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Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series
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The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a></strong>.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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00:47:37
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Words and Things: Mystical Traditions of Reading Sacred and Secular Books
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on June 20, 2018, by Mark Delp as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series.
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Delp, Mark
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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2018-06-20
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Permission has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audio recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library."
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English
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LEC_Delp_Mark_2018-06-20_ac
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Mysticism
Books and reading
Graduate Institute
Summer lecture series
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Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series
Description
An account of the resource
The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a></strong>.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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00:47:24
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Why We Should (Still) Read Beauvoir
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on July 5, 2017 by Rebecca Goldner as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series. <br /><br />Ms. Goldner is a tutor at St. John's College in Annapolis. Her talk is about the importance and relevance of the work of Simone de Beauvoir. In particular, her talk focuses on de Beauvoir's seminal work <em>The Second Sex</em> and the perennial questions it asks. From what it means to be a woman, to how this question impacts debates over subject and objectivity, and the way in which we practice the liberal arts, Ms. Goldner's talk places these questions in the context of de Beauvoir's work and shows their relevance for the past and future of liberal education.
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Goldner, Rebecca
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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2017-07-05
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Permission has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audio recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a copy of my typescript available online."
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<a title="Typescript" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/2617">Typescript</a>
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English
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Goldner_Rebecca_2017-07-05
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Beauvoir, Simone de, 1908-1986. Deuxième sexe. English
Feminism
Existentialism
Women
Graduate Institute
Summer lecture series
Tutors
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Text
Why We Should (Still) Read Beauvoir
A Lecture for the Graduate Institute Summer Series
Wednesday July 5, 2017
Rebecca Steiner Goldner
I want to thank you all for coming tonight and the Graduate Institute for
hosting this lecture, and to say a little bit about why I wanted to give this lecture.
Long, long ago, I was a GI student here over the course of four summers, and I recall
with great fondness the Wednesday night lectures, talks, and roundtable discussions
we had then, though they were perhaps less formally instituted than they have been
of late. My paper is aligned with the spirit of those exploratory and informal events
and the discussions that followed them.
I also want to say something about why I am lecturing on Beauvoir. I was
lucky enough to offer a preceptorial on Beauvoir this past academic year and so I
was given the gift of reading this incredible book with 10 of the most thoughtful,
invested, and interesting students one could wish for as interlocutors. It was
actually reading their preceptorial papers that inspired me to write on Beauvoir and
so I owe them a great amount of gratitude.
I wrote this talk expecting that one need not have read Beauvoir to
understand what I am saying: this is a paper on a non-program book and a book that
is not necessarily a part of our common discourse (yet). One of the aims of this talk,
then, is to introduce you to the book and perhaps to persuade you that The Second
Sex is worth reading, is still relevant, and that it raises important questions we
might not otherwise ask.
1
�My claim, however, is more specific than a general sense of the relevance of
The Second Sex. I also have found this book to be paradigmatic of a way of thinking—
perhaps of learning—that we aim for at this college. That is, The Second Sex could be
read as exemplifying characteristics that we take to be essential to an education in
the liberal arts. To this end, I suggest the following:
1.
Beauvoir’s book is motivated by a question— ‘What is
woman?’. One might call this her opening question. We like opening
questions, here. We particularly like opening questions that require us to
consider something we might take as a given, something we think we
understand or know, questions which help demonstrate – in particular
through prolonged discussion—that we don’t actually know what we
thought we knew. When Beauvoir offers her famous premise that “one is not
born, but rather becomes, woman” (283, which is almost precisely half way
through the book, at the beginning of the second volume) we might read this
as an elaboration of the question rather than any kind of answer-- the kind of
elaboration we might offer in the second half of a seminar to show that there
is more complexity and depth yet to be uncovered. I wonder how often we
ask exactly who is included or meant to be included when an author or text
refers to ‘humanity’ or ‘mankind’. The Second Sex helps us to investigate this
question, and it seems worth our exploring together, even if we don’t agree
on the answers. If agreement or assent/consensus were the aim of seminar
discussions, seminars would truly never end.
2
�2.
Beauvoir’s aim is freedom, and that freedom can only be
extended to women by uncovering and revealing the limiting and
determining features of women’s lived experiences. When the New Program
began in 1937, the motto of SJC was selected as a play on the Latin word for
“book” (liber) — “Facio Liberos Ex Liberis Libris Libraque”, “I Make Free
Adults from Children by Means of Books and a Balance.”1 We, like Beauvoir,
seem committed to the premise that learning can lead to freedom, and,
furthermore, that an understanding-- or at least a profound engagement
with-- history, literature, philosophy, theology, science, mathematics and art
can be liberating. That we question, probe and interrogate our previously
held assumptions and opinions about the world is a condition of free and
thoughtful action. If we hold assumptions and opinions about what ‘woman’
is, or what ‘feminine’ is, then the freedom of women depends upon exploring
our understanding of woman through questions, investigation, and dialogue.
That the term or idea ‘man’ can stand in for or represent humanity as a
universal (humankind, mankind) --even in our college motto-- risks enfolding
women into an absolute model of human freedom that does not adequately
recognize differences in the experiences of women. As Beauvoir puts it, “just
as for the ancients there was an absolute vertical that defined the oblique,
there is an absolute human type that is masculine” (5).
1 I will note that this translation of the motto is the one circulated in a 2014 letter to the community
written by Barbara Goyette and Victoria Mora, one or both of whom I assume offered the translation.
The college’s Wikipedia page translates the motto retaining the masculine universal—I make free
men…. (following the lecture, I changed the college Wikipedia page to the Goyette/Mora translation).
3
�3.
Beauvoir is concerned with how we live together. Beauvoir
envisions a subject who thinks freely and authentically and who actively
engages in human projects and relations. Such a subject ought to be a
consciousness engaged in a reciprocal movement with other subjects,
positing itself as Subject yet recognizing its possibility to be objectified when
confronted by Others. Only such a subject can fully take its part, she says, in
the human ‘mitsein’ (being-with). The plurality of conditions determines and
differentiates the experiences by which one becomes-- or fails to become--
such a subject, and, insofar as one fails to engage in such a reciprocal
movement, insofar as one is relegated to the position of Other, one will fail
both to live and to act freely. This failure is not only problem for women, it is
a human problem--one that spreads itself through all communities, from the
familial to the global.
These claims—that the text is motivated by a question, that it aims at human
freedom, and that such freedom is necessary for human communities—serve as the
background for the talk, though I am going to focus more specifically on a passage
from the introduction. Originally, I had intended to explicate five themes and terms
offered in this passage, but that would be far too long a lecture, as it turns out, and
so I have chosen two words that I hope will provide you with some sense of what I
find interesting and important in The Second Sex. (Here is the passage:)
4
�“What singularly defines the situation of woman is that being, like all
humans, an autonomous freedom, she discovers and chooses herself in a world
where men force her to assume herself as Other: an attempt is made to freeze her as
an object and doom her to immanence, since her transcendence will be forever
transcended by another essential and sovereign consciousness. Woman’s drama lies
in this conflict between the fundamental claim of every subject, which always posits
itself as essential, and the demands of a situation that constitutes her as
inessential.” (Introduction, 17)
I am going to focus on Situation and Freedom, and while I will discuss each of them
in turn, it will quickly become clear how they implicate one another.
Situation
Beauvoir’s first use of the word situation appears in the opening paragraph
of the introduction, where we find the term italicized in the following claim: “But
conceptualism has lost ground: biological and social sciences no longer believe there
are immutably determined entities that define given characteristics...science
considers characteristics as secondary reactions to a situation (une situation)”. A
few paragraphs later she draws the following contrast: it would never, Beauvoir
writes, occur to a man to write a book on the singular situation of males in humanity
(5). This is not to say that there is no situation for men, but that the situation for
men is a given; it is granted as the universal situation, and to ask “what is a man?” is
tantamount to asking “what is a human being?” We might here apply one of
5
�Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s two rules of feminism and ask whether this kind of
generalizing is reversible. That is, could we reverse the claim and put women in as
the universal? Could the question “what is a woman?” be taken to mean “what is a
human being?” My intuition is that we would not make this reversal so easily. If we
juxtapose claims about humanity in general-- that is, the situation for human beings
or the human condition-- with claims about woman or woman’s condition, we might
find enough disparity to recognize that to be human in this general sense and to be a
woman do not amount to the same thing. When Beauvoir writes of the situation of
woman she means one that places her in a secondary position within the human
situation, within the mitsein. If we can better understand what she means by
situation, we might better comprehend what Beauvoir means when she writes that
characteristics-- the characteristics of a woman -- might be defined by a situation,
that is, by a situation rather than nature, biology, or some mysterious feminine
essence.
First, I think it helpful to look to the structure of the book as a whole. The
book is divided into two volumes (1: Facts and Myths and 2: Lived Experience) and
each volume is sub-divided into parts and then chapters within the parts. Volume II,
Part II is entitled “Situation” but it also contains a chapter (10) entitled “Woman’s
Situation and Character”. We should not be misled by the way Beauvoir appears to
narrow her use of ‘situation’ to one part of the book. On my reading, the entirety of
The Second Sex reveals the situation as a whole, and the construction of the book
demonstrates the reciprocal nature of the relations between the facts and myths and
6
�the lived experiences, all of which together constitute the situation for
women. What we find in Volume II, Part II as in particular identified as ‘Situation’
are the concrete and typical situations that both result from and contribute to the
destiny, history and myths of Volume I.
To give an example, one of the concrete situations in the part Beauvoir calls
“Situation” is “The Mother”. Beauvoir’s account of “The Mother” (which is a chapter)
relies on the biological data, the psycho-analytic account, the historical record, the
myths, the economic reality, the childhood, the girlhood, the sexual initiation, the
marriage (and likely much more) to demonstrate how these facts and myths as well
as one’s own personal history are concretized into a presently lived experience, the
experience of being a mother. For a woman to explicitly and simply think that she
wants to be a mother because she likes children or because she assumes this role
will bring her happiness, is to ignore the plurality of forces at play on and through
her. There may a biological impetus to perpetuate the species that has demands on
the woman, but, as Beauvoir writes, “the woman’s body is one of the essential
elements of the situation she occupies in this world, but her body is not enough to
define her; biology alone cannot provide an answer to the question that concerns
us” (48). Following Beauvoir, from the biology we should next look to the psychoanalytic, economic, historical and political contributions to the situation. For the
specific situation of “The Mother,” these issues might take the form of some of the
following: the availability of birth control and/or abortion, which directly influence
a woman’s choice to become a mother; these concerns about women’s healthcare
will overlap-- sometimes in conflicting ways-- with questions of economics. How one
7
�was raised might play a role--does being handed dolls to play with encourage
maternality? The question of what other choices and activities are open to a woman,
and whether those options seem or are made to seem better or worse, is of course
relevant here. Could ‘mothering’ be an active human project-- a praxis-- that allows
someone to eschew other kinds of work? Can being a mother justify and provide
meaning to an existence that risks looking passive and aimed at repetition rather
than progress? Beauvoir thinks not, or, minimally, thinks that such justification or
meaning-giving is largely inauthentic, that is, it does not arise from a recognition of
one’s freedom. The decision or situation in which one becomes or doesn’t become a
mother is part of the intricate web that constitutes women’s lives. If we feel
ourselves inclined to think that motherhood is in and of itself fulfilling, respected,
and freely chosen, we should ask ourselves how many women have chosen
motherhood outside of a lasting partnership-- likely or historically a marriage. The
connection of the mother to marriage is more explicit than to other factors, but they
all play a role in more or less explicit ways.
At the same time, the lived experiences of women as mothers become the
grist for the mills of the myths and facts, that is, scientific fact, historical record,
theology and literature as it pertains to women. So long as women feel it is their
biological, essential and social destiny to be mothers, being a mother will continue
to be the biological, essential and social goal to be attained.
What I mean to suggest with the abbreviated example of The Mother is that
the particular situations in which women live-- as married women, as mothers, as
independent women are not free choices, but largely determined choices, choices
8
�affected and influenced not merely by the options available to any specific woman,
but by the way a woman takes on and lives, or assumes, the biology, history,
psychology and mythology that capture her. Rather than our choices (to marry, to
become a mother, to be an independent woman) representing an entirely rational
deliberation leading to free selection, Beauvoir maintains that such decisions are (in
the best circumstances) only “chosen in situation”, that is “both motivated and
freely chosen”. Of any choice a woman makes concerning how to live as a woman,
nothing in the mythology and facts is “determining, although all contribute to
explaining it” (436). The options for women are situated choices, choices weighted
with a politics, literature, economy, biology and psychology that have historically
tended towards the oppression rather than the liberation of women.
The situation, then, is this plurality of contributing circumstances constituted
both by external and internalized forces on an originally free consciousness. The
situation is both the present as lived by women and the entire history that weighs
upon that present. It is biological facts that claim as conclusions premises that went
unrecognized in its descriptive method; it is a body of literature that varies wildly in
its portrayals of women is still largely written from the male perspective. At the
individual level it is being raised as a girl, but it is also attempting to raise a girl as if
she were a boy. It is an experience of one’s own body as alienation, mystery, and
interiority. It is, as our opening citation tells us, to be constantly put into the
position of other-- or, as my students started saying, to be othered -- by men, by
women, by ourselves-- to be othered and yet to intuit one’s subjectivity. The
situation is not singular but is rather a convergence of lived, discursive and implicit
9
�conditions that crystallize in each particular woman. Whether she accepts or rejects
the conditions, she is always responsive to them. Even rejecting the notion of
woman is to be in some way captured by it, haunted by it even as one enacts its
negation.
We might recognize that many of the fields which comprise the facts and
myths (science, politics, literature, philosophy, theology—Beauvoir even references
Ptolemy in one place in the book) bear great resemblance to the arts we study as
part of a liberal education, but the way they converge in the situation is not
automatically liberating.2 Its multifacetedness does not immediately nor easily yield
escape-- in fact, we might better see it as an attack on all fronts. The situation is
synthetic insofar as it brings together what might appear as discrete considerations,
but that it synthesizes them into the lived experiences of women means that women
always locate themselves within a vast field of influences, many or most of which
serve to objectify and oppress her, to fix her in immanence. Beauvoir shows how
systemically the situation operates by pointing out that, historically, when one area
shows improvement, another area becomes more constraining. After she evaluates
the situation of women in the ancient world, Beauvoir points out that in Rome, when
women had great freedom in their personal lives they were afforded only limited
legal rights but just as women were offered some legal emancipation, their personal
lives came under far greater scrutiny. This is when we find that the satirists “went
2 Addressing why women have not produced the depth and scope of work that men in these fields
that men have, Beauvoir notes “Women do not challenge the human condition because they have
barely begun to assume it entirely…Art, literature and philosophy are attempts to found the world
anew on a human freedom: that of the creator; to foster such an aim one must first unequivocally
posit oneself as freedom” (748).
10
�wild against them” for behaving like men in their personal and political lives. Thus,
an abstract equality, especially equality before the law, was wholly insufficient to
change the situation.3 The danger particular to an oppressive situation is that it is
systematic, self correcting and self perpetuating.4
Though Beauvoir occasionally suggests a sort of hopefulness about
changing the situation, because the situation is so convoluted in its causality, it both
results from and in the alienation of women within the human species.5
Complicating matters is the fact that while other oppressed groups have united in
some way against their oppressors, “women lack the concrete means to organize
themselves into a unit that could posit itself in opposition…[women] do not use
‘we’…but remain tied to certain men—fathers or husbands—more closely than to
other women” (8). Sexual liberation, autonomy over her reproductive capacities, a
body of literature that better reflects women’s interests and realities, love that looks
more like friendship than marriage, are a few of the steps Beauvoir suggests
towards changing the situation. Perhaps too reliant on the promise of socialism,
Beauvoir emphasizes throughout, however, that economic liberation and work is
the sine qua non of a new and free situation for woman.6 Most importantly, however,
no single aspect of the situation could constitute sufficient liberation.
3 “In their exchanges, woman counts on the abstract equality she was guaranteed, man on the
concrete inequality he observes” (758).
4 Beauvoir denies that history is cyclical, if only because she is committed to the idea that “freedom
can break the circle” (763).
5 A species which is, Beauvoir reminds us in the conclusion, not so much a species as “an historical
becoming, defined by the way it assumes natural facticity” (753).
6 I say the promise of socialism because Beauvoir notes that this is what the Soviet revolution
promised but failed to deliver: “women raised and educated exactly like men would work under the
same conditions and for the same salaries…women would be obliged to provide another livelihood
for themselves; marriage would be based on a free engagement that the spouses could break when
11
�Freedom
This brings us to the next word from our opening passage: freedom. Beauvoir
contrasts freedom in numerous places (notably the introduction) with happiness,
and it is worth our time to think about why. Beauvoir rejects happiness as a goal or
an aim – happiness is an ambiguous notion and authenticity-- that is, recognition of
ourselves as free subjects-- would certainly be required before one could tackle the
question of happiness. “Is not a housewife happier that a woman worker” she asks
rhetorically? Her answer is neither yes nor no, but that, “we cannot really know
what the word happiness means and still less what authentic values it covers; there
is no way to measure the happiness of others, and it is always easy to call a situation
that one would like to impose on others happy: in particular, we declare happy
those condemned to stagnation under the pretext that happiness is immobility”
(16).
Happiness seems like such a clear aim-- even a telos-- for humans-- we think
so often that we are striving towards happiness. But given the wide range of human
activities, emotions and relations that we associate with happiness, could we
possibly know what it means to call something ‘human happiness’? More
importantly, how can I know that I have authentically chosen my variety of
happiness? Happiness is not a definitive term; perhaps in a seminar you have
considered the question ‘What is happiness?’. For Beauvoir, the happiness of the
they wanted to; motherhood would be freely chosen—that is, birth control and abortion would be
allowed—and in return all mothers and their children would be given the same rights; maternity
leave would be paid for by a society that would have responsibility for the children, which does not
mean that they would be taken from their parents but that they would not be abandoned to them”
(760). See also p. 761.
12
�bourgeois woman, for example, is, if not wholly illusory, greatly conditioned by her
situation. “How could the Cinderella myth not retain its validity?” Beauvoir asks, and
then elucidates, “Everything still encourages the girl to expect fortune and
happiness from a “Prince Charming” instead of attempting the difficult and
uncertain conquest alone” (155). She thus opposes the difficulties of authentic
freedom with the ease of accepting a constrained happiness. Choosing the happiness
of the bourgeois housewife allows a woman to ‘‘elude the metaphysical risk of a
freedom that must invent its goals without help” (10). The myth of domestic,
immanent, repetitive happiness makes it easier for the woman to give in to what she
calls the ‘temptation to flee freedom’ and, she concludes, ‘it is an easy path.” Women
are not simply condemned to this happiness but complicit in selecting it, “seduced
by the ease of their condition, they will accept the role of housewife and mother to
which they are being confined… It is easier,” Beauvoir writes, quoting George
Bernard Shaw, “to put people in chains than to remove them when the chains bring
prestige” (130).
Indeed, why remove the chains at all? Perhaps there are some women who
are content to go through life enchanted or enchained but happy (a common idiom
puts this more succinctly). We need not look much further than our program texts
to think about where this alleged domestic happiness leaves us: when Dorothea
achieves just the marriage she wanted, we next find her sobbing in a hotel room on
her honeymoon. Eve is tempted by the fruit in spite of ideal companionship in
Paradise; Penelope, on her own for the better part of her married life, labors in vain
13
�in her room only to undo what she produces each day, Clytemnestra, Antigone. How
great is their happiness? Lady Macbeth?
One problem with inauthentic happiness, happiness selected in a determined
and limited field, is that it will always be tenuous at best, always at risk of fracturing,
of falling apart, of recognizing the restrictions as such. In her novel, My Brilliant
Friend, Elena Ferrante describes such a realization through Lila, who calls it a
dissolving of margins. “But suddenly-she told me- in spite of the cold she had begun
to sweat. It seemed to her that everyone was shouting too loudly and moving too
quickly. This sensation was accompanied by nausea, and she had the impression
that something absolutely material, which had been present around her and around
everyone and everything forever, but imperceptible, was breaking down the
outlines of persons and things and revealing itself” (89-90). Lila’s horror, her
repulsion and her disassociation in this scene sound much like an impotent version
of what Sarah Ahmed refers to as ‘snapping’, an experience that forms the
foundation for what she calls Snap Feminism. She writes:
It is only when you seem to lose it, when you shout, swear, spill, that you
have their attention. And then you become a spectacle. And what you brought
out means you have to get out. When we think of such moments of snap,
those moments when you can’t take it anymore, when you just can’t take it
anymore, we are thinking about worlds; how worlds are organised to enable
some to breathe, how they leave less room for others.
Eve, Dorothea, Penelope, Antigone, Clytemnestra, Lady Macbeth, Donna Anna. Don’t
we see them experience their moments of snap, the instant when the happiness they
were promised proves highly illusory, when the margins begin to dissolve?
14
�Even if it could be authentic, happiness is a complex matter to elucidate and
risks so much relativism. Beauvoir does not deny that happiness may have a part in
the future she envisions for women, and for human community, but the happiness
that results from genuine freedom is secondary to it and largely unknowable at the
present time.7 For Beauvoir, happiness is not merely a difficult, but a dangerous, end
to work for, insofar as the ideal of happiness has been used as a tool of oppression.
Thus she elects not happiness, but freedom as the goal. Here at the college we talk
about human flourishing. If freedom and happiness are not the same thing, it seems
to me that Beauvoir would put flourishing on the side of freedom.
So what does Beauvoir mean by freedom, and why ought we aspire to it?
Beauvoir says, in contrast to happiness, that the position she holds is that of
‘existentialist morality’. We might better turn towards her work in the Ethics of
Ambiguity, written two years before The Second Sex, to recognize that Beauvoir does
not here intend a general or borrowed notion of existentialist morality, but one that
she herself has defined and described. Beauvoir’s existentialism is at once
committed to the possibility of human transcendence while fully aware of the limits
of facticity, or, as we described it above, the situation. Her ethics, then, is
accomplished through struggle and some reconciliation of a radical ideal of freedom
with a real possibility for it. In a general sense, existentialism conceives of human
subjectivity as wholly or almost entirely transcendent, able to overcome the
immanence of being through an ability to project itself into the future, and to alter
7 “…this does not mean that love, happiness, poetry and dreams will be banished from [the world of
tomorrow]. Let us beware lest our lack of imagination impoverish the future; the future is only an
abstraction for us…” (765)
15
�and affect the world through productivity and praxis. “Every subject,” Beauvoir
explains, “posits itself as a transcendence concretely, through projects; it
accomplishes its freedom only by perpetual surpassing toward other freedoms”
(16). That transcendence is accomplished through a surpassing of what is given
(that is, given by the materiality in the world, given by relations with others, with
society, given by one’s own past and even one’s present)-- this notion surpassing is
typical of existentialist theory; what Beauvoir adds to this (and perhaps what makes
it a morality or an ethics) is the surpassing not only towards the future but towards
other freedoms, that is, other subjects.
Let me be more concrete: I used to terrify undergraduate students (not here)
when we studied existentialism by getting them to see that there was really nothing- no genuine constraint or limitation-- keeping them in the classroom, holding that
they remain students pursuing a college degree. I would likewise upset them when I
suggested that there was also nothing- no essential identity or nature-- that assured
that I would continue to be a teacher, a runner, a wife, or a mother. Nothing except
my own choices and the way that I that I assume decisions made in my past as an
identity or my essential character; only these things can serve as any kind of
guarantee for the future. I will continue to be a teacher, to do what is expected of the
teacher as long as I see value in it and regard my identity as bound to that role-- and
only for so long. Because I create my own essence or identity rather than being born
into it, I can also undo it. Because I create values, they are at constant risk of
revaluation. This kind of transcendence is a radical and terrifying view of freedom.
16
�But Beauvoir thinks that there are some limitations on this otherwise
unrestricted human freedom. The first is that if I genuinely recognize my own
freedom and other subjects as like-me, I will also aim for their freedom.
Furthermore, Beauvoir recognizes the implications of the situation on this freedom.
That is to say, sometimes our situation, particularly when the situation is comprised
of systematic oppression-- the situation of a slave, a proletariat, a woman, a person
born into poverty-- sometimes a situation such as these has closed too many paths,
has restricted the possibilities too greatly to allow for such freedom. This limiting is
likely a direct result of the failure of one subject or group of subjects, positing itself
as free, to fail to extend that freedom to others.
Beauvoir’s ideal of freedom attempts to include some commitment to others- though such commitments risks immanence-- while attempting to maintain the
possibility of transcendence. “But what is true of friendship,” she writes, “ is true of
physical love: for friendship to be authentic it must first be free. Freedom does not
mean whim (caprice): a feeling is a commitment that goes beyond the instant; but it
is up to the individual alone to compare her general will to her personal behavior so
as either to uphold her decision or, on the contrary, to break it; feeling is free when
it does not depend on any outside command, when it is lived in sincerity without
fear”(511). 8 Only a commitment which actively and reflectively holds within itself
the possibility of being broken can be a free commitment. Freedom, then, is not the
rational recognition and pursuit of the best possibility, but entails the existence of
8 I have taken the liberty of altering the possessive adjectives from the masculine to the feminine. In
French, the possessives take their gender from the word they modify and we cannot then know that
Beauvoir intended them to mean one sex rather than the other. Furthermore, I have changed the
word et to “and” rather than “to”.
17
�many-- perhaps endless- possibilities without regard to their moral value beyond
the free recognition of them precisely as possible, for oneself and others.
Here is the problem. This freedom may not, indeed likely will not, be easy.
The radical freedom posited by existentialism is terrifying insofar as it is antireductionist and anti-essentialist. It is common for subjects-- men and women alike- to flee this kind of freedom, to create and hide in essential identities that define us
and limit our choices. We find solace and the respite that become characterized as
happiness in these identities. But for Beauvoir, being fully human-- and free in her
sense of the word-- may not result in happiness, and it is certainly incompatible
with the inauthentic happiness that comes with the roles or identities we
essentialize ourselves into. Perhaps paradoxically, in spite of her overt commitment
to freedom, Beauvoir thinks that some avenues need to be closed, some inauthentic
choices revealed as such: Thus, for example, “The situation has to be changed in
their common interest by prohibiting marriage as a ‘career’ for the woman” (523).
Given her devotion to freedom, has Beauvoir then contradicted herself by
eliminating some of the choices as valid possibilities? Why can one not choose to be
a housewife9 (home-maker, our new term which makes this task seem more active)
if one recognizes it as a free choice and, even better, if one suspects she will be
happy with this choice? I think Beauvoir’s response is that in the current situation
(hers? ours?) these are the avenues that cannot freely be chosen; the weight of the
situation is far too oppressive and extensive in these matters, we are already caught
9 We might now prefer or use the term ‘homemaker’ for housewife, though this seems a linguistic
attempt to make an active term (hence, a maker) out of someone Beauvoir sees as resigned to
repetition and maintenance (of the home).
