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The Problem of Absolute Knowing
St. John’s College, Annapolis – June 17, 2015
Abraham Jacob Greenstine
We have to admire Hegel’s confidence: on October 13th, 1806, as Napoleon rides into Jena,
and the day before a decisive defeat of the Prussian army, Hegel is finishing his Phenomenology of
Spirit. i The book’s final chapter, less than twenty pages, is called ‘Absolute Knowing’. Here we
have an unsalaried professor, in his thirties, abandoning his own place to the ransacking of the
French army, staying with one of his student’s parents, yet claiming to have solved the problems
of critical philosophy, to have established the authority of science, and to have achieved wisdom
itself. At minimum, Hegel is bold.
If we ourselves are bold enough to pursue philosophy, Hegel’s claim of absolute knowing
should provoke us. Here we are, striving for wisdom, and along comes Hegel purporting to have
it. When encountering Hegel, we must at least consider whether his claim is genuine, or
whether he is rather just a modern day sophist, pretending to something he doesn’t have. (An
aside: even if we count philosophy less central than, say, art or religion, Hegel’s audacity should
still shock us. In the Science of Logic he claims to be expounding the eternal essence of God before
creation (SoL 29), and in his lectures on aesthetics he is reported to say that art “is and remains a
thing of the past.” For tonight I will mostly focus on the philosophic problems.) ii
In 1967 Gilles Deleuze proposes that the model for the seeker of truth is not the scholar
asking ‘what is it?’ questions, but rather is the jealous lover. Not τὸ τί ἐστι, but instead who is
it, how often, when, how, how many, where? The thinker is not one of simple leisure and
wonder, but rather is incited by the force of ill-will. iii
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�In this case, at least, I think Deleuze is right. I am jealous of Hegel, and encountering his
writings has provoked me both earlier and now. From the first I needed to know the truth of
Hegel’s system, whether I could rely on his method or not. I don’t just want to know what
absolute knowing is. I also need to know how do I reach absolute knowing? How is this book, the
Phenomenology, supposed to get me to this point? Is this book the only way to reach absolute
knowing, and does it guarantee it? Why is it ‘phenomenology’ the leads to Science? Who knows
absolutely? How does one know ‘absolutely’, where and when can I find such knowing, for how long
can one ‘absolutely know’, who are the ‘false claimants’, the sophists who propose a mere image
of wisdom, how can I tell the difference between wisdom and its image, and if I do finally achieve
absolute knowing, what do I do with it?
Hegel tells us that we can neither simply summarize his philosophy, nor can we just
jump to its end. “Impatience demands the impossible, to wit, the attainment of the end without
the means” (§29). iv Instead, philosophy requires the force of necessity: every step must have its
reason, and we lose the necessity and reason when we summarize a philosophy or try to simply
list its conclusions. We can contrast this with axiomatic mathematics: while the deductions of
mathematics also have the force of necessity, our proposed axioms and postulates are only
hypothetical, and there is no absolute procedure for reaching conclusions.
Philosophical
necessity must, for Hegel, be stronger than this: not only must our conclusions follow from our
premises, but they must somehow be implicitly present in the premises. Moreover, the premises
of philosophy must be absolutely necessary, rather than merely hypothetical or presupposed.
Since these requirements are lacking for mathematics, the truth of a mathematical theorem does
not depend on the validity of its proof: a mathematical theorem is either true or false, and a good
proof merely demonstrates the truth already present. Not so with a philosophic truth: for Hegel, a
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�truth can only be comprehended as such insofar as it is a result of its deduction. Thus there are no
philosophic theorems: the truth of a principle can only be realized in the coming-to-be of that
very principle. Without being understood in the necessity of its genesis, philosophic truth will
only ever be contingent, inadequate, and incomplete.
Hence my attempt tonight is doomed to fail. In principle, I cannot adequately review the
Phenomenology as a whole, nor can I give a true rigorous account of the last chapter and figure of
the work, Absolute Knowing. Nevertheless, despite himself, Hegel time and again feels the need
to preface his texts, to summarize the arguments, to add contingent asides or ‘extraphilosophical’ remarks, and to propound what look like philosophic theorems [for example,
“Reason is purposive activity” (§22), “The true is the whole” (§20), “everything turns on grasping
and expressing the true, not only as substance, but equally as subject” (§18)]. Thus we find a
curious split (and not always a neat one) inside of Hegel’s Phenomenology between the central
argument or deduction (the phenomenology ‘proper’, necessary according to Hegel’s philosophic
standards), and the contingent asides, remarks, or summaries (occasionally marked off with the
phrase “in-itself, or for-us”).
This talk, then, while not measuring up to the stringent
requirements of Hegelian science, nonetheless accords with the style of the Hegelian aside, a
contingent reflection on philosophic necessity.
The problem, then, is absolute knowing. Tonight, I will raise this problem from two
directions. The first is through a review of the larger project of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.
Not only is such a review helpful for getting us all on the same page, I shall contend that the
guiding problem of the Phenomenology is the problem of the appearance of science, or the spiritual shape
of science, that is, of absolute knowing. The second direction will be an interrogation of absolute
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�knowing itself. Here I will return to the questions of who, when, how, etc. and examine some of
Hegel’s claims about absolute knowing at the end of the Phenomenology.
Part I: An Introduction to an Introduction
Many readers of Hegel’s Phenomenology find the text to be full of valuable resources for all
sorts of problems and questions. Yet too many of them miss the goal of the text. For all of
Hegel’s supposed obscurity, he is clear on the purpose of the Phenomenology: it is “the way to
science” (§88), the “coming-to-be of science as such or of knowledge” (§27), the deduction of pure
science, or absolute knowing (SoL 29). Hegel even says “To help bring philosophy closer to the
form of science, to the goal where it can lay aside the title ‘love of knowing’ and be actual
knowing—that is what I have set myself to do” (§5). In the age of revolutions and pamphlets, I
propose that the Phenomenology of Spirit, mammoth of a work that it is, can be seen as Hegel’s
pamphlet – philosophical science is possible, here is how!
At this point, there are three major lingering questions. (1) What does Hegel mean by
science? (2) Why do we need a ‘way’ into science, can’t we just start doing science? And (3),
how is phenomenology, in particular, going to accomplish this goal?
Our first question, what does Hegel mean by science, is perhaps best left aside for now.
Certainly he is not simply referring to the ‘laboratory’ sciences. The answers Hegel might give to
this question are somewhat cryptic: science is the unity of thinking and being, science is the
unity of theoretical and practical cognition, science is the absolute idea, the self-movement of
the concept, or the method of methods. And Hegel would remind us that all of these answers
are fundamentally insufficient when separated from the labor of science itself. For now, I merely
wish to maintain that we can link together science, on the one hand, and knowing, on the other,
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�as Hegel himself does in some of the aforementioned quotes. This connection between science
and knowledge is nothing new: the Greek term ἐπιστήμη and the Latin scientia can each mean
either knowledge or science, depending on the situation, and in our present context knowledge
translates the German Wissen while science translates Wissenschaft. More concretely, I propose
that science is the result of knowing; I will return to this later.
Yet why do we need a pathway to science at all? If science is our goal, then why don’t we
just start by doing science? One reason we have already seen: for Hegel science must meet the
standard of absolute necessity. Such a necessity is foreign to our daily lives, and demands a
different sort of consideration than that to which we are accustomed.
Further, recalling Socrates’ claims in the Republic, for Hegel true knowledge must be unhypothetical and without presupposition. Many thinkers have tried to find a self-evident
principle, an immediate truth from which we can go forward to achieve knowledge. Yet for
Hegel every supposedly self-evident principle must, in truth, rely on some presupposition or
other, precisely insofar as it is an isolated principle. Any single statement (or concept, or
argument) considered on its own proves to contain some implicit presupposition or other, and
ultimately implies, for Hegel, its own contradiction. We thus need a pathway to science insofar
as science itself requires a seemingly paradoxical beginning.
Finally, and perhaps most crucially for the text of the Phenomenology, due to the nature of
consciousness we naturally find ourselves opposed to some sort of object. Within a given
consciousness a division is made between what belongs to that consciousness, or the ‘self’ of
that consciousness, and what is other than, or outside of, or the object of, that same
consciousness. This split can take a number of shapes: my observing mind and the data that I
observe, my passions and the laws imposed upon them, my inner worthlessness and the divine
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�other, and so on. Without reducing consciousness to a single form, we find again and again that
it divides itself along the lines of self and other. Such a division, for Hegel, is in tension with the
project of science, insofar as it proposes an object outside of or other than the limits of our
comprehension.
Science, as the unity of thinking and being, must work against our
consciousness’ natural tendency to set itself against its object.
To recap: for Hegel, science requires necessary deductions, a starting point which is
presuppositionless without being reduced to a principle, and the rejection of all divisions
between self and other. If the Phenomenology is to show us science is possible, then it needs to
both show why these are requirements for science and how we can meet such requirements. In
truth, Hegel hopes to do even more: not only is science possible, he thinks, but rather it is
necessary, given our nature. Thus the Phenomenology is not a bare appeal to the ‘fact’ or appearance
of science: rather, it engages in the work of deducing the necessity of absolute knowing, and
demonstrating the inadequacy of other spiritual forms.
A pathway to science is, indeed, necessary for us to reach the point of properly beginning
our scientific system. Yet here is an impasse: if we need an introduction to show that science is
necessary, presuppositionless, and undivided from its object, then our introduction itself must
meet these same requirements. If not, then our science will rely on the contingency of our
pathway and the presuppositions carried with it. Thus “the way to science is itself already
science” (§88): the Phenomenology is not only an introduction to science and a demonstration of its
necessity, but it is also the first part of the system of science.
This brings us to our third question: why is phenomenology in particular the proper
introduction to science?
Moreover, how does phenomenology meet the aforementioned
requirements of science (i.e. be necessary, without presupposition, and unified with its object)?
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�Hegel is looking to establish the necessity of the appearance of science in our world.
Phenomenology, then, is going to be an account of appearances, up to and including that of
science. Still, there are a number of ways in which things can be said to really or truly appear,
and this often relies on various commitments or attitudes we have towards the world. Thus the
ancient skeptic only concedes the force of appearances which demand his or her passive assent;
the Baconian scientist, though, counts as true and certain data anything which can be recorded
as an observation. If Hegel were to simply propose a definitive essential schema of appearance,
the Phenomenology would not meet up to its scientific standards: it would not carry the force of
necessity against those who have a different model of appearances, it would rely on unjustified
presuppositions about the nature of appearances, and it would create a division between
‘Hegelian’ appearance and other sorts of appearances (e.g. the skeptic’s appearances).
We might be tempted to go to the other extreme: if we cannot impose a single schema on
appearances, perhaps our Phenomenology should embrace the style of a narrative or biography, or
maybe a review of different real, historical positions. However these methods cannot work,
either: at the very least, such biographical or historical accounts are filled with contingencies,
and thus inadequate for the purpose of introducing science.
Neither a schematic nor a biographical/historical account, the Phenomenology is a science
of the shapes of appearances, their essential features, together with the various personae,
experiences, activities, objects, and commitments entailed in these various shapes. It takes up
the forms of appearance as they present themselves, without fetishizing their chance
idiosyncrasies or imposing an alien structure upon them.
So, then, the Phenomenology examines the shapes of appearances and shows the necessity
of the appearance of science. Its investigation is interior to the different shapes of appearances
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�themselves: Hegel examines each shape based on its own internal criteria, whether these are
implicit or explicit, active or passive, concerning the object or regarding the subject. This gives
phenomenology its scientific rigor, each stage of the project containing its own immanent
necessity, immediacy, and unity. And what is it that Hegel finds, when he examines the various
shapes of appearances? Speaking generally, it is that within each shape of appearances (other
than, perhaps, absolute knowing) there is a tension within that shape itself. For example, let us
consider the Baconian scientific observers: they are committed to their observational reports as
the true data appearances, as what counts as real in their world. Yet their own activity is at
odds with this commitment: they treat their observations as a pure natural given, as simply
objective, but ignore their own role in the composition of observations. This leads to problems
of which these observers are aware, but cannot adequately resolve: e.g. how can we distinguish
between biased and unbiased observational reports? Yet this ignorance of the self is constitutive
of the observer’s appearances: the self cannot be observed like a hot-spring or a skeletal
structure, and upon realizing this problematic element, this inner tension, any observers who
are genuinely truth-seeking must change the way they approach appearances, they must
abandon simple observation and modify their commitments, objects, actions, or some other
factor. Thus through phenomenology we see a tension interior to this ‘observing’ shape of
appearances, plus the immanent motion that takes place when that tension or contradiction
resolves itself.
The Phenomenology of Spirit is consequently the movement through the various shapes and
stages of appearances. While it may not be necessary that every peculiar and idiosyncratic
possible shape of appearance be investigated in the Phenomenology, the project still should be
mostly exhaustive in the types it considers. If ‘appearance’ is what phenomenology investigates
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�in its broadest terms, the two most general ways in which appearance takes place for us are
those of consciousness and spirit.
Consciousness is the domain where I immediately grasp both myself and any external
objects. It is appearance at the level of the first-person-singular: e.g. objects are given to my
senses, or laws are imposed on me. Consciousness, to quote GM Hopkins, “Deals out that being
indoors each one dwells / Selves – goes itself; myself it speak and spells.” v
For Hegel,
consciousness begins with the certainty of what is immediately given, whether that is an object
outside of it (in simple consciousness), its own self (in self-consciousness), or knowledge of
itself as an agent in the world (in what Hegel calls reason). This immediate certainty proves to
be inadequate, requiring a more substantial conception of what there is (so, for example, we
move from immediate certainty in our senses to a more nuanced understanding of the world as
the consequence of invisible forces; or we move from the certainty of our own absolute authority
to the truth of a more complex relation we have to an authority outside ourselves).
Ultimately, consciousness can never be adequate to itself. Consciousness wants the final
say over everything, wants to become identical with its object, yet it is always resisted by a
larger world, which conditions it. When we recognize this, the certainty of consciousness’ selfassured individuality turns into the truth of what Hegel calls spirit.
Spirit is what
consciousness aspires to be: spirit is its own world. Spirit is identical with what is other than it:
it has objects, but these are a part of its spiritual domain. Spirit, then, is appearance at the level
of the first-person-plural: e.g. objects matter only insofar as they are useful to us, or we must act
only of our own free will, etc. Consciousness has not disappeared (any more than the singular
would ‘disappear’ in the plural): we cannot have spirit without consciousness, no more than we
could have a community without individuals. Yet by making spirit the primary object of
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�phenomenology we acknowledge that there are limits to any analysis of an individual
consciousness: consciousness takes itself as self-sufficient, but in truth its ground is the social
world of spirit. We can think of Hopkins, again: “I say more: the just man justices […] Lovely in
limbs, and lovely in eyes not his” here, we can see that we have gone beyond the “myself” that
consciousness “speaks and spells”, and onto justice, a social virtue, which is reflected through
others (and indeed, for Hopkins, through God).
Like consciousness, spirit too has different shapes which can be examined and evaluated.
While the movement of consciousness was from certainty to truth, spirit moves from truth to
certainty: beginning as substantial, unalterable truth (as with the eternal laws of the family and
gods, or the unequivocal identification of God with light), spirit develops a self-certainty by
incorporating and inscribing this truth within the consciousness of individuals who make it up
(as with Spirit as the self-legislating and autonomy of individuals, or the community that must
reconcile itself with the death of God). For Hegel, this takes place in three stages. The first is
spirit as such, the social world we inhabit. Next is religion, which is spirit’s comprehension of
itself in what Hegel calls ‘picture-thinking’. Finally, spirit’s last stage is absolute knowing,
which is Spirit certain of itself as the truth, where picture-thinking becomes genuine cognition.
In this way Hegel’s Phenomenology purports to bring us to absolute knowing. Indeed, the
goal of the book, to show the necessity of the appearance of science, is nothing more than to
bring us to this final stage. Absolute knowing is spirit’s free thinking of itself and its world, a
thinking by means of what Hegel calls the concept, the “pure element of spirit’s existence”
(§805). The exposition of this thinking and the concept is nothing else but science, which is
constrained by nothing but the necessity of its content. Science is then the result of absolute
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�knowing: “Spirit, therefore, having won the concept, displays its existence and movement in this
ether of its life and is science” (§805).
Part II: The Time of Absolute Knowing
Even if, by this point, I have given an accurate sketch of how the Phenomenology is meant
to bring its readers to absolute knowing, there is still so much we don’t know about this stage. I
wish, then, to interrogate absolute knowing itself, as to who it is, how it works, and what it
does. The most pivotal question though, for tonight at least, is that of when: when can I find
absolute knowing, can it be localized to a particular time? Is there absolute knowing before
Hegel? Before the French revolution? Before Christianity? Further, can we simply rely on
absolute knowing to be there in perpetuum? Or perhaps the possibility of absolute knowing has
past, and we cannot or should not return to it today.
These questions are not purely phenomenological, but instead concern the relation
between a phenomenological shape and actual history.
Hegel is clear that all figures of
consciousness or spirit must first have a real existence before they can be comprehended
phenomenologically: “nothing is known that is not in experience” (§802). In other words, Hegelian
knowledge is neither projective nor prophetic: we can only comprehend what was and is
(although it does seem that for Hegel knowledge is ‘retrojective’, that is, capable of thinking the
present back into the past, as implicitly and necessarily there all along). This holds just as much
for absolute knowing: “as regards the existence of this concept, science does not appear in time
and in the actual world before spirit has attained to this consciousness about itself” (§800).
Absolute knowing can, then, be localized in time, and we may rightfully ask: when does
science appear? When is absolute knowing? There is evidence that the answer to this question
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�is actually quite specific: “until spirit has completed itself in itself, until it has completed itself as
world-spirit, it cannot reach its consummation as self-conscious spirit” (§802), or “As spirit that
knows what it is, it does not exist before, and nowhere at all, till after the completion of its work
of compelling its imperfect ‘shape’ to procure for its consciousness the ‘shape’ of its essence”
(§800). That is to say, absolute knowing requires the stages that come before it, it comprehends
them and recapitulates them. Again and again Hegel considers absolute knowing in light of the
various shapes of appearance that precede it. Yet some of these stages have their existentialhistorical reality in just less than the twenty years before Hegel’s Phenomenology: the most
obvious case is the spiritual shape of ‘Absolute Freedom and Terror’, whose historical correlate
is the revolutionary period in France. Thus Kojève, for example, vi dates absolute knowing to
Hegel himself: Hegel is not merely demonstrating the reality of Science, he is inventing it.
Is it really the case that the birthdate of science and absolute knowing is the night before
the battle of Jena, as Napoleon enters the city and Hegel completes his project? If so, when we
ask who knows absolutely, it is Hegel, first of all.
Yet there is a problem with this answer. If we consider a post-Phenomenology text of
Hegel’s science, such as the Science of Logic, it clearly and explicitly relies on material from a
tradition of thought and philosophy stretching at least as far back as Parmenides. For example,
when discussing the philosophy of Spinoza, Hegel says “Such a standpoint … is not to be
regarded as just an opinion, an individual’s subjective, arbitrary way of representing and
thinking, and an aberration of speculation; on the contrary, speculation necessarily runs into it,
and, to this extent, the system is perfectly true” (SoL 511). How can we make sense of this: how
can Spinoza develop a true, necessary, system of speculative thought, while historically living
before the French revolution? We might wish to appeal to Hegel’s claim that absolute knowing
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�has existed in an undeveloped, implicit state in earlier historical periods (§801). But this is not
an adequate answer, insofar as Spinoza’s system is far from implicit and undeveloped, but rather
was written out, published, criticized, defended, and debated.
Spinoza’s Ethics is not a
testament to a hidden presence of absolute knowing, a ruse of reason behind the back of history,
but rather is an explicit scientific approach to the way things are.
I contend, then, that there is a sense of absolute knowing which is not restricted to a
post-revolutionary existence. Such absolute knowing, rather, exists at any point where spirit
has both raised itself out of its immediate social world, and broken with religious picturethinking, instead thinking of itself and of its world in their own terms. Absolute knowing is a
break with previous spiritual shapes. It is a latent possibility of spirit, not only in its historical
culmination, but at any point in its existence. [We might think of the relation between absolute
knowing and spirit as analogous to that of reason and consciousness: reason is not a simple
historical result of object-consciousness and self-consciousness, but rather is its inner truth
which can be realized at many times and places.] Spirit, as “Pure self-recognition in absolute
otherness … is the ground and soil of science or knowledge in general” (26). Thus if the germ of
science is the unity of thinking and being, the overcoming of the division between spirit and its
object, then absolute knowing has a historical reality stretching back at least to the Greeks.
We have, then, two different senses of absolute knowing: the first as precisely localized
in Germany, in the culmination of the Phenomenology, with the advent of the Hegelian system of
Science, while the second can be found through our history in the guise of philosophy and the
sciences in general, namely in any case where we take up our object in thought. Can we
reconcile these senses, or is absolute knowing merely equivocal?
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�To answer this, we must ask how absolute knowing knows itself.
All the earlier
movements of the Phenomenology somehow find their place in this culminating stage, to the point
where it can be hard to keep track of how everything is supposed to work together. For our
purposes, though, we will to only need to sketch out the movement of self-knowledge itself,
which has three components. In absolute knowing, spirit knows itself as the identity between
itself and its other. For Hegel, such an identity is only possible insofar as the self and other are
genuinely different, and this difference is superseded and transformed. In absolute knowing,
this all happens at once. In its first component, spirit knows “not only itself but the also the
negative of itself, or its limit”: the absolute other, outside of it, namely the “free contingent
happening” of nature, of an external time and space (§807). Simultaneously, spirit, entered into
existence, recognizes itself in its otherness, transforms what is other than it to a moment of
itself, and recollects itself in the contingencies of time: this is spirit’s self-knowledge as what
Hegel calls comprehended history (§806, §808). Such a history is the play of contingencies and
necessities, the shape of spirit which loses itself in externality to find itself again. Finally, with
the immediate identity of spirit and its other achieved, self-knowledge is identical to science
itself. Science, as both comprehended and comprehending, is a perfect activity wherein time is
annulled (§801). Other-against-self, other-as-becoming-self, and other-as-self: time, history,
eternity. In one movement Spirit knows itself through these three temporalities.
By seeing how absolute knowing lives in time, we can start to reconcile our two different
when’s (the one being located at Hegel in particular and the other extending across the history of
philosophy). While science is the accomplishment and result of absolute knowing, the finished
achievement of grasping the other-as-same, absolute knowing is not restricted to this scientific
endeavor, to the pure, timeless system of thought. The accomplishment of science is, rather, a
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�result of real, historical transformation of the other into the self. While spirit is always capable
of producing science, of reaching absolute knowing, at the same time science always has a
spiritual history.
Further, the unity of self and other can be established more or less
comprehensively, and as such science itself can be more or less comprehensive. This point is
worth restating: science, the timeless and necessary articulation of what is, the home of eternal
verity, is somehow conditioned by the contingent history of spirit. (As an aside: our other
temporality – natural time – has dropped from our discussion. I propose that in fact, while the
content and even form of science can change given spirit’s history, spirit always has the same
immediate relationship to nature: that of other, limit, and death.)
Returning, now, to our ambiguity. Yes, in the Napoleonic wars absolute knowing and
science break from what has come before, and we can rightfully say that Hegel, or the spiritual
community of which Hegel is a part, discovers this speculative system of science. Further, this
figure of absolute knowing and the science which results is, indeed, dependent on its history, on
reformation Christianity, on Kant’s critical philosophy, on the French revolution, and on
Napoleon’s conquests. Nevertheless, this historical moment does not mark the advent of either
absolute knowing or science as such. Absolute knowing “plays in ten thousand places”:
whenever Spirit arrives at the unity of thinking and being, wherever it casts away the form of
time and dares to think the truth as such. Plato’s διαλεκτική, Aristotle’s θεωρία, Spinoza’s
scientia intuitiva, Kant’s transcendental cognition: all are shapes of absolute knowing. And which
new shapes, whose new science, and what new eternal truths might we find in these two
hundred years after Hegel?
Conclusion: The Force of Hegel’s Thought
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�Turning back, we are faced, it seems, with a tension. In the first part of my talk, I
presented the Phenomenology as a deduction of the necessity of science, which itself is the
necessary, presuppositionless, and unified system of thought. Yet in the second part I concluded
that the real existence of absolute knowing, and with it science, depends on spirit’s history,
which itself contains an ineliminable element of chance. Hence the problem of absolute
knowing – how we reach it, when we find it – has carried us to a new problem, that of necessity
and contingency. This is not a question of understanding ‘where’ each modality applies (for
example, heavenly necessity and mundane contingency, or transcendental necessity and
empirical contingency). Rather, the problem is how to think through the contingent becoming
of necessity. How can chance events give rise to necessity? Only by addressing this can we
reconcile the necessity of science with its dependence on spirit’s history.
Finally, I want to conclude with a reflection on the challenge Hegel poses for us. I began
my talk by pointing out Hegel’s confidence in claiming to achieve absolute knowing. If
philosophy calls to us, I suggested, then even more so will the wisdom absolute knowing
purports to have achieved. By the end of the talk, I tried to close some of this distance between
Hegel’s absolute knowing and earlier philosophies. If history is a gallery of shapes of spirit, I
tried to show that we can consider the history of philosophy as the gallery of shapes of absolute
knowing. With this assertion, though, perhaps Hegel’s achievement seems diminished, and the
force of his text undermined. Before ending tonight, I want to dissuade you of this impression.
Hegel’s writings present a speculative thinking that forces us to reimagine what thought can be.
He dares to think being, the infinite, the absolute, but also externality, negativity, and
contradiction. He refuses to accept any presupposition, any limitation, any edification, as a
replacement for the labor of thought. Yes, Hegelian science can be seen as a philosophy among
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�many, but it is also a challenge to all others, an expectation that any thought and any philosophy,
whatever it be, think itself to and past its own limit. Not bad for a professor who needs to crash
at his student’s parent’s house.
Pinkard, Terry P. Hegel: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. 227-229.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The Science of Logic. Trans. George Di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Trans. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon, 1975. 10.
iii Deleuze, Gilles. Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953-1974. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2004. In particular, the 1967
lecture and discussion “Method of Dramatization”. Also related “The Image of Thought” from Difference and
Repetition.
iv Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. Arnold V. Miller. Oxford: Clarendon, 1977. Quotes
may have with minor modifications, and citation is of paragraph numbers.
v From “As Kingfishers Catch Fire”, Gerard Manley Hopkins.
vi Kojève, Alexandre. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. Raymond Queneau.
New York: Basic, 1969.
i
ii
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�
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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 Problem of Absolute Knowing
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Typescript of a lecture delivered on June 17, 2015 by Abraham Greenstine as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series. <br /><br />Greenstine's lecture looks at the possibility and problems of "Absolute Knowing" in Hegel's <em>Phenomonology of Spirit</em>. In particular, he asks the listener to reconsider the achievements Hegel claims to have made and, despite those limitations, the imaginative triumph of Hegel's thought of what "Absolute Knowing" could be.
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Greenstine, Abraham Jacob
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2015-06-17
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A signed permission form has been received stating, "To whom it may concern: I, Abraham Jacob Greenstine, grant my permission to the St. John's College Library to record my 06/17/15 Wednesday evening lecture entitled 'The Problem of Absolute Knowing', for the purpose of archival preservation, library circulation, and online hosting. I will also provide the library with a hard copy of the typescript for circulation and archival preservation."
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paper
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English
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Annapolis, MD
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St. John's College
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text
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Bib # 82508
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Phenomenology
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770-1831. Phänomenologie des Geistes.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770-1831. Absolute Wissen
Philosophy
Graduate Institute
Summer lecture series
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Text
Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 1
“Everyone Sees How You Appear; Few Touch What You Are”:
Machiavelli on Human Nature
How do the writings of Niccolò Machiavelli appear to us today? There is no small risk
that, whenever we crack the spines of The Prince or the Discourses on Livy, we will find these
books to be boring. Full of historical details, full of admittedly colorful and even shocking
anecdotes, they nonetheless appear to teach us only what we already know: the maxims of
amoral, or immoral, prudence, that ‘the end justifies the means,’ or that ‘might makes right.’ To
say that we already know such things does not mean that we believe them, of course. Perhaps in
extreme circumstances, with lives at stake, we might grant that it is necessary to be
Machiavellian; but who really expects to find himself in extreme circumstances? Most of the
time, among family, friends, and fellow citizens, we try to be good, to do what is right. We
might grant, while smothering a yawn, that we sometimes need to be Machiavellians. But we
would not say that we are Machiavellians.
And yet Machiavelli’s books are not just full of striking maxims about how we should
live, like “men should either be caressed or eliminated” [P 3:10].1 They are also full of striking
claims about how we do live, claims that Machiavelli offers in support of these maxims. “[M]en
should either be caressed or eliminated, because they avenge themselves for slight offenses but
cannot do so for grave ones” [P 3:10] – because, that is, only death can stop a human being from
seeking revenge, even for a slight injury. Behind or beneath the Machiavellian maxims about
how we should live, there appears to be a Machiavellian account of how we do live – an account
of what human beings are, an account of human nature. Could this account be true? And if we
find it to be so, are we compelled to be, not just rainy day Machiavellians, but Machiavellians
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 2
through and through? These questions, it seems to me, run a lesser risk of being boring.
Tonight I will sketch this Machiavellian account of human nature, chiefly as it is found in
The Prince, but with some reference to the Discourses on Livy. In concentrating on these two
books, I will be following Machiavelli’s advice, at least to some extent. In the Dedicatory Letter
of The Prince, he suggests that it contains all that he has learned and understood; while in the
Dedicatory Letter of the Discourses he writes that it contains as much as he knows and has
learned [P DL:3-4; D DL:3; compare TM, 17]. Either book on its own would presumably suffice
for the experienced student of Machiavelli. But for relative beginners like ourselves, it is helpful
to have the same matter given two different forms. What I hope to show by this sketch is that we
underestimate Machiavelli if we consider him simply as a teacher of amoral or immoral practices
that we can take or leave as we conduct our lives. To the extent that Machiavelli’s account of
human nature is shared by his successors, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau – to
whose thought we trace our political institutions and our understanding of ourselves – we may be
forced to acknowledge his account of human nature as our own. It may turn out that deep down,
where it counts, we are Machiavellians, even though we do not appear to be so, even to
ourselves.
This lecture will have three parts. In the first, I will offer the desire to acquire as the
main element of human nature as Machiavelli depicts it, and show how in a political setting this
desire ramifies into two humors, that of the great and that of the people. In the second I will
sketch goodness as the excellence of the popular humor and virtue as the excellence of the humor
of the great, and I will connect Machiavelli’s distinction between goodness and virtue to the
famous ‘turn’ in Chapter Fifteen of The Prince from the imagination of a thing to its effectual
truth [P 15:51]. In the final part I will suggest that Machiavelli’s view of human nature points to
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 3
a science of human nature without a distinctively human element – what Machiavelli calls a
“science of sites” – and I will raise some difficulties with this science, difficulties that originate
in Machiavelli’s own writings.
I
Readers who leaf through the pages of The Prince or the Discourses in search of the
phrase ‘human nature’ are bound, at first, to be disappointed. As far as I can tell, Machiavelli
never uses the phrase in either work. Mentions of nature, by contrast, are easy to find. In The
Prince, for example, Machiavelli writes of the natures of nonliving things, like sites, mountains,
low places, rivers, and marshes [P DL:4, 14:59]. He writes of the natures of living things, like
beasts, foxes, and lions [P 18:69, 70; 19:78]. He writes of the natures of particular human
beings, alone or in groups, like peoples, governments, ministers, emperors, princes, and cautious
men [P DL:4; 6:24; 4:18; 7:30; 17:68; 19:76; 23:95; 25:99, 100]. He even writes of nature in
general as something that contains things [P 7:26], and that causes particular men to incline in a
certain way [P 25:100].2 But each time he writes about nature, Machiavelli sidesteps the phrase
‘human nature.’ He is willing to write as if particular beings have natures, he is willing to
include particular human beings among these beings, and he is willing to imply that all beings
fall within nature in some general sense; but nature in each of these cases is subhuman or
superhuman – that is, not specifically human. The closest Machiavelli comes to writing about
human nature in The Prince is a single claim he makes about the “nature of men” – that they are
“obligated as much by benefits they give as by benefits they receive” [P 10:44]. Even there, he
does not dignify the nature of men with the specific adjective ‘human.’
Nonetheless, there are plenty of hints in The Prince that Machiavelli thinks that human
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 4
beings do have a nature, if only in the sense of an abiding character. Early in the work, for
example, he considers “a natural difficulty” and “another natural and ordinary necessity” that
confront a new prince: that “men willingly change their masters in the belief that they will fare
better,” but that “one must always offend those over whom he becomes a new prince” [P 3:8].3
In the immediate sequel Machiavelli treats these natural necessities that follow from the
character of men as “universal causes” [P 3:9],4 and suggests that they contribute to an
apparently permanent “order of things” [P 3:11] that endures despite the changes brought by
time [P 3:13; 10:44].5 Later in The Prince he invokes “human conditions” in much the same
way, to explain why a prince cannot have, nor wholly observe, all of the qualities that are held
good [P 15:62]. The conditions in question can be summarized in a single phrase: men are
wicked unless necessity makes them good.6 As with the other natural necessities felt by a new
prince, Machiavelli implies that these conditions will never change, as long as there are human
beings. If they did change, his description of the situation of the new prince, and of the political
situation more generally, would cease to be true.
Similar claims about the abiding character of human beings can be found in the
Discourses, in a somewhat more explicit form. In that work Machiavelli warns early on against
the error of thinking that men, among other things, have “varied in motion, order, and power
from what they were in antiquity” [D I.P.2:6]. To the contrary, “[w]hoever considers present and
ancient things easily knows that in all cities and in all peoples there are the same desires and the
same humors, and there always have been” [D I.39.1:83].7 Not just human beings but human
things have a permanent character: they “are always in motion, either they ascend or they
descend” [D II.P.2:123]. Perhaps as a result, the world has a permanent character too: “I judge
the world always to have been in the same mode,” Machiavelli writes, “and there to have been as
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 5
much good as wicked in it” [D II.P.2:124]. He even flirts, indirectly, with the idea that the world
is eternal. “To those philosophers who would have it that the world is eternal,” he writes, “I
believe that one could reply that if so much antiquity were true it would be reasonable that there
be memory of more than five thousand years – if it were not seen how the memories of times are
eliminated by diverse causes, of which part come from men, part from heaven” [D II.5.1:138139]. It is reasonable, then, that there be no memory of more than five thousand years, even if
the world is eternal. So is the world eternal? However this may be, Machiavelli regards the
world as lasting enough that he can claim that human things have an abiding character. “It has
always been, and will always be,” he announces, “that great and rare men are neglected in a
republic in peaceful times” [D III.16.1:254]. Men “have and always had the same passions, and
they must of necessity result in the same effect” [D III.43.1:302]. If it were to turn out that the
abiding character of human beings included an element specific to human beings, an element that
was a cause or principle of human motion and rest, then despite his avoidance of the term,
Machiavelli could be said to have an account of a specifically human nature.
