizes
that it is non-dual with the continual springing up of all existence, both sensory and intelligible,
of the world as a whole, including but not limited to the intelligible realm.
Yajfiavalkya thought that the following comment on Aristotle by Mr. Klein might
provide a fruitful direction to pursue in the question period: The receptive aspect of "vm:iv ... is
the state of wakefulness, a state of preparedness and alertness .... Nouc; ... when it is ... one with
the v01rr<i .... [o]nly then can be said to be wakefulness 'at work' ... " 53 Looking back to the
beginning, Yajfiavalkya wondered how Homer's realization of the full significance of a
situation, 54 Aristotle's reception of an intelligible, and Averroes's complete conjunction with the
agent intellect's self-intellection would compare, with respect to their degrees of wakefulness,
with dwelling in pure awareness.
I asked him how he would respond. He said: 'Perhaps the major difference between the
Upanishads and our three W estem thinkers might be that for the former the state of empty
"receptivity is supreme, that is, even more wakeful than "wakefulness at work."'
I rejoined: 'I'm not sure that I've really understood Averroes. But it might be that his
account of complete conjunction is a good partial depiction of Brahman. Insofar as Mr. Klein
was directing us to the experiential living-through of the moment in which the empty, receptive
intellect is one with the revelation of what is a profile of the full, unitary agent intellect, we do
seem to be pointed toward a face of Brahman, as it were, namely, the intellectual one.'
Yajfiavalkya had the last word: 'What you may be overlooking is that the empty,
receptive material intellect is an appearance of the outward turning of the full source of
�42
determinacy, the agent intellect, whereas, in the case of Brahman, the full and determinate is an
appearance of the outward turning of the empty.'
1
Compare: "Since [in all cases of seeing and hearing] we are aware ('mcr0av6µE:0a) that we are seeing and hearing,
it must either be by sight that we are aware [for example] that we are seeing or by some other [sense]" (OS, 425bl 112). "To each sense there belongs something special and something common. For example, what is special to sight
is to see, [what is special] to hearing is to hear, and similarly with the rest. But there is also a certain common power
that goes along with all of them, by which one is also aware that one is seeing and hearing (for it is not, after all, by
sight that one is seeing that one is seeing ... )." (On Sleeping and Waking, 455a12-5)
2
We may speak of self-consciousness in the sense of consciousness of myself only 'after' the construction of the
sense of self, which is discussed below.
3
By Kosman, who also made reference to Sartre's La Transcendence de !'Ego. I had been planning to use Sartre to
introduce the notion of selfawareness (seen. 4) as an alternative to anything in Aristotle. However, Kosman's
article, which I came across a couple of months ago, made it possible to cite Aristotle himself in order to introduce
this notion.
4
I write 'selfawareness' and 'awareness (of) itself' to suggest that the relationship between awareness and what it is
aware (of) is not the same as that between consciousness and the object of consciousness. I am following Sartre's
practice in L 'etre et le neant (pp. 18-20), where he writes 'conscience (de) soi' to refer to what I am calling
'selfawareness or 'awareness (of) itself'.
5
In La Transcendance de I 'Ego, from which the quotations are taken, Sartre uses only one word, 'conscience,'
which I have rendered as 'consciousness' when it is positional and as 'awareness' when it is non-positional.
Moreover, he does not here write 'conscience (de),' as he did later (see footnote 4).
Gurwitsch (1941) endorsed most of Sartre's position, to which Schiltz then objected. They debate this
issue further in Schiltz and Gurwitsch.
..
6
What is said will apply as well to consciousness that is imagining, remembering, judging, thinking, intellecting,
feeling, or evaluating.
7
See footnote 9.
8
The last two sentences represent my understanding of Gurwitsch (1985), 5, second paragraph).
9
Gurwitsch (1941) pointed out that this account of the arising of the sense of self is inconsistent with the fact that
reflection can accomplish no more than to render explicit the content of the reflected-upon consciousness (332-33).