18
�up in the situation by the time we think we can freely choose, we are choosing from
within and therefore not transcending it. It is like letting the prisoner choose the
color of her chains and then convincing her how happy she should be with her
choice. Jane Austen might best illustrate this point: Charlotte, perhaps herself a
proto-existentialist as it turns out, tells us that “happiness in marriage is entirely a
matter of chance” (16), but Lizzie disagrees. Lizzie rejects two proposals she thinks
will make her unhappy. So it looks like Lizzie makes a free choice, in the end, to
marry for love and happiness, but we cannot overlook that haunting the entirety of
the novel is the threat of economic disaster of social disgrace, of some future for
Lizzie, her sisters, and Mrs. Bennett that is so unthinkable Austen doesn’t fully
describe it for us. Yes, Lizzie chooses her marriage and yes, she thinks that it will
make her happy, but it is a radically situated and highly determined choice. We
cannot know what Elizabeth Bennett would have chosen in a different situation.
It is a common trope and an active topic of debate that the feminist
movement-- in particular the second wave feminism inspired by The Second Sex is
(was?) about choice. Perhaps a perfunctory reading of The Second Sex might
confuse Beauvoir’s notion of freedom with this concept of choice—indeed, we often
consider freedom and choice as equivalents--but this would be to misrepresent the
morality for which Beauvoir actually advocates. Often, the options described as
‘choices’ are actually direct consequences of an oppressive situation. Furthermore,
many of these so-called choices are only available to the group Beauvoir identifies as
the bourgeois, but we might now think of as hetero-normative women within a
comfortable socio-economic group. For so many women, for example, the ‘choice’ to
19
�stay at home with her children is not an option. At the same time, these women are
often judged by standards-- standards formed from the facts and myths of the
situation-- they are judged by standards of motherhood that proclaim the choice to
work as the completion of feminism, and at the same time subtly regard the decision
to stay home as the better one. For as long as women’s work is a choice, it also
remains easier to underpay them-- theirs is, of course, likely to be the second
income. Beauvoir’s sense that the economics of the situation cannot be surpassed
seems right from this perspective. So much of what we uphold as genuine choices
and possibilities for women, are in fact implicit reinforcements of the status quo.
Choice and freedom are not the same. It is for this reason that real freedom,
Beauvoir’s freedom, requires full participation in the human experience for all
humans, not the choice for one group to participate or to opt out. To be optional is to
remain secondary.
Conclusion
I actually find the conclusion to The Second Sex the most perplexing, and
perhaps, disappointing part of the book, and this is both because I find Beauvoir’s
hopefulness perplexing and, given the time elapsed since the book was written,
frustratingly sad because the claims of the book resonated so profoundly with me
and with the students I studied it with this year. Perhaps to avoid writing my own
perplexing and disappointing conclusion, I merely offer some questions:
If you look back at the opening passage from Beauvoir’s Introduction, does it
make more sense to you that woman’s existence could be lived as a drama between
the conflicting experiences of herself as free subjectivity and as situated objectivity?
20
�Could you understand why a single change, such as equality before the law, is too
abstract and insufficient to really change a situation constituted by systematic and
multifaceted oppression and othering of women? Do you think freedom and
happiness are different goals, and, if so, in which might consist human flourishing?
Is it alienating to women to assume that the term and idea man can include them? Is
it possible that the universal claims found in some of the books we read here might
apply differently to women because of their different experiences and situation? Do
you know what it is to be, or to become, woman? Could asking this question increase
the liberating possibilities of a liberal arts education?
But perhaps most importantly at this moment is the question of whether you
want to think more about these topics, to read a bit more from Beauvoir, and to
continue the discussion I have been hoping to begin tonight.
21
�Works Cited
Adichie, Chimamamda Ngozi. Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 2017. Electronic edition.
Ahmed, Sarah. “Snap!” Feministkilljoys.com. 2017/05/21.
Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. Indiana: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. 2001.
de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, trans. New
York: Vintage Books, 2011.
de Beauvoir, Simone. Le deuxieume Sexe, I&II. Italy: Gallimard, 1976.
Ferrante, Elana. My Brilliant Friend. Anne Goldstein, trans. New York: Europa Editions, 2012.
22
�
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Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series
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The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a></strong>.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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Why We Should (Still) Read Beauvoir
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Typescript of a lecture delivered on July 5, 2017 by Rebecca Goldner as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series. <br /><br />Ms. Goldner is a tutor at St. John's College in Annapolis. Her talk is about the importance and relevance of the work of Simone de Beauvoir. In particular, her talk focuses on de Beauvoir's seminal work <em>The Second Sex</em> and the perennial questions it asks. From what it means to be a woman, to how this question impacts debates over subject and objectivity, and the way in which we practice the liberal arts, Ms. Goldner's talk places these questions in the context of de Beauvoir's work and shows their relevance for the past and future of liberal education.
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Annapolis, MD
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2017-07-05
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Permission has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audio recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a copy of my typescript available online."
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Beauvoir, Simone de, 1908-1986. Deuxième sexe. English
Feminism
Existentialism
Women
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English
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St. John's College Lecture Recordings—Santa Fe
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01:05:29
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Why should I read James Joyce's Ulysses if it's only going to make my head hurt?
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Audio recording of a lecture given on June 15, 2016 by Grant Franks as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series.
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2016-06-15
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Joyce, James, 1882-1941. Ulysses.
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St. John's College Lecture Recordings—Santa Fe
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What kind of political community does the U.S. Constitution form?
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Audio recording of a lecture given on July 23, 2019 by Elizabeth C'de Baca Eastman as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series.
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Eastman, Elizabeth C'de Baca
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Aristotle. Politics
United States. Constitution
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English
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SF_EastmanE_What_Kind_of_Political_Community_Does_the_US_Constitution_Form_2019-07-23
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The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a></strong>.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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What is Right? The Fragility of Right and Thomas Aquinas
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on June 14, 2017, by Matthew Reiner as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series.
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Reiner, Matthew
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Annapolis, MD
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2017-06-14
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Permission has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audio recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a copy of my typescript available online."
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LEC_Reiner_Matthew_2017-06-14
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Thomas, Aquinas, Saint, 1225?-1274. Summa theologica.
Natural law
Graduate Institute
Summer lecture series
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Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series
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The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a></strong>.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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Toqueville's American Odyssey
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Typescript of a lecture delivered on July 1, 2015 by Steven Crockett as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series.<br /><br /><span>Mr. Crockett is a tutor at St. John's College in Annapolis. His talk centers on the year of Tocqueville's journey to and in America that would become the foundation for his work <em>Democracy in America</em>. His talk looks at letters, reflections, and memorabilia from the young Tocqueville who at that time was only 25-26. It explores his initial reactions and how those would mature into his later works and related to events happening back in France.</span>
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Crockett, Steven
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2015-07-01
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text
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English
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Bib # 83173
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<a title="Audio recording" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/272">Audio recording</a>
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Tocqueville, Alexis de, 1805-1859. De la démocratie en Amérique.
United States
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 1805-1859. Correspondence. Selections
Graduate Institute
Summer lecture series
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Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series
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The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a></strong>.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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Tocqueville's American Odyssey
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on July 1, 2015, by Steven Crockett as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series. <br /><br />Mr. Crockett is a tutor at St. John's College in Annapolis. His talk centers on the year of Tocqueville's journey to and in America that would become the foundation for his work <em>Democracy in America</em>. His talk looks at letters, reflections, and memorabilia from the young Tocqueville who at that time was only 25-26. It explores his initial reactions and how those would mature into his later works and related to events happening back in France.
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Crockett, Steven
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Annapolis, MD
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A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audio recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a copy of my typescript available online."
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Tocqueville, Alexis de, 1805-1859. Correspondence. Selections
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 1805-1859. De la démocratie en Amérique.
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St. John's College Lecture Recordings—Santa Fe
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The weirdness of classical thermodynamics
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Audio recording of a lecture given on June 25, 2019 by Don Lemons as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series.
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Lemons, Don S. (Don Stephen), 1949-
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St. John's College
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Thermodynamics
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SF_LemonsD_The_Wierdness_of_Classical_Thermodynamics_2019-06-25
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The Very Pictures of Education: On Rousseau’s Illustrations in Emile
Do great books need pictures?
This question arises once we notice that some great books have pictures, while others do
not. Once printing began to spread through Europe, in the sixteenth century, great books began
to appear with engravings, called frontispieces, placed at their beginnings. Francis Bacon’s
Great Instauration (1620) [Slide 1],1 whose frontispiece depicts two ships passing beyond the
Pillars of Hercules – that is, the Strait of Gibraltar – in search of a new world; Thomas Hobbes’s
Leviathan (1651) [Slide 2], whose frontispiece depicts the incorporation of the body politic, the
sovereign, from the bodies of its subjects; and Giambattista Vico’s New Science (1725) [Slide 3],
whose frontispiece depicts a collection of objects of allegorical significance, meant to help the
reader’s memory of the idea of the work [NS 1]2 are three famous seventeenth and eighteenthcentury examples. But by the nineteenth century, the use of frontispieces seems to have ended,
although the technology needed to include them remained available. Some authors of great
books seem to have chosen not to include pictures, then, though it was possible for them to do
so.
This historical record tempts us to dismiss the use of pictures as a fashion in printing.
But our question – do great books need pictures? – recurs from another, more serious,
perspective. Ever since Plato’s Socrates raised, in the Phaedrus, the possibility that a piece of
writing could be composed according to “some necessity” that dictates the order of its parts and
their suitability “to each other and to the whole” [264b-c],3 we have been reminded to ask
whether the author of a great book can give an account of the reason for its parts, according to
this principle of logographic necessity. From the perspective of this principle, then, the
�Black, The Very Pictures of Education, Page 2
difference between those authors who could have added pictures to their great books and did, and
those authors who could have but did not, looks like evidence not of a historical fad, but of a
disagreement over whether great books need pictures. This disagreement concerns us, as readers
of great books, not least because their contemporary publishers sometimes disagree with their
authors about the need for their pictures, and omit them from their editions, without notice.
Tonight I mean to consider Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s answer to this question – ‘do great
books need pictures?’ – by examining some of the pictures Rousseau provided for his great
books. Each of the three books that Rousseau says make up his “system,” the Discourse on the
Sciences and the Arts (1750), the Discourse on Inequality (1754), and Emile (1762) [CW 5:575]4
has a frontispiece; Emile also has four additional illustrations, so that it has five in total: as many
pictures as books. Rousseau also commissioned twelve illustrations for Julie, his epistolary
novel.5 In each case, moreover, there is evidence that the pictures are, in an important sense,
Rousseau’s. Apprenticed unhappily as an engraver in his youth [CW 5:26-37], Rousseau
corresponded extensively with the artists who worked on his illustrations; and while these letters
have been lost, we do have letters to others in which Rousseau indicates the attention he devoted
to the pictures for his books. Lamenting his publisher’s difficulties with the engravings for Julie,
for example, Rousseau writes,
the details into which I entered were not the sort to be carried out to the letter. It
is not what the designer must draw, but what he must know so as to make his
work conform to them as much as possible. Everything that I have described
must be in his head in order to put in his engraving everything that can be
admitted there and to put nothing contrary [CC 4:408; translation mine].6
Despite this evidence of Rousseau’s care in instructing his artists, publishers of his works have
not scrupled to omit his illustrations from their editions – sometimes even along with passages
that mention them – presumably because they consider them unnecessary adornments of
Rousseau’s books.
�Black, The Very Pictures of Education, Page 3
This lecture will have eight parts. In the first two, I will briefly examine the frontispieces
to the First and Second Discourses, considering them as preparations for Rousseau’s illustrations
in Emile. In the next five sections, I will briefly consider in turn each of these illustrations,
reading them first in themselves, then in the light of his explication of each, then in the light of
their mythological sources, and lastly in the light of their relation to the argument of Emile.
Finally, in the eighth and longest part, I will sketch what I take to be Rousseau’s answer to our
question – do great books need pictures? – with reference to his brief discussion in Emile of what
he calls the language of signs, and his fuller explanation of this language in the Essay on the
Origin of Languages.
Part One: Prometheus, or the Failed Frontispiece?
Rousseau’s literary fame dates from the publication of his First Discourse, his anonymous entry
into the Academy of Dijon’s prize competition, in which the academy asked whether the
restoration of the sciences and the arts has contributed to the purification of morals [FD 3;
compare 5]. In the Discourse Rousseau argues that, to the contrary, scientific and artistic
progress causes moral corruption [FD 9]. Rousseau’s use of illustrations in his works also dates
from the publication of the First Discourse, whose printed version was accompanied by a
frontispiece. Across from the work’s title page is an engraving of three figures in an outdoor
setting, with some vegetation in the foreground, and perhaps a mountain in the background
[Slide 4]. The leftmost figure is a muscular, bearded male, naked except for a cloak draped over
his shoulder. He holds a torch in his right hand, the flame of which strangely seems to burn
horizontally, rather than vertically. His left hand rests on the central figure’s shoulder;
otherwise, the leftmost figure seems to hover in midair, straddling a billowing cloud. He gazes
�Black, The Very Pictures of Education, Page 4
intently at the other figures in the scene. The central figure is another male, more slightly built
than the first, and wholly naked. He stands on a block, in a statuesque pose, with both hands
open, their palms visible. He could be looking rapturously at the face of the leftmost figure, or at
the torch that he holds. Lastly, though he is partly obscured by shadow, we see enough of the
rightmost figure to conclude that he is not fully human: he has horns and cloven hooves. A cloak
worn over his right shoulder partly covers his nakedness, and we can make out pan pipes slung
over the same shoulder. Of the three figures in the scene, the rightmost is the only one to have at
least one limb on the ground. His left hand is raised, palm upward, in an expressive gesture,
while his right hand is concealed behind the central figure, into whom he leans. He gazes avidly
at one or both of his companions, or perhaps at the torch in the leftmost figure’s hand.
This frontispiece also features a caption: “Satyr, you do not know it. See note page 31”
[FD 2]. It directs us to the center of the First Discourse, to the beginning of Part Two of the
work, to a footnote to Rousseau’s claim that, according to an ancient Egyptian tradition, the
sciences were invented by “a god inimical to men’s repose” [FD 16]. The footnote compares
this Egyptian myth about the god Theuth to the Greek myth about Prometheus, and points out
that both peoples regarded their divine benefactors with disfavor. “‘The satyr,’” Rousseau
quotes from an ancient fable, “‘wanted to kiss and embrace fire the first time he saw it but
Prometheus cried out to him: “Satyr, you will weep the loss of the beard on your chin, for it
burns when you touch it.”’ This is the subject of the frontispiece” [FD 16 n *]. It is not hard to
find the satyr among the figures in the illustration. But which is Prometheus? He could be the
leftmost figure, who bears a lit torch and hovers in the air like a god. But then who is the third
man?
�Black, The Very Pictures of Education, Page 5
Six years after the publication of the Discourse, Rousseau judged its frontispiece to be
“very bad” [CC 4:408]. It was certainly not understood by all of the Discourse’s readers. One of
them, Claude-Nicolas Lecat, wrote an anonymous Refutation of the work, in which he claims
that the central figure in the illustration is man, “naked and leaving the hands of Prometheus, of
nature.” The satyr, he maliciously continued, is Rousseau himself, ignorantly admiring the
image of natural man, which image is about to be burnt to ash by Prometheus’ fire [CW 2:156].
This tendentious interpretation provoked Rousseau’s retort that he would treat his readers “like
children,” and interpret for them the “clear allegory” of the illustration. “Prometheus’ torch,” he
says in the Letter to Lecat, “is that of the sciences, created to inspire great geniuses.” “[T]he
Satyr who, seeing fire for the first time, runs to it and wants to embrace it, represents common
men, seduced by the brilliance of letters, who surrender indiscreetly to study.”7 And
“Prometheus who cries out and warns them of the danger is the Citizen of Geneva” – that is,
Rousseau himself [CW 2:179].
Rousseau’s insistence on the clarity of his allegory should not make us forget that he still
only identifies two of the three figures in the frontispiece: Prometheus-Rousseau, the leftmost
figure, is known by his torch, while the satyr-common man, the rightmost figure who reaches for
Prometheus’ torch, is known by his shape. Again, who is the third man? We can make an
educated guess with the assistance of the illustration’s caption. The phrase “fire burns when one
touches it” [CW 2:12 n *] comes from Plutarch’s essay “How to profit by one’s enemies,” where
it is followed immediately by this qualification: “yet it furnishes light and heat, and is an
instrument of every craft for those who have learned to use it” [II.9].8 If Rousseau’s studied
omission of this sequel has the same cause as his studied silence about the identity of the third
man in the illustration, then it seems likely that this third man must be a “great genius,” whom
�Black, The Very Pictures of Education, Page 6
Prometheus’ torch was made to enlighten. In particular, it seems likely that this man must be the
great genius whose enlightenment leads him to keep enlightenment from the common people,
lest scientific and artistic progress corrupt their morals – namely, Rousseau himself. In the
frontispiece to the First Discourse, then, we see the first example of Rousseau doubling himself
in an image. Soon we will see another example of this practice in one of the illustrations in
Emile.
Years after the publication of the First Discourse, Rousseau complained in the Letter to
Beaumont that none of his adversaries had been able to understand his distinction between the
suitability of enlightenment for individuals, and its dangerousness for peoples – though he
always drew this distinction with care [OC 4:967]. We might blame precisely Rousseau’s care in
drawing this distinction for his adversaries’ failure to notice it. As we saw, Rousseau compares
Prometheus with the Egyptian god Theuth, who is mentioned in the discussion of the
“seemliness and unseemliness of writing” in Plato’s Phaedrus as the inventor of written letters,
among other sciences [275c-276c]. In this discussion, the question arises whether a piece of
writing can have the power to defend itself, by knowing how “to speak and keep silence toward
those it ought” [276a]. By trying, with the frontispiece to the First Discourse, to speak
differently to different readers, Rousseau seems to have spoken unclearly. But he would soon
have a second chance.
Part Two: The Hottentot, or the Literal Frontispiece
Four years later, Rousseau published his Second Discourse, a work that seeks to uncover man’s
original condition, and to describe the history of his development from this original condition to
his present state. Once again, Rousseau furnished this writing with a captioned frontispiece,
�Black, The Very Pictures of Education, Page 7
located across from its title page [Slide 5]. Again, the setting is outdoors, with vegetation in the
foreground and, this time, the ocean in the distance. But this frontispiece features a stark visual
and thematic division, cutting down the middle and through its principal figure. To his left we
see a group of five adult males, wearing broad-brimmed, feathered hats, with elegant clothes and
tasseled shoes. Four of them are standing, apparently disputing with one another: two have their
hands raised in animated gestures. The fifth man, perhaps their leader, sits on an ornate box.
One of his hands is raised to his face is a gesture familiar from our classes: the gesture of
pondering, or perhaps of duplicity. Behind this group, a crenellated keep rises, with two
machicolated bartizans. Over this left side of the image hang dark clouds, casting their shadows
on the keep and the ground below. To the right of the principal figure, by contrast, we see two
rows of low huts, set on a beach that slopes gently to the water. In front of the closer row of
huts, we can just make out five or six dark-skinned figures. Behind these huts, on the water, five
or six ships are moving under sail, their pennants streaming in the wind. Over this right side of
the image, the clouds are lighter, the sky brighter, and birds fly in the distance.
The principal figure stands between the two halves of this scene. He is a dark-skinned
male, wearing fur breeches, a necklace, and a sword at his hip. A bundle of fabric lies in the
foreground; peeking out from it is a broad-brimmed feathered hat like those worn by the other
men. While looking down at the leader of the group to his right, the central figure gestures with
his left hand at the huts on the beach or the ships on the water, and with his right at the bundle at
his feet. While his left foot is planted on the ground, his right heel is lifted, as if he were about to
take a step.
The caption to this illustration reads, “[h]e returns among [chez] his equals. See Note 13,
page 259” [SD 112; I have altered the translation]. Turning there, we find Rousseau observing
�Black, The Very Pictures of Education, Page 8
that despite every effort by Europeans, no savage has ever been won over to the European
religion and way of life. Anticipating the objection that this is due not to the superiority of the
savage life, but to their habitual attachment to it, which makes them insensible to the advantages
of the European way, he quotes at length from a traveler’s tale by Peter Kolben. The Dutch
governor of the Cape of Good Hope took an infant Hottentot, and had him raised in the European
religion and way of life. After he had been educated and had traveled, this Hottentot returned to
the Cape, and soon decided to visit his relatives. During this visit, he discarded his European
clothes and dressed himself in a sheepskin; he then returned to the Dutch fort, carrying his
former outfit, and told the Governor the following (and here Rousseau tells us to see the
frontispiece):
[b]e so good, Sir, as to note that I forever renounce these trappings. I also
renounce the Christian Religion for the rest of my life; my resolution is to live and
die in the Religion, the ways, and the customs of my Ancestors. The one favor I
ask of you is to leave me the Necklace and the Cutlass I am wearing. I shall keep
them for love of you [SD 220-221].
Then, without waiting for a reply, the Hottentot ran off, never to be seen in the Cape again.
The footnote containing this story is connected to a passage in the main text of the
Discourse, where Rousseau asserts that the savage state, “occupying a just mean between the
indolence of the primitive state and the petulant activity of our amour-propre, must have been the
happiest and the most lasting epoch… the least subject to revolutions, the best for man” [SD
167]. So at first it looks like the note and the frontispiece are meant to support these assertions.
The stability and superiority of the savage state are proven by the story of the Hottentot who –
although wholly familiar with the European religion and way of life, and wholly unfamiliar with
the savage alternative – prefers the savage way as soon as he learns of it. But Rousseau cautions
his reader that his notes “sometimes [stray] so wide of the subject that they are not good to read
together with the text” [SD 129]. And indeed, some of the details of the Hottentot’s speech are
�Black, The Very Pictures of Education, Page 9
puzzling. It is unreasonable to believe, for example, that he keeps the necklace and the sword for
love of the Governor of the Cape – the man who kidnapped him and deprived him of a childhood
and youth lived in the best and happiest way for a human being. Why then does the Hottentot
take these items, and run away without waiting for a reply?
Rousseau’s illustration helps us to answer this question, by showing us that in keeping
the necklace and sword, and indeed in wearing the sheepskin, the Hottentot is not returning to his
equals. These have neither swords nor necklaces; they do not even wear pants [Slide 6]. The
illustration also shows us that, while saying what he says, the Hottentot gestures not only at the
beach huts of his native people, but also at the ships of his adoptive people. These ships mean
that there will always be more Dutch, more Europeans, more civilized and enlightened human
beings arriving at the Cape of Good Hope, in a flood that the religion, ways, and customs of the
Hottentot’s ancestors cannot hope to survive – unless they can take advantage of European
military technology and luxury economics. The frontispiece to the Second Discourse thus shows
us that the Hottentot chooses not to return to the savage state, the mean between our primitive
and civilized states, but rather to combine the best of the savage state with what is necessary
from civilization. He means to try to be a natural man in civilized society. He means to try to be
an Emile.
Part Three: Thetis, or the Mother9
Emile, which Rousseau thought of as his best work [CW 5:473], depicts the education of an
imaginary child, named Emile, from birth or even before birth, until his marriage to a woman
named Sophie and the announcement of her pregnancy. Its first book lays out the reasons for
Rousseau’s educational project, and follows the child during his infancy. As a whole, Emile
�Black, The Very Pictures of Education, Page 10
consists of five books, each with an illustration commissioned by Rousseau.10 The first of these,
titled “Thetis,” is said, in Rousseau’s “Explication of the Illustrations,” to relate to the first book
and serve as the frontispiece to the work [E 36; I have altered the translation].11 As befits a
frontispiece, it appears across from Emile’s title page.12
Turning there, we find that we begin in the cave [Slide 7]. Five women are gathered
underground, on the bank of a river. Behind them, up and to the left, a twisting path rises to
daylight. One of the women, adorned with a necklace and bracelets, with jewelry in her hair and
wearing a fancy dress, kneels at the water’s edge, holding her skirts back with her left hand,
while with her right she dips a naked infant headfirst into the water. Behind her, and more
plainly dressed, the other four women are caught in animated poses. One holds a hand up in the
air, in a gesture that perhaps indicates astonishment; a second has her arms around the shoulders
of the first; a third holds the well-dressed woman’s cloak in one hand, while her other hand rests
on the woman’s arm – perhaps to comfort her, perhaps to keep her from falling into the river; a
fourth woman crouches at the water’s edge, her dress hitched up in her left hand. At least two of
these women have their blouses open and their breasts bared, as though they have just been
nursing. And finally, lurking in the darkest part of the scene and barely discernible, we can see a
muscular but hunched figure in a raft on the river, bearing a pole or an oar, and accompanied by
a shrouded companion [Slide 8].
Rousseau’s explication says that the illustration “represents Thetis plunging her son in the
Styx to make him invulnerable” [E 36]. The well-dressed woman, then, is Thetis; and the naked
infant is her son, whom readers of the Iliad will know as Achilles. If the river is the Styx, then
the figure in the raft must be Charon, ferrying a shade to the underworld. Rousseau’s use of this
image as a frontispiece to the whole work leads us to infer that the education described in Emile
�Black, The Very Pictures of Education, Page 11
is to be a type of ‘invulnerability treatment,’ and Emile a type of Achilles. But why include
Charon in the image, then – especially since Rousseau tells us outright that the river depicted is
the Styx? And why title the engraving “Thetis,” rather than “Achilles”?
Rousseau’s explication ends by directing the reader deep into the text of Book I.13
Following his direction, we find a paragraph about the two ways that mothers can depart from
nature: by neglecting their children – for example, by failing to breastfeed them – or by caring
excessively for them. In this context Rousseau mentions the fable of Thetis plunging Achilles in
the Styx, which he say contains a “lovely” and “clear” allegory.14 “The cruel mothers of whom I
speak do otherwise,” Rousseau concludes: “by dint of plunging their children in softness, they
prepare them for suffering; they open their pores to ills of every sort to which they will not fail to
be prey when grown” [E 47]. The example of Thetis thus seems like an instance of natural
mothering – her ‘invulnerability treatment’ for Achilles is neither too harsh, nor too soft, but just
right. And yet the engraving of Thetis suggests that she is not breastfeeding her son, but
confiding this task to wet nurses.
What is worse, a scant few pages later, in the context of a discussion of how doctors
cause their patients to fear death, Rousseau has the following to say about Achilles: “[i]t is the
knowledge of dangers that makes us fear them; he who believed himself invulnerable would fear
nothing. By dint of arming Achilles against peril, the poet takes from him the merit of valor;
every other man in his place would have been an Achilles at the same price” [E 55]. Had Thetis’
‘invulnerability treatment’ for Achilles succeeded, it would have protected him from death,
though at the cost of depriving him of the opportunity for virtue. But it did not succeed: Achilles
remained vulnerable in one place, and was therefore given the opportunity for virtue, but at the
cost of increasing his fear of death. The ‘Thetis’ engraving completes the argument of the text,
�Black, The Very Pictures of Education, Page 12
first by showing that Thetis was at once too hard and too soft – she neglected to breastfeed her
son, and she tried to make him invulnerable – and second by showing that the fear of death is
both the cause and the effect of both kinds of excess:15 the cause in the case of Thetis, the
mother, and the effect in the case of her son. Hence Charon, barely visible in the gloom, is the
most important figure in this illustration.