The best candidate for such an element, in The Prince and the Discourses, is the desire to
acquire. In The Prince this desire sets the tone for the whole book. Machiavelli mentions it in
the first sentence of the Dedicatory Letter, writing “[i]t is customary most of the time for those
who desire to acquire favor with a Prince to come to meet him with things that they care most for
among their own or with things that they see please him most” [P DL:3]. In the particular form
of the desire to acquire a principality, this desire dictates the concerns of the first half of the
work, and is mentioned in three of the first fourteen chapter titles;8 while the second half, which
examines “what the modes and government of a prince should be with subjects and with friends”
[P 15:61], can be understood as containing advice about how to keep an acquisition. But when
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 6
Machiavelli formulates this desire as a principle, he writes, “truly it is a very natural and ordinary
thing to desire to acquire” [P 3:14], without saying for whom, or for what, this is very natural
and ordinary. He does continue, in the immediate sequel, “and when men do it who can, they
will be praised or not blamed; but when they cannot, and want to do it anyway, here lie the error
and the blame” [P 3:14-15], but this amounts to saying that praise and blame are specifically
human, not that the desire to acquire is.9 In the Discourses Machiavelli elaborates: “nature has
created men so that they are able to desire everything and are unable to attain everything” [D
I.37.1:78]. As a result, “human appetites are insatiable, for since from nature they have the
ability and the wish to desire all things and from fortune the ability to achieve few of them, there
continually results from this a discontent in human minds and a disgust with the things they
possess” [D II.P.3:125]. While Machiavelli says that the insatiable appetites and the discontent
and disgust that they produce are specifically human, they are also effects of a cause that is not
specifically human: nature in general.
Not only does Machiavelli fail to insist that the desire to acquire is specifically human; he
also fails to assign the desire a specific end. In The Prince and the Discourses he depicts human
beings who desire to acquire material things like cities and provinces, states and kingdoms,
friends and partisans, and spiritual things like reputation, glory, and knowledge. But he never
argues that these are the proper objects of the desire to acquire. Instead, he asserts in the
Discourses, “each willingly multiplies that thing and seeks to acquire those goods he believes he
can enjoy once acquired” [D II.2.3:132; compare II.4.2:137]. The desire to acquire can have
anything as its object, then, so long as the one who acquires it believes he will enjoy it. But the
omnivorousness of the desire points again to its insatiability. Since the object of the desire is
nothing in particular, but rather acquisition for the sake of enjoying possession, and since
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 7
possession inspires only disgust and discontentment, the acquiring being goes from expecting
future enjoyment to feeling present dissatisfaction, and the desire to acquire must seek a new
object. Machiavelli is right, then, to call this desire a desire to acquire, since it aims at no object
in particular, but rather at acquisition, which is to say the feeling of acquisition, in general.
Human beings feel discontent and disgust with what they have; they enjoy only when they feel
that what they have is increasing.10 The desire to acquire thus resembles a drive to grow, since
its end is an increase in one’s own, without any intrinsic concern about whether one’s own is also
good.11
Understood in this way, the desire to acquire has both external and internal consequences.
Externally, this desire drives isolated human beings to acquire without limit and without
exclusion – in the Discourses Machiavelli mentions that it is even possible to “acquire the
world” [D I.20.1:54]. It follows from this that isolated human beings are almost entirely
formless.12 Perhaps this is one reason for Machiavelli’s practice of using “matter” as a term for
the human beings who are potential subjects of a prince [P 6:23; 26:102, 104]. But in a political
setting, when human beings live together, their desires to acquire interfere with one another, and
form arises. In The Prince, Machiavelli proclaims that in every city and every principality, “two
diverse humors are found” [P 9:39; compare 19:7613]: the people and the great. These humors
are defined by their characteristic appetites: “the people desire neither to be commanded nor
oppressed by the great, and the great desire to command and oppress the people” [P 9:39].14 In
the Discourses, Machiavelli calls these humors the nobles and the ignobles, and writes,
“[w]ithout doubt, if one considers the end of the nobles and of the ignobles, one will see great
desire to dominate in the former, and in the latter only desire not to be dominated; and in
consequence, a greater will to live free, being less able to hope to usurp it” – that is, to usurp
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 8
freedom – “than are the great” [D I.5.2:18].15
Lest we think that Machiavelli means that the people or the ignobles do not desire to
acquire, and that his two humors are therefore different natures,16 rather than ramifications of the
desire to acquire, Machiavelli points in the Discourses to their common source. Having just
characterized the difference between the nobles and the ignobles, he restates it paragraphs later
as the difference between “those who desire to acquire” and “those who fear to lose what they
have acquired,” and then explains that tumults are most frequently generated by those who
possess, because “the fear of losing generates in [them] the same wishes that are in those who
desire to acquire; for it does not appear to men that they possess securely what a man has unless
he acquires something else new” [D I.5.4:19].17 Machiavelli thereby blurs the difference
between the people and the great: fearing to lose has the same effects as desiring to acquire.
Later in the Discourses he makes much the same point, insisting that the difference between a
prince’s and a people’s way of proceeding “arises not from a diverse nature – because it is in one
mode in all” [D I.58.3:117], and that the popular desire for freedom is an effect of the desire to
acquire [D II.2.1:129].18 If these assertions are not enough, Machiavelli also tells a characteristic
story in the Discourses about Clearchus, the tyrant of Heraclea, who, finding himself caught
“between the insolence of the aristocrats… and the rage of the people,” “decided to free himself
at one stroke from the vexation of the great and to win over the people to himself.” By having
all the aristocrats cut to pieces, “he satisfied one of the wishes that peoples have – that is, to be
avenged. But as to the other popular desire,” Machiavelli continues, “to recover freedom, since
the prince cannot satisfy it, he should examine what causes are those that make [peoples] desire
to be free. He will find that a small part of them desires to be free so as to command, but all the
others, who are infinite, desire freedom so as to live secure” [D I.16.5:46]. Even if the humor of
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 9
the great is eliminated from a city or a principality, the remaining popular humor reforms itself
into two humors: the people, and the great.
These Machiavellian indications that the humors of the people and the great are
ramifications of the more fundamental desire to acquire also indicate that it is political life that
chiefly causes these ramifications. In isolation the desire to acquire knows only the feelings of
pleasurable increase or disgusting stasis; the desire to oppress, on the one hand, and the fear of
oppression on the other arise only in the political encounter with other more or less powerful
desires to acquire. Machiavelli acknowledges this in his brief account of the origins of political
life in the Discourses. “[S]ince the inhabitants were sparse in the beginning of the world,” he
writes, “they lived dispersed for a time like beasts; then, as generations multiplied, they gathered
together, and to be able to defend themselves better, they began to look to whoever among them
was more robust and of greater heart, and they made him a head, as it were, and obeyed him” [D
I.2.3:11].19 Thus arose the universal political struggle between the two humors, in which the
great give reputation to one of their number “so that they can satisfy their appetite under his
shadow,” while the people give reputation to one of the great “so as to be defended with his
authority” [P 9:39].20
The desire to acquire also has internal consequences: namely, the ramification of the
present into the past and the future. Like any desire, the desire to acquire involves opposing a
painful, factual present to a pleasant, counterfactual future. A being animated by such a desire
must be able to distinguish what it actually possesses from what it might possess, in order to
direct itself away from the former and toward the latter. So a being who desires to acquire, in
particular, must have memory, a continuing sense of its possessions, and foresight, a sense of
what its possessions might become. In the healthy case, its memory will be the basis of its
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 10
dissatisfaction with the present, and its foresight, the basis of its hope for the future. As
Machiavelli puts it in the Discourses, the insatiability of human appetites makes men “blame the
present times, praise the past, and desire the future, even if they are not moved to do this by any
reasonable cause” [D II.P.3:125].
It is the people or the ignobles in particular who blame the present and praise the past,
since their knowledge of the past is less accurate than their knowledge of the present, and past
things in general are neither feared nor envied [D II.P.1:123]. Moreover, memory supports the
popular form of the desire to acquire – the fear of loss – by preserving an inaccurate but
venerable past, and arguing that excellence consists in this preservation [D I.10.2:31]. Memory
encourages men to honor the past and obey the present, and thereby discourages conspiracies [D
III.6.1:218]. And when it involves fearsome events, memory can bring a state back to its
beginnings, and so preserve it [D III.1.3:211]. Perhaps unsurprisingly, memory is therefore also
an obstacle to the great or the nobles’ desire to acquire, especially when acquisition brings
innovation [P 2:7, 4:19, 5:21]. It is the first concern of new sects to eliminate the memory of
their predecessors, for example [D II.5.1:139]. But memory can also serve the foresight of the
great: if it helps to maintain a nation in the same customs for a long time, it makes it easy for
human beings to know future things by past ones [D III.43.1:302; compare I.39.1:83-84].21
Since the future is on this account the realm of hoped-for acquisition by the great, or
feared loss by the people, while the present is the realm of real possession, whether unsatisfying
to the great or satisfying to the people, the ramification of the present into the past and the future
is also a differentiation between the factual and counterfactual worlds, or between the real and
the imaginary. Taken together, the humors of the people and the great and the ramification of
the present into the past and the future explain the typical progressivism of the great, who want
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 11
to live in the future that their desire to acquire foresees, and the typical conservatism of the
people, who want to remain free of this future.22 Taken together, these forms of the desire to
acquire explain why each of Machiavelli’s humors has its corresponding understanding of human
excellence.
II
So far we have considered the desire to acquire as the core of human nature, according to
Machiavelli. We have also sketched the chief implications of this desire, showing how in
political settings it issues in a progressive great and a conservative people. Each of these
humors, it turns out, also has a characteristic understanding of human excellence: for the people
excellence is goodness, and for the great, excellence is virtue [D I.17.1-3:47-48; compare MV,
24-25]. We will discover, as we try next to fill in the content of goodness and virtue according
to Machiavelli, that the difference between goodness and virtue is also connected to his famous
distinction, made in The Prince, between the “effectual truth” and “imagined republics and
principalities” [P 15:61].
Perhaps because of its focus on the perspective of the great, goodness is only mentioned
twice in The Prince, both times in an ironic and disparaging way. Having begun his
consideration of ecclesiastical principalities with the claim that they are maintained without
virtue or fortune, Machiavelli concludes with the pious hope that “with his goodness and infinite
other virtues” Pope Leo X will make the pontificate “very great and venerable” [P 11:47]. In a
likeminded remark later in the book, during his survey of the fates of the Roman emperors,
Machiavelli notes that Emperor Alexander was of such goodness that he never made use of
summary execution. But he was also held to be effeminate, for which he was despised,
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 12
conspired against, and assassinated [P 19:77]. These examples distinguish goodness from virtue,
and can hardly be said to recommend goodness to a prince. In the Discourses, by contrast, there
is a fuller and less dismissive discussion of goodness. Machiavelli claims that it is the
characteristic excellence of peoples, as opposed to princes, writing that if the glories and the
disorders of princes be reviewed, “the people will be seen to be by far superior in goodness and
glory.” Princes, he explains, are superior to peoples in ordering, but peoples are superior to
princes in maintaining the things ordered – which is why they attain the glory of those who order
[D I.58.3:118]. Despite having characteristically retracted half of his praise of peoples,
Machiavelli leaves them with their superiority in goodness.
This excellence consists, then, in maintaining what is ordered at the founding of a sect, a
republic, or a kingdom, and promulgated by education [D III.1.2:209; III.30.1:280]: namely, the
laws, which are maintained by being obeyed by the people. Both peoples and princes show
goodness when they obey, and so are restrained by, the laws [D I.58.2:116; compare
III.24.1:270, III.46.1:307]. Indeed, early in the Discourses Machiavelli asserts, “the knowledge
of things honest and good” first arose out of the people’s obedience to the great. “[S]eeing that if
one individual hurt his benefactor,” he explains,
hatred and compassion among men came from it, and as they blamed the
ungrateful and honored those who were grateful, and thought too that those same
injuries could be done to them, to escape like evil they were reduced to making
laws and ordering punishments for whoever acted against them: hence came the
knowledge of justice [D I.2.3:11-12].
Now because goodness consists chiefly in obedience to the laws, it is closely connected
to religion as the basis of the laws [D I.11.3:35; I.55.2:110, 111], and to conscience as their
internal enforcement [D I.27.1:62; I.55.2:110]. Through obedience to the laws, goodness
procures and defends freedom [D I.17.1:47], which as we have seen is the goal of the people’s
modified desire to acquire. Lest we think that goodness consists solely in obedience to the laws,
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 13
Machiavelli mentions one example that “shows how much goodness and how much religion”
were in the Roman people. When the Senate issued an unpopular edict that required the plebs to
sacrifice to Apollo a tenth of the booty taken in a recent victory, “the plebs thought not of
defrauding the edict in any part by giving less than it owed, but of freeing itself from it by
showing open indignation” [D I.55.1:110]. Goodness consists chiefly in obedience to the laws,
but perhaps more importantly, in the refusal to use fraud even when one disobeys. It is almost
the same thing as honesty.
Machiavelli signals, in several places, that the opposite of goodness is corruption [D
I.17.1:47; I.55.1:110; III.1.2:209; III.30.1:280]. But there is reason to think that a more
thoroughgoing opposite to this excellence of the people is the excellence of the great, virtue.
This is not just because, as we have seen, Machiavelli is contemptuous of goodness in his book
on princes, nor just because the superiority of princes to peoples in ordering means that they
must destroy a prior order that others are trying to maintain. It is not just because virtue is
inimical to goodness. Rather, it is because goodness can also be inimical to virtue. We see how
so in one of the examples Machiavelli gives to illustrate the goodness of the matter and the
orders of Rome: that of Manlius Capitolinus, who found no one to support his rebellion against
the Senate and laws, and was condemned by the Roman people to death. “I do not believe that
there is an example in this history more apt to show the goodness of all the orders of that
republic than this,” Machiavelli concludes, “seeing that no one in that city moved to defend a
citizen full of every virtue, who publicly and privately had performed very many praiseworthy
works” [D III.8.1:238].23
In contrast to his account of goodness, Machiavelli’s account of virtue is developed more
fully in The Prince, and in particular in the book’s second half, Chapters Fifteen and following,
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 14
where he turns to consider “what the modes and government of a prince should be with subjects
and with friends” [P 15:61]. This statement of what remains of his project implies that the first
half of the book considered what the modes and government of a prince should be with
foreigners and with enemies; and when we see that the explicit subject of the first half of The
Prince is “How Many Are the Kinds of Principalities and in What Modes They Are Acquired”
[P 1.T:5] – that is acquisition – this implication is confirmed. We seem to be on a firm
Machiavellian footing: with foreigners and enemies the prince follows the desire to acquire,
while with subjects and friends he practices virtue. The generality of Machiavelli’s opening
statement on virtue might therefore come as a surprise. “A man who wants to make a profession
of good in all regards must come to ruin among so many who are not good,” he writes. “Hence it
is necessary to a prince, if he wants to maintain himself, to learn to be able not to be good, and to
use this and not use it according to necessity” [P 15:61]. Necessity, and not the difference
between friend and enemy, or subject and foreigner, determines whether the prince should be
good or wicked. The “so many who are not good” include friend and foe alike. To be able to act
as necessity demands, we will learn, is virtue.
Machiavelli connects his new account of virtue to his famous move from the imagination
of a thing to its effectual truth, or from how one should live to how one lives [P 15:61]. Before
considering this connection, though, let’s follow his development of this account of virtue in the
chapter of The Prince devoted to whether a prince should be honest. Since combat with laws –
what we might call the combat of the good – is often not enough, one must have recourse to
combat with arms: so “it is necessary for a prince to know well how to use the beast and the
man” [P 18:69]. The ancients understood this necessity, and communicated it by depicting the
centaur Chiron as the teacher of Achilles. “To have as a teacher a half-beast, half-man,”
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 15
Machiavelli writes, “means nothing other than that a prince needs to know how to use both
natures” [P 18.69]. We have mentioned that Machiavelli is willing to say that there is a nature of
princes [P ED:4]: this nature now seems to be something more comprehensive than the nature of
a man or the nature of a beast, if it is capable of using, or imitating [P 19:78], both of these
natures. “Thus, since a prince is compelled of necessity to know well how to use the beast,”
Machiavelli continues, “he should pick the fox and the lion, because the lion does not defend
itself from snares and the fox does not defend itself from wolves. So one needs to be a fox to
recognize snares and a lion to frighten the wolves” [P 18:69]. Each animal, then, has a single
defect that is remedied by the other: the fox’s astuteness remedies the lion’s gullibility, while the
lion’s fierceness remedies the fox’s contemptibility [compare P 19:79].
But if each of the two bestial natures that the prince should use has a single defect that is
remedied by the other, what use does the prince have for the other component of the centaur: the
nature of a man? Machiavelli has implied that this nature is needed for combat with laws, since
this is “proper to man” [P 18:69]; but we would be forgiven for doubting him, since he has also
claimed, six chapters earlier, that good arms are the necessary and sufficient condition of good
laws [P 12:48]. We might begin to suspect that combat with arms is also sufficient, and that the
prince who knows well how to use the nature of the fox and the lion has no need of the nature of
man in addition – that he could be entirely inhuman, all beast. But Machiavelli has more to say.
“[I]f all men were good, this teaching would not be good,” – if all men were honest, that is, there
would be no snares, and it would suffice for a prince to be a lion – “but because they are wicked
and do not observe faith with you, you also do not have to observe it with them” [P 18:69].
There are infinite modern examples, he claims, in which “the one who has known best how to
use the fox has come out best,” because a faithless prince has ensnared the gullible. “But it is
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 16
necessary,” Machiavelli continues, “to know well how to color this nature, and to be a great
pretender and dissembler; and men are so simple and so obedient to present necessities that he
who deceives will always find someone who will let himself be deceived” [P 18:70]. The nature
of the fox needs to be colored because its astuteness is limited to recognizing snares, as opposed
to setting them. There is a use for the nature of man after all: it equips an otherwise brutish
virtue with the specifically human ability to lie.
In restating his conclusion, Machiavelli makes it clear that his discussion of “In What
Mode Faith Should Be Kept by Princes” [P 18.T:68] is really a discussion of his account of all
virtue, which is to say a discussion “Of Those Things for Which Men And Especially Princes
Are Praised or Blamed” [P 15.T:61], or a discussion of human excellence in general. “[I]t is not
necessary,” he writes, “for a prince to have all the above-mentioned qualities [the traditional
virtues and vices] in fact, but it is indeed necessary to appear to have them” [P 18:70; compare
15:62]. Lest we infer that it is necessary to have some of these qualities, he then sharpens his
restatement: since “by having them and always observing them, they are harmful; and by
appearing to have them, they are useful,” it is necessary to “remain with a spirit built [edificato]
so that, if you need not to be those things, you are able and know how to change to the contrary”
[P 18:70]. To use a nature, or to imitate a nature, turns out to mean not to have but to appear to
have that nature. But to appear to have a nature one does not have is to lie. So the specifically
human ability to lie seems sufficient to generate the appearance of, and therefore sufficient to
make use of, all the other natures a virtuous prince might need.
This reading is supported by the discussion of Severus in the next chapter of The Prince.
Since Severus was a new prince whose actions were great and notable, Machiavelli wants “to
show briefly how well he knew to use the persons of the fox and the lion, whose natures I say
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 17
above are necessary for a prince to imitate” [P 19:78]. These natures are now persons, things
that can be impersonated. “[W]hoever examines minutely the actions of this man will find him a
very fierce lion and a very astute fox” [P 19:79], Machiavelli continues, again omitting to
mention the person or nature of a man. But it turns out that being like Severus is not sufficient
for the best kind of prince: “a new prince in a new principality… should take from Severus those
parts which are necessary to found his state and from Marcus [Aurelius] those which are fitting
and glorious to conserve a state that is already established and firm” [P 19:82]. Since we know
from the Discourses that those parts are called goodness, we might conclude that this is the use
of the nature of a man. But Marcus was an enemy of cruelty [P 19:76], whereas Severus was
very cruel [P 19:78], so the new prince who combines their parts will be neither, though he will
know how to appear to be both. In other words, the virtuous desire to acquire uses the
specifically human ability to lie to impersonate a man, just as much as to impersonate a lion or a
fox.
Understood in this way, the nature of the prince is something built, rather than something
grown. But this is also true of the nature of peoples. Recall Machiavelli’s practice of referring
to the people as “matter” to be formed by the prince [P 6:23; 26:102, 104], and his claims that
knowledge of goodness arises from obedient gratitude to the great, and knowledge of justice
from laws to protect against ingratitude [D I.2.3:11-12]. If the excellence of the people is
goodness, the maintenance of orders founded by the great, then the nature of peoples is
something built by the great, just as the nature of the great is something built by the great
themselves. The great, we might say, and especially the prince, give form both to their own
formless desire to acquire, and to that of the human beings around them. And they are guided in
this formation by necessity.
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 18
Machiavelli means this foundation on necessity to justify his claim in The Prince that by
departing from the orders of others in his discussion of virtue and goodness, and focusing on “the
effectual truth of the thing” rather than on the imagination of it, he is writing something “useful
to whoever understands it” [P 15:61]. Imaginary republics like Plato’s and imaginary
principalities like Christ’s, which “have never been seen or known to exist in truth,” are used to
illustrate how one should live – that is, they are used to support goodness. Real republics and
principalities, by contrast, are used by Machiavelli to illustrate how one does live. That there is a
difference between how one should live and how one does live is a sign of the failure of the
imaginary realm to make human beings completely good, and a sign of the need to turn to the
real. “Hence it is necessary for a prince,” Machiavelli concludes, “if he wants to maintain
himself, to learn to be able not to be good, and to use this and not use it according to necessity”
[P 15:61].
So the virtuous live in the realm of the real, according to Machiavelli, while the good live
for the most part in the realm of the imaginary, or the counterfactual. The virtuous live in the
present, which exists, while the good live mostly in the future, which does not. What is
surprising about this conclusion is that it exactly contraries the conclusion we came to in our
analysis of the desire to acquire, which had the humor of the people seeking to maintain present
possessions, and the humor of the great hoping for future acquisitions. In other words, each
humor of human nature, each way that the desire to acquire expresses itself in a political setting,
must need the native realm of the other. The good people need an imaginary future because their
desire to acquire, frustrated by the competing desires of the great, is limited in the real world to a
hope for maintenance; only in another world, or in a city in speech, can they hope to avenge their
subordination and become great. The virtuous great, by contrast, need the present because their
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 19
practice of lying – that is, their construction of imaginary worlds – for the sake of future
acquisition needs to be informed by present necessities imposed by the people they are lying to;
in other words, they require goodness for their virtue to be effectual. The difference between
goodness and virtue, we could say, is the difference between an ignorant self-deception and a
knowing deception of others.
III
Having concluded our sketch of Machiavelli’s view of human nature, understood as the
desire to acquire, with its two humors and their corresponding excellences, we might begin to
wonder whether this view is true. This is too big a question to explore in the final part of this
lecture, though Machiavelli’s view does have the merit of explaining a common moral
phenomenon: the concern of those who are trying to be good, that they might be the dupes of
those who are not. Instead, this final part is devoted to a narrower, though related, question: does
Machiavelli think that his account of human nature is true?
Recall that in the fifteenth chapter of The Prince Machiavelli claims to turn from the
imagination of a thing to its effectual truth, and from how one should live to how one lives [P
15:61]. He makes these claims right after announcing his turn to “what the modes and
government of a prince should be with subjects and with friends” [P 15:61], and presumably
away from what his modes and government should be with foreigners and with enemies. The
first chapter of The Prince, by contrast, refers in its title to the modes in which principalities are
acquired [P I.T:5], and so announces the subject of the first part of the work. The suggestion in
both parts of The Prince, then, is that what human beings should do follows directly from what
they in fact do. What human beings in fact do provides the content of necessity, on the basis of
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 20
which virtue acts. Moreover, Machiavelli’s distinctions between foreigners and subjects, or
between foes and friends, vanish from the perspective of necessity. The first part of The Prince
focuses on acquisition, and so on foreigners and foes, but it treats in the same spirit how
acquisitions are maintained, and so mentions subjects and friends [for example, P 7:29-30].
Similarly, the second part focuses on how the prince should treat subjects and friends, but the
virtues that Machiavelli discusses in this part are needed also for dealing with foreigners and foes
[for example, P 17:67-68]. Perhaps the clearest indication that these divisions vanish from the
perspective of necessity is the title of the fifteenth chapter of The Prince, “Of Those Things for
Which Men and Especially Princes Are Praised or Blamed” [P 15.T:61]. Attentive readers will
remember that Machiavelli has already, much earlier in the work, said what these things are:
“truly it is a very natural and ordinary thing to desire to acquire, and when men do it who can,
they will be praised or not blamed; but when they cannot, and want to do it anyway, here lie the
error and the blame” [P 3:14-15]. The difference between the first and the second parts of The
Prince is the difference between what human beings do to acquire, and what they ought to do.
The first part of the work is chiefly descriptive, the second chiefly hortatory; and Machiavelli’s
exhortation is based on his description: men should learn not to be good – that is, to be virtuous –
because men are not good – that is, they are corrupt. In other words, Machiavelli’s exhortation
to virtue requires two things to be true: that men are corrupt, and that there is a difference
between corruption and virtue. Let’s look at each of these criteria in turn.
One objection to Machiavelli’s claim that men are corrupt is that this may accidentally be
so, but it is not so necessarily. As we have seen, human nature, according to Machiavelli,
consists of a matter that is not specifically human, the desire to acquire, that can be formed to
have specifically human excellences, goodness and virtue. In other words, human nature is
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 21
malleable. (Moreover, Machiavelli is evasive about what is specifically human in goodness and
virtue: in The Prince, as we have seen, he guardedly identifies fraud, which uses or imitates
brutish natures, as specifically human; but since fraud merely serves the desire to acquire, it does
not serve a specifically human end.) In the Discourses Machiavelli makes this malleability more
explicit when commenting on Livy’s disparaging claim that the French begin battles as more
than men, but end them as less than women. “Thinking over whence this arises,” he writes, “it is
believed by many that their nature is made so, which I believe is true; but because of this it is not
that their nature, which makes them ferocious at the beginning, cannot be ordered with art, so
that it maintains them ferocious to the last” [D III.36.1:292]. To be precise, the nature of the
French makes them ferocious at the beginning of battles; it is the failure of this nature that makes
their ferocity lapse. This failure can be avoided, and their nature maintained, by the order
imparted by art. The Roman army, Machiavelli indicates later in the same chapter, exemplifies
such ordering. Nothing its soldiers did was not regulated: “they did not eat, they did not sleep,
they did not go whoring, they did not perform any action either military or domestic without the
order of the consul” [D III.36.2:292]. Not only can the difference between male and female be
maintained by art; art can also constrain the natural movements of growth and reproduction.
This artful ordering of nature produces the excellences that Machiavelli names goodness and
virtue.
But Machiavelli also admits in the Discourses that there are limits to what art can achieve
with its human material. He mentions two reasons why we are unable to change our natures as
necessity demands: “one, that we are unable to oppose that to which nature inclines us; the other,
that when one individual has prospered very much with one mode of proceeding, it is not
possible to persuade him that he can do well to proceed otherwise” [D III.9.3:240]. These
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reasons, which correspond to Machiavelli’s injunction in The Prince that one must both be able
to change one’s nature, and know how to do so [P 18:70], suggest that the limits to malleability
are imposed by the energy and the opinions of each human being.24 Since there will not always
be a human being available with the needed energy and opinions to do what necessity demands
in each case – and this is especially so if, as Machiavelli implies, success renders one’s opinions
inflexible – art will eventually fail to order nature, with a consequent failure of virtue and of the
goodness it orders. A permanently good human order, then, is not to be hoped for, despite the
malleability of human nature. Corruption is necessary, and so virtue is needed.
The requirement that virtue be different from corruption is trickier to establish. We have
seen that both of these forms of human nature are opposed to goodness; they differ because
virtue in departing from goodness looks to a different standard, necessity, whereas corruption in
departing from goodness does not. The difference between virtue and corruption depends, then,
on the existence of knowable necessities in human life. Now we have seen Machiavelli write as
though necessities are knowable by human beings; this is what he seems to mean when he urges
princes to “learn to be able not to be good, and to use this and not use it according to necessity”
[P 15:61].25 In other words, Machiavelli seems to think that there is a science of necessities. But
in The Prince and the Discourses taken together, Machiavelli mentions science only twice: both
times in a chapter late in the Discourses that asserts that a captain must be a knower of sites, or
of “the nature of countries” [D III.39.T:297; III.39.2:299]. The argument of this chapter closely
parallels that of a similar chapter in The Prince, titled “What a Prince Should Do Regarding the
Military” [P 14.T:58] – a chapter where, admittedly, science is not mentioned. In these two
places, Machiavelli advises that princes, captains, and the great should train in hunting, part of
the practical mode of the peaceful exercise of the art of war [P 14:59].26 Hunting yields
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 23
particular knowledge of the country in which one trains. “First,” Machiavelli writes in The
Prince, “one learns to know one’s own country, and one can better understand its defense; then,
through the knowledge of and experience with those sites, one can comprehend with ease every
other site that it may be necessary to explore as new” [P 14:59]. Particular knowledge becomes
general knowledge, and defensive ability becomes offensive ability, because of a “certain
similarity” between the corresponding features in every country, “so that from the knowledge of
a site in one province one can easily come to the knowledge of others” [P 14:59].27 Machiavelli
makes sweeping claims for his science of sites. Not only is it necessary for a captain to have this
“general and particular knowledge” of “sites and countries” if he wants to work anything well [D
III.39.1:297-298], but it will allow a prince to know “all the chances that can occur to an army”
[P 14:60]. While Philopoemen, Machiavelli’s example of a possessor of this science, led his
army, “there could never arise any unforeseen event for which he did not have the remedy” [P
14:60]. As long as we have the energy to be able to act as necessity demands, the science of sites
guarantees that we will know how to do so.
We might grant Machiavelli’s claim that there are no supernatural kingdoms: that
because all countries are alike in nature, knowledge of one leads to knowledge of all. But why
does he think that a perfected science of sites allows a prince to overcome fortune? A sentence
from the Discourses is helpful here. “Whoever has this practice,” Machiavelli writes, “knows
with one glance of his eye how that plain lies, how that mountain rises, where this valley reaches,
and all other things of which he has in the past made a firm science” [D III.39.2.298]. This talk
of plains, mountains, and valleys should remind us of the comparison in the Dedicatory Letter of
The Prince, between the natures of peoples and of princes, on the one hand, and the natures of
mountains or high places and of low places, on the other [P DL:4]. By limiting his use of the
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 24
word “science” in The Prince and the Discourses to the science of sites, Machiavelli indicates
that there is no science specific to human beings, nor even one specific to living beings. Human
nature and living nature are continuous with nonliving nature, and psychology is continuous with
geography – or better, with physics. The malleability of human nature, then, is great enough that
nonhuman and nonliving phenomena are imitable by human beings, but not so great that human
beings become incalculable as a result.28 Just as there are no superhuman kingdoms, there are no
supermen – though as we have seen there are centaurs.
This understanding of Machiavelli’s science of sites is puzzling, though, because it seems
to require a descriptive treatment of virtue, rather than the hortatory one that we find in the
second part of The Prince. If human beings are as determined and predictable as nonhuman
bodies, why not describe what they do, rather than fruitlessly exhorting them to behave otherwise
than they do? In particular, we would expect Machiavelli to insist that princes do learn to be
able not to be good, and to use it according to necessity, to the extent that they have the most
excellent form of the desire to acquire. Instead, as we have seen, he insists, “it is necessary for a
prince, if he wants to maintain himself, to learn to be able not to be good, and to use this and not
use it according to necessity” [P 15:61; emphasis added]. Now what sense does this condition,
“if he wants to maintain himself,” make in the light of Machiavelli’s claim that all human beings,
and the great above all, are driven by the desire to acquire? Since acquisition presupposes the
persistence of the acquiring being, how could a prince not want to maintain himself?29
In the chapter of The Prince devoted to conspiracies, Machiavelli admits that there exist
very rare human beings with “an obstinate spirit,” who do not care about death. A prince cannot
avoid death at the hands of such a conspirator, because “anyone who does not care about death
can harm him” [P 19:79]. Since the threat of death and the consequent loss of all one’s
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 25
acquisitions – the threat of ruin, as Machiavelli puts it – is the paramount necessity faced by
human beings [for example, P 15:61], these very rare human beings apparently fall outside the
scope of this necessity, and therefore outside the scope of the science of sites.30 There is no
remedy available to princes for such unforeseen events. We might expect Machiavelli to try to
account for the existence of such human beings by tracing their obstinacy back to the desire to
acquire, saying, for example, that they do not care about death because they hope for an afterlife
in which they will be rewarded. But he does not do so; instead, he says only that they are
motivated by the desire to avenge a “grave injury” [P 19:79-80; see also D III.6.11:227] – a
desire that can be satisfied in this life, even if one does not long survive its satisfaction.
In the Discourses Machiavelli claims, “private men enter upon no enterprise more
dangerous or more bold” than a conspiracy against a prince [D III.6.1:218; see also III.6.4:223].
In The Prince, by contrast, he writes, “nothing is more difficult to handle, more doubtful of
success, nor more dangerous to manage, than to put oneself at the head of new orders” [P 6:23].
The obstinate spirit one needs to brave the greatest danger in a conspiracy is presumably also
needed to brave the greatest danger in founding something entirely new, for every new
foundation begins as a conspiracy against the old. We might wonder, then, whether this account
of human nature is adequate to explain the activity of the new prince, or even Machiavelli’s own
activity. Is Machiavelli himself motivated by the desire to acquire? We cannot seriously believe
that a virtuous possessor of the science of sites, for whom, as long as he is armed, no accident
can arise for which he does not have the remedy [P 14:60], could be compelled to endure a
“great and continuous malignity of fortune” [P DL:4]. Machiavelli does make it seem, at the
beginning of the Dedicatory Letter of The Prince, that he desires “to acquire favor with a Prince”
[P DL:3]; but in the Preface to the first book of the Discourses he claims instead that he has
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 26
always had a “natural desire… to work, without any respect, for those things I believe will bring
common benefit to everyone” [D I.P.1:5].