He later (1985) offered a corrected account of the construction of the psychical empirical sense of self (15ff). It is
based on the recognition that both states and "qualities designate psychic constants, i.e., regularities of experience ...
rather than mental facts which themselves fall under direct experience" ( 15), as they do in Sartre.
10
I remember many years ago reading an article by him in The Washington Post, in which he described his
experience in somewhat these terms.
11
These characteristics are similar to those in the example of the violinist in Csikszentmihalyi: "A violinist must be
extremely aware of every movement of her fingers, as well as of the sound entering her ears, and of the total form of
the piece she is playing, both analytically, note by note, and holistically, in terms of its overall design" (64).
12
Csikszentmihalyi, 65.
13
Bankei, 58. I have substituted "awareness" first for "the Unborn" and then for "it," referring to her Buddha-mind.
14
This is Husserl's word (1964), passim.
15
It need not be living beings with respect to which we experience the connection: "The [mountain] climber,
focusing all her attention on the small irregularities of the rock wall that will have to support her weight safely,
speaks of the sense of kinship that develops between fingers and rock .. ." "This feeling is not just a fancy of the
imagination, but is based on a concrete experience of close interaction with some Other ... " (Csikszentmihalyi, 64).
16
A popular book on learning to draw, tells us of a subjective state that artists speak of, which is characterized by "a
sense of close 'connection' with the work, a sense of timelessness, difficulty in using words ... a lack of anxiety, a
sense of close attention to shapes and spaces and forms that remain nameless." It is important for the artist to
experience the shift from the ordinary state to this one. The student is encouraged to set up the proper "conditions
for this mental shift" and to become "able to recognize and foster this state in" himself (Edwards, 46). These
characteristics correspond quite well with the qualities of a consciousness in which awareness is in the foreground.
17
Merleau-Ponty (1961), 166, translation modified.
�43
18
The articulation in this paragraph emerged in a conversatibn with Nina Haigney, just a few minutes before I
delivered this lecture. It was an example of the sort of thing it attempts to articulate-a conversation, with
awareness to some degree in the foreground, allowing for the experience of"a certain emptiness," followed by the
·
emergence, in two people, of an, a least relatively, "authentic word."
19
Epstein, 194. The quotation from Freud is from "Recommendations to Physicians Practicing Psychoanalysis"
(1912).
20
Epstein, 195.
21
By Theodore Reik in 1948; see Epstein, 199-201.
22
Bion, 51-52, 55-56, 69.
23
M. Heidegger, On Time and Being, quoted in Ihde, 15; italics added and translation corrected at one point.
24
Husserl (1962), 140.27-33; to maintain consistency of terminology, I substituted "[reduction]" for epoche.
25
The same view is conveyed, in different language, by Husserl himself(l962), Sections 37-42.
26
Merleau-Ponty (1945), 191, where, however, the expression is not being used to characterize the
phenomenological reduction.
27
The distinction between disconnection and reducing proper parallels that in the Buddhist tradition between
mindfulness (sati) and seeing distinctly in detail (vi-pa§yana).
28
Cp.: "And so also must the gaze made free by the epoche be .. . an experiencing gaze" (Husserl (1962), 156.1315.
29
Husserl (1962), 147.29-32.
30
I take habituell to correspond to an adjectival form of 't~t<;.
31
Husserl (1962), 153.36-37 and 140.19-20.
32
Sekida, 62 and 93. This stage in the yogic tradition involves eight members, the last three of which are
concentration, meditation, and in-stance (samiidhi), which is opposed both to ex-stasy and to our ordinary counterstance vis-a-vis objects (Patafijali, II.29).
33
Sekida, 93; cp. Patafijali, I.42 and 44: coincidence wit hreflection (saviciirii samiipattih)
34
The quotations in this paragraph are taken from Low, 149-50; italics added.