Part Four: Chiron, or the Tutor
While it seems reasonable to attribute Achilles’ wrath to his fear of death, it might occur to those
of us who know Homer well that in the Iliad there is no mention of Thetis dipping the infant
Achilles in the Styx to make him invulnerable. So the Iliad cannot be the text to which the first
illustration in Emile refers. Rather, the story comes from a later, and to us less-known epic: the
Achilleid, by Statius [I.133-134].16 As it happens, this epic is also the likely source of the fable
behind the second illustration in Emile – suggesting that these two illustrations are best
interpreted together.
Book Two of Emile describes Emile’s childhood: the conditions of his happiness, his first
experience with property, his learning to speak, and the training of his senses. Turning to the
illustration found at the head of this book [Slide 9], we see two figures meeting on a
mountainside. To their right, from our perspective, the ground slopes downward to some trees;
to the left it slopes steeply upward to some tree-studded crags. In the distance we see some
clouds in the sky. The figure on our right is a young child, dressed in a tunic. In his right hand
the child holds a rabbit by the ears; it is not evident whether the rabbit is alive or dead. The
child’s streaming hair and posture, with one leg flexed but planted on the ground, and the other
in the air, suggest that he has arrived running. With his left hand the child reaches out for an
�Black, The Very Pictures of Education, Page 13
apple proffered by the figure on our left, as he gazes into his face. This figure is clearly a
centaur. His human upper body is clothed by some sort of cape, and his face is bearded. The
posture of his equine lower body is strange: with one foreleg straightened and planted on the
ground, and his one visible hind leg flexed, he could be rising from a crouching position. The
centaur gazes into the child’s face, extending the apple with his right hand, and reaching with his
left, not for the limp rabbit, but past it to caress the child’s cheek. At the centaur’s feet we can
barely make out a basket of apples to his left, and a heap of items to his right, including what
look like a crested helmet, a shield, a scroll, perhaps a lyre, a pad of paper, and perhaps even a
potted plant.
According to its title, the subject of this engraving is Chiron, the centaur; and the action
depicted, according to Rousseau’s explication, is “Chiron training the little Achilles in running”
[E 36]. The citation accompanying this explication directs us to “Page 382” of Emile’s first
volume, where we read the story of “an indolent and lazy child who was to be trained in
running” – a child who, like Achilles, “was intended for a military career.” This child prided
himself to such an extent on his noble birth that he persuaded himself that rank can take the place
of ability. “To make of such a gentleman a light-footed Achilles,” Rousseau tells us, “the skill of
Chiron himself would hardly have sufficed” [E 141]. To make a long story short, the tutor in this
example goads his pupil into competing with other children in running, using cakes as a prize.17
By secretly manipulating the conditions of each race, the tutor is able to arrange an initial victory
for his vain and lazy charge, and to ensure subsequent victories at his, the tutor’s, will. Not only
does this child become accomplished at running. “This accomplishment produced another of
which I had not dreamed,” writes Rousseau. “When he had rarely carried off the prize, he almost
always ate it alone, as did his competitors. But, in accustoming himself to victory, he became
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generous and often shared with the vanquished. […] I learned thereby what the true principle of
generosity is” [E 142].
Leaving aside for the moment this puzzling conclusion, we might also be puzzled by
Rousseau’s choice of an illustration for this text. The engraving depicts a race run for an apple,
not for a cake; and the competition in the race seems to be a hare, rather than another child.
Moreover, why say that the illustration depicts Achilles, and not just a lazy child; and why depict
the centaur Chiron rather than a human tutor? It turns out that the fable about Chiron’s education
of Achilles comes not from the Iliad18 but from the Achilleid, so that there is a close thematic
connection between the first two illustrations to Emile. Now the Achilleid begins with Thetis
witnessing the abduction of Helen by Paris, and realizing that the Trojan war will result. Fearing
that Achilles will be sought for, will want to fight, and will die [I.37-38, 74-76], she first tries
and fails to persuade Neptune to sink Paris’ ships [I.80-81], then seeks out Chiron [I.104-106], to
whom she had sent Achilles for his education. “High up his lofty dwelling bores through the
mountain” [I.106-107], Statius writes,
[h]ere are no darts that have tasted human blood, no ash trees fractured in festive
combats, nor mixing bowls shattered upon kindred foes, but innocent quivers and
empty hides of wild beasts… [f]or at this time unarmed his only labour was to
know herbs that bring health to living things in doubtful case or to limn with his
lyre the heroes of old for his pupil [I.112-118].
Thetis finds Chiron awaiting Achilles’ return from the hunt, and persuades him to release
Achilles to her – citing, among other things, her frequent nightmares about dipping Achilles in
the Styx [I.133-134]. Chiron assents, because Achilles has become unmanageable [I.149-155],
though Statius tells us that Chiron never would have done so had he known of Thetis’ plan to
disguise Achilles as a woman, in the hopes of avoiding his recruitment to fight at Troy [I.141143]. When Achilles finally appears, he is armed, accompanied by Patroclus, and bearing lion
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cubs that he has abducted after killing their mother [I.158-177]. Achilles and Thetis depart the
next day.
By alluding in this way to the Achilleid, the ‘Chiron’ illustration helps us to interpret its
details. Now we see why the scene is set on a mountainside, why Chiron is clothed in animal
skins, and why a helmet, a shield, a lyre, and a potted medicinal plant lie in the foreground. But
more importantly, the illustration deepens the story in the text to which it refers, both through its
allusion to the Achilleid and through its departures from that work. First, when compared with
the ‘Thetis’ illustration and interpreted in light of the Achilleid, the ‘Chiron’ illustration teaches
us that the mother and the tutor are antagonists in the education of the child. The mother, moved
by the fear of death, seeks to preserve her child from harm, while the tutor, whose motives are
unknown, seeks to prepare him to face it. This antagonism is touchingly depicted in the
Achilleid, when Achilles, Patroclus, Chiron and Thetis spend the night together in Chiron’s cave.
Statius writes, “[t]he huge Centaur collapses on stone and Achilles fondly twines himself about
his shoulders, though his faithful mother is there, preferring the familiar bosom” [I.195-197].
Tutor and mother both have a medicine for the human condition, but the mother’s medicine is
harmful – it culminates in proud wrath – while the tutor’s medicine is beneficial: it turns pride
into generosity, whose principle, the text implies, is confidence that there will always be more
cake – or in other words, ignorance of death.19 Second, in its departures from the Achilleid, the
‘Chiron’ engraving implies that Rousseau’s Achilles has been training in running, rather than
hunting; that his skill is with defensive weapons; and that he is a vegetarian, and so more capable
of pity.20 Rousseau’s Chiron, by contrast, may still be a carnivore; the fate of the hare is
unknown.
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Part Five: Hermes, or the God
Book Three of Emile spans the years between childhood and puberty, and covers Emile’s
introduction to the elements of the natural sciences and the trade of carpentry, as well as the
completion of the training of his senses. The third illustration in Emile appears at the beginning
of this book, which in the first edition falls at the beginning of its second volume. Appropriately
enough, this illustration also makes a new thematic beginning. Turning there we discover
another outdoor scene, populated by three figures [Slide 10]. The chief figure stands on a step in
the foreground, with one foot on the earth. He is nearly naked, clad only in a cloak draped over
his left shoulder, and a winged, soft-brimmed cap. His ankles also seem to be winged. In his left
arm he cradles a slim wand entwined by two serpents. With his right hand he uses a stylus to
draw what look like geometrical figures on one of the two broad columns that stand in the center
of the scene. And at his feet, in the foreground, are piled mathematical instruments: an armillary
sphere, a protractor, and a sundial are easily discerned, while the other objects may include a
writing desk with geometrical proofs, a book, a model star, and a carpenter’s square. In the
bottom right of the illustration, far from the mathematical instruments, a plant grows. The other
two figures in the scene seem to be an older, bearded male and his younger, beardless
companion. Both are dressed simply: the former in a cloak, the latter in an open-necked shirt.
Both are also gesturing expressively: the elder points discreetly with his right hand to the chief
figure’s activity, while perhaps restraining his companion with his left arm; the younger of the
men has his left hand raised in a gesture of wonder. The statue of what may be a sphinx beside
them, and the elongated pyramid or obelisk behind them, suggest an Egyptian setting – though
the tree on the left margin of the image, and the gently rising hill in the right background, are not
reminiscent of Egypt.
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Rousseau gives ‘Hermes’ as the subject of this engraving, and writes in his explications
that it depicts “Hermes engraving the elements of the sciences on columns” [E 36]. The
accompanying reference to the text is to “Page 76.” Turning there, we find Rousseau
proclaiming
I hate books. They only teach one to talk about what one does not know. It is
said that Hermes engraved the elements of the sciences on columns in order to
shelter his discoveries from a flood. If he had left a good imprint of them in
man’s head, they would have been preserved by tradition. Well-prepared minds
are the surest monuments on which to engrave human knowledge [E 184].
So the ‘Hermes’ engraving, like the ‘Thetis’ engraving, depicts a misguided action. Just as
Thetis should have trained her son in running, rather than trying to make him invulnerable, so
Hermes should have engraved the principles of the sciences in the minds of men, rather than on
columns. But how does one do this? Rousseau gives a clear answer in the immediate sequel:
with a book, indeed with one book in particular – Robinson Crusoe. While the general danger of
books is that they give their readers words that do not correspond to things, and so the opinion of
knowledge without the reality, books like Robinson Crusoe escape this danger by putting their
readers in imaginary situations that force them to attend to things, and in particular to their real
utility, apart from opinion [E 185]. This interested attention to utility is the only lasting
foundation of the sciences.
Rousseau’s example of a book that escapes the dangers of books helps us better to
interpret the ‘Hermes’ illustration. In our treatment of the frontispiece of the First Discourse, we
mentioned the possibility raised in Plato’s Phaedrus: that a piece of writing can overcome the
defects of writing, by knowing how “to speak and to keep silence toward those it ought” [276a].
A suitably edited Robinson Crusoe,21 it seems, is such a piece of writing: it keeps silent to those
interested in words, for whom it is only a quaint story, but it speaks volumes to those interested
in judging the true utility of things. But Rousseau also says that the frontispiece to the Discourse
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depicts a fable found allegorically in the “ancient tradition passed on from Egypt to Greece” [G,
16] about the Egyptian god Theuth, known to the Greeks as Hermes. Now we see the reason for
the Egyptian objects – the sphinx and the pyramid or obelisk – in the otherwise Greek scene of
the ‘Hermes’ illustration. Rousseau takes the fables of Prometheus, Theuth, and Hermes to have
the same meaning.22 They raise the question of how the sciences and the arts can be cultivated
without causing moral corruption.
Putting the ‘Prometheus’ and ‘Hermes’ illustrations side by side, we see that they have
similar structures [Slide 11]. There are three figures in each: a divinity who possesses the
sciences and the arts, a figure who is kept from them, and an intermediary between the two. But
the satyr who is kept away in the ‘Prometheus’ illustration, and who represents “common men”
[CW 2:179], is replaced in the ‘Hermes’ illustration by a young man who is kept from Hermes’
engravings, and yet shown them at a distance. The naked man, whom we guessed to represent
great geniuses who are suited to the sciences, is replaced by an older, bearded man, who at once
restrains his charge and points out Hermes’ work. Lastly, Prometheus himself is replaced by
Hermes. If it follows that Hermes also represents Rousseau,23 then the move from the First
Discourse to Emile involves a move from a project to keep the sciences and the arts away from
the common man, and in the hands of great geniuses, to a project to preserve the useful elements
of the sciences and the arts, by teaching them to ordinary intellects [compare E 52]. Far from
being uselessly employed in engraving these elements on columns, Hermes is usefully employed
in engraving them on the minds of men, using the writing that overcomes the defects of writing.
It is more than a joke that Emile’s central engraving is an engraving of Rousseau engraving.
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Part Six: Orpheus, or the Priest
Book Four of Emile is long, and treats the social but not fully sexual consequences of Emile’s
emerging erotic desires: his education in compassion, his study of history, and the education of
his taste. The book is made longer, though, by Rousseau’s exceptional inclusion of a distinct
writing in its midst, called “The Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar” [E 266-313]. The
illustration to Book Four is also exceptional, because it is found not at the beginning of the book,
as the second and third illustrations were found at the beginnings of their respective books, but in
the middle of the fourth book – which in the first edition falls at the beginning of the third
volume.24 In effect, this makes the illustration into a frontispiece for “The Profession of Faith,”25
whose preamble begins right after the engraving, where Rousseau writes, in reference to
religious matters, “[i]nstead of telling you here on my own what I think, I shall tell you what a
man more worthy than I thought” [E 260].
Turning to the illustration, we find another outdoor scene, set in the wooded foothills of a
mountain [Slide 12]. The center of the engraving is dominated by a man standing on a raised
patch of earth, and dressed in sandals, a tunic and a cloak. His left hand holds a fold of his cloak,
or perhaps a sheaf of paper, while his left arm cradles a lyre.26 His right hand is raised palm
upward in a gesture to the sky. By contrast, his serene gaze is directed downward, to the crowd
gathered around him. This crowd is chiefly composed of bare-chested men, old and young – or
at least bearded and beardless. Unlike the central figure, they are dressed only in animal skins
wrapped around their waists, and they are barefoot. One of these men cowers, one kneels, two
crouch; but all of them, except the cowering man, look up at the sky with expressions of awe.
The remainder of the crowd, to the central figure’s right from our perspective, consists of
animals. We can make out a small rodent, a sheep, an ox, a horse, and several birds, including a
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bird of prey that seems far too large for the branch it perches on. As far as we can tell, there are
no women present.
Rousseau titles this illustration “Orpheus,” and writes that the engraving “represents
Orpheus teaching men the worship of the gods” [E 36]. The illustration itself refers to “Page
128” of Volume Three. Turning there, we find an intermission in the “Profession of Faith,”
during which Rousseau remarks, “[t]he good priest had spoken with vehemence. He was moved,
and so was I. I believed I was hearing the divine Orpheus sing the first hymns and teaching men
the worship of the gods. Nevertheless I saw a multitude of objections to make to him” [E 294].
Rousseau thus likens the Savoyard Vicar, whose views on religion are given instead of
Rousseau’s own, and with whose views Rousseau does not agree,27 to Orpheus.
It will help here to review some of the details of the Orpheus myth. In Ovid’s version in
the Metamorphoses, Orpheus loses his bride Eurydice to death, and is so overcome with love for
her that he decides he cannot live without her [X.26].28 He pursues her into the underworld,
where his music charms everyone, and secures Eurydice’s release – on the condition that, as he
leads her to the surface, he not look back at her. We should understand this otherwise arbitrary
condition as a test of Orpheus’ trust in Eurydice: a test of his confidence that she would rather
accompany him than stay in the underworld. But when “they were nearing the margin of the
upper earth,” Ovid writes, “he, afraid that she might fail him, eager for the sight of her, turned
back his longing eyes; and instantly she slipped into the depths” [X.55-57]. Orpheus is stunned
by her second death; he tries to pursue her, but his descent is barred.
Orpheus mourns Eurydice for three years, spurning the other women who try to console
him.29 His lack of confidence in Eurydice becomes a mistrust of all women. He sings in
mourning, and Ovid reports that his songs draw to him “multitudinous birds,” “snakes,” a “train
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of beasts,” “oxen,” and some “stout peasants” [XI.20-21, 31, 33] – suggesting that Ovid’s
description provides some of the details of Rousseau’s illustration. Even the trees and the stones
are moved. But Orpheus’ song also attracts the local women who, offended by his contempt for
them, drown out his song and finally tear him to pieces. A nearby river carries off his head, still
singing, and his lyre, still sounding, while his shade is reunited at last with Eurydice’s in the
underworld.30
So Rousseau’s illustration compares the Savoyard Vicar to Orpheus, and Ovid’s telling of
the Orpheus myth suggests that the singer was destroyed by his soured love for a woman. Does
Rousseau mean thus to suggest that the “Profession of Faith” – the Vicar’s teaching concerning
the gods, his song – is also based on erotic love gone wrong? If we look at the details of what
the Vicar says, this is exactly what we learn. In his preamble we learn that the Vicar is miserable
because of a scandal caused by a conflict between his erotic desires and his respect for marriage.
The Vicar cannot be chaste, but he cannot marry; nor can he bring himself to commit adultery.
So he sleeps with an unmarried woman, and she becomes pregnant, without a husband on whom
to blame the pregnancy. The lovers are discovered and torn from one another’s arms [E 267].31
“A few such experiences lead a reflective mind a long way,” the Vicar confesses to JeanJacques. We see how far the Vicar was led when we read his “Profession of Faith.” There he
outlines a metaphysics in which the soul is enslaved to, and yet feels contempt for, the body: the
soul is “subjected to the senses and chained to [the] body which enslaves it and interferes with
it,” but “care for [the] body’s preservation incites the soul to relate everything to the body and
gives it an interest contrary to the general order, which the soul is nevertheless capable of seeing
and loving” [E 292]. Having been torn, like Orpheus, from his love, the Vicar is now
figuratively torn apart, like Orpheus was literally, by contempt for his own erotic desires.32
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Now Rousseau does not wholly agree with the Vicar’s “Profession of Faith,” and Emile
will hear nothing like it from Jean-Jacques.33 Rousseau’s own view seems to be that the conflict
erotic desire can foment between the soul and the body is not necessary: it can be forestalled by
correct education. To the extent that otherworldly metaphysical teachings arise from thisworldly
sexual conflict, then, they too are not necessary – and they too can be avoided by correct
education. This conclusion reminds us of another, less-known thread of the Orpheus myth. In
the Argonautica Apollonius mentions Orpheus first among the Argonauts [I.23],34 and depicts
him saving his crewmates on two occasions: once when he sings of the origin of the cosmos and
of the gods, to stop the Argonauts from quarreling [I.492-511]; and once when he sings to drown
out the voices of the Sirens [IV.903-909].35 Apollonius’ version of the Orpheus myth suggests
the possibility of another, more successful Orpheus who can protect his comrades against the
dangers of erotic desire, and reminds us of another hero, more successful than Achilles, who
resisted the Sirens’ song, who did not lose but regained a wife, and whose image governs the last
two books of Emile, as Achilles’ image does the first two.
Part Seven: Circe, or the Woman
The fifth and final book of Emile begins with a discussion of the natural differences between
men and women; it goes on to describe the education of Emile’s intended wife, Sophie, their
courtship, Emile’s travels, and their marriage. Rousseau places the illustration for this book at its
beginning, which falls at the beginning of the first edition’s fourth volume. The engraving
depicts our first indoor scene, with two figures in the foreground [Slide 13]. On our left is a
young woman, richly clad in a patterned dress and a cloak, and adorned with a ribbon in her hair
and bracelets on her wrist. Her head is tilted to her left, and she wears a serene, welcoming
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expression; her arms are extended, palms open and fingers splayed, as if to invite an embrace.
At her sandaled feet lie a long stick and a shallow-bowled, broad-based cup. Behind her are a
striking table with a claw-footed leg, and the edge of a sumptuous, canopied bed [Slide 14]. On
our right is a bearded man, wearing a plumed helmet, a cloak, short breeches, and sandals. In his
right hand he holds a sword, but since his finger is across the hilt and stretched in the direction of
the blade, and since the sword point is on the ground, he seems about to lay it down. In his left,
he holds what looks like a sprig of vegetation, with his arm stretched out away from the woman.
The man’s left leg is extended, his knee unbent, and he gazes directly into the woman’s eyes, his
expression made unreadable by the shadow cast by his helmet. He looks like he is trying to step
into the woman’s embrace while setting down his sword, without bending his knee or looking
away from her gaze. Behind the man we see the snouts and bodies of four or five pigs; behind
them, columns reminiscent of the ‘Hermes’ illustration; and behind these a neoclassical temple,
its dome faintly visible, decorated with one figure in an alcove, and two more lounging to either
side of the pediment.
Rousseau titles this engraving ‘Circe,’ and says in his explications that it depicts her
“giving herself to Ulysses, whom she was not able to transform” [E 36]. We are referred to
“Page 304” of Emile’s fourth volume, where we find the conclusion to the following story.
During his courtship of Sophie, Emile and Jean-Jacques live nearby. Sophie only permits Emile
occasional visits: one or two a week, for a day or two at most. When Emile first met Sophie,
heard her name and heard her speak, he began “to swallow with deep draughts the poison with
which she intoxicates him” [E 415]; but now, when he is apart from Sophie, he “is Emile again.
He has not been transformed at all” [E 435]. Emile studies the neighborhood and works to
improve it, and at least once a week, or in bad weather, he and Jean-Jacques labor in a
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carpenter’s shop in the city [E 437]. Alerted to this practice by Sophie’s father, one day Sophie
and her mother visit the workshop. They admire the respectability and the cleanliness of the
carpenter’s trade, and they are moved by how seriously Emile takes his low-paying job. Then
they prepare to leave, and Sophie’s mother invites Emile to leave with them. Emile sadly replies
that he cannot: he and Jean-Jacques are needed, and they have promised to work. So Sophie and
her mother leave, the mother in a fit of pique. Why didn’t Emile, who is rich, pay off his
obligation, and leave with them? But Sophie is happy with Emile’s choice. Had he paid off his
obligation, this would have meant “putting his riches in place of his duties” [E 438]. “It is for
me that he stays,” she tells her mother; “I saw it in his eyes” [E 439]. Here Rousseau interrupts
to explain that Sophie wants to be loved for her virtues, more than for her charms; so she wants
Emile to prefer his own duty to her, and her to all else. “She wants to reign over a man whom
she has not disfigured,” Rousseau concludes. “It is thus that Circe, having debased Ulysses’
companions, disdains them and gives herself only to him whom she was unable to change” [E
439].
Though Rousseau follows Horace in using the hero’s Roman name, Ulysses,36 the most
likely source for the myth behind this illustration is Homer’s Odyssey. In Book Ten, Odysseus
tells of how he came to Circe’s island after the loss of all but one of his ships [X.130-132].37
Spying her house from afar, he sends half his remaining men to scout. Circe invites them in,
gives them a potion to make them forget their country, and strikes them with her wand, turning
their bodies, though not their minds, into those of pigs [X.236-241]. Only one man, who
suspected treachery, escapes. When Odysseus learns of the fate of his comrades, he resolves to
go to Circe’s house alone. But on his way there, he meets Hermes, disguised as a youth. The
god tells Odysseus what to expect: Circe “will make you a potion, and put drugs in the food, but
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she will not even so be able to enchant you, for this good medicine which I give you now will
prevent her” [X.290-292]. He tells Odysseus what to do –
as soon as Circe with her long wand strikes you, then drawing from beside your
thigh your sharp sword, rush forward against Circe, as if you were raging to kill
her, and she will be afraid, and invite you to go to bed with her. Do not then resist
and refuse the bed of the goddess, for so she will set free your companions, and
care for you also; but bid her swear the great oath of the blessed gods, that she has
no other evil hurt that she is devising against you, so she will not make you weak
and unmanned, once you are naked [X. 290-301] –
and he gives Odysseus a black root with a milky flower, whose nature he explains, called moly
by the gods.
Events unfold as Hermes predicts. Circe offers Odysseus the potion; he drinks and is not
enchanted. She strikes him with her wand; he rushes her with drawn sword. “[S]he screamed
and ran under my guard,” Odysseus narrates, “and clasping both knees in loud lamentation spoke
to me” [X.323-324]. Circe wonders at Odysseus’ immunity to her drugs; she says, “[t]here is a
mind in you no magic will work on” [X.329]. She recognizes him as Odysseus, whose arrival
was foretold to her many times by Hermes. She invites Odysseus to bed, and he complies – but
only after securing her oath, as Hermes recommended. Later, he will require her to restore his
men to human form.
With Homer’s assistance, we can now recognize Circe’s “long staff,” and the potion
goblet at her feet. The plant in Ulysses’ left hand is no doubt the moly, and the pigs in the
background are Ulysses’ unfortunate companions – moved from the pens Homer mentions [X.
238] to Circe’s bedroom for visual effect. The meaning of the bed behind Circe, of her
expression and gesture, is unmistakable. But what of Odysseus’ claim in Homer that Circe ran
under his guard and clasped his knees? Here both parties are standing. And what of Rousseau’s
offhand comment that Emile has already drunk of Sophie’s poison, and been transformed [E 415,
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435]? Lastly, what of the implication of Rousseau’s carpentry story: that it was Sophie’s mother
who tried to make Emile into a rich pig, whereas Sophie herself had no intention of doing so?
By juxtaposing illustration, myth, and text in this way, we see that Rousseau has tinkered
meaningfully with his Homeric precedent. Whereas the Homeric Circe tries both her potion and
her wand on Odysseus, and only submits out of apparent fear when both fail,38 the Rousseauean
Circe-Sophie tries her potion, succeeds in making Ulysses-Emile forget his country, and then
drops her wand, preferring to offer herself willingly to the man who, despite being enchanted by
her, nonetheless still prefers his duty. Accordingly, Ulysses-Emile holds the moly off to one
side; it is not needed in this encounter. Instead, it will be needed later in Book Five. There, in a
final reference to the ‘Thetis’ illustration, which Rousseau has called a “frontispiece to the
[whole] work” [E 36], Rousseau recounts how Jean-Jacques must use the authority granted to
him by Emile to compel Emile to leave Sophie and travel for a year. The stated purpose of these
travels is for Emile to study the principles and practice of government [E 455] – that is, to
remind Emile about his country – but they have an additional purpose: to satisfy Jean-Jacques, as
Sophie is satisfied, that Emile loves his duty more than he loves her [E 443]. So after gaining
Emile’s attention, and stunning his reason, by making him envision Sophie’s death, Jean-Jacques
speaks at length about how Emile’s love for Sophie exposes Emile to hurt. “[I]t is in vain,” JeanJacques tells him, “that I have dipped your soul in the Styx; I was not able to make in
everywhere invulnerable. A new enemy is arising which you have not learned to conquer, and
from which I can no longer save you. That enemy is yourself” [E 443]. That it is not Thetis but
Chiron-Hermes-Jean-Jacques who does the dipping, and not Emile-Achilles’ body but his soul
that is dipped, shows us how far we have come from the mistaken motherly care of the beginning
of the book. Sophie is both a necessary condition for the man raised uniquely for himself to be
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good for others [E 41], and Emile’s Achilles heel. The gravity of this vulnerability is hinted at
by Rousseau’s title for the unfinished and unpublished sequel to Emile: Emile and Sophie, Or the
Solitaries [CW 13:685].39
Part Eight: The Very Pictures of Education?
Now that we have surveyed each of the illustrations in Emile, let’s return to our opening
question: do great books need pictures? Is there “some necessity” in writing that dictates that a
great book should have illustrations as well as text? In our survey we have given Rousseau’s
illustrations four cumulative readings: first as pictures, then as pictures informed by Rousseau’s
explications, then as pictures informed by ancient myths, and lastly as pictures informed by the
text of Emile. To understand Rousseau’s answer to our opening question, then, we should ask
him why each of these readings is necessary. He gives us an answer in a passage from Book
Four of Emile, and additional assistance in passages from the Essay on the Origin of Languages
and the Second Discourse.
