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St. John's College Lecture Recordings—Santa Fe
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Discernment of the good : on Michelangelo and Kierkegaard
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Audio recording of a lecture given on July 18, 2018 by Anthony Eagan as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series.
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2018-07-18
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Michelangelo Buonarroti, 1475-1564. David
Kierkegaard, Søren, 1813-1855
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English
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Eagan, 2018-07
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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00:37:29
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Shakespeare’s Sonnet 64: What Can Be Said About a Poem, and What Should Be Said
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on July 11, 2018, by Elliott Zuckerman as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series.
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Zuckerman, Elliott
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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2018-07-11
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English
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LEC_Zuckerman_Elliott_2018-07-11_ac
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Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616. Sonnets
Graduate Institute
Summer lecture series
Tutors
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St. John's College Lecture Recordings—Santa Fe
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00:55:46
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Does the Declaration of Independence speak to us today?
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Audio recording of a lecture given on July 4, 2018 by Elizabeth Eastman as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series.
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Eastman, Elizabeth C'de Baca
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St. John's College
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Santa Fe, NM
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2018-07-04
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sound
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United States. Declaration of Independence
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English
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Eastman, 2018-07
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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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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sound
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mp3
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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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St. John's College Lecture Recordings—Santa Fe
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00:49:55
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Logic, nothingness, and the university : on the different versions of Heidegger's "What is metaphysics?"
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Audio recording of a lecture given on June 27, 2018 by Ian Alexander Moore as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series.
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Moore, Ian Alexander
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St. John's College
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Santa Fe, NM
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2018-06-27
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Heidegger, Martin, 1889-1976
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English
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Moore, 2018-06
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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Summer 2018 Lecture Schedule
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Schedule of lectures and concerts in Summer 2018, sponsored by the Graduate Institute.
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Graduate Institute
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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2018
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pdf
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Lecture Schedule 2018 Summer
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July 13, 2018. Peterson, John. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3940" title="Property, Belief, and the Barbarian in Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws">Property, Belief, and the Barbarian in Montesquieu's <em>Spirit of the Laws</em></a> (audio)
Graduate Institute
Lecture schedule
Summer lecture series
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Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series
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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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00:53:46
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Property, Belief, and the Barbarian in Montesquieu's <em>Spirit of the Laws</em>
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on June 13, 2018, by John M. Peterson as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series.
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Peterson, John Matthew
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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2018-06-13
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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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sound
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mp3
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English
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LEC_Peterson_ John_2018-06-13_ac
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Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron de, 1689-1755. De l'esprit des lois.
Graduate Institute
Summer lecture series
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PDF Text
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This "'.laterial may be protected by
Copyright law (Title 17 U.S. Code)
The Greeks and Their Dogs
-
Jonathan Tuck
[A summer lecture, given at St. John's College, July 17, 2002]
After his return to Ithaca, Odysseus is a party to a number of recognition scenes.
One of the most affecting involves his old dog Argos (the word means "shining"), who
now lies helpless, shinging no longer, in filth and fleas at the door of the palace. Though
he and Odysseus are both much changed for the worse, each recognizes the other
immediately. Argos wags his tail and drops his ears, but is too weak to move toward his
master. Odysseus, concealing a tear, asks his companion, the swineherd Eumaios, why
such a fine-looking dog lies here amid the dung. Eumaios, still ignorant of the identity of
Odysseus, answers that Argos was once a fine dog, but now no one cares for him, since
his master perished in a far land. The two men move past the dog Argos to enter the
palace; and the narrator tells us:
But the fate of black death took hold of Argos,
Having seen Odysseus again in the twentieth year.
(XVII. 326-7)
Clearly Argos dies of joy, at the sight of the man he has awaited for twenty years. No
one else, recognizing Odysseus, gives such clear evidence of pure faithfulness and
devotion. For that matter, no other human being penetrates Odysseus' disguise instantly,
without tokens or persuasion. Of those that recognize Odysseus on his return, the only
other character to see through his disguise is the goddess Athena, herself disguised, on
the beach in Book XIII.
�2
On the showing of this episode, we would likely assume that both Odysseus and
Homer hold dogs in high regard. But recall another moment of recognition, this one in
Book XXII: Having easily strung the bow and shot an arrow through the axeheads,
Odysseus reveals himself to the suitors by killing their leader, Antinous. Still, they do
not recognize him; but Odysseus puts them out of doubt, saying:
0 you dogs [~ K6vsc;], you thought I would never come again,
returning home from the land of the Trojans ...
(XXIl.35-6, emphasis mine)
[digression on the word K6mv, KVVO<;-(use the blackboard): A third declension
noun, the embarrassingly erroneous name ofthe women's soccer team ["K6vm x0rovtm"]
to the contrary notwithstanding; derives from Inda-European root kwon-; etymologically
related to cynic, cynosure, canine, kennel.]
Isn't it puzzling that in this moment of passion, the worst thing Odysseus can call his
mortal enemies, the faithless usurpers of his kingdom, his house and his marriage, is
"dogs"? Has he forgotten Argos so soon?
Now those among us who own both dogs and houses might argue that there is no
contradiction at all in claiming that dogs are, on the one hand, utterly faithful and selfless
defenders of the house, and on the other hand, utterly shameless, wanton usurpers ofit.
But it seems unlikely that Odysseus was referring to the cheerful fecklessness with which
dogs chew up valuable garments, destroy lawns and gardens and shed fur and other
excreta on every available surface. Admittedly, dogs are slobs, but such negligence
seems to be a far cry from the deep-seated malice that Odysseus attributes to the suitors.
When we look at other allusions to dogs in the Homeric poems, and elsewhere in some of
the Greek books we read, we will see that dogs are presented at best equivocally or
�3
ambivalently. In Homer, they get a very bad press most of the time. I will return to
Argos later; for the moment I only want to suggest that by looking at the Greeks and their
dogs we may learn something about our attitudes towards our own animals and our own
animality.
Perhaps the most surprising negative characterization of dogs involves a kind of
boldfaced shamelessness-surprising to me because many of the dogs I have known have
seemed to display the ability to feel a very human kind of shame. Homer uses the phrase
Kt>ov cioss~ - "fearless dog," in the vocative-as well as words like l(l)Vrom~-"dogfaced, or dog-eyed"-to refer to this brazen boldness. Helen uses the term of herself
twice, once in the Iliad and once in the Odyssey. It is also used by Hephaestus, referring
to the infidelity of his wife Aphrodite (Od VIII), and applied to Athena, Artemis and
Hera, as well as to the serving-girl Melantho, addressed by Penelope. A striking use of
l(l)Vcom~
comes in Odysseus' colloquy with the ghost of Agamemon, in the underworld
(Od XI). Agamemnon says of Clytemnestra:
She, bitch-faced, turned away, and did not stay to
close my eyes with her hands or to shut my mouth,
though I was dying and going to Hades. So there is
nothing else more fearsome [mv6rspov] or shameless
["doglike," Kt>vrspov] than a woman, who takes into
her mind such deeds as these: the ugly work she devised,
preparing death for her wedded husband.
One interesting thing about all these occurrences of "dogfaced," meaning shameless or
"bold," is that they are all applied to women, frequently in a context of sexual infidelity or
the immodesty of acting in a way unbefitting a woman, especially rebelling against
domestic subjugation (Clytemnestra, Hera). In Homer there is only one exception to this
rule: Achilles, in Book I, addresses Agamemnon as "dogfaced" (l(l)Vc01t11~) and latter
�4
accuses him of "having the eyes of a dog, but the heart of a deer." We can see that
Achilles' furious taunting of Agamemnon involves an implicit sexual reference; an
epithet is applied to him that is otherwise used only of women.
Outrageous boldness is also represented in comparative and superlative forms of
an canine-related adjective. In Book XX of the Odyssey, Odysseus is forced to restrain
himself and endure watching the women of the palace behaving wantonly. His heart
growls within him, the narrator tells us,
as a dog growls,standing over her tender puppies, seeing an
unknown man, and ready to fight.
But then Odysseus strikes his breast and exclaims,
"Endure, my heart! You endured a worse thing (1C6vi-spov-a
"doggier" thing, a more outrageously degrading thing) on the day
when the mighty Cyclops devoured my noble companions... "
(Od XX.18)
We get the superlative form in Iliad X, in the Doloneia, when Odysseus, after stealing the
horses of the sleeping Thracians, ponders what biggest outrage (6 n 1C6vi-awv, the
doggiest thing) he can do to them.
This is an etymological conjecture unsupported by Chantraine, but I think the
idea of dogginess might also be represented in the Greek word for a catamite, rivmoo~,
one who has the rLtOOO~, the shame, of a dog-that is, none. lCLVatOSia, the abstract noun,
is the word for ''unnatural lust" or "sexual perversion." But sexuality is not the only
physical drive connected with dogs. Odysseus says to the Phaiakians:
"But let me dine, even though I am grieving; for there is
nothing more shameless [1C6vi-spov, "doglike"] than the
�5
loathsome belly, which by necessity commands a man to
remember, even when he is worn down and holds grief in
his heart, as I do, and bids me always to eat and drink, and
to forget all that I have suffered... "
(Odyssey VIl.216f)
So the idea that dogs are particularly shameless seems to be connected with physicality in
general, both with sexual lust and with other appetites that we share with dogs and other
beasts, like the need for food and drink. This association of dogs with our corporeality
reminds me of some lines from the American poet May Swenson:
Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen ....
How will I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead
["Question," 11. 1-4, 11-15]
That dogs stand for physicality also means that they are connected with death. As
we saw, Argos' most eloquent action, the only tribute he can give to his returning master,
is to die--to die like a dog, as we still say. In one way the dog is our surrogate, the body
which dies; in another way the dog is purely other, a threat to the fate of our bodies after
we are dead. At the very beginning of the fliad, we are told that the rage of Achilles sent
the souls of many heroes to Hades, but made them themselves-that is, their bodies-a
prey for dogs and the delicate feastings of birds. Dogs are feeders on carrion. It is
disgraceful to become a prey for dogs, in the same way that death is disgraceful, only
more so. Both death itself and becoming a feast for dogs and birds represent being
reduced to mere physicality. Repeatedly, the threat of being eaten by dogs is used to
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urge men to fight harder, or to taunt them (e.g., lliadII.393, VII.379, XVIII.179,
XXII.339, etc.; Odyssey XXI.363). Ifwe care too much for the safety of our bodies, we
consider ourselves to be nothing more than our bodies, which becomes a self-fulfilling
prophecy when the dogs and the birds get us in the end. Perhaps that is why both
Diomedes and Achilles use the epithet "dog" in accusing Hector of cowardice:
"Now once again you have escaped death, you dog,
but the evil came close to you; now again Phoebus
Apollo saved you. You must have prayed to him as
you went among the hurtling spears. But I will make an
end of you when I meet you later. .. "
(fliadXI. 362 f. and XX. 449 f.)
In similes, dogs are usually on the defensive, an undifferentiated group of faceless
antagonists for some brilliant lion or boar who attacks the flock. Almost always it is the
Trojans who are the dogs, serving as foils for some isolated Greek hero who becomes
briefly godlike. Sarpedon speaks of his Trojan allies as cowering before Diomedes, in his
aristeia, his moment of excellence, "like dogs around a lion" (fl. V. 476). Similarly, in
the fight over the body of Patroclus:
As when some mountain-bred lion, trusting in his strength
snatches from the grazing herd whichever cow is best, first
taking its neck in his strong jaws he breaks it, and then gulps
down the blood and all the innards, and around him the dogs
and the herdmen shout from a distance, but are not willing to
come closer, for pale fear seizes them; so the spirit of none of
them dared to go against glorious Menelaus.
(XVI.61-69)
We seem to have come quite a distance, from shameless boldness to shameless
timorousness. But if one class characteristic underlies these various instances, I would
say it is the degraded condition of dogs, the lumpish physicality that either does not or
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ought not assert itself. If humans are halfway between gods and beasts, the particular
beast that we are above is often the dog. For the Greeks ideationally, as for us
orthographically, "dog" is "god" spelled backwards; to be a dog is essentially to be
ungodlike, to be the gods' polar opposite (hence my whimsical, quasi-dyslexic title,
which Judy Seeger says was very difficult for her to type). I infer this pattern of
opposition partly from general experience. If the Homeric gods are complex, wild, free,
masterful and mysterious, dogs seem to be simple, domestic, slavish and transparent.