35
When allowing the children to play, you are not caught up in their playing; so, you have a kind of distance from it.
Yet you are 'with' them, accompanying them. Thus, your distance is of a different kind than the distance that occurs
in Objectivation, where the Ob-ject is over against you (discussed below).
Moreover, while it might seem as though the Objective, perceptual world were free of captivation, when
compared to the dynamic, sensory realm (discussed below), in fact, the former is grounded in the primordial doxa of
the latter.
36
Sekida, 62 and 94. The role that this experience of pure awareness plays in the upanishadic tradition parallels that
of the "aloneness of seeing" (dr§eh kaivalyam; Patafijali, II.25) in the yogic tradition (Patafijali, III.50; IV.26 and
34).
37
Low, 40.
38
Sekida, 95.
39
This account ofrealization of Brahman is based on zen sources. However, as Shear points out, this experience of
awake, pure selfawareness lacks any empirical qualities or content. As a result differing references to it as the ·
Brahman-realm or Buddha-nature are not pointing to qualitative differences in the experience (1983, 57-59; 1990,
392).
40
The page numbers given in this paragraph all refer to Maritain, Quatre essais.
41
Carter, 54. Sekida, 91-97, also depicts the corresponding state in the zen tradition in this way.
Carter proposes the comparison with binocular vision. It is interesting that Bion, too, uses this analogy
(Grinberg, Sor, and Tabak di Bianchedi, 35-36).
42
Sharma, 43; first two sets of italics added. The quotation is from Ramana Maharshi as reported in D. Goodman,
ed., The Teachings ofSri Ramana Maharshi (NY: Arkana, 1985), pp. 42, 41.
43
Cp. the description in Husserl (1964), 124-25
44
Cp. the description in Husserl (1964), 206-08
45
Cp. the descriptions in Husserl (1964), tt#58-61, 80-82, 86-87 and in Husserl (1950), #10.
46
The page references in this paragraph are from Straus, Vom Sinn der Sinne.
47
Zuckerkandl, 19.
48
Sekida, 91. .
49
Csikszentmilalyi.
50
YUASA, 68.
�44
51
I believe that Kleist had the same phenomenon in view when he reported Herr C.'s words after two anecdotes,
one about a graceful dancer who lost his grace when self-consciousness arose and the other about a bear, who
effortlessly parried every thrust of Herr C. 's rapier with a graceful swipe of his paw:
' ... [I]n the same degree as, in the organic world, reflection becomes more obscure and
weaker, giace emerges there ever more radiant and supreme.-Yetjust as. :. the image
in a concave mirror, after withdrawing to infinity, suddenly comes right in front of us
again, so when consciousness has, as it were, passed through an infinite, grace will
again put in an appearance. Hence, it appears most purely in the human bodily
structure that has either no self-consciousness or an infinite self-consciousness ... '
(Kleist, 67)
That is, in our terms, grace emerges in the realm of animal, sensory consciousness, a realm which we can
experience, but not enter completely (Straus, 284). And it emerges again in the realm of pure self-awareness, in
which we are no longer caught up in first- or second-degree consciousness.
52
Kosman, 516; the ending in the original is "a pure, objectless knowledge."
53
Klein, 65.
54
Another question to pursue might be whether Homer's realization of full significance became narrower and more
limited in passing over into intellection.
ABREVIATIONS
BU
Brihadtiranyaka Upanishad
CU
Chtindogya Upanishad
F
Fink, E., Sixth Cartesian Meditation: The Idea of a Transcendental Theory ofMethod.
FK
"Die Phanomenologische Philosophie Edmund Husserls in der Gegenwartigen Kritik."
HG
Otto, W., The Homeric Gods: The Spiritual Significance of Greek Religion.
I
Homer, Iliad
IU
Isa Upanishad
KeU
Kena Upanishad
LC
Averroes, Long Commentary = Commentarium Magnum in Aristotelis De Anima.