First, why are the illustrations themselves necessary? At a climactic moment in Book
Four of Emile – Jean-Jacques is about to give his ‘Savoyard Vicar’ speech to Emile, wherein he
will reveal all he has done for Emile’s education, warn him of the dangers of sex, and extract
from him an unconditional promise of future obedience; that is, Hermes is about to give Ulysses
the moly to protect him from Circe – Rousseau pauses the action to discuss how to prepare Emile
for this speech. Since his lesson about sex should influence Emile “for the rest of his days,” the
instruction it contains ought “never to be forgotten.” “Let us try therefore,” Rousseau proposes,
“to engrave [graver: OC 4:645] it in his memory in such a way that it will never be effaced” [E
321]. The verb he uses here, graver, is related to one of the nouns for engraving, gravure, which
�Black, The Very Pictures of Education, Page 28
suggests a connection between Jean-Jacques’s goal in setting the scene for his speech to Emile,
and Rousseau’s goal in providing illustrations in his book.40 The way to achieve this goal,
Rousseau continues, is to use “the most energetic of languages”: “the language of signs that
speak to the imagination” [E 321], a language that consists of actions.
While this goal of making a teaching more memorable reminds us of the illustration of
Hermes engraving the elements of the sciences on columns, and responds to the concern raised in
the Phaedrus that writing causes “forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it, through
neglect of memory” [275a], it is not the chief reason for Rousseau’s interest in the language of
signs. In the discussion in Emile he turns quickly from the mnemonic use of this language to its
persuasive use: to make human beings act. Unadorned reason, Rousseau pronounces,
“sometimes restrains, it arouses rarely, and it has never done anything great” [E 321]. If you
want great actions from human beings, you need reason adorned with images of action, whose
energy makes a stronger impression than unadorned reason does, by speaking to the heart.
Rousseau does not say why this is so in Emile, but passages from the Second Discourse and the
Essay on the Origin of Languages explain that the energy of the language of signs is due to the
particularity, the variety, the expression, and the compression of the images that make up its
vocabulary.41 So Rousseau’s answer to the question ‘why are the illustrations in Emile
necessary?’ is that he hopes that they will persuade human beings to act.
Why, then, must the illustrations be explicated? Rousseau’s next move in Book Four of
Emile is to launch into a four-paragraph “digression” [E 323] that purports to show, through
historical examples, that the ancients knew how to persuade men to act through the language of
signs, whereas the moderns, through neglect of this language, can move men only by self-interest
or force. The ancients had such a command of this language, Rousseau asserts, that “often” [E
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322] – though pointedly not always – an object they exhibited to the eyes of their audience was
able to say everything. Rousseau’s favorite example of this, which he uses both in Emile and in
the Essay, is the gift given by the king of the Scythians to Darius, the king of the Persians, when
the latter were invading Scythia: a bird, a frog, a mouse, and five arrows. “This terrifying
harangue made its point,” Rousseau writes, “and Darius hurried to get back to his country in
whatever way he could” [E 322] – whereas a threatening letter in place of these signs would only
have been laughable.
But if we look up the source of this story, in Book Four of Herodotus, we learn that the
Scythians gave the Persians the gift as a puzzle42 – likely hoping to detain them in Scythia – and
that the Persians gave the gift two opposite interpretations: as a surrender, and as a threat.
Herodotus does not tell us which interpretation was correct, and it’s not even clear from his
account that the Scythians knew what they meant to say. He merely recounts that an accidental
defeat led Darius to conclude that the Scythians despised the Persians, and to prefer the
interpretation that their gift was a threat. If we give the same treatment to the rest of Rousseau’s
historical examples from this passage in Emile, and the corresponding passage in the Essay, we
find that in several of them he suppresses a detail that is mentioned by his source: that the signs
in question did not say everything, because they were accompanied by a speech.43
Once again, we find a helpful explanation in the Essay on the Origin of Languages.
There Rousseau concludes from his historical examples that “one speaks much better to the eyes
than to the ears,” and that “[t]he most eloquent discourses are even seen to be those with the
most images embedded in them” [EOL 250].44 But then he admits that
when it is a question of moving the heart and inflaming the passions, it is an
entirely different matter. The successive impression made by discourse, striking
with cumulative impact, succeeds in arousing in you a different emotion than does
the presence of the object itself which you take in all at once glance [EOL 250].
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Rousseau distinguishes between the power of images and the power of sounds by stating that
“visible signs make for more accurate imitation, but… interest is more effectively aroused by
sounds” [EOL 251]. It follows from this distinction that while images can concentrate the
interest of their viewers, they cannot generate this interest, nor ensure that it is directed rightly.45
This account explains why the language of signs needs the assistance of discourse, as we
see from many of Rousseau’s historical examples; but it does not explain what can be done for
illustrations in a written work – which, unless it is read dramatically aloud, cannot rely on sounds
to generate interest. If we read further in the Essay, though, we find another helpful section,
where Rousseau writes, “we do not realize that often [sensations] affect us not only as sensations
but as signs or images, and that their moral effects also have moral causes” [EOL 284].
Sensations of beautiful colors, for example, are given life by drawing, by imitation, so that “it is
the passions which they express that succeed in arousing our own, the objects which they
represent that succeed in affecting us” [EOL 284]. This is why colors can be removed from a
painting – it can be turned into a drawing – without it moving us less. When illustrations are
used to depict an action, then, the passions that motivate action are concentrated by the
simultaneity of the drawing, but generated – in the absence of sounds – by the meaning of the
things drawn. So if the viewer knows what the images mean, either because he recognizes them,
or because he can read an explication of what they represent, they will generate and concentrate
his interest. This is Rousseau’s answer to why the illustrations must be explicated: so that the
energy of the language of signs will be properly directed, and the right action will be more likely
to ensue.
But why, third, must the images and their explications refer to ancient myths? After all,
the frontispiece to the Second Discourse makes no such reference, and yet there is no sign that
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Rousseau considered it a failure. We can infer Rousseau’s answer to this question once we
notice another implication of his historical examples: that the language of signs is more
successful the more the communicating parties have something in common. We can treat the
example of the Scythian gift as one in which the parties had little in common, and in which the
language of signs failed – presuming that communication was ever intended in the first place.
By contrast, in Book Four of Emile Rousseau offers several examples46 of the successful use of
the language of signs, in which the sign alone did say everything. The first of these,
“Thrasybulus and Tarquin cutting off the tops of the poppies” [E 322], partly refers to another
story in Herodotus, one that is substantially repeated with different characters by Livy. When
Periander came to power in Corinth, he sent to Thrasybulus, tyrant of neighboring Miletus,
asking about the “safest political establishment for administering the city best” [V.92].
Thrasybulus led Periander’s messenger outside the city, and, speaking with him about unrelated
matters, cut down each stalk of corn that had grown higher than the rest. He then sent the
messenger back to Periander. Now according to the messenger, Thrasybulus made no reply to
Periander’s query. But once he heard what Thrasybulus had done, Periander understood that the
safest political course was to “murder the most eminent of his citizens” [V.92].
In this example, communication by the language of signs succeeded between the two
tyrants because of their similar situations and inclinations; but it was accomplished by a
messenger who was unaware of the message he carried, because of the difference between his
situation and inclination and those of the tyrants.47 We see that the same sign can have meaning
among those who have something in common, while being meaningless to those who do not.
And this helps us to see how allegorical illustrations can be suited to audiences composed of
those with various levels of education. To readers who know the Achilleid, the Phaedrus, the
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Metamorphoses, the Argonautica, and the Odyssey, at one extreme, Rousseau’s illustrations will
be full of detailed meaning; those who do not even know the names Thetis, Chiron, Hermes,
Orpheus and Circe, at the other, will only find as much meaning as one sees in a picture of a
woman dipping a baby in a river.48 So we have Rousseau’s answer to the question of why his
illustrations must refer to ancient myths: to single out his educated readers, and in particular
those who pride themselves on their devotion to the highly questionable modern project of
enlightenment.
Lastly, why then must the images in Emile refer also to passages in Rousseau’s text – and
do so, as I have suggested, in a way that complicates and corrects their corresponding ancient
myths? One final observation will be helpful here about the examples in Rousseau’s
“digression”: they quietly point out that the chief users of the language of signs are tyrants.
Rousseau begins his digression by listing four ancient examples of Biblical covenants based on
threats of divine force;49 then he refers in a footnote to the modern example of the signs used by
the Roman clergy and the “tyrannical government” of Venice [E 322 n *]. After the examples of
Thrasybulus and Periander, of Tarquin and his son, already mentioned, who communicate their
tyrannical designs by signs, he concludes with the example of Mark Antony, who failed to save
the Roman republic because, according to Plutarch, he was “swept away by the tide of popular
applause,” and by “the prospect, if Brutus were overthrown, of being without doubt the ruler-inchief” [II, 489].50 Now if the language of signs is meant to give its users a hold on human beings
other than “by force or by self-interest” [E 321], it must be appealing to those who are unable or
unwilling to use force, but also unable to appeal to self-interest, in either its uneducated or its
educated form. And since human beings act either willingly or unwillingly, persuasion does not
amount to a third option – rather, it amounts to a combination of the two: human beings thinking
�Black, The Very Pictures of Education, Page 33
that they act willingly, while in fact they are acting unwillingly. But this requires that the
interests that cause actions in human beings be connected with actions that are not ordinarily
their result: that the Achilles or the Odysseus that causes admiration, for example, be
surreptitiously replaced by the Emile who is both and better than both. This, then, is Rousseau’s
answer to the question why his illustrations must refer to passages in his text: that only by so
doing can he persuade his educated and enlightened readers to turn their attachment to ancient,
mythical heroes into an attachment to Emile.
So Rousseau’s answer to our opening question – do great books need pictures? – is a
resounding yes. They need pictures, he says, as long as their readers have hearts as well as
heads, and as long as their authors mean to make their readers act. They need pictures of
mythological figures as long as their authors want especially to reach and move their educated
readers. And they need to juxtapose these figures with arguments in their pages as long as they
want to persuade their educated readers to act in new ways. As the ancients knew, and Rousseau
himself knows, persuasion, which does not attempt to enlighten self-interest, but does not crush
with force, is the very picture of education.
Jeff J.S. Black
Annapolis, Maryland
June 18, 2013
Delivered June 19, 2013
Explication of the Slides
Slide 1 represents the frontispiece of Bacon’s Great Instauration, which may be found in Francis Bacon, Novum
Organum. Translated and Edited by Peter Urbach and John Gibson. (Chicago: Open Court, 1994), ii.
Slide 2 represents the title page of the Head Edition of Hobbes’s Leviathan, which may be found in Thomas Hobbes,
Leviathan, with selected variants from the Latin edition of 1668. Edited, with Introduction, by Edwin Curley.
(Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1994), lxxviii.
�Black, The Very Pictures of Education, Page 34
Slide 3 represents the frontispiece of Vico’s New Science, which may be found in Giambattista Vico, The New
Science of Giambattista Vico. Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744) with the addition of “Practic of
the New Science.” Translated by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Frisch. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1984), 2.
Slide 4 represents the frontispiece of Rousseau’s First Discourse, which may be found in Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
The Discourses and other early political writings. Edited and translated by Victor Gourevitch. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997), 2.
Slide 5 represents the frontispiece of Rousseau’s Second Discourse, which may be found in Rousseau, The
Discourses and other early political writings, 112.
Slide 6 represents and magnifies the detail from the bottom right-hand corner of the frontispiece of the Second
Discourse, wherein the huts of the Hottentots are depicted.
Slide 7 represents the ‘Thetis’ illustration from Emile, which may be found in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On
Education. Translation and Introduction by Allan Bloom. (New York: Basic Books, 1979), ii. A portion of the
illustration on the middle left margin has been boxed in red.
Slide 8 represents and magnifies the detail from the middle left margin of the ‘Thetis’ illustration, wherein the figure
of Charon can barely be discerned.
Slide 9 represents the ‘Chiron’ illustration from Emile, which may be found in Rousseau, Emile, 76.
Slide 10 represents the ‘Hermes’ illustration from Emile, which may be found in Rousseau, Emile, 164.
Slide 11 juxtaposes the frontispiece of the First Discourse from Slide 4 with the ‘Hermes’ illustration from Slide 10.
Slide 12 represents the ‘Orpheus’ illustration from Emile, which may be found in Rousseau, Emile, 261.
Slide 13 represents the ‘Circe’ illustration from Emile, which may be found in Rousseau, Emile, 76.
Slide 14 represents and magnifies the detail from the top left margin of the ‘Circe’ illustration, wherein a bed canopy
is depicted.
Notes
1
Readers of this lecture, who cannot benefit from the slideshow that accompanied it, should consult the
“Explication of the Slides,” above.
2
Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744)
with the addition of “Practic of the New Science.” Translated by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch.
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968). Citations to this edition are given in the form [NS page].
3
Plato, Phaedrus. Translated with Introduction, Notes, and Interpretive Essay by James H. Nichols Jr. (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1998).
4
Quotations from Rousseau’s writings are taken from the best editions that are widely available. Quotations from
the First and Second Discourses and the Essay on the Origin of Languages are from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The
Discourses and other early political writings. Edited and Translated by Victor Gourevitch. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), and are given in the forms [FD, SD, or EOL page]. Quotations from Emile are from JeanJacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education. Translation and Introduction by Allan Bloom. (New York: Basic
�Black, The Very Pictures of Education, Page 35
Books, 1979), and are given in the form [E page]. I also refer in the text to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Correspondance
complète de Jean Jacques Rousseau. Édition critique établie et annotée par R.A. Leigh. Fifty-Two Volumes.
(Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1965-1998), in the form [CC Volume:page]; to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Collected
Writings. Thirteen Volumes. Series Editors Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly. (Hanover, NH: University
Press of New England, 1992-2010), in the form [CW Volume:page]; and to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Œuvres
complètes. Five Volumes. Series Editors Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond. (Paris: Bibliothèque de la
Pléiade, 1964-95), in the form [OC Volume:page]. Translations from CC and OC are my own.
5
These engravings were not ready for the first edition of the novel, and so were at first published separately,
accompanied by narrative descriptions of the “Subjects of the Engravings” [CW 6:621-628] that indicate the high
level of detail Rousseau meant his illustrations to communicate. As he writes at the beginning of his discussion of
these illustrations,
Most of these Subjects are detailed so as to make them understood, much more so than they can be
in the execution: for in order to realize a drawing felicitously, the Artist must see it not as it will be
on his paper, but as it is in nature. The pencil does not distinguish a blonde from a brunette, but
the imagination that guides it must distinguish them. The burin cannot render highlights and
shadows well unless the Engraver also imagines the colors. In the same way, with figures in
motion, he needs to see what precedes and what follows, and accord a certain latitude to the time
of the action; otherwise one will never capture well the unity of the moment to be expressed. The
Artist’s skill consists in making the Viewer imagine many things that do not appear on the plate;
and that depends on a felicitous choice of circumstances, of which the ones he renders lead us to
presuppose the ones he does not. Therefore one can never enter into too much detail when one
wants to present Subjects for Engraving, and is absolutely ignorant of the art [CW 6:621].
6
For an example of Rousseau’s care with the details of his illustrations, consider this passage from a letter to his
publisher, Duchesne, written on March 7, 1762:
The change that was made to the flames [in the Thetis engraving] on my advice is very bad, and
spoils the effect of the engraving which the lit portion brought out a great deal; I would wish that
my stupidity in this respect be fixable. I will be more hesitant the next time to give my advice, for
fear of committing another. And yet to this point I have not been mistaken in matters of effect [CC
10:142-143].
7
Why is a satyr an appropriate allegorical representation of common men? Rousseau writes at some length about
the mixed or monstrous character of modern human beings in Book One of Emile [E 37-41]. He attributes this
mixture to contradictions between the education we are given by nature, and the one we are given by men. The
satyr, half beast and half man, is a good image for the kind of monsters that we are, according to Rousseau. It
follows that if the education of nature were to have its way with us, we would be nothing other than beasts.
8
See Plutarch, Moralia. Volume Two. Translated by Frank Cole Babbitt. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1962). Citations from this work are given in the text in the form [Volume.section].
9
My discussion of Rousseau’s illustrations in the next five sections of this lecture has benefited considerably from
John T. Scott’s unpublished paper “The Illustrative Education of Rousseau’s Emile,” which he was kind enough to
share with me.
10
Charles Eisen, who designed the engraving for the Second Discourse, also designed the engravings for Emile
[Scott, 6].
11
Rousseau rejected the idea that the engravings should be identified by inscriptions explicating the action depicted
in each. In one letter to his publisher he writes,
I do not believe that inscriptions at the bottom of the engravings are needed: one ought not to
explain at all what is clear: we could just number the page and the volume there, to which each
�Black, The Very Pictures of Education, Page 36
engraving is related; but I fear that the binder will move it [each engraving] to that page, whereas
each engraving ought to be at the head of a book” [CC 10:143].
In a later letter, Rousseau continues,
[i]t is not possible, Sir, that the inscription of the engraving remain as it is; the way in which it has
been cut into two lines forming two sort of little rhyming verses, [is] very ridiculous, and I must
warn you that anyway we will redo the inscriptions; since there are changes to be made to those
that I have sent you, one ought not to have them engraved without alerting me. I would be of the
opinion, then, that we erase the inscription completely, if it’s possible to do so without much
trouble. If you would rather leave it in, and consequently put one on all the others (and I consent
to it if you judge it appropriate) in this case this one absolutely must be rewritten in the following
way, since once again it cannot remain as it is. Thetis dips Her son / in the Styx. See p. 37 [CC
10:150].
12
Rousseau instructed his publisher that, with the exception of “Orpheus,” each engraving was to be placed
opposite the first page of each book:
The citations of pages that you had engraved at the top of each engraving will certainly lead the
binders and signature-sewers to commit an error. They will place the engraving facing the cited
page, instead of putting it at the beginning of the book or volume, as is said in the explication.
You must attempt to prevent this. There should be an engraving as frontispiece for each volume
and another in the first volume at the head of the second book [CC 10:222-223].
13
As Scott rightly notes, Bloom mistakenly has the explications point to the pages on which the engravings are
found, rather than the pages of the text to which the engravings refer [Scott, 9-10].
14
Rousseau also uses the terms “fable” and “allegory” in his description of the frontispiece to the First Discourse.
See the discussion of the Prometheus illustration, above, the Discourse itself, [G, 16 n *], and the Letter to Lecat
[CW 2:179].
15
How does the fear of death cause Thetis to neglect to breastfeed her son? Breastfeeding might entail implicit
acknowledgement of one’s mortality, because it involves explicit acknowledgement of one’s subordination to one’s
offspring. Rousseau advocates familiarizing young girls with the fear of death early in their educations, whereas he
recommends keeping this fear from young boys. See Book Five of Emile [E 379-380].
16
References to this work are to Statius, Achilleid. Edited and Translated by D.R. Shackleton Bailey. (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), and are given in the text in the form [Book.line numbers].
17
Scott points out that Rousseau is “coy” about whether the tutor and the pupil in this example are Jean-Jacques and
Emile. In the example itself he distinguishes himself from “the man who speaks in this example” [E 141], and
presumably thereby distinguishes the pupil from Emile. But in one place later in the text he refers to Emile as the
pupil in the example [E 153], and in another to Emile’s “former races” [E 436]. Earlier, Rousseau had written that
he “will not be distressed if Emile is of noble birth” [E 52]. See Scott, 18.
18
Scott notes that the only reference in Homer to the “most righteous of the centaurs” is to his medicinal skill,
which he taught to Asclepius and to Achilles. See Iliad IV.219 and XI.832. It may be significant that Asclepius
tried to use these skills to overcome death. Scott also helpfully directs us to the first chapter of Xenophon’s
Cynegeticus, where Chiron is mentioned as a master of hunting, and to the eighteenth chapter of Machiavelli’s
Prince, where he is a metaphor for knowing “how to use the beast and the man.” See Scott, 15-16.
19
Another difference between Thetis’ and Chiron’s treatments is that Thetis’ are physical, whereas Chiron’s are
psychic. Chiron is a singer, and he teaches Achilles to sing as well. This points to a connection between the
‘Chiron’ illustration and the ‘Orpheus’ illustration.
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20
Rousseau devotes a few pages of Book Two of Emile to a discussion of carnivorousness. Human beings are
naturally vegetarians, he argues, and it is “above all… important not to denature this primitive taste,” not for the
sake of health, but for the sake of character: “it is certain that great eaters of meat are in general more cruel and
ferocious than other men” [E 153]. He follows these claims with a lengthy quotation from Plutarch, of a lurid
passage that argues that while the first carnivorous human beings must have overcome a deep repugnance to eat
animal corpses, they were compelled to do so by natural scarcity [!], whereas modern human beings have no such
excuse [E 154-155]. It may be relevant to note that Statius’ carnivorous Achilles does indeed seem to be cruel and
ferocious. Thetis wants to keep him from the Trojan war by disguising him as a girl and hiding him among the girls
of Scyros. Ashamed to comply, especially by the thought of what Chiron might say, Achilles only goes along with
her plan after he is seized by lust for one of the girls, Deidamia [I.301-303]. Soon afterward, he rapes and
impregnates her [I.640-643]. In some respect, the rest of the story of Emile could be understood as Rousseau’s
attempt to avoid this outcome for his Achilles. Compare the interpretation of the Circe engraving, below.
The vegetarianism of the Achilles depicted in the Chiron illustration could just as well have been indicated
by the depiction of a cake as by the depiction of an apple. Perhaps Rousseau chose the latter to allude to the story of
Adam and Eve, or to the story of the beauty contest that was the first cause of the Trojan War. Or perhaps an apple
is easier to identify in an engraving than a cake.
21
“This novel,” Rousseau writes,
disencumbered of all its rigmarole, beginning with Robinson’s shipwreck near his island and
ending with the arrival of the ship which comes to take him from it, will be both Emile’s
entertainment and instruction throughout the period which is dealt with here [E 185].
It is instructive to see which parts of the novel, falling before Robinson’s shipwreck and after the arrival of his
rescuers, Rousseau considers to be “rigmarole.”
22
Scott points out that the identification of the Egyptian god Thoth or Theuth with the Greek god Hermes only came
after the age of classical Greek literature, in the person of Hermes Trismegistus of the hermetic tradition [Scott, 20].
23
It also makes sense to interpret the beardless youth as Emile, and the older, bearded man as his tutor, JeanJacques – though Rousseau has argued earlier in Emile that a tutor should be as near in age to his pupil as possible:
“a child’s governor ought to be young and even as young as a wise man can be” [E 51]. This interpretation has the
advantage of agreeing with the story of Book Three, wherein Jean-Jacques shows Emile the elements of the
sciences, without allowing him to approach any of the sciences very closely. “The issue is not to teach him the
sciences,” Rousseau writes, “but to give him the taste for loving them and the methods for learning them when this
taste is better developed” [E 172]. It also has the advantage of repeating the strange doubling of Rousseau that we
saw in the ‘Prometheus’ illustration. There Rousseau was at once Prometheus the titan (or Rousseau the author) and
the Citizen of Geneva; here he is at once Hermes the god (or Rousseau the author) and Jean-Jacques the tutor.
24
Another indication of the exceptional character of the ‘Orpheus’ illustration is that in his “Explications” Rousseau
tells us that it “belongs” to the fourth book – again, unlike the illustrations to Books Two and Three, each of which
was said to be “at the beginning” of its book, or the illustration to Book One, which was said to “relate” to that book
[E 36; I have altered the translation]. John Scott details the convincing circumstantial evidence that this engraving is
a late addition: Rousseau’s
instructions for the division of [the] published work come in November 1761, just six months
before it appeared, and include his specification that the third volume should open with the
dramatic introduction to the “Profession.” At this same time, Rousseau also sends his ideas to
Eisen for the engravings for the last two books, and thus his instruction for the engraving of
Orpheus. Finally, the textual reference in Book IV to Orpheus was added only during production.
See Scott, 25 and OC 4:1569.
25
Recall that Rousseau instructed Duchesne to place the ‘Orpheus’ engraving at the beginning of the Profession of
Faith of the Savoyard Vicar. See note 12, above.
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26
There is also a lyre in the ‘Chiron’ illustration.
27
We can detect this disagreement at the end of the Vicar’s speech, where he advises the young Rousseau:
[i]f my reflections lead you to think as I do, if my sentiments are also yours and we have the same
profession of faith... [g]o back to your own country, return to the religion of your father, follow it
in the sincerity of your heart, and never leave it again [E 311].
Since the young Rousseau did not take this advice, we ought to infer that he did not share the Vicar’s sentiment. An
indication of the ground of their disagreement may be seen earlier in the Profession of Faith, where the Vicar claims
that conscience is to the soul what instinct and the passions are to the body. He makes this claim in the context of an
argument that conscience and instinct or the passions are always at odds with one another, and that of these, it is
conscience that speaks with the voice of nature. The young Rousseau tries to interrupt the Vicar at this point, but the
Vicar will not let him speak [E 286-7]. To put the comparison crudely for the sake of brevity, Rousseau and the
Savoyard Vicar seem to agree that conscience is an innate principle of justice and virtue [E 289]; that it speaks in
sentiments rather than in judgments [E 290]; that it therefore differs from reason or the natural intellect, since reason
leads to knowledge of the good and conscience to our love of the good [E 286]; that both reason and conscience are
required for moral action [E 294]; and that the voice of conscience can be stifled but not eradicated [E 291]. But
Rousseau disagrees with the Vicar’s inferences from the contradictory demands of instinct or the passions and
conscience. The Vicar takes these demands to indicate that human beings are composed of body and soul [E 279].
This fundamental dualism leads him to a belief in human freedom [E 281], in the existence of God [E 275; cf. 290
and 295], in the natural sociability of human beings [E 290], and in an afterlife—understood as the place where the
soul, freed from the body, can finally pursue wholeheartedly the demands of conscience [E 282-5]. It also follows
from the Vicar’s hatred of the body and his reliance on the afterlife that, as he sees it, the demands of conscience are
not compatible with patriotism [E 295]. The importance of the Vicar’s dualism becomes clear in his comment that
[i]f conscience is the work of the prejudices, I am doubtless wrong, and there is no demonstrable
morality. But if to prefer oneself to everything is an inclination natural to man, and if nevertheless
the first sentiment of justice is innate in the human heart, let him who regards man as a simple
being overcome these contradictions, and I shall no longer acknowledge more than one substance
[E 279].
By claiming, in his own name, that conscience develops from the selfish human passions [E 235], Rousseau has
already suggested, earlier in Emile, how these contradictions may be overcome. According to his own argument,
then, the Vicar ought to abandon his dualism, and everything that follows from it.
28
References here are to Ovid, Metamorphoses. With an English Translation by Frank Justus Miller. In Two
Volumes. (London: William Heinemann, 1916), and are given in the text in the form [Book.lines].
29
Ovid adds here that Orpheus turns his sexual attentions to young boys, heightening the impression of Orpheus’
burgeoning dislike for women.
