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Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
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01:02:39
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Hegel's Reading of Antigone
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on September 30, 1988, by Patricia Locke as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
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Locke, Patricia M.
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Annapolis, MD
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1988-09-30
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Hege, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770-1831
Sophocles. Antigone
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LEC_Locke_Patricia_1988-09-30_ac
Friday night lecture
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Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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What Is a Philosophic Question?
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on April 28, 1989, by Samuel S. Kutler as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
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Kutler, Samuel S.
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St. John's College
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1989-04-28
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Aristotle. Metaphysics
Philosophy
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English
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LEC_Kutler_Samuel_1989-04-28_ac
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Text
Philosophy and the Cave Wall
Plato and Kant on the form of the given
Would the mind’s escape from the body be a good thing? This question might arise for
anyone who sees a distinction in our human nature between thought and sense. Why might one
wish for such an escape? And what might warn one against such a wish? Compare these two
different ways of approaching the question, each formulated by Kant:
The inclinations themselves, as sources of need, are so far from having an absolute
worth, that to be altogether free of them must be the general wish of every rational
being.
(Kant, Groundwork, 428) 1
Here, sensible appetites and aversions are a regrettable encumbrance. Of course, the
annihilation of bodily needs is just a “wish”-- these impositions of nature are truly inescapable for
us as long as we live in this body. But who hasn’t felt this wish, in moments of frustration,
struggle, or frailty? Just as the addict can see his own addiction as something to regret, as
something worth being free from, we may all sometimes see the demands our own bodies seem
to make on us as regrettable, and as unfortunate. Socrates spoke of this kind of wish in the
Phaedo, when he explained to his friends that a philosopher looks forward to death– the soul
leaving the body– as the greatest of blessings.
But here is another take on the question:
The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine
that its flight would be still easier in empty space. 2 It was thus that Plato left the world of
the senses, as setting too narrow limits to the understanding, and ventured out beyond it
on the wings of the ideas, in the empty zone of pure understanding. He did not observe
that with all his efforts he made no advance– meeting no resistance that might, as it
were, serve as a support upon which he could take a stand, to which he could apply his
powers, and so set his understanding in motion.
Kant is more subtle in other works. “The inclinations, in themselves, are good” (Religion within the Limits
of Reason Alone). Nevertheless, they do not enable our cognition of the Good itself.
2 Is there such a thing as empty space? The dove thinks so. Kant will argue that mind is absent from no
place in the world (“the sum of possible experience”): it is an ideal plenum, so to speak.
1
1
�(Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A5/B8)
Here sensibility could be thought of as a resource, a help that makes knowledge possible for the
mind. The wish of the thinker to be released from sense is mistaken, because it fails to see how,
if realized, this would mean the withdrawal of that resource, the abandonment of that crucial gift.
Notice how Kant relates his own thinking to Plato explicitly in the second passage, and implicitly
in the first.
Kant seems to be divided. In the practical sphere, where action is concerned, sense can
be an obstacle, or at least an encumbrance. But in the theoretical sphere, where knowledge is
concerned, Kant is in fact a champion of sensibility. Ultimately, according to Kant, it is only when
we understand the epistemic resource provided by sensibility that we can see how necessary,
universal knowledge of the world around us is possible. Kant aims to carry out a previously
unattempted task for philosophy: to unfold the principles of sensibility. Philosophy, Kant claims,
must not sprint ahead to the realm of pure reason, to what seems to it maximally intelligible.
Rather, it can and must make intelligible what is not intelligible on its own– the senses. When
explicated, this would be a kind of wisdom unavailable to the mere mathematician or scientist,
and unheard of by the metaphysician: a philosophical apology of sense, what Kant calls a
‘transcendental aesthetic.’
Getting to read Plato and Kant every few years in an alternating cycle, it has come to
seem to me that perhaps Plato, for one, did contemplate such an account. To see this thread in
Plato, I will consider tonight passages from two great dialogues: the Republic, and its sibling,
the Timaeus.
Kant himself turns our attention in this direction by identifying Plato as the beginning of
his own philosophical tradition, one that asks first and foremost: how is knowledge possible?
The example of mathematics, Kant claims, convinced Plato that we have access universal,
necessary truths not derived from sense experience—what Kant calls a priori knowledge.
Socrates is often occupied with this sort of knowledge, as in the slave-boy’s recollection of true
geometrical judgments he was never taught. To explain this sort of knowing, Socrates
sometimes invokes purely intellectual, so-called forms of what is known. The pure forms
somehow come to have sensible images of themselves, in our minds and in the world. That is,
they are somehow participated in, or received, and it is by means of their reception that the
world can be known for what it is. But how is this reception into the sensible realm possible?
The problem of human knowledge, of how the given can be known, is therefore always also the
problem of sensible receptivity.
2
�The lecture has four parts. We will trace a path of inquiry into receptivity through Book VI
of the Republic (section 1), and then into the Timaeus (section 2), where I hope to show how
Plato’s thinking reaches a kind of culmination in the account of the so-called ‘receptacle’. In the
third section of the lecture, we’ll compare the Platonic approach to the problem with Kant’s
account of space in the Transcendental Aesthetic of the Critique of Pure Reason. We might
then be in a position to judge whether Plato and Kant are really philosophical brothers-in-arms,
as Kant suggests (section 4). We will not discover that Plato and Kant held the same doctrines.
Plato’s dialogic writings protect us from ascribing “doctrines” to his writings at all. Nevertheless,
philosophers—even philosophers who disagree with each other-- might be colleagues in so far
as they are moved by the same questions, and the same problems. It is this comradery under a
question I hope to examine in Kant and Plato tonight.
The Path Upward is not the Path Downward
In Book VI of Plato’s Republic, Socrates asks his conversation partners to imagine a line
divided into two unequal sections, each of which is divided again into two subsections (509d7
ff). Then both faculties of the soul and the objects of these faculties are mapped onto the line:
the two main sections correspond to sense and understanding; the realm of sense, of what
seems to be, is divided into bodily things, and their images; while the realm of the
understanding, of what is, is divided into what Socrates calls the “mathematicals,” or the
learnable things, and what he calls the “ideas,” or the forms. The philosopher’s authentic activity
is knowing the forms, which he or she achieves by what Socrates calls “dialectic.” The category
of the mathematicals, by the way, might be much broader than what we would mean by
‘mathematics,’ embracing anything that can be universally known or demonstrated: not only
music and mechanics, but perhaps also several natural sciences, and even language arts like
grammar and general logic-- the mathematicals, taken together, sserve as the topics of our
tutorials and labs.
The realm of the sensible is known by experience. Enough familiarity with the solid
structures we use as houses lets a carpenter repair and construct. His or her colleague within
the sensible realm is the artist who expertly paints images of the same houses that the
carpenter constructs. But many aspects of housebuilding follow from geometry, which grasps
universal principles about figures. The knowledge of these belongs to the understanding. Here
we can see laid out three personages, three psychic activities, and three sorts of object: the
3
�painter, making images of houses by artistic imitation; the carpenter, putting his or her body into
motion to bring those same houses into being as solid structures; the geometrician,
demonstrating the necessary, universal figurative principles governing the house’s structure.
The painting is an image of the roof’s eaves, which in turn can be thought of as images of
angles. These angles can be seen “only by thought,” and raising ourselves to the level of the
mathematicals reveals that human beings can have contact with universal, necessary truths
beyond convention and passing opinion. They give us purchase on the truth beyond experience.
But Socrates follows his construction of the divided line by posing two “reservations” to
his interlocutors about mathematical knowledge. The first is that its objects are taken as
“assumptions” by the thought that knows them. Geometry, for example, like all other particular
sciences, must simply assume that mathematical figures exist, and are therefore available for
study. It has no account of what sort of existence they have, and whether this existence has a
cause or source. Second, geometry will always be at least partially immersed in sensibility,
since it must always make use of sensible images in its demonstrations. In Socrates’ account,
philosophy will emerge as a possible kind of knowing that could transcend these two
“reservations.”
Let us consider the reservations in turn. Socrates complains that the mathematicals are
not truly “first principles” or beginnings, but “assumptions” But how does he know this? True,
geometry does not explain how its angle exists, but could this not be a consequence of the
figure’s ultimate priority? It can’t be explained by geometry, because it can't be explained at all:
it is a first principle. This is a tempting defense of mathematical supremacy. (when
mathematicians call themselves ‘platonists’,sometimes I think this is what they mean.) But
consider carefully the difference between self-evidence and assumption: an assumed premise is
not self-evident, because it leaves unsettled what sort of being on its own the object may have
apart from me, who assumes it. As long as it remains an assumption, a geometrical angle,
though it seemed to be real to us, might turn out to be a sort of illusion. Perhaps the reality of
things is that spaciousness is not real at all, that nothing is linearly extended, and no two lines
are spread out from each other in an angle. While this is perhaps disturbing to contemplate, it is
not a possibility the geometer can rule out. There is nothing about the angle that renders its
non-existence self-contradictory, and by hypothesis, geometry does not understand the figure’s
reality to be guaranteed by some higher source. Geometricians like Euclid and Lobachevski do
a great service for knowledge by identifying certain principles as unproved “postulates” or
“assumptions.” But even they leave unarticulated, and therefore unexamined, the whole host of
presuppositions that underlie their objects. The question, ‘how do angles exist?’ is not
4
�nonsensical, and remains. The geometer, while he or she might ask this question from time to
time, cannot answer it from within his or her own science.
The second reservation is, I think, more subtle. Just as geometry couldn’t “extricate”
itself from its own assuming, it also can’t pull itself out of the very sensibility it is so proud of
rising above. Socrates’ speech, with all its talk of higher and lower, here might sound like it is
assuming a kind of low-class uncleanliness about sensibility. Or maybe he is exploiting the
thumotic character of his interlocutor Glaucon, who will be pleased to look down on the uppity
mathematicians who are still enmeshed in the dingy senses. But if we are not so hastily
thumotic, we might wonder what is so damning about mathematics’ return to the senses. Is
Socrates’ second reservation not itself an unreasoning prejudice against embodiment?
In fact I think Socrates is onto something very important here. Mathematics begins by
seeking an object more knowable than what presents itself to the senses. But when it
demonstrates necessary truths about these objects, it finds it must turn back to sensibility to
construct images of what it wants to know. 3 We all know this from our study of Euclid and his
sucessors (even Lobachevski): no board or no paper, or no imaginary field in one’s mind, then
no demonstration of the proposition. We think the universal we desire to prove on our own, but
we turn to the board to manifest what we think about this universal, and the board helps us
along, making room for the instantiation of the figure, keeping things apart from each other,
letting them abide next to each other, sorting the different directions– left, right, back and forth. It
is as if the board, or rather, space itself, were a partner in the demonstration. This means that
geometry’s very scientific character is dependent upon sensible conditions. But these sensible
conditions are not understood by geometry, and indeed, are never brought into examination by
it. We might not find this situation humiliating, but we should find it intellectually unsatisfying.
The point is not so much that sensibility contaminates, but that for all its crucial contribution to
knowing, it remains unintelligible, a silent partner in the sciences.