These doubts about Machiavelli’s science of sites – that it ought to preclude the hortatory
character of the second part of The Prince, and that it cannot account for human beings who are
contemptuous of death – suggest that the account of human nature in The Prince and the
Discourses is partial, and that Machiavelli knows it.31 Through these works he means to shape
human nature, to the extent that it can be shaped, by an education that claims that human nature
is more malleable and more predictable than Machiavelli really thinks it is. For the sake of the
common benefit, he means to persuade the great to act as if they are acting only according to
necessity. This project would amount to nothing more than a curiosity in the history of political
thought were it not for its remarkable success. We are the indirect beneficiaries of Machiavelli’s
questionable attempt: we who believe that our natures are malleable, especially by technology;
we who believe in rights founded only on necessities; we who believe ourselves great because of
the dream of acquisition without limit; we who believe in progress, and in the necessity of a
better future; and we who believe ourselves to be the people whose acquisitions the laws of
nature and of nature’s God secure. Without attention to Machiavelli’s account of human nature
we run the risk of remaining the unconscious inheritors at third hand of a partial account, of a
project, posing as a science, to narrow human possibilities through education. We risk being
Machiavellians without knowing it. How is this to the common benefit of everyone?
Jeff J.S. Black
Annapolis, Maryland
20 June 2012
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 27
Notes
1
References to The Prince and to the Discourses will be given in the text, in the forms [P Chapter:page] and [D
Book.chapter.paragraph:page], respectively. In these references, DL stands for dedicatory letter, P for preface, and
T for title. The editions used are Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince. A New Translation with an Introduction, by
Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1985), and Niccolò Machiavelli,
Discourses on Livy. Translated by Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov. (Chicago and London: The University
of Chicago Press, 1996). I also refer to Harvey C. Mansfield, Machiavelli's New Modes and Orders: A Study of the
Discourses on Livy. (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2001) in the form [MNMO, page]; to
Harvey C. Mansfield, Machiavelli's Virtue. (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996) in the
form [MV, page]; and to Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli. (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago
Press, 1958) in the form [TM, page].
2
In the former passage, Machiavelli writes, “states that come to be suddenly, like all other things in nature that are
born and grow quickly, cannot have roots and branches” [P 7:26], while in the latter he writes that a man cannot be
found who is so prudent to accommodate himself to changes in fortune, in part “because he cannot deviate from
what nature inclines him to” [P 25:100]. In two passages in the Discourses analogous to the latter passage in The
Prince, Machiavelli writes that we are unable to change in part because “we are unable to oppose that to which
nature inclines us” [D III.9.3:240], and “it is given by nature to men to take sides in any divided thing whatever, and
for this to please them more than that” [D III.27.3:275]. In these last three passages we might expect Machiavelli to
write “his nature” or “our nature,” but he does not. There is one passage in the Discourses where he refers to “the
wicked nature of men” [D III.29.1:277], but he makes the reference while quoting a view with which he does not
agree.
3
In nearby chapters at the beginning of The Prince, Machiavelli uses the phrases “natural prince” [P 2:7] and
“natural affection” [P 4:17] to refer to the prince who inherits a principality and the affection felt for him. The
natural and the ordinary are closely connected at this point in the work, and they both refer primarily to the sequence
of human generation. The new prince is opposed to the natural or ordinary prince in Machiavelli’s argument, and
the natural and ordinary is both an obstacle and an opportunity for him.
4
Machiavelli may mean to contrast these “universal causes” with the “superior causes” that he mentions in his
discussion of ecclesiastical principalities [P 11:45].
5
“[T]ime sweeps everything before it and can bring with it good as well as evil and evil as well as good” [P 3:13],
according to Machiavelli, and “worldly things are so variable that it is next to impossible for one to stand with his
armies idle in a siege for a year” [P 10:44]. There is another reference to an “order of things” much later in The
Prince: “in the order of things it is found that one never seeks to avoid one inconvenience without running into
another; but prudence consists in knowing how to recognize the qualities of inconveniences, and in picking the less
bad as good” [P 21:91].
6
“[O]ne can say this generally of men,” Machiavelli writes, “that they are ungrateful, fickle, pretenders and
dissemblers, evaders of danger, eager for gain. While you do them good, they are yours, offering you their blood,
property, lives, and children… when the need for them is far away; but, when it is close to you, they revolt” [P
17:66]. Having taught his reader later in The Prince that a prudent lord cannot observe faith, he continues, “if all
men were good, this teaching would not be good; but because they are wicked and do not observe faith with you,
you also do not have to observe it with them” [P 18:69]. Indeed, “men will always turn out bad for you unless they
have been made good by a necessity” [P 23:95]. Machiavelli’s other claims about the apparently abiding character
of men include, “men in general judge more by their eyes than by their hands, because seeing is given to everyone,
touching to a few” [P 18:71], and, “men are much more taken by present things than by past ones, and when they
find good in the present, they enjoy it and do not seek elsewhere” [P 24:96].
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 28
7
Machiavelli repeats this claim much later in the Discourses, in a way that suggests an amendment. “Prudent men
are accustomed to say,” he writes, “and not by chance or without merit, that whoever wishes to see what has to be
considers what has been; for all worldly things in every time have their own counterpart in ancient times. That
arises because these are the work of men, who have and always had the same passions, and they must of necessity
result in the same effect” [D III.43.1:302]. What prudent men say by custom rather than by chance, and not without
merit, is then corrected by what Machiavelli says in the immediate sequel: that it is true that the works of men “are
more virtuous now in this province than in that, and in that more than in this, according to the form of education in
which those people have taken their mode of life” [D III.43.1:302]. Education can shape nature, such that “Men
Who Are Born in One Province Observe Almost the Same Nature for All Times” [D III.43.T:302; emphasis added].
Similarly, when investigating “Whence It Arises That One Family in One City Keeps the Same Customs for a Time”
[D III.46.T:306], Machiavelli argues that this “cannot arise solely from the bloodline, because that must vary
through the diversity of marriages, but it necessarily comes from the diverse education of one family from another”
[D III.46.1:306].
8
“How Many Are the Kinds of Principalities and in What Modes They Are Acquired” [P 1.T:5]; “Of New
Principalities That Are Acquired through One’s Own Arms and Virtue” [P 6.T:21]; “Of New Principalities That are
Acquired by Others’ Arms and Fortune” [P 7.T:25].
9
This suggests another reason why Chapter XV, titled “Of Those Things for Which Men And Especially Princes are
Praised or Blamed” [P 15.T:61] is also about acquisition.
10
The desire to acquire thus amounts to a desire for novelty. Later in the Discourses Machiavelli writes “men are
desirous of new things, so much that most often those who are well off desire newness as much as those who are
badly off. For, as was said another time [at D I.37.1:78], and it is true, men get bored with the good and grieve in
the ill” [D III.21.2:263].
11
And just as reproduction is growth by other means, so are one’s offspring and their acquisitions one’s own
acquisitions, by other means. Consider Machiavelli’s hints about how Alexander VI used Cesare Borgia [P 11:46].
Death is not simply a limit of the desire to acquire. But compare note 27, below.
Machiavelli does occasionally refer to a good that is the goal of acquisition. For example, in the
Discourses he writes,
[i]t appears that in the actions of men, as we have discoursed of another time [D I.6.3:21-22,
where he wrote of “inconveniences”], besides the other difficulties in wishing to bring a thing to
its perfection, one finds that close to the good there is always some evil that arises with that good
so easily that it appears impossible to be able to miss the one if one wishes for the other. One sees
this in all the things that men work on. So the good is acquired only with difficulty unless you are
aided by fortune, so that with its force it conquers this ordinary and natural inconvenience” [D
III.37.1:294].
But it is not clear that by “the good” here Machiavelli means anything other than any acquisition that can be felt and
so enjoyed.
Also, there are occasional hints in The Prince and the Discourses that some acquisitions can be harmful to
the body that acquires them. In The Prince Machiavelli first raises the possibility of such acquisitions when he tells
his reader that to keep an acquisition the prince must ensure that the acquired body becomes “one whole body” with
the acquiring body [P 3:9]. If the new acquisition instead remains disparate with respect to the prince’s other
possessions, then he runs the risk of losing it. A powerful foreigner can easily gain the lesser powers in a disparate
province, since the lesser powers, moved by their envy of their rulers, quickly and willingly make “one mass” with
the foreign invader [P 3:11]. A prince who rules a disparate state, and who fails to prevent powerful foreigners from
taking advantage of this disparity, will soon lose his new acquisition, and “while he holds it, [he] will have infinite
difficulties and vexations within it” [P 3:11]. So acquisitions can be harmful to the prince and his state as long as
they remain disparate with his other possessions; in general, Machiavelli claims, “the disparity in the subject”
explains why some conquerors hold their acquisitions while others lose them [P 4:19]. This disparity can be
eliminated, and the new acquisition made into one whole body with the acquiring state, by eliminating the new
acquisition’s memory of its previous way of life [P 4:19] – that is, by making the acquisition more complete.
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 29
Acquisition in Machiavelli’s account thus resembles nutrition, in that the acquired body must become like
the acquiring body before it can be good for the acquiring body. As long as an acquisition remains disparate, it
remains undigested, and a cause of “difficulties and vexations.” But it is not until he considers cities and
principalities that live under their own laws before they are acquired that Machiavelli suggests that some
acquisitions are by their nature indigestible. Considering the case of a city, he claims at first that “a city used to
living free may be held more easily by means of its own citizens than in any other mode, if one wants to preserve it
[P 5:20]. But Machiavelli soon admits that this is impossible: “in truth there is no secure mode to possess them
other than to ruin them” [P 5:20]. The acquisition of a free city is necessarily harmful: “whoever becomes patron of
a city accustomed to living free and does not destroy it, should expect to be destroyed by it” [P 5:20-21]. The
indigestibility of such a city results, as we might expect, from the persistence of the memory of its way of life,
despite length of time, benefits received, and anything short of destruction [P 5:21]. So the only secure way for a
prince to keep such an acquisition is to eliminate it, or to live in it – that is, rather than digesting it, to be digested by
it [P 5:21].
This marks the extent of Machiavelli’s admission in The Prince that some acquisitions are not good for the
acquiring body. In the Discourses he writes that “[t]he intention of whoever makes war through choice – or, in
truth, ambition – is to acquire and maintain the acquisition, and to proceed with it so that it enriches and does not
impoverish the country and his fatherland” [D II.6.1:140]. Machiavelli thereby admits that there can be acquisitions
that are not good. A later chapter title, “That Acquisition by Republics That Are Not Well Ordered and That Do Not
Proceed According to Roman Virtue Are for Their Ruin, Not Their Exaltation” [D II.19.T:172], suggests that virtue
might be the necessary and sufficient condition that makes acquisitions good, though Machiavelli ends the chapter
by suggesting that “acquiring was about to be pernicious for the Romans in the times when they proceeded with so
much prudence and so much virtue” [D II.19.2:175]. His most general remark about the goodness of acquisition in
the Discourses comes in a chapter whose title proclaims its concern in part with the causes that eliminate the
memories of things, where Machiavelli asserts in passing that “in simple bodies, when very much superfluous matter
has gathered together there, nature many times moves by itself and produces a purge that is the health of that body”
[D II.5.2:140]. But this remark about the goodness of acquisition, like the analogous discussion in The Prince,
reduces goodness to similarity to the acquiring body: that is, it reduces the good to what is one’s own. It does not
point to the an account in terms of a good that is independent of one’s own.
12
Almost, because the presence of other competing desires to acquire is likely not the only source of formative
effects on the desire to acquire. To the extent that circumstances resist acquisition – one is not strong enough, for
example, to climb the tree to reach the desired apple – the desire to acquire is also given form. But these formative
effects are presumably not as lasting as political ones. If they were, then our common experience of infantile
weakness would yield in everyone the humor of the people.
13
Here Machiavelli writes, “in other principalities” than the Roman empire, “one has to contend only with the
ambition of the great and the insolence of the people” [P 19:76]. In the Roman empire one had to contend as well
with the cruelty and avarice of the soldiers.
14
Later in the same chapter Machiavelli will reformulate this distinction, writing, “the great want to oppress and the
people want not to be oppressed” [P 9:39]. The disappearance of command from his formulation calls for an
explanation, and Machiavelli provides one in the sequel when he claims, “when a prince who founds on the people
knows how to command,” among other things, “he will see he has laid his foundations well” [P 9:41], since
“citizens and subjects” can become “accustomed to receive commands” [P 9:42]. Where oppression is concerned,
the great and the people have nothing in common; but they do have something in common where command that is
not oppressive is concerned. Command is thus the closest thing to a political solution to the existence of two
humors.
15
One difference between the perspectives of The Prince and the Discourses is signaled by Machiavelli’s different
description of the desires of the two humors in the two works. ‘Command and oppress’ in The Prince becomes
‘dominate’ in the Discourses. In the former work Machiavelli distinguishes between kinds of domination; in the
latter he does not.
16
Mansfield writes that according to Machiavelli, morality
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 30
is controlled by natural temperament, by the two humors that divide all mankind and underlie all
moral behavior and opinion. By speaking of humors Machiavelli indicates that they are not habits
of the mind nor mental in origin but prerational dispositions. Not being rational in nature, they
cannot be reconciled by speech or argument. These are two human types who do not understand
each other – the one preferring security and comfort, suspicious of anyone who desires more, the
other seeking risk and demanding honor, unbelieving that anyone could be satisfied with less [MV,
24].
17
Machiavelli’s sudden shift from the plural to the singular in the course of this passage is both striking and
puzzling. Could he mean to imply that men can be made to feel secure in their possession if only one man among
them – their prince, for example, who in a sense has what they have – acquires something new?
18
“It is an easy thing to know whence arises among peoples this affection for a free way of life for it is seen through
experience that cities have never expanded either in dominion or in riches if they have not been in freedom” [D
II.2.1:129]. Moreover, if a republic “will not molest others, it will be molested, and from being molested will arise
the wish and the necessity to acquire” [D II.19.1:173]. The desire to acquire is also an effect of the desire for
freedom.
19
There is a similar but less detailed account in the previous and first chapter of the Discourses. Since all cities are
either founded by natives or by foreigners, and all foreigners were natives elsewhere, then the original foundation of
cities
occurs when it does not appear, to inhabitants dispersed in many small parts, that they live
securely, since each part by itself, both because of the site and because of the small number,
cannot resist the thrust of whoever assaults it; and when the enemy comes, they do not have time
to unite for their defense. Or if they did, they would be required to leave many of their
strongholds abandoned; and so they would come at once to be the prey of their enemies. So to
flee these dangers, moved either by themselves or by someone among them of greater authority,
they are restrained to inhabit together a place elected by them, more advantageous to live in and
easier to defend [D I.1.1:7].
20
That the command of one of the great produces a political struggle between the two humors indicates that this
command is not a perfect solution to the existence of the two humors. This is partly because the great continue to
desire to acquire by oppressing the people. But it is also because the satisfaction of the people’s desire to be free of
oppression cannot amount to a satisfaction of their more fundamental desire to acquire. Even a free people is
compelled to recognize the superiority of the great, whose fundamental desire they share, and to see this superiority
as an obstacle to the satisfaction of their desire to acquire. The result is envy: the desire that the great be deprived of
their superiority. Machiavelli acknowledges this difficulty early in The Prince, when he considers the challenges a
prince faces in holding a recently-acquired province that is disparate from those he already holds. “[T]he order of
things is such that as soon as a powerful foreigner enters a province, all those in it who are less powerful adhere to
him, moved by the envy they have against whoever has held power over them” [P 3:11]. Even or especially
founders face envy [P 6:25], though Machiavelli conceals this difficulty in his concluding exhortation of a prince to
seize Italy and free her from the barbarians [P 26:105]. Since envy persists among the people even when they are
free from oppression by the great, and arises among the great when they elevate one of their number to command the
people, Machiavelli distinguishes envy from fear [P 7:31; D II.P.1:123] and elevates it to a characteristic of human
beings in the Discourses. “[T]he envious nature of men,” he writes there, “has always made it no less dangerous to
find new modes and orders than to seek unknown waters and lands, because men are more ready to blame than to
praise the actions of others” [D I.P.1:15]. The political solution to the existence of the two humors is not just
command, but hidden command.
21
According to Machiavelli, there may be airborne intelligences, by contrast, who foresee future things by “natural
virtue” [D I.56.1:114].
22
This is not to deny that the people, and especially an oppressed people, might long for a future in which they are
free from oppression. But such a future would require that the great be deprived of their superiority. The people are
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 31
typically conservative as long as they cannot imagine a satisfaction for their envy. In a chapter titled “The Multitude
is Wiser and More Constant than a Prince,” Machiavelli admits that under a corrupt prince the people fear the
present more than the future, while under a corrupt people they fear the future more than the present, because in the
future a tyrant might emerge [D I.58.4:119]. But the corrupt case is not the typical one. Similarly, circumstances
might require the great to fear the loss of their acquisitions, rather than to desire further acquisitions – for example,
when threatened by a superior desire to acquire. But this is also an atypical case for the great.
23
Manlius’ fate points to another of Machiavelli’s remarks about goodness. Later in the Discourses, in a chapter
partly titled “For One Citizen Who Wishes to Do Any Good Work in His Republic by His Authority, It Is Necessary
First to Eliminate Envy” [D III.30.T:278], Machiavelli suggests first that “virtue and goodness” can eliminate envy,
and then characteristically revises his claim by adding that “goodness is not enough” [D III.30.1:279, 280] –
implying that virtue, if not sufficient, is at least necessary.
24
Extraordinary energy is needed for a prince to avoid the dangers of either being loved or being feared, according
to the Discourses. “One cannot hold exactly to the middle way,” Machiavelli writes, for our nature does not consent
to it, but it is necessary to mitigate those things that exceed with an excessive virtue” [D III.21.3:263; compare
22.3:266]. Perhaps most difficult is the apparently miraculous feat of ordering virtue and goodness in the same
human being. In the same work Machiavelli praises
the generosity of spirit of those [Roman] citizens whom, when put in charge of an army, the
greatness of their spirit lifted above every prince. They did not esteem kings, or republics; nothing
terrified or frightened them. When they later returned to private status, they became frugal,
humble, careful of their small competencies, obedient to the magistrates, reverent to their
superiors, so that it appears impossible that one and the same spirit underwent such change [D
III.25.1:272].
25
In a later formulation, Machiavelli writes that the prince “needs to have a spirit disposed to change as the winds of
fortune and variations of things command him” [P 18:70].
26
The theoretical mode of the peaceful exercise of the art of war involves reading histories and imitating some
excellent man in the past [P 14:60]. The practical and theoretical modes of the peaceful exercise of the art of war,
added to the wartime exercise of this art, make up the whole art of war, which Machiavelli says should be the only
art of the prince, because many times it enables men to acquire states, and it helps them to maintain them [P 14:58].
Machiavelli wrote a book called The Art of War.
27
Machiavelli repeats this reasoning in the Discourses. “Once one individual has made himself very familiar with a
region, he then understands with ease all new countries; for every country and every member of the latter have some
conformity together, so that one passes easily from the knowledge of one to the knowledge of the other” [D
III.39.2:298]. Without this familiarization with one’s own country, one comes to know new countries either never,
or only after a long time and with difficulty.
28
As Mansfield puts it,
Machiavelli adumbrates the modern scientific understanding of nature that, with Bacon, abandons
natural beings and begins the search for natural laws, but he does no more than adumbrate. Since
he approaches the question of the nature of nature from the standpoint of what is good for human
beings, he remains faithful to the fact that in morals and politics, different natures appear distinct
to us, above all the difference between good and evil [MV, 21].
I mean here to fill out the content of Machiavelli’s adumbration with respect to human nature, and to point out the
resulting tension between his abandonment of natural beings and his fidelity to the natural difference between good
and evil. One sign of this tension is that while the science of sites seems to entail a mechanical or hydrodynamic
account in which lifeless nature is primary [see, for example, P 25:98-99], the examples that Machiavelli offers for
the excellent human being to imitate are chiefly living beings [compare P 25:100-101]. It is not clear whether the
living or the nonliving is the primary category for Machiavelli’s comprehensive science.
�Black, Machiavelli on Human Nature, Page 32
29
A reader who remembers the example of Pope Alexander VI from The Prince might object at this point that
Alexander hoped to continue acquiring after his death, using his son Cesare Borgia as “his instrument” [P 11:46].
But acquisitions made through one’s offspring can be lost to death just as well as one’s own acquisitions, as long as
one’s offspring are also mortal [P 7:31-32]. Also, it may necessarily be the case that a prince’s instruments are
always inferior to him; had he lived, Alexander VI might not have made the errors that Cesare Borgia made
[compare P 7:32-33 with 18:70]. Lastly, the pleasure of an predicted acquisition might necessarily be poorer than
the pleasure of a real acquisition, if one has doubts about the possibility of enjoying it.
30
We learn by Machiavelli’s treatment of the same episode in the Discourses that the centurion with the “obstinate
spirit” was not in fact the initiator of the successful conspiracy. Rather, he was the instrument of a prefect, who was
himself driven to conspire against his emperor by the necessity imposed by the prefect’s fear of death [D
III.6.11:227]. This elaboration does not detract from Machiavelli’s admission that some human beings cannot be
compelled by the threat of death, and so his admission that his science of sites is not comprehensive.
31
There are other details in The Prince that raise similar doubts about the science of sites. For example, Machiavelli
suggests that “obedience to present necessities” is what makes human beings vulnerable to being deceived [P
18:70]. He seems to mean not just that necessities can be manipulated [compare D III.12.1:247], since a human
being would be no less excellent were he to be responsive to artificial necessities as well as to natural ones, nor just
that necessities can be apparent rather than real, since a science of sites would distinguish only real necessities.
Instead, he seems to mean to qualify his claim that it is sufficient for virtue to orient itself by necessity. In the same
chapter Machiavelli also warns that “the vulgar are taken in by the appearance and the outcome of a thing”; and
there is a similar passage in the Discourses where he writes, “all men are blind in this, in judging good or bad
counsel by the end” [D III.35.2:291]. Again, if necessity were as knowable as Machiavelli elsewhere claims that it
is, judging by the end would not be an instance of blindness or gullibility.
�
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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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"Everyone Sees How You Appear; Few Touch What You Are": Machiavelli on Human Nature
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Black, Jeff J. S., 1970-
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St. John's College
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2012-06-20
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Annapolis, MD
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Machiavelli, Niccolò, 1469-1527
Philosophy, Renaissance
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English
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Bib # 80134
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An account of the resource
Typescript of a lecture delivered on June 20, 2012 by Jeff Black as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series.
Mr. Black is a tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis. His talk is on exactly what constitutes human nature in the work of Machiavelli. In particular, he considers how this view has affected the way we see Machiavelli's works and what it has to teach us about his writings.
Type
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text
Deans
Graduate Institute
Summer lecture series
Tutors
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https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/1e9e51b80314fb05e958aefd2ecdf7d8.mp3
2121b78de4bcae6cae7f46883020ee8a
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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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00:44:45
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Courage, Insight, Sympathy, Solitude: The Genealogy of the Noble Type in Part Nine of <em>Beyond Good and Evil</em>.
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Boxel, Lise van
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St. John's College
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2012-08-01
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Annapolis, MD
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Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900. Jenseits von Gut und Böse. English
Nobility
Philosophy
Courage
Good and evil
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900
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English
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Bib # 80814
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on August 1, 2012, by Lise van Boxel as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series. <br /><br />Ms. van Boxel was a tutor at St. John's College. Her talk is on Nietzsche's <em>Geneology of Morals</em>. In particular, her talk examines what it is that makes up a "noble type" for Nietzsche by looking at a close reading of part nine of his work. Her lecture aims to point towards a positive definition of what the noble type in Nietzsche actually constitutes.
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Tutors
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https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/428cb0237da0e28f29f37b5fd07fdea1.mp3
40ef117944dd53194f904704fa9fdc0d
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Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series
Description
An account of the resource
The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a></strong>.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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Gimbel, Steven, 1968-
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Einstein's Jewish Science: Physics at the Intersection of Politics and Religion
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2012-07-11
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mp3
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on July 11, 2012 by Steven Gimbel as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series.
Gimbel's lecture is on the relationship between Judaism and Einstein's scientific thinking, in particular Einstein's unique convergence of science, religion, and politics. Gimbel holds the Edwin T. Johnson and Cynthia Shearer Johnson Distinguished Teaching Chair in the Humanities at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, where he also serves as Chair of the Philosophy Department. He received his bachelor's degree in Physics and Philosophy from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and his doctoral degree in Philosophy from the Johns Hopkins University, where he wrote his dissertation on interpretations and the philosophical ramifications of relativity theory.
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission: To make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. To make an audio recording of my lecture available on the St. John's College web site."
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sound
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Einstein, Albert, 1879-1955
Physics
Religion and science
Judaism--20th century
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English
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Bib # 80142
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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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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00:58:08
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LEC_Crockett_Steven_2015-07-01_ac
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Tocqueville's American Odyssey
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on July 1, 2015, by Steven Crockett as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series. <br /><br />Mr. Crockett is a tutor at St. John's College in Annapolis. His talk centers on the year of Tocqueville's journey to and in America that would become the foundation for his work <em>Democracy in America</em>. His talk looks at letters, reflections, and memorabilia from the young Tocqueville who at that time was only 25-26. It explores his initial reactions and how those would mature into his later works and related to events happening back in France.
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Crockett, Steven
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Annapolis, MD
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2015-07-01
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A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audio recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a copy of my typescript available online."
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sound
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mp3
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<a title="Typescript" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/323">Typescript</a>
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St. John's College
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Tocqueville, Alexis de, 1805-1859. Correspondence. Selections
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 1805-1859. De la démocratie en Amérique.
United States
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English
Graduate Institute
Summer lecture series
Tutors
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Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series
Description
An account of the resource
The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a></strong>.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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00:51:37
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Bib # 82743
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The Lost Idea of a Liberal Art
Description
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on July 8, 2015 by Daniel Harrell as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series.<br /><br /><span>Mr. Harrell is a tutor at St. John's College in Annapolis. His talk delves into the conversation surrounding the liberal arts education. In particular, he examines this argument through certain calls for "relevance" as well as the truth of the liberal arts in general. He further meditates on the relationship between the liberal arts and the world at large, and those tensions and rewards offered by a student of the liberal arts.</span>
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Harrell, Daniel
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Annapolis, MD
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2015-07-08
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A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audio recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a copy of my typescript available online."
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sound
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mp3
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<a title="Typescript" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/320">Typescript</a>
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St. John's College
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Education
Education, Humanistic
St. John's College (Annapolis, Md.)
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English
Graduate Institute
Summer lecture series
Tutors
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https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/7d9ba40240cf115ed55ee370db415660.mp3
35913a871c87e93a97369fba2d9f7935
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Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series
Description
An account of the resource
The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a></strong>.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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01:06:23
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LEC_Radasanu_Andrea_2014-07-30_ac
Title
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The Tragedy of Demosthenes in Thucydides' Peloponnesian War
Description
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on July 30, 2014, by Andrea Radasanu as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series.
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Radasanu, Andrea, 1973-
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Annapolis, MD
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2014-07-03
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A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audio recording of my lecture available online. Make typescript copies of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a copy of my typescript available online."
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sound
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mp3
Subject
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Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, English
Graduate Institute
Summer lecture series
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/3f0695cc8bf55422cb7f8b8dcce7fe2f.pdf
dfae78ce5397a4404e0da586c4926451
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Text
The Lost Idea of a Liberal Art
Daniel Harrell
July 8, 2015*
Contents
Introduction
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Acknowledgment
Introduction
The title of my lecture tonight, “The Lost Idea of a Liberal Art,” is meant to
express a worry I have about the future of liberal education. This puts me in a
sizable club. To have worries at all has become reflexive among those of us in
any way devoted to this education. And there is no end these days, it seems, to
prophecies, even pronouncements, of death. Type the words “death of liberal
education” into Google, and you get back such headlines as
Why Liberal Arts Education is Dying (or Already Dead)
Is the Four-Year, Liberal-Arts Education Model Dead?
The Death of Liberal Education
The Death of Liberal Education
Who Killed the Liberal Arts?
Liberals are Killing the Liberal Arts
Conservatives killed the liberal arts
In Our High-Tech World, Are the Liberal Arts Dead?
The Liberal Arts Are Dead; Long Live STEM
Jobs: The Economy, Killing Liberal Arts Education
The Liberal Arts Major: Would you like fries with that?
*A
lecture given on the Annapolis campus of St. John’s College.
1
�All these headlines, I think, have one thing in common. While they may disagree about the threat to liberal education, they agree in distinguishing liberal
education from the threat, as if the threat were external. The headlines make
you think something else is killing liberal education, whether it be liberals or
conservatives or technology or the economy. And it is hard to envision a defense of liberal education without such a distinction, even if headlines draw it
simplistically, or even inaccurately. For if liberal education itself were somehow
the threat, then death might well be liberal education’s best defense, but in
defeat. No surprise, then, that those of us devoted to liberal education are wont
to conceive its threats as if they came from outside it. For this justifies a defense
that succeeds only if liberal education survives.
And there is no shortage of such defenses. Type the words “defense of liberal
education” into Google, and you will find one, it seems, for every headline predicting the death of liberal education. And not just in articles. There are books
to defend liberal education, most recently a bestseller by Fareed Zakaria, bearing the title In Defense of a Liberal Education.1 There are blogs to defend
liberal education, including one at St. John’s featuring regular posts by Christopher Nelson, the Annapolis president.2 There are campaigns to defend liberal
education, with slogans like Securing America’s Future: The Power of Liberal
Arts Education, to mention just one initiative, launched in 2012 by the Council
of Independent Colleges.3 And behind these campaigns are associations to defend liberal education, like the just-mentioned Council of Independent Colleges,
or the Association of American Colleges and Universities, or the Association for
General and Liberal Studies, or the Association for Core Texts and Courses, or
the American Academy for Liberal Education. There are so many defenders of
liberal education, in fact, that you can even find think-pieces pondering why
they seem to have failed, since liberal education remains in peril.
But what if the defenders have succeeded—by putting liberal education in peril?
What if the threat to liberal education comes from within? This is my worry.
Let the idea of a liberal art, for the moment, simply mean whatever it is that
distinguishes a liberal education from any other form of education—a technical
education, say. What if our many defenses of liberal education have made us
forget this idea? What if the idea of a liberal art is lost?
Back to top
1 Other books include Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters by Michael
S. Roth; and College: What It Was, Is, And Should be by Andrew Delbanco.
2 Other blogs include “The LEAP Challenge Blog,” sponsored by the Association of American Colleges and Universities; and The Power of Liberal Arts “Blogs” page, sponsored by the
Council of Independent Colleges, that gathers blog posts defending liberal education.
3 Other campaigns include Liberal Education and America’s Promise, launched in 2005 by
the Association of American Colleges and Universities.
2
�Part One
Now in one sense, I think, the threat to liberal education must always come from
within. The fate of liberal education, after all, will not be decided in headlines,
but in choices made by each of us about the best education, once education
matters. Not the best education, then, in general, as such, per se; but the best
education for my daughter, or my son, or me. In having to make such choices,
those devoted to liberal education are no different from those dismissive of it.
And in this respect, the threat to liberal education can never lie outside it. To
pursue an education at all, liberal or no, is to have answered a question that a
liberal education obliges each of us to ask, and ask on our own behalf: What
does it mean to be educated? And we might well answer this question in a
choice against liberal education, even at the risk of its extinction, if the same
choice is made repeatedly. But this is perhaps the best evidence we have that
the question is real, and the threat to liberal education therefore intrinsic to
it. The death of liberal education, so understood, would similarly come from
within, in a proof of its life, and perhaps the only proof of life.
But again, those of us devoted to liberal education are unlikely to want this
death, especially just to show we were devoted to something rather than nothing.
And while the threat may be internal in this general sense, it is still external, I
think, in a specific sense. For if the threat to liberal education does come from
within, in a question it would have us ask for ourselves about what it means to
be educated, then while we may well answer this question in a choice against
liberal education, we may also answer the question otherwise, by choosing liberal
education. Liberal education would then be a second answer to the question,
opposed to the first. And insofar as one answer opposes the other, the threat
to liberal education would be external.
But if the threat is external, as one answer opposed to another, then we can
infer at least one thing, I think, about any defense of liberal education against
this threat. It will have to convince us that liberal education does provide an
answer, even for those who give a different answer. It will have to show us
that something is lost in a choice against liberal education, whatever might be
gained; and that the answer we give in such a choice, even if it turns out right,
risks being wrong. And showing this much, it seems, means showing there is
something learned in liberal education, that would otherwise go unlearned. To
show, in short, that liberal education has a subject-matter. Or, in a word:
content.
But what, then, is this content? What should we say is learned in a liberal
education alone? Traditionally, the content of a liberal education was identified
with a curriculum of seven liberal arts, a so-called trivium of grammar, logic, and
rhetoric; and a quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Each
of these arts was thought to wed a skill to a subject. And together, these arts
were thought to form a whole. This is why one could say there was something to
learn in a liberal education, rather than many things, or anything, or nothing.
3
�This is also what I want to say is contained in the idea of a liberal art: a skill
wedded to a subject, in a whole of such skills and subjects, that gives a liberal
education its content.
But one might also suspect that a liberal education has no content in this sense,
and that the liberal arts as traditionally conceived show us why. They were
learned, after all, by the few rather than the many—the leisured few, in that
sense already free from servitude. Perhaps the education they received was
‘liberal,’ then, not in liberating them, but in shaping them, stamping them, and
perpetuating them. And the same might be suspected of any content. For in
what sense could we be freed by it, rather than bound to it? What distinguishes
content, so-called, from dogma, or doctrine? What keeps it from closing the
mind that a truly liberal education is meant to open?
This suspicion of content can also come from the opposite direction, so to speak:
by what we take to threaten liberal education, or indeed any form of education.
For leaving headlines aside, this threat can seem to reflect a kind of triumph of
content over context, from college rankings and scorecards at the start, to tests
and grades at the end, making the very meaning of education a matter of datadriven results; and a choice against liberal education the answer to a question
never asked. Or we might conceive this threat in economic terms, reducing
education to just another a product with a price in the global marketplace.
Against all this, the first thing we might think to say in defense of education is
that products are not enough, results are not enough, answers are not enough,
content is not enough.