30
We find many of the same details in Virgil’s telling of the story in Book IV of his Georgics, though his imagery
does not correspond as closely with Rousseau’s engraving as Ovid’s does. Virgil attributes the fateful backward
glance to “a sudden frenzy [that] seized Orpheus, unwary in his love” [IV.488-489], rather than to any fear of
weakness in Eurydice. And he does not suggest that it was homosexual practices that turned the local women
against the singer. See Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid. With an English Translation by H. Rushton Fairclough.
In Two Volumes. (London: William Heinemann, 1916). The citation above from the Georgics is given in the form
[Book.lines].
31
The Vicar says that his resolve not to profane the institution of marriage
was precisely what destroyed me. My respect for the bed of others left my faults exposed. The
scandal had to be expiated. Arrested, interdicted, driven out, I was far more the victim of my
scruples than of my incontinence; and I had occasion to understand, from the reproaches with
�Black, The Very Pictures of Education, Page 39
which my disgrace was accompanied, that often one need only aggravate the fault to escape the
punishment [E 267].
32
As Rousseau later writes in reference to Emile’s first sexual experience, “I have reflected on men’s morals too
much not to see the invincible influence of this moment on the rest of his life” [E 318]. Compare his later
chastisement of readers who “do not sufficiently consider the influence which a man’s first liaison with a woman
ought of have on the course of both of their lives” [E 415].
33
Instead of receiving an otherworldly metaphysical teaching, Emile receives a thisworldly revelation in which
Jean-Jacques explains what he has done for his education [E 323], and then, having thus secured his attention,
initiates him into the mysteries and dangers of sex [E 324]. In reply, Emile asks Jean-Jacques to retain his authority
over him, in order to protect Emile from his own passions [E 325].
34
References here are to Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica. With an English Translation by R.C. Seaton. (London:
William Heinemann, 1912], and are given in the form [Book.lines].
35
Jean-Jacques uses the Sirens as an image of the dangers of sex in his revelatory conversation with Emile, as a way
of impressing on Emile how difficult it will be to heed Jean-Jacques’s authority. “Just as Ulysses, moved by the
Sirens’ song and seduced by the lure of the pleasures, cried out to his crew to unchain him, so you will want to break
the bonds which hinder you” [E 316]. This passage, together with a reference to Ulysses at the beginning of Book
IV of Emile [E 212], leads John Scott to the thoughtful, and to my mind correct, hypothesis that, had Rousseau not
been required by the division of the work into volumes to place an engraving in the middle of Book Four, he would
have placed an engraving of Odysseus at the beginning of this book. “The engraving to Book V of Emile also
depicts Odysseus,” Scott writes,
and choosing the same figure to illustrate Book IV would have given the work as a whole a
symmetry with the first two books relating the story of Achilles and the last two the story of
Odysseus. […] The choice of Odysseus as the subject for an engraving for Book IV would be
appropriate for novelistic reasons, since the story of Emile’s wandering begins there and continues
into Book V. It would also be appropriate for theoretical reasons, for the taming of Odysseus’
wily pride and his return to domesticity would accord with Rousseau’s reinterpretation of the story
of Achilles in the first two engravings for the work and the philosophical thrust of the work.
See Scott, 25-26. It poses no difficulty for this hypothesis that Odysseus’ encounter with the Sirens happens after
his encounter with Circe, according to the Odyssey. Homer writes that Circe warns Odysseus of the danger of the
Sirens, and tells him how escape despite listening to their song [XII.39-54]. In his Epistles, in a passage which
Rousseau knew well, Horace mentions the Sirens and Circe in this order. See note 36.
36
“You know the Sirens' songs and Circe's cups,” Horace writes in the Epistles; “if, along with his comrades,
[Ulysses] had drunk of these in folly and greed, he would have become the shapeless and witless vassal of a harlot
mistress – would have lived as an unclean dog or a sow that loves the mire” [I.ii.23-26]. See Horace, Satires,
Epistles, and Ars Poetica. With an English Translation by H. Rushton Fairclough. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1942). The reference is in the form [Book.epistle.lines]. It’s likely that Rousseau was familiar
with this source, the next line of which contains the line nos numerus sumus, et fruges consumere nati, which Lecat
cites in his Refutation of the First Discourse [CW 2:133], and which Rousseau later quotes in Book Two of Emile
[CW 13:296].
37
References to the Odyssey are to Homer, The Odyssey of Homer. Translated with an Introduction by Richmond
Lattimore. (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), and are given in the text in the form [Book.lines].
38
Those who would argue that Circe offers herself to Odysseus because she recognizes who he is need to find a way
to explain the details of Hermes’ advice. He does not advise Odysseus simply to identify himself to Circe.
39
This work, which seems unfinished, and was not published during Rousseau’s lifetime, consists of two letters
written by Emile to his tutor Jean-Jacques. In the first, Emile describes how, after Sophie bears him a son and a
�Black, The Very Pictures of Education, Page 40
daughter, Jean-Jacques leaves, and Emile and Sophie’s misfortunes begin. Sophie’s parents soon die, then her
daughter by Emile. Consumed with grief, she is taken by Emile to the capital city for distraction, accompanied by a
friendly couple. They spend two years in the capital, during which time Emile and Sophie are both corrupted. Their
friends turn out to be libertines, and the female friend apparently ends by persuading Sophie to engage in an
adulterous affair with the friend’s husband. Sophie then reveals this affair to Emile, and the resulting pregnancy.
He is thunderstruck; he roams the capital in a passionate fury. But once he calms down, Emile leaves the capital and
takes work as a carpenter, while he deliberates about what to do. He decides to leave Sophie and to take his son
with him; but he is dissuaded from the latter on learning of a secret visit by Sophie, who fears precisely this.
Instead, Emile flees Sophie and the capital, heading south.
In the second letter we read that Emile, arriving eventually in Marseilles, embarks for Naples as a common
sailor. Unfortunately, the captain of his ship is in cahoots with the Barbary pirates. When the captain’s treachery
becomes clear, Emile kills him, but is taken by the pirates and – as soon as they see he will not be ransomed – sold
into slavery. As a slave Emile is put to use, first as a craftsman and then as a laborer on public works. When the
latter situation becomes dangerously onerous, Emile plots with his fellow slaves to go on strike: an action which
ends with Emile being made the overseer of the other slaves. He performs so well in this position that he attracts the
attention of, and is eventually sold to, the Dey of Algiers – at which point the primary manuscript breaks off. Two
passages in the first letter suggest that, had the work been completed, we would have read of the deaths of Sophie
and of Emile’s son as well [CW 13:685-721].
40
It would have occurred to Rousseau that illustrations could be used to this end if he was familiar, as seems likely,
with Vico’s New Science, whose allegorical frontispiece is composed of what Vico calls “hieroglyphs,” to which he
devotes thirty paragraphs of explanation, and which he says are intended “to give the reader some conception of the
work before he reads it, and, with such an aid as imagination may afford, to call it back to mind after he has read it”
[NS, 3]. There is no conclusive evidence, as far as I can tell, that Rousseau read Vico, but there are suggestive
similarities between their thoughts. The editors of the Pléiade edition remark that the Essay on the Origin of
Languages especially raises the question of whether Rousseau read Vico while he was in Venice, but that decisive
proof is lacking [OC 1:1548; 5:1545].
41
“Every general idea is purely intellectual,” Rousseau writes in the discussion of language in the Second
Discourse; but
if the imagination is at all involved, the idea immediately becomes particular. Try to outline the
image of a tree in general to yourself, you will never succeed; in spite of yourself it will have to be
seen as small or large, bare or leafy, light or dark, and if you could see in it only what there is in
every tree, the image would no longer resemble a tree. Purely abstract beings are either seen in
this same way, or conceived of only be means of discourse. Only the definition of a Triangle
gives you the genuine idea of it: As soon as you figure one in your mind, it is a given Triangle and
not another, and you cannot help making its lines perceptible or its surface colored. Hence once
has to state propositions, hence one has to speak in order to have general ideas: for as soon as the
imagination stops, the mind can proceed only by means of discourse [SD 148].
In the first chapter of the Essay on the Origin of Languages, Rousseau adds that the language of gesture, which
when frozen in time becomes drawing, is just as natural as spoken language, but easier and less dependent on
conventions: “for more objects strike our eyes than our ears, and shapes exhibit greater variety than do sounds; they
are also more expressive and say more in less time” [EOL 248].
42
While Rousseau claims that “[t]he ambassador [left] his present and [departed] without saying anything” [E 322],
Herodotus writes that the messenger said, “let the Persians… if they were clever [sophoi] enough, discover the
signification of the presents” [IV.131]. See Herodotus, The History. Translated by David Grene. (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1987).
43
One of Rousseau’s examples in the Essay is of the Levite of Ephraim, who cut the body of his wife into twelve
pieces to rouse the tribes of Israel against the tribe of Benjamin. About this sign, Rousseau writes, “[a]t this ghastly
sight they rushed to arms… [a]nd the Tribe of Benjamin was exterminated” [EOL 249-250]. But in Judges, the
source of the story, we read that while the Israelites were outraged at the sight of the woman’s dismembered corpse
[19:30], they needed a speech to determine them to attack those responsible in Gibeah [20:4-9]. Another of the
�Black, The Very Pictures of Education, Page 41
examples in the Essay is of King Saul, who dismembered his plow oxen to being Israel to the assistance of the tribe
of Jabesh. But in I Samuel we read that Saul accompanied the parts of his dismembered oxen with a threat.
“‘Whoever does not come out after Saul and after Samuel, thus will be done to his oxen!’ And the fear of the Lord
fell on the people,” the scripture writer concludes, “and they came out as one man” [11:7]. Again, while Rousseau
claims in the Essay that the orator Hyperides got the courtesan Phryne acquitted “without urging a single word in her
defense” [EOL 250], we read the following in Athenaeus, The Deipnosophists, XIII:
Hyperides spoke in support of Phryne, and when his speech accomplished nothing, and the jurors
seemed likely to convict her, he brought her out in public, ripped her dress to shreds, exposed her
chest, and at the conclusion of his speech produced cries of lament as he gazed at her, causing the
jurors to feel a superstitious fear of this priestess and temple-attendant of Aphrodite, and to give in
to pity rather than put her to death. Afterward, then she had been acquitted, a decree was passed to
the effect that no speaker was to lament on another person’s behalf, and that no accused man or
[woman] was to be put on display while their case was being decided [590e-f].
See Athenaeus, The Learned Banqueters. Edited and Translated by S. Douglas Olson. Volume VI. (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 411-413. Finally, the same criticism could be made of Rousseau’s use of the
example of Antony, at the end of his digression in Emile. “On the death of Caesar,” he writes, “I imagine one of our
orators wishing to move the people; he exhausts all the commonplaces of his art to present a pathetic description of
Caesar’s wounds, his blood, his corpse. Antony, although eloquent, does not say all that. He has the body brought
in. What rhetoric!” [E 322-323]. According to Plutarch’s “Life of Antony,’ though, Rousseau’s likely source,
Antony behaved differently:
[a]s Caesar’s body was conveying to the tomb, Antony, according to the custom, was making his
funeral oration in the market-place, and perceiving the people to be infinitely affected with what
he had said, he began to mingle with his praises language of commiseration, and horror at what
had happened, and, as he was ending his speech, he took the under-clothes of the dead, and held
them up, showing them stains of blood and the holes of the many stabs, calling those that had done
this act villains and bloody murderers. All which excited the people to such indignation, that they
would not defer the funeral, but, making a pile of tables and forms in the very market-place, set
fire to it; and every one, taking a brand, ran to the conspirators’ houses, to attack them [II, 489490].
Antony uses the language of signs to concentrate the passions generated by his spoken words.
44
Rousseau claims to be following Horace in drawing this conclusion. And indeed, we read in On the Art of Poetry,
“[l]ess vividly is the mind stirred by what finds entrance through the ears than by what is brought before the trusty
eyes, and what the spectator can see for himself.” Yet Horace follows up with this qualification: “you will not bring
upon the stage what should be performed behind the scenes, and you will keep much from our eyes, which an actor's
ready tongue will narrate anon in our presence [180-184].” The examples he gives of such things are of atrocities
and miraculous transformations. If these things are more striking when imagined than when feigned on the stage,
they may indicate a limit to the energy of the language of signs.
45
“The object that is exhibited to the eyes shakes the imagination, arouses curiosity, keeps the mind attentive to
what is going to be said” [E 322], Rousseau explains in Book Four of Emile.
46
The other examples are, first, “Alexander placing his seal on his favorite’s mouth,” and second, “Diogenes
walking before Zeno.” The first is a reference to Plutarch’s “Life of Alexander,” paragraph 39 [E 491 n 68]. The
story told there involves a friend of Alexander who had read a letter from Alexander’s mother, advising Alexander
to desist from giving magnificent gifts, because this made their recipients equal to kings and made them many
friends, while stripping Alexander bare. The gesture was meant to tell the friend to keep silent about the advice,
which Alexander had been keeping secret. The second phrase is a reference to Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the
Philosophers, VI.39 [E 491 n 69]. The text only says that when “someone” told Diogenes there is no such thing as
motion, he got up and walked around. In both examples, though, the significance of the action depends on the
communicating parties having a considerable amount of experience in common: the content of Alexander’s mother’s
letter, in the first case, and the claims of Zeno’s paradoxes in the second.
�Black, The Very Pictures of Education, Page 42
47
According to Herodotus, the messenger reported “that Thrasybulus had made no suggestion at all, and indeed he
wondered what sort of a man this was he had been sent to, a madman and a destroyer of his own property” [V.92].
Despite his ignorance of the message, the messenger’s judgment of Thrasybulus was good.
48
In the Letter to Raynal, an early reply to criticisms made of the First Discourse, Rousseau answers the claim that
“[i]t is impossible to be too emphatic about truths that clash so head-on with the general taste, and it is important to
deny chicanery every possible hold” by saying that “I am not altogether of the same opinion, and I believe that
children should be left some baubles” [G, 31; italics in the original]. Compare what Rousseau says about the
illustrations in Emile in a letter to his publisher: “I am very happy with the illustrator, and even with the engraver,
and I am, like children, quite taken with beautiful images” [CC 10:151].
49
Rousseau’s first examples showing the superiority of the ancients have to do with covenants. When the gods
ruled instead of force, he tells us, covenants were solemnly made in their presence, and these covenants were
recorded in the “book” of the earth: in stones, trees, and heaps of rocks. “[T]he faith of men was more assured by
the guarantee of these mute witnesses than it is today by all the vain rigor of the laws” [E 321]. He implies that by
swearing in the presence of these objects, the ancient Israelites made it more likely that their covenants be kept –
that is, that the language of signs persuaded men to act faithfully. What, then, was the basis of this persuasion?
Rousseau gives four examples of ancient covenants – all taken from Genesis. The first is to “the well of the
oath” [Genesis 26:32-33; Bloom, 491 n 65]. In this example, a pact is struck between Isaac and Abimelech in which
the latter pledges not to attack the former, because “[w]e have clearly seen that the Lord is with you” [Genesis
26:28], and a well is dug called the well of the oath. The evidence that the Lord is with Isaac seems chiefly to have
been the flourishing of the Israelites that followed once Abimelech realized that Isaac was Rebekah’s husband, and
put him under his protection. Second, Rousseau mentions “the well of the living and seeing” [Genesis 16:14;
Bloom, 491 n 65]. In this case Hagar encounters a messenger of the Lord, who promises her that she will bear a son
named Ishmael, “a wild ass of a man – / his hand against all, the hand of all against him, / he will encamp in despite
of all his kin” [16:12]. This covenant leads Hagar to return to Sarai and to endure her abuse, but it also promises
centuries of conflict. Third, Rousseau cites “the old oak of Mamre” [Genesis 18:1; Bloom, 491 n 65]. In this
passage, the Lord appeared to Abraham in the form of three men, and they promised Sarai that she would have a
child. The same three men went on to visit, and destroy, Sodom and Gomorrah. And finally, Rousseau mentions
“the mound of the witness” [Genesis 31:46-48; compare Bloom, 491 n 65]. In this last example we read about how
Jacob, having taken flocks and daughters from Laban, made a pact with the latter to draw a boundary between them
[31:52]. Jacob is able to make this pact because, he claims, God was with him [31:42] in his theft – that is, the theft
succeeded.
What these examples seem to have in common is that in each case the covenant symbolized by a natural
object was concluded against the backdrop of an indirect or direct demonstration of the power of God. We are led to
conclude that while the signs concentrated the memory of these demonstrations of power, it was the demonstrations
themselves – in other words, an experience of force – that aroused the interest of the contracting parties, and
persuaded them to be faithful. The examples thus illustrate how persuasion is based on the tyrannical exercise of
force.
50
The only exception, if that is what it is, to the rule that Rousseau’s historical examples of the language of signs
involve tyrants, is the example of Diogenes and Zeno [E 322].
�
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The very pictures of education: on Rousseau's illustrations in Emile
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The Tragedy of Demosthenes in Thucydides' Peloponnesian War
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The republic of laughter
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In the year 610 of the Christian Era, a merchant of the prominent Quraysh tribe sat
meditating in a cave on Mt. Hira near Mecca. He heard a voice saying,
Recite: In the Name of thy Lord who created.
created man of a blood clot.
Recite: And thy Lord is the Most Generous,
who taught by the Pen,
taught Man that he knew not. [96.1-5]
Thus began the youngest of the major world religions and one of the most successful
lives in world history. As a religious, political, and military leader, Muhammad
(570-632) is without equal. Only Moses comes close, but Moses was not allowed to
enter the Promised Land, while Muhammad returned to Mecca as a victorious conqueror.
We are. moreover, fortunate to have better documentation for his life than for that of
Moses, Jesus, or the Buddha. On any reckoning, Muhammad’s biography is one well
worth studying. If you read the Qur'an, you may want to read along with it the most
important early biography, the Life of Muḥammad by Ibn Isḥāq.
Today, however, our primary goal is to become acquainted with the Qur’an. While
some light may be shed on this great book by a fuller knowledge of its historical context,
nothing replaces study of the text itself. Thus, most of my talk will focus on the primary
text, though I will first discuss some of the major events and issues that form the
background of the Qur’an.
Muhammad was an orphan. His father died before he was born and his mother when
he was six years old. His grandfather took care of him for two more years before he died
#1
�as well. Thereafter his uncle Abu Talib, head of the Banu Hashim clan, assumed
guardianship of the boy. Thus Muhammad grew up as something of an outsider within
Meccan society. Although he did belong to its most prominent tribe, the Quraysh, he was
a weak and vulnerable member of it. He rose to prominence, however, due to his skills as
a caravan trader, as well as for his reputation of honesty. When he was 25, the wealthy
widow Khadija, rather impressed, asked for his hand in marriage, was accepted, and
became his first wife.
Mecca was a major hub of the Arabian caravan trade routes that connected the
Byzantine Empire in the north with the spice-exporting Yemen in the south. The Quraysh
not only dominated Meccan trade but also were custodians of the Kaaba, the central
shrine for the still largely pagan Arab tribes. The word Kaaba, related to our word
"cube", refers to the cubical structure enclosing the Black Stone, a sacred object
traditionally venerated by the pagan Arabs and possibly of meteoric origin. Mecca and
the Kaaba were already sites of pilgrimage before Muhammad's time, the time that
Muslims refer to as Jahiliyya, or the time of ignorance.
During their sojourn there, the Arabs would hold fairs, including competitions in
poetry, still a largely oral art. Several of these pre-Islamic poems survive. Some of them
are known as the "Hanging" or "Suspended" Odes and were supposedly hung up in the
Kaaba as a token of honor.
Although Arab polytheism still flourished at its major center of Mecca, monotheistic
religions were common not only in the surrounding areas but even with Arabia itself.
Orthodox Christianity was the official religion of the Byzantine Empire, while the
#2
�Sassanid Persian Empire supported Zoroastrianism, arguably a monotheistic faith,
although a highly dualistic one. Many Christians, of various sects, were spread througout
Arabia, and there was a sizeable Jewish community in the city of Yathrib.
Thus when Muhammad brought forward his monotheistic message, he had many
enemies. Although he had hoped to find a receptive audience among the “People of the
Book”, i.e, Jews and Christians, in this hope he was largely disappointed. The fiercer and
earlier struggle, however, was against the leaders of his own city and tribe, the polytheist
Quraysh, for Muslims, like Jews and Christians before them, not only believed in the
existence of one God, but held that God to be a jealous god, a god who would “have no
other gods before him.” Polytheism was not simply mistaken, but even a direct affront to
God and could not be tolerated.
Polytheism is more tolerant than monotheism. The chief god of the Arabic pagan
pantheon was Allah, or "the God." "Allah" simply comes from a common Semitic root
for "god" and is cognate with Hebrew Elohim and Ugaritic El. The pagan Arabs had
traditionally associated other gods with Allah and worshipped these other divinities, in
particular Allah’s daughters (al-Lat, Manat, and al-Uzza). The polytheists could well
accept that Allah was the one supreme god; they could not, however, accept that he was
the only god or the only god to be worshipped. Particularly offensive to this traditional
tribal society, however, must have been the claim that their ancestors, by worshipping
associates alongside of Allah, were now burning in hell. Moreover, Muhammad’s attack
upon polytheism was a direct threat to their domination of the Meccan trade and shrine.
#3
�The polytheists challenged Muhammad to prove his apostleship by performing a
miracle. He replied that it was not in his power to perform miracles, but only in God’s
power to do so, and that the Qur’an itself was the miracle. A noble, elevated discourse
spoken through an illiterate merchant, the Qur’an impressed both believers and nonbelievers alike. Muhammad challenged his opponents to sit down and produce
something like it. If they could not do so, the argument goes, then the Qur’an must be a
work of greater than human creation.
Besides the Qur’an itself, there is one other miracle involving Muhammad that
cannot be passed over in silence, since it is the basis of the Muslim claim on Jerusalem as
a holy city. It is reported that one night as he was sleeping in Mecca, Muhammad was
transported by the fabulous winged beast Buraq to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem,
whence he was allowed to ascend the seven heavens and discourse with Abraham, Moses,
and Jesus. Thence he was brought back to Mecca the same night. More than half a
century after the Muslims conquered Jerusalem from the Byzantine Christians, the
Umayyad Caliph Abd-al-Malik, had the Dome of the Rock constructed on the Temple
Mount, known to Muslims as Haram es-Sharif.
The hostility of the Quraysh leadership could well have led to the murder of
Muhammad, if it had not been for the protection of his still pagan uncle Abu Talib. The
killing of somebody under tribal protection would have led to a blood feud. So instead of
attacking Muhammad directly, the polytheists persecuted his followers. Despite
persecution, Islam grew, attracting in particular many of the alienated members of
Meccan society, such as freedmen and slaves. When Abu Talib died, however, (619) and
#4
�the new leader of the Banu Hashim, Abu Lahab (another uncle of the prophet) withdrew
protection from him, Muhammad looked for another home for the Muslim community.
When an opportunity for refuge and alliance presented itself in nearby Yathrib, he and his
Muslim followers migrated there. This migration, or hijra, is the beginning of the
Muslim epoch.
Up to this point, Muhammad had been a religious leader. Now he became a political
leader by founding the nascent Islamic state in Yathrib, now known as Madinat an-Nabiy,
that is, the City of the Prophet, or Medina. The revelations of the Medina period show a
much greater concern for political matters and laws relevant to the foundation of a state.
The hostility between the Muslims and the polytheists of Mecca did not end then,
however. Muhammad insisted that the Muslims be allowed to worship at the Kaaba,
which he claimed had been originally a monotheist shrine founded by Abraham and his
son Ishmael. The Meccans had also confiscated Muslim properties in Mecca and the
immigrants to Medina turned to the Arab tradition of caravan raiding to make a living.
This hostility broke out into open war when Muhammad led the Muslims in a raid on a
Meccan caravan at Badr (624). Engaging with reinforcements from Mecca and
outnumbered by more than three to one, the Muslims won a decisive victory. After
further battles with mixed results, Muhammad entered Mecca as a conqueror in 630,
pardoned nearly the whole population, and purified the Kaaba of its idols.
Muhammad only lived for two more years. In that time he completed the conquest
and conversion of Arabia and unified the Arab tribes for the first time in history, a
unification made possible perhaps by religion alone. He thus provided the basis for the
#5
�astonishing Arab military expansion that was to explode onto the world scene shorty after
his death. He had no surviving sons, however, and his only significant failure as a leader
was that he did not appoint a clear successor or establish a clear policy of succession.
This failure resulted in a series of civil wars after his death and in the schism of the
Islamic community into Sunni and Shi’ite sects that has remained of fateful importance
even to the present day. The majority sect, the Sunnis, accepted Abu Bakr as the caliph
or successor to Muhammad, whereas the Shi'ites believed that Muhammad's nephew and
son-in-law 'Ali should have been recognized as the first caliph.
Even if Muhammad had only united the Arab tribes, he would be remembered as an
eminent political and military leader. But his importance as not merely an Arab leader,
but also as a world leader rests on his prophetic mission. For although the Qur’an is in
Arabic and addresses Arabs most directly, its message is of universal import. From the
beginning, Islam, like Christianity, has seen itself as having a universal mission. So
without further ado, let us turn to the Qur’an.
When we first encounter with the Qur’an as Westerners, we are likely to be puzzled.
This is not a book like the books we are familiar with. It does not tell a story like the
Iliad or War and Peace. Although it has many themes in common with the Bible, it lacks
the narrative frame that organizes many, if not all, of the books of the Bible. Although it
has chapters, or suras, there is little or no apparent connection between a given chapter
and the one that comes before or after it. Even within a given sura, one can encounter a
bewildering mixture of prophetic warnings, stories, and legal stipulations. So our first
question is, “What kind of book is the Qur’an?”.
#6
�Just as the Bible is not one book, but a collection of many books, so too the Qur’an is
not a single revelation but a collection of several revelations. If one were to sit down and
read the entire Bible, one would be rightly puzzled if one were to find the book of Joshua
next to the Gospel of Matthew, the Song of Songs next to Paul’s Letter to the Romans. It
is not surprising to find diversity within the Bible, a collection of texts spanning some
thousand years, written by different authors, addressing different audiences in widely
divergent circumstances. Since the Qur’an, however, was all revealed within a span of
some 23 years, and to one man, Muhammad, we might have expected a high degree of
uniformity, and while there is more uniformity in the Qur’an than in the Bible, there is
still a surpising amount of diversity, as we shall see.
When I say that the Qur’an was revealed to Muhammad, I do not wish to take a
stance on the question of divine authorship, but I do want to emphasize that Muhammad
did not compose or write this book. According to all accounts, both those supportive of
and hostile to him, Muhammad spoke forth individual suras while in a kind of trance or
ecstatic state. Some believed that he was receiving communication from the angel
Gabriel, others that he was possessed by a genie or demon. The former, of course, took
him to be the latest prophet and became his first followers; while the latter accused him
of being a “poet possessed,” alluding to the traditional Arabic view of poets as being
possessed by some divine or demonic spirit. The Arabic word for "crazy," majnun
derives from the same root as jinn or genie.