Socrates proposes that philosophy can rise above mathematics’ limits. “Reason may
take hold” of mathematicals, he says, not as “assumptions”, but as “stepping stones,” examining
from what higher principles they might proceed, by means of “dialectic.” This philosophical kind
of knowing, as an extension of geometrical inquiry, would answer the question ‘how do angles
exist?’ by discovering genuinely self-evident truths upon which angles depend. In this sense, its
objects would not be assumptions, and it would escape the first reservation about
mathematicals. The second reservation would also be escaped, because the dialectical ascent
[It is not only geometry that turns back to sensibility, but arithmetic as well. Counting needs an extended
field in which successive moments can be distinguished. For Kant, this is time.]
3
5
�upon the grounds of mathematical knowing would move towards fully intelligible objects of
reason. Its accounts would move from reason to reason, with nothing but reason in between. In
other words, it would never descend back into sensibility’s manifestations to demonstrate, but
would [‘hypothetically’] infer the conditions it was after. Philosophy, like seminar, will not need to
use the board.
As wonderful as these philosophical successes might be if realized, Socrates’ proposal
raises some crucial questions not addressed explicitly in the Republic. Remember the concern
involved in the second reservation, that mathematics requires the use of sensible images. If this
“use” involves epistemic contributions from sensibility not understood by mathematics, these
contributions will not be any better recognized by a purely eidetic, dialectical philosophy. Rather,
they will be transcended, as the mere circumstances of a lower form of knowing, perhaps not
worth the attention of reason unencumbered. In this presentation of philosophy, we are
encouraged to assume that sensibility is not, in fact, an epistemic resource. If the contributions
to knowledge come wholly from ‘above’, so to speak, from reason alone, then this is perhaps a
safe assumption. But a lover of wisdom would rather not beg this question.
The image of the divided line is followed by the image of a cave, in which we are born
chained to our sensible experience, which plays before us like shadows cast by models of real
things outside of the cave. In this allegory, knowledge indeed comes ‘from above’: the naturally
true is imitated in the figures manipulated in the cave, and these are imitated in the shadows
they cast. But throughout the allegory is an unexplicated factor: each sort of knowable
generates an image in some receiver– the forms of the true objects are received into the
materials used to construct their likenesses, and the likenesses themselves on the cave wall
that receives their shadows. Without these receivers, no chain of imitation is possible. Following
the allegory, without the cave wall, no sensible experience is possible. But of what is the wall
itself a depiction? Whatever it is, is it of a nature to contribute to the kind of knowing we have in
our experience of the world? Socrates’ allegory might distract some readers from such a
question with its narrative of “turning-around.” By pointing the aspiring philosopher ‘upwards’
towards reason’s resources, rather than ‘downwards’ towards the nature of sensibility, he is
leaving at least one big question on the table.
If the path upwards were pursued, what would the Socratic philosopher discover about
the first principles of geometric “assumptions”? A first step still within mathematics might be the
discovery that figures can be taken as images of ratios– for examples, the pentagon as a spatial
flowering of the uncalculable mean and extreme ratio, and the circle, of the transcendent ratio
called ‘pi.’ But these so-called “irrational” or “mute” ratios themselves might turn out to be
6
�approximations of rational, speakable– that is, arithmetic– ratios. The very first mathematical
principles from which figures are derived would then be numbers, whose first still-mathematical
principle might be the unit, or that by which we call something one. Now, a dialectical inquiry
into the possibility of numbers-- and indeed the possibility of the unit-- might lead to purely
intelligible forms such as the Same itself, the Other itself, and the One itself. This ascent leaves
space behind as a sort of encumbrance. Of course, space itself is not accounted for in such a
philosophical ascent. The givenness of figures, that they are outside of us, and the receptivity of
both the world around us and our own imaginations to the spatial images of ultimately rational
principles, is not itself given an explanation. The silent partnership of the cave wall has been left
silent.
The Turn to Bastard Reasoning
Eric Salem once proposed in a lecture on Socrates’ allegory that the account of the cave
wall is not given in the Republic, but rather might be sought in part in the Timaeus’ account of
the receptacle. I want to follow his suggestion here, and so we now turn to the Timaeus.
In the dialogue’s introductory section, Socrates asks to hear about his idea of a beautiful
city, which had been elaborated in speech the day before, but this time set in motion, at war. His
request might already indicate an interest in just what was left unexplored above: in motion, in
the realm of becoming, the beautiful city will need to come down off its seat in intellectual
heaven, and show how it might be given in the world of change. But it will not be Socrates who
takes this path downward. Rather, the title character Timaeus speaks for the remainder of the
dialogue. Before the city in motion can be discussed, however, Socrates and his interlocutors
decide they want an account of the nature of the humans who will make up the city. Moreover,
they want an account of the whole, moving cosmos in which these humans emerge. The
remainder of the dialogue is accordingly cosmological, and then anthropological (the political
question is postponed). Timaeus’ very first step in pursuing his cosmology is to offer a
fundamental distinction familiar to Plato’s readers: the sensible world, he says, must be
distinguished from the purely intelligible model of which it is an image. The intelligible admits of
no motion, is eternal, and can never have come to be at all– it simply is. The sensible comes to
be, and Timaeus pictures this coming to be as the result of a divine constructive “craftsman” (ho
demiourgos) or “framer” (ho synistas). He narrates how this power might have constructed a
7
�harmonious image in imitation of the perfect model, making use of mathematical figures and
ratios familiar to the sciences of astronomy and music. 4
Timaeus’ cosmos, at this point, is like a mathematician’s diagram. Compare Ptolemy’s
mathematical astronomy. Its theories do not speak of where or in what the motions of the stars
occur, but rather only of the stars’ motions’ knowable ratios, demonstrable in diagrams. In this
way, the question of the nature of the space that receives the world-image might not arise for
the merely mathematical cosmologist. 5 But several steps into the narration, Timaeus points out
a problem. The divine maker constructed these mathematical models as somehow imitations of
what is best—that is, as imitations of the intelligible original. But it doesn’t seem that this
procedure—imitation of the best—is sufficient to account for the whole cosmos. On the contrary,
Timaeus claims that the world as it is comes to be not simply from the intellect’s grasp of the
good, as his story had been assuming, but also from what he now calls “necessity”: by what, if it
exists, has to be the way it is. Where does this necessity come from? Despite the fact that the
mathematical arts and sciences (like Ptolemy’s) are filled with insights into what is necessarily
and universally true about corporeal nature, none of them can give a deduction of this
necessity’s origin. For example, none of the cosmologists, Timaeus points out, have given an
account of how the medium of natural change—the elements of bodies-- have come to be in the
matter in which they are. 6 To theorize a changing cosmos, mathematical diagrams alone,
unhindered by necessity, will not be sufficient.
What is needed, Timaeus proposes, is a “new beginning,” a “retreat” to a new principle,
a “third kind” of being, making sense of the world’s receptivity as such for the knowable forms.
Timaeus calls this principle “the receptacle”, a co-eternal origin alongside the intellect’s model of
the cosmos. Not the model itself, nor its constructed image, it is precisely that into which the
model is received.
With the introduction of his “third” principle, Timaeus is in fact clarifying a fundamental
dualism about knowledge. The relation of original to image so dear to Socrates leaves out of
account a second origin for the image, in receptivity itself. The world as it appears is different
from its origin– this is the Socratic proposal. But that its origins are two is Timaeus’ thesis– by
Geometry and arithmetic provide a science of ratio in general; but astronomy and music turn to
appearances to discover which particular ratios and figures form a harmonious whole, either of heavenly
motions, or of musical scales. Timaeus borrows the particular ratios and figures of the latter two sciences.
5 At this stage, time is given as “a moving image of eternity.” It is the outcome of ratio-metric mathematical
principles, not a container in which they have being. This approach is unlike Timaeus’ conception of
space.
6 If successful, an account of necessity would perhaps stave off the allegation that corporeal becoming is
nothing but an unintelligible flux.
4
8
�adding his “third kind”, he uncovers that second origin, and reveals the apparent world as what
he calls a “syntasis”: a combination of heterogenous sources. The multifarious shifting from
stability to instability and back again that constitutes the mortal world will take place in the
receptacle; but the discovery of this principle reveals that it must have been there all along,
providing space even for the relatively unchanging motions of astronomy. 7 With the receptacle,
astronomy can be taken as no longer merely mathematical, for its objects are not merely
diagrammable ratios. Rather, they are now natural bodies with a place in the cosmos. Their
astronomy belongs to physics. 8
Timaeus warns his audience that an account of the receptacle will be “strange and
unusual,” because the object of study is “difficult and obscure.” His warnings indicate to us that
an entirely new sort of theorizing will be taking place: for unlike the eidetic model, the receptacle
is not itself intelligible. And unlike the visible world, it does not appear to the senses. If we have
only intellect and sense at our disposal, with what will we know that which is in itself unavailable
to either? In one of the strangest passages in Plato (the 4th passage on the handout), Timaeus
tells us that the receptacle not only “shares in the intelligible in a most perplexing and hard-to
capture manner”— but is “graspable by a bastard sort of reasoning, with the aid of insensibility”
(52a8).
The claim seems to be that the principle unavailable to our two faculties, sense and
thought, will be revealed through a perverse deployment of those very same faculties. Why
“bastard”? Wherefore base? This term suggests that in pursuing this account, reason will not be
occupied within reason’s own, high territory of the purely intelligible, but with the supposedly
baser realm of the sensible. The account to be developed takes the forms to have been mired in
the sensible realm, and attempts to understand precisely their adulterated existence. Reasoning
will be trying to make sense of what is not its own.
And why “insensibility”? How could that help? The idea here could be that the inquiring
subject has to somehow scrutinize the nature of his or her own sensible experience, while
shutting out the material influence of the sensible object. Insensibility here is a sort of deep
abstraction. Regard the curtains behind me, but become insensible to their color, their solidity,
their texture, perhaps even their particular magnitude [imagining FSK here]. What emerges for
us then is “seen dimly” as if in a “dream,” Timaeus says.
Timaeus implies that the heavenly motions of astronomy are not eternal, but rather only an “image” of
eternity. The demiurge remarks that “all that is bound together can be dissolved” (41b1).
8 The receptacle belongs to “the account of the whole” 48d5, and “is…before the birth of Heaven.” 52d4
7
9
�As he proceeds, Timaeus’ retreat reasons backwards towards the “nature” or “eidos” of
the receptacle. That is, he infers what it would have to be like, in order to fulfill its role as the
field in which the visible manifests. It can have no sensible qualities, since it must be able to
take any of them on. Similarly, it cannot be pictured or diagramed, since it is the ground of all
possible diagrams. It can’t be drawn on the board, since it is what makes the board available in
the first place. This is what it is not, but what can be said positively about it? Timaeus calls it the
“chora,” the space or room in which the world appears. He also calls it a neutral “molding stuff”
for the world, and even a “wet-nurse”, and “mother.” This sequence of metaphors draws out a
sense of the formal and causal power of the receptacle. The receptacle thus somehow
nourishes, or pours life into things, sustaining them. These metaphors indicate how far from
“empty” the receptacle is, even in itself. We might often think of space as sheer void, waiting
indifferently to be filled by perceptible items. 9 But Timaeus’ space is teeming with potential life,
waiting, not indifferently, but expectantly, to give birth. It is perhaps neither full, nor empty, but
according to its eternal priority, the source of either of these spatial dispositions. When it gets
filled by forms, it gives them the room to manifest themselves. When it gets filled by void, it
holds open the room in which no forms are. Compare the blackboard: where the diagram is not
drawn, indeed, in the crucial zones between the parts of the diagram, the board is not merely
empty of inscription, but spread out in its blankness.