Think of Baudelaire's poem Les Chats, in which he portrays cats as divine in origin,
arrogantly beautiful, and sheerly enigmatic. A cat-god makes perfect sense. Could we
without laughter imagine such a poem about dogs? But in addition to general experience,
I can appeal to a number of details in Homer's text. I have already mentioned that there
are two recognition scenes in which Odysseus is recognized immediately, one with the
goddess Athena and one with the dog Argos. Athena herself is in disguise; Argos is
incapable of disguising his responses, but also too weak to express them openly enough
to be a danger. He is the only loyal member of the Ithaca household that dies, and that is
all he does. In all this he is the opposite of godlike. There is another episode to support
the claim that Argos and Athena form a pair of sorts, framing the other, human
recognition scenes. In Book XVI, Athena appears to Odysseus in the swineherd's hut in
order to urge him to reveal himself to Telemachus:
She came near, and she looked like a woman, tall and
beautiful of body, and skilled in beautiful works. She stood
against the door of the hut, appearing to Odysseus, but
Telemachus did not see her in front of him or recognize
her. For somehow the gods do not appear clearly to everyone.
But Odysseus saw her, and so did the dogs. They did not
bark, but with a whimper they went in fear to the far side
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of the farmstead.
(XVl.157-163)
Here once again Athena and the dogs are symmetrically positioned on either side of
Odysseus, excluding other humans.
Another illustration of the notion of dogs as ungodlike: The wild dogs who are
eaters of carrion are outside the human community: They are fuµocp<iym, raw meat eaters,
like the Cyclops, and as such not fit to live in cities. We remember Aristotle's dictum
that whoever does not live in a city is either a beast or a god. At the other extreme, the
gods do not eat the roasted flesh that is offered to them; they only smell the sweet smoke
of it. We humans, city-dwellers, in our medial position, we eat the cooked meat.
The only Homeric dogs that constitute a clear exception, in my view, are the
wonderful dogs in Phaiakia. As we hear in Odyssey VII:
On either side [of the door] there were golden and
silver dogs, which Hephaestus had made with skilful
cunning to guard the home of greathearted Alkinous;
They were deathless and ageless all their days.
(VIl.91-94)
This is the kind of exception that proves the rule. In magical Phaiakia, every aspect of
the natural order seems to be inverted: Ships steer themselves and trees bloom and bear
fruit together in every season. All the more reason to think that dogs as a class are the
opposite of these splendid specimens.
Speaking of dogs as the polar opposites of gods leads me straight to a
semidigression on the interesting topic of Socrates' oath, "by the dog." In a learned note,
E.R. Dodds, the editor of the Oxford edition of Gorgias, tells us that this oath was
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thought by ancient commentators to be a euphemism, coined by Rhadamanthus the Just
in order to avoid taking the names of the gods in vain. (It is thus almost exactly cognate
with our expression "Doggone it" instead of "Goddamn it.") 1bis humorous, colloquial
substitution of the name of dog for the name of god confirms my claim that dogs and
gods are polar opposites. Even in its simpler, un-Egyptian form, the oath draws upon this
opposition. "By the dog" is not peculiar to Socrates; Dodds cites a usage of it by a slave
in Aristophanes' Wasps. (In other comedies, characters swear "by the wild goose" and
"by the cabbages.") If the oath was euphemistic in origin, it does not seem to fill that role
for Socrates, since he is on many occasions not averse to swearing by Zeus, by Hera, by
Hercules, and so forth. I count ten uses of "by the dog," three in Republic, one each in
Phaedrus, Cratylus, Apology and Phaedo, and three in Gorgias, including one special
one I will come to in a moment. One might suppose that if we are right about the
opposition of gods and dogs, swearing by the dog might be an indicator of a tone of
pointed irony on Socrates' part, perhaps even a suggestion that he does not mean what he
is attesting by his oath. But on the contrary, most of the attestations seem to be both
sincere and emphatic, though qualified by a kihd of folksiness or a tone of mock surprise:
- By the dog! I said, we seem accidentally to have
purged the city that we said was luxurious!
(Republic 399 E)
... sinceby the dog, I think these tendons and bones
would long since have been in Megara or Boeotia,
carried there by an opinion about the best thing, if I
had not thought it juster and nobler to endure whatever
punishment the city might decree, rather than to flee.
(Phaedo 98E)
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The uses of "by the dog" often accompany a personal apostrophe to the interlocutor
Socrates is addressing; the oath is a gesture of familiarity, like clapping him on the
shoulder in a friendly way.
And by the dog, 0 men of Athens, for I must tell you
the truth, I experienced something like this: Those with
with best repute of wisdom seemed almost the most lacking.
(Apology 22A)
By the dog, Gorgias, to examine sufficiently how these
things are will require a lengthy conversation.
(Gorgias 461B)
The special usage that begs our attention most urgently is the notorious exclamation at
Gorgias 482B, "by the dog, the god of the Egyptians" or, as it is often rendered, "by the
dog that is god in Egypt." As Eva Brann tells us, the allusion is to Anubis, the dogheaded Egyptian god who served in the Egyptian pantheon some of the functions of
Hermes in the Greek one. Notably, and most relevant for our purposes, he was the
'1'1>X01t0µ1t6~,
the conductor of the souls of those who had recently died, who were being
brought into the underworld to be judged. Now it seems to me that ifthere is any validity
in a tradition of opposmg gods and dogs, our reading of the immediate context of this
oath in Gorgias may be enriched in a number of ways. I want to claim that this use of the
canine oath is not in continuity with other occurrences of "by the dog," but in pointed
contrast to them.
Recall that Socrates has been forcing his interlocutor Polus to concede that, since
it is worse to commit wrong than to suffer it, the wrongdoer should desire and seek
punishment as an expiation. Therefore, instead of using rhetoric to try to evade
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punishment, he could only use it to accuse himself with greater eloquence-or, if it was
an enemy who had done wrong, the rhetorician should try to punish his soul by pleading
that his body should be let off scot-free. At this point the politician and demagogue
Callicles breaks in to claim that Socrates must be joking. For, he says,
if you are being serious and if these things you say
tum out to be true, what else can we think but that
the life of humans would be turned upside-down and
that we do everything, as it seems, the opposite of how
we ought to do it?
(481C2-6)
In response, Socrates says it is one of his two beloveds, Philosophy, that speaks thus, not
he. She is more constant than the other beloved (Alcibiades), for her words are always
the same. Socrates concludes:
So either refute her about what I just said, show that wrongdoing
and remaining unpunished for it is not the ultimate of all evils, or if
you leave it unrefuted, by the dog, the god of the Egyptians, Callicles
will never agree with you, 0 Callicles, but will be in discord with you
for your whole life.
(482B3-8)
If the common opinion holds, and holds truly, that dogs are essentially and precisely not
gods, then the oath "by the dog," insofar as it is intended to be recognized as an ironic
euphemism, would endorse that common view. Thus it might be a suitable choice of
attestation to guarantee the view that our common opinions about crime and punishment
are valid ones. But Socrates, in putting forth a radically upside-down view of crime and
punishment (according to the common opinion), uses his oath to point out an analogous
upside-down case: In Egypt, contrary to the common opinion of the Greeks, a dog is in
fact a god. Not only that, but this very dog-god aids in the dispensing of otherworldly
punishments for crimes committed here. Callicles, if he does not make a rational
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argument but nonetheless persists in his common opinion, is not just in a state of selfcontradiction; he is, remarkably, committing a kind of impiety. BUT: He would be seen
as impious only in .Egym, which for Socrates is often the source of many crucial pieces of
exotic ancient wisdom. To muddy the waters even further, this dog-god, regarded in
Greece, where dogs are not gods, might seem to be in discord with himself, just like
Calli cl es. The use of the quaint and paradoxical oath, apart from suggesting that Socrates
feels a certain complacency about the point he has just forcefully made, seems to raise the
stakes of the argument. The entrance of Callicles, who will be Socrates' interlocutor and
antagonist for the rest of the dialogue, represents a critical moment in the discussion. At
the same time, I think I want to claim that the tonal ambiguity of "by the dog, the god of
the Egyptians" leaves open the possibility that Socrates will not carry the day.
End of Digression. I have been making the Greek case against dogs, that they are
not only ungodlike but quintessentially, shamelessly bestial. What, you may be thinking,
has happened to Man's Best Friend? The dog, after all, is the proverbial domestic
animal. We must beware of saying that dogs are the beasts that are unfit to live in cities.
In taking the wild carrion-eating dogs as paradigms for the whole species, we are
committing the error against which the Eleatic Stranger warns in Plato's Sophist. Let us
not, he says, confuse the sophists with dialecticians, lest we give them too much honor.
Young Theaetetus objects that the description just given seems very like them; but the
Stranger replies:
Yes, and indeed a wolf is very like a dog, the wildest thing
like the tamest. But it is necessary for the careful man always
to be on his guard [1[oU::icr0m niv q>uA.alcfJv] about resemblances,
for they are the most slippery kind of things.
(231A7-10)
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As the phrase "be on his guard" reminds us, dogs are the good guys who stand on guard
against wolves and sophists. We have already seen dogs guarding flocks and houses, not
only poor old Argos, but those very downtrodden dogs who served as spearcarriers in the
similes where the lions or boars played the starring role. And since every dog must have
his day, sometimes the dogs even get the top billing: In IliadX, for example, Nestor and
Diomedes go in the middle of the night to seek the other Greek leaders:
And when they came in among the guards who had
gathered together, they did not find the leading guards
asleep; but they all sat in wakefulness with their weapons.
As when dogs keep painful watch over the flocks in the fold,
hearing the strong-hearted beast as he comes down through
the woods among the hills, and there is a great cry against him
from both men and dogs, and their sleep is destroyed; so was
sweet sleep destroyed from the eyelids of the guards, watching
through that terrible night.
(X.179-194)
In ancient Greece, a domestic dog was a working dog; as Carl Page recently
reminded me, the Greeks didn't do pets. If they weren't guards or sheepherders, they
might be hunting dogs, who also figure in a number of Homeric similes. We can see that
these two household jobs draw to a great extent on the same doggy virtue. Dogs do not
initiate, but they do perseverate; it is not for nothing that they give their name to the word
"dogged," and proverbially the old ones don't learn new tricks. A guard dog is expected
to repel change from without, to preserve the status quo. He needs to endure, to keep on
keeping on. And so does a hunting dog, who in following a trail tries to keep the same
scent in his nostrils. Both of these roles are in play in the Oresteia of Aeschylus. As
early in the trilogy as the third line of the Agamemnon, the loyal watchman laments that
he has to sleep on top of the palace KUvoc; ~tld]v, "in the manner of a dog." (Later in the
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play, the Chorus uses the same phrase to describe Cassandra, sniffing out the terrible
secrets of the House of Atreus.) In her disarming flattery of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra
hails him as "the watchdog of the fold," the first of a string of effusively complimentary
epithets. Cassandra later describes this flattery as a bitch's fawning. In the Libation
Bearers, Electra complains that she is kept pent up in the house, like a dog. Later in the
trilogy, the watchdogs give way decisively to the hunting dogs: The Furies are
consistently portrayed as dog-like, both by themselves, by Orestes, and by Clytemnestra
(and her ghost). Of course, most of these canine comparisons are somewhat ambivalent.
It seems that a fawning watchdog can turn on its master; we recall that the ghost of
Agamemnon in the Odyssey described Clytemnestra as a shameless bitch. Here again,
the guardian of the house may also be its usurper. The Furies, in their tenacious pursuit,
illustrate the virtue of a good hunting dog (though we do first see them asleep on the job).
But they are complicated figures: deathless, sinister and threatening but also sort of
comically dopey. They are loathsome in aspect, hated and feared by gods and men. In
my problematized reading of the ending of Eumenides, it is not clear that these old
hunting dogs will be able to learn the new trick of keeping beneficent watch over the city
of Athens.
In the same way, the maenad chorus in Euripides' Bacchae, which are also
repeatedly referred to as hounds, are a kind of safety valve for the city's passions, but
also potentially destructive of the city. Just as a sheepdog may revert to wildness and tear
his own flock, a hunting dog may turn upon his master. The famous case, of course, is
the huntsman Actaeon, who was tom to pieces by his own hounds after inadvertently
seeing Artemis naked. Actaeon is mentioned in the Bacchae; Cadmus points out that
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Pentheus was killed on Mt. Kithaeron, the same place where Actaeon died. The usual
allegoresis of the story of Actaeon, in both ancient and modem times, has been that the
hounds represent the passions, which will destroy the person who is subject to them.
So even domesticated dogs, useful and even indispensable though they clearly
are, can revert to brutish wildness. We might ask whether the canine characteristic of
perseveration is better instantiated by a dog's remaining tame or by his reverting to his
wilder nature. When we domesticate dogs, are we merely diverting them temporarily
from a constant path? As tame dogs, they are our artifacts; we teach them to imitate us,
and we take pleasure in their resemblance to us, as we take pleasure in any imitation. But
a likeness is not fully assimilated to the thing it resembles. Dogs seem simple to usthey offer us a kind of trusting, unconditioned love, and hence we feel safe around them.
But should we? If the patina of domestication conceals an enduring nature in opposition
to it, then tame dogs are not simple but complex, and it is we that have made them so.