While some thought that he spun old wives’ tales, there is no contemporary
accusation that he was simply “faking” an ecstatic state for some ulterior motive, e.g., a
#7
�political one. This, I have no doubt, is how Machiavelli sees Muhammad, thus joining
him with Numa and Moses as political leaders who feigned divine communication in
order to bolster a political order. But telling against this view is the fact that when the
Quraysh offerred Muhammad political leadership in exchange for ceasing to preach
monotheism, he refused.
Muhammad spoke forth individual revelations or suras when he fell into an ecstatic
trance. He and many of his followers were illiterate, so although some may have been
written down by his literate followers, by and large the revelations were passed on by
word of mouth, until they were all written down and collected by the third caliph
‘Uthman (c.656). Although traditions had passed down some information about when the
various suras were revealed, in particular whether during the Meccan or the Medinan
period, ‘Uthman did not attempt to arrange the suras chronologically. Instead, by and
large, and with the exception of the first sura, the suras are arranged from longest to
shortest.
It turns out that the Meccan suras tend to be shorter than the Medinan suras, so the
Qur’an roughly moves in a backwards chronological order. Thus the traditional Muslim
way of learning the Qur’an in Arabic—beginning with the end of the book—also makes
chronological sense. A concern with chronology, however, is a largely Western concern,
for Muslims would deny that there is any change or development in the message revealed
in their holy book, whereas Westerners are always looking for development, even where
there is none to be found. Although I would argue that there are interesting differences
between the Meccan and Medinan suras, it is still debatable how significant those
#8
�differences are. The Meccan suras tend not only to be shorter, but also often use beautiful
natural imagery to discuss the coming Day of Judgment. The Medinan suras, by contrast,
are not only longer, but often deal with many of the social and legal issues that needed to
be addressed by the nascent Islamic state in Medina.
So the Qur’an is not a composition, if by “composition” we mean an arrangement
ordered according to a certain principle, so that it would be impossible to move pieces
around and still have the same thing. Exodus cannot come before Genesis, the death of
Patroclus cannot come before the anger of Achilles, Proposition I.47 of Euclid cannot
come before proposition I.1. Nothing is lost, I would argue, by reading the Qur’an
backwards. This is another way of saying that the Qur’an is a collection rather than a
composition.
But perhaps a more important point to emphasize is that each sura is meant to stand
on its own. The longer suras, one might argue, are even meant to present the whole truth.
Thus to go from one sura to another in sequence is not like adding pieces together to form
a whole picture but is like revisiting the same truth again and again, sometimes from a
slightly different angle. Thus a key feature of the form of the Qur’an is repetition. While
this may be tedious for a Western reader who is used always to encountering something
new in the next chapter, this formal feature also reinforces one of the central points of the
content of the Qur’an: human beings’ central failing is that they are forgetful. Prophets
come to remind us of the truth that we have forgotten or that we would like to forget.
And as anybody knows who has tried to learn a foreign language, repetition is the key to
remembering.
#9
�To fend off the accusation that Muhammad was just another “posessed poet,” the
Qur’an itself is claimed not to be poetry, altough it does make use of many poetic
techniques. The suras are composed of verses and make extensive use of end rhyme. I
will now play for you a recitation of the first sura, “Al-Fatihah”, or “The Opening.”
Notice the end rhyme on “-im, -in.”
I hope this excerpt, even through the medium of a foreign language, gives you a sense
of the beauty, power, and appeal of the original. These features of language, in particular
of poetic language, suffer the most in the process of translation. Nor are they thought to
be extrinsic to the essence of the Qur’an. For the Qur’an tells us more than once that it
is written in clear, noble Arabic. The incomparable beauty of the language is the main
argument for the Qur’an being a divine revelation. The verses are called ‘ayāt,’ which
literally means “signs.” Just like the beautiful and powerful cosmic signs such as the sun,
the moon, and the stars, the verses of the Qur’an are taken to be signs that point to the
power, goodness, and wisdom of the Creator who made them.
Having touched briefly on the form of the Qur’an, I will now turn to its content. The
first and most essential part of this content is the theology. A concise statement of its
theology is provided by sura 112:
Say: ‘He is God, One
God, the Everlasting Refuge,
who has not begotten, and has not been begotten,
and equal to him is not any one.’
#10
�Thus God is one and without associates. That he neither begets nor is begotten not
only rules out the Arab polytheist beliefs that he has daughters but also the Christian
trinitarian doctrine. He is eternal and absolute. Elsewhere we are told that he is allknowing and all-powerful. He created everything, not only inanimate things like the sun
and moon, stars and earth, but also the different orders of living things—the angels, the
jinn, and human beings and plants and animals. God is not only just but also
"compassionate and merciful." He commands human beings to do good and resist evil,
but is compassionate towards those who turn to him and ask for forgiveness. On the Day
of Judgment, human beings will be resurrected and summoned before God. Their good
and evil deeds will be recorded and weighed in a balance. Those whose good deeds
prevail will be rewarded will eternal life in Paradise. Others will be cast into the pit of
Hell to suffer eternal torment.
When God created Adam he commanded the angels to bow down before him. All did
so except for Iblis (Satan), who thereby became man’s bitter enemy. Adam and Eve were
cast from the Garden for eating of the fruit of the tree of life, contrary to divine
prohibition. There is no Islamic doctrine of original sin, however. We are not being
punished now for the sin that Adam and Eve committed. We have, however, inherited
their forgetfulness. In particular, human beings get caught up in pursuing their individual
self-interest, such as accumulating wealth, and forget divine warnings. We will all die
and cannot take our wealth with us. We will all be judged and our wealth will not help
us. We are commanded to provide for the more vulnerable members of society—the
#11
�widow, the orphan, the poor. We are commanded to do so by paying the alms tax, the
zakat. Failure to do so will result in grievous punishment in the hereafter.
Prophets have been sent to all peoples and have by and large been ignored. Even
after punishment came upon certain cities that ignored a prophet’s warnings, others did
not heed those examples. God has even sent down two books, the Torah and the Gospel,
to be constant reminders. The people who preserve those books, the “People of the
Book” (i.e., Jews and Christians), continue to bear witness to the one true God, although
even they have altered the true message by corrupting the divine text with human
interpolations. During to these corruptions, Islam, unlike Christianity, does not regard
earlier biblical texts as part of its canon. All the truths of the Torah and Gospel are also to
be found in the Qur'an itself. Muhammad has now been sent as the final prophet, as the
“seal of the prophets,” so this is humanity’s last opportunity to finally get the message.
The message has been essentially the same ever since Abraham, the first monotheist,
brought it to human beings. By submitting his willing to Allah, the one God, Abraham
became the first Muslim, (“one who submits”). The word muslim comes from the same
root as the greeting salām, and is cognate with the Hebrew shalom. According to Islam,
Islam did not begin with Muhammad but rather with Abraham. Muhammad’s importance
lies not in founding Islam, but in restoring it and in being the final prophet. Together
with his son Ishmael, the ancestor of the Arabs, Abraham built and consecrated the
central shrine of Islam, the Kaaba in Mecca.
To receive the message brought first by Abraham, restated by Moses and Jesus, and
finally restored by Muhammad, is to be a believer. To ignore or reject the message is to
#12
�be a non-believer, or infidel. Since the essence of the message is monotheism, infidels
and polytheists are seen as one and the same. Because prophets have been sent to all
peoples, there are no “innocent” polytheists: every people has had an opportunity to
accept the monotheist message. Since there are clear signs everywhere pointing to the
existence of one God, rejecting the oneness of God is taken to indicate not mere
ignorance, but willful ignorance. Polytheists reject God because they want to, not
because they are clueless. Some passages suggest a doctrine of predestination: "God
guides whom he wills and leads astray whom he wills."
The “People of the Book” are not infidels, nor are they believers in the proper sense.
While they have accepted the core of the message—i.e., that God is one—they have
become confused as to other aspects of it. Christians, for example, have mistakenly taken
their prophet Jesus to be not a mere messenger of God, but to be God. Jews have
wrongly rejected Muhammad’s prophetic mission.
Islam asserts a strong dualism of good versus evil and sees them as in constant
struggle with one another. Struggle, or jihād, is a central concept of Islam, although it is
not quite one of the pillars of the faith, at least for Sunnis. Just as in the universe, so too
amongst human beings and in the human soul there is a constant battle between good and
evil, a battle that will last until the Day of Judgment, when all will be resolved by God.
Since God is good, and believers are the ones who have taken God’s side, believers are
inherently on the side of good. This does not mean that believers cannot fall into evil or
err, but it does at least mean that they are on the right side of the cosmic struggle.
Contrariwise, to disbelieve is to go against God, to side with evil against good. Thus
#13
�whatever meritorious action, such as feeding a beggar, disbelievers may do, that action
cannot override the fact that disbelievers have taken the wrong side in the battle of good
versus evil. While they continue in their disbelief, they cannot be saved. Believers, on
the other hand, are not guaranteed salvation, but they will at least receive God’s open ear
and mercy when they ask for forgiveness for their sins.
The struggle against disbelief and evil in oneself and in the world has important
implications for how the Islamic community defines itself in relation to others. During
the Meccan period, when Muslims were a perscuted minority in a largely pagan city, the
message preached sounds something like a message of toleration, as we can see from sura
109:
Say: ‘O unbelievers,
I serve not what you serve
and you are not serving what I serve,
nor am I serving what you have served,
neither are you serving what I serve.’
To you your religion, and to me my religion!’
Now this sura can be taken in more than one way. The weakest reading is that it is a mere
observation that Muslims and polytheists have different religions. But since this is said
directly to polytheists, it is at the very least an act of defiance, for polytheism seeks to
incorporate new gods and cults within itself. It may even, as we can see from Herodotus,
deny the existence of different religions. This sura may be a way of saying, “You may
say that both you and we worship Allah, but in fact we don’t worship the same thing, for
#14
�we worship Allah alone, while you worship him alongside of his supposed daughters and
other false gods.” The last line is thus an assertion of an impassable barrier between
Islam and polytheism.
Another intriguing possibility lies in an ambiguous word in the last line. The
word translated as “religion,” din, can also mean “judgment,” as in the expression,
yawmu d-din, the “Day of Judgment.” Thus we could translate instead, “To you your
judgment, and to me my judgment.” This could be a way of saying, “We fundamentally
disagree, and God will decide between us on Judgment Day.”
Whichever of these possible readings we adopt, something like tolerance is still
being proposed, for in this sura the believer is told to speak the truth to the non-believer,
rather than to attack, oppress, or kill the unbeliever. It does not, however, go against the
idea of a fundamental struggle between good and evil, or between believers and nonbelievers. The Muslim community in Mecca was not in a position to take the offensive
against the Meccan polytheists, so the most that can be expected of them is to maintain
the integrity of their belief by bearing witness to it, i.e., being martyrs for it, in the face of
persecution and oppression.
Once the Muslims migrated to Medina, however, and became powerful enough to
assert themselves against the Meccans, they did so. And the suras from that period reveal
a more aggressive and militant policy against polytheism. Muslims are commanded to
fight the polytheists of Mecca until they cease oppressing Muslims and allow them to
worship in the sacred mosque of Mecca: “Fight them, till there is no persecution and the
#15
�religion is God’s; then if they give over, there shall be no enmity save for
evildoers.” (2.193).
Thus Islam is not a religion that says “Turn the other cheek.” On the other hand,
Muslims are explicity warned not to be the aggressors, “And fight in the way of God with
those who fight with you, but aggress not: God loves not the aggressors.” (2.190) Thus
only defensive warfare is justified, and it is not only justified but even commanded.
Moreover, while Muslims are commanded to spread the word, forced conversion is
explicitly forbidden, “No compulsion is there in religion.” (2.256).
The People of the Book have a special status within Islam. While conflict
between Muslims and polytheists is seen as nearly unavoidable, the People of the Book
should be granted tolerance as fellow, although erring, monotheists. Tolerance in this
context means that Jews and Christians living in a Muslim society are allowed to practice
their own religion under their own laws so long as they recognize Muslim superiority and
pay a tax in exchange for Muslim military protection. While this policy is not explicitly
stated in the Qur’an itself, it did become enshrined in the shari’a or Muslim law. The
Qur’an itself is equivocal on the relations between Muslims and Jews or Christians. To
cite a favorable passage:
Dispute not with the People of the Book
save in the fairer manner, except for
those of them that do wrong; and say,
‘We believe in what has been sent down
to us, and what has been sent down to you;
our God and your God is One, and to Him
we have surrendered.’ (29.46)
#16
�We also read:
Surely they that believe, and those of Jewry
and the Christians, and those Sabaeans,
whoso believes in God and the Last Day, and works
righteousness—their wage awaits them with their Lord,
and no fear shall be on them, neither shall they sorrow. (2.62).
If we turn to the structure of the Islamic society, we find it bound together by religious
and social duties. Although the Qur’an itself does not assign a particular number to these
duties or refer to them as “pillars,” different Islamic sects have enumerated different
“pillars of the faith.” The majority sect, the Sunnis, enumerate five such pillars. Besides
payment of the alms tax, or zakat, that we have already mentioned, we also find the
prescription of five daily prayers, or salat, the pilgrimage to Mecca, or the hajj, as well as
the fast of Ramadan. The remaining duty, the shahada, or testimony of faith, is not
explicitly prescribed as a duty in the Qur’an but may be seen as a precondition for
accepting the Qur’an as a revealed word at all. It goes, “I testify that there is no god but
God, and I testify that Muhammad is the messenger of God.”
What kind of society do these duties promote? First of all, it is one that struggles
against the selfishness of individualism. There is nothing wrong with becoming wealthy
in itself, but there is if one does so at the expense of others, or if one refuses to contribute
to the welfare of those less fortunate. The Qur’an does not seek to abolish or level
existing social hierarchies, whether of rich vs. poor, free vs. slave, or man vs. woman, but
#17
�it does accept the spiritual equality of all before God and insists that all have a duty to
attend not only to the spiritual, but also to the physical, welfare of all others in the
community.
The opposition between the spiritual and the physical, between the spirit and the
“flesh,” so marked in Christianity, is not so strong in Islam. Islamic paradise includes
flowing water, flourishing plants, abundant honey, and beautiful virgins and youths.
Christians have long been scandalised, but that only shows that Muslims do not war
against the flesh as Christians have for so long. Given that God has made both our bodies
and our souls, our flesh and our spirit, to reject the physical is to reject part of God’s
creation. While Islam does believe in a strong opposition between good and evil and
does contrast this current inferior world with the superior world to come, it does not show
a marked contrast between flesh and spirit, nor does it brand the “desires of the flesh” as
inherently evil. There is nothing wrong with desiring and enjoying beautiful things. This
world is inferior to the world to come not because this world is physical and the next
world is spiritual. Even Christians, after all, insist on the resurrection of the body, and
what would a body be good for in a purely spiritual realm? This world is inferior to the
next rather because it is fleeting and filled with injustice and selfishness.
To take one particular example. Islam prohibits the consumption of alcohol not
because it excessively titillates our appetite for gustatory relish, but rather because it
inhibits our ability to act as responsible members of society. Likewise, its sexual
regulations, against adultery and fornication for example, are justified in terms of
mainting a well-regulated society. There is nothing wrong with sexual pleasure per se,
#18
�much less with sexual desire. Modesty in dress is prescribed for both men and women,
although it is more strictly expected of the latter.
Let us take another example. Islam, along with Judaism and Christianity,
prohibits usury on loans to one’s fellow citizens. While economists will rightly point out
that prohibiting usury is both ineffective and inefficient, that criticism misses the point,
for the economists are presupposing a core human selfishness that Islam is striving to
overcome. It is possible to feed the poor to bolster one’s sense of grandeur, or one’s
ranking on some list; it may even work well when all in society simply pursue their
enlightened self-interest. But to do the right thing for the wrong reason is still not to act
morally: one should support charity just because it is the right thing to do.
This is much more that one could say about the Qur’an. I hope the little that I
have said gives you some sense of the context in which it was revealed, of its form and
content, and also of how it conceives of the nature of Islamic society and the relation of
Islam to other religions.
#19
�
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St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe
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The Qur'an : an introduction for Johnnies
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Transcript of a lecture given on June 16, 2021 by Ken Wolfe as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series. Mr. Wolfe provided this description of the event: "In this introduction to the Qur'an, I will explore the context of its composition within the life of Muhammad and 6th century Arabia, its form and content, its relation to other texts and traditions (the Bible, Judaism, Christianity), and its influence upon certain aspects of the Islamic tradition."
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Wolfe, Kenneth
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St. John's College
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Santa Fe, NM
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2021-06-16
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Qur'an
Islam
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English
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SF_WolfeK_The_Qur'an--An_Introduction_for_Johnnies_2021-06-16
Graduate Institute
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The Problem of Absolute Knowing
St. John’s College, Annapolis – June 17, 2015
Abraham Jacob Greenstine
We have to admire Hegel’s confidence: on October 13th, 1806, as Napoleon rides into Jena,
and the day before a decisive defeat of the Prussian army, Hegel is finishing his Phenomenology of
Spirit. i The book’s final chapter, less than twenty pages, is called ‘Absolute Knowing’. Here we
have an unsalaried professor, in his thirties, abandoning his own place to the ransacking of the
French army, staying with one of his student’s parents, yet claiming to have solved the problems
of critical philosophy, to have established the authority of science, and to have achieved wisdom
itself. At minimum, Hegel is bold.
If we ourselves are bold enough to pursue philosophy, Hegel’s claim of absolute knowing
should provoke us. Here we are, striving for wisdom, and along comes Hegel purporting to have
it. When encountering Hegel, we must at least consider whether his claim is genuine, or
whether he is rather just a modern day sophist, pretending to something he doesn’t have. (An
aside: even if we count philosophy less central than, say, art or religion, Hegel’s audacity should
still shock us. In the Science of Logic he claims to be expounding the eternal essence of God before
creation (SoL 29), and in his lectures on aesthetics he is reported to say that art “is and remains a
thing of the past.” For tonight I will mostly focus on the philosophic problems.) ii
In 1967 Gilles Deleuze proposes that the model for the seeker of truth is not the scholar
asking ‘what is it?’ questions, but rather is the jealous lover. Not τὸ τί ἐστι, but instead who is
it, how often, when, how, how many, where? The thinker is not one of simple leisure and
wonder, but rather is incited by the force of ill-will. iii
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�In this case, at least, I think Deleuze is right. I am jealous of Hegel, and encountering his
writings has provoked me both earlier and now. From the first I needed to know the truth of
Hegel’s system, whether I could rely on his method or not. I don’t just want to know what
absolute knowing is. I also need to know how do I reach absolute knowing? How is this book, the
Phenomenology, supposed to get me to this point? Is this book the only way to reach absolute
knowing, and does it guarantee it? Why is it ‘phenomenology’ the leads to Science? Who knows
absolutely? How does one know ‘absolutely’, where and when can I find such knowing, for how long
can one ‘absolutely know’, who are the ‘false claimants’, the sophists who propose a mere image
of wisdom, how can I tell the difference between wisdom and its image, and if I do finally achieve
absolute knowing, what do I do with it?
Hegel tells us that we can neither simply summarize his philosophy, nor can we just
jump to its end. “Impatience demands the impossible, to wit, the attainment of the end without
the means” (§29). iv Instead, philosophy requires the force of necessity: every step must have its
reason, and we lose the necessity and reason when we summarize a philosophy or try to simply
list its conclusions. We can contrast this with axiomatic mathematics: while the deductions of
mathematics also have the force of necessity, our proposed axioms and postulates are only
hypothetical, and there is no absolute procedure for reaching conclusions.
Philosophical
necessity must, for Hegel, be stronger than this: not only must our conclusions follow from our
premises, but they must somehow be implicitly present in the premises. Moreover, the premises
of philosophy must be absolutely necessary, rather than merely hypothetical or presupposed.
Since these requirements are lacking for mathematics, the truth of a mathematical theorem does
not depend on the validity of its proof: a mathematical theorem is either true or false, and a good
proof merely demonstrates the truth already present. Not so with a philosophic truth: for Hegel, a
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�truth can only be comprehended as such insofar as it is a result of its deduction. Thus there are no
philosophic theorems: the truth of a principle can only be realized in the coming-to-be of that
very principle. Without being understood in the necessity of its genesis, philosophic truth will
only ever be contingent, inadequate, and incomplete.
Hence my attempt tonight is doomed to fail. In principle, I cannot adequately review the
Phenomenology as a whole, nor can I give a true rigorous account of the last chapter and figure of
the work, Absolute Knowing. Nevertheless, despite himself, Hegel time and again feels the need
to preface his texts, to summarize the arguments, to add contingent asides or ‘extraphilosophical’ remarks, and to propound what look like philosophic theorems [for example,
“Reason is purposive activity” (§22), “The true is the whole” (§20), “everything turns on grasping
and expressing the true, not only as substance, but equally as subject” (§18)]. Thus we find a
curious split (and not always a neat one) inside of Hegel’s Phenomenology between the central
argument or deduction (the phenomenology ‘proper’, necessary according to Hegel’s philosophic
standards), and the contingent asides, remarks, or summaries (occasionally marked off with the
phrase “in-itself, or for-us”).
This talk, then, while not measuring up to the stringent
requirements of Hegelian science, nonetheless accords with the style of the Hegelian aside, a
contingent reflection on philosophic necessity.
The problem, then, is absolute knowing. Tonight, I will raise this problem from two
directions. The first is through a review of the larger project of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.
Not only is such a review helpful for getting us all on the same page, I shall contend that the
guiding problem of the Phenomenology is the problem of the appearance of science, or the spiritual shape
of science, that is, of absolute knowing. The second direction will be an interrogation of absolute
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�knowing itself. Here I will return to the questions of who, when, how, etc. and examine some of
Hegel’s claims about absolute knowing at the end of the Phenomenology.
Part I: An Introduction to an Introduction
Many readers of Hegel’s Phenomenology find the text to be full of valuable resources for all
sorts of problems and questions. Yet too many of them miss the goal of the text. For all of
Hegel’s supposed obscurity, he is clear on the purpose of the Phenomenology: it is “the way to
science” (§88), the “coming-to-be of science as such or of knowledge” (§27), the deduction of pure
science, or absolute knowing (SoL 29). Hegel even says “To help bring philosophy closer to the
form of science, to the goal where it can lay aside the title ‘love of knowing’ and be actual
knowing—that is what I have set myself to do” (§5). In the age of revolutions and pamphlets, I
propose that the Phenomenology of Spirit, mammoth of a work that it is, can be seen as Hegel’s
pamphlet – philosophical science is possible, here is how!
At this point, there are three major lingering questions. (1) What does Hegel mean by
science? (2) Why do we need a ‘way’ into science, can’t we just start doing science? And (3),
how is phenomenology, in particular, going to accomplish this goal?
Our first question, what does Hegel mean by science, is perhaps best left aside for now.
Certainly he is not simply referring to the ‘laboratory’ sciences. The answers Hegel might give to
this question are somewhat cryptic: science is the unity of thinking and being, science is the
unity of theoretical and practical cognition, science is the absolute idea, the self-movement of
the concept, or the method of methods. And Hegel would remind us that all of these answers
are fundamentally insufficient when separated from the labor of science itself. For now, I merely
wish to maintain that we can link together science, on the one hand, and knowing, on the other,
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�as Hegel himself does in some of the aforementioned quotes. This connection between science
and knowledge is nothing new: the Greek term ἐπιστήμη and the Latin scientia can each mean
either knowledge or science, depending on the situation, and in our present context knowledge
translates the German Wissen while science translates Wissenschaft. More concretely, I propose
that science is the result of knowing; I will return to this later.
Yet why do we need a pathway to science at all? If science is our goal, then why don’t we
just start by doing science? One reason we have already seen: for Hegel science must meet the
standard of absolute necessity. Such a necessity is foreign to our daily lives, and demands a
different sort of consideration than that to which we are accustomed.
Further, recalling Socrates’ claims in the Republic, for Hegel true knowledge must be unhypothetical and without presupposition. Many thinkers have tried to find a self-evident
principle, an immediate truth from which we can go forward to achieve knowledge. Yet for
Hegel every supposedly self-evident principle must, in truth, rely on some presupposition or
other, precisely insofar as it is an isolated principle. Any single statement (or concept, or
argument) considered on its own proves to contain some implicit presupposition or other, and
ultimately implies, for Hegel, its own contradiction. We thus need a pathway to science insofar
as science itself requires a seemingly paradoxical beginning.
Finally, and perhaps most crucially for the text of the Phenomenology, due to the nature of
consciousness we naturally find ourselves opposed to some sort of object. Within a given
consciousness a division is made between what belongs to that consciousness, or the ‘self’ of
that consciousness, and what is other than, or outside of, or the object of, that same
consciousness. This split can take a number of shapes: my observing mind and the data that I
observe, my passions and the laws imposed upon them, my inner worthlessness and the divine
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�other, and so on. Without reducing consciousness to a single form, we find again and again that
it divides itself along the lines of self and other. Such a division, for Hegel, is in tension with the
project of science, insofar as it proposes an object outside of or other than the limits of our
comprehension.
Science, as the unity of thinking and being, must work against our
consciousness’ natural tendency to set itself against its object.
To recap: for Hegel, science requires necessary deductions, a starting point which is
presuppositionless without being reduced to a principle, and the rejection of all divisions
between self and other. If the Phenomenology is to show us science is possible, then it needs to
both show why these are requirements for science and how we can meet such requirements. In
truth, Hegel hopes to do even more: not only is science possible, he thinks, but rather it is
necessary, given our nature. Thus the Phenomenology is not a bare appeal to the ‘fact’ or appearance
of science: rather, it engages in the work of deducing the necessity of absolute knowing, and
demonstrating the inadequacy of other spiritual forms.
A pathway to science is, indeed, necessary for us to reach the point of properly beginning
our scientific system. Yet here is an impasse: if we need an introduction to show that science is
necessary, presuppositionless, and undivided from its object, then our introduction itself must
meet these same requirements. If not, then our science will rely on the contingency of our
pathway and the presuppositions carried with it. Thus “the way to science is itself already
science” (§88): the Phenomenology is not only an introduction to science and a demonstration of its
necessity, but it is also the first part of the system of science.
This brings us to our third question: why is phenomenology in particular the proper
introduction to science?
Moreover, how does phenomenology meet the aforementioned
requirements of science (i.e. be necessary, without presupposition, and unified with its object)?
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�Hegel is looking to establish the necessity of the appearance of science in our world.
Phenomenology, then, is going to be an account of appearances, up to and including that of
science. Still, there are a number of ways in which things can be said to really or truly appear,
and this often relies on various commitments or attitudes we have towards the world. Thus the
ancient skeptic only concedes the force of appearances which demand his or her passive assent;
the Baconian scientist, though, counts as true and certain data anything which can be recorded
as an observation. If Hegel were to simply propose a definitive essential schema of appearance,
the Phenomenology would not meet up to its scientific standards: it would not carry the force of
necessity against those who have a different model of appearances, it would rely on unjustified
presuppositions about the nature of appearances, and it would create a division between
‘Hegelian’ appearance and other sorts of appearances (e.g. the skeptic’s appearances).