The receptacle’s radical priority to experience further suggests that is matter only in a
metaphorical sense. 10 For it is not literally “stuff” in the sense we know from experience– after
all, it is “molded” both into our solid, present objects and into the absent spaces between them.
It is thus not a source of nourishment for the world in a material sense, but perhaps rather in a
formal sense. That is, it “nourishes”, so to speak, the sensible givenenness of things by
sustaining them as spatial.
Timaeus offers one more, especially puzzling metaphor: he calls the receptacle a
“winnowing basket.” Change in sensible things, he points out, comes to be through contact
between differences. The hot next to the cold, the dry next to the moist– we might add: negative
charge around positive charge, north magnetic poles across from south, or ‘masses’ in a
gravitational field. These different “powers”, whatever they may be, “jostle” each other, and
thereby produce change. Over time, these changes generate the apparently structured world
which we observe. These change-inducing juxtapositions, these jostlings, do not happen
through tools of arrangement, as if parts were separated and pushed together with a hoe and a
9
Lucretius’ void. Interesting that Lucretius is such an unmathematical thinker.
Aristotle and Plotinus both take the Receptacle to be “matter.”
10
10
�rake. Rather, the parts themselves act on each other, like grains in a winnowing basket. 11 The
basket merely provides the venue in which this jostling can transpire– it is a passive sort of tool
that does nothing more than make the reciprocal influences of the worked-upon matter possible,
by providing them the room for juxtaposition. The six directions of space– left, right, back,
forward, up and down– act like the grid of a basket, sorting the tendencies of material things into
different directions, giving them a stage on which they can come upon their brethren.
Does Timaeus’ story of the receptacle serve as the ’missing’ account of receptivity–
missing, that is, from the picture of Socratic philosophy in the Republic? Recall that part [of] the
vocation of philosophy described there, to ascend to the intellectual first principles of the
mathematical sciences’ own starting places, would leave unexamined the non-intellectual first
principles of sensibility, that is, of the receptivity in which the knowable images come to be. On
the other hand, Timaeus’ oddly named “receptacle”, which has resonances in Greek of
“reservoir” or “harbor,” represents receptivity as a cognitive resource. The name indicates the
epistemic purposiveness of the “third kind”: the receptacle provides a welcoming cosmic
hospitality for the forms, so that they may be known by us in their images. Timaeus follows his
account of the receptacle with an extended speculation about the solid geometry of the
elements. Certain propositions about the elements– how many there could be, how they would
act upon each other, and how they could change into each other– are derivable a priori, since
they arise from the demonstrably necessary geometrical character of the solids. These
speculations have hypothetical—perhaps fanciful—beginnings. But the necessity involved in the
geometry of his hypotheses generates an a priori, synthetic natural science. 12 Timaeus’
procedure suggests that any mathematical natural science of matter will ultimately rest upon a
story about the receptacle as an ultimate condition of the possibility of extended, sensible being.
Is this foundational story satisfactory as a philosophical account?
But doesn’t the “sieve” itself move? I can only make sense of this in an extremely analogical way. We
might be reminded here of a passage from Plato’s Parmenides, in which the elder philosopher
proposes that the One– the very highest principle of all being– is both at rest, and in motion
(146a). It is at rest, so to speak, Parmenides claims, because it doesn’t ever depart from being
fully in itself. But it also is in motion, so to speak, because it always is in other things, making
each of them one thing. The metaphysical participation of things in the One can be thought of as
a kind of flowing motion of it outwards, into them. Could this conception help us interpret
Timaeus’ winnowing basket? The receptacle’s motion is not a locomotion, but a “change” in
which it takes on a form it doesn’t have in itself. In so far as the spatialization of these forms has
consequences for how they evolve, it is as if the ‘change’ of the receptacle imparts further
changes to the things in it.
11
Cf thinkers like Kepler, Maxwell, Rutherford—anyone who imagines a model, derives necessary
conclusions from it, and compares these with the appearances.
12
11
�Timaeus warned his audience at the start that any cosmology of a becoming world
would not be knowledge, but only a “likely story,” in so far as what becomes is not what is, but
only its likeness. Philosophy seeks to rise to what is, and discover knowledge of the eternal
there. Accordingly, Timaeus’ mathematical chemistry of the elements is not wisdom about the
highest things. Socrates of the Republic would agree. Now, the receptacle, as the neutral field
of change, can itself neither change nor come to be. However, Timaeus seems to suggest that
as the eternal mother of becoming, the receptacle is itself approachable only under the guise of
[a] likely story. This in part justifies his copious use of metaphor in its account. Metaphor
becomes the handmaiden of ‘bastard reasoning’, with which we can articulate in speech what is
not in itself intelligible. The conjunction of several metaphors– space, mother, nurse, matter,
basket– raises the problem of thinking the thing coherently, since its metaphorical predicates
are not simultaneously compatible. But beneath this interpretive problem is a deeper paradox:
the account treats the receptacle as an eternal, self-subsistent thing, even though it is not, by
hypothesis, a being. This double-speak renders the account of that which underlies all
becoming even more mythic– “not less, but more likely” (48d3) -- than the playful speculations
about shapes and growths that make up the rest of Timaeus’ physics. This paradox, that the
receptacle is both beyond becoming and other than being, runs through Plato’s adventure along
the path downward. Accordingly, the hoped-for account of the cave wall turns out to be, in
Plato’s treatment, deeply enigmatic.
The Form of Outer Sense
Kant’s life’s work, it seems to me, was an attempt to demythologize philosophical
enigmas. Where receptivity is concerned, he’s on the case. He begins in the Critique of Pure
Reason with a distinction in kind between thought and sense. In the dialogues, thought was
understood as the faculty that grasps the universal, which is, while sense grasps the particular,
which merely seems or becomes. One of Kant’s innovations is to add to these correlations the
proposal that while thought in us is active, sense is receptive. Kant names the study of the
principles of knowledge belonging to thought a ‘Logic’ – the study of logos. He names the study
of the principles of knowledge belonging to sensibility an ‘Aesthetic’-- the study of aesthesis.
(Note that Kant’s ‘aesthetic’ has nothing directly to do with the beautiful.) An empirical aesthetic
would investigate the particular senses we happen to have, and what features of the world they
give us access to: color, odor and taste, sound, temperature, as well as shape, size, and
duration. Perhaps what we read in Book II of Aristotle’s De Anima could be considered an
12
�empirical aesthetic. A transcendental aesthetic, on the other hand, would investigate sensibility
as such, rising past or transcending the particularities our equipment for sensation.
This new science’s object comes into view in two stages (described in the 5th passage
on the handout): first, Kant claims that we must “isolate sensibility by taking away everything
from it which the understanding thinks through its concepts.” In the second step, we “separate
off from sensibility everything belonging to its impressions.” The first move resists the claim of
monist thinkers like Leibniz, for whom the distinction between sensibility and understanding is a
difference in degree– that is, sense is merely the obscure end of the spectrum of human
representation, whose clear and distinct end is called understanding. For Leibniz, there is
accordingly only one path for philosophy: towards the higher principles of the intellect, for there
is properly speaking no heterogenous epistemic contribution from sensibility itself. Taken as an
interpretation of the divided line, we can see that Leibniz’s Socratic conception must hold that
there is no philosophical theory of the cave wall.
Kant’s interest, on the other hand, is not unlike the dualist Timaeus’, for whom givenness
must be traced back to a second principle. Timaeus proposed his receptacle as the ultimate
ground of the givenness of things, as the reason why things can be given to the senses at all.
This question reappears in a new guise in Kant’s account of “sensibility,” defined as
receptivity— not, to begin with, the receptivity of the world for intelligible forms, but the
receptivity of our own mode of knowing; the openness, one could say, of our minds for things as
given.
In its second step, the transcendental aesthetic clears out from intuition what Kant calls
the “matter” of sense, leaving nothing but the “form.” Kant claims there are two sorts of sense
for us: space, the form of “outer sense”, and time, the form of “inner sense.” Kant’s space, in this
respect, like the receptacle, is invisible, inaudible, and impalpable. Taken together, these two
steps reveal an object not properly available to either the understanding or to sensation. Rather,
the philosopher must abstract from the matter of things sensed outside of us to the form of their
being “outer” at all. The underlying precondition for juxtaposition, extension, and orientation is
not any spatial thing, but space itself– or perhaps better, spatiality. This spatiality is not thought
up by us, and is not derived from experience. It is the form or ultimate pre-intuition of whatever
could be given as ‘outside.’ This form itself is a “pure manifold”– not merely many, like the
spatial stuff of outer sense, but the ordered, stuff-less multiplicity of orientations in which
sensations are always given, and to which they cannot themselves contribute. Recalling the
warnings of the difficulty of the inquiry voiced by Timaeus, Kant tells us in the introduction of his
13
�book that “it may be that we are not in a position to distinguish [the form of knowledge] from the
raw material, until with long practice of attention we have become skilled in separating it” (B1-2).
This ultimate priority of space ahead of all outer things means that, like the receptacle, it
cannot have come to be. And on precisely the grounds of this priority does space make
necessary knowledge of the outer world possible. Our geometrical demonstrations draw their
necessity from the way the pre-intuited field in which they are inscribed or imagined determines
those inscriptions and images. Thanks be to the board, where we may draw our figures. But
greater thanks be to space, which opens out to make room for the board, and opens out for our
imaginations to spread and discover what must follow from what among our figures. It is
essentially one, embracing all particular spaces. It is both given, in that we do not
spontaneously think it at all, and infinite, in that no bounds can be set for its magnitude. It is
empty, in that it is the container or receptacle for all sensible content, and unremovable, in that
we cannot imagine it away.
Timaeus introduced the receptacle, not as an aspect of particular material things, but as
a single underlying whole which pre-exists them, so that it may receive them. This seems to be
what Aristotle, for one, was most at pains to resist about Plato’s Timaean conception– for the
later thinker, the places of things, along with their shape and their magnitude, are accidents of
their individual existences: a thing is in a place as the contact boundary of what surrounds it.
There is no whole receiver, only a nested series of surrounding containers. Hume’s argument
reaches a similar conclusion: no impression comes to us without some spatial magnitude, he
claims, and so space itself is only a subsequent abstraction made possible by the accumulation
of spatial particulars. Kant, filling in argumentation absent from his ancient comrade Timaeus’
account, argues that the nature of spatiality requires independent singularity and wholeness.
For, each particular place is bounded only in so far as these boundaries are between spatial
regions. That is, bounded spaces are always “limitations” of the same one space. Just as what
recieves limitation must be priori to the result of its limitation, so divisions into particular places
presuppose the field which they limit. Accordingly, larger spaces cannot be assembled originally
out of smaller ones, and so space is not an aggregate; it is rather, Kant claims, a “totum”
(B466), preceding the particular parts we may carve out of it.
Recall also how Timaeus brought in the receptacle as an additional “kind” to ground his
mathematical science of material nature. Kant seems to have agreed that the nature of
geometrical knowledge of things required a heterogenous, spatial source of knowing; indeed, he
thought the necessity of mathematical sciences was the strongest evidence for his
sense/thought dualism. He points out that geometrical demonstration, for example, reveals that
14
�necessary predicates about figures cannot be derived out of their concepts by analysis, but
must rather be synthesized or constructed out of the intuited figures. That the third side of a
triangle is shorter than the sum of the other two does not fall out of the concept of what a
triangle is, but only from the determination of the sensible field in which we inscribe triangles.