MuU Mundaka Upanishad
NE
Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics; translation altered in some places.
0
Homer, Odyssey
OS
Aristotle, On the Soul; translation altered in some places.
�45
S
Sartre, J.-P., La Transcendance de /'Ego: Esquisse d'une descriptionphenomenologique.
ST
St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, Latin text, Volume II, containing Ia, QQ.2-11.
TU
Taittitrfya Upanishad
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�
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You Are That!: The <em>Upanishads</em> Read Through Western Eyes
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Friday night lecture
Tutors
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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
10
�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
11
�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
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An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
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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
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John of the Cross, Saint, 1542-1591. Noche oscura del alma. English
Mysticism
Purgative way to perfection
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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/a9152d8c3d33dffbb94407e3f8bb01dc.mp4
f2fa870f99f78ab33c0cdbea8682b6e4
Dublin Core
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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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Zoom video conference
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01:22:39
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Looking in Freshman Lab III – Looking Into The Constitution of Bodies: How Does the Supposition of Particles Help Us to See?
Description
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Video recording of a lecture delivered on April 13, 2022, by Annapolis tutor Robert Druecker as part of the Formal Lecture Series. The lecture is the third in a three-part series on Freshman Lab.
Note: The title frame at the beginning of the lecture reads Looking in Freshman Lab II, but the lecture is Looking in Freshman Lab III.
Druecker describes his lecture: "This is a lecture specifically for first-year students. It will tell a story of how the presupposition that particles exist is used and made precise by a succession of chemists, from Lavoisier through Mendeleev. Does it enable us to see anything new in the phenomena we encounter in the laboratory? How does its contribution to seeing compare with that of Archimedes’ and Pascal’s mathematical approaches to weights and fluids?"
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Druecker, Robert
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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2022-04-13
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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"
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moving image
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mp4
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Particles
Chemistry--Study and teaching
Chemistry--Experiments
Relation
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<a href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/7629">Looking in Freshman Lab part I (typescript)</a><br /><br /><a href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/7350">Looking in Freshman Lab part I (video)</a><br /><br /><a href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/7628">Looking in Freshman Lab part II (typescript)</a><br /><br /><a href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/7627" title="Looking in Freshman Lab part II (video)">Looking in Freshman Lab part II (video)</a><br /><br /><a href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/7630">Looking in Freshman Lab part III (typescript)</a>
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English
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LEC_Druecker_Robert_2022-04-13_ac
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/235f0dc0152010d8b003fd3d1fbce82d.mp3
a4909475386df417dd9fda7a626df453
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An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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St. John's College 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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01:21:56
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Toward a Revival of the Mixed Constitution
Description
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on September 16, 2022, by Patrick Deneen as part of the Formal Lecture Series. <br /><br />Mr. Deneen is a professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, where he holds the David A. Potenziani Chair of Constitutional Studies. He is the author of <em>Democratic Faith</em> (Princeton University Press, 2005) and <em>Why Liberalism Failed</em> (Yale University Press, 2018).<br /><br /><span>This lecture is also part of the Steiner Lecture Series, which is made possible by a gift from the Steiner family in memory of Andrew Steiner, an alumnus of the college from 1963. The lecture series was established to bring notable speakers to campus from a variety of disciplines and endeavors, in recognition of Steiner’s intellectual versatility, and for the sake of continued learning.</span>
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Deneen, Patrick J., 1964-
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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2022-09-16
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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."
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sound
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mp3
Subject
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Political science--Philosophy
Constitutional history
Constitutional history, Ancient
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Macfarland, Joseph C.