Defenses of liberal education, accordingly, have generally made education a
matter of context rather than content. And the most common way of doing this
is to locate learning not in a set of subjects, but instead in the self. Thus it is
said that “the maturation of the student—not information transfer—is the real
purpose of colleges and universities.” Or that “if we are to navigate skillfully
the turbulent changes of the twenty-first century, we must educate students not
only to process information effectively, but to think wisely and well.”
And talk of turbulent changes points to another way that defenses of liberal
education have made it a matter of context: by locating the self in an everchanging world. A good example comes from an address by President Nelson:
With boundaries among the disciplines vanishing, with job requirements and needs changing rapidly, we need citizens prepared for
change, prepared to adapt to jobs that do not yet exist, prepared
to enter an unknown world with a kind of fearless determination to
undertake whatever is required to succeed. We will need skills of
inquiry to enter a world we cannot yet even envision.
We can begin to see from this quote why making liberal education a matter
of context rather than content, means forgetting, more or less deliberately, the
4
�idea of a liberal art. For suppose we did live in a world that changes more than
it abides, where our freedom, to the extent this depended on skill, were a matter
of adaptation more than application. Any art that deserved the name ‘liberal’,
in that case, would involve a skill more likely divorced from any subject than
wedded to one; which is to say, a skill that can be applied to many subjects, even
to every subject. And suppose the number of such subjects to have multiplied
past counting, in one way the world indeed seems to have changed, since the
advent of modern science. If the liberal arts could still be said to encompass a
set of subjects, then it would seem better understood as a diversity than as a
totality.
So once defenses of liberal education make it a matter of context, it is unsurprising that they separate its skills from its subjects. The subjects, if they are
specified at all, are specified to give an impression of breadth, as if there were
many things one might learn in a liberal education rather than just one. The
current St. John’s website, for example, speaks of the college’s “wide-ranging, interdisciplinary curriculum,” where “areas of study include philosophy, literature,
history, mathematics, economics, political theory, theology, biology, physics,
music, chemistry, and languages.” Other lists of subjects are even more expansive. One from the earlier-mentioned Power of Liberal Arts campaign makes it
sound as if you might study anything:
You might be surprised by the kinds of subjects and majors that are
included in the liberal arts. They include much more than studio
art and English classes (though those are great!)—they range from
mathematics to Mandarin, from statistics to sociology. At liberal
arts colleges and universities students can study the sciences—such
as biology, chemistry, and physics—and social sciences—including
economics, political science, and psychology. Students can study
newer subjects, such as environmental science and neuroscience, and
traditional ones, too.
This same impression of breadth is given in the way defenses of liberal education
present its skills apart from subjects. You can indeed learn anything, then, in
learning how to learn. And this encompasses a range of skills similarly presented
apart from subjects: how to read, how to write, how to speak, even how to
think.4 St. John’s current way of putting this is to claim that its students “learn
to speak articulately, read attentively, reason effectively, and think creatively.”
In a similar vein, defenses of liberal education will call the liberal arts “transferable skills,” 5 , again against the backdrop of an ever-changing job market.
And “usefulness” has become a ubiquitous word to counter the opinion, and
4A
good example of this is found in Fareed Zakaria, “What is the Earthly Use of Liberal
Education.”
5 “Although modern liberal arts curriculums have an updated choice of a larger range of
subjects, it still retains the core aims of the liberal arts curricula maintained by the medieval
universities: to develop well-rounded individuals with general knowledge of a wide range
5
�the traditional conviction, that the liberal arts are useless. It is more generally
the habit in defenses of liberal education to talk of the liberal arts as if they
empowered us rather than enlightened us—the aforementioned Power of Liberal
Arts campaign being the most explicit example.
There are deeper strains in this line of defense, that try to reach beyond a
liberal education’s usefulness for any career, to the way it might be useful for
life, making the self, in sense, the subject of its skills. A liberal arts education can
be “truly, enduringly useful,” so one recent defense puts it, once it is “oriented
towards the question of how to live.” Or as President Nelson has written:
The primary purpose of college—contrary to the opinion of hiring
managers—is not to provide trained-up workers for business, nor
even to provide young people with the skills needed to make a living.
The primary purpose is to help young people develop the character
and the judgment to shape a life worth living.
In these appeals to the way a life might be shaped, defenses of liberal education
might be said to deepen the sense in which liberal education is a matter of
context, not content, by locating what is learned in a cultivated readiness for the
world, whatever the world may hold. Here is how a recent St. John’s graduate
puts it:
After my two-year commitment with Teach For America, I hope to
continue my work in the field of education. But really, I can do
anything. St. John’s has given me the tools: the ability to listen,
to think, to speak, to write, and ultimately, to act. I need only to
decide where to direct my passion, and the world is mine, thanks to
the incredible education I have had the blessing to receive here. 6
And there are ways to deepen this context still further; the most common being
to take this readiness for the world as an openness to the world, whether the
self so opened is described as curious, inquisitive, imaginative, self-critical, or
sympathetic. Thus we find Martha Nussbaum, to pick on a famous example,
defending liberal education insofar as it develops
1. The capacity for Socratic self-criticism and critical thought about one’s
own traditions.
2. The ability to see oneself as a member of a heterogeneous nation and
world.
of subjects and with mastery of a range of transferable skills. They will become ‘global
citizens’, with the capacity to pursue lifelong learning and become valuable members of their
communities.” http://www.topuniversities.com/blog/what-liberal-arts-education
6 This comes from Grace Tyson, “‘When You Know Better, You Do Better’: A Senior’s
Reflections on St. John’s. Parts of this address are also quoted in Christopher Nelson, Is It
Worth It?.
6
�3. The ability to sympathetically imagine the lives of people different from
oneself.
And as suggested by Nussbaum’s reference to Socrates, the sense in which a truly
liberal education opens minds rather than closes them has particular appeal at
St. John’s, where it would now sound antiquated to claim, as Scott Buchanan
did in the first catalog of the New Program, that the liberal arts put us in
possession of the truth.7 What we say instead is self-consciously Socratic. Thus
President Nelson will say that “liberal education is the best and quickest way to
become comfortable not knowing.” Or that “learning is grounded in recognition
and acceptance of one’s own ignorance.” Or as the same St. John’s graduate I
quoted earlier puts it:
I have learned that great questions lead to more and more questions,
not necessarily to answers, and I have learned that the greatness of
the human spirit shows itself in just this realization. As Socrates says
in Plato’s Meno: “We shall be better and braver and less helpless if
we think that we ought to enquire, than we should have been if we
indulged in the idle fancy that there was no knowing and no use in
seeking to know what we do not know.” We must have intellectual
bravery, that is, the courage to push forward, to continue seeking
truth even in the face of doubts about its very existence.
It is this same Socratic self-consciousness that explains how St. John’s can make
even an all-required program of books, which might thought inescapably full of
content, into a matter of context. For anything written down, we might claim,
is simply doctrine, until a reader puts it into dialogue by questioning it rather
than assimilating it. And underlying this shift from doctrine to dialogue is
perhaps the deepest belief one can have about a truly liberal education: that
we are only able to learn, truly learn, insofar as we do this for ourselves. It
would seem to follow directly from this that what we learn is found indeed in
the self, or even the soul, rather than in a set of subjects. And the more liberal
an education becomes, so we could say, the more that what we learn is a matter
of how we learn, and who we become in learning it. Which at this college, at
least, means the more that any so-called subject is found in a book, which is
found in a reader of that book, who is found in a conversation about that book,
which brings the book to life, with all it may contain. And this conversation,
both with others and with oneself, might then be said to exemplify the sense in
which a liberal education is ultimately a matter of context rather than content.
For this is an education in selfhood rather than subjects, where the something
we finally learn is what it means to learn, and even what it means to love it.
The suspicion that a truly liberal education has no content, then, can be cast in
terms that encompass what many of us, I think, might say a liberal education
7 “The arts of apprehending, understanding, and knowing the truth are the liberal arts, and
they set their own ends.” (Bulletin of St. John’s College in Annapolis, 1937–38).
7
�finally is, and where any appeal to a number of liberal arts seems beside the
point. St. John’s even tried dropping any reference to the liberal arts, along
with any mention of liberal education, when it first launched its new website,
as if indeed to forget the whole idea. But it did this, I think, to locate the
place of a liberal education in the present rather than the past. It was only a
matter of months before the college restored these references to its website, since
there were prospective students still using such terms to find such things. But
St. John’s has otherwise remained embarked, like nearly every other liberal arts
college in the country, on a communications project carried out in images rather
than text, in the attempt not simply to say what a liberal education is, but to
show it, and capture something about the experience of a liberal education when
mere explanations are thought no longer enough. Gone are the days when the
college could package its education, as it were, in a brown paper wrapper, as if
the education were not only a matter of content, but the kind of content that
couldn’t be seen from outside. Even the first video St. John’s made of itself, back
in 1954, was mostly staged and performed in vignettes, retaining at least that
much separation from the ongoing world. But it is just this separation that is
now deemed better erased than preserved, leading to efforts that range from the
Summer Academy to the college’s Instagram feed, as if to give the impression
that what separates the college from the outside world is only a window, and
a window more often open than shut. At its worst, this project might be said
to pander or flatter rather than inform or educate; but at its best, it might be
said to make St. John’s finally look like a college rather than a cult. Or to put
the sense of this strategy more generally: it tries to defend liberal education by
locating the place of liberal education within the world rather than apart from
it. —And this is perhaps the most visible way that a liberal education is now
being made a matter of context rather than content.
Back to top
Part Two
By this point in my lecture, however, I think one could make an objection. For
I haven’t yet given any grounds for worrying about any of this. If we have lost
the idea of a liberal art, by making liberal education a matter of context rather
than content, then at most all I have shown so far is that we have lost this
idea deliberately, in what might be called an act of forgetting. So let me now
explain my worry, which the rest of the lecture will try to justify. My worry is
that in losing this idea, more or less deliberately, we risk another loss beyond
our control: which is to lose any way of giving a clear and compelling answer
to the question of what it means to be educated. —Which is to say, an answer
that distinguishes liberal education from any other form of education; and that
sheds any light, in turn, on what is lost in a choice against liberal education,
whatever might be gained. I worry, then, that once the idea of a liberal art is
lost in defense of liberal education, the defense is lost. And once the defense is
8
�lost, liberal education is lost.
To begin to see all this, I want now to revisit the various ways that defenses
of liberal education have made it a matter of context. For example: the basic
set of skills, again separated from subjects, that defenses of liberal education
claim are imparted by it. There is no doubt that learning how to learn, along
with how to read, write, speak, and think, are useful skills; and one might even
grant their necessity for a life lived in freedom. But it is hard to see how these
skills belong to a liberal education rather than to any education. And the more
indispensable these skills sound, the harder it is to conceive them as liberal
rather than remedial. Shouldn’t we already know how to learn, and read, write,
speak, and think, before we go to college?
There are, of course, ways to specify such skills, but they reflect another aspect
of the problem. To recall St. John’s way of doing this, in a liberal education
you learn how to speak articulately, read attentively, reason effectively, think
creatively. But are we we then to believe that you’ll be left speaking inarticulately, reading inattentively, reasoning ineffectively, or thinking uncreatively,
if you choose another kind of education—say, to pursue a degree in computer
programming? This is doubtful. But if so, then what again distinguishes a
liberal education from any education?
The same problem emerges from the attempt to distinguish a liberal education
on higher-sounding grounds. In one of his blogposts, for example, President
Nelson writes: “St. John’s College is the right fit for someone who is seeking
a special sort of education—an education in the arts of freedom, an education
in how to make learning and life their own.” But one could ask how such encompassing terms could distinguish a St. John’s education from any education,
or even from human experience as such. For isn’t the distinction between experience and innocence, or experience and endurance, found in just the kind
of learning, and living, that is necessarily one’s own? Or suppose we take our
bearings from Socrates, and claim that St. John’s will teach you intellectual
courage: how to persevere in the pursuit of knowledge rather than yield in the
face of ignorance. Perhaps St. John’s will, but so then will any field of research
one might pursue, it could be argued, that relies on science to reach its results
rather than superstition. And direct appeals to Socrates, as if the Enlightenment never happened, won’t be enough to distinguish St. John’s in particular,
or liberal education more generally, on the matter of intellectual courage.
But there is a whole other side to this problem. Insofar as it becomes hard to
distinguish a liberal education from any education when it is made a matter
of context, it becomes easy to make a choice against liberal education merely
by wanting an education with content. To consider this problem from one
angle, take the penchant in education nowadays for testing and ranking and
training and specializing. It may be good and even necessary to speak against
all this in defense of liberal education. But this risks the impression that a
liberal education is an education for dilettantes, providing an escape from being
challenged or judged or driven or dedicated. And what can be said to correct
9
�this impression, if in a liberal education, these virtues are matters of context
rather than content? Matters, that is, about which nothing more, really, can
be said, but only shown—where you see such students for yourself? Or even be
such a student yourself? For as one noted defender of liberal education, Andrew
Delbanco, has put it:
One of the difficulties in making the case for liberal education against
the rising tide of skepticism is that it is almost impossible to persuade
doubters who have not experienced it for themselves. The Puritan
founders of our oldest colleges would have called it “such a mystery
as none can read but they that know it.”
This way of putting the problem captures what is potentially self-defeating in
defenses of liberal education that make it a matter of context. For if the point of
any defense is to persuade people to experience liberal education for themselves,
then how can there be a defense that depends on such an experience to be
persuasive?
There are, of course, ways of trying to capture this experience in images, as
I earlier discussed in the case of St. John’s. But this same case reflects the
problem. If we make its education a matter of context, by showing a student
playing croquet, or reading a book on a bench near a tree, or even speaking
with passion and eloquence about how much her education means, we haven’t
yet distinguished St. John’s from any other college where such things might
be said or done—even though St. John’s is unique, in having renounced the
elective system and established an all-required curriculum. But St. John’s is
unique, then, as a matter of content, not context. And something similar by
way of distinction-erasing might be said of the defenses of liberal education more
generally. For if these defenses were products of a liberal education, one might
have expected them to reflect a diversity of views, or an originality of thought.
But so far as these defenses make liberal education a matter of context, and
speak of the kind of skills one needs to flourish in life, it becomes hard not
to speak in platitudes or commonplaces. And indeed these defenses more or
less follow a script: In an ever-changing world, now more than ever, we need
the truly useful arts of a liberal education. Even President Nelson hasn’t quite
managed to liberate himself from this script, even though I regard him as a
gifted writer, who is making the most of the script.
Still, I suspect that those of us devoted to liberal education will need more than
a script to survive. And if my lecture so far is right, this means finding what
we have lost, or recollecting what we have forgotten. So in the time I have left,
I want to sketch one way back to the idea of a liberal art.
Back to top
10
�Part Three
To take the first step back, I want you to imagine that we have shut every
window at St. John’s College, and drawn every curtain; as if St. John’s were
indeed a cult. Or to put this more generously: as if the place of liberal education
were not within the world but apart from it. But why would we believe this? We
would believe it, I think, because of something we believed about the freedom
promised by a liberal education. We would take this freedom to be important
enough, yet fragile enough, to protect its pursuit. We would regard this freedom
as invaluable, then, but not indispensable. A life could be lived, and even lived
well, without it. And this would be why its pursuit would need protection from
the outside world. For it would be a freedom that might well be forgotten in the
living of life; or even dismissed, or denied—for example, in the choice of another
form of education. Or in the quest for power, or the drive to succeed. The kind
of freedom that someone like Meno might not want, but that his slave-boy might
need, to be free at all. The kind of freedom, then, that might be possessed even
by those in chains, or in prison, or in poverty. The kind of freedom we can still
possess at the moment of death, when there is no life left to live. The kind of
freedom you can count on, then, not when you might do anything, but when you
can do nothing. At moments of life when you might be said to need a useless
skill, not a useful one.
But what kind of freedom could this be? The answer takes us a second step
back. For this would be a freedom, I think, that transcends the horizons of life,
and indeed be the freedom it is—perhaps the highest kind there is—in having
no horizons. But what does having no horizons mean? Here is one answer, and
to my mind the best answer: having no horizons means having the truth. And
a liberal education, then, would promise you the truth.
If this promise sounds ridiculous, then good. For if what I have so far argued
is right, then we are better off saying ridiculous things than obvious things in
defense of liberal education. But this promise, you’ll also have to admit, is
one way, and perhaps the simplest way, to claim that a liberal education has
content. And truth might be the only way to understand a content that frees
us rather than binds us. The promise of truth should also sound attractive,
at least if there is any chance to keep the promise. But perhaps you think no
liberal arts college these days would dare to make the promise. Well, you would
be wrong. At the time I write this sentence (which was yesterday), the college
whose curriculum most resembles St. John’s had the slogan “Truth Matters”
emblazoned across its home page. And this same college began its own defense
of liberal education by claiming that “to learn is to discover and grow in the
truth about reality. It is the truth, and nothing less, that sets men free.”
Now, I have to admit that the college in question is Thomas Aquinas. And
perhaps you would tell me their belief in truth is based on their belief in Christ.
I would agree, but hasten to add that St. John’s has a source of its own for
a belief in truth. Which takes us a third step back. For though we may not
11
�have to believe in Christ to believe in truth, perhaps we do have to believe in
Ptolemy.
But what do I mean by a belief in Ptolemy? To explain what I mean, and to
take yet another step back to the idea of a liberal art, I’m going to turn now not
to Ptolemy, but instead to Socrates; and indeed, a Socrates we are all familiar
with, from Plato’s Meno. I do this because if St. John’s can already be said to
believe in anything, it believes in this: you can only learn, truly learn, insofar
as you do this for yourself. But if Socrates’s myth of recollection to Meno can
be believed, then learning for yourself would be impossible, unless you somehow
already possessed whatever you might learn. Which is all but to say: unless
you somehow already had the truth. Of course, we might take this myth to
be merely myth; and one sign of its doubtfulness even at St. John’s can be
glimpsed in what I earlier quoted from a St. John’s graduate, when she claimed
that “We must have intellectual bravery, that is, the courage to push forward,
to continue seeking truth even in the face of doubts about its very existence.”
I think Socrates’s myth is meant to suggest, to the contrary, that all doubts
about truth’s existence are put to rest, as soon as we start to learn.
But I call this a suggestion, because the proof, I suspect, actually lies in
Socrates’s dramatic turn to the slave-boy, and a shift from myth to mathematics. Which brings me to my final step back. For it is in Socrates’s encounter
with the slave-boy, I think, that we can find the lost idea of a liberal art. And
to recover it, I now offer what I call a loose reading of this encounter.
The central question of this episode is: how long, exactly, is the side of an
eight-foot square? (Meno 82e) Now, as you no doubt know, because the line in
question is irrational, there is no answer to the question in terms of feet. But I
prefer to put this a different way. There is an answer, but only insofar as the
answer is made into a matter of research, with a divide-and-conquer approach.
And this is one way to describe the slave-boy’s initial stab at the question, when
he finds that the line in question is between 2 feet and 3 feet in length, before
giving up. (84a) But under one idea of intellectual courage, we could say, we
should not give up. And we could forge ahead, on the slave-boy’s behalf, in
further research, by dividing the 3 foot line even more. And putting the results
in suitably modern terms, we learn that the line in question is between 2.8
and 2.9 feet; then we learn it is between 2.82 and 2.83 feet; then we learn it is
between 2.828 and 2.829 feet. Or to put what we learn still more exactly: the
first number in the length of the line is 2; and the next is 8; and the next is
2; then 8; then 4; then 2; then 7; and so on. There would be no pattern in
the numbers thereby found, but this is what would make every number found
a genuine discovery, which carried us ever farther in truth, leading us from one
learned thing to the next. We could even say we were learning for ourselves,
and persevering in the pursuit of knowledge rather than yielding in the face of
ignorance. And I think this more or less captures the meaning of learning in
what I will call the idea of a field of research, which we have inherited from
modern science.
12
�But again, the slave-boy gives up on this approach at the very first number 2.
And Socrates doesn’t exhort him to keep at it, or show him how to divide the 3
foot line any further. Instead, Socrates says to the slave-boy: if you don’t want
to count the line out, then just show it to me. (84a) —It’s as if Socrates had a
different idea of intellectual courage, a different idea of learning, and a different
idea of how the question should be approached, forming a different discipline
from a field of research. And I think we can already say why. For while you
can certainly make the line in question a matter of research, you thereby put
it out of reach—as a matter of recognition. For there is no end to the numbers
you will find in the divide-and-conquer approach to the line in question. So
you are learning more and more about an object that you will never get to see,
and in that sense, never get to know. We will always be left, as it were, at the
first number we find, with an ever-expanding but never-vanishing horizon at the
latest number we find. Or more simply put, we will be seeking the truth, and
even advancing the truth, but never possessing the truth.
So what idea of approach does Socrates have in mind instead? We can see it
coming-to-be in the very next thing he does with the slave-boy. For the slaveboy is truly stumped, and can’t even show the line in question. For of course it
is not in front of the slave-boy yet; and in his mind, we might say, it is not yet
a matter of recognition, but still a matter of research, even though he’s given
the project up. So in perhaps his one outright act of teaching, giving birth, we
might say, to the very idea of a liberal art, Socrates simply draws the line in
question—erasing at once any remaining horizon of discovery, and showing we
are already in possession of the truth. (85a) And what he does in drawing this
line radically changes what it means for the slave-boy to learn. For this is no
longer to discover any more about the line in question, but instead to recognize
the line in question. Or perhaps I should say recollect the line in question. But
in either formulation, this means seeing that the line Socrates has drawn is
indeed the line in question. And the slave boy does this in yet another act of
recognition, when he sees that the figure Socrates draws, upon the line that he
draws, is indeed the eight-foot square in question.
But let me try to clarify this by generalizing it. Let us suppose that Socrates
has asked the slave-boy a more encompassing question. Such as: “Why do
the heavens move as they do?” One way to answer this question is again to
make it a matter of research, producing fields and even sub-fields of research,
in a divide-and-conquer approach to the question. But this risks putting the
matter beyond the reach of recognition. True, we will learn more and more about
heavenly motions in this approach; but there is no promise that we will ever learn
enough to finally answer the question. And this reflects one way to understand
learning, leading to one interpretation of “astronomy,” that we have inherited
from modern science. But there is still another way to understand learning,
leading to another interpretation of “astronomy,” that we have inherited from
ancient science, and that promises us an answer, in promising us the truth. And
a college like ours is committed to it, I think, if we believe that learning is a
finally a matter of recognition.
13
�So another way of answering the question “Why do the heavens move as they
do?” that we can still call “astronomy,” produces a liberal art. And in this
approach, strange as it may sound, we can simply answer the question, in already
possessing the truth. We don’t even have to stop at one answer: Ptolemy, as
I recall, gives us two—suggesting that the truth is more generous than frugal.
And we don’t even need any telescopes. All we have to do is draw lines just
like Socrates did, that allow us to see, or more exactly see again, the object in
question. Which in this more encompassing case is the motion of the heavens;
hence we have to draw the lines—circles, basically—that allow us to see again,
and in that sense to recognize, the very motions of the heavens we were asking
about. And in this way we can give a true account of these motions, since this
account allows us not simply to explain what we see, as if to move past it, but
to recognize what we see, in a recovery of it.
But now suppose we made the question Socrates asks the slave-boy allencompassing—something like: “Why is the world the way it is?” In one
approach—let us call this a technical education—we would be led into ever-more
numerous fields of research to answer the question, with no promise that we
will ever recover the world by the end, in an act of recognition. But in another
approach—let us call this a liberal education—we would be led to seven liberal
arts to answer the question, where this recovery of the world in an act of
recognition is precisely the point. And this is why, I think, these antique seven
arts might still be said to form a whole, that gives a truly liberal education its
content.
But let me say one final thing in this spirit of recollection on behalf of St. John’s
College. Let us suppose that the truth is very generous. So generous, that when
we ask the question “Why is the world the way it is?” there is not just one
answer, or two answers, or seven answers, but something closer to a hundred.
And let us suppose that the lines that might be drawn to produce this hundred
are drawn, not to form squares, or circles, but letters; and that the letters are
suitably arranged in words, sentences, paragraphs, to compose what we might
call “books.” Any of the hundred so-called books, in that case, would allow us
to recover the world in an act of recognition. And we could recognize the world
in such a book, by reading it with the same generosity possessed by the truth.
The book would be inescapably be full of content, in being inescapably full of
truth. These are the books I think we read at the college, and believe in. And
in being full of truth, they give, to any conversation at the college that brings
them to life, a purpose, and a point, beyond that life; proving there is more,
even to life, than life. Truth.
14
�Acknowledgment
Much of the thinking in this lecture is indebted to Barbara McClay. So I wanted
to thank her for that, and dedicate the lecture to her. For more on her own
defense of liberal education, which is much better than the defenses I discuss
here, see:
“In Defense of Liberal Arts”
“ ‘What is Liberal Education For?’: A Preview”
“We’re All Pinmakers Now: Liberal Education in a Specialized Age”
“With Friends Like These”
Back to top
15
�
Dublin Core
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Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series
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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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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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paper
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15 pages
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The Lost Idea of a Liberal Art
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Typescript of a lecture delivered on July 8, 2015 by Daniel Harrell as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series.
Mr. Harrell is a tutor at St. John's College in Annapolis. His talk delves into the conversation surrounding the liberal arts education. In particular, he examines this argument through certain calls for "relevance" as well as the truth of the liberal arts in general. He further meditates on the relationship between the liberal arts and the world at large, and those tensions and rewards offered by a student of the liberal arts.
Creator
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Harrell, Daniel
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
Date
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2015-07-08
Rights
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A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audio recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a copy of my typescript available online."
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text
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pdf
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English
Identifier
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Bib # 82742
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<a title="Audio recording" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/275">Audio recording</a>
Subject
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Education, Humanistic
Education
St. John's College (Annapolis, Md.)
Graduate Institute
Summer lecture series
Tutors
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series
Description
An account of the resource
The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a></strong>.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Contributor
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
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paper
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18 pages
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Toqueville's American Odyssey
Description
An account of the resource
Typescript of a lecture delivered on July 1, 2015 by Steven Crockett as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series.<br /><br /><span>Mr. Crockett is a tutor at St. John's College in Annapolis. His talk centers on the year of Tocqueville's journey to and in America that would become the foundation for his work <em>Democracy in America</em>. His talk looks at letters, reflections, and memorabilia from the young Tocqueville who at that time was only 25-26. It explores his initial reactions and how those would mature into his later works and related to events happening back in France.</span>
Creator
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Crockett, Steven
Publisher
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St. John's College
Coverage
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Annapolis, MD
Date
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2015-07-01
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an 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."
Type
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text
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pdf
Language
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English
Identifier
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Bib # 83173
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<a title="Audio recording" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/272">Audio recording</a>
Subject
The topic of the resource
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 1805-1859. De la démocratie en Amérique.
United States
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 1805-1859. Correspondence. Selections
Graduate Institute
Summer lecture series
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The Very Pictures of Education: On Rousseau’s Illustrations in Emile
Do great books need pictures?
This question arises once we notice that some great books have pictures, while others do
not. Once printing began to spread through Europe, in the sixteenth century, great books began
to appear with engravings, called frontispieces, placed at their beginnings. Francis Bacon’s
Great Instauration (1620) [Slide 1],1 whose frontispiece depicts two ships passing beyond the
Pillars of Hercules – that is, the Strait of Gibraltar – in search of a new world; Thomas Hobbes’s
Leviathan (1651) [Slide 2], whose frontispiece depicts the incorporation of the body politic, the
sovereign, from the bodies of its subjects; and Giambattista Vico’s New Science (1725) [Slide 3],
whose frontispiece depicts a collection of objects of allegorical significance, meant to help the
reader’s memory of the idea of the work [NS 1]2 are three famous seventeenth and eighteenthcentury examples. But by the nineteenth century, the use of frontispieces seems to have ended,
although the technology needed to include them remained available. Some authors of great
books seem to have chosen not to include pictures, then, though it was possible for them to do
so.
This historical record tempts us to dismiss the use of pictures as a fashion in printing.
But our question – do great books need pictures? – recurs from another, more serious,
perspective. Ever since Plato’s Socrates raised, in the Phaedrus, the possibility that a piece of
writing could be composed according to “some necessity” that dictates the order of its parts and
their suitability “to each other and to the whole” [264b-c],3 we have been reminded to ask
whether the author of a great book can give an account of the reason for its parts, according to
this principle of logographic necessity. From the perspective of this principle, then, the
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difference between those authors who could have added pictures to their great books and did, and
those authors who could have but did not, looks like evidence not of a historical fad, but of a
disagreement over whether great books need pictures. This disagreement concerns us, as readers
of great books, not least because their contemporary publishers sometimes disagree with their
authors about the need for their pictures, and omit them from their editions, without notice.
Tonight I mean to consider Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s answer to this question – ‘do great
books need pictures?’ – by examining some of the pictures Rousseau provided for his great
books. Each of the three books that Rousseau says make up his “system,” the Discourse on the
Sciences and the Arts (1750), the Discourse on Inequality (1754), and Emile (1762) [CW 5:575]4
has a frontispiece; Emile also has four additional illustrations, so that it has five in total: as many
pictures as books. Rousseau also commissioned twelve illustrations for Julie, his epistolary
novel.5 In each case, moreover, there is evidence that the pictures are, in an important sense,
Rousseau’s. Apprenticed unhappily as an engraver in his youth [CW 5:26-37], Rousseau
corresponded extensively with the artists who worked on his illustrations; and while these letters
have been lost, we do have letters to others in which Rousseau indicates the attention he devoted
to the pictures for his books. Lamenting his publisher’s difficulties with the engravings for Julie,
for example, Rousseau writes,
the details into which I entered were not the sort to be carried out to the letter. It
is not what the designer must draw, but what he must know so as to make his
work conform to them as much as possible. Everything that I have described
must be in his head in order to put in his engraving everything that can be
admitted there and to put nothing contrary [CC 4:408; translation mine].6
Despite this evidence of Rousseau’s care in instructing his artists, publishers of his works have
not scrupled to omit his illustrations from their editions – sometimes even along with passages
that mention them – presumably because they consider them unnecessary adornments of
Rousseau’s books.
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This lecture will have eight parts. In the first two, I will briefly examine the frontispieces
to the First and Second Discourses, considering them as preparations for Rousseau’s illustrations
in Emile. In the next five sections, I will briefly consider in turn each of these illustrations,
reading them first in themselves, then in the light of his explication of each, then in the light of
their mythological sources, and lastly in the light of their relation to the argument of Emile.
Finally, in the eighth and longest part, I will sketch what I take to be Rousseau’s answer to our
question – do great books need pictures? – with reference to his brief discussion in Emile of what
he calls the language of signs, and his fuller explanation of this language in the Essay on the
Origin of Languages.
Part One: Prometheus, or the Failed Frontispiece?
Rousseau’s literary fame dates from the publication of his First Discourse, his anonymous entry
into the Academy of Dijon’s prize competition, in which the academy asked whether the
restoration of the sciences and the arts has contributed to the purification of morals [FD 3;
compare 5]. In the Discourse Rousseau argues that, to the contrary, scientific and artistic
progress causes moral corruption [FD 9]. Rousseau’s use of illustrations in his works also dates
from the publication of the First Discourse, whose printed version was accompanied by a
frontispiece. Across from the work’s title page is an engraving of three figures in an outdoor
setting, with some vegetation in the foreground, and perhaps a mountain in the background
[Slide 4]. The leftmost figure is a muscular, bearded male, naked except for a cloak draped over
his shoulder. He holds a torch in his right hand, the flame of which strangely seems to burn
horizontally, rather than vertically. His left hand rests on the central figure’s shoulder;
otherwise, the leftmost figure seems to hover in midair, straddling a billowing cloud. He gazes
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intently at the other figures in the scene. The central figure is another male, more slightly built
than the first, and wholly naked. He stands on a block, in a statuesque pose, with both hands
open, their palms visible. He could be looking rapturously at the face of the leftmost figure, or at
the torch that he holds. Lastly, though he is partly obscured by shadow, we see enough of the
rightmost figure to conclude that he is not fully human: he has horns and cloven hooves. A cloak
worn over his right shoulder partly covers his nakedness, and we can make out pan pipes slung
over the same shoulder. Of the three figures in the scene, the rightmost is the only one to have at
least one limb on the ground. His left hand is raised, palm upward, in an expressive gesture,
while his right hand is concealed behind the central figure, into whom he leans. He gazes avidly
at one or both of his companions, or perhaps at the torch in the leftmost figure’s hand.
This frontispiece also features a caption: “Satyr, you do not know it. See note page 31”
[FD 2]. It directs us to the center of the First Discourse, to the beginning of Part Two of the
work, to a footnote to Rousseau’s claim that, according to an ancient Egyptian tradition, the
sciences were invented by “a god inimical to men’s repose” [FD 16]. The footnote compares
this Egyptian myth about the god Theuth to the Greek myth about Prometheus, and points out
that both peoples regarded their divine benefactors with disfavor. “‘The satyr,’” Rousseau
quotes from an ancient fable, “‘wanted to kiss and embrace fire the first time he saw it but
Prometheus cried out to him: “Satyr, you will weep the loss of the beard on your chin, for it
burns when you touch it.”’ This is the subject of the frontispiece” [FD 16 n *]. It is not hard to
find the satyr among the figures in the illustration. But which is Prometheus? He could be the
leftmost figure, who bears a lit torch and hovers in the air like a god. But then who is the third
man?
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Six years after the publication of the Discourse, Rousseau judged its frontispiece to be
“very bad” [CC 4:408]. It was certainly not understood by all of the Discourse’s readers. One of
them, Claude-Nicolas Lecat, wrote an anonymous Refutation of the work, in which he claims
that the central figure in the illustration is man, “naked and leaving the hands of Prometheus, of
nature.” The satyr, he maliciously continued, is Rousseau himself, ignorantly admiring the
image of natural man, which image is about to be burnt to ash by Prometheus’ fire [CW 2:156].
This tendentious interpretation provoked Rousseau’s retort that he would treat his readers “like
children,” and interpret for them the “clear allegory” of the illustration. “Prometheus’ torch,” he
says in the Letter to Lecat, “is that of the sciences, created to inspire great geniuses.” “[T]he
Satyr who, seeing fire for the first time, runs to it and wants to embrace it, represents common
men, seduced by the brilliance of letters, who surrender indiscreetly to study.”7 And
“Prometheus who cries out and warns them of the danger is the Citizen of Geneva” – that is,
Rousseau himself [CW 2:179].