The blackboard must play its role. Kant here is taking Socrates’ second reservation about
mathematics– that it could not extricate itself from sensible conditions– as decisive evidence
that sensibility is, after all, an epistemic resource, and that human knowledge is dual.
Idealism
Taking up the torch of ‘bastard reasoning,’ Kant finally explains the unacknowledged
source of scientific knowledge of sense objects, by reasoning back to the invisible, nonintellectual condition of sensibility. This condition, however, is– unlike Timaeus’ receptacle– not
a self-subsisting, eternal being, but a mere form of our own sensibility. It is in us, not in a
psychological sense, as if it were a figment of each thinker’s mind, but in a metaphysical sense,
as a feature of our knowledge of things, and not of the things as they are in themselves. Space
is not ‘in our heads’-- indeed, our heads are in space. But space is ‘in’ our own, human knowing
of things, such as our knowledge of the heads in this room.
The radically blank ‘non-thing’ that is space, therefore, does not exist in itself. Kant
writes (this is on the handout) that those who “maintain the absolute reality of space” as
“subsistent...(which is generally the view taken by the mathematical students of nature),... have
to admit [an] eternal and infinite self-subsistent non-entity, which is there, yet without being
anything real, only in order to contain in itself all that is real” (A39/B56). He was probably
thinking of Newton here, but the description fits the deep cosmology of the Timaeus, as well. 13
As we saw, Timaeus’ chora made knowledge possible, but only by way of an existence which is
neither being nor becoming. Like Timaeus, Kant infers that there is a determining source of
knowledge in receptivity. But to elude the paradox, Kant makes clear that this source, space, is
nothing but an epistemic condition. The receptivity, and thus the receptacle– the form of outer
sense–, is ours. This position of sensibility– both subjective and essentially sharable– may be
more familiar to us from the realm of thought. That is, when we think a concept together, each
The receptacle is eternal, but Timaeus never calls it infinite. This is perhaps because qua unformed, it
has no quanitity. What did Newton mean by calling space “empty” in the Principia? In the Optics, Newton
writes that space is “the sensorium of God.”
13
15
�one of us shares the same universal in our thought. The mind’s concept is not a psychological
event, but a form or standard. According to Kant’s account, mind is present in sensibility, as
well. The space of things is not a psychological feature of their images in our minds, but rather a
necessary feature of how they can known by beings like us. This is what Kant means by “the
transcendental ideality of space.”
Kant does declare his form of outer sense to be “empty,” which might make us think it is
pure, void extension. Where is the living, expectant energy of Timaeus’ receptacle? We might
say that its energy has been idealized. The expectancy, the power to hold the shape of what will
come to be in it-– that is, the maternal power of space– this is in Kant’s space as well. But we
can now see this power as life-like, precisely because it is a power of the mind. Space as the
form of intuition is not a null void, but a manifold field ready for knowledge to be generated in.
The pure manifold, the cave wall, is alive, because it is sensibility.
Kant’s journey down into sensibility has none of the metaphorical images of Timaeus’.
On the contrary, it strikes a scientific pose, where Timaeus’ story was only “likely.” Kant speaks
in his own voice as philosophical inquirer, rather than through a fictional character whose own
relation to philosophy is obscure. Kant’s account appears first in his book, as the starting place
for a looming system, where Timaeus’ appears as a “revision” or “retreat” part-way through a
narrative. The highly metaphorical, fictive frame of the receptacle might suggest that the
receptacle as described is a poetic manifestation of knowable principles, according to which
what is transcendentally ideal (space) is depicted as if it were real, in itself, but in a likeness, in
a mythos. This would certainly not be the only time Plato has characters speak in a
metaphorical mode, rendering as material what cannot properly speaking exist in that way. Such
a depiction generates paradox, as we have seen, and this paradox raises questions about
subjectivity and the knowability of the world that Plato was content to leave as questions. By
demythologizing the receptacle, showing that it is not an alien, quasi-divine being outside of us,
but rather a constitutive principle within us all, pulling the depiction out of the poetic sphere of
the ‘likely’, Kant gives himself the opportunity to answer these questions. Whether his answers
are satisfactory, is a question for us.
16
�
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Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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Philosophy and the Cave Wall: Plato and Kant on the Form of the Given
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Typescript of a lecture delivered on March 31, 2023, by Matthew Caswell as part of the Formal Lecture Series. <br /><br />Mr. Caswell describes his lecture: "<span>The lecture will compare inquiries into the nature of sensibility offered by Plato, and by Kant. That </span><i>space</i><span> might be the ultimate ground of a certain kind of sensible givenness is a possibility investigated by both thinkers. What can our love of wisdom gain from pointing itself downward, into the senses?</span>"
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Caswell, Matthew
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Annapolis, MD
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2023-03-31
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Kant, Immanuel, 1724-1804
Plato
Philosophy
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English
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LEC_Caswell_Matthew_2023-03-31
Friday night lecture
Tutors
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6cb1756cf96da69b72628c3fdd358fd9
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Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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Sappho I: An Ontological Approach
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on January 13, 1995, by Joshua Kates as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
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Kates, Joshua
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1995-01-13
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Sappho. Works. Fragment 1
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English
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LEC_Kates_Joshua_1995-01-13_ac
Friday night lecture
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Text
On a recent plane trip, I sat next to a young man who is currently a junior at a small college in
Pennsylvania. He was very friendly, eager to tell me about his troubles with a girl who offered
him a ride to a tattoo parlor, his coach’s tactics for defense, and how little he was learning in
college. When he found out I was a professor he decided to help me out by telling me how he
cheats on all his tests. I thanked him for the information, but told him that we don’t have tests at
St. John’s. He was very interested, paused for a moment, and then asked how the party scene
was. Excellent, every friday night there is a lecture.
Since he was so forthcoming, I decided to ask him what he knew about Galileo. He thought that
Galileo was the guy who dropped things off the leaning tower of Pisa (quite possibly true), and
that Galileo argued that the sun revolved around the earth (right topic, but he had his
heliocentrism and geocentrism mixed up).
These two facts about Galileo, that he showed that bodies do not fall with speeds proportional to
their weights and that he championed Copernicanism over Ptolemaic astronomy, are probably the
two most well known features of Galileo’s corpus. And yet I’m not sure that Juniors, after
studying Galileo for a week in Junior mathematics and a month in Junior Laboratory, would have
learned either of these things from their study. We don’t study why Galileo rejected Aristotle
and Ptolemy, we study a new science that Galileo built upon the apparent ruins of Aristotelian
natural philosophy and metaphysics: a science of the actualized infinite in the mathematics
tutorial, and the study of local motions described in the third and fourth days of Galileo’s last
published book, The Two New Sciences.
The Two New Sciences is a discourse between three friends, Simplicio, Sagredo, and Salviati that
lasts four days. On the first two days, the three friends discuss a new science concerning the
resistance of solid bodies to separation. While there are theorems sprinkled throughout these two
days, the banter between the friends leads us, for the most part, gently and slowly through the
mathematical and physical arguments. Along the way we are treated with numerous diagrams,
some of them purely geometric, but many more are intricately drawn sketches of ropes with
frayed edges, beams with knots and grain that look like olive not pine, and crumbling arches of
brick that support not only beams but plants with branching roots that are breaking through,
clumps of moss, and new sprigs with veined leaves.
On the third and fourth day, where we begin our study, readers begin with the unnamed
Academician’s Latin text rather than a friendly Italian conversation with our three interlocutors.
The Latin text describes the locomotion of disembodied moveables that are more like
mathematical points than the natural bodies in days one and two, the diagrams reminiscent of
book five of Euclid rather than the drawings of olive beams, braided ropes, and crumbling
arches. What we see is an academic mathematician, one who precisely defines equable motion,
naturally accelerated motion, and projectile motion, then applies Euclid’s theory of proportion
1
�and Apollonius’ study of conics. The third day, in particular, is remarkably spare. Only fifteen
of its more than seventy-five pages are Italian dialogue, the remainder, mathematical theorem
after mathematical theorem in Latin.
It is on the third and fourth day with this spare Latin text on the mathematics of motion that our
Junior Laboratory begins. If one ignores nuance, the use of proportion, geometrical corollaries,
and blurs one’s vision, then one could summarize our readings thus: in six theorems on equable
motion, Galileo shows that speed is distance divided by time; in the next six theorems on
naturally accelerated motion, he shows that the distance a body falls is one half its accumulated
speed times the time of its fall squared; in the final two theorems on projectile motion, Galileo
demonstrates that a body can simultaneously move with equable motion in one direction while
falling with naturally accelerated motion downward resulting in a parabolic path.
What we study in the third and fourth days is Galileo’s last published work, written at the sunset
of a life exhausted by a revolutionary study of motion, published as his body was bedridden by
disease, his eyesight failing, his person imprisoned, and his soul shattered from the death of his
beloved daughter; this monument risks seeming for us an unremarkable dawn, a new beginning
we could unconscionably sleep through, a dry academic Latin textbook in which two elementary
equations for moving bodies are derived.
But the new beginning that we study is the distillation of a lifelong argument between Aristotle
and Galileo. Galileo lets us hear echoes of this argument in his dialogues by including the
Aristotelian, Simplicio, among his characters. While Simplicio will argue for the Aristotelian
approach tenaciously and with spirit, his understanding is often second hand, rote, and
handicapped by a poor mathematical education consisting in nothing beyond book one of Euclid.
Salviati and Sagredo often team up and ridicule the Aristotelian account and tend to just ignore
Simplicio altogether whenever the discussion requires mathematical expertise. It often seems
that Galileo is not treating the Aristotelian worldview fairly, as Simplicio himself complains,
allowing Salviati to vaunt over an impoverished, dried up, rather rubbish version of
Aristotelianism. If Aristotelianism is so ridiculous, why include it at all? Why have Simplicio
partake in these dialogues?
Galileo’s new science of local motion is now old and familiar to us. Because of this we might
have a hard time seeing Galileo’s theory without first becoming strangers to it. One way to do
this is to immerse ourselves in another way of thinking about motion first. This is in fact what
we do in the program by studying Aristotle. By studying Aristotle we are able to not only see a
cohesive, beautiful, and philosophically rich way of understanding motion, we also are put in a
better position to see how our own understanding of nature is itself a theory that requires
attention and thought.
2
�I think that Galileo puts Simplicio into the dialogues so that we notice that Galileo’s steps were
not taken out of necessity, by habit, or from authority, but consciously taken to set himself upon a
new path to understand nature. Simplicio is there so that we notice that Galileo isn’t simply
doing mathematics, he is philosophizing. Simplicio is there to remind us that Aristotelian
philosophy, was more than any part that Galileo might contradict, it was a whole philosophy of
nature, and that this new “way of philosophizing tends to subvert all natural philosophy, and to
disorder and set in confusion heaven and earth and the whole universe.”1 Simplicio is in the
dialogues because Galileo is still trying to understand the significance of his disagreement with
Aristotle.