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English
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LEC_Deneen_Patrick_2022-09-16_ac
Friday night lecture
Steiner lecture
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/ac54c4a9f8e21ccd6096baa14b782f2f.mp3
90735c35823694c77438ef15e1f0a1e9
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Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
formallectureseriesannapolis
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
audiocassette
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
00:54:50
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Octaves: The Variety of Sameness
Description
An account of the resource
Audio recording of a lecture delivered on September 19, 1997 by Elliott Zuckerman as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Zuckerman, Elliott
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1997-09-19
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Permission has been given to make this available online.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
sound
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
mp3
Subject
The topic of the resource
Music theory
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LEC_Zuckerman_Elliott_1997-09-19_ac
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/e69cfd4b302a71f33edc2994888691f4.mp4
19e81d94888bc4f519a01f57c4160c5f
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
formallectureseriesannapolis
Moving Image
A series of visual representations imparting an impression of motion when shown in succession. Examples include animations, movies, television programs, videos, zoetropes, or visual output from a simulation.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
mp4
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
00:56:10
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Moments in the Liberal Education of Frederick Douglass from <em>My Bondage and My Freedom</em>
Description
An account of the resource
Video recording of a lecture delivered on August 26, 2022 by Joseph Macfarland as part of the Formal Lecture Series. First formal lecture of the academic year, previously referred to as the "Dean's Lecture", but now called the "Christopher B. Nelson Lecture".
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Macfarland, Joseph C.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2022-08-26
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Permission has been given to make this available online.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
moving image
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
mp4
Subject
The topic of the resource
Douglass, Frederick, 1818-1895
Education, Humanistic
Slavery--United States
Slaves--United States--Education
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LEC_Macfarland_Joseph_2022-08-26_ac
Christopher B. Nelson Lecture
Deans
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/8daf28e6162f65ee6c3f662f61c820a2.mp4
44f4029c52262d4f8ad896c43ca85095
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
formallectureseriesannapolis
Moving Image
A series of visual representations imparting an impression of motion when shown in succession. Examples include animations, movies, television programs, videos, zoetropes, or visual output from a simulation.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
mp4
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
01:02:03
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Perceptual and Deliberative Imagination in Aristotle’s <em>De Anima</em>
Description
An account of the resource
Video recording of the <span>National Endowment for the Humanities lecture </span>delivered on April 22, 2022, by Annapolis tutor Jason Tipton as part of the Formal Lecture Series.<br />
<p class="x_MsoNormal"><span>Mr. Tipton describes his lecture: "Many animals, Aristotle claims, live by imagination. In an important way, we can understand that imagination is the product of the process of perception and the condition for noetic activity. It is both an end and a beginning. Imagination is proto-cognitive and supra perceptual. The task will be to disentangle imagination from perception and understanding so that we might see the proper unities that come to be."</span></p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Tipton, Jason A.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2022-04-22
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
A signed permission form has been received stating: "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an 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."
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
moving image
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
mp4
Subject
The topic of the resource
Aristotle. De anima
Imagination (Philosophy)
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Macfarland, Joseph C.
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LEC_Tipton_Jason_2022-04-22_ac
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/f0ad61f8a58ce280b730e638c1c90471.pdf
cbcbec0adcf644670e9ddc57e39ba3d5
PDF Text
Text
������������������
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
formallectureseriesannapolis
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
pdf
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
18 pages
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Reading Genesis Chapter Three
Description
An account of the resource
Typescript of a lecture delivered on September 2, 2022, by William Braithwaite as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Mr. Braithwaite offers this description: "The Garden of Eden story, about Adam and Eve, what they did and how they were punished for it, is the authoritative source for the Christian doctrine of original sin. Before St. Augustine and St. Paul appropriated it for this purpose, however, the story belonged to the Hebrew Scriptures of the ancient Israelites, and Judaism has no dogma of original sin. But even before ancient rabbis put the story in writing many centuries ago, it may, some scholars suggest, have circulated orally.
If we try to imagine who first told the story, and to whom, and with what end in mind, what would we take it to be about, and what truth might we find in it? What does the story say to those who are not Christians or Jews, whether of another faith, or even atheist or agnostic? Seeking reliable speculations on such questions is the work behind this lecture."