Rousseau’s insistence on the clarity of his allegory should not make us forget that he still
only identifies two of the three figures in the frontispiece: Prometheus-Rousseau, the leftmost
figure, is known by his torch, while the satyr-common man, the rightmost figure who reaches for
Prometheus’ torch, is known by his shape. Again, who is the third man? We can make an
educated guess with the assistance of the illustration’s caption. The phrase “fire burns when one
touches it” [CW 2:12 n *] comes from Plutarch’s essay “How to profit by one’s enemies,” where
it is followed immediately by this qualification: “yet it furnishes light and heat, and is an
instrument of every craft for those who have learned to use it” [II.9].8 If Rousseau’s studied
omission of this sequel has the same cause as his studied silence about the identity of the third
man in the illustration, then it seems likely that this third man must be a “great genius,” whom
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Prometheus’ torch was made to enlighten. In particular, it seems likely that this man must be the
great genius whose enlightenment leads him to keep enlightenment from the common people,
lest scientific and artistic progress corrupt their morals – namely, Rousseau himself. In the
frontispiece to the First Discourse, then, we see the first example of Rousseau doubling himself
in an image. Soon we will see another example of this practice in one of the illustrations in
Emile.
Years after the publication of the First Discourse, Rousseau complained in the Letter to
Beaumont that none of his adversaries had been able to understand his distinction between the
suitability of enlightenment for individuals, and its dangerousness for peoples – though he
always drew this distinction with care [OC 4:967]. We might blame precisely Rousseau’s care in
drawing this distinction for his adversaries’ failure to notice it. As we saw, Rousseau compares
Prometheus with the Egyptian god Theuth, who is mentioned in the discussion of the
“seemliness and unseemliness of writing” in Plato’s Phaedrus as the inventor of written letters,
among other sciences [275c-276c]. In this discussion, the question arises whether a piece of
writing can have the power to defend itself, by knowing how “to speak and keep silence toward
those it ought” [276a]. By trying, with the frontispiece to the First Discourse, to speak
differently to different readers, Rousseau seems to have spoken unclearly. But he would soon
have a second chance.
Part Two: The Hottentot, or the Literal Frontispiece
Four years later, Rousseau published his Second Discourse, a work that seeks to uncover man’s
original condition, and to describe the history of his development from this original condition to
his present state. Once again, Rousseau furnished this writing with a captioned frontispiece,
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located across from its title page [Slide 5]. Again, the setting is outdoors, with vegetation in the
foreground and, this time, the ocean in the distance. But this frontispiece features a stark visual
and thematic division, cutting down the middle and through its principal figure. To his left we
see a group of five adult males, wearing broad-brimmed, feathered hats, with elegant clothes and
tasseled shoes. Four of them are standing, apparently disputing with one another: two have their
hands raised in animated gestures. The fifth man, perhaps their leader, sits on an ornate box.
One of his hands is raised to his face is a gesture familiar from our classes: the gesture of
pondering, or perhaps of duplicity. Behind this group, a crenellated keep rises, with two
machicolated bartizans. Over this left side of the image hang dark clouds, casting their shadows
on the keep and the ground below. To the right of the principal figure, by contrast, we see two
rows of low huts, set on a beach that slopes gently to the water. In front of the closer row of
huts, we can just make out five or six dark-skinned figures. Behind these huts, on the water, five
or six ships are moving under sail, their pennants streaming in the wind. Over this right side of
the image, the clouds are lighter, the sky brighter, and birds fly in the distance.
The principal figure stands between the two halves of this scene. He is a dark-skinned
male, wearing fur breeches, a necklace, and a sword at his hip. A bundle of fabric lies in the
foreground; peeking out from it is a broad-brimmed feathered hat like those worn by the other
men. While looking down at the leader of the group to his right, the central figure gestures with
his left hand at the huts on the beach or the ships on the water, and with his right at the bundle at
his feet. While his left foot is planted on the ground, his right heel is lifted, as if he were about to
take a step.
The caption to this illustration reads, “[h]e returns among [chez] his equals. See Note 13,
page 259” [SD 112; I have altered the translation]. Turning there, we find Rousseau observing
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that despite every effort by Europeans, no savage has ever been won over to the European
religion and way of life. Anticipating the objection that this is due not to the superiority of the
savage life, but to their habitual attachment to it, which makes them insensible to the advantages
of the European way, he quotes at length from a traveler’s tale by Peter Kolben. The Dutch
governor of the Cape of Good Hope took an infant Hottentot, and had him raised in the European
religion and way of life. After he had been educated and had traveled, this Hottentot returned to
the Cape, and soon decided to visit his relatives. During this visit, he discarded his European
clothes and dressed himself in a sheepskin; he then returned to the Dutch fort, carrying his
former outfit, and told the Governor the following (and here Rousseau tells us to see the
frontispiece):
[b]e so good, Sir, as to note that I forever renounce these trappings. I also
renounce the Christian Religion for the rest of my life; my resolution is to live and
die in the Religion, the ways, and the customs of my Ancestors. The one favor I
ask of you is to leave me the Necklace and the Cutlass I am wearing. I shall keep
them for love of you [SD 220-221].
Then, without waiting for a reply, the Hottentot ran off, never to be seen in the Cape again.
The footnote containing this story is connected to a passage in the main text of the
Discourse, where Rousseau asserts that the savage state, “occupying a just mean between the
indolence of the primitive state and the petulant activity of our amour-propre, must have been the
happiest and the most lasting epoch… the least subject to revolutions, the best for man” [SD
167]. So at first it looks like the note and the frontispiece are meant to support these assertions.
The stability and superiority of the savage state are proven by the story of the Hottentot who –
although wholly familiar with the European religion and way of life, and wholly unfamiliar with
the savage alternative – prefers the savage way as soon as he learns of it. But Rousseau cautions
his reader that his notes “sometimes [stray] so wide of the subject that they are not good to read
together with the text” [SD 129]. And indeed, some of the details of the Hottentot’s speech are
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puzzling. It is unreasonable to believe, for example, that he keeps the necklace and the sword for
love of the Governor of the Cape – the man who kidnapped him and deprived him of a childhood
and youth lived in the best and happiest way for a human being. Why then does the Hottentot
take these items, and run away without waiting for a reply?
Rousseau’s illustration helps us to answer this question, by showing us that in keeping
the necklace and sword, and indeed in wearing the sheepskin, the Hottentot is not returning to his
equals. These have neither swords nor necklaces; they do not even wear pants [Slide 6]. The
illustration also shows us that, while saying what he says, the Hottentot gestures not only at the
beach huts of his native people, but also at the ships of his adoptive people. These ships mean
that there will always be more Dutch, more Europeans, more civilized and enlightened human
beings arriving at the Cape of Good Hope, in a flood that the religion, ways, and customs of the
Hottentot’s ancestors cannot hope to survive – unless they can take advantage of European
military technology and luxury economics. The frontispiece to the Second Discourse thus shows
us that the Hottentot chooses not to return to the savage state, the mean between our primitive
and civilized states, but rather to combine the best of the savage state with what is necessary
from civilization. He means to try to be a natural man in civilized society. He means to try to be
an Emile.
Part Three: Thetis, or the Mother9
Emile, which Rousseau thought of as his best work [CW 5:473], depicts the education of an
imaginary child, named Emile, from birth or even before birth, until his marriage to a woman
named Sophie and the announcement of her pregnancy. Its first book lays out the reasons for
Rousseau’s educational project, and follows the child during his infancy. As a whole, Emile
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consists of five books, each with an illustration commissioned by Rousseau.10 The first of these,
titled “Thetis,” is said, in Rousseau’s “Explication of the Illustrations,” to relate to the first book
and serve as the frontispiece to the work [E 36; I have altered the translation].11 As befits a
frontispiece, it appears across from Emile’s title page.12
Turning there, we find that we begin in the cave [Slide 7]. Five women are gathered
underground, on the bank of a river. Behind them, up and to the left, a twisting path rises to
daylight. One of the women, adorned with a necklace and bracelets, with jewelry in her hair and
wearing a fancy dress, kneels at the water’s edge, holding her skirts back with her left hand,
while with her right she dips a naked infant headfirst into the water. Behind her, and more
plainly dressed, the other four women are caught in animated poses. One holds a hand up in the
air, in a gesture that perhaps indicates astonishment; a second has her arms around the shoulders
of the first; a third holds the well-dressed woman’s cloak in one hand, while her other hand rests
on the woman’s arm – perhaps to comfort her, perhaps to keep her from falling into the river; a
fourth woman crouches at the water’s edge, her dress hitched up in her left hand. At least two of
these women have their blouses open and their breasts bared, as though they have just been
nursing. And finally, lurking in the darkest part of the scene and barely discernible, we can see a
muscular but hunched figure in a raft on the river, bearing a pole or an oar, and accompanied by
a shrouded companion [Slide 8].
Rousseau’s explication says that the illustration “represents Thetis plunging her son in the
Styx to make him invulnerable” [E 36]. The well-dressed woman, then, is Thetis; and the naked
infant is her son, whom readers of the Iliad will know as Achilles. If the river is the Styx, then
the figure in the raft must be Charon, ferrying a shade to the underworld. Rousseau’s use of this
image as a frontispiece to the whole work leads us to infer that the education described in Emile
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is to be a type of ‘invulnerability treatment,’ and Emile a type of Achilles. But why include
Charon in the image, then – especially since Rousseau tells us outright that the river depicted is
the Styx? And why title the engraving “Thetis,” rather than “Achilles”?
Rousseau’s explication ends by directing the reader deep into the text of Book I.13
Following his direction, we find a paragraph about the two ways that mothers can depart from
nature: by neglecting their children – for example, by failing to breastfeed them – or by caring
excessively for them. In this context Rousseau mentions the fable of Thetis plunging Achilles in
the Styx, which he say contains a “lovely” and “clear” allegory.14 “The cruel mothers of whom I
speak do otherwise,” Rousseau concludes: “by dint of plunging their children in softness, they
prepare them for suffering; they open their pores to ills of every sort to which they will not fail to
be prey when grown” [E 47]. The example of Thetis thus seems like an instance of natural
mothering – her ‘invulnerability treatment’ for Achilles is neither too harsh, nor too soft, but just
right. And yet the engraving of Thetis suggests that she is not breastfeeding her son, but
confiding this task to wet nurses.
What is worse, a scant few pages later, in the context of a discussion of how doctors
cause their patients to fear death, Rousseau has the following to say about Achilles: “[i]t is the
knowledge of dangers that makes us fear them; he who believed himself invulnerable would fear
nothing. By dint of arming Achilles against peril, the poet takes from him the merit of valor;
every other man in his place would have been an Achilles at the same price” [E 55]. Had Thetis’
‘invulnerability treatment’ for Achilles succeeded, it would have protected him from death,
though at the cost of depriving him of the opportunity for virtue. But it did not succeed: Achilles
remained vulnerable in one place, and was therefore given the opportunity for virtue, but at the
cost of increasing his fear of death. The ‘Thetis’ engraving completes the argument of the text,
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first by showing that Thetis was at once too hard and too soft – she neglected to breastfeed her
son, and she tried to make him invulnerable – and second by showing that the fear of death is
both the cause and the effect of both kinds of excess:15 the cause in the case of Thetis, the
mother, and the effect in the case of her son. Hence Charon, barely visible in the gloom, is the
most important figure in this illustration.
Part Four: Chiron, or the Tutor
While it seems reasonable to attribute Achilles’ wrath to his fear of death, it might occur to those
of us who know Homer well that in the Iliad there is no mention of Thetis dipping the infant
Achilles in the Styx to make him invulnerable. So the Iliad cannot be the text to which the first
illustration in Emile refers. Rather, the story comes from a later, and to us less-known epic: the
Achilleid, by Statius [I.133-134].16 As it happens, this epic is also the likely source of the fable
behind the second illustration in Emile – suggesting that these two illustrations are best
interpreted together.
Book Two of Emile describes Emile’s childhood: the conditions of his happiness, his first
experience with property, his learning to speak, and the training of his senses. Turning to the
illustration found at the head of this book [Slide 9], we see two figures meeting on a
mountainside. To their right, from our perspective, the ground slopes downward to some trees;
to the left it slopes steeply upward to some tree-studded crags. In the distance we see some
clouds in the sky. The figure on our right is a young child, dressed in a tunic. In his right hand
the child holds a rabbit by the ears; it is not evident whether the rabbit is alive or dead. The
child’s streaming hair and posture, with one leg flexed but planted on the ground, and the other
in the air, suggest that he has arrived running. With his left hand the child reaches out for an
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apple proffered by the figure on our left, as he gazes into his face. This figure is clearly a
centaur. His human upper body is clothed by some sort of cape, and his face is bearded. The
posture of his equine lower body is strange: with one foreleg straightened and planted on the
ground, and his one visible hind leg flexed, he could be rising from a crouching position. The
centaur gazes into the child’s face, extending the apple with his right hand, and reaching with his
left, not for the limp rabbit, but past it to caress the child’s cheek. At the centaur’s feet we can
barely make out a basket of apples to his left, and a heap of items to his right, including what
look like a crested helmet, a shield, a scroll, perhaps a lyre, a pad of paper, and perhaps even a
potted plant.
According to its title, the subject of this engraving is Chiron, the centaur; and the action
depicted, according to Rousseau’s explication, is “Chiron training the little Achilles in running”
[E 36]. The citation accompanying this explication directs us to “Page 382” of Emile’s first
volume, where we read the story of “an indolent and lazy child who was to be trained in
running” – a child who, like Achilles, “was intended for a military career.” This child prided
himself to such an extent on his noble birth that he persuaded himself that rank can take the place
of ability. “To make of such a gentleman a light-footed Achilles,” Rousseau tells us, “the skill of
Chiron himself would hardly have sufficed” [E 141]. To make a long story short, the tutor in this
example goads his pupil into competing with other children in running, using cakes as a prize.17
By secretly manipulating the conditions of each race, the tutor is able to arrange an initial victory
for his vain and lazy charge, and to ensure subsequent victories at his, the tutor’s, will. Not only
does this child become accomplished at running. “This accomplishment produced another of
which I had not dreamed,” writes Rousseau. “When he had rarely carried off the prize, he almost
always ate it alone, as did his competitors. But, in accustoming himself to victory, he became
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generous and often shared with the vanquished. […] I learned thereby what the true principle of
generosity is” [E 142].
Leaving aside for the moment this puzzling conclusion, we might also be puzzled by
Rousseau’s choice of an illustration for this text. The engraving depicts a race run for an apple,
not for a cake; and the competition in the race seems to be a hare, rather than another child.
Moreover, why say that the illustration depicts Achilles, and not just a lazy child; and why depict
the centaur Chiron rather than a human tutor? It turns out that the fable about Chiron’s education
of Achilles comes not from the Iliad18 but from the Achilleid, so that there is a close thematic
connection between the first two illustrations to Emile. Now the Achilleid begins with Thetis
witnessing the abduction of Helen by Paris, and realizing that the Trojan war will result. Fearing
that Achilles will be sought for, will want to fight, and will die [I.37-38, 74-76], she first tries
and fails to persuade Neptune to sink Paris’ ships [I.80-81], then seeks out Chiron [I.104-106], to
whom she had sent Achilles for his education. “High up his lofty dwelling bores through the
mountain” [I.106-107], Statius writes,
[h]ere are no darts that have tasted human blood, no ash trees fractured in festive
combats, nor mixing bowls shattered upon kindred foes, but innocent quivers and
empty hides of wild beasts… [f]or at this time unarmed his only labour was to
know herbs that bring health to living things in doubtful case or to limn with his
lyre the heroes of old for his pupil [I.112-118].
Thetis finds Chiron awaiting Achilles’ return from the hunt, and persuades him to release
Achilles to her – citing, among other things, her frequent nightmares about dipping Achilles in
the Styx [I.133-134]. Chiron assents, because Achilles has become unmanageable [I.149-155],
though Statius tells us that Chiron never would have done so had he known of Thetis’ plan to
disguise Achilles as a woman, in the hopes of avoiding his recruitment to fight at Troy [I.141143]. When Achilles finally appears, he is armed, accompanied by Patroclus, and bearing lion
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cubs that he has abducted after killing their mother [I.158-177]. Achilles and Thetis depart the
next day.
By alluding in this way to the Achilleid, the ‘Chiron’ illustration helps us to interpret its
details. Now we see why the scene is set on a mountainside, why Chiron is clothed in animal
skins, and why a helmet, a shield, a lyre, and a potted medicinal plant lie in the foreground. But
more importantly, the illustration deepens the story in the text to which it refers, both through its
allusion to the Achilleid and through its departures from that work. First, when compared with
the ‘Thetis’ illustration and interpreted in light of the Achilleid, the ‘Chiron’ illustration teaches
us that the mother and the tutor are antagonists in the education of the child. The mother, moved
by the fear of death, seeks to preserve her child from harm, while the tutor, whose motives are
unknown, seeks to prepare him to face it. This antagonism is touchingly depicted in the
Achilleid, when Achilles, Patroclus, Chiron and Thetis spend the night together in Chiron’s cave.
Statius writes, “[t]he huge Centaur collapses on stone and Achilles fondly twines himself about
his shoulders, though his faithful mother is there, preferring the familiar bosom” [I.195-197].
Tutor and mother both have a medicine for the human condition, but the mother’s medicine is
harmful – it culminates in proud wrath – while the tutor’s medicine is beneficial: it turns pride
into generosity, whose principle, the text implies, is confidence that there will always be more
cake – or in other words, ignorance of death.19 Second, in its departures from the Achilleid, the
‘Chiron’ engraving implies that Rousseau’s Achilles has been training in running, rather than
hunting; that his skill is with defensive weapons; and that he is a vegetarian, and so more capable
of pity.20 Rousseau’s Chiron, by contrast, may still be a carnivore; the fate of the hare is
unknown.
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Part Five: Hermes, or the God
Book Three of Emile spans the years between childhood and puberty, and covers Emile’s
introduction to the elements of the natural sciences and the trade of carpentry, as well as the
completion of the training of his senses. The third illustration in Emile appears at the beginning
of this book, which in the first edition falls at the beginning of its second volume. Appropriately
enough, this illustration also makes a new thematic beginning. Turning there we discover
another outdoor scene, populated by three figures [Slide 10]. The chief figure stands on a step in
the foreground, with one foot on the earth. He is nearly naked, clad only in a cloak draped over
his left shoulder, and a winged, soft-brimmed cap. His ankles also seem to be winged. In his left
arm he cradles a slim wand entwined by two serpents. With his right hand he uses a stylus to
draw what look like geometrical figures on one of the two broad columns that stand in the center
of the scene. And at his feet, in the foreground, are piled mathematical instruments: an armillary
sphere, a protractor, and a sundial are easily discerned, while the other objects may include a
writing desk with geometrical proofs, a book, a model star, and a carpenter’s square. In the
bottom right of the illustration, far from the mathematical instruments, a plant grows. The other
two figures in the scene seem to be an older, bearded male and his younger, beardless
companion. Both are dressed simply: the former in a cloak, the latter in an open-necked shirt.
Both are also gesturing expressively: the elder points discreetly with his right hand to the chief
figure’s activity, while perhaps restraining his companion with his left arm; the younger of the
men has his left hand raised in a gesture of wonder. The statue of what may be a sphinx beside
them, and the elongated pyramid or obelisk behind them, suggest an Egyptian setting – though
the tree on the left margin of the image, and the gently rising hill in the right background, are not
reminiscent of Egypt.
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Rousseau gives ‘Hermes’ as the subject of this engraving, and writes in his explications
that it depicts “Hermes engraving the elements of the sciences on columns” [E 36]. The
accompanying reference to the text is to “Page 76.” Turning there, we find Rousseau
proclaiming
I hate books. They only teach one to talk about what one does not know. It is
said that Hermes engraved the elements of the sciences on columns in order to
shelter his discoveries from a flood. If he had left a good imprint of them in
man’s head, they would have been preserved by tradition. Well-prepared minds
are the surest monuments on which to engrave human knowledge [E 184].
So the ‘Hermes’ engraving, like the ‘Thetis’ engraving, depicts a misguided action. Just as
Thetis should have trained her son in running, rather than trying to make him invulnerable, so
Hermes should have engraved the principles of the sciences in the minds of men, rather than on
columns. But how does one do this? Rousseau gives a clear answer in the immediate sequel:
with a book, indeed with one book in particular – Robinson Crusoe. While the general danger of
books is that they give their readers words that do not correspond to things, and so the opinion of
knowledge without the reality, books like Robinson Crusoe escape this danger by putting their
readers in imaginary situations that force them to attend to things, and in particular to their real
utility, apart from opinion [E 185]. This interested attention to utility is the only lasting
foundation of the sciences.
Rousseau’s example of a book that escapes the dangers of books helps us better to
interpret the ‘Hermes’ illustration. In our treatment of the frontispiece of the First Discourse, we
mentioned the possibility raised in Plato’s Phaedrus: that a piece of writing can overcome the
defects of writing, by knowing how “to speak and to keep silence toward those it ought” [276a].
A suitably edited Robinson Crusoe,21 it seems, is such a piece of writing: it keeps silent to those
interested in words, for whom it is only a quaint story, but it speaks volumes to those interested
in judging the true utility of things. But Rousseau also says that the frontispiece to the Discourse
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depicts a fable found allegorically in the “ancient tradition passed on from Egypt to Greece” [G,
16] about the Egyptian god Theuth, known to the Greeks as Hermes. Now we see the reason for
the Egyptian objects – the sphinx and the pyramid or obelisk – in the otherwise Greek scene of
the ‘Hermes’ illustration. Rousseau takes the fables of Prometheus, Theuth, and Hermes to have
the same meaning.22 They raise the question of how the sciences and the arts can be cultivated
without causing moral corruption.
Putting the ‘Prometheus’ and ‘Hermes’ illustrations side by side, we see that they have
similar structures [Slide 11]. There are three figures in each: a divinity who possesses the
sciences and the arts, a figure who is kept from them, and an intermediary between the two. But
the satyr who is kept away in the ‘Prometheus’ illustration, and who represents “common men”
[CW 2:179], is replaced in the ‘Hermes’ illustration by a young man who is kept from Hermes’
engravings, and yet shown them at a distance. The naked man, whom we guessed to represent
great geniuses who are suited to the sciences, is replaced by an older, bearded man, who at once
restrains his charge and points out Hermes’ work. Lastly, Prometheus himself is replaced by
Hermes. If it follows that Hermes also represents Rousseau,23 then the move from the First
Discourse to Emile involves a move from a project to keep the sciences and the arts away from
the common man, and in the hands of great geniuses, to a project to preserve the useful elements
of the sciences and the arts, by teaching them to ordinary intellects [compare E 52]. Far from
being uselessly employed in engraving these elements on columns, Hermes is usefully employed
in engraving them on the minds of men, using the writing that overcomes the defects of writing.
It is more than a joke that Emile’s central engraving is an engraving of Rousseau engraving.
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Part Six: Orpheus, or the Priest
Book Four of Emile is long, and treats the social but not fully sexual consequences of Emile’s
emerging erotic desires: his education in compassion, his study of history, and the education of
his taste. The book is made longer, though, by Rousseau’s exceptional inclusion of a distinct
writing in its midst, called “The Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar” [E 266-313]. The
illustration to Book Four is also exceptional, because it is found not at the beginning of the book,
as the second and third illustrations were found at the beginnings of their respective books, but in
the middle of the fourth book – which in the first edition falls at the beginning of the third
volume.24 In effect, this makes the illustration into a frontispiece for “The Profession of Faith,”25
whose preamble begins right after the engraving, where Rousseau writes, in reference to
religious matters, “[i]nstead of telling you here on my own what I think, I shall tell you what a
man more worthy than I thought” [E 260].
Turning to the illustration, we find another outdoor scene, set in the wooded foothills of a
mountain [Slide 12]. The center of the engraving is dominated by a man standing on a raised
patch of earth, and dressed in sandals, a tunic and a cloak. His left hand holds a fold of his cloak,
or perhaps a sheaf of paper, while his left arm cradles a lyre.26 His right hand is raised palm
upward in a gesture to the sky. By contrast, his serene gaze is directed downward, to the crowd
gathered around him. This crowd is chiefly composed of bare-chested men, old and young – or
at least bearded and beardless. Unlike the central figure, they are dressed only in animal skins
wrapped around their waists, and they are barefoot. One of these men cowers, one kneels, two
crouch; but all of them, except the cowering man, look up at the sky with expressions of awe.
The remainder of the crowd, to the central figure’s right from our perspective, consists of
animals. We can make out a small rodent, a sheep, an ox, a horse, and several birds, including a
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bird of prey that seems far too large for the branch it perches on. As far as we can tell, there are
no women present.
Rousseau titles this illustration “Orpheus,” and writes that the engraving “represents
Orpheus teaching men the worship of the gods” [E 36]. The illustration itself refers to “Page
128” of Volume Three. Turning there, we find an intermission in the “Profession of Faith,”
during which Rousseau remarks, “[t]he good priest had spoken with vehemence. He was moved,
and so was I. I believed I was hearing the divine Orpheus sing the first hymns and teaching men
the worship of the gods. Nevertheless I saw a multitude of objections to make to him” [E 294].
Rousseau thus likens the Savoyard Vicar, whose views on religion are given instead of
Rousseau’s own, and with whose views Rousseau does not agree,27 to Orpheus.
It will help here to review some of the details of the Orpheus myth. In Ovid’s version in
the Metamorphoses, Orpheus loses his bride Eurydice to death, and is so overcome with love for
her that he decides he cannot live without her [X.26].28 He pursues her into the underworld,
where his music charms everyone, and secures Eurydice’s release – on the condition that, as he
leads her to the surface, he not look back at her. We should understand this otherwise arbitrary
condition as a test of Orpheus’ trust in Eurydice: a test of his confidence that she would rather
accompany him than stay in the underworld. But when “they were nearing the margin of the
upper earth,” Ovid writes, “he, afraid that she might fail him, eager for the sight of her, turned
back his longing eyes; and instantly she slipped into the depths” [X.55-57]. Orpheus is stunned
by her second death; he tries to pursue her, but his descent is barred.
Orpheus mourns Eurydice for three years, spurning the other women who try to console
him.29 His lack of confidence in Eurydice becomes a mistrust of all women. He sings in
mourning, and Ovid reports that his songs draw to him “multitudinous birds,” “snakes,” a “train
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of beasts,” “oxen,” and some “stout peasants” [XI.20-21, 31, 33] – suggesting that Ovid’s
description provides some of the details of Rousseau’s illustration. Even the trees and the stones
are moved. But Orpheus’ song also attracts the local women who, offended by his contempt for
them, drown out his song and finally tear him to pieces. A nearby river carries off his head, still
singing, and his lyre, still sounding, while his shade is reunited at last with Eurydice’s in the
underworld.30
So Rousseau’s illustration compares the Savoyard Vicar to Orpheus, and Ovid’s telling of
the Orpheus myth suggests that the singer was destroyed by his soured love for a woman. Does
Rousseau mean thus to suggest that the “Profession of Faith” – the Vicar’s teaching concerning
the gods, his song – is also based on erotic love gone wrong? If we look at the details of what
the Vicar says, this is exactly what we learn. In his preamble we learn that the Vicar is miserable
because of a scandal caused by a conflict between his erotic desires and his respect for marriage.
The Vicar cannot be chaste, but he cannot marry; nor can he bring himself to commit adultery.
So he sleeps with an unmarried woman, and she becomes pregnant, without a husband on whom
to blame the pregnancy. The lovers are discovered and torn from one another’s arms [E 267].31
“A few such experiences lead a reflective mind a long way,” the Vicar confesses to JeanJacques. We see how far the Vicar was led when we read his “Profession of Faith.” There he
outlines a metaphysics in which the soul is enslaved to, and yet feels contempt for, the body: the
soul is “subjected to the senses and chained to [the] body which enslaves it and interferes with
it,” but “care for [the] body’s preservation incites the soul to relate everything to the body and
gives it an interest contrary to the general order, which the soul is nevertheless capable of seeing
and loving” [E 292]. Having been torn, like Orpheus, from his love, the Vicar is now
figuratively torn apart, like Orpheus was literally, by contempt for his own erotic desires.32
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Now Rousseau does not wholly agree with the Vicar’s “Profession of Faith,” and Emile
will hear nothing like it from Jean-Jacques.33 Rousseau’s own view seems to be that the conflict
erotic desire can foment between the soul and the body is not necessary: it can be forestalled by
correct education. To the extent that otherworldly metaphysical teachings arise from thisworldly
sexual conflict, then, they too are not necessary – and they too can be avoided by correct
education. This conclusion reminds us of another, less-known thread of the Orpheus myth. In
the Argonautica Apollonius mentions Orpheus first among the Argonauts [I.23],34 and depicts
him saving his crewmates on two occasions: once when he sings of the origin of the cosmos and
of the gods, to stop the Argonauts from quarreling [I.492-511]; and once when he sings to drown
out the voices of the Sirens [IV.903-909].35 Apollonius’ version of the Orpheus myth suggests
the possibility of another, more successful Orpheus who can protect his comrades against the
dangers of erotic desire, and reminds us of another hero, more successful than Achilles, who
resisted the Sirens’ song, who did not lose but regained a wife, and whose image governs the last
two books of Emile, as Achilles’ image does the first two.
Part Seven: Circe, or the Woman
The fifth and final book of Emile begins with a discussion of the natural differences between
men and women; it goes on to describe the education of Emile’s intended wife, Sophie, their
courtship, Emile’s travels, and their marriage. Rousseau places the illustration for this book at its
beginning, which falls at the beginning of the first edition’s fourth volume. The engraving
depicts our first indoor scene, with two figures in the foreground [Slide 13]. On our left is a
young woman, richly clad in a patterned dress and a cloak, and adorned with a ribbon in her hair
and bracelets on her wrist. Her head is tilted to her left, and she wears a serene, welcoming
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expression; her arms are extended, palms open and fingers splayed, as if to invite an embrace.
At her sandaled feet lie a long stick and a shallow-bowled, broad-based cup. Behind her are a
striking table with a claw-footed leg, and the edge of a sumptuous, canopied bed [Slide 14]. On
our right is a bearded man, wearing a plumed helmet, a cloak, short breeches, and sandals. In his
right hand he holds a sword, but since his finger is across the hilt and stretched in the direction of
the blade, and since the sword point is on the ground, he seems about to lay it down. In his left,
he holds what looks like a sprig of vegetation, with his arm stretched out away from the woman.
The man’s left leg is extended, his knee unbent, and he gazes directly into the woman’s eyes, his
expression made unreadable by the shadow cast by his helmet. He looks like he is trying to step
into the woman’s embrace while setting down his sword, without bending his knee or looking
away from her gaze. Behind the man we see the snouts and bodies of four or five pigs; behind
them, columns reminiscent of the ‘Hermes’ illustration; and behind these a neoclassical temple,
its dome faintly visible, decorated with one figure in an alcove, and two more lounging to either
side of the pediment.
Rousseau titles this engraving ‘Circe,’ and says in his explications that it depicts her
“giving herself to Ulysses, whom she was not able to transform” [E 36]. We are referred to
“Page 304” of Emile’s fourth volume, where we find the conclusion to the following story.
During his courtship of Sophie, Emile and Jean-Jacques live nearby. Sophie only permits Emile
occasional visits: one or two a week, for a day or two at most. When Emile first met Sophie,
heard her name and heard her speak, he began “to swallow with deep draughts the poison with
which she intoxicates him” [E 415]; but now, when he is apart from Sophie, he “is Emile again.
He has not been transformed at all” [E 435]. Emile studies the neighborhood and works to
improve it, and at least once a week, or in bad weather, he and Jean-Jacques labor in a
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carpenter’s shop in the city [E 437]. Alerted to this practice by Sophie’s father, one day Sophie
and her mother visit the workshop. They admire the respectability and the cleanliness of the
carpenter’s trade, and they are moved by how seriously Emile takes his low-paying job. Then
they prepare to leave, and Sophie’s mother invites Emile to leave with them. Emile sadly replies
that he cannot: he and Jean-Jacques are needed, and they have promised to work. So Sophie and
her mother leave, the mother in a fit of pique. Why didn’t Emile, who is rich, pay off his
obligation, and leave with them? But Sophie is happy with Emile’s choice. Had he paid off his
obligation, this would have meant “putting his riches in place of his duties” [E 438]. “It is for
me that he stays,” she tells her mother; “I saw it in his eyes” [E 439]. Here Rousseau interrupts
to explain that Sophie wants to be loved for her virtues, more than for her charms; so she wants
Emile to prefer his own duty to her, and her to all else. “She wants to reign over a man whom
she has not disfigured,” Rousseau concludes. “It is thus that Circe, having debased Ulysses’
companions, disdains them and gives herself only to him whom she was unable to change” [E
439].
Though Rousseau follows Horace in using the hero’s Roman name, Ulysses,36 the most
likely source for the myth behind this illustration is Homer’s Odyssey. In Book Ten, Odysseus
tells of how he came to Circe’s island after the loss of all but one of his ships [X.130-132].37
Spying her house from afar, he sends half his remaining men to scout. Circe invites them in,
gives them a potion to make them forget their country, and strikes them with her wand, turning
their bodies, though not their minds, into those of pigs [X.236-241]. Only one man, who
suspected treachery, escapes. When Odysseus learns of the fate of his comrades, he resolves to
go to Circe’s house alone. But on his way there, he meets Hermes, disguised as a youth. The
god tells Odysseus what to expect: Circe “will make you a potion, and put drugs in the food, but
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she will not even so be able to enchant you, for this good medicine which I give you now will
prevent her” [X.290-292]. He tells Odysseus what to do –
as soon as Circe with her long wand strikes you, then drawing from beside your
thigh your sharp sword, rush forward against Circe, as if you were raging to kill
her, and she will be afraid, and invite you to go to bed with her. Do not then resist
and refuse the bed of the goddess, for so she will set free your companions, and
care for you also; but bid her swear the great oath of the blessed gods, that she has
no other evil hurt that she is devising against you, so she will not make you weak
and unmanned, once you are naked [X. 290-301] –
and he gives Odysseus a black root with a milky flower, whose nature he explains, called moly
by the gods.
Events unfold as Hermes predicts. Circe offers Odysseus the potion; he drinks and is not
enchanted. She strikes him with her wand; he rushes her with drawn sword. “[S]he screamed
and ran under my guard,” Odysseus narrates, “and clasping both knees in loud lamentation spoke
to me” [X.323-324]. Circe wonders at Odysseus’ immunity to her drugs; she says, “[t]here is a
mind in you no magic will work on” [X.329]. She recognizes him as Odysseus, whose arrival
was foretold to her many times by Hermes. She invites Odysseus to bed, and he complies – but
only after securing her oath, as Hermes recommended. Later, he will require her to restore his
men to human form.