What is this Aristotelian natural philosophy that Galileo threatens to subvert, disorder, and set in
confusion? There are countless small derisive references to the peripatetic philosophy
throughout both the Two Chief World Systems and the Two New Sciences, Simplicio championing
it and defending it in turn, but tonight I thought it would be worthwhile to turn to an earlier text
in Galileo’s career, On Motion or in Latin De Motu.
Galileo wrote and rewrote De Motu while he had a chair in mathematics at the University of Pisa
at the outset of his career (1589-1592). Some hypothesize that De Motu was written as notes for
lectures on Aristotle, others that it was written for publication, perhaps it was both. As a young
professor, he is more conservative than when he is older; he works from a foundation established
by Aristotle’s natural philosophy. Galileo might remind us of Simplicio in these lectures,
adhering to an Aristotelian theory without fully recognizing its consequences. Here we
encounter Galileo wrestling with Aristotle rather than pumping his fist in triumph. Although he
eagerly points out inconsistencies with the same iconoclastic spirit we see in the later dialogues,
the apparent goal is not to refute but to improve upon Aristotle by supplementing his account
with mathematical reasoning inspired by Archimedes writings on the balance, making Aristotle’s
theory more consistent with our experiences of moving bodies. As Galileo develops the
consequences of these changes, we will see a description of nature emerge that is at odds with
the foundations: Aristotle’s definition of nature.
I.
Aristotle’s theory of natural motion
I’ll begin with a few basic ideas from Aristotle’s natural philosophy, before giving a more
detailed account of what we might call Aristotle’s science of the locomotion of bodies.
Aristotle defines nature in the beginning of the second book of the Physics: “nature is a principle
or cause of being moved and of being at rest in that to which it belongs primarily, in virtue of
1
Galileo, Two Chief World Systems (trans. Stillman Drake, University of California Press, 1953, second revised
edition 1967), Day I.
3
�itself and not accidentally”(192b21-22).2 Nature is not deer, trees, rivers, and soil, but the cause
of motion and rest in deer, trees, rivers, and soil; the cause that belongs to these things in virtue
of what they are and not accidentally. Nature is the reason something moves or something rests
when it moves or rests because of itself. Nature is an internal cause of motion or rest.
Nature is not the only cause of motion. Another cause that we are familiar with is force. If I lift
a stone, it does not move because of nature but because of a force which I apply to the stone. All
local motions will have a cause, either a natural cause which is internal and belongs to the body,
or a violent cause which is usually external and is the result of a force being imposed upon the
body. For Aristotle, natural motions are eminently more interesting than forced motions.
Now when we turn to study nature, the internal cause of motion and rest, we are faced with two
kinds of things. There are things that have life or soul and things without life or soul. In the
Physics, Aristotle says that having an internal source of motion and rest is “a characteristic of life
and peculiar to living things” (255a6-7)3. For Aristotle there is an intriguing puzzle about the
motion of non-living things, why and how do they move themselves without soul? His account
of nature needs to stretch to incorporate a kind of motion that originates in a thing without
originating in a thing’s soul. In this lecture, we will call the natural motion and rest of a
non-living thing, the natural motion and rest of a body.
Aristotle will say two things about a body’s motion, and there is some tension between these two
claims, which we will need to address. First, a body’s source of motion, a body’s nature, is ‘the
heavy’ and ‘the light’ in the body. In De Caelo, Aristotle will say that bodies have “in
themselves some spark (as it were) of movement”(308a2); this spark (τὁ ζωπὐρον) is ‘the heavy’
and ‘the light’.4 If we were to form an analogy we could say that soul is to an animal’s or a
plant’s natural motion as spark is to a body’s natural motion.
But the second claim that Aristotle makes is that the body does not move itself as an agent, the
motion is pure passivity. Here is Aristotle in the Physics, “in all these cases the thing does not
move itself, but it contains within itself the source of motion–not of moving something or of
causing motion, but of suffering it” (255b29-31)5. Here we have Aristotle pushing against the
idea that we should understand the heavy and the light as anything analogous to soul. The body’s
motion is pure passivity, the spark is not a soul, but a passive potential for a kind of activity,
being at rest in a particular place. The idea here is two-fold. First, while a stone resting on the
ground will never move itself, if I lift that stone up and release it the stone will move. The spark
2
Aristotle, Physics (The Complete Works of Aristotle, edited by Jonathan Barnes,
translated by R. P. Hardie, Princeton University Press, 1984), Book II, ch. 1.
3
Ibid., Book VIII, ch. 4.
4
Aristotle, De Caelo (also from The Complete Works of Aristotle, edited by Jonathan
Barnes, but translated by R. K. Gaye, Princeton University Press, 1984), Book IV, ch. 1.
5
Ibid., Book VIII, ch. 4.
4
�does not turn into a roaring fire by itself, but only when one uses bellows to fan the flame.
Second, the heavy and the light do not choose their place of rest and where they will move when
they do move; there is no internal account for why they move where they move. Aristotle says
that ultimately, “these things are moved by that which brought the thing into existence and made
it light and heavy”(256a1)6.
We can now turn from these few basic ideas underlying Aristotle’s natural philosophy, to some
more specific claims in his account of how ‘the heavy’ and ‘the light’ can be used to describe the
natural local motions of bodies.
First, and of primary interest tonight, is this: Aristotle believes that bodies fall with speeds in
proportion to their heaviness and lightness. In the De Caelo, Aristotle gives the following
example (which is illustrated in the handout, and labeled figure 1). If we have a body that falls
through line ce in a given time, and we divide both the body and the line in the same ratio, so
that ab is to the whole body as cd is to the whole line, then the part of the body will complete the
part of the line in the same time as the whole of the body would move through the whole line.7
This means that a stone half as big as another stone, that is with half its heaviness, will fall half
as far as the bigger stone in the same time. Aristotle will give similar examples for the light as
well as the heavy. A fire twice as large as another fire, will rise twice as far in the same time.
Paired with this claim is a claim about how bodies fall through different mediums. If one is
given a body, it will fall with a speed that is inversely proportional to the density of the medium.8
If water is twice the density of air, then a body will fall half as fast in water as it will in air.
Aristotle also gives an explanation for how and why bodies naturally accelerate. In De Caelo,
Aristotle says that when a body naturally falls downward or rises upward, it moves towards
fulfillment and “comes into that place, quantity, and quality” which belongs to its form
(310a20-35).9 The idea that something moving upwards would change not only in location but
in quantity and quality, might seem strange. But we can remind ourselves that for Aristotle
motion is not simply locomotion, motion is a general category, it is a becoming, an actualization
of a potentiality as such. ‘The heavy’ doesn’t just move downward, it has a place in the cosmos,
the center. When ‘the heavy’ is in its place it is fulfilling its purpose, it is at-work-being-itself, it
is actualized. Similarly with ‘the light’. When ‘the heavy’ moves downward it is not simply
changing its place, it is becoming more itself. It is, to return to the quote above, coming “into
that place, quantity, and quality” which belongs to its form. This means that as the heavy moves
downward it gets heavier, and because it is heavier, it moves faster. Galileo adds in the margins
Thomas Aquinas’ way of putting this, “Aristotle held that the speed of motion is increased
6
Physics, Book VIII, chapter 4.
On Motion, p. 263, ch. 8, and De Caelo 301a27-32.
8
Physics, Book IV, chapter 8, 215a24-215b11.
9
De Caelo, Book IV, chapter 3.
7
5
�because the weight of the body is more concentrated and strengthened as the body approaches its
proper place” (ch. 19, 316)10.
We now have the basic outlines of Aristotle’s account of nature and how he uses this to explain
the natural motions of bodies: where a body is at rest, where it moves when it is displaced, the
speed with which it moves, and why a body accelerates. But because the heavy and the light are
not soul, they are not active principles, but passive principles, we can still ask the question, why
does the light go up and the heavy down? To answer this question, Aristotle says that we have to
look outside the bodies to “that which brought the thing into existence and made it light and
heavy” (256a1).11
II. Galileo critique of Aristotle
Galileo thinks that Aristotle was wrong that speed is proportional to weight. Galileo prepares
many thought experiments which might not refute Aristotle, but work on the reader’s
imagination so that Aristotle’s claims become more problematic. Because Galileo writes these
thought experiments to persuade, I’ll focus on the one that I found most persuasive and try to
explain why I found it so.
Galileo instructs us to imagine two bodies of equal weight falling next to each other with equal
speeds. As these bodies fall, they are shoulder to shoulder and then, at some point, they become
attached. An Aristotlelian will be compelled to say that once they become attached, they will go
twice as fast. Galileo concludes that it is obvious that this is not the case for anyone who “looks
at the matter simply and naturally” (ch. 8, 266)12. As we reconsider the example, in an attempt to
look at the matter simply and naturally, we might notice that the sudden increase in speed is
coincidental with the cohesion of the two bodies. The cause of the increased speed doesn’t seem
to be more weight, but the fact that a given weight is in one body rather than two. But why
should this matter? How would this cohesion increase the speed? Surely the bodies will
continue going the speed that they had been going, whether the bodies are rubbing shoulders or
holding hands, as it were. Now, is a chunk of wood any different from two halves “holding
hands”? I don’t see why it would be, so it must be that the larger chunk of wood falls just as fast
as any of its parts would fall and it just so happens that all these parts are “holding hands”. Now,
perhaps this is not what Galileo meant by looking at the matter simply and naturally, but I am
sure that this is the sort of inner dialogue that he wanted his readers to have.
There is no indication in these lectures that Galileo rejected Aristotle claims based on a field trip
to the leaning bell tower in Pisa. If anything, the sorts of examples he gives indicate an approach
10
Galileo Galilei, On Motion and On Mechanics, The University of Wisconsin Press,
1960. On Motion was translated by I. E. Drabkin. Hereafter, “De Motu”.
11
Physics, Book VIII, chapter 4.
12
De Motu.
6
�that puts more weight on reason and imagination than any particular experience. The example we
have just given of two bodies being joined together mid-fall, is just such an instance. How could
bodies be made to do this? A few pages back, Galileo gives another counterexample to
Aristotle’s claim that speed is proportional to heaviness. Here he asks his students to imagine
two lead balls, one a hundred times as large as the other, both being dropped from the moon. In
both cases, the examples are not the sort of thing one can put to an actual test. Despite what one
will hear about Galileo being among the first experimentalists, it is clear in De Motu that his
theories were not based on results from experiments.13 Rather than torturing nature for answers,
he was more likely to interrogate his imagination and think through a problem theoretically.
Galileo says that he likes to “employ reasoning at all times rather than examples, for what we
seek are the causes of effects, and these causes are not given to us by experience”(263, ch. 8)14.
The ability to guide his own imagination and reason until he sees a clear relation of cause and
effect and then to convey this idea so clearly to others that they cannot possibly doubt the
relation, this is one of Galileo’s greatest points of pride. In both the Two New Sciences and the
Two Chief World Systems Sagredo will repeatedly complement Saviati on his ability to do just
this.15 This praise which Sagredo heaps on Salviati, is really Galileo heaping praise on himself
without shame. (Incidentally, Descartes in a letter finds fault with Galileo for putting
self-flattery into his books in this way.) As if the shameless self-praise weren’t enough, we
might recognize in it the praise that Plutarch gives to Archimedes, “god-like Archimedes” as
Galileo calls him.16 Plutarch points out that Archimedes is so clear in his explanations that once
you have learned something from him, you are sure you would have come to know it by
yourself. Both Galileo and Plutarch are building on the idea that mathematical knowledge, at
least, seems to be a kind of recollection. Galileo, putting himself in the position of Socrates or
Archimedes, brags that he is particularly adept at playing the part of the midwife to our
recollection of the true causes of physical phenomena.