We might be tempted to go to the other extreme: if we cannot impose a single schema on
appearances, perhaps our Phenomenology should embrace the style of a narrative or biography, or
maybe a review of different real, historical positions. However these methods cannot work,
either: at the very least, such biographical or historical accounts are filled with contingencies,
and thus inadequate for the purpose of introducing science.
Neither a schematic nor a biographical/historical account, the Phenomenology is a science
of the shapes of appearances, their essential features, together with the various personae,
experiences, activities, objects, and commitments entailed in these various shapes. It takes up
the forms of appearance as they present themselves, without fetishizing their chance
idiosyncrasies or imposing an alien structure upon them.
So, then, the Phenomenology examines the shapes of appearances and shows the necessity
of the appearance of science. Its investigation is interior to the different shapes of appearances
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�themselves: Hegel examines each shape based on its own internal criteria, whether these are
implicit or explicit, active or passive, concerning the object or regarding the subject. This gives
phenomenology its scientific rigor, each stage of the project containing its own immanent
necessity, immediacy, and unity. And what is it that Hegel finds, when he examines the various
shapes of appearances? Speaking generally, it is that within each shape of appearances (other
than, perhaps, absolute knowing) there is a tension within that shape itself. For example, let us
consider the Baconian scientific observers: they are committed to their observational reports as
the true data appearances, as what counts as real in their world. Yet their own activity is at
odds with this commitment: they treat their observations as a pure natural given, as simply
objective, but ignore their own role in the composition of observations. This leads to problems
of which these observers are aware, but cannot adequately resolve: e.g. how can we distinguish
between biased and unbiased observational reports? Yet this ignorance of the self is constitutive
of the observer’s appearances: the self cannot be observed like a hot-spring or a skeletal
structure, and upon realizing this problematic element, this inner tension, any observers who
are genuinely truth-seeking must change the way they approach appearances, they must
abandon simple observation and modify their commitments, objects, actions, or some other
factor. Thus through phenomenology we see a tension interior to this ‘observing’ shape of
appearances, plus the immanent motion that takes place when that tension or contradiction
resolves itself.
The Phenomenology of Spirit is consequently the movement through the various shapes and
stages of appearances. While it may not be necessary that every peculiar and idiosyncratic
possible shape of appearance be investigated in the Phenomenology, the project still should be
mostly exhaustive in the types it considers. If ‘appearance’ is what phenomenology investigates
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�in its broadest terms, the two most general ways in which appearance takes place for us are
those of consciousness and spirit.
Consciousness is the domain where I immediately grasp both myself and any external
objects. It is appearance at the level of the first-person-singular: e.g. objects are given to my
senses, or laws are imposed on me. Consciousness, to quote GM Hopkins, “Deals out that being
indoors each one dwells / Selves – goes itself; myself it speak and spells.” v
For Hegel,
consciousness begins with the certainty of what is immediately given, whether that is an object
outside of it (in simple consciousness), its own self (in self-consciousness), or knowledge of
itself as an agent in the world (in what Hegel calls reason). This immediate certainty proves to
be inadequate, requiring a more substantial conception of what there is (so, for example, we
move from immediate certainty in our senses to a more nuanced understanding of the world as
the consequence of invisible forces; or we move from the certainty of our own absolute authority
to the truth of a more complex relation we have to an authority outside ourselves).
Ultimately, consciousness can never be adequate to itself. Consciousness wants the final
say over everything, wants to become identical with its object, yet it is always resisted by a
larger world, which conditions it. When we recognize this, the certainty of consciousness’ selfassured individuality turns into the truth of what Hegel calls spirit.
Spirit is what
consciousness aspires to be: spirit is its own world. Spirit is identical with what is other than it:
it has objects, but these are a part of its spiritual domain. Spirit, then, is appearance at the level
of the first-person-plural: e.g. objects matter only insofar as they are useful to us, or we must act
only of our own free will, etc. Consciousness has not disappeared (any more than the singular
would ‘disappear’ in the plural): we cannot have spirit without consciousness, no more than we
could have a community without individuals. Yet by making spirit the primary object of
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�phenomenology we acknowledge that there are limits to any analysis of an individual
consciousness: consciousness takes itself as self-sufficient, but in truth its ground is the social
world of spirit. We can think of Hopkins, again: “I say more: the just man justices […] Lovely in
limbs, and lovely in eyes not his” here, we can see that we have gone beyond the “myself” that
consciousness “speaks and spells”, and onto justice, a social virtue, which is reflected through
others (and indeed, for Hopkins, through God).
Like consciousness, spirit too has different shapes which can be examined and evaluated.
While the movement of consciousness was from certainty to truth, spirit moves from truth to
certainty: beginning as substantial, unalterable truth (as with the eternal laws of the family and
gods, or the unequivocal identification of God with light), spirit develops a self-certainty by
incorporating and inscribing this truth within the consciousness of individuals who make it up
(as with Spirit as the self-legislating and autonomy of individuals, or the community that must
reconcile itself with the death of God). For Hegel, this takes place in three stages. The first is
spirit as such, the social world we inhabit. Next is religion, which is spirit’s comprehension of
itself in what Hegel calls ‘picture-thinking’. Finally, spirit’s last stage is absolute knowing,
which is Spirit certain of itself as the truth, where picture-thinking becomes genuine cognition.
In this way Hegel’s Phenomenology purports to bring us to absolute knowing. Indeed, the
goal of the book, to show the necessity of the appearance of science, is nothing more than to
bring us to this final stage. Absolute knowing is spirit’s free thinking of itself and its world, a
thinking by means of what Hegel calls the concept, the “pure element of spirit’s existence”
(§805). The exposition of this thinking and the concept is nothing else but science, which is
constrained by nothing but the necessity of its content. Science is then the result of absolute
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�knowing: “Spirit, therefore, having won the concept, displays its existence and movement in this
ether of its life and is science” (§805).
Part II: The Time of Absolute Knowing
Even if, by this point, I have given an accurate sketch of how the Phenomenology is meant
to bring its readers to absolute knowing, there is still so much we don’t know about this stage. I
wish, then, to interrogate absolute knowing itself, as to who it is, how it works, and what it
does. The most pivotal question though, for tonight at least, is that of when: when can I find
absolute knowing, can it be localized to a particular time? Is there absolute knowing before
Hegel? Before the French revolution? Before Christianity? Further, can we simply rely on
absolute knowing to be there in perpetuum? Or perhaps the possibility of absolute knowing has
past, and we cannot or should not return to it today.
These questions are not purely phenomenological, but instead concern the relation
between a phenomenological shape and actual history.
Hegel is clear that all figures of
consciousness or spirit must first have a real existence before they can be comprehended
phenomenologically: “nothing is known that is not in experience” (§802). In other words, Hegelian
knowledge is neither projective nor prophetic: we can only comprehend what was and is
(although it does seem that for Hegel knowledge is ‘retrojective’, that is, capable of thinking the
present back into the past, as implicitly and necessarily there all along). This holds just as much
for absolute knowing: “as regards the existence of this concept, science does not appear in time
and in the actual world before spirit has attained to this consciousness about itself” (§800).
Absolute knowing can, then, be localized in time, and we may rightfully ask: when does
science appear? When is absolute knowing? There is evidence that the answer to this question
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�is actually quite specific: “until spirit has completed itself in itself, until it has completed itself as
world-spirit, it cannot reach its consummation as self-conscious spirit” (§802), or “As spirit that
knows what it is, it does not exist before, and nowhere at all, till after the completion of its work
of compelling its imperfect ‘shape’ to procure for its consciousness the ‘shape’ of its essence”
(§800). That is to say, absolute knowing requires the stages that come before it, it comprehends
them and recapitulates them. Again and again Hegel considers absolute knowing in light of the
various shapes of appearance that precede it. Yet some of these stages have their existentialhistorical reality in just less than the twenty years before Hegel’s Phenomenology: the most
obvious case is the spiritual shape of ‘Absolute Freedom and Terror’, whose historical correlate
is the revolutionary period in France. Thus Kojève, for example, vi dates absolute knowing to
Hegel himself: Hegel is not merely demonstrating the reality of Science, he is inventing it.
Is it really the case that the birthdate of science and absolute knowing is the night before
the battle of Jena, as Napoleon enters the city and Hegel completes his project? If so, when we
ask who knows absolutely, it is Hegel, first of all.
Yet there is a problem with this answer. If we consider a post-Phenomenology text of
Hegel’s science, such as the Science of Logic, it clearly and explicitly relies on material from a
tradition of thought and philosophy stretching at least as far back as Parmenides. For example,
when discussing the philosophy of Spinoza, Hegel says “Such a standpoint … is not to be
regarded as just an opinion, an individual’s subjective, arbitrary way of representing and
thinking, and an aberration of speculation; on the contrary, speculation necessarily runs into it,
and, to this extent, the system is perfectly true” (SoL 511). How can we make sense of this: how
can Spinoza develop a true, necessary, system of speculative thought, while historically living
before the French revolution? We might wish to appeal to Hegel’s claim that absolute knowing
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�has existed in an undeveloped, implicit state in earlier historical periods (§801). But this is not
an adequate answer, insofar as Spinoza’s system is far from implicit and undeveloped, but rather
was written out, published, criticized, defended, and debated.
Spinoza’s Ethics is not a
testament to a hidden presence of absolute knowing, a ruse of reason behind the back of history,
but rather is an explicit scientific approach to the way things are.
I contend, then, that there is a sense of absolute knowing which is not restricted to a
post-revolutionary existence. Such absolute knowing, rather, exists at any point where spirit
has both raised itself out of its immediate social world, and broken with religious picturethinking, instead thinking of itself and of its world in their own terms. Absolute knowing is a
break with previous spiritual shapes. It is a latent possibility of spirit, not only in its historical
culmination, but at any point in its existence. [We might think of the relation between absolute
knowing and spirit as analogous to that of reason and consciousness: reason is not a simple
historical result of object-consciousness and self-consciousness, but rather is its inner truth
which can be realized at many times and places.] Spirit, as “Pure self-recognition in absolute
otherness … is the ground and soil of science or knowledge in general” (26). Thus if the germ of
science is the unity of thinking and being, the overcoming of the division between spirit and its
object, then absolute knowing has a historical reality stretching back at least to the Greeks.
We have, then, two different senses of absolute knowing: the first as precisely localized
in Germany, in the culmination of the Phenomenology, with the advent of the Hegelian system of
Science, while the second can be found through our history in the guise of philosophy and the
sciences in general, namely in any case where we take up our object in thought. Can we
reconcile these senses, or is absolute knowing merely equivocal?
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�To answer this, we must ask how absolute knowing knows itself.
All the earlier
movements of the Phenomenology somehow find their place in this culminating stage, to the point
where it can be hard to keep track of how everything is supposed to work together. For our
purposes, though, we will to only need to sketch out the movement of self-knowledge itself,
which has three components. In absolute knowing, spirit knows itself as the identity between
itself and its other. For Hegel, such an identity is only possible insofar as the self and other are
genuinely different, and this difference is superseded and transformed. In absolute knowing,
this all happens at once. In its first component, spirit knows “not only itself but the also the
negative of itself, or its limit”: the absolute other, outside of it, namely the “free contingent
happening” of nature, of an external time and space (§807). Simultaneously, spirit, entered into
existence, recognizes itself in its otherness, transforms what is other than it to a moment of
itself, and recollects itself in the contingencies of time: this is spirit’s self-knowledge as what
Hegel calls comprehended history (§806, §808). Such a history is the play of contingencies and
necessities, the shape of spirit which loses itself in externality to find itself again. Finally, with
the immediate identity of spirit and its other achieved, self-knowledge is identical to science
itself. Science, as both comprehended and comprehending, is a perfect activity wherein time is
annulled (§801). Other-against-self, other-as-becoming-self, and other-as-self: time, history,
eternity. In one movement Spirit knows itself through these three temporalities.
By seeing how absolute knowing lives in time, we can start to reconcile our two different
when’s (the one being located at Hegel in particular and the other extending across the history of
philosophy). While science is the accomplishment and result of absolute knowing, the finished
achievement of grasping the other-as-same, absolute knowing is not restricted to this scientific
endeavor, to the pure, timeless system of thought. The accomplishment of science is, rather, a
14
�result of real, historical transformation of the other into the self. While spirit is always capable
of producing science, of reaching absolute knowing, at the same time science always has a
spiritual history.
Further, the unity of self and other can be established more or less
comprehensively, and as such science itself can be more or less comprehensive. This point is
worth restating: science, the timeless and necessary articulation of what is, the home of eternal
verity, is somehow conditioned by the contingent history of spirit. (As an aside: our other
temporality – natural time – has dropped from our discussion. I propose that in fact, while the
content and even form of science can change given spirit’s history, spirit always has the same
immediate relationship to nature: that of other, limit, and death.)
Returning, now, to our ambiguity. Yes, in the Napoleonic wars absolute knowing and
science break from what has come before, and we can rightfully say that Hegel, or the spiritual
community of which Hegel is a part, discovers this speculative system of science. Further, this
figure of absolute knowing and the science which results is, indeed, dependent on its history, on
reformation Christianity, on Kant’s critical philosophy, on the French revolution, and on
Napoleon’s conquests. Nevertheless, this historical moment does not mark the advent of either
absolute knowing or science as such. Absolute knowing “plays in ten thousand places”:
whenever Spirit arrives at the unity of thinking and being, wherever it casts away the form of
time and dares to think the truth as such. Plato’s διαλεκτική, Aristotle’s θεωρία, Spinoza’s
scientia intuitiva, Kant’s transcendental cognition: all are shapes of absolute knowing. And which
new shapes, whose new science, and what new eternal truths might we find in these two
hundred years after Hegel?
Conclusion: The Force of Hegel’s Thought
15
�Turning back, we are faced, it seems, with a tension. In the first part of my talk, I
presented the Phenomenology as a deduction of the necessity of science, which itself is the
necessary, presuppositionless, and unified system of thought. Yet in the second part I concluded
that the real existence of absolute knowing, and with it science, depends on spirit’s history,
which itself contains an ineliminable element of chance. Hence the problem of absolute
knowing – how we reach it, when we find it – has carried us to a new problem, that of necessity
and contingency. This is not a question of understanding ‘where’ each modality applies (for
example, heavenly necessity and mundane contingency, or transcendental necessity and
empirical contingency). Rather, the problem is how to think through the contingent becoming
of necessity. How can chance events give rise to necessity? Only by addressing this can we
reconcile the necessity of science with its dependence on spirit’s history.
Finally, I want to conclude with a reflection on the challenge Hegel poses for us. I began
my talk by pointing out Hegel’s confidence in claiming to achieve absolute knowing. If
philosophy calls to us, I suggested, then even more so will the wisdom absolute knowing
purports to have achieved. By the end of the talk, I tried to close some of this distance between
Hegel’s absolute knowing and earlier philosophies. If history is a gallery of shapes of spirit, I
tried to show that we can consider the history of philosophy as the gallery of shapes of absolute
knowing. With this assertion, though, perhaps Hegel’s achievement seems diminished, and the
force of his text undermined. Before ending tonight, I want to dissuade you of this impression.
Hegel’s writings present a speculative thinking that forces us to reimagine what thought can be.
He dares to think being, the infinite, the absolute, but also externality, negativity, and
contradiction. He refuses to accept any presupposition, any limitation, any edification, as a
replacement for the labor of thought. Yes, Hegelian science can be seen as a philosophy among
16
�many, but it is also a challenge to all others, an expectation that any thought and any philosophy,
whatever it be, think itself to and past its own limit. Not bad for a professor who needs to crash
at his student’s parent’s house.
Pinkard, Terry P. Hegel: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. 227-229.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The Science of Logic. Trans. George Di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Trans. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon, 1975. 10.
iii Deleuze, Gilles. Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953-1974. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2004. In particular, the 1967
lecture and discussion “Method of Dramatization”. Also related “The Image of Thought” from Difference and
Repetition.
iv Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. Arnold V. Miller. Oxford: Clarendon, 1977. Quotes
may have with minor modifications, and citation is of paragraph numbers.
v From “As Kingfishers Catch Fire”, Gerard Manley Hopkins.
vi Kojève, Alexandre. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. Raymond Queneau.
New York: Basic, 1969.
i
ii
17
�
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The Problem of Absolute Knowing
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Typescript of a lecture delivered on June 17, 2015 by Abraham Greenstine as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series. <br /><br />Greenstine's lecture looks at the possibility and problems of "Absolute Knowing" in Hegel's <em>Phenomonology of Spirit</em>. In particular, he asks the listener to reconsider the achievements Hegel claims to have made and, despite those limitations, the imaginative triumph of Hegel's thought of what "Absolute Knowing" could be.
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Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770-1831. Phänomenologie des Geistes.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770-1831. Absolute Wissen
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The privilege of reason : identity and eternity
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The Lost Idea of a Liberal Art
Daniel Harrell
July 8, 2015*
Contents
Introduction
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Acknowledgment
Introduction
The title of my lecture tonight, “The Lost Idea of a Liberal Art,” is meant to
express a worry I have about the future of liberal education. This puts me in a
sizable club. To have worries at all has become reflexive among those of us in
any way devoted to this education. And there is no end these days, it seems, to
prophecies, even pronouncements, of death. Type the words “death of liberal
education” into Google, and you get back such headlines as
Why Liberal Arts Education is Dying (or Already Dead)
Is the Four-Year, Liberal-Arts Education Model Dead?
The Death of Liberal Education
The Death of Liberal Education
Who Killed the Liberal Arts?
Liberals are Killing the Liberal Arts
Conservatives killed the liberal arts
In Our High-Tech World, Are the Liberal Arts Dead?
The Liberal Arts Are Dead; Long Live STEM
Jobs: The Economy, Killing Liberal Arts Education
The Liberal Arts Major: Would you like fries with that?
*A
lecture given on the Annapolis campus of St. John’s College.
1
�All these headlines, I think, have one thing in common. While they may disagree about the threat to liberal education, they agree in distinguishing liberal
education from the threat, as if the threat were external. The headlines make
you think something else is killing liberal education, whether it be liberals or
conservatives or technology or the economy. And it is hard to envision a defense of liberal education without such a distinction, even if headlines draw it
simplistically, or even inaccurately. For if liberal education itself were somehow
the threat, then death might well be liberal education’s best defense, but in
defeat. No surprise, then, that those of us devoted to liberal education are wont
to conceive its threats as if they came from outside it. For this justifies a defense
that succeeds only if liberal education survives.
And there is no shortage of such defenses. Type the words “defense of liberal
education” into Google, and you will find one, it seems, for every headline predicting the death of liberal education. And not just in articles. There are books
to defend liberal education, most recently a bestseller by Fareed Zakaria, bearing the title In Defense of a Liberal Education.1 There are blogs to defend
liberal education, including one at St. John’s featuring regular posts by Christopher Nelson, the Annapolis president.2 There are campaigns to defend liberal
education, with slogans like Securing America’s Future: The Power of Liberal
Arts Education, to mention just one initiative, launched in 2012 by the Council
of Independent Colleges.3 And behind these campaigns are associations to defend liberal education, like the just-mentioned Council of Independent Colleges,
or the Association of American Colleges and Universities, or the Association for
General and Liberal Studies, or the Association for Core Texts and Courses, or
the American Academy for Liberal Education. There are so many defenders of
liberal education, in fact, that you can even find think-pieces pondering why
they seem to have failed, since liberal education remains in peril.
But what if the defenders have succeeded—by putting liberal education in peril?
What if the threat to liberal education comes from within? This is my worry.
Let the idea of a liberal art, for the moment, simply mean whatever it is that
distinguishes a liberal education from any other form of education—a technical
education, say. What if our many defenses of liberal education have made us
forget this idea? What if the idea of a liberal art is lost?
Back to top
1 Other books include Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters by Michael
S. Roth; and College: What It Was, Is, And Should be by Andrew Delbanco.
2 Other blogs include “The LEAP Challenge Blog,” sponsored by the Association of American Colleges and Universities; and The Power of Liberal Arts “Blogs” page, sponsored by the
Council of Independent Colleges, that gathers blog posts defending liberal education.
3 Other campaigns include Liberal Education and America’s Promise, launched in 2005 by
the Association of American Colleges and Universities.
2
�Part One
Now in one sense, I think, the threat to liberal education must always come from
within. The fate of liberal education, after all, will not be decided in headlines,
but in choices made by each of us about the best education, once education
matters. Not the best education, then, in general, as such, per se; but the best
education for my daughter, or my son, or me. In having to make such choices,
those devoted to liberal education are no different from those dismissive of it.
And in this respect, the threat to liberal education can never lie outside it. To
pursue an education at all, liberal or no, is to have answered a question that a
liberal education obliges each of us to ask, and ask on our own behalf: What
does it mean to be educated? And we might well answer this question in a
choice against liberal education, even at the risk of its extinction, if the same
choice is made repeatedly. But this is perhaps the best evidence we have that
the question is real, and the threat to liberal education therefore intrinsic to
it. The death of liberal education, so understood, would similarly come from
within, in a proof of its life, and perhaps the only proof of life.
But again, those of us devoted to liberal education are unlikely to want this
death, especially just to show we were devoted to something rather than nothing.
And while the threat may be internal in this general sense, it is still external, I
think, in a specific sense. For if the threat to liberal education does come from
within, in a question it would have us ask for ourselves about what it means to
be educated, then while we may well answer this question in a choice against
liberal education, we may also answer the question otherwise, by choosing liberal
education. Liberal education would then be a second answer to the question,
opposed to the first. And insofar as one answer opposes the other, the threat
to liberal education would be external.
But if the threat is external, as one answer opposed to another, then we can
infer at least one thing, I think, about any defense of liberal education against
this threat. It will have to convince us that liberal education does provide an
answer, even for those who give a different answer. It will have to show us
that something is lost in a choice against liberal education, whatever might be
gained; and that the answer we give in such a choice, even if it turns out right,
risks being wrong. And showing this much, it seems, means showing there is
something learned in liberal education, that would otherwise go unlearned. To
show, in short, that liberal education has a subject-matter. Or, in a word:
content.
But what, then, is this content? What should we say is learned in a liberal
education alone? Traditionally, the content of a liberal education was identified
with a curriculum of seven liberal arts, a so-called trivium of grammar, logic, and
rhetoric; and a quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Each
of these arts was thought to wed a skill to a subject. And together, these arts
were thought to form a whole. This is why one could say there was something to
learn in a liberal education, rather than many things, or anything, or nothing.
3
�This is also what I want to say is contained in the idea of a liberal art: a skill
wedded to a subject, in a whole of such skills and subjects, that gives a liberal
education its content.
But one might also suspect that a liberal education has no content in this sense,
and that the liberal arts as traditionally conceived show us why. They were
learned, after all, by the few rather than the many—the leisured few, in that
sense already free from servitude. Perhaps the education they received was
‘liberal,’ then, not in liberating them, but in shaping them, stamping them, and
perpetuating them. And the same might be suspected of any content. For in
what sense could we be freed by it, rather than bound to it? What distinguishes
content, so-called, from dogma, or doctrine? What keeps it from closing the
mind that a truly liberal education is meant to open?
This suspicion of content can also come from the opposite direction, so to speak:
by what we take to threaten liberal education, or indeed any form of education.
For leaving headlines aside, this threat can seem to reflect a kind of triumph of
content over context, from college rankings and scorecards at the start, to tests
and grades at the end, making the very meaning of education a matter of datadriven results; and a choice against liberal education the answer to a question
never asked. Or we might conceive this threat in economic terms, reducing
education to just another a product with a price in the global marketplace.
Against all this, the first thing we might think to say in defense of education is
that products are not enough, results are not enough, answers are not enough,
content is not enough.
Defenses of liberal education, accordingly, have generally made education a
matter of context rather than content. And the most common way of doing this
is to locate learning not in a set of subjects, but instead in the self. Thus it is
said that “the maturation of the student—not information transfer—is the real
purpose of colleges and universities.” Or that “if we are to navigate skillfully
the turbulent changes of the twenty-first century, we must educate students not
only to process information effectively, but to think wisely and well.”
And talk of turbulent changes points to another way that defenses of liberal
education have made it a matter of context: by locating the self in an everchanging world. A good example comes from an address by President Nelson:
With boundaries among the disciplines vanishing, with job requirements and needs changing rapidly, we need citizens prepared for
change, prepared to adapt to jobs that do not yet exist, prepared
to enter an unknown world with a kind of fearless determination to
undertake whatever is required to succeed. We will need skills of
inquiry to enter a world we cannot yet even envision.
We can begin to see from this quote why making liberal education a matter
of context rather than content, means forgetting, more or less deliberately, the
4
�idea of a liberal art. For suppose we did live in a world that changes more than
it abides, where our freedom, to the extent this depended on skill, were a matter
of adaptation more than application. Any art that deserved the name ‘liberal’,
in that case, would involve a skill more likely divorced from any subject than
wedded to one; which is to say, a skill that can be applied to many subjects, even
to every subject. And suppose the number of such subjects to have multiplied
past counting, in one way the world indeed seems to have changed, since the
advent of modern science. If the liberal arts could still be said to encompass a
set of subjects, then it would seem better understood as a diversity than as a
totality.
So once defenses of liberal education make it a matter of context, it is unsurprising that they separate its skills from its subjects. The subjects, if they are
specified at all, are specified to give an impression of breadth, as if there were
many things one might learn in a liberal education rather than just one. The
current St. John’s website, for example, speaks of the college’s “wide-ranging, interdisciplinary curriculum,” where “areas of study include philosophy, literature,
history, mathematics, economics, political theory, theology, biology, physics,
music, chemistry, and languages.” Other lists of subjects are even more expansive. One from the earlier-mentioned Power of Liberal Arts campaign makes it
sound as if you might study anything:
You might be surprised by the kinds of subjects and majors that are
included in the liberal arts. They include much more than studio
art and English classes (though those are great!)—they range from
mathematics to Mandarin, from statistics to sociology. At liberal
arts colleges and universities students can study the sciences—such
as biology, chemistry, and physics—and social sciences—including
economics, political science, and psychology. Students can study
newer subjects, such as environmental science and neuroscience, and
traditional ones, too.
This same impression of breadth is given in the way defenses of liberal education
present its skills apart from subjects. You can indeed learn anything, then, in
learning how to learn. And this encompasses a range of skills similarly presented
apart from subjects: how to read, how to write, how to speak, even how to
think.4 St. John’s current way of putting this is to claim that its students “learn
to speak articulately, read attentively, reason effectively, and think creatively.”
In a similar vein, defenses of liberal education will call the liberal arts “transferable skills,” 5 , again against the backdrop of an ever-changing job market.
And “usefulness” has become a ubiquitous word to counter the opinion, and
4A
good example of this is found in Fareed Zakaria, “What is the Earthly Use of Liberal
Education.”
5 “Although modern liberal arts curriculums have an updated choice of a larger range of
subjects, it still retains the core aims of the liberal arts curricula maintained by the medieval
universities: to develop well-rounded individuals with general knowledge of a wide range
5
�the traditional conviction, that the liberal arts are useless. It is more generally
the habit in defenses of liberal education to talk of the liberal arts as if they
empowered us rather than enlightened us—the aforementioned Power of Liberal
Arts campaign being the most explicit example.