With Homer’s assistance, we can now recognize Circe’s “long staff,” and the potion
goblet at her feet. The plant in Ulysses’ left hand is no doubt the moly, and the pigs in the
background are Ulysses’ unfortunate companions – moved from the pens Homer mentions [X.
238] to Circe’s bedroom for visual effect. The meaning of the bed behind Circe, of her
expression and gesture, is unmistakable. But what of Odysseus’ claim in Homer that Circe ran
under his guard and clasped his knees? Here both parties are standing. And what of Rousseau’s
offhand comment that Emile has already drunk of Sophie’s poison, and been transformed [E 415,
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435]? Lastly, what of the implication of Rousseau’s carpentry story: that it was Sophie’s mother
who tried to make Emile into a rich pig, whereas Sophie herself had no intention of doing so?
By juxtaposing illustration, myth, and text in this way, we see that Rousseau has tinkered
meaningfully with his Homeric precedent. Whereas the Homeric Circe tries both her potion and
her wand on Odysseus, and only submits out of apparent fear when both fail,38 the Rousseauean
Circe-Sophie tries her potion, succeeds in making Ulysses-Emile forget his country, and then
drops her wand, preferring to offer herself willingly to the man who, despite being enchanted by
her, nonetheless still prefers his duty. Accordingly, Ulysses-Emile holds the moly off to one
side; it is not needed in this encounter. Instead, it will be needed later in Book Five. There, in a
final reference to the ‘Thetis’ illustration, which Rousseau has called a “frontispiece to the
[whole] work” [E 36], Rousseau recounts how Jean-Jacques must use the authority granted to
him by Emile to compel Emile to leave Sophie and travel for a year. The stated purpose of these
travels is for Emile to study the principles and practice of government [E 455] – that is, to
remind Emile about his country – but they have an additional purpose: to satisfy Jean-Jacques, as
Sophie is satisfied, that Emile loves his duty more than he loves her [E 443]. So after gaining
Emile’s attention, and stunning his reason, by making him envision Sophie’s death, Jean-Jacques
speaks at length about how Emile’s love for Sophie exposes Emile to hurt. “[I]t is in vain,” JeanJacques tells him, “that I have dipped your soul in the Styx; I was not able to make in
everywhere invulnerable. A new enemy is arising which you have not learned to conquer, and
from which I can no longer save you. That enemy is yourself” [E 443]. That it is not Thetis but
Chiron-Hermes-Jean-Jacques who does the dipping, and not Emile-Achilles’ body but his soul
that is dipped, shows us how far we have come from the mistaken motherly care of the beginning
of the book. Sophie is both a necessary condition for the man raised uniquely for himself to be
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good for others [E 41], and Emile’s Achilles heel. The gravity of this vulnerability is hinted at
by Rousseau’s title for the unfinished and unpublished sequel to Emile: Emile and Sophie, Or the
Solitaries [CW 13:685].39
Part Eight: The Very Pictures of Education?
Now that we have surveyed each of the illustrations in Emile, let’s return to our opening
question: do great books need pictures? Is there “some necessity” in writing that dictates that a
great book should have illustrations as well as text? In our survey we have given Rousseau’s
illustrations four cumulative readings: first as pictures, then as pictures informed by Rousseau’s
explications, then as pictures informed by ancient myths, and lastly as pictures informed by the
text of Emile. To understand Rousseau’s answer to our opening question, then, we should ask
him why each of these readings is necessary. He gives us an answer in a passage from Book
Four of Emile, and additional assistance in passages from the Essay on the Origin of Languages
and the Second Discourse.
First, why are the illustrations themselves necessary? At a climactic moment in Book
Four of Emile – Jean-Jacques is about to give his ‘Savoyard Vicar’ speech to Emile, wherein he
will reveal all he has done for Emile’s education, warn him of the dangers of sex, and extract
from him an unconditional promise of future obedience; that is, Hermes is about to give Ulysses
the moly to protect him from Circe – Rousseau pauses the action to discuss how to prepare Emile
for this speech. Since his lesson about sex should influence Emile “for the rest of his days,” the
instruction it contains ought “never to be forgotten.” “Let us try therefore,” Rousseau proposes,
“to engrave [graver: OC 4:645] it in his memory in such a way that it will never be effaced” [E
321]. The verb he uses here, graver, is related to one of the nouns for engraving, gravure, which
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suggests a connection between Jean-Jacques’s goal in setting the scene for his speech to Emile,
and Rousseau’s goal in providing illustrations in his book.40 The way to achieve this goal,
Rousseau continues, is to use “the most energetic of languages”: “the language of signs that
speak to the imagination” [E 321], a language that consists of actions.
While this goal of making a teaching more memorable reminds us of the illustration of
Hermes engraving the elements of the sciences on columns, and responds to the concern raised in
the Phaedrus that writing causes “forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it, through
neglect of memory” [275a], it is not the chief reason for Rousseau’s interest in the language of
signs. In the discussion in Emile he turns quickly from the mnemonic use of this language to its
persuasive use: to make human beings act. Unadorned reason, Rousseau pronounces,
“sometimes restrains, it arouses rarely, and it has never done anything great” [E 321]. If you
want great actions from human beings, you need reason adorned with images of action, whose
energy makes a stronger impression than unadorned reason does, by speaking to the heart.
Rousseau does not say why this is so in Emile, but passages from the Second Discourse and the
Essay on the Origin of Languages explain that the energy of the language of signs is due to the
particularity, the variety, the expression, and the compression of the images that make up its
vocabulary.41 So Rousseau’s answer to the question ‘why are the illustrations in Emile
necessary?’ is that he hopes that they will persuade human beings to act.
Why, then, must the illustrations be explicated? Rousseau’s next move in Book Four of
Emile is to launch into a four-paragraph “digression” [E 323] that purports to show, through
historical examples, that the ancients knew how to persuade men to act through the language of
signs, whereas the moderns, through neglect of this language, can move men only by self-interest
or force. The ancients had such a command of this language, Rousseau asserts, that “often” [E
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322] – though pointedly not always – an object they exhibited to the eyes of their audience was
able to say everything. Rousseau’s favorite example of this, which he uses both in Emile and in
the Essay, is the gift given by the king of the Scythians to Darius, the king of the Persians, when
the latter were invading Scythia: a bird, a frog, a mouse, and five arrows. “This terrifying
harangue made its point,” Rousseau writes, “and Darius hurried to get back to his country in
whatever way he could” [E 322] – whereas a threatening letter in place of these signs would only
have been laughable.
But if we look up the source of this story, in Book Four of Herodotus, we learn that the
Scythians gave the Persians the gift as a puzzle42 – likely hoping to detain them in Scythia – and
that the Persians gave the gift two opposite interpretations: as a surrender, and as a threat.
Herodotus does not tell us which interpretation was correct, and it’s not even clear from his
account that the Scythians knew what they meant to say. He merely recounts that an accidental
defeat led Darius to conclude that the Scythians despised the Persians, and to prefer the
interpretation that their gift was a threat. If we give the same treatment to the rest of Rousseau’s
historical examples from this passage in Emile, and the corresponding passage in the Essay, we
find that in several of them he suppresses a detail that is mentioned by his source: that the signs
in question did not say everything, because they were accompanied by a speech.43
Once again, we find a helpful explanation in the Essay on the Origin of Languages.
There Rousseau concludes from his historical examples that “one speaks much better to the eyes
than to the ears,” and that “[t]he most eloquent discourses are even seen to be those with the
most images embedded in them” [EOL 250].44 But then he admits that
when it is a question of moving the heart and inflaming the passions, it is an
entirely different matter. The successive impression made by discourse, striking
with cumulative impact, succeeds in arousing in you a different emotion than does
the presence of the object itself which you take in all at once glance [EOL 250].
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Rousseau distinguishes between the power of images and the power of sounds by stating that
“visible signs make for more accurate imitation, but… interest is more effectively aroused by
sounds” [EOL 251]. It follows from this distinction that while images can concentrate the
interest of their viewers, they cannot generate this interest, nor ensure that it is directed rightly.45
This account explains why the language of signs needs the assistance of discourse, as we
see from many of Rousseau’s historical examples; but it does not explain what can be done for
illustrations in a written work – which, unless it is read dramatically aloud, cannot rely on sounds
to generate interest. If we read further in the Essay, though, we find another helpful section,
where Rousseau writes, “we do not realize that often [sensations] affect us not only as sensations
but as signs or images, and that their moral effects also have moral causes” [EOL 284].
Sensations of beautiful colors, for example, are given life by drawing, by imitation, so that “it is
the passions which they express that succeed in arousing our own, the objects which they
represent that succeed in affecting us” [EOL 284]. This is why colors can be removed from a
painting – it can be turned into a drawing – without it moving us less. When illustrations are
used to depict an action, then, the passions that motivate action are concentrated by the
simultaneity of the drawing, but generated – in the absence of sounds – by the meaning of the
things drawn. So if the viewer knows what the images mean, either because he recognizes them,
or because he can read an explication of what they represent, they will generate and concentrate
his interest. This is Rousseau’s answer to why the illustrations must be explicated: so that the
energy of the language of signs will be properly directed, and the right action will be more likely
to ensue.
But why, third, must the images and their explications refer to ancient myths? After all,
the frontispiece to the Second Discourse makes no such reference, and yet there is no sign that
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Rousseau considered it a failure. We can infer Rousseau’s answer to this question once we
notice another implication of his historical examples: that the language of signs is more
successful the more the communicating parties have something in common. We can treat the
example of the Scythian gift as one in which the parties had little in common, and in which the
language of signs failed – presuming that communication was ever intended in the first place.
By contrast, in Book Four of Emile Rousseau offers several examples46 of the successful use of
the language of signs, in which the sign alone did say everything. The first of these,
“Thrasybulus and Tarquin cutting off the tops of the poppies” [E 322], partly refers to another
story in Herodotus, one that is substantially repeated with different characters by Livy. When
Periander came to power in Corinth, he sent to Thrasybulus, tyrant of neighboring Miletus,
asking about the “safest political establishment for administering the city best” [V.92].
Thrasybulus led Periander’s messenger outside the city, and, speaking with him about unrelated
matters, cut down each stalk of corn that had grown higher than the rest. He then sent the
messenger back to Periander. Now according to the messenger, Thrasybulus made no reply to
Periander’s query. But once he heard what Thrasybulus had done, Periander understood that the
safest political course was to “murder the most eminent of his citizens” [V.92].
In this example, communication by the language of signs succeeded between the two
tyrants because of their similar situations and inclinations; but it was accomplished by a
messenger who was unaware of the message he carried, because of the difference between his
situation and inclination and those of the tyrants.47 We see that the same sign can have meaning
among those who have something in common, while being meaningless to those who do not.
And this helps us to see how allegorical illustrations can be suited to audiences composed of
those with various levels of education. To readers who know the Achilleid, the Phaedrus, the
�Black, The Very Pictures of Education, Page 32
Metamorphoses, the Argonautica, and the Odyssey, at one extreme, Rousseau’s illustrations will
be full of detailed meaning; those who do not even know the names Thetis, Chiron, Hermes,
Orpheus and Circe, at the other, will only find as much meaning as one sees in a picture of a
woman dipping a baby in a river.48 So we have Rousseau’s answer to the question of why his
illustrations must refer to ancient myths: to single out his educated readers, and in particular
those who pride themselves on their devotion to the highly questionable modern project of
enlightenment.
Lastly, why then must the images in Emile refer also to passages in Rousseau’s text – and
do so, as I have suggested, in a way that complicates and corrects their corresponding ancient
myths? One final observation will be helpful here about the examples in Rousseau’s
“digression”: they quietly point out that the chief users of the language of signs are tyrants.
Rousseau begins his digression by listing four ancient examples of Biblical covenants based on
threats of divine force;49 then he refers in a footnote to the modern example of the signs used by
the Roman clergy and the “tyrannical government” of Venice [E 322 n *]. After the examples of
Thrasybulus and Periander, of Tarquin and his son, already mentioned, who communicate their
tyrannical designs by signs, he concludes with the example of Mark Antony, who failed to save
the Roman republic because, according to Plutarch, he was “swept away by the tide of popular
applause,” and by “the prospect, if Brutus were overthrown, of being without doubt the ruler-inchief” [II, 489].50 Now if the language of signs is meant to give its users a hold on human beings
other than “by force or by self-interest” [E 321], it must be appealing to those who are unable or
unwilling to use force, but also unable to appeal to self-interest, in either its uneducated or its
educated form. And since human beings act either willingly or unwillingly, persuasion does not
amount to a third option – rather, it amounts to a combination of the two: human beings thinking
�Black, The Very Pictures of Education, Page 33
that they act willingly, while in fact they are acting unwillingly. But this requires that the
interests that cause actions in human beings be connected with actions that are not ordinarily
their result: that the Achilles or the Odysseus that causes admiration, for example, be
surreptitiously replaced by the Emile who is both and better than both. This, then, is Rousseau’s
answer to the question why his illustrations must refer to passages in his text: that only by so
doing can he persuade his educated and enlightened readers to turn their attachment to ancient,
mythical heroes into an attachment to Emile.
So Rousseau’s answer to our opening question – do great books need pictures? – is a
resounding yes. They need pictures, he says, as long as their readers have hearts as well as
heads, and as long as their authors mean to make their readers act. They need pictures of
mythological figures as long as their authors want especially to reach and move their educated
readers. And they need to juxtapose these figures with arguments in their pages as long as they
want to persuade their educated readers to act in new ways. As the ancients knew, and Rousseau
himself knows, persuasion, which does not attempt to enlighten self-interest, but does not crush
with force, is the very picture of education.
Jeff J.S. Black
Annapolis, Maryland
June 18, 2013
Delivered June 19, 2013
Explication of the Slides
Slide 1 represents the frontispiece of Bacon’s Great Instauration, which may be found in Francis Bacon, Novum
Organum. Translated and Edited by Peter Urbach and John Gibson. (Chicago: Open Court, 1994), ii.
Slide 2 represents the title page of the Head Edition of Hobbes’s Leviathan, which may be found in Thomas Hobbes,
Leviathan, with selected variants from the Latin edition of 1668. Edited, with Introduction, by Edwin Curley.
(Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1994), lxxviii.
�Black, The Very Pictures of Education, Page 34
Slide 3 represents the frontispiece of Vico’s New Science, which may be found in Giambattista Vico, The New
Science of Giambattista Vico. Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744) with the addition of “Practic of
the New Science.” Translated by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Frisch. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1984), 2.
Slide 4 represents the frontispiece of Rousseau’s First Discourse, which may be found in Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
The Discourses and other early political writings. Edited and translated by Victor Gourevitch. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997), 2.
Slide 5 represents the frontispiece of Rousseau’s Second Discourse, which may be found in Rousseau, The
Discourses and other early political writings, 112.
Slide 6 represents and magnifies the detail from the bottom right-hand corner of the frontispiece of the Second
Discourse, wherein the huts of the Hottentots are depicted.
Slide 7 represents the ‘Thetis’ illustration from Emile, which may be found in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On
Education. Translation and Introduction by Allan Bloom. (New York: Basic Books, 1979), ii. A portion of the
illustration on the middle left margin has been boxed in red.
Slide 8 represents and magnifies the detail from the middle left margin of the ‘Thetis’ illustration, wherein the figure
of Charon can barely be discerned.
Slide 9 represents the ‘Chiron’ illustration from Emile, which may be found in Rousseau, Emile, 76.
Slide 10 represents the ‘Hermes’ illustration from Emile, which may be found in Rousseau, Emile, 164.
Slide 11 juxtaposes the frontispiece of the First Discourse from Slide 4 with the ‘Hermes’ illustration from Slide 10.
Slide 12 represents the ‘Orpheus’ illustration from Emile, which may be found in Rousseau, Emile, 261.
Slide 13 represents the ‘Circe’ illustration from Emile, which may be found in Rousseau, Emile, 76.
Slide 14 represents and magnifies the detail from the top left margin of the ‘Circe’ illustration, wherein a bed canopy
is depicted.
Notes
1
Readers of this lecture, who cannot benefit from the slideshow that accompanied it, should consult the
“Explication of the Slides,” above.
2
Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744)
with the addition of “Practic of the New Science.” Translated by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch.
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968). Citations to this edition are given in the form [NS page].
3
Plato, Phaedrus. Translated with Introduction, Notes, and Interpretive Essay by James H. Nichols Jr. (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1998).
4
Quotations from Rousseau’s writings are taken from the best editions that are widely available. Quotations from
the First and Second Discourses and the Essay on the Origin of Languages are from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The
Discourses and other early political writings. Edited and Translated by Victor Gourevitch. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), and are given in the forms [FD, SD, or EOL page]. Quotations from Emile are from JeanJacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education. Translation and Introduction by Allan Bloom. (New York: Basic
�Black, The Very Pictures of Education, Page 35
Books, 1979), and are given in the form [E page]. I also refer in the text to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Correspondance
complète de Jean Jacques Rousseau. Édition critique établie et annotée par R.A. Leigh. Fifty-Two Volumes.
(Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1965-1998), in the form [CC Volume:page]; to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Collected
Writings. Thirteen Volumes. Series Editors Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly. (Hanover, NH: University
Press of New England, 1992-2010), in the form [CW Volume:page]; and to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Œuvres
complètes. Five Volumes. Series Editors Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond. (Paris: Bibliothèque de la
Pléiade, 1964-95), in the form [OC Volume:page]. Translations from CC and OC are my own.
5
These engravings were not ready for the first edition of the novel, and so were at first published separately,
accompanied by narrative descriptions of the “Subjects of the Engravings” [CW 6:621-628] that indicate the high
level of detail Rousseau meant his illustrations to communicate. As he writes at the beginning of his discussion of
these illustrations,
Most of these Subjects are detailed so as to make them understood, much more so than they can be
in the execution: for in order to realize a drawing felicitously, the Artist must see it not as it will be
on his paper, but as it is in nature. The pencil does not distinguish a blonde from a brunette, but
the imagination that guides it must distinguish them. The burin cannot render highlights and
shadows well unless the Engraver also imagines the colors. In the same way, with figures in
motion, he needs to see what precedes and what follows, and accord a certain latitude to the time
of the action; otherwise one will never capture well the unity of the moment to be expressed. The
Artist’s skill consists in making the Viewer imagine many things that do not appear on the plate;
and that depends on a felicitous choice of circumstances, of which the ones he renders lead us to
presuppose the ones he does not. Therefore one can never enter into too much detail when one
wants to present Subjects for Engraving, and is absolutely ignorant of the art [CW 6:621].
6
For an example of Rousseau’s care with the details of his illustrations, consider this passage from a letter to his
publisher, Duchesne, written on March 7, 1762:
The change that was made to the flames [in the Thetis engraving] on my advice is very bad, and
spoils the effect of the engraving which the lit portion brought out a great deal; I would wish that
my stupidity in this respect be fixable. I will be more hesitant the next time to give my advice, for
fear of committing another. And yet to this point I have not been mistaken in matters of effect [CC
10:142-143].
7
Why is a satyr an appropriate allegorical representation of common men? Rousseau writes at some length about
the mixed or monstrous character of modern human beings in Book One of Emile [E 37-41]. He attributes this
mixture to contradictions between the education we are given by nature, and the one we are given by men. The
satyr, half beast and half man, is a good image for the kind of monsters that we are, according to Rousseau. It
follows that if the education of nature were to have its way with us, we would be nothing other than beasts.
8
See Plutarch, Moralia. Volume Two. Translated by Frank Cole Babbitt. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1962). Citations from this work are given in the text in the form [Volume.section].
9
My discussion of Rousseau’s illustrations in the next five sections of this lecture has benefited considerably from
John T. Scott’s unpublished paper “The Illustrative Education of Rousseau’s Emile,” which he was kind enough to
share with me.
10
Charles Eisen, who designed the engraving for the Second Discourse, also designed the engravings for Emile
[Scott, 6].
11
Rousseau rejected the idea that the engravings should be identified by inscriptions explicating the action depicted
in each. In one letter to his publisher he writes,
I do not believe that inscriptions at the bottom of the engravings are needed: one ought not to
explain at all what is clear: we could just number the page and the volume there, to which each
�Black, The Very Pictures of Education, Page 36
engraving is related; but I fear that the binder will move it [each engraving] to that page, whereas
each engraving ought to be at the head of a book” [CC 10:143].
In a later letter, Rousseau continues,
[i]t is not possible, Sir, that the inscription of the engraving remain as it is; the way in which it has
been cut into two lines forming two sort of little rhyming verses, [is] very ridiculous, and I must
warn you that anyway we will redo the inscriptions; since there are changes to be made to those
that I have sent you, one ought not to have them engraved without alerting me. I would be of the
opinion, then, that we erase the inscription completely, if it’s possible to do so without much
trouble. If you would rather leave it in, and consequently put one on all the others (and I consent
to it if you judge it appropriate) in this case this one absolutely must be rewritten in the following
way, since once again it cannot remain as it is. Thetis dips Her son / in the Styx. See p. 37 [CC
10:150].
12
Rousseau instructed his publisher that, with the exception of “Orpheus,” each engraving was to be placed
opposite the first page of each book:
The citations of pages that you had engraved at the top of each engraving will certainly lead the
binders and signature-sewers to commit an error. They will place the engraving facing the cited
page, instead of putting it at the beginning of the book or volume, as is said in the explication.
You must attempt to prevent this. There should be an engraving as frontispiece for each volume
and another in the first volume at the head of the second book [CC 10:222-223].
13
As Scott rightly notes, Bloom mistakenly has the explications point to the pages on which the engravings are
found, rather than the pages of the text to which the engravings refer [Scott, 9-10].
14
Rousseau also uses the terms “fable” and “allegory” in his description of the frontispiece to the First Discourse.
See the discussion of the Prometheus illustration, above, the Discourse itself, [G, 16 n *], and the Letter to Lecat
[CW 2:179].
15
How does the fear of death cause Thetis to neglect to breastfeed her son? Breastfeeding might entail implicit
acknowledgement of one’s mortality, because it involves explicit acknowledgement of one’s subordination to one’s
offspring. Rousseau advocates familiarizing young girls with the fear of death early in their educations, whereas he
recommends keeping this fear from young boys. See Book Five of Emile [E 379-380].
16
References to this work are to Statius, Achilleid. Edited and Translated by D.R. Shackleton Bailey. (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), and are given in the text in the form [Book.line numbers].
17
Scott points out that Rousseau is “coy” about whether the tutor and the pupil in this example are Jean-Jacques and
Emile. In the example itself he distinguishes himself from “the man who speaks in this example” [E 141], and
presumably thereby distinguishes the pupil from Emile. But in one place later in the text he refers to Emile as the
pupil in the example [E 153], and in another to Emile’s “former races” [E 436]. Earlier, Rousseau had written that
he “will not be distressed if Emile is of noble birth” [E 52]. See Scott, 18.
18
Scott notes that the only reference in Homer to the “most righteous of the centaurs” is to his medicinal skill,
which he taught to Asclepius and to Achilles. See Iliad IV.219 and XI.832. It may be significant that Asclepius
tried to use these skills to overcome death. Scott also helpfully directs us to the first chapter of Xenophon’s
Cynegeticus, where Chiron is mentioned as a master of hunting, and to the eighteenth chapter of Machiavelli’s
Prince, where he is a metaphor for knowing “how to use the beast and the man.” See Scott, 15-16.
19
Another difference between Thetis’ and Chiron’s treatments is that Thetis’ are physical, whereas Chiron’s are
psychic. Chiron is a singer, and he teaches Achilles to sing as well. This points to a connection between the
‘Chiron’ illustration and the ‘Orpheus’ illustration.
�Black, The Very Pictures of Education, Page 37
20
Rousseau devotes a few pages of Book Two of Emile to a discussion of carnivorousness. Human beings are
naturally vegetarians, he argues, and it is “above all… important not to denature this primitive taste,” not for the
sake of health, but for the sake of character: “it is certain that great eaters of meat are in general more cruel and
ferocious than other men” [E 153]. He follows these claims with a lengthy quotation from Plutarch, of a lurid
passage that argues that while the first carnivorous human beings must have overcome a deep repugnance to eat
animal corpses, they were compelled to do so by natural scarcity [!], whereas modern human beings have no such
excuse [E 154-155]. It may be relevant to note that Statius’ carnivorous Achilles does indeed seem to be cruel and
ferocious. Thetis wants to keep him from the Trojan war by disguising him as a girl and hiding him among the girls
of Scyros. Ashamed to comply, especially by the thought of what Chiron might say, Achilles only goes along with
her plan after he is seized by lust for one of the girls, Deidamia [I.301-303]. Soon afterward, he rapes and
impregnates her [I.640-643]. In some respect, the rest of the story of Emile could be understood as Rousseau’s
attempt to avoid this outcome for his Achilles. Compare the interpretation of the Circe engraving, below.
The vegetarianism of the Achilles depicted in the Chiron illustration could just as well have been indicated
by the depiction of a cake as by the depiction of an apple. Perhaps Rousseau chose the latter to allude to the story of
Adam and Eve, or to the story of the beauty contest that was the first cause of the Trojan War. Or perhaps an apple
is easier to identify in an engraving than a cake.
21
“This novel,” Rousseau writes,
disencumbered of all its rigmarole, beginning with Robinson’s shipwreck near his island and
ending with the arrival of the ship which comes to take him from it, will be both Emile’s
entertainment and instruction throughout the period which is dealt with here [E 185].
It is instructive to see which parts of the novel, falling before Robinson’s shipwreck and after the arrival of his
rescuers, Rousseau considers to be “rigmarole.”
22
Scott points out that the identification of the Egyptian god Thoth or Theuth with the Greek god Hermes only came
after the age of classical Greek literature, in the person of Hermes Trismegistus of the hermetic tradition [Scott, 20].
23
It also makes sense to interpret the beardless youth as Emile, and the older, bearded man as his tutor, JeanJacques – though Rousseau has argued earlier in Emile that a tutor should be as near in age to his pupil as possible:
“a child’s governor ought to be young and even as young as a wise man can be” [E 51]. This interpretation has the
advantage of agreeing with the story of Book Three, wherein Jean-Jacques shows Emile the elements of the
sciences, without allowing him to approach any of the sciences very closely. “The issue is not to teach him the
sciences,” Rousseau writes, “but to give him the taste for loving them and the methods for learning them when this
taste is better developed” [E 172]. It also has the advantage of repeating the strange doubling of Rousseau that we
saw in the ‘Prometheus’ illustration. There Rousseau was at once Prometheus the titan (or Rousseau the author) and
the Citizen of Geneva; here he is at once Hermes the god (or Rousseau the author) and Jean-Jacques the tutor.
24
Another indication of the exceptional character of the ‘Orpheus’ illustration is that in his “Explications” Rousseau
tells us that it “belongs” to the fourth book – again, unlike the illustrations to Books Two and Three, each of which
was said to be “at the beginning” of its book, or the illustration to Book One, which was said to “relate” to that book
[E 36; I have altered the translation]. John Scott details the convincing circumstantial evidence that this engraving is
a late addition: Rousseau’s
instructions for the division of [the] published work come in November 1761, just six months
before it appeared, and include his specification that the third volume should open with the
dramatic introduction to the “Profession.” At this same time, Rousseau also sends his ideas to
Eisen for the engravings for the last two books, and thus his instruction for the engraving of
Orpheus. Finally, the textual reference in Book IV to Orpheus was added only during production.
See Scott, 25 and OC 4:1569.
25
Recall that Rousseau instructed Duchesne to place the ‘Orpheus’ engraving at the beginning of the Profession of
Faith of the Savoyard Vicar. See note 12, above.
�Black, The Very Pictures of Education, Page 38
26
There is also a lyre in the ‘Chiron’ illustration.
27
We can detect this disagreement at the end of the Vicar’s speech, where he advises the young Rousseau:
[i]f my reflections lead you to think as I do, if my sentiments are also yours and we have the same
profession of faith... [g]o back to your own country, return to the religion of your father, follow it
in the sincerity of your heart, and never leave it again [E 311].
Since the young Rousseau did not take this advice, we ought to infer that he did not share the Vicar’s sentiment. An
indication of the ground of their disagreement may be seen earlier in the Profession of Faith, where the Vicar claims
that conscience is to the soul what instinct and the passions are to the body. He makes this claim in the context of an
argument that conscience and instinct or the passions are always at odds with one another, and that of these, it is
conscience that speaks with the voice of nature. The young Rousseau tries to interrupt the Vicar at this point, but the
Vicar will not let him speak [E 286-7]. To put the comparison crudely for the sake of brevity, Rousseau and the
Savoyard Vicar seem to agree that conscience is an innate principle of justice and virtue [E 289]; that it speaks in
sentiments rather than in judgments [E 290]; that it therefore differs from reason or the natural intellect, since reason
leads to knowledge of the good and conscience to our love of the good [E 286]; that both reason and conscience are
required for moral action [E 294]; and that the voice of conscience can be stifled but not eradicated [E 291]. But
Rousseau disagrees with the Vicar’s inferences from the contradictory demands of instinct or the passions and
conscience. The Vicar takes these demands to indicate that human beings are composed of body and soul [E 279].
This fundamental dualism leads him to a belief in human freedom [E 281], in the existence of God [E 275; cf. 290
and 295], in the natural sociability of human beings [E 290], and in an afterlife—understood as the place where the
soul, freed from the body, can finally pursue wholeheartedly the demands of conscience [E 282-5]. It also follows
from the Vicar’s hatred of the body and his reliance on the afterlife that, as he sees it, the demands of conscience are
not compatible with patriotism [E 295]. The importance of the Vicar’s dualism becomes clear in his comment that
[i]f conscience is the work of the prejudices, I am doubtless wrong, and there is no demonstrable
morality. But if to prefer oneself to everything is an inclination natural to man, and if nevertheless
the first sentiment of justice is innate in the human heart, let him who regards man as a simple
being overcome these contradictions, and I shall no longer acknowledge more than one substance
[E 279].
By claiming, in his own name, that conscience develops from the selfish human passions [E 235], Rousseau has
already suggested, earlier in Emile, how these contradictions may be overcome. According to his own argument,
then, the Vicar ought to abandon his dualism, and everything that follows from it.
28
References here are to Ovid, Metamorphoses. With an English Translation by Frank Justus Miller. In Two
Volumes. (London: William Heinemann, 1916), and are given in the text in the form [Book.lines].
29
Ovid adds here that Orpheus turns his sexual attentions to young boys, heightening the impression of Orpheus’
burgeoning dislike for women.
30
We find many of the same details in Virgil’s telling of the story in Book IV of his Georgics, though his imagery
does not correspond as closely with Rousseau’s engraving as Ovid’s does. Virgil attributes the fateful backward
glance to “a sudden frenzy [that] seized Orpheus, unwary in his love” [IV.488-489], rather than to any fear of
weakness in Eurydice. And he does not suggest that it was homosexual practices that turned the local women
against the singer. See Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid. With an English Translation by H. Rushton Fairclough.
In Two Volumes. (London: William Heinemann, 1916). The citation above from the Georgics is given in the form
[Book.lines].
31
The Vicar says that his resolve not to profane the institution of marriage
was precisely what destroyed me. My respect for the bed of others left my faults exposed. The
scandal had to be expiated. Arrested, interdicted, driven out, I was far more the victim of my
scruples than of my incontinence; and I had occasion to understand, from the reproaches with
�Black, The Very Pictures of Education, Page 39
which my disgrace was accompanied, that often one need only aggravate the fault to escape the
punishment [E 267].
32
As Rousseau later writes in reference to Emile’s first sexual experience, “I have reflected on men’s morals too
much not to see the invincible influence of this moment on the rest of his life” [E 318]. Compare his later
chastisement of readers who “do not sufficiently consider the influence which a man’s first liaison with a woman
ought of have on the course of both of their lives” [E 415].
33
Instead of receiving an otherworldly metaphysical teaching, Emile receives a thisworldly revelation in which
Jean-Jacques explains what he has done for his education [E 323], and then, having thus secured his attention,
initiates him into the mysteries and dangers of sex [E 324]. In reply, Emile asks Jean-Jacques to retain his authority
over him, in order to protect Emile from his own passions [E 325].
34
References here are to Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica. With an English Translation by R.C. Seaton. (London:
William Heinemann, 1912], and are given in the form [Book.lines].
35
Jean-Jacques uses the Sirens as an image of the dangers of sex in his revelatory conversation with Emile, as a way
of impressing on Emile how difficult it will be to heed Jean-Jacques’s authority. “Just as Ulysses, moved by the
Sirens’ song and seduced by the lure of the pleasures, cried out to his crew to unchain him, so you will want to break
the bonds which hinder you” [E 316]. This passage, together with a reference to Ulysses at the beginning of Book
IV of Emile [E 212], leads John Scott to the thoughtful, and to my mind correct, hypothesis that, had Rousseau not
been required by the division of the work into volumes to place an engraving in the middle of Book Four, he would
have placed an engraving of Odysseus at the beginning of this book. “The engraving to Book V of Emile also
depicts Odysseus,” Scott writes,
and choosing the same figure to illustrate Book IV would have given the work as a whole a
symmetry with the first two books relating the story of Achilles and the last two the story of
Odysseus. […] The choice of Odysseus as the subject for an engraving for Book IV would be
appropriate for novelistic reasons, since the story of Emile’s wandering begins there and continues
into Book V. It would also be appropriate for theoretical reasons, for the taming of Odysseus’
wily pride and his return to domesticity would accord with Rousseau’s reinterpretation of the story
of Achilles in the first two engravings for the work and the philosophical thrust of the work.
See Scott, 25-26. It poses no difficulty for this hypothesis that Odysseus’ encounter with the Sirens happens after
his encounter with Circe, according to the Odyssey. Homer writes that Circe warns Odysseus of the danger of the
Sirens, and tells him how escape despite listening to their song [XII.39-54]. In his Epistles, in a passage which
Rousseau knew well, Horace mentions the Sirens and Circe in this order. See note 36.
36
“You know the Sirens' songs and Circe's cups,” Horace writes in the Epistles; “if, along with his comrades,
[Ulysses] had drunk of these in folly and greed, he would have become the shapeless and witless vassal of a harlot
mistress – would have lived as an unclean dog or a sow that loves the mire” [I.ii.23-26]. See Horace, Satires,
Epistles, and Ars Poetica. With an English Translation by H. Rushton Fairclough. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1942). The reference is in the form [Book.epistle.lines]. It’s likely that Rousseau was familiar
with this source, the next line of which contains the line nos numerus sumus, et fruges consumere nati, which Lecat
cites in his Refutation of the First Discourse [CW 2:133], and which Rousseau later quotes in Book Two of Emile
[CW 13:296].