III. Galileo’s theory of motion
13
In later works, Galileo appears to rely more heavily on experiment.
De Motu.
15
Here, for example, is Sagredo responding to Saviati in our readings from Junior Laboratory:
Sagredo: Too evident and too easy is this reasoning with which you make
hidden conclusions manifest. This great facility renders the conclusions less
prized than when they were under seeming contradiction. I think that people
generally will little esteem ideas gained with so little trouble, in comparison with
those over which long and unresolvable altercations are waged. Two New
Sciences, (Wall & Thompson, Toronto, 1989), p. 161.
16
“It is not possible to find in all geometry more difficult and intricate questions, or more simple and lucid
explanations…. No amount of investigation of yours would succeed in attaining the proof, and yet, once seen, you
immediately believe you would have discovered it; by so smooth and so rapid a path he leads to the conclusion
required.” (Plutarch, Lives, Life of Marcellus, (trans. John Dryden, Modern Library) p. 378)
14
7
�One goal for Galileo is to improve upon Aristotle’s account of the speeds of falling bodies.
Galileo is willing to reject the claim that speed is proportionate to weight, but he is not willing to
reject the claim that there is some relation between speed and weight. His stubbornness might
be difficult for us to understand. Doesn’t he see that the speed of falling bodies has nothing at all
to do with the quantity of matter? Absolutely not. And this fact, this amazing fact, is what
makes me love Galileo in De Motu. At this moment he is Simplicio. At this moment, he is a
dyed in the wool Aristotelian. He believes that nature is a cause of rest and motion in a body.
He believes that for bodies without soul, the nature of the body is its weight. He believes that
weight must be the cause of rest and motion.
But, Galileo recognizes that there are some areas of weakness in Aristotle’s account. In
particular, Galileo will need to finesse the relationship between speed and weight. Galileo has a
way to do this. At the age of 22, in 1586, he wrote a small little essay. A lab report, if you will.
The topic of his essay, how Archimedes discovered the theft of Hiero’s crown. He thinks that the
method ascribed to Archimedes by others is a “crude thing, far from scientific precision” and not
befitting the divine Archimedes. In the remainder of the essay, he argues that Archimedes does
not find out the fraud by immersing equal weights of gold and silver in water and measuring the
different quantities of spilled water. Archimedes discovers the fraud by measuring the weight of
the crown when it is immersed in water. The key is that Archimedes recognized that “solid
bodies that sink in water weigh in water so much less than in air as is the weight in air of a
volume of water equal to that of the body”. The body will weigh less in water by exactly the
weight of the water that the body displaces. This difference in weight then serves as an accurate
measure of the volume of the body, allowing one to precisely measure the differences in the
quality or density of two submerged metals that are of equal weight in air.
What Galileo takes away from Archimedes and wishes to apply to Aristotle is this idea: it isn’t
weight but essential weight, or density, that distinguishes bodies from one another. Just as
Archimedes is able to distinguish gold and silver by their essential weights, Galileo is not able to
distinguish all kinds of natures from one another by considering their essential weights. And
this, a body’s essential weight, this must determine its speed of fall.
What a thrill for Galileo! He has figured out what nature is! He has found the key to
determining the speed of any given body! The peripatetics, if they aren’t too stubborn, too tied
to every last exact word of Aristotle, are going to love this! He might even get promoted! After
all, and this is a common saying of the time, “ignorance of motion is ignorance of nature”, and
he has found the key to motion, the real nature, essential weight.
But to get this theory off the ground, he has to revisit Aristotle’s natural philosophy. Can
Aristotle’s, ‘heavy’ and ‘light’ be replaced with essential weight? Can motion be explained by
the outcome of a balance?
8
�Galileo begins confidently, not only sure that he can replace Aristotle’s ‘heavy’ and ‘light’ with
essential weight in order to explain motion, but that doing so will improve Aristotle’s account of
nature in other ways.
As we saw above, Aristotle faced a puzzle in explaining the motion of non-living bodies. He
was committed to explaining their motion by finding an internal cause, but because these bodies
do not have soul or life, they couldn’t be agents of this motion. In one way, then, the heavy and
the light explained the rest and motion of bodies, but in another way, Aristotle ends up needing
to look for a principle outside the bodies to explain the principle of rest and motion. Galileo’s
way of describing the situation is that Aristotle finally didn’t have an explanation for why the
heavy goes down, or the light up, but instead was forced to make nature operate “according to
whim and chance”17.
Galileo says that he “anxiously sought from time to time to think of some cause, if not necessary,
at least reasonable and useful” to determine why the heavy goes down and the light up. Here too
the key was replacing the idea of heaviness and lightness with essential weight. In doing so, he
realizes that nature chose to put the densest at the center and the rarest at the perimeter with
“complete justice and with consummate wisdom”. In doing so, nature has distributed matter
equally around the center of the cosmos. The smallest sphere which is closest to the center has
equal matter but much less space than the larger spheres farther from the center. Therefore, the
smallest sphere must be the place of a substance whose form causes matter to be compressed in a
very narrow space, while those spheres farther from the center, must be the place for substances
whose form causes matter to expand in ample space (253, ch. 2)18. Galileo’s account has
supplied a formal cause for the cosmos that explains why the heavy, the dense, rests at the center,
and the light, the expansive, rests away from the center.
Once Galileo suggests that this principle of equality is at work in the organization or creation of
the cosmos, it is natural that he should think it is at work in the preservation and restoration of
the order in the cosmos. In other words, this same principle might be at work not only when
bodies are at rest in a perfectly ordered world, but after bodies are disturbed, and are working to
restore that order. For example, this principle is at work when, after I lift a rock and remove it
from its place, I release it and it rushes downwards.
For the restoration and preservation of order, nature needs more than a cosmos that was created
with matter equally distributed about the center. Nature will need a way to measure inequalities
and restore equality. Nature needs a balance. Here, Galileo, “it is therefore clear that the motion
of bodies moving naturally can be suitably reduced to the motion of weights in a balance”(259)19.
17
De Motu, p. 15.
De Motu
19
Ibid.
18
9
�Now in general, a balance measures the relative weights of two bodies. But when Archimedes’
submerged the scale in water, he was able to determine essential weights. So Galileo
hypothesizes that to get an accurate measure of the nature that determines speed, the balance will
need to determine essential weight. One arm of the balance might carry the body, but the other
needs to take into account the medium. Here Galileo: “the body moving naturally plays the role
of one weight in the balance, and a volume of the medium equal to the volume of the moving
body represents the other weight in the balance”(259)20. Just as the crown submerged in water
was lifted by the water to the extent that a weight equal to the weight of the water it displaced
would lift it, so too Galileo imagines that any medium will lift a body to the extent that a
weight–a weight equal to the weight of the volume of the medium it displaces–would lift it.
Bodies don’t fall with speeds proportional to their weights, but speeds proportional to this
adjusted weight, their own weight less the weight of an equal volume of the medium.
Now, as it turns out, Galileo’s theory is just as inaccurate as Aristotle’s. Galileo seems to
recognize this fairly quickly. Here he is working through an example:
…If there are two bodies equal in volume but unequal in weight, the weight of one of
them being 8, and of the other 6, and if the weight of a volume of the medium equal to
the volume of either body is 4, the speed of the first body will be 4 and of the second 2.
These speeds will have a ratio of 4 to 2, not the same as the ratio between their weights,
which is 8 to 6. (272-273)21
In this particular example, the medium has an essential weight that is fairly comparable to the
essential weight of the two bodies. The ratio of the speeds in the medium is thus larger than the
ratio of the original essential weights. In fact we see that the ratio in speed could get really large
if we find a medium that has an essential weight close to 6. In this case, one body would drop
with some speed, while the other body would not move at all, or very slowly. This result looks
pretty good. Here Galileo’s theory seems to explain why the ratios of the speeds of bodies
falling in water seems to be larger than the ratio that the bodies have when falling in air. On the
other hand, as the medium gets thinner, as its essential weight becomes negligible compared to
the essential weights of the bodies, the ratios of the essential weights should be approximately
proportional to the ratios of the speeds. In very light mediums Aristotle’s claim, speeds are
proportional to weights, is analogous to Galileo’s, speeds would become close to proportional to
essential weight. In other words, take equal sized balls of wood and iron, drop both from a large
tower and they should fall with speeds proportional to their weights. Here Galileo:
But note that a great difficulty arises at this point, because those ratios will not be
observable by one who makes the experiment. For if one takes two different bodies,
which have such properties that the first should fall twice as fast as the second, and if one
then lets them fall from a tower, the first will not reach the ground appreciably faster or
twice as fast (273).22
20
Ibid.
Ibid.
22
Ibid.
21
10
�While it might not have been Gailleo’s first inclination to head to the tower, it seems like he was
not opposed to making a test of his theory once it was in hand. In doing so, he must have been
quite disappointed. But he is not yet able to give up the theory, he concludes in the same way
that Aristotle would have: “This is not the place to consider how these contradictory and, so to
speak, unnatural accidents come about (for they are accidental)”(273)23.
Let’s take a step back from the details of Galileo’s theory for a moment. What Aristotle and
Galileo seek to explain is how the body’s weight can explain its place of rest and its motion; they
are looking for an internal cause of rest and motion. Aristotle explains this by turning to the
‘spark’ inside the body which determines its place and makes it passively suffer the motion
determined for it. Galileo explains place by looking at density, and supposing a formal cause in
the organization of the comsos, ‘the equal’. Galileo explains motion by having us imagine how a
balance tips when bodies of unequal essential weights are placed on its arms. Galileo has asked
us to supplement the internal principle of motion and rest, the bodies essential weight, with two
additional principles, a principle of equality, and the principle of the balance.
But what is the principle of the balance? What is it that makes it move? Does the balance have a
nature? Certainly not (says Aristotle). But the balance does have some sort of law governing it.
This is not just a law of equality, it is not an equation merely telling us that two quantities are
equal. The balance is dynamic, it is telling us something about forces. Galileo puts it this way:
“a heavy body tends to move downward with as much force as it is necessary to lift it up”. On
each side of the balance a body pushes down, but on each side a body is also being pushed
upwards. The principle of the balance is that every downward force is transformed into an equal
and upward force. Balances work because they pair opposing forces. Galileo seems to think that
this principle of the balance is not just present in a balance, but is present everywhere and
always.
In addition to the internal principle of rest and motion, the body’s essential weight, Galileo has
introduced two additional principles: a principle of equality and a principle of equal and opposite
forces. Neither of these principles belongs inside a body. Both are principles about how one
body relates to another body. In fact, the principle of the balance, is best understood as a
principle about opposition between bodies, about the forces that bodies exert on one another,
about violence. This is a problem for an Aristotelian, a natural motion is being given an
unnatural explanation.
23
Ibid.
11
�Galileo acknowledges the difficulty himself: “It is therefore clear that this kind of motion may be
called ‘forced’, although commonly…called ‘natural’”(259, ch. 6).24 Galileo does not flinch. In
what follows there is no apology, and no explanation for this radical consequence.