There are deeper strains in this line of defense, that try to reach beyond a
liberal education’s usefulness for any career, to the way it might be useful for
life, making the self, in sense, the subject of its skills. A liberal arts education can
be “truly, enduringly useful,” so one recent defense puts it, once it is “oriented
towards the question of how to live.” Or as President Nelson has written:
The primary purpose of college—contrary to the opinion of hiring
managers—is not to provide trained-up workers for business, nor
even to provide young people with the skills needed to make a living.
The primary purpose is to help young people develop the character
and the judgment to shape a life worth living.
In these appeals to the way a life might be shaped, defenses of liberal education
might be said to deepen the sense in which liberal education is a matter of
context, not content, by locating what is learned in a cultivated readiness for the
world, whatever the world may hold. Here is how a recent St. John’s graduate
puts it:
After my two-year commitment with Teach For America, I hope to
continue my work in the field of education. But really, I can do
anything. St. John’s has given me the tools: the ability to listen,
to think, to speak, to write, and ultimately, to act. I need only to
decide where to direct my passion, and the world is mine, thanks to
the incredible education I have had the blessing to receive here. 6
And there are ways to deepen this context still further; the most common being
to take this readiness for the world as an openness to the world, whether the
self so opened is described as curious, inquisitive, imaginative, self-critical, or
sympathetic. Thus we find Martha Nussbaum, to pick on a famous example,
defending liberal education insofar as it develops
1. The capacity for Socratic self-criticism and critical thought about one’s
own traditions.
2. The ability to see oneself as a member of a heterogeneous nation and
world.
of subjects and with mastery of a range of transferable skills. They will become ‘global
citizens’, with the capacity to pursue lifelong learning and become valuable members of their
communities.” http://www.topuniversities.com/blog/what-liberal-arts-education
6 This comes from Grace Tyson, “‘When You Know Better, You Do Better’: A Senior’s
Reflections on St. John’s. Parts of this address are also quoted in Christopher Nelson, Is It
Worth It?.
6
�3. The ability to sympathetically imagine the lives of people different from
oneself.
And as suggested by Nussbaum’s reference to Socrates, the sense in which a truly
liberal education opens minds rather than closes them has particular appeal at
St. John’s, where it would now sound antiquated to claim, as Scott Buchanan
did in the first catalog of the New Program, that the liberal arts put us in
possession of the truth.7 What we say instead is self-consciously Socratic. Thus
President Nelson will say that “liberal education is the best and quickest way to
become comfortable not knowing.” Or that “learning is grounded in recognition
and acceptance of one’s own ignorance.” Or as the same St. John’s graduate I
quoted earlier puts it:
I have learned that great questions lead to more and more questions,
not necessarily to answers, and I have learned that the greatness of
the human spirit shows itself in just this realization. As Socrates says
in Plato’s Meno: “We shall be better and braver and less helpless if
we think that we ought to enquire, than we should have been if we
indulged in the idle fancy that there was no knowing and no use in
seeking to know what we do not know.” We must have intellectual
bravery, that is, the courage to push forward, to continue seeking
truth even in the face of doubts about its very existence.
It is this same Socratic self-consciousness that explains how St. John’s can make
even an all-required program of books, which might thought inescapably full of
content, into a matter of context. For anything written down, we might claim,
is simply doctrine, until a reader puts it into dialogue by questioning it rather
than assimilating it. And underlying this shift from doctrine to dialogue is
perhaps the deepest belief one can have about a truly liberal education: that
we are only able to learn, truly learn, insofar as we do this for ourselves. It
would seem to follow directly from this that what we learn is found indeed in
the self, or even the soul, rather than in a set of subjects. And the more liberal
an education becomes, so we could say, the more that what we learn is a matter
of how we learn, and who we become in learning it. Which at this college, at
least, means the more that any so-called subject is found in a book, which is
found in a reader of that book, who is found in a conversation about that book,
which brings the book to life, with all it may contain. And this conversation,
both with others and with oneself, might then be said to exemplify the sense in
which a liberal education is ultimately a matter of context rather than content.
For this is an education in selfhood rather than subjects, where the something
we finally learn is what it means to learn, and even what it means to love it.
The suspicion that a truly liberal education has no content, then, can be cast in
terms that encompass what many of us, I think, might say a liberal education
7 “The arts of apprehending, understanding, and knowing the truth are the liberal arts, and
they set their own ends.” (Bulletin of St. John’s College in Annapolis, 1937–38).
7
�finally is, and where any appeal to a number of liberal arts seems beside the
point. St. John’s even tried dropping any reference to the liberal arts, along
with any mention of liberal education, when it first launched its new website,
as if indeed to forget the whole idea. But it did this, I think, to locate the
place of a liberal education in the present rather than the past. It was only a
matter of months before the college restored these references to its website, since
there were prospective students still using such terms to find such things. But
St. John’s has otherwise remained embarked, like nearly every other liberal arts
college in the country, on a communications project carried out in images rather
than text, in the attempt not simply to say what a liberal education is, but to
show it, and capture something about the experience of a liberal education when
mere explanations are thought no longer enough. Gone are the days when the
college could package its education, as it were, in a brown paper wrapper, as if
the education were not only a matter of content, but the kind of content that
couldn’t be seen from outside. Even the first video St. John’s made of itself, back
in 1954, was mostly staged and performed in vignettes, retaining at least that
much separation from the ongoing world. But it is just this separation that is
now deemed better erased than preserved, leading to efforts that range from the
Summer Academy to the college’s Instagram feed, as if to give the impression
that what separates the college from the outside world is only a window, and
a window more often open than shut. At its worst, this project might be said
to pander or flatter rather than inform or educate; but at its best, it might be
said to make St. John’s finally look like a college rather than a cult. Or to put
the sense of this strategy more generally: it tries to defend liberal education by
locating the place of liberal education within the world rather than apart from
it. —And this is perhaps the most visible way that a liberal education is now
being made a matter of context rather than content.
Back to top
Part Two
By this point in my lecture, however, I think one could make an objection. For
I haven’t yet given any grounds for worrying about any of this. If we have lost
the idea of a liberal art, by making liberal education a matter of context rather
than content, then at most all I have shown so far is that we have lost this
idea deliberately, in what might be called an act of forgetting. So let me now
explain my worry, which the rest of the lecture will try to justify. My worry is
that in losing this idea, more or less deliberately, we risk another loss beyond
our control: which is to lose any way of giving a clear and compelling answer
to the question of what it means to be educated. —Which is to say, an answer
that distinguishes liberal education from any other form of education; and that
sheds any light, in turn, on what is lost in a choice against liberal education,
whatever might be gained. I worry, then, that once the idea of a liberal art is
lost in defense of liberal education, the defense is lost. And once the defense is
8
�lost, liberal education is lost.
To begin to see all this, I want now to revisit the various ways that defenses
of liberal education have made it a matter of context. For example: the basic
set of skills, again separated from subjects, that defenses of liberal education
claim are imparted by it. There is no doubt that learning how to learn, along
with how to read, write, speak, and think, are useful skills; and one might even
grant their necessity for a life lived in freedom. But it is hard to see how these
skills belong to a liberal education rather than to any education. And the more
indispensable these skills sound, the harder it is to conceive them as liberal
rather than remedial. Shouldn’t we already know how to learn, and read, write,
speak, and think, before we go to college?
There are, of course, ways to specify such skills, but they reflect another aspect
of the problem. To recall St. John’s way of doing this, in a liberal education
you learn how to speak articulately, read attentively, reason effectively, think
creatively. But are we we then to believe that you’ll be left speaking inarticulately, reading inattentively, reasoning ineffectively, or thinking uncreatively,
if you choose another kind of education—say, to pursue a degree in computer
programming? This is doubtful. But if so, then what again distinguishes a
liberal education from any education?
The same problem emerges from the attempt to distinguish a liberal education
on higher-sounding grounds. In one of his blogposts, for example, President
Nelson writes: “St. John’s College is the right fit for someone who is seeking
a special sort of education—an education in the arts of freedom, an education
in how to make learning and life their own.” But one could ask how such encompassing terms could distinguish a St. John’s education from any education,
or even from human experience as such. For isn’t the distinction between experience and innocence, or experience and endurance, found in just the kind
of learning, and living, that is necessarily one’s own? Or suppose we take our
bearings from Socrates, and claim that St. John’s will teach you intellectual
courage: how to persevere in the pursuit of knowledge rather than yield in the
face of ignorance. Perhaps St. John’s will, but so then will any field of research
one might pursue, it could be argued, that relies on science to reach its results
rather than superstition. And direct appeals to Socrates, as if the Enlightenment never happened, won’t be enough to distinguish St. John’s in particular,
or liberal education more generally, on the matter of intellectual courage.
But there is a whole other side to this problem. Insofar as it becomes hard to
distinguish a liberal education from any education when it is made a matter
of context, it becomes easy to make a choice against liberal education merely
by wanting an education with content. To consider this problem from one
angle, take the penchant in education nowadays for testing and ranking and
training and specializing. It may be good and even necessary to speak against
all this in defense of liberal education. But this risks the impression that a
liberal education is an education for dilettantes, providing an escape from being
challenged or judged or driven or dedicated. And what can be said to correct
9
�this impression, if in a liberal education, these virtues are matters of context
rather than content? Matters, that is, about which nothing more, really, can
be said, but only shown—where you see such students for yourself? Or even be
such a student yourself? For as one noted defender of liberal education, Andrew
Delbanco, has put it:
One of the difficulties in making the case for liberal education against
the rising tide of skepticism is that it is almost impossible to persuade
doubters who have not experienced it for themselves. The Puritan
founders of our oldest colleges would have called it “such a mystery
as none can read but they that know it.”
This way of putting the problem captures what is potentially self-defeating in
defenses of liberal education that make it a matter of context. For if the point of
any defense is to persuade people to experience liberal education for themselves,
then how can there be a defense that depends on such an experience to be
persuasive?
There are, of course, ways of trying to capture this experience in images, as
I earlier discussed in the case of St. John’s. But this same case reflects the
problem. If we make its education a matter of context, by showing a student
playing croquet, or reading a book on a bench near a tree, or even speaking
with passion and eloquence about how much her education means, we haven’t
yet distinguished St. John’s from any other college where such things might
be said or done—even though St. John’s is unique, in having renounced the
elective system and established an all-required curriculum. But St. John’s is
unique, then, as a matter of content, not context. And something similar by
way of distinction-erasing might be said of the defenses of liberal education more
generally. For if these defenses were products of a liberal education, one might
have expected them to reflect a diversity of views, or an originality of thought.
But so far as these defenses make liberal education a matter of context, and
speak of the kind of skills one needs to flourish in life, it becomes hard not
to speak in platitudes or commonplaces. And indeed these defenses more or
less follow a script: In an ever-changing world, now more than ever, we need
the truly useful arts of a liberal education. Even President Nelson hasn’t quite
managed to liberate himself from this script, even though I regard him as a
gifted writer, who is making the most of the script.
Still, I suspect that those of us devoted to liberal education will need more than
a script to survive. And if my lecture so far is right, this means finding what
we have lost, or recollecting what we have forgotten. So in the time I have left,
I want to sketch one way back to the idea of a liberal art.
Back to top
10
�Part Three
To take the first step back, I want you to imagine that we have shut every
window at St. John’s College, and drawn every curtain; as if St. John’s were
indeed a cult. Or to put this more generously: as if the place of liberal education
were not within the world but apart from it. But why would we believe this? We
would believe it, I think, because of something we believed about the freedom
promised by a liberal education. We would take this freedom to be important
enough, yet fragile enough, to protect its pursuit. We would regard this freedom
as invaluable, then, but not indispensable. A life could be lived, and even lived
well, without it. And this would be why its pursuit would need protection from
the outside world. For it would be a freedom that might well be forgotten in the
living of life; or even dismissed, or denied—for example, in the choice of another
form of education. Or in the quest for power, or the drive to succeed. The kind
of freedom that someone like Meno might not want, but that his slave-boy might
need, to be free at all. The kind of freedom, then, that might be possessed even
by those in chains, or in prison, or in poverty. The kind of freedom we can still
possess at the moment of death, when there is no life left to live. The kind of
freedom you can count on, then, not when you might do anything, but when you
can do nothing. At moments of life when you might be said to need a useless
skill, not a useful one.
But what kind of freedom could this be? The answer takes us a second step
back. For this would be a freedom, I think, that transcends the horizons of life,
and indeed be the freedom it is—perhaps the highest kind there is—in having
no horizons. But what does having no horizons mean? Here is one answer, and
to my mind the best answer: having no horizons means having the truth. And
a liberal education, then, would promise you the truth.
If this promise sounds ridiculous, then good. For if what I have so far argued
is right, then we are better off saying ridiculous things than obvious things in
defense of liberal education. But this promise, you’ll also have to admit, is
one way, and perhaps the simplest way, to claim that a liberal education has
content. And truth might be the only way to understand a content that frees
us rather than binds us. The promise of truth should also sound attractive,
at least if there is any chance to keep the promise. But perhaps you think no
liberal arts college these days would dare to make the promise. Well, you would
be wrong. At the time I write this sentence (which was yesterday), the college
whose curriculum most resembles St. John’s had the slogan “Truth Matters”
emblazoned across its home page. And this same college began its own defense
of liberal education by claiming that “to learn is to discover and grow in the
truth about reality. It is the truth, and nothing less, that sets men free.”
Now, I have to admit that the college in question is Thomas Aquinas. And
perhaps you would tell me their belief in truth is based on their belief in Christ.
I would agree, but hasten to add that St. John’s has a source of its own for
a belief in truth. Which takes us a third step back. For though we may not
11
�have to believe in Christ to believe in truth, perhaps we do have to believe in
Ptolemy.
But what do I mean by a belief in Ptolemy? To explain what I mean, and to
take yet another step back to the idea of a liberal art, I’m going to turn now not
to Ptolemy, but instead to Socrates; and indeed, a Socrates we are all familiar
with, from Plato’s Meno. I do this because if St. John’s can already be said to
believe in anything, it believes in this: you can only learn, truly learn, insofar
as you do this for yourself. But if Socrates’s myth of recollection to Meno can
be believed, then learning for yourself would be impossible, unless you somehow
already possessed whatever you might learn. Which is all but to say: unless
you somehow already had the truth. Of course, we might take this myth to
be merely myth; and one sign of its doubtfulness even at St. John’s can be
glimpsed in what I earlier quoted from a St. John’s graduate, when she claimed
that “We must have intellectual bravery, that is, the courage to push forward,
to continue seeking truth even in the face of doubts about its very existence.”
I think Socrates’s myth is meant to suggest, to the contrary, that all doubts
about truth’s existence are put to rest, as soon as we start to learn.
But I call this a suggestion, because the proof, I suspect, actually lies in
Socrates’s dramatic turn to the slave-boy, and a shift from myth to mathematics. Which brings me to my final step back. For it is in Socrates’s encounter
with the slave-boy, I think, that we can find the lost idea of a liberal art. And
to recover it, I now offer what I call a loose reading of this encounter.
The central question of this episode is: how long, exactly, is the side of an
eight-foot square? (Meno 82e) Now, as you no doubt know, because the line in
question is irrational, there is no answer to the question in terms of feet. But I
prefer to put this a different way. There is an answer, but only insofar as the
answer is made into a matter of research, with a divide-and-conquer approach.
And this is one way to describe the slave-boy’s initial stab at the question, when
he finds that the line in question is between 2 feet and 3 feet in length, before
giving up. (84a) But under one idea of intellectual courage, we could say, we
should not give up. And we could forge ahead, on the slave-boy’s behalf, in
further research, by dividing the 3 foot line even more. And putting the results
in suitably modern terms, we learn that the line in question is between 2.8
and 2.9 feet; then we learn it is between 2.82 and 2.83 feet; then we learn it is
between 2.828 and 2.829 feet. Or to put what we learn still more exactly: the
first number in the length of the line is 2; and the next is 8; and the next is
2; then 8; then 4; then 2; then 7; and so on. There would be no pattern in
the numbers thereby found, but this is what would make every number found
a genuine discovery, which carried us ever farther in truth, leading us from one
learned thing to the next. We could even say we were learning for ourselves,
and persevering in the pursuit of knowledge rather than yielding in the face of
ignorance. And I think this more or less captures the meaning of learning in
what I will call the idea of a field of research, which we have inherited from
modern science.
12
�But again, the slave-boy gives up on this approach at the very first number 2.
And Socrates doesn’t exhort him to keep at it, or show him how to divide the 3
foot line any further. Instead, Socrates says to the slave-boy: if you don’t want
to count the line out, then just show it to me. (84a) —It’s as if Socrates had a
different idea of intellectual courage, a different idea of learning, and a different
idea of how the question should be approached, forming a different discipline
from a field of research. And I think we can already say why. For while you
can certainly make the line in question a matter of research, you thereby put
it out of reach—as a matter of recognition. For there is no end to the numbers
you will find in the divide-and-conquer approach to the line in question. So
you are learning more and more about an object that you will never get to see,
and in that sense, never get to know. We will always be left, as it were, at the
first number we find, with an ever-expanding but never-vanishing horizon at the
latest number we find. Or more simply put, we will be seeking the truth, and
even advancing the truth, but never possessing the truth.
So what idea of approach does Socrates have in mind instead? We can see it
coming-to-be in the very next thing he does with the slave-boy. For the slaveboy is truly stumped, and can’t even show the line in question. For of course it
is not in front of the slave-boy yet; and in his mind, we might say, it is not yet
a matter of recognition, but still a matter of research, even though he’s given
the project up. So in perhaps his one outright act of teaching, giving birth, we
might say, to the very idea of a liberal art, Socrates simply draws the line in
question—erasing at once any remaining horizon of discovery, and showing we
are already in possession of the truth. (85a) And what he does in drawing this
line radically changes what it means for the slave-boy to learn. For this is no
longer to discover any more about the line in question, but instead to recognize
the line in question. Or perhaps I should say recollect the line in question. But
in either formulation, this means seeing that the line Socrates has drawn is
indeed the line in question. And the slave boy does this in yet another act of
recognition, when he sees that the figure Socrates draws, upon the line that he
draws, is indeed the eight-foot square in question.
But let me try to clarify this by generalizing it. Let us suppose that Socrates
has asked the slave-boy a more encompassing question. Such as: “Why do
the heavens move as they do?” One way to answer this question is again to
make it a matter of research, producing fields and even sub-fields of research,
in a divide-and-conquer approach to the question. But this risks putting the
matter beyond the reach of recognition. True, we will learn more and more about
heavenly motions in this approach; but there is no promise that we will ever learn
enough to finally answer the question. And this reflects one way to understand
learning, leading to one interpretation of “astronomy,” that we have inherited
from modern science. But there is still another way to understand learning,
leading to another interpretation of “astronomy,” that we have inherited from
ancient science, and that promises us an answer, in promising us the truth. And
a college like ours is committed to it, I think, if we believe that learning is a
finally a matter of recognition.
13
�So another way of answering the question “Why do the heavens move as they
do?” that we can still call “astronomy,” produces a liberal art. And in this
approach, strange as it may sound, we can simply answer the question, in already
possessing the truth. We don’t even have to stop at one answer: Ptolemy, as
I recall, gives us two—suggesting that the truth is more generous than frugal.
And we don’t even need any telescopes. All we have to do is draw lines just
like Socrates did, that allow us to see, or more exactly see again, the object in
question. Which in this more encompassing case is the motion of the heavens;
hence we have to draw the lines—circles, basically—that allow us to see again,
and in that sense to recognize, the very motions of the heavens we were asking
about. And in this way we can give a true account of these motions, since this
account allows us not simply to explain what we see, as if to move past it, but
to recognize what we see, in a recovery of it.
But now suppose we made the question Socrates asks the slave-boy allencompassing—something like: “Why is the world the way it is?” In one
approach—let us call this a technical education—we would be led into ever-more
numerous fields of research to answer the question, with no promise that we
will ever recover the world by the end, in an act of recognition. But in another
approach—let us call this a liberal education—we would be led to seven liberal
arts to answer the question, where this recovery of the world in an act of
recognition is precisely the point. And this is why, I think, these antique seven
arts might still be said to form a whole, that gives a truly liberal education its
content.
But let me say one final thing in this spirit of recollection on behalf of St. John’s
College. Let us suppose that the truth is very generous. So generous, that when
we ask the question “Why is the world the way it is?” there is not just one
answer, or two answers, or seven answers, but something closer to a hundred.
And let us suppose that the lines that might be drawn to produce this hundred
are drawn, not to form squares, or circles, but letters; and that the letters are
suitably arranged in words, sentences, paragraphs, to compose what we might
call “books.” Any of the hundred so-called books, in that case, would allow us
to recover the world in an act of recognition. And we could recognize the world
in such a book, by reading it with the same generosity possessed by the truth.
The book would be inescapably be full of content, in being inescapably full of
truth. These are the books I think we read at the college, and believe in. And
in being full of truth, they give, to any conversation at the college that brings
them to life, a purpose, and a point, beyond that life; proving there is more,
even to life, than life. Truth.
14
�Acknowledgment
Much of the thinking in this lecture is indebted to Barbara McClay. So I wanted
to thank her for that, and dedicate the lecture to her. For more on her own
defense of liberal education, which is much better than the defenses I discuss
here, see:
“In Defense of Liberal Arts”
“ ‘What is Liberal Education For?’: A Preview”
“We’re All Pinmakers Now: Liberal Education in a Specialized Age”
“With Friends Like These”
Back to top
15
�
Dublin Core
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Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series
Description
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The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a></strong>.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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15 pages
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The Lost Idea of a Liberal Art
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Typescript of a lecture delivered on July 8, 2015 by Daniel Harrell as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series.
Mr. Harrell is a tutor at St. John's College in Annapolis. His talk delves into the conversation surrounding the liberal arts education. In particular, he examines this argument through certain calls for "relevance" as well as the truth of the liberal arts in general. He further meditates on the relationship between the liberal arts and the world at large, and those tensions and rewards offered by a student of the liberal arts.
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Harrell, Daniel
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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2015-07-08
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A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audio recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a copy of my typescript available online."
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text
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pdf
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English
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Bib # 82742
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<a title="Audio recording" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/275">Audio recording</a>
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Education, Humanistic
Education
St. John's College (Annapolis, Md.)
Graduate Institute
Summer lecture series
Tutors
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Title
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Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series
Description
An account of the resource
The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a></strong>.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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00:51:37
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wav
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Bib # 82743
Title
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The Lost Idea of a Liberal Art
Description
An account of the resource
Audio recording of a lecture delivered on July 8, 2015 by Daniel Harrell as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series.<br /><br /><span>Mr. Harrell is a tutor at St. John's College in Annapolis. His talk delves into the conversation surrounding the liberal arts education. In particular, he examines this argument through certain calls for "relevance" as well as the truth of the liberal arts in general. He further meditates on the relationship between the liberal arts and the world at large, and those tensions and rewards offered by a student of the liberal arts.</span>
Creator
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Harrell, Daniel
Coverage
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Annapolis, MD
Date
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2015-07-08
Rights
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A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audio recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a copy of my typescript available online."
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sound
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mp3
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<a title="Typescript" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/320">Typescript</a>
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St. John's College
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Education
Education, Humanistic
St. John's College (Annapolis, Md.)
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English
Graduate Institute
Summer lecture series
Tutors
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https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/2c01c7d7759d75cbda9cfb0dd60f1413.mp3
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St. John's College Lecture Recordings—Santa Fe
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St. John's College Meem Library
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Santa Fe, NM
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01:31:24
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The idea of the common good
Description
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Audio recording of a conversation with Seth Appelbaum and David McDonald on July 7, 2020, hosted by Edward Walpin as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series. The Graduate Institute provided this description of the event: "The idea of a 'common good' had largely faded as a theme of our public discourse until the Age of COVID-19. The notion of a shared good seems fairly uncontroversial when it shows up as a presupposition of public health policy. Beyond the realm of public health, and even in our fragmented and adversarial era, most activists and factions will sooner or later claim that they are working in service of the common good and not simply against their opponents. Does this resurgence of the 'common good' in our rhetoric herald an emerging consensus about the goal of politics, or is it a narrow, technical claim made in reaction to a specific emergency situation? How has the common good been understood throughout its long lineage, and what is at stake in the idea now? Join St. John’s tutors Seth Appelbaum and David McDonald for a live conversation on the question of what it might mean to have an ethical aim beyond that of the individual."
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Appelbaum, Seth
McDonald, David
Walpin, Edward
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St. John's College
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Santa Fe, NM
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2020-07-07
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Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online.
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sound
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mp3
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Common good
Locke, John, 1632-1704
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<p>A video of this conversation is available on the St. John's College YouTube channel: <a href="https://youtu.be/hWyWx6DS3CM">https://youtu.be/hWyWx6DS3CM</a></p>
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English
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SF_AppelbaumS_McDonaldD_The_Idea_of_the_Common_Good_2020-07-07
Graduate Institute
Summer lecture series
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College Catalogs and Statements of the Program
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St. John's College
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St. John's College
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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Statements of the Program are published each Academic Year. They provide an overview of the program and historical information about the college. <br /><br />The titles of these publications have changed over the course of the College's history. From the 19th century through 1971 they were titled Catalogue. During this period, some Catalogues were distributed as issues of <em>The Bulletin of St. John's College</em>. The title changed from Catalogues to Statement of the Program with the 1972-1973 publication. <br /><br />Also included in this collection are Graduate Institute catalogs and promotional publications about the St. John's program. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="College Catalogues" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=10">Items in the College Catalogs and Statements of the Program Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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collegecatalogs
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ii, 22 pages
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paper
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GI Catalog 1989-1990
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St. John's College
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The Graduate Institute in Liberal Education, St. John's College, 1989-90 Bulletin
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1989-1990
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GI college catalog for the years 1989 to 1990.
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Annapolis, MD
Santa Fe, NM
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St. John's College
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English
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text
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St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
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pdf
Catalog
Catalogue
Graduate Institute
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/3e713896efed48dc5cb7524a928b5fef.pdf
b4a1496979cd7256a4abc9a23c43cf4a
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
College Catalogs and Statements of the Program
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
St. John's College
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Description
An account of the resource
Statements of the Program are published each Academic Year. They provide an overview of the program and historical information about the college. <br /><br />The titles of these publications have changed over the course of the College's history. From the 19th century through 1971 they were titled Catalogue. During this period, some Catalogues were distributed as issues of <em>The Bulletin of St. John's College</em>. The title changed from Catalogues to Statement of the Program with the 1972-1973 publication. <br /><br />Also included in this collection are Graduate Institute catalogs and promotional publications about the St. John's program. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="College Catalogues" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=10">Items in the College Catalogs and Statements of the Program Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
collegecatalogs
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
ii, 22 pages
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
GI Catalog 1988-1989 Bulletin
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
St. John's College
Title
A name given to the resource
The Graduate Institute in Liberal Education, St. John's College, 1988-89 Bulletin
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1988-1989
Description
An account of the resource
GI college catalog for the years 1988 to 1989.
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
Santa Fe, NM
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Catalog
Catalogue
Graduate Institute
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