Perhaps this is the source of the complexity and ambivalence of the Greek response to
them. The possibility of a good dog gone wrong might lead us to wonder about how fully
domesticated we ourselves are, whether we have been educated enough to subdue the
bestial appetites within us. And by this route, we have come at last to the dogs in Plato's
Republic. Here the ambivalence toward dogs, the doubt about whether they are indeed
reliably tamable or educable, is thematized; and what is at stake is nothing less than the
survival of the city-in-speech.
Almost as soon as we leave the city of pigs, it is clear that the newly expanded
city will need warriors, guardians, as Socrates calls them. And almost immediately, these
guardians are likened to dogs-first through a pun (crK6A.a~, "puppy," is close to
cpuA.a~,
�16
"guard") and then through a consideration of the temperament required for a guardian.
Like dogs of good breeding, the warrior-guardians must have a high degree of 0uµ6~,
spirit, in order to be courageous in defense of the city. But can such a warrior also be a
safe presence in the city he is to defend? Socrates claims at 375D to solve the problem
through the likeness to dogs; he argues that since it is clear that dogs can be made tame
while retaining spiritedness, it is therefore possible for one nature to have both qualities.
But this supposed solution is almost immediately undercut. Socrates goes on to claim,
outrageously, that dogs are not only gentle and spirited but also philosophic:
Does it seem to you also that our future guardian will need,
in addition to the spiritedness in his nature, to be philosophic?
-How so? he said. I don't understand.-You will see this also
in dogs, I said, which is something in the beast well worth wondering
at.-What?-lfhe sees someone he doesn't know, he gets angry, even
if he has never suffered anything bad from him. But anyone known
to him he welcomes, even if he has never gotten anything good from
him. Haven't you ever marveled at that?-Not much, he said, I never
thought about it before now; but it's clear that he does it.-But it
shows an exquisite feeling in his nature, and a truly philosophic one.How?- Why, I said, in that he distinguishes a friendly sight from an
unfriendly one by nothing but having learned one and not recognizing
the other. And indeed, how could it not be a love oflearning, defining
what is akin to him and what is other by understanding and ignorance?It couldn't, he said.-But then, I said, aren't love of learning and
philosophy the same thing?-Yes, he said.
(375E-376B)
Where do we begin, in attempting to deconstruct this farrago of nonsense? In the first
place, pace Glaucon, it is by no means clear that this is how dogs behave. Our dog has
heard and smelled the same mailman every day for years on end; yet she never fails to
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hurl herself at the closed door with paroxysms of self-righteous barking. Or, if you prefer
authority to experience, we need look no further than "the master of those that know"
[Inferno N.131], Aristotle, who says in the Nicomachean Ethics:
But let us observe that a lack of restraint for spiritedness is
less shameful than a lack of restraint for desires. For spiritedness
seems to listen to reason to some extent, but to mis-hear it, just
as servants in a hurry, who rush off before hearing everything
that is said, get the instructions wrong, or dogs, before looking
to see if it is a friend, bark if there is merely a noise.
(tr. Joe Sachs, l 149A25-30, BK. VII. Chap. 6)
It's notable that the very question under discussion in this passage is the one Socrates was
embroiled in: whether 8uµ6c;, spirit, can be responsive to reason. I would even surmise
that Aristotle had the Republic passage in mind, and was answering it explicitly.
Aristotle would seem to be a more trustworthy guide than Plato (even if Plato were in
deadly earnest here) on questions of animal behavior. But let us grant, for the sake of
argument, that dogs do behave as Socrates describes. Still it is clear, as Allan Bloom and
other commentators have noted, that the example proves the exact opposite of what
Socrates wants it to prove. Dogs do not want to learn anything or anyone new; they bark
at the unknown instead of making it more known to themselves. They are masters of
perseveration and old tricks; they love not what is true or good, but what is their own. If
philosophy were the love of what we already know, Socrates' reasoning would be right;
but if Eros is philosophic, as Diotima says, then the philosopher's love must be for the
wisdom that he lacks. And it seems clear from the long quoted exchange between
Socrates and Glaucon that Socrates knows this full well. Otherwise, why would he even
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raise the question of whether it is the same thing to be cpiA.6crocpo~, a lover of wisdom, as
to be cpiA.oµaSfJ~, a lover of learning?
Though Socrates in this passage claims to believe that the domestication of dogs
is a success story that can be paradigmatic for the taming of the high-spirited warrior, he
returns to the topic later on, just after introducing the Noble Lie:
It is the most fearful and shameful thing of all for the shepherds
to train such dogs as helpers of the flocks, in such a way that
through dissipation or hunger or bad habit those very dogs raise
their hands against the sheep, to injure them, and instead of dogs
to resemble wolves.
(416A3-8)
Socrates goes on to reiterate the importance of education to prevent this scenario. But
there was really no need to raise it, out of the blue, unless it serves the dramatic purpose
of betraying a kind of insecurity that the previous argument did not dispel. The issue is
important enough for Socrates to go on worrying at it, as a dog gnaws away at a bone.
If dogs represent the thumoeidic in humans, we have seen that there is an ample tradition
of negativism about the possibility of making this brute impulse safe for the home or for
the city. It seeins likely that Socrates is deliberately evoking this tradition in choosing the
comparison of the guardians with dogs. What he may be implying about the attainability
of the best city or of justice on earth, I will not here conjecture.
I am almost finished with this cavalcade of canines, but I cannot resist adding an
epilogue about the Cynics. The question of whether dogs are philosophic might naturally
raise the question of whether philosophers are, or ought to be, doglike; the Cynics-the
K6viKm or dog-philosophers- said yes. The founder of this school is said to have been
Antisthenes, one of the most faithful followers of Socrates, according to Xenophon.
After the death of Socrates, he began teaching his doctrines of virtue in the Gymnasium
�19
called Cynosarges, or "white (or shining) dog." We remember poor old Argos-though
the name seems not to be an allusion to him, but rather to a white dog who carried off a
sacrifice which was meant for Herakles. Some information about Antisthenes is
available in Diogenes Laertius' Lives of the Philosophers; but it's a rather skimpy
account; one pregnant detail is that one of his lost treatises was entitled, "On Odysseus,
Penelope and the Dog." I wish it had survived; it would be interesting to see the Cynics'
reading of Argos. The real inaugurator of the Cynic tradition was a student of
Antisthenes, Diogenes of Sinope, who became a revered and semi-legendary figure
among the Stoics and others; his name is often yoked by Epictetus with that of Socrates
himself. Diogenes Laertius gives a lot of space to the life of his namesake, Diogenes of
Sinope. It is an entertaining account full of anecdotes and vignettes, usually culminating
in triumphant one-liners by the crusty dog-philosopher. Whatever the origin of the name
of"Cynic," Diogenes clearly embraced the name with literalistic enthusiasm. He referred
to himself as a dog: The tale goes that Alexander once came and stood next to him,
saying,"! am Alexander the Great King," whereby Diogenes replied, "And I am
Diogenes the Dog." And when he was buried, the Corinthians erected a statue of a dog
over his grave, by the city gate leading to the Isthmus.
Why did Diogenes welcome the name of dog-philosopher? What elements of the
traditions I have sketched about dogs might have appealed to him? For one thing, the
brute physicality of a dog's life, which to a Homeric warrior might have seemed
shameful, was for Diogenes a laudable simplicity and self-sufficiency. He lived as a
beggar, slept out in his cloak and tried to have as few possessions as possible. He once
tried to eat raw meat, but could not digest it. When he saw a child drinking out of his
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hands, he exclaimed that he had been outdone in plainness of living, and then threw away
the drinking cup he had carried. He proudly claimed for himself a physical hardihood
due to plain living: Once he hugged a marble statue to show how easily he could endure
the cold. Another time, when people asked him what kind of dog he was, he replied:
"When hungry, a Maltese; when full, a Molossian. Most
people, while praising these, don't dare because of the labor
to go along hunting with them. In the same way, you are not
able to live with me out of fear of the discomforts."
(Diog. Laert., Lives, Vl.55)
At times this robust physicality seems to have gone over the line in its defiance of
convention: As the biographer tells us, once at a feast people mockingly threw bones at
Diogenes as ifhe were a dog. In response, he acted like a dog and peed on them.
Actions like these were not undertaken only in momentary fits of irascibility.
They were part of a program of "shamelessness"--hvaibcta-that served as a central
creed, almost a doctrine, for Diogenes. The very quality that was made a proverbial
reproach to dogs in the literary tradition is here considered to be a virtue, and I want to
conjecture a reason for this. Again and again we hear Diogenes raising the question,
"What is a man?" The story everyone has heard about him is that he went out in broad
daylight with a lantern. When asked why, he said, "I am looking for a man." (Not "an
honest man," as the misquotation has it.) When he was asked where in Greece he saw
good men, he said, "Men nowhere, but boys in Lacedaemon." Once he called out, "Oh,
people!" When people gathered, he laid into them with his stick, saying "It was people I
called for, not dregs [Ka8<ipµma]." Once he was returning from the Olympic games, and
someone asked him if there was a great crowd there.. "Yes, a great crowd, but few men,"
�21
he said. To Diogenes also is attributed the sarcastic throwing of a plucked fowl at Plato,
for defining "man" as a "featherless biped." This thematizing of the question "what is
man?" seems designed not only to humble our pride and preach fortitude; it goes beyond
that to ask what place we as humans occupy in the ranks of animate beings. Hamlet asks,
What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.
Sure he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and godlike reason
To fust in us unused.
((IV.4.33-39)
But on the other hand, Diogenes wants to remind us that philosophy must not become too
abstract and speculative. If we try to deny our physical nature, we forfeit our selfknowledge. Once when Plato was discoursing about "tablehood" ['tpa7tss6'tTJ~] and
"cuphood"
[KUa86'tT]~],
Diogenes replied, "Table and cup I see, but no tablehood and
cuphood." lfwe get too fancy or lofty in our aspirations, we need to be humbled. In
common with the Stoics, the Cynics seem to stress the acceptance of mortal limitations.
The task of the philosopher is to prescribe an ethical way of living, teaching by example.
But even so, I don't think Diogenes would have wanted the Athenians in general
to emulate his doggy ways. In his public behavior, he was performing a kind of theatre
to challenge them, to raise issues. Epictetus makes this point explicitly about the Cynic
philosopher, quoting a passage from Plato's Chaerophon where Socrates is compared to a
tragic deus ex machina:
He [sc. the Cynic] should be prepared to mount the tragic stage and
speak the words of Socrates: "O people, where are you bound?
Miserable ones, what are you doing? You reel up and down, like the
blind. You have left the real path and are going off on another one."
�22
(Discourses, 3.22.26)
Such a performance requires an audience, in the same way that Socrates requires a
straight man to answer his prickly questions. Part of Diogenes' theatrical demeanor
seems to have sprung from a kind of cranky vanity that prompts him to rail at people for
no good reason. When someone asked Plato what sort of a person he thought Diogenes
was, Plato replied, "LmKpaTil<; µmv6µEVo<;, A Socrates gone mad." He seems to have
been an uneasy presence to have in the city. When asked why he was called a dog, he
said, "I fawn on those who give, I bark at those who don't give, and I bite the wicked."
This is not strictly true. Like the watchdogs Aristotle portrays, Diogenes barked at
everyone, at friend and foe alike. This unlovely trait is taken up by Shakespeare in his
comic portrayal of the Cynic philosopher Apemantus, in the late, unfinished play Timon
ofAthens; and the same crabbiness probably accounts for the way we use the word
"cynic" in ordinary language today. In his comment about himself as a dog that no one
cares to go hunting with, Diogenes acknowledges the ambivalence of people's responses
to him. It is a similar ambivalence to what we have seen expressed in the received
tradition about dogs: In his high-spirited attack on vice, Diogenes could have represented
a threat to the city, like Socrates, ifhe had not made himself into a figure of fun. It was
only centuries later that he was mythologized and given a heroic stature.
When in a moment of idle curiosity I embarked upon this investigation, I still
harbored, as I now realize, a number of sentimental notions about dogs. I might well
have agreed with Sir Walter Scott that "the Almighty, who gave the dog to be companion
of our pleasures and our toils, hath invested him with a nature noble and incapable of
deceit." Or to put it in the less sloppy phrasing of Mark Twain, "If you pick up a starving
�23
dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference
between a dog and a man." But the bracing air ofHellas is a good antidote to
sentimentality: In different ways, a number of the Greek authors we have surveyed seem
to question the view of Scott and Twain. Is it that the dog is too stupid to be treacherous
or deceitful? Is our capacity for deceit and disguise inseparable from our godlike use of
reason? Or is the premise invalid-Will the dog turn on us, lose his patina of passive
domestication and revert to a wild beast, biting the hand that feeds him? And if he cannot
be made safe for the city, by discipline and education, are we sure that we can?
Resemblances are slippery things, but this is the question that has dogged us all night.
There must have been some dog in the monster Typhon, since he was the father of
Cerberus. So it is fitting that in the Phaedrus Socrates dismisses mythography, saying
I let these matters go, believing the customary things
about them, as I said. I examine not these things but
myself, asking whether I am a more complicated and
ravenous beast than Typhon, or a gentler and simpler
animal who has been allotted a nature that is humble
and godly.