37
References to the Odyssey are to Homer, The Odyssey of Homer. Translated with an Introduction by Richmond
Lattimore. (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), and are given in the text in the form [Book.lines].
38
Those who would argue that Circe offers herself to Odysseus because she recognizes who he is need to find a way
to explain the details of Hermes’ advice. He does not advise Odysseus simply to identify himself to Circe.
39
This work, which seems unfinished, and was not published during Rousseau’s lifetime, consists of two letters
written by Emile to his tutor Jean-Jacques. In the first, Emile describes how, after Sophie bears him a son and a
�Black, The Very Pictures of Education, Page 40
daughter, Jean-Jacques leaves, and Emile and Sophie’s misfortunes begin. Sophie’s parents soon die, then her
daughter by Emile. Consumed with grief, she is taken by Emile to the capital city for distraction, accompanied by a
friendly couple. They spend two years in the capital, during which time Emile and Sophie are both corrupted. Their
friends turn out to be libertines, and the female friend apparently ends by persuading Sophie to engage in an
adulterous affair with the friend’s husband. Sophie then reveals this affair to Emile, and the resulting pregnancy.
He is thunderstruck; he roams the capital in a passionate fury. But once he calms down, Emile leaves the capital and
takes work as a carpenter, while he deliberates about what to do. He decides to leave Sophie and to take his son
with him; but he is dissuaded from the latter on learning of a secret visit by Sophie, who fears precisely this.
Instead, Emile flees Sophie and the capital, heading south.
In the second letter we read that Emile, arriving eventually in Marseilles, embarks for Naples as a common
sailor. Unfortunately, the captain of his ship is in cahoots with the Barbary pirates. When the captain’s treachery
becomes clear, Emile kills him, but is taken by the pirates and – as soon as they see he will not be ransomed – sold
into slavery. As a slave Emile is put to use, first as a craftsman and then as a laborer on public works. When the
latter situation becomes dangerously onerous, Emile plots with his fellow slaves to go on strike: an action which
ends with Emile being made the overseer of the other slaves. He performs so well in this position that he attracts the
attention of, and is eventually sold to, the Dey of Algiers – at which point the primary manuscript breaks off. Two
passages in the first letter suggest that, had the work been completed, we would have read of the deaths of Sophie
and of Emile’s son as well [CW 13:685-721].
40
It would have occurred to Rousseau that illustrations could be used to this end if he was familiar, as seems likely,
with Vico’s New Science, whose allegorical frontispiece is composed of what Vico calls “hieroglyphs,” to which he
devotes thirty paragraphs of explanation, and which he says are intended “to give the reader some conception of the
work before he reads it, and, with such an aid as imagination may afford, to call it back to mind after he has read it”
[NS, 3]. There is no conclusive evidence, as far as I can tell, that Rousseau read Vico, but there are suggestive
similarities between their thoughts. The editors of the Pléiade edition remark that the Essay on the Origin of
Languages especially raises the question of whether Rousseau read Vico while he was in Venice, but that decisive
proof is lacking [OC 1:1548; 5:1545].
41
“Every general idea is purely intellectual,” Rousseau writes in the discussion of language in the Second
Discourse; but
if the imagination is at all involved, the idea immediately becomes particular. Try to outline the
image of a tree in general to yourself, you will never succeed; in spite of yourself it will have to be
seen as small or large, bare or leafy, light or dark, and if you could see in it only what there is in
every tree, the image would no longer resemble a tree. Purely abstract beings are either seen in
this same way, or conceived of only be means of discourse. Only the definition of a Triangle
gives you the genuine idea of it: As soon as you figure one in your mind, it is a given Triangle and
not another, and you cannot help making its lines perceptible or its surface colored. Hence once
has to state propositions, hence one has to speak in order to have general ideas: for as soon as the
imagination stops, the mind can proceed only by means of discourse [SD 148].
In the first chapter of the Essay on the Origin of Languages, Rousseau adds that the language of gesture, which
when frozen in time becomes drawing, is just as natural as spoken language, but easier and less dependent on
conventions: “for more objects strike our eyes than our ears, and shapes exhibit greater variety than do sounds; they
are also more expressive and say more in less time” [EOL 248].
42
While Rousseau claims that “[t]he ambassador [left] his present and [departed] without saying anything” [E 322],
Herodotus writes that the messenger said, “let the Persians… if they were clever [sophoi] enough, discover the
signification of the presents” [IV.131]. See Herodotus, The History. Translated by David Grene. (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1987).
43
One of Rousseau’s examples in the Essay is of the Levite of Ephraim, who cut the body of his wife into twelve
pieces to rouse the tribes of Israel against the tribe of Benjamin. About this sign, Rousseau writes, “[a]t this ghastly
sight they rushed to arms… [a]nd the Tribe of Benjamin was exterminated” [EOL 249-250]. But in Judges, the
source of the story, we read that while the Israelites were outraged at the sight of the woman’s dismembered corpse
[19:30], they needed a speech to determine them to attack those responsible in Gibeah [20:4-9]. Another of the
�Black, The Very Pictures of Education, Page 41
examples in the Essay is of King Saul, who dismembered his plow oxen to being Israel to the assistance of the tribe
of Jabesh. But in I Samuel we read that Saul accompanied the parts of his dismembered oxen with a threat.
“‘Whoever does not come out after Saul and after Samuel, thus will be done to his oxen!’ And the fear of the Lord
fell on the people,” the scripture writer concludes, “and they came out as one man” [11:7]. Again, while Rousseau
claims in the Essay that the orator Hyperides got the courtesan Phryne acquitted “without urging a single word in her
defense” [EOL 250], we read the following in Athenaeus, The Deipnosophists, XIII:
Hyperides spoke in support of Phryne, and when his speech accomplished nothing, and the jurors
seemed likely to convict her, he brought her out in public, ripped her dress to shreds, exposed her
chest, and at the conclusion of his speech produced cries of lament as he gazed at her, causing the
jurors to feel a superstitious fear of this priestess and temple-attendant of Aphrodite, and to give in
to pity rather than put her to death. Afterward, then she had been acquitted, a decree was passed to
the effect that no speaker was to lament on another person’s behalf, and that no accused man or
[woman] was to be put on display while their case was being decided [590e-f].
See Athenaeus, The Learned Banqueters. Edited and Translated by S. Douglas Olson. Volume VI. (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 411-413. Finally, the same criticism could be made of Rousseau’s use of the
example of Antony, at the end of his digression in Emile. “On the death of Caesar,” he writes, “I imagine one of our
orators wishing to move the people; he exhausts all the commonplaces of his art to present a pathetic description of
Caesar’s wounds, his blood, his corpse. Antony, although eloquent, does not say all that. He has the body brought
in. What rhetoric!” [E 322-323]. According to Plutarch’s “Life of Antony,’ though, Rousseau’s likely source,
Antony behaved differently:
[a]s Caesar’s body was conveying to the tomb, Antony, according to the custom, was making his
funeral oration in the market-place, and perceiving the people to be infinitely affected with what
he had said, he began to mingle with his praises language of commiseration, and horror at what
had happened, and, as he was ending his speech, he took the under-clothes of the dead, and held
them up, showing them stains of blood and the holes of the many stabs, calling those that had done
this act villains and bloody murderers. All which excited the people to such indignation, that they
would not defer the funeral, but, making a pile of tables and forms in the very market-place, set
fire to it; and every one, taking a brand, ran to the conspirators’ houses, to attack them [II, 489490].
Antony uses the language of signs to concentrate the passions generated by his spoken words.
44
Rousseau claims to be following Horace in drawing this conclusion. And indeed, we read in On the Art of Poetry,
“[l]ess vividly is the mind stirred by what finds entrance through the ears than by what is brought before the trusty
eyes, and what the spectator can see for himself.” Yet Horace follows up with this qualification: “you will not bring
upon the stage what should be performed behind the scenes, and you will keep much from our eyes, which an actor's
ready tongue will narrate anon in our presence [180-184].” The examples he gives of such things are of atrocities
and miraculous transformations. If these things are more striking when imagined than when feigned on the stage,
they may indicate a limit to the energy of the language of signs.
45
“The object that is exhibited to the eyes shakes the imagination, arouses curiosity, keeps the mind attentive to
what is going to be said” [E 322], Rousseau explains in Book Four of Emile.
46
The other examples are, first, “Alexander placing his seal on his favorite’s mouth,” and second, “Diogenes
walking before Zeno.” The first is a reference to Plutarch’s “Life of Alexander,” paragraph 39 [E 491 n 68]. The
story told there involves a friend of Alexander who had read a letter from Alexander’s mother, advising Alexander
to desist from giving magnificent gifts, because this made their recipients equal to kings and made them many
friends, while stripping Alexander bare. The gesture was meant to tell the friend to keep silent about the advice,
which Alexander had been keeping secret. The second phrase is a reference to Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the
Philosophers, VI.39 [E 491 n 69]. The text only says that when “someone” told Diogenes there is no such thing as
motion, he got up and walked around. In both examples, though, the significance of the action depends on the
communicating parties having a considerable amount of experience in common: the content of Alexander’s mother’s
letter, in the first case, and the claims of Zeno’s paradoxes in the second.
�Black, The Very Pictures of Education, Page 42
47
According to Herodotus, the messenger reported “that Thrasybulus had made no suggestion at all, and indeed he
wondered what sort of a man this was he had been sent to, a madman and a destroyer of his own property” [V.92].
Despite his ignorance of the message, the messenger’s judgment of Thrasybulus was good.
48
In the Letter to Raynal, an early reply to criticisms made of the First Discourse, Rousseau answers the claim that
“[i]t is impossible to be too emphatic about truths that clash so head-on with the general taste, and it is important to
deny chicanery every possible hold” by saying that “I am not altogether of the same opinion, and I believe that
children should be left some baubles” [G, 31; italics in the original]. Compare what Rousseau says about the
illustrations in Emile in a letter to his publisher: “I am very happy with the illustrator, and even with the engraver,
and I am, like children, quite taken with beautiful images” [CC 10:151].
49
Rousseau’s first examples showing the superiority of the ancients have to do with covenants. When the gods
ruled instead of force, he tells us, covenants were solemnly made in their presence, and these covenants were
recorded in the “book” of the earth: in stones, trees, and heaps of rocks. “[T]he faith of men was more assured by
the guarantee of these mute witnesses than it is today by all the vain rigor of the laws” [E 321]. He implies that by
swearing in the presence of these objects, the ancient Israelites made it more likely that their covenants be kept –
that is, that the language of signs persuaded men to act faithfully. What, then, was the basis of this persuasion?
Rousseau gives four examples of ancient covenants – all taken from Genesis. The first is to “the well of the
oath” [Genesis 26:32-33; Bloom, 491 n 65]. In this example, a pact is struck between Isaac and Abimelech in which
the latter pledges not to attack the former, because “[w]e have clearly seen that the Lord is with you” [Genesis
26:28], and a well is dug called the well of the oath. The evidence that the Lord is with Isaac seems chiefly to have
been the flourishing of the Israelites that followed once Abimelech realized that Isaac was Rebekah’s husband, and
put him under his protection. Second, Rousseau mentions “the well of the living and seeing” [Genesis 16:14;
Bloom, 491 n 65]. In this case Hagar encounters a messenger of the Lord, who promises her that she will bear a son
named Ishmael, “a wild ass of a man – / his hand against all, the hand of all against him, / he will encamp in despite
of all his kin” [16:12]. This covenant leads Hagar to return to Sarai and to endure her abuse, but it also promises
centuries of conflict. Third, Rousseau cites “the old oak of Mamre” [Genesis 18:1; Bloom, 491 n 65]. In this
passage, the Lord appeared to Abraham in the form of three men, and they promised Sarai that she would have a
child. The same three men went on to visit, and destroy, Sodom and Gomorrah. And finally, Rousseau mentions
“the mound of the witness” [Genesis 31:46-48; compare Bloom, 491 n 65]. In this last example we read about how
Jacob, having taken flocks and daughters from Laban, made a pact with the latter to draw a boundary between them
[31:52]. Jacob is able to make this pact because, he claims, God was with him [31:42] in his theft – that is, the theft
succeeded.
What these examples seem to have in common is that in each case the covenant symbolized by a natural
object was concluded against the backdrop of an indirect or direct demonstration of the power of God. We are led to
conclude that while the signs concentrated the memory of these demonstrations of power, it was the demonstrations
themselves – in other words, an experience of force – that aroused the interest of the contracting parties, and
persuaded them to be faithful. The examples thus illustrate how persuasion is based on the tyrannical exercise of
force.
50
The only exception, if that is what it is, to the rule that Rousseau’s historical examples of the language of signs
involve tyrants, is the example of Diogenes and Zeno [E 322].
�
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The very pictures of education: on Rousseau's illustrations in Emile
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“Reasons without Reason: Anti-rationalism in Heidegger’s Being and Time”
by Lee Goldsmith
(Delivered at St. John’s College Annapolis, June 29th, 2016)1
Every polity—but especially a democratic polity—faces difficult questions that they must
answer together. Often we settle the answers through political institutions, but sometimes the
questions remain in the informal sphere of social life. On many of these questions we disagree
with one another deeply, sincerely, and seemingly intractably. It is no surprise then that public
discourse can be exasperating, even among friends and colleagues. Nevertheless, we should not
succumb to the exasperation. However we finally resolve difficult questions—and even if we
never do—it would be best if public discourse were reasonable. Even where we persistently
disagree, we ought to be able to articulate the reasons we have, understand those of others, give
rejoinders, and, if necessary, reconcile ourselves to a resolution. In order to continue working
together as a polity, we ought to be able to have reasonable disagreements where everyone
involved can acknowledge the sincerity of the reasons offered, even if the reasons are ultimately
unconvincing. If public discourse is to be public reason, we must treat each other as capable of
having reasons.
Unfortunately, many participants in public discourse scrutinize each other as if they were
not offering reasons but some non-rational consideration. Bruno Latour describes the problem
ably:
One could say, with more than a little dose of irony, that there has been a sort of
miniaturization of critical efforts: what in the past centuries required the formidable effort
of a Marx, a Nietzsche, a Benjamin, has become accessible for nothing… You can now
have your Baudrillard’s or your Bourdieu’s disillusion for a song, your Derridian
deconstruction for a nickel. Conspiracy theory costs nothing to produce, disbelief is easy,
debunking what is learned in 101 classes in critical theory. As the recent advertisement of
a Hollywood film proclaimed, ‘Everyone is suspect… everyone is for sale… and nothing
is true!’2
To sum up: when reason is suspect, so is everyone else. If we believe that humans can act only
non-rationally—that is to say, not on the basis of reasons but due to causes such as desires,
drives, and manipulated beliefs—then we will treat others’ words and deeds as expressions or
outgrowths of subterranean roots, and the truth of our criticisms as the more secure, the deeper
beneath the surface those roots stretch, the more inscrutable they become. Our public
appearances will be interpreted in the first place as idiosyncrasy rather than potential
communion. When we encounter difference or disagreement, we will tend to explain away its
bearing on us and have our own explanations likewise dismissed. Most importantly, deep public
questions about how we are to live together peacefully and respectfully will tend to elicit
recriminations rather than answers. I expect anyone who has tried to have serious conversations
1
I would like to note that my work on Heidegger has been deeply influenced by my teachers, Cristina Lafont and
Rachel Zuckert, although I do not reference their work in this piece. I owe them much thanks.
2
Latour, Bruno. “What is Iconoclash? or Is there a world beyond image wars?” in Iconoclash, Beyond the ImageWars in Science, Religion and Art, ed. Weibel, Peter and Latour, Bruno, ZKM and MIT Press (Cambridge, MA:
2002). The movie tagline is from 1997’s L.A. Confidential, directed by Curtis Hanson, although I believe the last
clause should read, “and nothing is as it seems.”
1
�with strangers on social media will recognize the phenomenon: the cheapness of critique erodes
the soil of productive public discourse.
I do not mean to suggest that public discourse today is more fraught than it has been in
the past. However, we do face a different problem today than our predecessors did. Latour’s
quote provides the clue that the erosion of public discourse today arises at least in part from the
popularity of reductive anti-rationalist critics of rationalist thinkers. By ‘rationalist’ here, I do not
mean the traditional notion: someone who holds that we have some central concepts and
knowledge independent of sensory experience. Instead, I mean someone who holds that human
beings have a faculty of reason. A faculty of reason is a systematically unified set of principles,
encompassing more than classical logic, that binds each of us because it is part of us. Prominent
rationalist philosophers, in my sense, include Plato, Leibniz, and Kant. Each held that reason is
governed by a single principle—the good, the principle of sufficient reason, the unconditioned—
and that subordinate principles align with the fundamental unifying principle as well as cohere
with one another, producing a systematic set of principles for thought that a person could
discover through introspection. For the rationalist, a person has a reason when she correctly
subsumes her situation under the principles set out in the faculty.3
Anti-rationalists, on the other hand, deny that human beings have such a faculty. And
anti-rationalists are reductive when they treat any appearance of having a reason as the
manifestation of a proximate cause alone. Reductive anti-rationalism rose to the foreground as a
final critique of Enlightenment ideals. Reductive anti-rationalists—among whom we might count
Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud—worked from the premises of modern scientific inquiry to show
that we do not have a faculty of reason. Even the appearance of having reasons is illusory,
generated by a false consciousness of our own self-constitution. From the perspectives of history
and psychology, they maintained, human considerations are too diverse, contextually embedded,
and self-interested to cohere with a systematically unified set of rational principles. In light of
these alternate explanations, the existence of reasons is an extraneous hypothesis.
The reductive anti-rationalists pose a serious objection to rationality and, thereby, the
very possibility of public reason. One response to their challenge would be to defend the
rationalist position. I will not be exploring that line of thought here. Instead, I will present a third
option, which I lift from Heidegger’s work in Being and Time. According to the schematization I
have presented, Heidegger is an anti-rationalist: he presents a purportedly complete account of
human existence that excludes any faculty of reason. Nevertheless, we can reconstruct from
Heidegger’s work a conception of reasons. To be specific, Heidegger’s account of authenticity
and the roles that death and conscience play in that account provide the basis for an account of
when a person has a reason to do or believe something.4 That is to say, Heidegger holds out the
possibility that we might be able to accept the anti-rationalist critique of rationalism without
losing reasoning from the picture of humanity. From this Heideggerian account of reasons
without reason, we can look again at the question of public reason with fresh eyes.
I have drawn this account of a faculty of reason from Susan Neiman’s work on Kant. (Neiman, Susan. The Unity of
Reason: Rereading Kant. Oxford UP (New York: 1994).) The three features—universality, unity, and
systematicity—are meant to be minimal conditions. They provide the beginning of a complete account of a faculty
of reason but not at all the whole thing.
4
Steven Crowell has already developed an account of rationality based on Heidegger’s conception of conscience.
For the basic account, see: Crowell, Steven. “Conscience and Reason: Heidegger and the Grounds of Intentionality”
in Transcendental Heidegger. eds. Crowell, Steven and Malpas, Jeff. Stanford UP (Stanford: 2007) pp.43-62. This
essay does not address that work directly but implicitly extends it.
3
2
�To flesh out my interpretive assertion, I will begin with a brief overview of Being and
Time, then present you with two key quotes that will serve as the focus for an interpretation of
authenticity as the basis for having reasons. After that, I will conclude with some reflections on
the relationship between Heideggerian reasons and public reason.
In Being and Time the central question for investigation is: what is the meaning of being?
Heidegger’s answer is temporality (H.1).5 Let’s take the question first. Heidegger initially
demarcates being as what distinguishes entities as such from each other and what makes those
entities intelligible to us (H.6). To say that temporality is the meaning of being is to say that
temporality is the first basis on which entities are distinguishable. (If you are having trouble
imagining what this means, consider that a basic property of matter is to persist through time
despite changes in location.) His conception of temporality is abstruse and difficult to grasp,
even for those who have studied it intently. At a first pass, temporality is the unfolding of past,
present, and future in which the future takes priority.(§65, especially H.327-8) But Heidegger is
not an eschatologist: the meaning of being is not to bring about some destined or desired state of
affairs. Rather, the future is essentially what is not yet, what is possible but never actual.6 In
time, I hope to make this essential futurity clearer. But to do that we must turn to the outline of
Heidegger’s argument.
The crux of Heidegger’s argument that temporality is the meaning of being rests on the
claim that we ourselves stretch through past, present, and future, and are the fundamental source
of all other distinctions among entities. We are the distinctively ontological entity, who asks the
question of being and cares about answering it (H.12). In caring about that question, we open up
a world of people, places, and things and find meaning within it. To pick out this distinctive
character of our being, Heidegger coins the technical term ‘Dasein.’7 Heidegger uses the term—a
common German noun for ‘existence’— in order to distinguish the biological interpretation of
humanity—homo sapiens—from that which makes us truly human. Dasein is being in the world
(H.53) and the entity for whom being is at issue (H.12). It is not for anything in particular
(H.130) and is distinctive precisely because it can interpret its own existence all the way down to
the most basic concepts (H.9). Dasein is in the world by both being determined by it and
determining it in return. For this reason, Heidegger calls Dasein a thrown-project (H.199). We
are thrown and socialized into a world with an established order, from the past, that we now, at
the present, have to project ourselves into, so as to make for ourselves a future. In doing so we
inherit complex distinctions among entities that we then have to apply to our own situations and
sometimes even add, edit, or discard in order to make better sense of the world and who and
what are in it. When we add, edit, and discard distinctions, we do not do it for ourselves alone
but anticipate that it will make better sense of future situations as well. Indeed, it would be
5
Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit. 19th edition, Max Niemeyer Verlag (Tübingen: 2006). I will provide references
to Being and Time within parentheses. These will mostly point you to passages I am paraphrasing. The format for
the page references is ‘H.#’ where the ‘H’ indicates the pagination of the published German text and the ‘#’
indicates the page. In any translation of Being and Time you can find the German pagination along the outside
margin of the pages. In a few cases, I reference not the pages but the section of Being and Time. In that case the
section number will be preceded by this symbol: ‘§.’
6
Hence, Heidegger’s slogan: possibility is higher than actuality (H.38).
7
Heidegger initially defines the term at H.7 and spends a large section of the introduction characterizing Dasein’s
special role in ontology.
3
�unjustifiable to offer a purely idiosyncratic concept for others to use because Dasein lives in an
always already shared world.
According to Heidegger, as we have it so far, the meaning of being is temporality
because humans live by unfolding the phases of past, present, and future with each other. It is not
that time is a container in which we exist but rather that humans create a past, present, and future
through their interpretive social activities. According to Heidegger, the sense of time as a
container is derived from the sense of time as unfolding through meaning-making (H.424-5).
How, then, does Dasein make meaning and why is meaning-making connected to time?
Here is the summary answer that we will spend the rest of the talk unpacking: Dasein makes
meaning for itself as a movement from inauthenticity to authenticity (die Eigentlichkeit), and it is
enabled to make this movement by its mortality. By ‘authenticity,’ Heidegger does not mean
what we tend to mean by it, namely, being connected to one’s roots or being different for
difference’s sake. Rather, inauthenticity bears these descriptions just as well as authenticity
because by ‘inauthenticity’ Heidegger means being lost in the crowd, which one can be when
one is trying to reconnect with one’s roots or trying to stand out just to stand out. Authenticity, at
a first pass, is recovering oneself from the crowd, individuating oneself from others, and taking
ownership over oneself (H.12, H.42-3). It is in this movement that Dasein becomes able to have
reasons.
What then is this movement like? We must start from a structural description of what it is
like for Dasein to be in the world.8 Imagine yourself cooking dinner for your family. You are in
your kitchen, surrounded by your supplies and tools. You have ingredients, a knife for cutting
them, a cutting board on which to cut them, and so on. You also have a recipe that sets out the
steps for cooking the meal. The meal, in turn, is the end-product of a sequence of steps or inorder-tos that employ your resources and tools. Moreover, the meal is for you and your family.
You all are ends of the cooking but in a different sense than the meal is the end. You will
appropriate the meal from the cooking activity to the eating activity. You are the end as
consumer rather than product. In turn, the eating activity has the same structure: it serves to
sustain you so that you can go on to participate in other activities. As far as this structural
description takes us, it seems as though we are the executors of activities in order to be executors
of other activities. Everything is for-something already given. Even you seem to be forproducing and for-consuming endlessly. But observe: this indefinite series of activities tells us
nothing about how you benefit from the activities, unless we assume that merely participating in
activities, whatever they are, is beneficial. Of course, that is a non-starter. A person may choose
to forego eating and bring the series of activities to a close. Although it might be sad that she do
so, it can nevertheless be good for her, in which case the distinction between beneficial and
harmful collapses. Thus, the indefinite series of activities cannot be the whole story of our
participation in these activities. Our activities cannot be merely in order to participate in other
activities. We must at least be capable of participating in them for the sake of something final,
something that brings the indefinite series to a third kind of end, the end of explanation or
justification. In other words, we must be able to say why we participate in activities without the
answer admitting of a further why-question. The world in which we live is not a holistic totality
8
This structural description (which philosophers also call a phenomenology) is based on §§15-18. Of note:
Heidegger provides very little argument that the for-the-sake-of-which must be part of the description and that is the
crucial move he makes against the reductive anti-rationalists.
4
�of in-order-tos. The world includes final ends or, in Heidegger’s vocabulary, for-the-sake-ofwhiches (worumwillen).
In this description of daily life, we discover a holistic network of tools and activities in
which we can participate for the sake of something beyond the products of those activities.
Consider again these activities in relation to a for-the-sake-of-which. We do not engage in these
activities merely as free floating individuals without any prior entanglements. On the contrary, at
every moment we occupy at least one social role, whether we have chosen it or not. We are
children, parents, students, teachers, citizens, politicians, clients, lawyers, and so on. Each social
role brings with it a package of norms that guide the occupant toward the appropriate behavior
and away from the inappropriate. These norms manifest themselves in what an occupant counts
as satisfying the duties under that role and what others expect the occupant to do to satisfy those
duties. For the most part these expectations will overlap and be independent of the specific
personality occupying the role. Thus, we often express these norms via the impersonal pronoun,
‘one.’ For example, as a child, one heeds one’s elders. When entering a subway car, one waits
for riders to exit before entering. As a lawyer, one does not divulge private information about
one’s clients. In each of these cases, it would be inappropriate to act against the anonymous
expectation except in extraordinary circumstances. To do so would be a basis for censure from
anyone aware of the transgression (H.126-7). What one does, then, is general in two senses: I can
be the ‘one’ at any time and I can encounter the ‘one’ in others at any time. We can follow the
one’s norms without relating it to any for-the-sake-of-which because we can just mimic what
others do. But, at the same time, I can never be the ‘one’ simply. I can only be the ‘one’ via a
particular social role that establishes what is appropriate or inappropriate behavior for me at a
given time. Even as the ‘one’ I cannot do whatever others are doing and count as following the
social norms. I have always already followed certain paths rather than others.
Consequently, the ‘one’ is unstable. Social norms are not only the rules I follow but also
how I justify my actions. For example, as a teacher, if I am asked why I am granting a student an
extension when her hard drive crashes, I can cite the norm that teachers should not punish their
students for circumstances beyond their control. If I were asked that question and could give no
answer or merely cited what other teachers usually do, I would have failed to justify my
teacherly action. Similarly, if I am asked why I am a teacher rather than something else, I ought
to be able to respond with more than, “Someone told me to do it.” But when we are first
socialized into our social roles, that is the only answer we are prepared to give because up to that
point we have simply been learning how to be guided by the ‘one,’ yet the ‘one’ does not provide
the basis for an answer. Only a for-the-sake-of-which could. Precisely to this problem,
authenticity provides a solution.
Let us now turn to the passages at the heart of my interpretation of authenticity as the
basis for having reasons. The first passage concerns Dasein’s conscience, the voice that calls
Dasein back from its absorption in its everyday activities as the ‘one.’
In being a ground—that is, in existing as thrown—Dasein constantly lags behind its
possibilities. It is never existent before its ground, but only from it and as this ground.
Thus being-a-ground means never to have power over its ownmost being from the ground
up. This not belongs to the existential meaning of thrownness. It itself, being a ground, is
a nullity of itself. Nullity does not signify anything like not-being-present-at-hand or notsubsisting; what one has in view here is rather a not which is constitutive for this being of
Dasein—its thrownness. The character of this not as a not may be defined existentially: in
being its self, Dasein is, as a self, the entity that has been thrown. It has been released
5
�from its ground, not through itself but to itself, so as to be as this ground. Dasein is not
itself the ground of its being, inasmuch as this ground first arises from its own projection;
rather, as being-its-self, it is the being of its ground. This ground is never anything but the
ground for an entity whose being has to take over being-a-ground. (H.284-5)9
That passage contains a lot of thought to digest all at once. I will elucidate it for you shortly. For
now hold in mind these two key points. First, Dasein is a ground that it must take over. ‘Ground’
here could also be translated by ‘reason.’ And, so, we might interpret this to say that Dasein must
become a reason for itself. Second, Dasein never has power over this ground from the bottom up.
It lags behind its possibilities in two senses. It engages in certain activities rather than others
before it ever considers whether those activities matter to it. And it is not the source of those
activities. To become a ground then is precisely to struggle with which activities matter to it and
how it can also be a source of them.
The second passage comes from Heidegger’s analysis of death. As I mentioned above,
Dasein’s mortality enables it to become authentic by disclosing to it how to make a responsible
choice for what to do with its life. Here Heidegger clarifies the relationship between Dasein’s
death and its array of choices:
The ownmost, non-relational possibility [death] is not to be outstripped. Being towards
this possibility enables Dasein to understand that giving itself up impends for it as the
uttermost possibility of its existence. Anticipation, however, unlike inauthentic beingtowards-death, does not evade the fact that death is not to be outstripped; instead,
anticipation frees itself for accepting this. By anticipating and, thereby, becoming free for
its own death, Dasein is freed from being lost in possibilities that accidentally impinge
upon it with the result that becoming free for death allows Dasein to understand and
choose authentically, for the first time, the factical possibilities that lie upstream and
ahead of the one that Dasein cannot outstrip… As a non-relational possibility, death
individualizes but only in order to, as a possibility which is not to be outstripped, make
Dasein, as being-with, understanding of the capacity-to-be of others. Since anticipation of
the possibility which is not to be outstripped discloses also all the possibilities which lie
ahead of that possibility, this anticipation includes the possibility of taking the whole of
Dasein in advance in an existentiell manner that is to say, it includes the possibility of
existing as a whole capacity-to-be. (H.264)10
Again this passage might be overwhelming. So, again, I offer two key points to hold in mind.
First, the possibilities among which Dasein makes its most fundamental choice of what to do
with its life “lie upstream and ahead” of its death. In so far as Dasein understands death, those
possibilities transcend it, by which I mean they can last forever even if in fact they do not.
Dasein knows itself to be finite but does not know the same about its possibilities. Second, the
transcendence of the possibilities puts Dasein in authentic contact with others. By becoming
authentic, Dasein recognizes others as similarly capable of authenticity and able to share in
9
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. tr. Macquarrie, John and Robinson, Edward, Harper & Row (New York:
1962), pp.330-1. I adjusted the translation to make it clearer.
10
Ibid, pp.308-9. Again, I adjusted the translation to make it clearer. I discovered this crucial passage thanks to a
comment in Page, Carl. Philosophical Historicism and the Betrayal of First Philosophy. Penn State Press
(University Park, PA: 1995), p.141. Like Page I understand this passage as undermining the common interpretation
of Being and Time, according to which Heidegger shows that eternal truths or goods are impossible. Unlike Page,
however, I do not interpret this passage to leave open the possibility that human beings could know or understand
anything as eternal.
6
�possibilities authentically with Dasein. Let’s now dig deeper into these thoughts and see how
they give rise to an account of reasons without a faculty of reason.
In the first passage Heidegger describes Dasein as both a ground for its existence and
having to take over its being-a-ground. Dasein, of course, is not the ground, like a self-caused
thing would be. Dasein is caused to be in a number of ways, including parentage and
socialization. Nevertheless, Dasein is one of those grounds. But a ground in what way? Part of
the answer to this question comes prior to this passage. Dasein’s conscience calls to it but says
nothing (H.272-4). Instead, it points Dasein to its ability to become authentic and to the implicit
choices it has not not yet owned. In turn, Dasein interprets the call as indicating its guilt.
Heidegger does not mean “guilty” in any of its ordinary senses. Dasein’s ontological guilt is not
original sin, moral wrongdoing, being the cause of certain events, or debts to others. Rather,
Dasein is guilty in the sense of being responsible for its choices, where ‘responsible’
(verantwortlich) takes on its etymological meaning: able to give an answer (H.280-8). By
heeding its conscience, Dasein takes over being-a-ground by interpreting itself as answerable for
its choices. Conscience brings Dasein into a discourse, albeit a merely internal one so far.
Intriguingly, Heidegger describes Dasein’s being-a-ground as a nullity. By this he means
two important things. First, Dasein does not give itself the factical possibilities for its existence.
And this goes all the way down. Conscience is silent because anything it could say would be
expressed in a public language that one speaks and remains inevitably ambiguous. Precisely here
we might expect that a faculty of reason could provide unambiguous content. But such a faculty
could only express itself in a public language, which needs interpretation in still further terms.
Second, Dasein negates possibilities. That is to say, Dasein is a ground for its existence by
eliminating factical possibilities for itself. Dasein chooses by means of exclusion rather than
invention. For the most part Dasein excludes without realizing it and, when asked, tends to defer
responsibility for its actions to some authority. When it becomes authentic, it alters its
relationship to the exclusions. It connects its exclusions to the pursuit of something worth it for
its own sake and ceases to defer responsibility for its actions to anyone else. In this sense we
should say Dasein alters its existence as a ground from being merely a cause of events to a
reason for them.
But we should not pass over these crucial and interesting claims without noticing how
counter-intuitive they are. Human beings are endlessly creative. From the slightest pun to the
inception of a whole new realm of activity (such as modern natural science), human beings seem
to be more than merely a nullity. We do not only negate possibilities we add them. What then
would justify Heidegger’s counter-intuitive claim?
The answer to this question lies in the second passage. In it, Heidegger is discussing the
relationship between Dasein’s anticipation of death and the factical possibilities on which it
resolves in becoming authentic. The concept ‘possibility’ as Heidegger uses it encompasses any
way that Dasein could be.11 At bottom, any description befitting of Dasein is a possibility for it.12
For our purposes, however, we should focus on the two kinds of factical possibility that are
fundamental to a life-path. The first are the social roles discussed above. Dasein occupies at least
one and usually multiple roles throughout its life, and these roles govern what it does daily as
According to Heidegger, when we use ‘possibility’ in other senses—e.g., logical possibility (not in violation of
the principle of non-contradiction)—we derive the meaning of ‘possibility’ from its meaning as applied to Dasein.