By introducing a formal cause, ‘the equal’, by explaining motion and speed with the balance,
Galileo has not improved the Aristotelian account, he has undermined it. Natural motion has
gone from being internal to the body to being caused by a relation between one body and another
body. Motions which were once the actualization of the potentiality of a single body are now
understood to be violent outcomes of contests of forces between bodies. Galileo has shown
himself to be a wolf in sheep’s clothes. The principle of equality and the principle of the balance
are not compatible with Aristotle’s definition of nature. Archimedes might move the science of
motion forward, but the science won’t be compatible with Aristotle’s natural philosophy. Nature
is no longer the principle of motion or rest within a body. Nature has been replaced by a balance,
a contest between quantities of matter.
IV. Inclined Planes
Despite his failure to explain the speeds of falling bodies, Galileo charges onward. He now
wants to use the principles of equality and of the balance to solve a problem: how fast do bodies
fall along inclined planes.
Below, I will quote a larger passage, which is not particularly remarkable, apart from his
palpable excitement and, not unrelatedly, how many times he uses the word “problem”. Here’s
Galileo:
The problem we are now going to discuss has not been taken up by any philosophers, so
far as I know. Yet, since it has to do with motion, it seems to be a necessary subject for
examination… And it is a problem no less necessary than neat and elegant. The problem
is why the same heavy body, moving downward in natural motion over various planes
inclined to the plane of the horizon, moves more readily and swiftly on those planes that
make angles nearer a right angle with the horizon; and, in addition, the problem calls for
the ratio of the speeds of the motions that take place at the various inclinations. The
solution of this problem, when first I had tried to investigate it, seemed to require
explanations that were by no means simple. But while I was examining it more carefully,
and was trying to analyze its solution into its basic principles, I finally discovered that the
24
Ibid. In fact, I’m not sure that Aristotle could consistently maintain that the principle
or cause of motion of bodies is simply in each body because of what we will see in the
next section: he thinks the speed of fall of a body is inversely proportional to the density
of the medium. It seems like both he and Galileo think that some aspects of motion will
need to depend on something besides the body itself.
12
�solution for this problem, as of others which at first glance seem very difficult, depended
on known and obvious principles of nature. (296, Ch, 14)25
In past junior laboratory classes, I have sometimes wondered whether we are studying nature,
machines, nature as a machine, or machines as if they were nature. This passage led me to have
a new way of thinking about this question. With Galileo, maybe in this very passage, the subject
matter is shifting. The balance stands midway between nature and machines, it is not unnatural,
for Galileo it reveals nature, in fact it has become the principle of motion and rest. But the
balance, with intelligent use, very quickly becomes a lever, a machine. The balance brings
together nature and machines allowing us to create problems, problems that are no longer simply
mechanical problems for artisans in the shipyard, but problems that are now demonstrations of
how nature works. The instruments of the shipyard, are no longer for the artisans alone, they are
now the instruments the philosophers and the mathematicians will need to use in the laboratory
to reveal how nature works.
Galileo moves from understanding nature as an individual principle inside a body, to thinking
about nature as a beautiful, intricate, tapestry of problems, infinite interconnected balances each
in delicate equilibrium, systems of equations joined by the weights, speeds and forces of
individual bodies. Here we only see the introduction of a single problem, but the excitement,
the repetition, makes me think that Galileo is no longer seeing individual natural bodies, he is
seeing a web of bodies connected and revealed by the balance, an infinite and infinitely intricate
machine, giving rise to the promise of problems everywhere.
Right now, we have only a single problem, how fast will a body go down planes of different
inclinations. The known and obvious principle of nature which will play an essential role in his
solution: the balance. Galileo will show how he can weigh the body on different tracks and thus
predict how fast the body will go.
It takes a bit of geometry, a few diagrams, and maybe some gestures towards our laboratory
equipment to see how Galileo imagines the balance at work in his study of inclined planes. In
the handout, you will see an enlargement of Galileo’s diagram (figure 2). The circle represents
two things. First, it represents a circular track on which a body could fall on its concave surface
from d to b. Second, it is a balance, like the “Newton’s wheels” that we study in Freshman
Laboratory. The axle of the wheel, the fulcrum of the balance, is at a.
We are to imagine two things happening in tandem, a body is falling down the track from d to b,
and at each moment we can pause it and ask what is the weight of the body at c, that will balance
the falling body at that moment.
25
Ibid.
13
�The problem Galileo is investigating concerns the planes that are tangent to the circular track, the
planes that are inclined to the horizon. We only have three such planes drawn, but obviously
there are an infinite number of these planes that we could have drawn.
Galileo, as we saw above, is interested in this problem: to find the ratio of the speeds of the
motion that take place at the various inclinations of planes inclined to the horizon. For example,
he is interested in finding the ratio of the speeds of the body falling down the vertical plane ef to
the sharply inclined plane gh.
Galileo reiterates the principle of the balance: “a heavy body tends to move downward with as
much force as it is necessary to lift it up.” Weight, as measured by a balance, will allow us to see
how much force is necessary to lift a body up, and thus measures the force of a body’s tendency
downward, and its speed. The circular balance is there to determine how the weight of the body
varies with the different inclinations of the
planes so that we can determine the speeds
along any inclined plane. The balance will
give us the solution to our problem.
At point d, furthest away from the center of
the circle towards the right, the tangent to the
circle is vertical, and the track does not lighten
the weight of the body. The weight needed at
c to balance the body at d, is equal to d’s
weight. As we travel down the circumference,
we come to point s. At point s, Galileo suggests that the body is not as heavy as it was at point d,
the body has been lightened by the ramp. What weight at c is necessary to balance a weight at s?
Galileo believes that we can set aside circular ramps and the inclined planes, and simply consider
the balance. The body has moved from d to s on the wheel. As we know from freshman lab, we
need to draw a perpendicular from s up to cd, to determine the horizontal distance of the body
from the fulcrum. This distance is ap, which is less than the previous distance ad. Because the
body at s is now closer to the fulcrum, we will need a smaller weight to balance it at c. The ratio
of the new smaller weight to the previous weight, is ap to ad. Galileo concludes that the ratio of
these weights is the ratio of the downward tendencies of the body and so the ratio of the speed
along these various planes.
The inference that Galileo makes, that the weight the body has on the balance at a point is the
same weight that the body would have on the track with an incline tangent to that point remains
unexamined and unexplained. While the circular balance is very much present in this diagram,
the balance is not present when we have a simple inclined plane.
14
�And yet, Galileo seems to think that it is. Every time a body falls, we could explain the speed of
its fall by recognizing that a balance is at work. The weight that would be necessary to balance
this body, is the force with which the body tends downward, and therefore proportional to the
speed with which the body will fall. While the balance isn’t visible, the principle of the balance
is everywhere at work. The balance is woven into the relations that exist between bodies.
And yet, for me, the pattern still floats above the fabric of nature. It is clearly meant to be woven
in, but how and why the balance is attaching itself to the ramp, to the body, to the medium
remains murky. What we would like to know is why it is that the balance should succeed in
measuring how these ramps lighten the weight?
Perhaps there is some clue in what follows. Galileo continues his exposition with what appears
to be a superfluous explanation that directs our attention outside the circle towards a triangle that
is geometrically similar to the ones that are inside the circle (triangle aps, for example), but is not
at all associated with the balance, the similar triangle spq. About this, Galileo notes that “as da is
to pa, so is qs to sp, i.e., the length of the oblique descent to the length of the vertical drop”.
That is, the ratio da to pa which stood in for the ratio of the weights necessary to balance our
body on the vertical and oblique incline gh have the same ratio as qs to sp. But when we take
two inclined planes of the same height, or a drop and an inclined plane of the same height, it
turns out that we will get this ratio.
With his analysis of the exterior triangle, Galileo directs our attention away from the balance,
and towards the ratio of the paths which two bodies will take when they are released from the
same height but along different inclines. He says that the speed of fall is inversely as the lengths
of the planes. Here the ratio of speeds is not derived from the heaviness of the body, but has
something to do with the height from which the body falls and the lengths of the planes having
those equal heights.
Galileo has given us not one, but two ways to see how this same ratio emerges from the diagram.
Because of this he also seems to be suggesting two explanations, one based on the bodies’
weights, the other on the bodies’ heights and paths. Which account of the ratio would give us a
better explanation for the difference in the speed? Or, do these two explanations have some
relation to one another? Galileo started the essay believing that weight caused speed, but his
analysis here seems to hint at a new openness to explaining speed in other ways, perhaps
something having to do with the height from which a body falls and the path that it takes.
Perhaps he thinks there is a way in which something associated with speed is causing weight.
Galileo does not help us, he leaves these two expositions, these two similar triangles, these two
equal ratios, side-by-side.
15
�This juxtaposition of two mathematically equivalent ratios might remind us of the third chapter
of the third book of Ptolemy’s Almagest, where Ptolemy gives the reader two hypotheses that
will result in identical phenomena. Just as Ptolemy gives us mathematically equivalent eccentric
and epicyclic diagrams of the motion of the heavenly bodies, Galileo gives us mathematically
similar triangles one made from the distances to a fulcrum, the other by the paths of the moving
bodies. Galileo’s first triangle, suggests that the speed down more sharply inclined planes can be
explained by greater weight. The second triangle suggests that the speed down inclined planes
can be explained by considering the height from which the body falls, since taking a common
height between two planes will give us the correct ratio of speeds. Ptolemy’s circles and
Galileo’s triangles could be carving at the joints of nature, but they could also be mathematical
tools, seductive geometric figures that invite us to imagine physical structures.
After giving his account, Galileo is eager to share all manners of “problems” that can be solved
with his method. The one he culminates his discussion with is this: given two bodies of
different essential weights which fall at different speeds, how to construct a ramp so that the
faster body falling down the ramp will fall in the same time as the slower body in free fall (301,
ch. 14)26. For example, presuming that the steel ball will fall faster than the wooden ball,
Galileo would like to construct a ramp for the steel ball, so that it will roll down the inclined
plane in the same time that it would take the wooden ball to fall freely. Here, he seems eager to
use the inclination of ramps to “balance speeds” in the same way that a balance uses the distance
from a fulcrum to balance weights.
Ptolemy was incredibly successful in “saving the appearances”; he used the circle to effectively
predict where heavenly bodies would be and when they would arrive. Galileo finds that he is
much less successful in “saving the appearances”. But, he doesn’t acknowledge any doubt in his
theory, instead he uses the same excuse we saw above, “accidental factors”(302, Ch. 14)27.
The problems that Galileo solves are constructions, but merely mental constructions. When
these constructions are realized in the world he does not despair when the consequences he has
derived are not seen to be true. Unlike Ptolemy, Galileo is not yet able to save the appearances.
IV. Conclusion, looking forward to what Galileo will do and will discover.
Galileo might have been wrong that essential weight is the cause of motion and rest in bodies,
but in developing this idea he introduced two principles inspired by his study of Archimedes: the
principle of equality, and the principle of the balance. Both are enormously influential in the
subsequent study of physics. Neither of these principles reside in bodies, they are instead
principles that govern the relations between bodies. They are principles equally at home in
26
27
Ibid.
Ibid.