(230Al-7)
********
�
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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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The Greeks and Their Dogs
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Typescript of a lecture delivered on July 17, 2002 by Jonathan Tuck as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series. <br /><br />Mr. Tuck is a tutor emeritus at St. John's College, Annapolis. His talk is on the Ancient Greek view of dogs through their literature. He surveys Greek works from the <em>Illiad</em> and the <em>Odyssey</em> down to Plato to attempt to uncover the place of the dog in Ancient Greek thought and literature.
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Tuck, Jonathan
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Annapolis, MD
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2002-07-17
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St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online.
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text
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pdf
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English
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lec Tuck 2002-07-17
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Greek literature
Epic poetry, Greek
Homer
Dogs in literature
Summer lecture series
Tutors
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Text
Joe Sachs, draft of introduction to his translation of Aristotle's Physics
Delivered as a lecture for the Graduate Institute, August 6, 1983
1
INfRODUCTION
Philosophic writing
The activity known as philosophy did not originate among the ancient
Greeks. It is a permanent human possibility, that must have arisen in all
places and times when anyone paused in the business of life to wonder
about the way things are. But it was among the Greeks that it was named
and described, and began to be reflected in written texts. It was two
thinkers who wrote during the fourth centucy B.C., Plato and Aristotle, who
showed the world for all time the clearest examples of philosophic
thinking.
Plato's dialogues display the inescapable beginnings of
philosophy in all questions that touch on how a human being should
live~
and show that such questions must open up for examination all the
comfortable assumptions we make about the world. Aristotle's writings
trace an immense labor of the intellect, striving to push the power of
thinking to its limits.
Reading Aristotle, to be sure, is not at all like reading Plato. The
dialogues are beautiful in style, sensitive in the depiction of living and
breathing people, and altogether polished works meant for the widest
public. The writings of Aristotle that we possess as wholes are school texts
that, with the possible exception of the Nicomachean Ethics, were never
meant for publication. The title that we have with the Physics describes it
as a "course of listening." The likeliest conjecture is that these works
_-. . originated as oral discourses by Aristotle, written down by students,
.
corrected by Aristotle, and eventually assembled into longer connected
. arguments.
They presuppose acquaintance with arguments that are
referred to without being made (such as the "third
m~"),
and with
�2
examples that are never spelled out (such as the incommensurability of
.•
i"
the diagonal). They 'are demanding texts to follow, and are less interested
in beauty of composition than in exactness of statement. But in the most
important respect, the writings of Plato and Aristotle are more like each
other than either is like anything else. Both authors knew how to breathe
philosophic life into dead words on a page.
In Plato's dialogues, it is the figure of Socrates, always questioning,
always disclaiming knowledge, always pointing to what is not yet
understood, who keeps the tension of live thinking present. Despite the
efforts of misguided commentators, one need only read any dialogue to see
that there is no dogma there to be carried off, but only work to be done,
work of thinking into which Plato draws us. It may appear that Aristotle
rejects this Platonic path, giving his thought the closure of answers and
doctrine, turning philosophy into "science,"
but this is a distortion
produced by transmission through a long tradition and by bad translations.
The tradition speaks of physics, metaphysics, ethics, and so on as sciences
in the sense of conclusions deduced from first principles, but the books
written by Aristotle that bear those names contain no such "sciences."
What they all contain is dialectical reasoning, argument that does not start
with the highest knowledge in hand, but goes in quest 'of it, beginning with
whatever opinions seem worth examining. Exactly like Plato's dialogues,
Aristotle's writings lead the reader on from untested opinions toward more
reliable ones. Unlike the author of the dialogues, Aristotle records his best
~·, efforts to get beyond trial
and error to trustworthy ·conclusions. What
keeps those conclusions from becoming items of dogma? The available
translations hide the fact, but Aristotle devises a philosophic vocabulary
that is incapable of dogmatic ·use.
�3
This claim will come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the lore of
substances and accidents, categories, essences, per se individuals, and so
forth, but if Aristotle were somehow to reappear among us he would be
even more surprised to find such a thicket of impenetrable verbiage
attributed to him. Aristotle made his students work hard, but he gave
them materials they could work with, words and phrases taken from the
simplest contents of everyday speech, the kind of language that is richest
in meaning and most firmly embedded in experience and imagination. The
only trouble with ordinary speech, for the purposes of philosophy, is that it
carries too much meaning; we are so accustomed to its use that it
automatically carries along all sorts of assumptions about things, that we
make without being aware of them. Aristotle's genius consists in putting
together the most ordinary words in unaccustomed combinations. Since
the combinations are jarring, our thinking always has to be at work, right
now, afresh as we are reading, but since the words combined are so readily
understood by everyone, our thinking always has something to work with.
The meanings of the words in Aristotle's philosophic vocabulary are so
straightforward and inescapable that two results are assured: we will be
thinking about something, and not stringing together empty formulas, and
we will be reliably in communication with Aristotle; ·thinking about the
· very things he intended.
. We need to illustrate both the sort of thing that Aristotle wrote, and the
way the translations we have destroy its effect.
Consider the word
essence. This is an English word, and we all know more or less how to use
it. Perfumes have essences, beef stock can be boiled down to its essence,
and the most important part of anything can be called its essenceo It
seems to have some connection with necessity, since we occasionally
�4
dismiss something as not essential. By the testimony of usage, that is
about it. Essence is a relatively vague English word. If we know Latin, the
word begins to have some resonance, but none of the:it has crossed over
into English. So what do we do when we find a translation of Aristotle full
of the word essence?
We have to turn to expert help.
Ordinary
dictionaries will probably not be sufficient, but we will need philosophic
dictionaries, commentaries on Aristotle, textbooks on philosophy, or
trained lecturers who possess the appropriate degrees. In short, we need
to be initiated into a special dub; it may make us feel superior to the
ordinary run of human beings, and it will at least make us think that
philosophy is not for people in general, but only for specialists. Medical
doctors, for example, seek just those effects for their area of expert
knowledge by never using an ordinary, understandable name for anything,
but only a Latin derivative with many syllables. But did Aristotle want
such a result? If not, writing in such a style can hardly be presented as a
translation of Aristotle.
What did Aristotle write where the translators put the word essence?
In some places he wrote "the what" something is, or "the being" of it. In
most places he wrote "what something keeps on being in order to be at all,"
or "what it is for something to be." These phrases brlng us to a stop, not
because we cannot attach meaning to them, but because it takes some
·work to get hold of what they mean. Since Aristotle chose to write that
way, is it not reasonable to assume that he wanted us to do just that?
When the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins writes the line "Though worlds of
· · wanwood leafmeal lie," everything in his words is readily accessible,
though the pieces are combined in unusual ways. We recognize this sort of
word-play as a standard device of poetry, that works on .us through the
�5
ear, the visual imagination, and our feelings.
The poet makes us
experience a fresh act of imagining and feeling, at his direction. (Think of
all that would be lost if he had written "Notwithstanding the fact that an
immeasurable acreage of deciduous forest manifests the state of affairs
characteristic of its incipiently dormant condition.") Aristotle's phrases in
the present example do something that is exactly analogous to the poet's
word-play, but is directed only at the intellect and understanding. Other
words and phrases of his do carry imaginative content, but subordinated to
the intellect and understanding. Aristotle is not a poet, but a philosophic
writer, one who, like a poet, loosened and recombined the most vivid parts
· · of ordinary speech to make the reader ·see and think afresh.
Many
philosophers have written books, but few have worked as carefully and
deliberately to make the word be suited to the philosophic deed
Tra.nslati.on and tradition
A long stretch of centuries stands between Aristotle and us. The usual
translations of his writings stand as the end-product of all the history that
befell them in those centuries. For about five centuries up to 1600 they
were the source of the dominant teachings of the European universities; for
about four centuries since then they have been reviled as the source of a
rigid and empty dogmatism that stifled any genuine pursuit of knowledge.
One has to be very learned indeed to uncover all that history, but
fortunately for those of us who are interested only in understanding the
writings themselves, no such historical background is of any use. In fact it
takes us far away from anything Aristotle wrote or meant.
By chance1
when Aristotle's books dominated the centers of European learning, the
common language of higher learning was Latin. When in tum later
�6
thinkers rebelled against the tyranny of the established schools, it was a
Latinized version of Aristotle that they attacked. They wrote in the
various modern European languages, but the words and phrases of
Aristotle that they argued with and about came into those languages with
the smallest possible departures from the Latin.
Thomas Hobbes, for example, writing in 1651 (in the next to last
chapter of the last part of Leviathan), makes a common complaint in a
memorable way: "I beleeve that scarce any thing can be more absurdly
said in naturall Philosophy, than that which is now called Aristoteles
Metaphysiques...An.d since the Authority of Aristotle is onely current [in
the universities], that study is not properly Philosophy, (the nature
whereof dependeth not on Authors,) but Aristotelity...To know now upon
what grounds they say there be Essences Abstract, or Substantial] Formes,
wee are to consider what those words do properly signifie...But what then
would become of these Terms, of Entity, Essence, Essential], Essentiality,
that. ..are... no Names of Things... [T]his doctrine of Separated Essences, built
on the Vain Philosophy of Aristotle, would fright [men] ...with empty names
as men fright Birds from the Corn with an empty doublet, a hat, and a
crooked stick."
The usual translations of Aristotle are concerned most of all with
preserving a continuity of tradition back though these early modem critics
of Aristotle. Richard McKean, in a note to a philosophic glossary, defends
this practice: "The tendency recently in translations from greek and latin
philosophers, has been to seek out anglo-saxon terms, and to avoid latin
derivatives. Words as clear and as definitely fixed in a long tradition of
usage as privation, accident, and even substance, have been replaced by
barbarous compound terms, which awaken no echo in the mind of one
�7
familiar with the tradition, and afford no entrance into the tradition to one
unfamiliar with it. In the translations above an attempt has been made to
return to the terminology of the... english philosophers of the seventeenth
century. Most of the latin derivatives which are used...have justification in
the works of Hobbes, Kenelm Digby, Cudworth, Culveiwell, even Bacon, and
scores of writers contemporary with them... ff]he mass of commentary on
Aristotle will be rendered more difficult, if not impossible, of
understanding if the terms of the discussion are changed arbitrarily after
two thousand years." (Selections from Medieval Philosophers, Vol. II, pp.
422-3., Scribner's, 1930)
The tendency deplored by McKeon has not made its way into any
translations of the writings of Aristotle known to this writer. There was
some hope of it when Hippocrates Apostle announced a new series of
translations, and included the following among its principles: "The terms
should be familiar, that is, commonly used and with their usual meanings.
If such terms are available, the use of strange terms, whether in English or
in some other language, adds nothing scientific to the translation but
unnecessarily strains the reader's thought and often clouds or misleads it."
(Aristotle's Metaphysics, p. x, Indiana U.P., 1966) This is a sentiment
worth endorsing, but Apostle respects it only to the minor extent of
avoiding such pretentious phrases as ceteris paribus (Latin for "other
things being equal"), and nothing in his translations would disturb McKeon.
But if Apostle's general claim is correct, and if in addition Aristotle never
used technical jargon in his own language, then surely to use such language
to translate him is to confuse Aristotle's writings with a tradition that
adapted them to purposes that were not his. And if that Latin tradition
distorted Aristotle's meaning and was untrue to his philosophic spirit, until
�8
all that remained was the straw man so easily ridiculed by Hobbes and
every other lively thinker of his time, then to insist on keeping Aristotle
within the confines of that caricature is perverse.
It is never possible to translate anything from one language to another
with complete accuracy, and it is especially difficult to translate an author
who takes liberties with common usage in his own language. But in this
case there is one simple rule that is easy to follow and always tends in a
good direction, and that is to avoid all the conventional technical words
that have been routinely used for Aristotle's central vocabulary. In fact,
virtually all those words are poor translations of the Greek they mean to
stand for. The word privation, for instance, will not be found in this
translation for the simple reason that its meaning cannot be expected to be
known to all educated readers of English. The commentaries on Aristotle
use the word extensively, but if the Greek word it refers to has been
adequately translated in the first place, you will not need commentaries to
tell you what it means. Here that Greek word will be translated sometimes
as deprivation, sometimes as lack, according as one or the other fits more
comfortably into its context. What matters is not whether Latin or AngloSaxon derivatives are used, but whether an understandable English word
translates an understandable Greek one. Accident is a perfectly good
· English word, but not in the sense in which it appears in commentaries on
·Aristotle; the Greek word it replaces has a broad sense, that corresponds to
our word attribute, and a narrower one that can be conveyed by the
phrase "incidental attribute." In this case again, Latin derivatives are
available which cany clear and appropriate meanings in English, since one
does not need to know any Latin to ferret them out. It is true that adcadere has a sense that could have given rise to the meanings we attach to
�9
the words "incidental" and "attribute," but it did not in fact transmit that
meaning to its English derivatives. There is some pedantic pleasure in
pointing out those connections, but to use the word accident in that sense
is to write a forced Latin masquerading as English, guaranteed to confuse
the non-specialist reader, where Aristotle used the simplest possible
language in a way that keeps the focus off the words and on · the things
meant by them.