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Braithwaite, William T. (William Thomas)
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2022-09-02
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
A signed permission form has been received stating: "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: make 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
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Subject
The topic of the resource
Bible. Genesis
Eve (Biblical figure)
David, King of Israel
Parables
Solomon, King of Israel
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LEC_Braithwaite_William_2022-09-02
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/9d616d3a535fd123c110306180d11c1b.mp4
93d3683564517a6d7a174ed2f280deae
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
formallectureseriesannapolis
Moving Image
A series of visual representations imparting an impression of motion when shown in succession. Examples include animations, movies, television programs, videos, zoetropes, or visual output from a simulation.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
mp4
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
00:57:46
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Danger of Political Pessimism
Description
An account of the resource
Video recording of a lecture delivered on November 19, 2021, by Melvin Rogers as part of the Formal Lecture Series. <br />
<p class="x_MsoNormal"><span>Professor <span class="markruqqvzcf4">Rogers</span> is an Associate Professor of Political Science and the </span><span>Director of Graduate Studies of Political Science </span><span>at Brown University. His current book project is, </span><i><span>The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought.</span></i><span></span></p>
<p class="x_MsoNormal"><span>Professor Rogers describes his lecture: "'One of the fundamental paradoxes of black politics,' writes Barnor Hesse and Juliet Hooker, is 'the invariable futility of directing activism toward a racially governing regime historically founded on the constitutive exclusion and violation of blackness.' This paradox raises a fundamental question: How can African Americans appeal to the nation in the name of freedom and equal standing, if the ethical and political presuppositions of the polity turn on their fundamental exclusion? Although this question animates our contemporary moment, especially with the ascendancy of Afro-pessimism, this essay recovers its initial articulation as well as pessimistic response from the 19<sup>th</sup> century African American nationalist Martin Delany. And it seeks to distill from Delany’s counterpart, Frederick Douglass, an alternative vision that both resist the paradox and the political logic that gives it shape.</span></p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Rogers, Melvin L.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2021-11-19
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
A signed permission form has been received stating: "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an 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."
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
moving image
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
mp4
Subject
The topic of the resource
Delany, Martin Robison, 1812-1885
Douglass, Frederick, 1818-1895
Afropessimism (Philosophy)
Philosophy, Black
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Macfarland, Joseph C.
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LEC_Rogers_Melvin_2021-11-19_ac
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/dc06c22013d18f65428a401d773c47f5.mp4
c57e3f4182d4ff5f178750deda3d92d4
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
formallectureseriesannapolis
Moving Image
A series of visual representations imparting an impression of motion when shown in succession. Examples include animations, movies, television programs, videos, zoetropes, or visual output from a simulation.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
mp4
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
00:43:04
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Gender, Intersectionality, and Marx’s Value Theory
Description
An account of the resource
Video recording of a lecture delivered on October 29, 2021, by Sarah Vitale as part of the Formal Lecture Series. <br /><br />Dr. Vitale is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Co-Editor of <em>Radical Philosophy Review</em> at Ball State University. <br /><br />Dr. Vitale describes her lecture: “Marxist feminists have approached the question of what comes first – patriarchy or capitalism – in many ways, but there are two main threads: dual systems theories and single systems theories. In the first, capitalism and patriarchy are two separate systems existing alongside one another, creating different oppressions. In the other view, capitalism and patriarchy are part of the same system and cannot be understood properly apart from one another. <br /><br />In my presentation, I will consider one recent attempt towards a single systems theory – the intersectional feminist approach. Intersectionality, an important contribution by Black feminists to the discourse on oppression and emancipation, diagnoses an important problem. However, I will argue that to apply the intersectional approach to the relationship between capitalism and patriarchy requires a different approach to capitalism than most intersectional feminists – and perhaps most Marxists – use. I will suggest that despite the best intentions, intersectional approaches to the question of capitalism and patriarchy end up functioning as dual systems theories depending on an ahistorical notion of gender. If we want to examine and dismantle capitalism and patriarchy, we must understand how patriarchy or the gender order in capitalism is a capitalist gender order. To do so, I suggest we look to a relatively recent turn in Marxist theory called Wertkritik or value criticism, which has also made significant contributions to the conversation about gender and capital.”