12
When we take note of history—the rise and fall of peoples, empires, and civilizations—we must distinguish
between live and dead possibilities. ‘is a samurai’ is a description befitting Dasein but not live for anyone today.
11
7
�well as how it organizes its weeks, months, and years. Moreover, these roles are the sort of
activity it can find enriching or fulfilling. They engage its capacities in a complete way. Dasein
knows this because the possibilities can draw it out of the stultifying fear that attends the
anticipation of its own death and they are worth pursuing unto death. They are not merely means
to other states of affairs. Rather, Dasein can engage in them until there are no more states of
affairs left to it.
We might conclude, then, that social roles are the factical possibilities that we pursue for
their own sake. But that would be imprecise. Social roles are constitutive of pursuing something
for its own sake, but what makes a given social role a for-the-sake-of-which is not the social role
itself. Instead, we find some aspect of the social role worth pursuing for its own sake. The social
role engages us in charity or requires lifelong learning or puts us in contact with some other
value or good that we take to be final. These values are only accessible to us through social roles
but they are not reducible to them.
These are the factical possibilities that Heidegger is discussing in the second passage:
social role and ultimate value combined. By anticipating death, Dasein no longer sees its
possibilities merely as means to other possibilities ad infinitum. Observe: although a given social
role can be constitutive of something worth pursuing for its own sake, it is not essentially so. For
example, I can choose a career as a mere means to supporting a loving, nurturing family. When
Dasein is inauthentic or “lost in its possibilities,” all social roles look like mere means. The final
goods that social roles can manifest remain hidden as long as Dasein ignores its own mortality.
But when it confronts that mortality, Dasein reveals that aspect of social roles to itself. It frees
itself for a choice by putting the social roles into a framework where a responsible choice
becomes possible. Specifically, it frees itself from the condition in which nothing appears worthy
of choice.
This brings us to the two crucial claims that ground a Heideggerian account of reasons.
First, the factical possibilities in question “lie upstream and ahead” of Dasein’s death. The
German reads “vorgelagert sind.” I’ve used the hendiadys “upstream and ahead” to render the
double-meaning of “vorgelagert.” The idiomatic German meaning of the adjective is “upstream”
or “off the coast,” but it is derived from semantic pieces that mean something like “to be camped
ahead.” So, we have here a metaphor for the conceptual and explanatory relationship between
Dasein’s factical possibilities and death. On the one hand, “lies upstream” suggests a common
philosophical metaphor for explanatory priority. If a is upstream from b then a explains b or
some aspect of it, while b explains no aspect of a. Thus, Heidegger is claiming that Dasein’s
factical possibilities explain some aspect of Dasein’s own death. On the other hand, the “lies
ahead” suggests that these possibilities are part of Dasein’s future and, indeed, extend into the
future beyond Dasein’s own death. But if the factical possibilities only become available for
authentic resolution through Dasein’s anticipation of its own death, how can those possibilities
explain any aspect of its death? And how could those possibilities transcend Dasein’s death?
The answer to these two questions comes towards the end of the paragraph where
Heidegger tells us that death, “as an un-outstrip-able possibility, makes Dasein…understanding
of others. Recall that Dasein develops its basic capacities as it is socialized by others. Of
necessity the socialization process subordinates Dasein to authorities who teach it the social
norms. As a result Dasein always starts out as inauthentic and sees inauthentically the factical
possibilities into which it has been socialized. However, when Dasein understands itself as
capable of authenticity, it also understands that others have the same capacity. It follows that the
socialization process offered more to Dasein than first met its eye. Dasein inherited factical
8
�possibilities that set its mortality in relief. Death too is a possibility; it is distinctive as nonoptional and final. Dasein’s factical possibilities can fit the finality of death, but they are not nonoptional. They present Dasein with a choice. Thus, the socialization process, in which Dasein
inherits factical possibilities, explains how Dasein understands death as a basis for making
meaning for itself and not just the cessation of its existence. Of course, the factical possibilities
cannot explain the fact that Dasein dies. Nevertheless, they can explain how Dasein can
distinguish death as a possibility that makes meaning possible, as opposed to impossible.
Furthermore, the factical possibilities on which Dasein can resolve are not limited by
Dasein’s death. Because Dasein understands them as inherited through the socialization process,
it also understands that others have engaged in these possibilities authentically. And just as
Dasein is the future to those who are no longer, so Dasein will hand down its authentic factical
possibility to future generations. Or what is the other side of the same coin, Dasein shares its
authentic factical possibility with others and knows that it can. Dasein’s authentic resolution
individualizes it but at the same time brings it into a community which stretches before its birth
and after its death. It commits itself to a common project with others with whom it works in
concert.
With this interpretation of the second passage in hand, I can now answer the above
question about creativity. The answer comes in two prongs. First, Heidegger can explain
creativity as a reshuffling of factical possibilities. When we seem to invent something new, we in
fact draw upon a pattern or patterns from one or more areas of life and apply them to another
area where the patterns had not previously applied (as far as we know). Even modern science, as
Heidegger shows (§69b), is derived from possibilities already available. Thus, Dasein can be
creative while merely negating given factical possibilities. Second, no factical possibility—
however new—gets its content from an individual Dasein alone because every factical possibility
is always already shared. Even the most innovative person offers her innovation to a community.
What that offering means and whether it is a success depends not on the will and intellect of the
individual innovator but rather on how the community takes it up. Thus, individual Dasein
contributes no irreducibly unique content to the possibilities in a community. By itself, Dasein is
a nullity.
Based on the foregoing interpretation, we can reconstruct a conception of reasons from
Heidegger’s conception of authenticity. A reason is a consideration in favor of forming a belief,
drawing an inference, or taking a course of action. But not just any consideration in favor of
something is a reason for it. I might have a desire to bash my neighbor’s mailbox with a baseball
bat but that is not, by itself, a reason for doing so. A reason requires further grounding. We have
to be able to trace it back to a source, a principle, a good. Unlike other considerations, a reason
has a pedigree. Even when I perceive my desire to bash my neighbor’s mailbox as a reason to do
it, it is a reason only if I can trace that desire to a principle that licenses satisfying it. (And I
doubt any pedigree exists for such a desire.)
We are subject to desires and impulses throughout our daily lives. Our thoughts, bodies,
and decked-out environments elicit them. In turn, we have to sort through which ones to satisfy
and which to suppress. For the most part we do this in an unconscientious way (which is not to
say unconscious). We follow the impulses and desires that align with our tasks and suppress the
ones that do not. When we reflect on what we are doing we perceive ourselves as having reasons
for sorting through our impulses and desires as we do. But we rarely trace the complete pedigree
of those purported reasons such that we verify them. This omission opens up the question
whether what we take to be our reasons are in fact reasons.
9
�One way that a consideration might fail to be a reason for a person—a way central to a
Heideggerian account—is that the person traces the consideration back to an external authority.
For example, when I follow a recipe, I defer to the authority of the chef who wrote the recipe.
The instructions for me are not reasons, as they are for the chef who can explain how and why
they produce the final dish. And should the recipe fail, the chef is prepared to examine what went
wrong and attempt to fix the problem. The chef, who takes responsibility for the success of the
recipe, has reasons with respect to making the dish whereas I merely have considerations.
Indeed, each step in the recipe, the dish, those whom the chef will serve, and the wider world of
expert food-making, all manifest reasons for the chef, whereas I do not have those reasons. The
world of mere in-order-tos is transformed by authenticity into a world of reasons. That
transformation takes place because the chef takes herself to be an authority, in the sense that she
is an author—albeit not the unique author—of norms governing proper food-making. Her
authorship, however, is in no way a creation from nothing. She always engages with the norms
that she has inherited, and is answerable to others who, like her, take responsibility for those
same norms.
The foregoing suggests a Heideggerian conception of rationality.13 According to it,
someone has a reason for a potential action—mental actions included—when the state of affairs
fits the norms governing a social role he authentically occupies. Accordingly, a reason is part of
a chain of in-order-tos that someone relates to an activity worth pursuing for its own sake. This is
the sense in which Dasein’s conscience makes it a ground for reasons. Its conscience calls it to
relate the states of affairs in the world to whatever can bring an end to a series of why-questions.
Heideggerian reasons, then, are always parts of lines of reasoning that reach a conclusive end. As
a part of a line of reasoning, Heideggerian reasons are discursive.
Moreover, Heideggerian reasons are constrained by publicly known norms. Since reasons
are parts of responses to why-questions, they can be exchanged with others as explanations or
justifications for actions or beliefs. And since the reasons are grounded by a resolution on social
roles, the reasons a person may offer must be shown either to accord with publicly known norms
for those roles—as, for example, a novel application of them—or improve on one or more of
them—as, for example, refusing to implement corporal punishment as a teaching tool. Not just
any series of statements offered to an interlocutor—even by authentic Dasein—qualifies as a line
of reasoning. Dasein’s autonomy is not unlimited, despite lacking the law of reason. Instead, it is
answerable to those from whom it has inherited its factical possibility and to whom it will hand it
down.
Heideggerian reasons are serially grounded, discursive and constrained. By contrast,
mere considerations are serial but not grounded and discursive but not constrained. Consider the
desire to bash a neighbor’s mailbox. I can connect that to a further consideration, such as venting
anger or getting revenge. But those further considerations do not bring an end to why-questions.
The considerations are ungrounded. Similarly, bare appeals to authority suffer the same defect.
They fail to end the series of why-questions because we must ask what justifies deferring to that
authority. Mere considerations are defectively serial. They also show a symmetrical defect with
respect to discursiveness. I can offer a mere consideration to someone else, and they can
recognize it as something that favors my action, in the way that desires always favor their own
If this Heideggerian account of reasons has reminded you of Kant’s conception of autonomy there is good reason
for it. In the concept of authenticity, Heidegger sought to retain the distinction between autonomy and heteronomy
without relying on a faculty of reason that gives the laws for being autonomous.
13
10
�satisfaction. But the consideration is unconstrained by any norms that would distinguish the
desire as licit or illicit. The interlocutor cannot share in endorsing the consideration. Again, the
same goes for appeals to authority. The interlocutor must wonder why the authority offered
should be binding on himself. Mere considerations offer explanations for actions but not
justifications.
You might be wondering why social norms offer justifications where mere considerations
do not? After all, social norms are positive phenomena, instituted by human beings.
Consequently, appeals to social norms seem like just another appeal to authority. Here the
double-aspect of factical possibilities plays a crucial role. The social norms that constitute the
social roles Dasein plays are always in service of the values that make the social roles worth
pursuing for their own sake. Justifications in terms of social norms always take for granted that
the norms continue to serve those values. If an interlocutor raises an objection that a norm no
longer serves that value, then that breakdown must be repaired either by dispelling the objection
or emending the norm.
A moment of reflection on values such as charity, friendship, equality, and liberty reveals
that they are multiple and not objectively prioritized. As Dasein pursues its factical possibility it
will have to weigh values against one another when they come into conflict. Heideggerian
reasons, then, are ultimately grounded in a choice for how to prioritize values. At this point, the
differences between Heideggerian reasons and the traditional account of rationality become
clear. As noted above the faculty of reason displays three central features: universality, unity,
and systematicity. None of these features apply to Heideggerian reasons. First, Heideggerian
reasons are not universal because they depend on a choice to prioritize values into a hierarchy
that is not itself rationally required. Even though an interlocutor can recognize that a reason is
binding for her friend, given his authentic resolution, the interlocutor herself, who resolves on a
different factical possibility, might find that his line of reasoning does not bind her because they
prioritize values differently. Heideggerian reasons, then, are not categorially universal, although
they encompass at least all those who share an authentic factical possibility. Second,
Heideggerian reasons are not unified: they do not trace back to any single principle. Whereas the
faculty of reason is unified by a principle embodied in a concept such as the good or the
unconditioned, Heidegger’s account of rationality is unified by Dasein’s ability to authentically
resolve on some factical possibility. This ability, as we saw, is conceptually contentless—it is a
nullity, the ultimate source of negation—and each person uniquely exercises it. The conceptual
content derives not from the ability to become authentic itself but rather from the possibility
adopted in its exercise. When Dasein reasons, it reasons back to its fundamental factical
possibility and then can offer no further reason, should a disagreement persist. Dasein makes a
Lutherian commitment in whose favor it can say nothing else. In Heideggerian lines of
reasoning, not all roads lead to Rome. Finally, since reasons are neither universal nor unified,
they cannot be systematic. It will always be possible that two lines of reasoning will be
ultimately incompatible. For example, two appellate court justices might sincerely disagree over
whether the norms of constitutional interpretation permit them to rule that every application of
the death penalty is a cruel punishment. That they disagree does not indicate that at least one of
them is mistaking what reasons they have. They each could exhaust the reasons they have
without reaching the same conclusion.
Since Heideggerian reasons are not universal, nor unified, nor systematic, Heidegger is
an anti-rationalist, as I defined it at the outset. However, Heidegger is not a reductive antirationalist. He does not reduce the appearance of reasons to causes. Although Dasein has moods
11
�and desires that inform its authentic resolution, its resolution is not reducible to psychological
drives or self-interest. In anticipating death, Dasein’s mood reveals what and who in the world
matter to it. Moreover, even if Dasein’s mood were caused by psychological drives, Dasein
accepts responsibility for its psychological make-up when it authentically resolves. By projecting
itself into a factical possibility, Dasein becomes answerable for who and how it is: it will not
excuse itself through its psychological make-up, even if that make-up plays a key role in
explaining or justifying its actions or beliefs. And it treats this answerability as a reciprocal
expectation among Daseins. Dasein does not privilege its own authenticity over the authenticity
of others. A condition of authenticity is that Dasein enables or at least refuses to impede other
Daseins’ ability to be authentic (H.122).14 Thus, the usual strategies for reducing reasons to
causes—power, economic interest, or psychological drives—are all rebutted by Heidegger’s
account of authenticity. In so far as Heidegger can treat the appearance of reasons as something
like what we expect a reason to be, Heidegger has an advantage over the reductive antirationalist accounts.
So far, I have sketched an interpretation of a Heideggerian account of reasons. The
interpretation remains incomplete because I have not addressed some key kinds of reasons—in
particular, theoretical reasons—that are not obviously assimilable to Heidegger’s account.
Nevertheless, we have enough of the interpretation on the table to consider what conception of
public reason the Heideggerian account grounds. First, anyone who has read Being and Time
knows that Heidegger is skeptical of the value of discourse in the public sphere (H.127).15 In the
public sphere, speakers pass along claims for which they themselves cannot vouch, offer
truncated lines of reasoning, and flit from one subject-matter to another without spending enough
time on them for anyone to acquire a useful understanding, let alone a reasonable one.16 Given
Heidegger’s account of reasons, it is no surprise that he would be pessimistic concerning the
value of public discourse. Clearly, not every participant in the discourse—and possibly few or
none—will themselves be authentic. Those who are not cannot offer their own reasons but can
only pass along reasons others have. As a result, members of the general public cannot decide
whom to trust on a matter that is important but not part of their own factical possibility.
Furthermore, speakers have a plethora of self-interested considerations in favor of manipulating
one’s audience rather than informing them or following lines of reasoning with them. Under
these conditions, we could be forgiven for suspecting that the speakers who have widespread
exposure in the public sphere are bad actors, whose speeches are better explained by the theories
of reductive anti-rationalists.
Although we could be forgiven, perhaps we should not let those suspicions govern our
interpretations of others in public discourse, especially those with whom we disagree. It is clear
that Heidegger, even if he endorsed the Heideggerian account of reasons I have reconstructed
here, would deny that it can support a conception of public reason. Heidegger himself would not
rescue us from the morass described by Latour. So, to Heidegger, myself and you all, I would
like to pose a question about the public sphere: is Heidegger’s pessimism inevitable? To be sure,
even if we conceive of an ideal public sphere, replete with authentic agents exchanging lines of
reasoning, we cannot imagine that the end result—even at the end of time—will necessarily be
Again, those familiar with Kant will recognize this as a Heideggerian version of Kant’s Formula of Humanity.
The word Macquarrie and Robinson translate as ‘publicness’ is ‘die Offentlichkeit.’ It is commonly used to refer
to the public sphere and rarely to the abstract property of being public.
16
These descriptions are a gloss on Heidegger’s conceptions of idle talk, ambiguity, and curiosity, respectively.
14
15
12
�universal consensus on the solution to every dispute. The need for public reasoning will never be
complete nor even approach an end like a hyperbola to its asymptote. This essential
incompleteness follows from the lack of universality and unity. Heidegger himself recognizes
this essential incompleteness, which is why he describes authentic politics as a kind of struggle
(kampf, H.384-5). When reasons inevitably run out, all that is left is non-rational means of
persuading others. It would be easy to assume that non-rational means of persuasion are, a
fortiori, violent in the sense that they require some people to submit to a power they do not
endorse by their own lights. This assumption seems all the more justified because, without a
universal conception of reason, it is unclear whether there are any norms of discourse that would
undermine a public discourse that oppresses authentic voices who have reasons to offer. If there
are no universal norms then we have a strong reason to believe there is no foundation for a public
discourse that can legitimate public courses of action.
It might seem then that Heidegger’s pessimism is inevitable. However, I would like to
close by offering initial considerations that would open up an optimistic line of investigation.
First, we must recall that authenticity requires reciprocity. It is possible that we could derive
universal norms of participation from the reciprocity that authenticity requires. If oppression
inhibits Dasein’s capacity to be authentic, then authentic Dasein cannot endorse norms that
oppress others. It would follow that an authentic public sphere would not prevent anyone from
participating in it. Second, authentic Dasein is aware that its own authentic resolution is just one
among many possible resolutions. Furthermore, it is aware that its own resolution puts it into a
particular, limited perspective. Dasein does not have authentic access to all matters of public
import. When it does not, it ought to be open to the reasons that others who do have to offer. By
heeding the reasons that others can offer from their own authentic resolutions, Dasein accepts
that rationality is not something given to us that we must discover but rather something at stake
for us that we must forge. An optimistic view of a Heideggerian conception of reasons takes
public reason as a collective challenge for us. And the question is: what resources does the
Heideggerian conception—or any other conceptions that are live to the problem rationality
poses—provide for us to meet this challenge?
13
�
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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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Typescript of a lecture delivered on June 29, 2016 by Lee Goldsmith as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series.<br /><br /><span>Mr. Goldsmith is an instructor of philosophy at George Washington University. His talk is about the issue of reason and the criticism of reason in the thought of Martin Heidegger. Mr. Goldsmith particularly examines Heidegger's work <em>Being and Time</em> and illucidates the critique of Reason writ large and the larger "struggle" within Heideggerean theory. His talk concludes with a potential grounding for optimism about a project of critical reason coming out of Heideggeran "reasons" rather than Reason itself. <br /><br />Mr. Goldsmith earned his Ph.D. from Northwestern University and his B.A. from St. John's College Annapolis.</span>
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Goldsmith, Lee
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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2016-06-29
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Reasons without Reason: Anti-rationalism in Heidegger’s Being and Time
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Bib # 83173
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Heidegger, Martin, 1889-1976. Sein und Zeit. English
Existentialism
Reason
Philosophy
Graduate Institute
Summer lecture series
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SUMMER2010
"LIFE OF THE MIND SERIES"
Wednesdays, 7:30p.m.
June 23
Matthew Linck
Some Questions about the Philosophy of Nature
June 30
Felicia Martinez
On Wallace Stevens' "Of Mere Being"
July 7
Jeff Smith
The Political Interstices of King Lear
July 14
Anita Kronsberg
A viewing of the film of King Lear starring Scofield
Followed by discussion
July 21
Matt Caswell
Michael Grenke
Henry Higuera
Michael Weinman
What is Philosophy?
July 28
Eric Stoltzfus
Five fables of La Fontaine, translated and set to
Elliott Zuckerman music by Elliott Zuckerman, and
performed by Eric Stoltzfus, tenor, accompanied at the
piano. With discussion.
Marcel Widzisz
A reading of Medea
August 4
& company
The movie on July 14 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
Description
An account of the resource
The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a></strong>.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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paper
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Graduate Institute
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Summer 2010 "Life of the Mind Series"
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2010
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Schedule of lectures and concerts in Summer 2010, sponsored by the Graduate Institute.
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Lecture Schedule 2010 Summer
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Annapolis, MD
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St. John's College
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English
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text
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St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
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pdf
Graduate Institute
Lecture schedule
Summer lecture series
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___________________________________________________________________________________________
Summer 2013 “Wednesday Night Lecture Series”
St. John’s College Annapolis
Join us this summer for a series of informal lectures, sponsored by the Graduate Institute
Wednesdays at 7:30 p.m., Great Hall
___________________________________________________________________________________________
“The Very Pictures of Education: On Rousseau’s Illustrations in Emile”
Wednesday, June 19
Jeff Black, Director of the Graduate Institute, St. John’s College, Annapolis
“Equality of the Sexes in Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae (The Assembly of Women)”
Wednesday, June 26
William. Braithwaite, Tutor, St. John’s College, Annapolis
“John Huston’s ‘The Dead’: A Film Screening and Discussion” (Reading the Dead from James Joyce’s
The Dubliners is highly recommended. Time and location to be announced.)
Wednesday, July 3
Louis Petrich, Tutor, St. John’s College, Annapolis
“Miracles and Belief: Is Belief in Miracles Compatible with a Scientific Understanding of the World?”
Wednesday, July 10
Joseph Cohen, Tutor, St. John’s College, Annapolis
“The Rise of the Private Self in Genesis One‐Three”
Wednesday, July 17
Amanda Printz, Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Oglethorpe University
“On Courage”
Wednesday, July 24
Michael W. Grenke, Tutor, St. John’s College, Annapolis
Nietzsche, Hegel, and the Problem of History
Wednesday, July 31
Shilo Brooks, Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Bowdoin College
___________________________________________________________________________________________
�
Dublin Core
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Title
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Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series
Description
An account of the resource
The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a></strong>.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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paper
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Summer 2013 "Wednesday Night Lecture Series"
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2013
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Schedule of lectures and concerts in Summer 2013, sponsored by the Graduate Institute.
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Lecture Schedule 2013 Summer
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Annapolis, MD
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St. John's College
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English
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text
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pdf
Graduate Institute
Lecture schedule
Summer lecture series
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McGuire, Terry
From:
Sent:
Subject:
Waters, Taylor
Tuesday, June 10, 2014 1:15 PM
Wednesday Night Lecture Series
Summer 2014 Wednesday Night Lecture Series"
St. John's College Annapolis
Join us this summer for a series of informal lectures, sponsored by the Graduate Institute
Wednesdays at 7:30p.m., Great Hall
"On High Mountains: An Overview of Nietzsche's Perspectivism"
Wednesday, June 18
JS. Black, Director of the Graduate Institute, St. John's College, Annapolis
"Hume's Philosophy of Science"
Wednesday, June 25
James M Mattingly, Georgetown University
"On Reading Poetry Aloud: Some Lessons from Shakespeare's As You Like It"
Wednesday, July 2
William Braithwaite, Tutor, St. John's College, Annapolis
"Machiavelli and Absolution"
Wednesday, July 9
Stephen D. Wrage, United States Naval Academy
"Mastery, Freedom, Friendship: Tutor and Pupil in Rousseau's Emile"
Wednesday, July 16
Gianna Englert, Georgetown University
"The Relationship of Art and Truth in Plato's Republic"
Wednesday, July 23
Jamuna Reppert, Claremont Graduate University
On the Humanity of Thucydides' Demosthenes"
Wednesday, July 30
Andrea Radasanu, Northern Illinois University
1
�
Dublin Core
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Title
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Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series
Description
An account of the resource
The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a></strong>.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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1 page
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paper
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Graduate Institute
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Summer 2014 ["]Wednesday Night Lecture Series"
Date
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2014
Description
An account of the resource
Schedule of lectures and concerts in Summer 2014, sponsored by the Graduate Institute.
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Lecture Schedule 2014 Summer
Coverage
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Annapolis, MD
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St. John's College
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English
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text
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pdf
Graduate Institute
Lecture schedule
Summer lecture series
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___________________________________________________________________________________________
Summer 2016 “Wednesday Night Lecture Series”
St. John’s College Annapolis
Join us this summer for a series of informal lectures, sponsored by the Graduate Institute
Wednesdays at 7:30 p.m., Great Hall
___________________________________________________________________________________________
“Imagination and Leadership”
Wednesday, June 15
David Townsend, Tutor, St. John’s College
“A Good Answer: Comment on Exodus, Chapter 3”
Wednesday, June 22
Andre Barbera, Tutor, St. John’s College
“Reason without Reasons: Anti‐Rationalism in Heidegger’s Being and Time.”
Wednesday, June 29
Lee Goldsmith, George Washington University
“We Are, Nonetheless, Cartesians”
Wednesday, July 6
Anton Barba‐Kay, The Catholic University of America
“The Concept of Movement/Change in Ancient Chinese Thought and its Modern Application”
Wednesday, July 13
Brian Dougherty, The University of Maryland
All College Seminar
Wednesday, July 20
The Graduate Council, St. John’s College
“All in C Major: The Opening of Bach’s Well‐Tempered Clavier”
Wednesday, July 27
Elliott Zuckerman, Tutor, St. John’s College
___________________________________________________________________________________________
�
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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 2016 "Wednesday Night Lecture Series"
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2016
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Schedule of lectures and concerts in Summer 2016, sponsored by the Graduate Institute.
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Lecture Schedule 2016 Summer
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Annapolis, MD
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St. John's College
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text
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pdf
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<p><a title="Reasons without Reason" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/762">Reasons without Reason: Anti-rationalism in Heidegger’s Being and Time</a></p>
Graduate Institute
Lecture schedule
Summer lecture series
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Text
Summer 2015 “Wednesday Night Lecture Series”
St. John’s College Annapolis
Join us this summer for a series of informal lectures, sponsored by the Graduate Institute
Wednesdays at 7:30 p.m., Great Hall
“The Problem of Absolute Knowing”
Wednesday, June 17
Abraham Jacob Greenstine, Duquesne University
“Why Can’t Gods Be Jealous? Aristotle’s Quarrel with the Poets in the Metaphysics”
Wednesday, June 24
Christopher Utter, Georgetown University
“Tocqueville’s American Odyssey”
Wednesday, July 1
Steven Crockett, Tutor, St. John’s College, Annapolis
“The Lost Idea of a Liberal Art”
Wednesday, July 8
Daniel Harrell, Tutor, St. John’s College, Annapolis
“Crime, Suffering and Punishment: A Look at O’Connor’s ‘A Good Man is Hard to
Find’”
Wednesday, July 15
George A. Russell, Tutor, St. John’s College, Annapolis
“Sciene and Philosophy in Istanbul, 1650-1750”
Wednesday, July 22
Harun Kucuk, Assistant Professor, University of Pennsylvania
“Of Texts and Teachers: Writing and its Limits in Plato’s Laws”
Wednesday, July 29
Pavlos Leonidas Papadopoulos, University of Dallas
___________________________________________________________________________________________
�
Dublin Core
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Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series
Description
An account of the resource
The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a></strong>.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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paper
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Graduate Institute
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Summer 2015 "Wednesday Night Lecture Series"
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2015
Description
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Schedule of lectures and concerts in Summer 2015, sponsored by the Graduate Institute.
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Lecture Schedule 2015 Summer
Coverage
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Annapolis, MD
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St. John's College
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English
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text
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St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
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pdf
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<a title="The problem of absolute knowing" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/9">The problem of absolute knowing</a> (typescript)
<a title="Tocqueville's American Odyssey" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/272">Tocqueville's American Odyssey</a> (audio)<br /><a title="Tocqueville's American Odyssey" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/323">Tocqueville's American Odyssey</a> (typescript)
<a title="The lost idea of a liberal art" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/275">The lost idea of a liberal art</a> (audio)<br /><a title="The lost idea of a liberal art" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/320">The lost idea of a liberal art</a> (typescript)
Graduate Institute
Lecture schedule
Summer lecture series
-
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PDF Text
Text
SUMMER 2012
“Wednesday Night Lecture Series”
Great Hall
Wednesdays, 7:30 p.m.
June 20
Jeff Black
“Everyone Sees How You Appear; Few Touch
What You Are: Machiavelli on Human Nature”
June 27
William T. Braithwaite
Anita L. Kronsberg
William Pastille
John Verdi
“What is ‘Political Speech’?: A Panel
Discussion of Some Recent First Amendment
Cases”
July 4
Michael W. Grenke
“The Problem of Socrates”
July 11
Steven Gimbel
“Einstein’s Jewish Science: Physics at the
Intersection of Politics and Religion”
July 18
David Levy
“Eros and Rhetoric in the Phaedrus”
July 25
Paul Wilford
“A Look at Kantian Theodicy: Rational Faith
and the Idea of History”
August 1
Lise van Boxel
“Courage, Insight, Sympathy, Solitude: The
Genealogy of the Noble Type in ‘Part Nine’ of
Beyond Good and Evil”
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series
Description
An account of the resource
The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a></strong>.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Contributor
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Page numeration
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2 page
Original Format
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paper
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Creator
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Graduate Institute
Title
A name given to the resource
Summer 2012 "Wednesday Night Lecture Series"
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2012
Description
An account of the resource
Schedule of lectures and concerts in Summer 2012, sponsored by the Graduate Institute.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Lecture Schedule 2012 Summer
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Publisher
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St. John's College
Language
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English
Type
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text
Rights
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St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
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pdf
Relation
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June 20, 2012. Black, Jeff. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/10" title="Everyone sees how you appear; few touch what you are">Everyone sees how you appear; few touch what you are</a> (typescript)
July 11, 2012. Gimbel, Steven. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/26" title="Einstein's Jewish science">Einstein's Jewish science</a> (audio)
August 1, 2012. van Boxel, Lise. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/11" title="Courage, insight, sympathy, solitude">Courage, insight, sympathy, solitude</a> (audio)
Graduate Institute
Lecture schedule
Summer lecture series
-
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b3442839fcfe23fee8cd338d2076802d
PDF Text
Text
Summer Lectures (1979)
8 June
Michael Dink
15 June
Elliot Zuckerman
22 June
Jon Lenkowski
29 June
Samuel Kutler
6 July
David Lachterman
13 July
John White
20 July
ESSAYS DUE
27 July
Mary Hannah Jones
3 August James Carey
Friendship in Plato’s Phaedo
An Opinion about Major and Minor
On Definitions
Play and Seriousness
On Aristotle’s Metaphysics
Aristotle’s Poetics
Muθos in the Odyssey
Aristotle and the Problems of Intelligibility
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series
Description
An account of the resource
The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a></strong>.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
2 pages
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Graduate Institute
Title
A name given to the resource
Summer Lectures (1979)
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1979
Description
An account of the resource
Schedule of lectures and concerts in Summer 1979, sponsored by the Graduate Institute.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Lecture Schedule 1979 Summer
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Dink, Michael
Zuckerman, Elliott
Lenkowski, Jon
Kulter, Samuel
Lachterman, David Rapport, 1944-
White, John
Jones, Mary Hannah
Carey, James
Graduate Institute
Lecture schedule
Summer lecture series
-
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PDF Text
Text
LECTURE SCHEDULE
Summer 1981 - February Freshman
Samuel Kutler
On Perfection
June 12
John White
Poetics (of Aristotle)
June 19
Douglas Allanbrook
Concert
Great Hall
June 26
Donald Conroy
Pindar
July
Mr. Lindemuth
Ethics of Aristotle
July 10
Elliott Zuckerman
On Major and Minor
July 17
N o
July 24
Joe Sachs
Metaphysics of Aristotle
July 31
Winfree Smith
The Wandering Moon
June
5
3
L e c t u r e
(essay week-end)
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series
Description
An account of the resource
The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a></strong>.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
1 page
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Graduate Institute
Title
A name given to the resource
Lecture Schedule, Summer 1981 - February Freshman
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1981
Description
An account of the resource
Schedule of lectures and concerts in Summer 1981, sponsored by the Graduate Institute.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Lecture Schedule 1981 Summer
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Rights
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St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
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pdf
Contributor
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Kutler, Samuel
White, John
Allanbrook, Douglas
Conroy, Donald
Lindemuth, Donald
Zuckerman, Elliott
Sachs, Joe
Smith, J. Winfree
Graduate Institute
Lecture schedule
Summer lecture series
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/b098fa77fe286f019d9fe50f1154d82b.pdf
3198ca38ab6c6c57142b746b6d1cf974
PDF Text
Text
8
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:
ST
JoHN's CoLLEGE
ANNAPOLIS. MARYLAND 21404
FouNDED 16% AS KING WtLllAM·s ScHOOL
Friday Night Events:
June 7
- Lecture:
Summer 1985
Meno's Paradox and the Zetetic Circle
Mr. Jon Lenkowski
8:15 p.m. in the King William Room
June 14- Lecture:
What Does-counting Presuppose?
Mr. Samuel Kutler
8:15 p.m. in the King William Room
June 21 -_All College Seminar:
Prometheus Bound
8:00 p.m. - Rooms posted
June 28- Lecture:
on Aristotle's Ethics and Politics
Mr. Laurence Berns
8:15 p.m. in the King William Room
July 5
Mr. Douglas Allanbrook
- Concert:
(Program to be announced)
8:15 p.m. F.S.K. Backstage
July 12 -Lecture:
On Plato's Timaeus
Mr. Peter Kalkavage
8:15 p.m. in the King William Room
July 19 - Lecture:
On Sophocles' Antigone
Miss Janet Dougherty
8:15 p.m. in the King William Room
July 26 -Lecture:
Aristotle's Metaphysics VII, 17
Mr. Stewart Umphrey
8:15 p.m. in the King William Room
August 2 - Lecture:
On Lavoisier
Mr. Chester Burke
8:15 p.m. in the King William Room
TELEPHONE 'JOI- 263-2371
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series
Description
An account of the resource
The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a></strong>.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
1 page
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Graduate Institute
Title
A name given to the resource
Friday Night Events: Summer 1985
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1985
Description
An account of the resource
Schedule of lectures and concerts in Summer 1985, sponsored by the Graduate Institute.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Lecture Schedule 1985 Summer
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Lenkowski, Jon
Kutler, Samuel
Berns, Laurence, 1928-
Allanbrook, Douglas
Kalkavage, Peter
Dougherty, Janet
Umphrey, Stewart, 1942-
Burke, Chester
Graduate Institute
Lecture schedule
Summer lecture series
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