But to undo the mischief caused by McKeon's third example, substance,
stronger medicine is required. Joseph Owens records the way this word
became established in the tradition.
(The Doctrine of Being in the
Aristotelian 'Metaphysics', pp. 140-143, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval
Studies, 1951) It is a comedy of errors in which Christian scruples were
imposed upon a non-Biblical theology, and a disagreement with Aristotle
was read back into his words as a translation of them. This translator
ignores the contortions of the tradition and without apology uses the
barbarous Anglo-Saxon compound thinghood. This is a central notion in
the Metaphysics, and in all Aristotle's thought, though it occurs rarely in
the Physics, and the word "substance" does nothing but obscure its
meaning. Lively arguments about substance go on today in the secondary
literature, but a choice must be made, and the primary texts of Aristotle
are better, clearer, richer, deeper, easier to absorb, and more worth
pursuing than the commentaries on them. · As it stands in the usual
translations, the word "substance" is little more than an unknown x, for
which meaning has to be deduced by a kind of algebra, while Aristotle
shows (Metaphysics 1028b 2-7) that just asking what the thinghood of
things consists in, and what is responsible for it, unlocks the highest
inquiry of which philosophy is capable. For the promise of such a return, it
�10
is worth risking a little barbarity. The barbarism of a word like thinghood
is just the fact that it falls far outside common usage in our language, and
not in a direction that needs any historical or technical special knowledge
to capture it, but in one that invites the same flexibility that poets ask of
us. We cannot read such a barbarism in a passive way, but must take
responsibility for its meaning. This in itself, in moderation and in welljudged places, is something good, and is an imitation of what Aristotle does
with Greek.
It has already been remarked that the present translation does not
always use the same English word for the same Greek one. This is partly
because no English word ever has the same full range of meaning as any
Greek word, so that such a range has to be conveyed, or unwanted
connotations suppressed, by the use of a variety of near-synonyms. It is
partly because a Greek word may have two or more distinct uses that
differ by context; in this way, the word for thinghood will often be
translated as "an independent thing." It is also partly because Aristotle
always paid attention to the fact that important words are meant in more
than one way. For him this was not a fault of language, but one of the
ways in which it is truthful. A word often has a primary meaning and a
variety of derivative ones, as a reflection of causal reiatlons in the world.
A diet can be healthy only because, in a different and more governing
-sense, an animal can be healthy, and there can be a medical knife only
because there is a medical skill. This array of difference within sameness
usUally cannot be lifted over from Greek to English, and has to be gotten at
indirectly. In the Physics, every kind of change is spoken of as a motion,
though the word for motion is gradually and successively limited until it
refers strictly only to change of place. This progression determines the
�11
main structure of the inquiry, but in English the path is not as clearly
indicated by transitions of meaning within a single word. And finally,
there are some words that have many translations that are equally good in
their different ways. In such cases, this translation rejoices in variety; this
again is an imitation of Aristotle's general practice. Where the traditional
translations are marked by rigid, formulaic repetitions, Aristotle loves to
combine overlapping meanings, or separate intertwined meanings, to point
to things the language has no precise word for. It is the living, naturat
flexible character of thinking that breathes through Aristotle's use of
language, and not the artificial, machine-like fixity one finds in the
translations.
This last point should not be taken as a promise of smooth English, but
just the reverse. Idiomatic expressions and familiar ways of putting words
together conceal unthinking assumptions of just the kind that philosophy
tries to get beyond. The reader will need a willingness to follow sentences
to places where meaning would be lost if it were forced into well-worn
grooves, and will need to follow trains of thought that would not be the
same if they did not preserve Aristotle's own ways of connecting them. As
far as possible, this translation follows the syntax of Aristotle's text.
Montgomery Furth has followed this same procedure in a translation of
part of the Metaphysics, and apologizes for the result as neither English
nor
Gree~
but Eek. (Aristotle, Metaphysics, Books Vll-X, p. vi, Hackett,
1985} Furth does this because of an interest in following Aristotle's logic
faithfully, but he retains all the usual Latinized vocabulary of Ross's Oxford
translation, so that the resulting language might better be called Leek. The
present translation goes farther, in vocabulary and syntax both, beyond
the Latin and toward the Greek, and could be called Gringlish, but for this
�12
as well it comes before you without apology.
Furth violates English
sensibilities for the special purposes of graduate students and professional
scholars; this translation violates them for the common human purposes of
joining Aristotle in thinking that breaks through the habitual and into the
philosophic.
A philosophic physics?
Now it may seem odd to combine philosophic aims with the topic of
physics. It may seem that Aristotle had to speculate philosophically about
the natural world because he did not have the benefit of the secure
knowledge we have about it. In the current secondary literature, one sees
at least some scholars who think they might learn something about
thinking from De Anima, or about being from the Metaphysics, but articles
on the Physics seem at most to pat Aristotle on the head for having come
to some conclusion not utterly in conflict with present-day doctrines. This
kind of smugness is a predictable result of the way the sciences have been
taught to us. Conjectures and assumptions, because they have been part of
authoritative opinion for a few centuries, are presented to us as stories, or
as facts, without recourse to evidence or argument. Particular doctrines,
even when they stand on theoretical structures as complex and fragile as a
house of cards, or even when they presuppose a picture of things that is
flatly in contradiction with itself, tend to be prefaced with the words "we
know... " All the rhetoric that surrounds the physics of our time tells us
. that philosophic inquiry need not enter its territory, that here the
philosophizing is over and done, the best minds agree about everything,
and non-experts couldn't hope to understand enough to assess the
evidence in any case. Strangely, the physics of the twentieth century is
�13
surrounded by the same air of dogmatic authority as was the schoolAristotelianism of the sixteenth century.
But there are two kinds of support for the present-day physics that
seem to lift it above dogmatism. One is a long history of experiment and
successful technology, and the other is the greatest possible reliance on
mathematics. These are both authorities that cannot be swayed by human
preferences, and cannot lie.
Their testimony can, however, be
misunderstood, and can be incorporated into a picture of the world that
fails in other ways. But even if the current physics contains nothing
untrue, one might wish to understand it down to its roots, to unearth the
fundamental daims about things on which it rests, which have been lost
sight of in the onrush of theoretical and practical progress. To do this one
has to stand back from it, to see its founding claims as alternatives to other
ways of looking at the world, chosen for reasons. The earliest advocates of
the "new physics" did just that, and the alternatives they rejected all stem
from Aristotle's Physics. Martin Heidegger has said that "Aristotle's
Physics is the hidden, and therefore never adequately studied,
foundational book of Western philosophy." ("On the Being and Conception
of ct>U:U: in Aristotle's Physics B, 1," in Man and World, IX, 3, 1976, p. 224)
The physics of our time is inescapably philosophic, ifonly in the original
choices, preserved in it, to follow certain paths of thought to the exclusion
of others. To see that physics adequately and whole, we too need to be
philosophic, to lift our gaze to a level at which it can be seen to be one
possibility among many. Only then is it possible to decide rationally and
responsibly to adopt its opinions as our own.
But there is a second respect in which twentieth-century physics has
opened its doors to philosophy, and will not be able to close them. The
�14
physics that came of age in the seventeenth century, and seemed to have
answered all the large questions by the nineteenth, is limping toward the
end of the twentieth century in some confusion.
Mathematics and
technology have coped with all the crises of this century, but the picture of
the world that underlay them has fallen apart. It was demonstrated
conclusively that light is a wave, except when it shines on anything; then it
arrives as particles. It is shown with equal certainty that the electron is a
particle, except when it bounces off a crystal surface; then it must be a
wave, interacting with the surface everywhere at once. Just when atomic
physics seemed ready to uncover the details of the truth underlying all
appearances, it began to undercut all its own assumptions. A wavemechanics that held out an initial promise of reducing all appearances of
particles to the behavior of waves failed to do so, and degenerated into a
computational device for predicting probabilities. The most far-seeing
physicists of the century have shown that particles and waves are equally
necessary, mutually incompatible aspects of every atomic event, and that
physics, at what was supposed to be the ultimate explanatory level, must
abandon its claim to objectivity. The physicist is always describing, in
part, his own decisions to interfere with things in one way rather than
another; this brings along, as a causally necessary conclusion, the collapse
of the belief in causal determinism. When Hobbes laughed at Aristotle, he
.was certain that he knew what a body is. Today all bets are off.
But some physicists have been unwilling to give up their dogmatic
habits without a fight. Even Einstein, after he had taught the world to give
up the rigid Newtonian ideas of time, space, and mass, was unable to
suspend his unquestioned assumption that bodies have sharply defined
places, and cannot interact except by contact or by radiation. Niels Bohr
�15
and Werner Heisenberg had announced the most radical of revolutions,
requiring physicists to ask what knowledge is, and no longer to answer by
pointing to what they do. Einstein, in a famous 1935 collaboration ("Can
Quantum-Mechanical Description of Reality be Considered Complete?",
Physical Review 47), tried to hold off this final revolution, saying in effect
"I know enough about the fundamental structure of the world to be certain
that some things cannot happen." Experiments have revealed that those
very things do happen, that the state of one particle is provably dependent
on whether a measurement is performed on a distant second particle, from
which no signal could have radiated. But a new and opposite tactic permits
some physicists to embrace this or any other seeming impossibility
without admitting the need for any philosophic re-thinking of the way
things are. Listen to these words of Richard Feynman: "We always have
had a great deal of difficulty in understanding the world view that
quantum physics represents. At least I do, because I'm an old enough man
that I haven't got to the point that this stuff is obvious to me...you know
how it always is, every new idea, it takes a generation or two until it
becomes obvious that there's no real problem." (quoted by N. David
Mermin in The Great Ideas Today, 1988, p. 52) So if the discoveries of
quantum physics make you feel an urgent need· to re-examine the
presuppositions of physics, just repress that feeling for a generation or
two, and it will go away.
Perhaps more than any other reason for resisting opening physics to
philosophic examination, there is the plain fact that there is no need for it
to do anything differently.
Whatever happens can be described
mathematically, and new discoveries are readily incorporated into some
mathematical scheme, and then predicted. Technology aQ.vances no less
�16
rapidly in areas in which the explanatory ground has been cut from under
our feet, than in those in which its workings are intelligible. But the new
physics arose out of a desire to know, and has undeniably become a highly
questionable kind of knowing. Indeed, the very fact that its picture of the
world can collapse while leaving its mathematical description and practical
applications intact is a powerful stimulus to wonder. While wishing
physics well in all its dealings, some of us may simply want to understand
what it is and what it isn't. But we cannot see how its various strands
have separated without understanding what it was to begin with, so again
we are thrown back to the choices by which it came into being, and thus in
turn to the picture of the world that it rejected. From this standpoint,
though, that is more than a quest to uncover something past and
superseded.
It entails the risk of being convinced that the original
decisions of the seventeenth century physicists were not all worthy of our
own acceptance. It is possible that parts of Aristotle's understanding of
the world might serve to heal our own dilemmas and confusions.
The things that are
Where should an understanding of the things around us begin? It
might seem that there are plain facts that could serve as uncontroversial
starting points. What are some of the plainest ones? The stars circle us at
night, the sun by day. Rocks fall to earth, but flames leap toward the sky.
Bodies that are thrown or pushed slow down continually until they stop
moving. Animals and plants belong to distinct kinds, which they preserve
from generation to generation. The visible whole is a sphere, with the
earth motionless at its center. These are facts of experience, so obvious
that the only way to be unaware of them is by not paying attention. If you
�17
disbelieve any of them it is not because of observation, but because you
were persuaded not to trust your senses. No physics begins by looking at
the things it studies; those things must always be assigned to some larger
context in which they can be interpreted. Aristotle states this in the first
sentence of his Physics by saying that we do not know anything until we
know its causes. Nothing stands on its own, without connections, and no
event happens in isolation; there must be some comprehensive order of
things in which things are what they are and do what they do. Physics
seeks to understand only a part of this whole, but it cannot begin to do so
without some picture of the whole.
But it has been noted earlier that none of Aristotle's inquiries begins
with the knowledge that most governs the things it studies. We never
start where the truth of things starts, but must find our way there. That
means that we cannot dispense with some preliminary picture of things,
though we must be ready to modify it as the inquiry proceeds. What is
Aristotle's preliminary picture of the whole of things? It is one that
permits the plainest facts of experience to be just the way they appear to
us. We live at the center of a spherical cosmos as one species of living
thing among many, in a world in which some motions are natural and some
forced, but all require causes actively at work, and cease when those
causes cease to act. The natural motions are those by which animals and
. plants live and renew their kinds, the stars circle in unchanging orbits, and
the parts of the cosmos-earth, water, air, and fire-are transformed into
one another by heat and cold, move to their proper places up or down, and
maintain an ever-renewing equilibrium. This picture is confirmed and
fleshed out by Aristotle's inquiries in writings other than the Physics, but
since Aristotle never writes "scientifically," that is deductively, there is no
�18
necessary or right order in which they should be read. All those inquiries
stand in a mutual relation of enriching and casting light upon one another,
and the Physics is in an especially close relation with the Metaphysics.