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Vitale, Sarah (Professor of philosophy)
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2021-10-29
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
A signed permission form has been received stating: "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an 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."
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
moving image
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
mp4
Subject
The topic of the resource
Socialist feminism
Intersectionality (Sociology)
Capitalism
Patriarchy
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Macfarland, Joseph C.
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LEC_Vitale_Sarah_2021-10-29_ac
Friday night lecture
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/c1e2075a0aaf60f1e0b0cd3e605106f9.mp4
5c17fe83adad9e63be30a19715786f28
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
formallectureseriesannapolis
Moving Image
A series of visual representations imparting an impression of motion when shown in succession. Examples include animations, movies, television programs, videos, zoetropes, or visual output from a simulation.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Zoom video conference
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
00:37:59
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Reading and Teaching the Constitution
Description
An account of the resource
Video recording of a lecture delivered on June 29, 2022, by Steve Steinbach as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series. <br /><br />Mr. Steinbach was a partner at a law firm in Washington, D.C. before leaving the legal profession for teaching. He is now the chair of the History department at Sidwell Friends, and is the author of <em>With Liberty and Justice for All?: The Constitution in the Classroom</em>. <br /><br />Mr. Steinbach describes his talk: "Is the Constitution of the United States a 'great book' in the St. John’s tradition? How might the document be read, taught, and understood intelligently, whether in the nation’s classrooms or our wider civic discourse? The lecture will explore the Constitution’s continuing relevance by focusing in part on two critical 'constitutional moments' from the past: the Alien and Sedition Acts controversy and the Dred Scott case."
Creator
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Steinbach, Steven A.
Publisher
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St. John's College
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2022-06-29
Rights
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An email has been received from the lecturer giving permission to record the lecture and make it available online.
Type
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moving image
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
mp4
Subject
The topic of the resource
Education, Humanistic
Alien and Sedition laws, 1798
Scott, Dred, 1809-1858
Constitutional law
Contributor
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Langston, Emily
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
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Steinbach_Steve_2022-06-29access
Graduate Institute
Summer lecture series
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/aa011b7993207e6293c473b9ef6b85a9.mp4
efb11d8f9962485fbfdc4bb50957330c
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
formallectureseriesannapolis
Moving Image
A series of visual representations imparting an impression of motion when shown in succession. Examples include animations, movies, television programs, videos, zoetropes, or visual output from a simulation.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Zoom video conference
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
00:36:49
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
It’s Just Talking: Legal Advocacy and the Vital Role of Listening
Description
An account of the resource
Video recording of a lecture delivered on July 6, 2022, by Gabriela Quercia Kahrl as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series.
Ms. Kahrl is the Associate Director of the Chacon Center for Immigrant Justice at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law.
As part of the partnership between the Annapolis Graduate Institute and the Carey School of Law, Ms. Kahrl speaks about liberal education and the role of listening in legal advocacy, reflecting on the nature of conversations, oral advocacy as a kind of conversation, and why and how listening is a vital legal skill. Her lecture draws from texts/authors, including Simone Weil, the Bible, and Plato, and includes examples of legal practice.
Creator
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Kahrl, Gabriela Quercia
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2022-07-06
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
An email has been received from the lecturer giving permission to record the lecture and make it available online.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
moving image
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
mp4
Subject
The topic of the resource
Education, Humanistic
Communication in law
Conversation
Legal assistance to immigrants
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Langston, Emily
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Kharl_Gabreila_2022-07-06access
Graduate Institute
Summer lecture series
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