It is not only a picture of the whole that is assumed in the Physics, but
also a comprehensive understanding of the way things are.
In the
Metaphysics, this latter is not assumed but arrived at by argument,
through the sustained pursuit of the question, what is being? Since being
is meant in many ways, Aristotle looks for the primary sense of it, being as
such or in its own right, on which the other kinds of being are dependent.
That primary sense of being is first identified as thinghood, then
discovered to be the sort of being that belongs only to animals, plants, and
the cosmos as a whole. For these pre-eminent beings, being is being-atwork, since each of them is a whole that maintains itself by its own
activity. For any other sort of being, what it is for it to be is not only
something less than that, but it is in every case dependent on and derived
from those highest beings, as a quality, quantity, or action of one, a relation
between two or more, a chance product of the interaction between two or
more, or an artificial product deliberately made from materials borrowed
from one or more of them. Life is not a strange by-product of things, but
the source of things, and the non-living side of nature has being in a way
strictly analogous to life: as an organized whole that maintains itself by
continual activity. In the central books of the Metaphysics, Aristotle
captures the heart of the meaning of being in a cluster of words and
phrases that are the most powerlul expressions of his thinking. · In the
usual translations-substance, essence, actuality, and actuality again-they
not only fall flat but miss the central point: that the thinghood of a thing is
�19
what it keeps on being in order to be at all, and must be a being-at-work
so that it may achieve and sustain its being-at-work-staying-itself.
Now the physics of our time adopts an understanding of being that is
exactly opposite to that of Aristotle, in the principle of inertia. The
primary beings are what they are passively, by being hard enough to
resist all change, and do nothing but bump and move off blindly in straight
lines. The picture of the world assumed by this physics is of atoms in a
void, so there can be no cosmos, but only infinite emptiness, no life, but
only accidental rearrangements of matter, and no activity at all, except for
motion in space. This is ancient idea, that goes back long before Aristotle's
time. Lucretius finds it appealing, as a doctrine that teaches us that, while
there is little to hope for in life except freedom from pain, there is little to
fear either, since a soul made of atoms will dissolve, but cannot suffer
eternal torment. There are reasons of two other kinds that make this
picture of things attractive to the new physics.
First, it makes it
unnecessary to look for causes. Just because everything is taken to be
reducible to atoms and the void, every possible event is pre-explained.
Mechanical necessity takes over as the only explanation of anything, so the
labor of explanation is finished at one stroke. And second, this picture
makes every attribute that belongs to anything, and every event that can
happen, entirely describable by mathematics. The glory of the new
physics is the power it gains from mathematics. The world that is present
to the senses is set aside as "secondary," and the mathematical imagination
takes over as our way of access to the true world behind the appearances.
The only experience that is allowed to count is the controlled experiment1
designed in the imagination, with a limited array of possible outcomes that
are all interpreted in advance.
�20
From its beginnings, mathematical physics moves from success to
success, but almost from the beginning its mechanistic picture of things
fails. Newton begins his Principia with the assumption that all bodies are
inert, but in the course of it shows that every body is the seat of a
mysterious power of attraction. Is this simply a new discovery to be
added to our picture of the world? Shall we say that there are atoms, void,
and a force of gravitation? But the whole purpose of the new worldpicture was to avoid occult qualities. And where do we put this strange
force of attraction? There is no intelligible way that inert matter can be
conceived as causing an urge in some distant body. Shall we say that the
force resides in a field? A field of what? The Principia shows that the
spaces through which the planets move are void of matter. How can a
point in empty nothing be the bearer of a quantity of energy? This new
discovery can be described mathematically, but it does not fit into the
world-picture that led to it, and cannot be understood as something added
to it. Something similar happens with light, which is discovered by
Maxwell to be describable as an electromagnetic wave. But a wave is a
material conception: a disturbance in a string, or a body of water, or some
such carrier, moves from one place to another while the parts of the body
stay where they were. So when it is shown that a iight-bearing aether
would need to have contradictory properties, electromagnetic radiation is
left as a well-described wave motion taking place in nothing whatever.
In the twentieth century, the mechanist picture underlying
mathematical physics has broken down even more radically, in ways that
have been mentioned above. Popularizations of physics usually tell us that
the ideas of Newton and Maxwell failed when they were applied on an
astronomic or atomic scale, but remain perfectly good approximations to
�21
the phenomena of the middle-sized world. But in what sized world can
matter be inert and not inert, and space empty and not empty? And the
middle-sized world is characterized more than anything else by the
presence of living things, which the atoms-and-void picture never had any
hope of explaining, but only of explaining away. Shall we at least say,
though, that we have learned that the world is not a cosmos? Let us listen
to David Bohm: "The theory of relativity was the first significant indication
in physics of the need to question the mechanist order... [I]t implied that no
coherent concept of an independently existent particle is possible...The
quantum theory presents, however, a much more serious challenge to this
mechanist order... so that the entire universe has to be thought of as an
unbroken whole. In this whole, each element that we can abstract in
thought shows basic properties (wave or particle, etc.) that depend on its
overall environment, in a way that is much more reminiscent of how the
organs constituting living beings are related, than it is of how parts of a
machine interact... [T]he basic concepts of relativity and quantum theory
directly contradict each other... [W]hat they have basically in common...is
undivided wholeness. Though each comes to such wholeness in a different
way, it is clear that it is this to which they are both fundamentally
pointing." (Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Ark, 1983, pp. 173-6)
According to Bohm, it is only prejudice and habit that keep the evidence
of the wholeness of things from being taken seriously. The contrary view
is not just an opinion, but one of those fundamental ways of looking,
thinking, and interpreting that permit us to have opinions at all, and to
decide what is and what isn't a fact. To abandon the ground beneath our
feet feels like violence, especially when no new authority is at hand to
assure us that there is somewhere else for us to land We
t~nd
to prefer to
�22
live with unreconciled dualities. Descartes notoriously makes the relation
of mind and body a "problem." Newton speaks in his General Scholium as
though gravitation were incapable of explanation by physics, a
supernatural element in the world. Leibniz speaks of two kingdoms, one of
souls and one of bodies, as harmoniously superimposed (as in Monadology
79). Kant tells us that we are free, except insofar as our actions are part of
the empirical world.
We sometimes speak of biology as something
unconnected with physics, as though what is at work in a tree or a cat is
not nature in its most proper sense. We have had the habit so long that we
consider it natural to regard ourselves, with our feeling, perception, and
understanding, as an inexplicable eruption out of a nature that has nothing
in common with us. Might it be possible to find a more coherent way to
put together our experience? Perhaps it would be worthwhile to suspend,
at least for a while, our notions of what can be and what it is for something
to be, to try out some other way of looking.
A non-mathematical physics
The world as envisioned in Aristotle's Physics is more diverse than the ·
world described by mathematical physics, and we must accustom
ourselves to a correspondingly richer vocabulary iil order to read it.
Motion means one thing to us, but irreducibly many kinds of thing when
Aristotle speaks of it, and the same is true of cause. We tend to use nature
as an umbrella-word, a collective name for the sum of things, while
Aristotle means it to apply to whatever governs the distinct pattern of
activity of each kind of being. It would be possible to use different English
words for these three ideas, to bring out what is distinctive in Aristotle's
meanings, but here it seems best to keep the familiar words.and push their
�23
limits beyond their prevalent current meanings. Nature, cause, and motion
are the central topics of the Physics, and come to sight first as questions; it
is important to see that Aristotle and the later mathematical physicists
were ultimately asking about the same things. Nature is mathematized not
as an interesting game, or to abandon a harder task in favor of an easier
one, but in order that the truth of it may be found.
In the Assayer, Galileo makes the famous claim that "this grand book,
the universe, .. .is written in the language of mathematics." Later in the
same book, in a discussion of heat, he explains why. "I suspect that people
in general have a concept of this which is very remote from the truth. For
they believe that heat is a real phenomenon, or property, or quality, which
actually resides in the material by which we feel ourselves warmed
...Without the senses as our guides, reason or imagination unaided would
probably never arrive at qualities like these. Hence I think that tastes,
odors, colors, and so on are no more than mere names so far as the object
in which we place them is concerned, and that they reside only in the
consciousness.
Hence if the living creature were removed, all these
qualities would be wiped away and annihilated."
But shapes, sizes,
positions, numbers, and such things are not mere names, imposed on
objects by the consciousness of the living creature, because "from these
conditions, I cannot separate [a material or corporeal] substance by any
stretch of my imagination." (Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, Anchor,
1957, pp. 237-8, 274) The direct experience of the world has the taint of
· subjectivity, but the mathematical imagination captures the object just as
it is. Sadder but wiser physicists would no longer try to read themselves
out of physics; they too are living creatures, interpreting the experience of
a consciousness, with all the risk and uncertainty that accompanies such an
�24
activity. But our use of language may betray our second thoughts, and pull
us back to Galileo's point of view.
What is motion? Do you think of something like a geometrical point
changing position? What about a child moving into adolescence? Warmth
moving into your limbs? Blossoms moving out of the buds on a tree? A
ripening tomato, moving to a dark red? Are these other examples motions
in only a metaphorical sense, while the first is correctly so called? Are the
other examples really nothing but complex instances of the first, with
small-scale changes of position adding up to large-scale illusions of
qualitative change? For Aristotle, the differences among the kinds of
motion determine the over-all structure of the Physics, but they first of all
belong together as one kind of experience.
The kinds of becoming
correspond to the ways being belongs to anything, and being-somewhere is
only one aspect of being. A thing can also be of a certain size, or of a
certain sort or quality, and can undergo motion in these respects by
coming to be of another size, or of a different quality, by some gradual
transition. It can even undergo a motion with respect to its thinghood.
One thinks first of birth and death, but eating displays the same kind of
motion. A cow chomps grass, and it is no longer pa.rt of the life of a plant,
and soon it is assimilated into the body of the cow. This is no mere change
of quality, since no whole being persists through it to have first one, then
some other quality belonging to it. Something persists, but first in one,
then in another, kind of thinghood.
In any encounter with the natural world, it is the kinds of change other
than change of place that are most prominent and most productive of
wonder. Mathematical physics must erase them all, and attempt to argue
that they were never anything but deceptive appearances of something
�25
else, changing in some other way. Why? Because those merely local
changes of merely inert bodies can be described mathematically. But if the
testimony of the senses has a claim to "objectivity," and to be taken
seriously, that is at least equal to that of the mathematical imagination,
then there is no necessity of such a reduction. And in fact the reduction of
kinds of motion that is required is not just from four to one, but to less
than one. Aristotle has considerable interest in change of place, but such a
thing is possible only if there are places. Motion as mathematically
conceived happens in space, and in space there are no places. Underneath
the idea of motion that is prevalent today lurks this other idea,
unexamined and taken on faith, that there is such a thing as space.
Aristotle twice makes the argument that space, or empty extension, is
an idea that results only from the mis-use of mathematics. It is the exact
counter-argument to Galileo's claim that ordinary people project their nonmathematical ideas onto the world. Aristotle says that the mathematician
separates in thought the extension that belongs to extended bodies. (This
is sometimes called "abstraction," but the word Aristotle uses is the
ordinary word for subtraction.)
There is nothing wrong with this
falsification of things, which makes it easier to study what has been
isolated artificially, so long as one does not forget that the original
falsification took place. But some people do just that, and read this
extension, which they have subtracted from bodies, back into the world as
though it were empty and somehow existed on its own, prior to bodies.
Now, in the imagination, it is possible
~o
examine this "space" and
determine all sorts of things about it. It is of infinite extent, for example,
and since it is entirely empty, no part of it can have any characteristic by
which it could differ from any other part. If our impulse,. when thinking
�26
about motion, is automatically to give it a mathematical image, that is
because we have pre-supposed that the ultimate structure of the world is
space. But this supposition is laden with consequences and ought not to be
adopted blindly. Aristotle says that one of the reasons physics cannot be
mathematical is that the mathematician abolishes motion. Physics is the
study of beings that move, and motion is a rich and complex topic, but
within the constraints of "space" every form of motion disappears, except
for one which is diminished out of recognition. If it is in space that our
examination begins, nature will be nowhere to be found (but will survive
as a mere name) because space is, from the beginning, a de-natured realm.
Conversely, without the imposition of the idea of space, it is possible for
nature to be understood as part of the true constitution of things, because
motion in all its variety can be present. But since motion is not reduced to
the pre-explained realm of mathematics, it is necessary to understand
what it is. Aristotle says that, so long as we are ignorant of motion, we are
ignorant of nature as well. But how can one give a rational account of
motion? To assign it to some other genus would seem to make it a species
of non-motion. In fact, two of Aristotle's predecessors, Parmenides and
Zeno, had argued that motion is completely illusory. Parmenides argued
that any attempt to say that there is motion must
drum that what is-not
also is. And Zeno, in four famous paradoxes preserved by Aristotle, tried
to show that any description of motion involves self-contradiction of some
kind. It would seem that motion has to be accepted as a brute fact of
experience, from which explanations can begin, but which cannot itself be
explained But Aristotle, for the first and perhaps only time ever, did give
motion a place not only in the world but in a rational account of the world,
explaining it in terms of ideas that go deeper. The Parmenidean challenge
�27
is met by Aristotle primarily in the Metaphysics, where he shows that
being must be meant in more than one way. His response to Zeno's
challenge spreads over the whole of the Physics, and is concentrated in his
definition of motion.
Aristotle defines motion in terms of potency and being-at-work. In the
first book of the Physics there is a preliminary analysis of change that
discovers the ultimate explanatory notions available to the inquiry to be
form, material, and the deprivation of form. Material is described as that
which, by its own nature, inherently yearns for and stretches out toward
form. This should never be called matter, by which we mean something
that stands on its own with a determinate set of properties (has weight,
occupies space, preserves its state of motion in a straight line). What
Aristotle means by material, on the contrary, is (1) not inert, (2) not
necessarily tangible, (3) relative to its form, which may in tum be material
for some other form, (4) not possessed of any definite properties, and (S)
ultimately a purely "ideal" being, incapable of existing in separation, which
would be rejected by any "materialist." Form, in turn, does not mean
shape or arrangement, but some definite way of being-at-work. This is
evident in Book II of the Physics, and arrived at by argument principally
in VIII, 2 of the Metaphysics. Every being consists of material and form,
that is, of an inner striving spilling over into an outward activity. Potency
and being-at-work are the ways of being of material and form.
The usual translations render potency as potentiality, which might
suggest mere indeterminacy or logical possibility, which is never the sense
in which Aristotle uses it. What is worse, though, is the rendering of
being-at-work, and the stronger form of it used in the definition,
being-at~
work-staying-itself, as actuality. This has some reference, by way of Latin,
�28
to activity, but is a useless word that makes it completely impossible to get
anything resembling Aristotle's meaning out of the definition.
"The
actuality of the potentiality as a potentiality" becomes a seventeenthcentury joke, the ultimate example of the destruction of healthy common
sense by pretentious gobbledygook. Does it refer to the actuality that
belonged to the potential thing before it changed? That's not a motion, but
something that precedes one. Does it refer to the actuality that exactly
corresponds to the pre-existent potentiality? That's not a motion either,
but something left when the motion ends. Does it mean, though it would
have to be tortured to give this sense, the gradual transformation of a
potentiality into an actuality? That at least could refer to a motion, but
only by saying that a motion is a certain kind of motion. Perhaps it means
that motion is the actuality of a potentiality to be in motion. This is surely
the silliest version of them all, but respected scholars have defended it
with straight faces. An intelligent misinterpretation of the definition was
put forward by Thomas Aquinas, who took it to mean that the special
condition of a thing in motion is to be partly actual while partly potential,
and directed toward greater actuality of that same potentiality. But this
account would not distinguish motion from a state of balanced equilibrium,
such as that of a rock caught in a hand, still straining downward but
prevented from falling any further.
The account is subject to this
ambiguity because it focusses on an instantaneous condition, a snapshot of
a thing in motion, which is what an actuality is, but by no means what a
being-at-work is.
What Aristotle said was that motion is the being-at-work-staying-itself
of a potency, just as a potency. When an ongoing yearning and striving for
form is not inner and latent, but present in the world just as itself, as a
�29
yearning and striving, there is motion. That is because, when motion is
present, the potency of some material has the very same structure that
form has, forming the being as something holding-on in just that particular
motion. This does not mean that every motion is the unfolding of some
being into its mature form; every such unfolding can fall short, overshoot,
encounter some obstacle, or interact in some incidental way with some
other being. It does mean that no motion of any kind would take place if it
were not for those potencies that emerge of their own accord from beings.
Motion depends on the organization of beings into kinds, with inner
natures that are always straining to spill into activity. Only this dynamic
structure of being, with material straining toward form, and form staying
at work upon material, makes room for motion that is not just an
inexplicable departure from the way things are, but a necessary and
· intrinsic part of the way things are.
For example, consider the most uninteresting motion you can think of,
say the falling of a pencil from the edge of a desk onto the floor. What is
the potency that is at work, and to what being does it belong? The potency
is not that of being at that spot on the floor, and the being that has it is not
the pencil at all, since it is no genuine being. The potency at work here is
that of earth to be down, or of the cosmos to sustain itSelf with earth at the
center. No motive power belongs to the pencil as such, but it can move on
its own because there is present in it a potency of earth, set free to be at
work as itself when the obstacle of the desk is removed. And the motion is
not defined by the position or state in which it happens to end up, but by
the activity that governs its course; the former is an actuality, but is not a
being-at-work. Just as Newton's laws give a set of rules for analyzing any
motion, Aristotle's definition directs us in a different way to bring the
�30
structure of any motion into focus: first, find the being, and then find the
potency of it which the motion displays, or to which the particular motion
is incidental. No motion, however random or incidental, gains entrance
into the world except through the primary beings that constitute the
world.
Aristotle sometimes argues about a body A that moves from B to C. Our
first impulse may be to let A be represented by a point, the motion by a
line, and Band C by positions. But Aristotle always has in mind an A with
some nature, and a motion that may be from one condition to another
rather than one place to another. Even if a motion from place to place is in
question, those places would not be neutral and indifferent positions, but
regions of the cosmos, that might or might not be appropriate surroundings
for body A. The argument might be about something like continuity, so
general that the particular Band C need not be specified, but it makes all
the difference in the world that they represent motion in its fullest sense,
as spelled out in the definition. The mathematized sort of motion, that can
be fully depicted on a blackboard, is vulnerable to the kinds of attack
present in Zeno's paradoxes.
Motion as Aristotle understands it,
constituted by potency and being-at-work, deriving its wholeness and
.·
continuity from a deeper source, overcomes those paradoxes.
(The
particular arguments will be looked at in the commentaries on the text.)
It is evident from this account of motion that material and form are
understood as causes. The usual examples given for material and formal
causes, an inert lump of bronze and a static blueprint, miss the point, that
material meets form half-way, and form is always at work. And it is not
just motions that they cause, but everything that endures. We tend to
speak of causes as events that lead to other events, since that is the only
�31
kind of causality that remains possible in a mathematically-reduced world,
but Aristotle understands everything that is the case as resulting from
causes, and every origin of responsibility as a cause. Something called the
"efficient" cause has been grafted onto Aristotle's account; it means the
proximate cause of motion, like the bumping of billiard balls. This is
sometimes even used as a translation of one of Aristotle's four kinds of
cause, but not correctly. Aristotle speaks of the external source of motion
as one kind of cause, the flrst thing from which the motion proceeds. The
incidental and intermediate links, that merely pass motions around
without originating them, are not causes at all, except in a derivative sense.
All of Aristotle's causes stem from beings, and are found not by looking
backward in time, but upward in a chain of responsibility.
There is a fourth kind of cause, in most cases the most important one of
all, the final cause. This is often equated with purpose, but that is only one
kind of final cause, and not the most general. A deliberate action of an
intelligent being cannot be understood except in terms of its purpose, since
· only in achieving that purpose does the action become complete. The claim
that final causes belong to non-human nature becomes ludicrous if it is
thought that something must in some analogous way have purposes. What
Aristotle in fact means is that every natural being is··a whole, and every
natural activity leads to or sustains that wholeness. His phrase for this
kind of cause is "that for the sake of which" something does what it does or
is what it is. Does rain fall for the sake of the crops that humans grow?
No, but it does fall for the sake of the equilibrium of the cosmos, in which
evaporation is counter-balanced by precipitation in a cycle of
ever~
renewed wholeness. That wholeness provides a stable condition for the
flourishing of plants and of humans, in lives and acts that come to
�32
completion in their own ways. Aristotle's "teleology" is just his claim that
nothing in nature is a fragment or a chance accumulation of parts. To
grasp the final cause of anything is to see how it fits into the ultimate
structure of things. But surely there are fragmentary things and chance
combinations to be found around us. Aristotle finds it as strange that some
thinkers deny chance altogether, as it is that others think chance governs
everything. From Aristotle's standpoint, even chance always points back
to that which acts for the sake of something, since it results from the
interference of two or more such things. It therefore represents not an
absence of final causes, but an over-abundance of them, a failure of final
cause resulting from a conflict among final causes.
Because such incidental interactions lead to innumerable unpredictable
chance results, nature is not a realm of necessity, but neither is it a realm
of randomness, since the forms of natural beings govern all that happens.
Aristotle speaks of the patterns of nature as present not always but "for
the most part." His way of understanding the causes of things does not
need to do violence either to the stability or to the variability of the world,
but affirms the unfailing newness-within-sameness that we observe in the
return of the seasons and the generations of living things. It offers an
example of a physics that interprets causality without recourse to
mechanical necessity or mathematical law. Both the collision of billiard
balls and the co-variation of the two sides of an algebraic equation are too
random in their beginnings and too rigid in their consequences to . be
adequate images of the natures we know.
The shape of the inquiry
�33
It has been mentioned above that all Aristotle's inquiries are dialectical.
His writings have structures that are not rigid but organic, with parts that
are whole in themselves, but arranged so that they build up larger wholes.
In Book I of most of his works, he reviews what has been said by his
predecessors, and here that is combined with a preliminary analysis of
change, which concludes that it must always imply the presence of some
material that can possess. or be deprived of form. This first analysis of
everything changeable into form and material is then available as a
starting point to approach any later question. Next comes the heart of the
Physics, in Book II and the beginning of Book III, of which an account has
been given in the last section of this introduction. It begins with a
definition of nature that has all the characteristics Aristotle attributes in I,
1 to proper beginnings: it starts from what is familiar to us, is clear in its
reference but unclear in its meaning, and takes its topic as a whole and in
general, without separating out its parts or their particular instances.
Since it defines nature as an inner cause of motion, the first task is to
explore the meanings of cause and motion, not as words or logical classes,
but through disciplined reflection on our experience. The result is a
sharpened and deepened understanding of a way of encountering and
interpreting the world. This is a more sustained use of the kind of analysis
that took place in Book I, that dwells on a topic to unfold into clarity what
was already present in an implicit and confused way.
A second kind of analytic reasoning begins after motion has been
defined, a successive examination of conditions presupposed by the
presence of motion in the world. This occupies the rest of Books III and
IV. Zeno had taught everyone that motion presupposes infinity, and
Aristotle turns first to this.
He finds a non-contradictory way to
�34
understand the infinite divisibility of motion, but his conclusion that there
is no infinite extended body is incomplete as it stands. It depends upon
the claim that things have natural places, and so the topic of place must be
e.xplored next. Place is understood as a relation to the parts of the cosmos,
on
but this topic in turn dependsLthe next, since the exclusive array of places
in the world results from the impossibility of void. The e.xploration of the
idea of void completes this sequence, since the arguments against it stand
independently. But motion also entails time, to which Aristotle turns next,
finding that it is not in fact a presupposition but a consequence of motion.
Time is found to result from a comparison of motions to one another, that
can only be carried out by a perceiving soul. Like place, time is not a preexisting container, and not graspable by the mathematical imagination.
Each of them is an intimate relation amongs beings, intelligible only when
the particularlity of this world is taken into account.
The last four books of the Physics take up the kind of cause and the
kind of motion that are least central in Book II. The formal, material, and
final causes of a living thing are internal to it, and constitute its nature,
and it has parents that are external sources of its motions of birth,
development, and growth. But as Aristotle mentions at the end of II, 2,
both other human beings and the sun beget a human being. All life is
dependent upon conditions supplied by the cosmos, which seems to
maintain itself primarily through cycles of local motion. Books V through
VIII trace a complex argument up to the source of all change of place in
the world. In its broadest outline, that argument is reminiscent of the
structure of the Metaphysics. Though the Metaphysics is put together out
of a large number of independent pieces, it has perhaps the clearest line of
unifying structure of any of Aristotle's works. The meaning of being is
�35
pursued through four most general senses, to an eight-fold array of kinds
of non-incidental predications, to its primary sense of thinghood, to the
source of thinghood as form, to the meaning of form as being-at-work, to
the source of all being-at-work in the divine intellect. It thus culminates
in the discovery of the primary being that is the source of all being, and
gets there from the innocent question, which of the meanings of being is
primary?
A similar progressive narrowing of the meanings of motion takes place
in the Physics. In Book III, motion was said to be of four kinds: change of
thinghood, alteration of quality, increase and decrease, and change of place.
In Book V it is argued that motion properly understood is from one
contrary to another, passing through intermediate states or conditions. But
coming-into-being and destruction should be understood strictly as
changes not to a contrary but to a contradictory condition, abrupt changes
that have no intermediate conditions to pass through. Thus in a strict
sense there are only three kinds of motion. But in Book VI it is argued
that there is a certain discontinuity in every qualitative change.
If
something black turns white, it goes through a spectrum of intermediate
shades, but it can be regarded as still being black until sometime in the
course of the motion. In a change of quantity or place·; once the thing is in
motion it has departed from its initial condition, however much one might
try to divide the beginning of the motion. So in the still stricter sense of
being unqualifiedly continuous, there are only two kinds of motion.
Finally, it is pointed out in Book VII that quantitative change must be
caused by something that comes to be present where the changing thing is,
so that it depends always upon a change of place prior to it, and it is
argued in Book VIII that change of place is the primary kind of motion in
�36
every sense in which anything can be primary. The analysis goes one
more step, to the primary motion within the primary kind, which is
circular rotation. This is the most continuous of motions, so much so that it
alone can be considered a simply unchanging motion.
Though the definition of motion in Book III applies to all motions, its
application is most straightforward in the case of those motions most
opposed to the primary kind, those that involve the greatest amount of
change. Birth, development, and growth obviously unfold out of potencies
that are present beforehand, and these changes point most directly to the
inner natures of things that operate as formal, final, and material causes.
But at the opposite extreme of the spectrum of change there is changeless
circular motion. Because it moves without changing, it can be in contact
with a completely unvarying cause. The last step of the inquiry in the
Physics is the uncovering of a motionless first mover, acting on the cosmos
at its outermost sphere. It is a source of local motion that not only holds
the cosmos together, but contributes to the conditions of life by descending
through the lower spheres, including that of sun, to maintain the stable
alternation of the seasons. Nature is thus seen as twofold, originating in
sources of two kinds, the inner natures of living things and the cause
holding together the cosmos as the outer condition of iife. This is reflected
in a bi-polar relation of motion and change, in which the ascending scale of
motions· (leading to the first external mover), is also the descending scale
of changes (starting from the coming-into-being of new beings). The twodirectionality of the scale is all-important. Aristotle does not reduce
change to change of place, but traces it back, along one line of causes. But
the primacy of local motion in the cosmos does not abolish the primacy of
the opposite kind of change, spilling over out of potency, that guarantees
�37
that even changes of place will be wholes, not vulnerable to the attacks of
Zeno. The Physics has a double conclusion, displaying the continuity rooted
in potency as present in the limit of mere change of place, as a final and
deepest refutation of Zeno, which becomes one of the last steps in the
argument that uncovers the motionless cause of motion.
Acknowledgements
The interpretation presented here has been stewing for almost thirty
years, since my first college teacher, Robert Bart, opened my eyes to
Aristotle's definition of motion in particular, and to the whole project of
looking beneath and behind the presuppositions of modern science. Jacob
Klein's "Introduction to Aristotle" is printed here as an appendix to help
those who might wish to read further in Aristotle's writings; it was my
first guide on that journey. Klein had heard Martin Heidegger lecture on
Aristotle in the 1930s. This translation owes much to Heidegger's example
of the possibility of reading Aristotle directly, not through the language of
either the Latin tradition or the science of recent centuries. Heidegger
suffers in translation almost as much as Aristotle does, but a good English
version of his lectures on Book II, Chapter 1 of the Physics is cited earlier
in this introduction. He is too ready to see form
as presence-at-hand,
uninvolved in the joining of things and emptying of one thing into another,
and he is much too ready to talk about "the Greek idea of (whatever),"
when discussing an insight that may have been achieved by only one or
two thinkers, but as an antidote to the deadening effects of most
commentary on Aristotle he is hard to beat.
This translation was a gleam in my eye for about fifteen years, until it
was made possible by the generosity of St. John's College, the National
�38
Endowment for the Humanities, the Beneficial Corporation, and the Hodson
Trust. Students and colleagues at St. john's have read drafts of it in classes
and study groups. I am grateful for their conversation, and above all for
encouragement given to me in 'this work, shortly before his death, by J.
Winfree Smith. Whatever faults this translation may have, it had the
merit of giving delight to that good man.
The marginal page numbers, with their a and b divisions, are from the
standard two-column Bekker edition. The line numbers between them
match up with the lines of the Oxford Classical Text. Ross's text as given
there is followed with a few departures into his notes of variant readings;
in the first paragraph of V, 3, for example, Ross has needlessly scrambled
the text, and the translation follows the manuscripts in everything but the
placement of one sentence. The old Oxford translation by Hardie and Gaye,
outside of Aristotle's central vocabulary, was an invaluable aid to the
meaning of many words and phrases, and Ross's commentary was the
source of a number of references. Ordinary parentheses in the text contain
Aristotle's own parenthetical remarks; square brackets are used
occasionally for my own insertions, when these go beyond repeating an
antecedent of a pronoun. In one instance (at the end of IV, 8), curly
brackets are used around a passage that is not in th·e early manuscripts
but appears in some late sources. The text is interspersed with running
commentary, and preceded by an extensive glossary, intended in part as a
supplement to this introduction.
This translation is not intended to stand in place of Aristotle's inquiry in
pursuit of nature, but to draw you closer to it. If what you find in the
translation makes you want to go further, you should consider reading
Aristotle's own Greek. His grammar is elementary, and · his style is so
�39
repetitious that it doesn't take long to catch on to; the only difficulty in
reading him is the concentration required to keep his pronouns straight.
But if that route does not appeal to you, it is still possible to join with
Aristotle just by doing your own thinking about the questions he raises, in
the light of the broadened and deepened array of possibilities he leads us
to see.
Annapolis, Maryland
May, 1993
�
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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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Introduction: Philosophic Writing
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1983-08-06
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Typescript of a lecture delivered on August 6, 1983 by Joe Sachs s part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series. <br /><br />Mr. Sachs is a tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis. His talk is a draft of his introduction to his translation of Aristotle's <em>Metaphysics</em>. His talk compares and contrasts the writings of Plato and Aristotle and in particular the differences and similarities between the Platonic Dialogues and Aristotle's corpus.
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lec Sachs 1983-08-06
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Annapolis, MD
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text
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pdf
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Philosophy
Aristotle
Plato
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Sachs, Joe, 1946-
Graduate Institute
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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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Learning, Knowing, and Remembering in a Digital World
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on July 26, 2017 by Naomi Baron as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series.
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Baron, Naomi S.
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2017-07-26
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Baron_Naomi_2017-07-26
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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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From Nature to History: The Search for Fundamental Necessities in Thucydides, Machiavelli, and Nietzsche
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on July 13, 2017, by Charles Zug as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series.
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Zug, Charles
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2017-07-13
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LEC_Zug_Charles_2017-07-13
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St. John's College Lecture Recordings—Santa Fe
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"The tutor and the feeder of my riots" : the problem of friendship in Shakespeare's treatment of Falstaff and Prince Hal
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Sterling, J. Walter
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Santa Fe, NM
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2017-07-19
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Audio recording of a lecture given on July 19, 2017 by J. Walter Sterling as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series.
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Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616--Criticism and interpretation
Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616--Characters
Friendship in literature
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English
Graduate Institute
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St. John's College Lecture Recordings—Santa Fe
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01:00:36
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The republic of laughter
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Richardson, Robert Allan, 1937-
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St. John's College
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Santa Fe, NM
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2017-07-12
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Audio recording of a lecture given on July 12, 2017 by Robert Richardson as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series.
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Plato. Republic
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English
Graduate Institute
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https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/3f9edf83237ac11fc28a36fd8a32d130.mp3
d4563f211022ff33e093317f259c8b50
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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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00:44:27
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A Tale of Two Theodicies: Kant and the Self-Contradictions of Leibnizian Theodicy
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on June 28, 2017 by Joseph Trullinger as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series.
Trullinger, an assistant professor at George Washington University, examines Leibniz, Kant and the philosophers’ emblematic responses to the problem of evil. He also explores Kant’s critique of his predecessor and discusses what he calls “contradictions” in Kant’s arguments.
Trullinger received his bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Bucknell University in 2003; his master’s in philosophy from the University of Kentucky in 2006; and his PhD in philosophy from Kentucky in 2010. His dissertation was titled, The Hidden Life of God: Kant and the German Idealists on Ethical Purity.
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Trullinger, Joseph
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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2017-06-28
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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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Kant, Immanuel, 1724-1804
Theodicy
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, Freiherr von, 1646-1716
Good and evil
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English
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Trullinger_Joseph_2017-06-28
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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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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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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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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text
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Beauvoir, Simone de, 1908-1986. Deuxième sexe. English
Feminism
Existentialism
Women
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English
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Goldner_Rebecca_2017-07-05_Typescript
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<a title="Audio recording" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/2618">Audio recording</a>
Graduate Institute
Summer lecture series
Tutors
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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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wav
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01:07:15
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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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St. John's College
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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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sound
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Thomas, Aquinas, Saint, 1225?-1274. Summa theologica.
Natural law
Graduate Institute
Summer lecture series
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SUMMER2009
WEDNESDAY EVENING EVENTS
June 24
Joan Silver
A Reading from Flannery O'Connor's Artificial
Nigger, followed by discussion
July I
Matthew Linck
On Aristotle's Physics and Ethics
July 8
Greg Recco
Developing Emotions: Aristotle's Rhetoric II.2-ii
July 15
Marcel Widzisz
The Greatness of Early Rome According to Livy
July 22
John Verdi
Ambiguity in Art and Science
July 29
Louis Petrich
A Viewing of Kenneth Branagh's film of
Shakespeare's Henry V.
Followed by discussion
August 5
George Russell
On Lincoln
The movie on July 29 will be shown in the Hodson Conference Room in Mellon Hall.
All other events will be held in the Great Hall of McDowell Hall.
�
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Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series
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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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Summer 2009, Wednesday Evening Events
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2009
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Schedule of lectures and concerts in Summer 2009, sponsored by the Graduate Institute.
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Lecture Schedule 2009 Summer
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Annapolis, MD
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St. John's College
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English
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pdf
Graduate Institute
Lecture schedule
Summer lecture series
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S!JOHN'S
College
SUMMER 2008 LECTURES
7:30P.M.
ANNAPO LI S • SANTA FE
June 25
Jonathan Tuck
Plato 's Epitaph to Aster
July2
John White
On the Principle ofNon-Contradiction
(Aristotle's Metaphysics, IV.4)
July 9
Chester Burke, Flute
Leslie Star, oboe
Eric Stoltzfus, cello
Cynthia Lapp, soprano
Baroque Sonatas and Arias
July 16
Movie & Discussion
Rash omon
July 23
Faculty Study Group
On Kant's Third
Critique
Kant' s Critique ofJudgment
July 30
Christian Holland
On Bernard's Summation in Woolfs
The Waves
August 6
William Braithwaite
On Proving True Opinion
(Dred Scott Decision, 1857)
OFFICE OF
THE DEAN
P.O. Box z8oo
ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND
21404
4w-6z6-zsn
FAX 4I0-295-6937
www. ~jca. edu
The concert on July 9 will be held in the Great Hall. The movie on July 16 will be
viewed in the Hodson Conference Room. On July 23, the faculty study group will hold
their discussion in the Hartle Room. All other lectures will be held in the King William
Room.
�
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Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series
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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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Summer 2008 Lectures
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2008
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Schedule of lectures and concerts in Summer 2008, sponsored by the Graduate Institute.
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Lecture Schedule 2008 Summer
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Annapolis, MD
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Graduate Institute
Lecture schedule
Summer lecture series
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Text
Dean's Office
CAMPUS MAIL
SUMMER 2007 LECTURES BY ST. JOHN'S TUTORS
BARR BUCHANAN CENTER/WOODWARD HALL.
KING WILLIAM ROOM
7:30P.M.
June20
George Russell
Plutarch's Alexander
June 27
Patricia Locke
Primordial Silence: The Silence of Chaco Canyon
July 11
Jonathan Tuck
Sons of Homer: The Post-Homeric Epic
July 18
Faculty Study Group
On Aristotle's Metaphysics
On the Metaphysics
July25
Daniel Harrell
Does Beauty Have a Place in Liberal Education?
August 1
Michael Weinman
"A divided sovereignty": Metaphysics, XII.lO and
the Echo of Homer
K/S/Lectures/SU07 schedule
�
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Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series
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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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Office of the Dean
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Summer 2007 Lectures by St. John's Tutors
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2007
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Schedule of lectures and concerts in Summer 2007, [sponsored by the Graduate Institute].
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Lecture Schedule 2007 Summer
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Annapolis, MD
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St. John's College
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pdf
Graduate Institute
Lecture schedule
Summer lecture series
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