16
�political philosophy as natural philosophy. We can see this in Galileo’s language. He appeals to
equality, prudence, justice, and harmony in his explanation for the natural place and position of
rest for bodies. Galileo then appeals to the balance, a symbol we use for the weighing of
injustices, in his explanation of motion. These principles from Archimedes that Galileo
introduces to his study of nature are not internal principles of motion, they are not compatible
with an Aristotelian account of nature.
When Galileo turns to study astronomy, he will not begin by trying to improve upon Aristotle’s
account. Instead he starts all over from the beginning. The source of motion is not where you
think it is: this radical departure from Aristotle is the beginning point.
It is as if Galileo once fell for an enormous cosmic prank and is willing to risk imprisonment to
prove to the cosmos that he won’t fall for it again: he once thought the principle of motion is in
the things that appear to move, but now when he sees the sun rise and set and the stars revolve
around his head, he knows better than to think the principle of motion is in those bodies.
In Jacob Klein’s essay on modern rationalism he says the following: “mathematical physics is the
most important part of our entire civilization and actual life. …the principles of mathematical
physics are basic to our whole way of thinking and behavior”(57)28. At the conclusion of the
same essay he points to the vast machinery of our society and the indirectness of our contact with
the world, direct contact replaced by a symbolic unreality. Klein claims that “Our work, our
pleasures, even our love and our hatred are dominated by these all-pervading forces which are
beyond our control (64)29.
These are radical claims. After rereading Klein’s essays this Fall, I had the opportunity to talk
with Eva Brann, a longtime friend of Klein’s. I got up the courage to ask her, “was Klein
exaggerating?” Did he really think that “mathematical physics is the most important part of our
entire civilization and actual life”? That our work, pleasure, love and hatred are dominated by
these all pervading forces? Her answer, “Oh yes.”
After studying De Motu and watching Galileo struggle to reconcile Aristotle’s philosophy of
nature with Archimedes’ mathematics, I’m less incredulous of Klein’s claim. The movement
that I see in Galileo’s early study of the natural motion, the move away from thinking about
nature as a principle of rest and motion in individual bodies, towards thinking about nature as a
contest between bodies and eventually thinking of all motion as the consequence of forces that
originate entirely outside oneself, is quite familiar. The way we love and hate, the way we think
about happiness, the way we make choices, personal, professional, and political, the way we
participate in athletics, the way we understand economic life, in all these ways we repeatedly
28
Jacob Klein, Lectures and Essays, “Modern Rationalism”, eds. Robert Williamson and Elliott Zuckerman, St.
John’s College Press, 1985.
29
Ibid.
17
�appeal to equality, to the balance. Equality is a democratic value we all hold dear in some way;
the balance is a symbol of justice and rectitude, of progress and scientific learning, of a life lived
well, a symbol emblazoned on our school seal. But in studying Galileo’s use of the balance, we
see how it transformed his thinking about nature. Where Aristotle’s nature is the principle of
motion and rest in individual substances which are at work becoming more fully themselves,
more like their own forms, Galileo’s nature is a system of balances, at first glance embodying
principles of equality, prudence, justice and harmony, but on closer inspection these principles
merely adjudicate an underlying opposition between bodies. The move from Aristotle to
Galileo, is a move from nature as a cause inside an individual substance that is at work becoming
more fully itself, to nature as a system of laws governing the underlying violent opposition
between bodies.
Ptolemy can say the following about his study of astronomy, “with regard to virtuous conduct in
practical actions and character, this science, above all things, could make men see clearly; for the
constancy, order, symmetry and calm which are associated with the divine, it makes its followers
lovers of this divine beauty, accustoming them and reforming their natures, as it were, to a
similar spiritual state”(Almagest 1.1)30. I don’t think a physics based on Galileo’s De Motu could
say the same. Galileo sees earthly bodies moving according to principles of tension and
opposition, any rest, order, symmetry, or calm, supervenes on a tenuous equilibrium that masks
underlying tension and opposition. The equal and opposite forces that are inspired by his study
of Archimedes, are forces that lead to moments of apparent peace but these mask a perpetual war
between bodies. Perhaps this explains why he turns away from the discussion of causes in Two
New Sciences, contenting himself with studying what is orderly, symmetrical, and calm, the
measurement of motions. Here he finds the peace he was not able to find when he sought after
the causes of the motions of bodies.
30
Ptolemy, Almagest, translated by G. J. Toomer, Princeton University Press, 1998.
18
�
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On Motion
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Typescript of a lecture delivered on February 24, 2023, by Leah Lasell as part of the Formal Lecture Series. <br /><br />Ms. Lasell describes her lecture: "The new science of motion presented in the last two days of <i>The Two New Sciences</i> is Galileo's last word in a lifelong argument with Aristotle. Galileo lets us hear echoes of this argument by including the Aristotelian, Simplicio, among his characters. While Simplicio will argue for the Aristotelian approach tenaciously and with spirit, his understanding is often second hand, rote, and handicapped by his poor mathematical education which consists of nothing beyond book one of Euclid. Salviati and Sagredo often team up and ridicule the Aristotelian account and tend to just ignore Simplicio altogether whenever the discussion requires mathematical expertise. It often seems that Galileo is not treating the Aristotelian worldview fairly, as Simplicio himself complains, allowing Salviati to vaunt over an impoverished, dried up, rather rubbish version of Aristotelianism.
<p class="x_MsoNormal"><span></span></p>
<p class="x_MsoNormal"><span class="x_contentpasted0"><span>In order to better understand the argument between Galileo and Aristotle, we will look at one of Galileo's early unpublished works, <i>De Motu, </i>or <i>On Motion. </i>Here, Galileo works within the Aristotelian framework, his own outlook a bit like Simplicio's. His goal is not to refute but to improve upon Aristotle by supplementing his account with mathematical reasoning inspired by Archimedes writings on the balance, making Aristotle’s theory more consistent with his experiences of moving bodies. But as Galileo attempts to bring together Aristotle, Archimedes, and his own experiences of moving bodies, two different and conflicting understandings of nature emerge.<br /><br />The lecture should be of interest to the whole community: Galileo will lead us through a consideration of Aristotle's philosophy of nature, Archimedes' balance, and Galileo's inclined planes."</span></span></p>
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Annapolis, MD
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2023-02-24
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Galilei, Galileo, 1564-1642. Di motu. English
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Friday night lecture
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Continuing the Conversation
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Continuing the Conversation is a web and podcast series produced by St. John's College. Episodes 1-20 were released in 2023. <br /><br />More information about the series is available on the Continuing the Conversation page of the St. John's College website: <a href="https://www.sjc.edu/continuing-conversation">https://www.sjc.edu/continuing-conversation</a>.
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Annapolis, Md.
Santa Fe, NM
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Zena Hitz + David Townsend: What Is Freedom & How Do We Cultivate It?
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Zena Hitz + David Townsend: What Is Freedom & How Do We Cultivate It? is episode 6 of the Continuing the Conversation series and podcast. The episode was published on February 15, 2023.
Liberal education is education for freedom. What kind of freedom does it or should it cultivate? Freedom without discipline is anarchy, and life without freedom is tyranny—or so says Annapolis tutor David Townsend, who joins host Zena Hitz in this probing conversation into the nature of freedom, the ways in which individuals and communities can cultivate it, and the need for self-discipline in tempering our freedoms. The two also discuss how a liberal education can free minds from the prejudices connatural to all human communities, and how the St. John’s education strives to do just that.
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Townsend, David L., 1947-
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2023-02-15
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Continuing the Conversation
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Continuing the Conversation is a web and podcast series produced by St. John's College. Episodes 1-20 were released in 2023. <br /><br />More information about the series is available on the Continuing the Conversation page of the St. John's College website: <a href="https://www.sjc.edu/continuing-conversation">https://www.sjc.edu/continuing-conversation</a>.
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Annapolis, Md.
Santa Fe, NM
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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Louis Petrich + Michael Grenke: The Limitations & Possibilities of Sight: Euclid’s Optics
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Louis Petrich + Michael Grenke: The Limitations & Possibilities of Sight: Euclid’s Optics is episode 1 of the Continuing the Conversation series and podcast. The episode was published on January 19, 2023.
What are the limitations and possibilities of perception—and what do ancient mathematics and modern literature have to say about this question? Written in 300 BC, Euclid’s Optics is a foundational work of mathematics on the geometry of vision, while Swann’s Way, the first book in Proust’s multi-volume Remembrance of Things Past, published in 1913, states: “Even with respect to the most insignificant things in life, none of us constitutes a material whole. Even the very simple act that we call ‘seeing the person we know’ is, in part, an intellectual one; we fill in the physical appearance of the individual we see with all the notions we have about him, and of the total picture that we form for ourselves, these notions certainly occupy the greater part.” These works are the jumping off points for a conversation between Annapolis tutor Michael Grenke and host Louis Petrich, on the limitations and possibilities of perception.
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Grenke, Michael W.
Petrich, Louis
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Friday Night Lecture
St. John's College, Annapolis
September4, 1998
What, then, is Time?
Eva Brann
When our dean asked me to lecture this September it was because he had heard that I'd just
completed a book on time, and he thought I might like to talk about it. He was right, and here are
three possible kinds of profit that, on thinking it over, I figured might come to you and to me if I
gave what I guess one might call a book report.
First, even if the writing of books is a few decades off for most of you here tonight, it
turns out that writing papers and annual essays is not so different from writing books, and I
thought I might be able to tell you something useful. In fact I'll do it right now. \Vhen the time
comes to write, whether it's a small paper or a long annual essay, never think: "I've got to write
this thing! Help! I need a paper!" Instead search your soul for a question you have nursed for
quite a while, whether articulately or inarticulately, somethingj:hat bothered and puzzled you,
something that might be very intimate but is capable of public expression. Then flip mentally
through the books you've studied, or the music you've sung, or the theorems you've proved, or
the experiments you've re-enacted, and ask yourself which have a bearing, taken in the largest
sense, on your issue. What will happen next is the result of a mixture of concentration and luck:
some paradox or analogy or some other significant array will jump out at you. Seize that and
slowly pummel, stroke, and shape it into an articulate order. Of course, none of that can happen at
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�the last minute. For looking into yourself, for calling on your studies, for finding a crystallizing
moment, for working all of it into a well-shaped' whole, time is of the essence.
My second thought was that time is one subject concerning which it does not matter
whether one is a freshman finishing the second week at the college or a senior beginning the fourth
year, or even a tutor who has taught most of the program. Stormy love is not a pressing issue to
all ages, nor is looming death, but there is, I think, no one, at any time of life, for whom time does
not become a problem in some way or other. I know this from experience. Of the things that have
urgently interested me from time to time, the mention of Being and Non-being, for example,
provokes mostly stupefied non-interest, the mention of the Imagination elicits an account of
people's favorite fantasy series, but the mention of Time gives rise to intelligently companionable
puzzlement. People have a different relation to the question concerning time than to other deep
matters, which they are either willing to bypass as too obscure for their taste or to treat with the
most unreflective but familiar particularity.
The title of this lecture -- and of my book -- is "What, then, is Time?" It is a quotation
from the most famous sentence ever written on time by the man who was most deeply immersed in
its elusive familiarity, Augustine. It comes from the eleventh book of his Confessions, which we
read in the sophomore year. Here is the \vhole sentence:
What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain
it to the questioner, I do not know.
My own concern with time started from two ends at once, intellectual puzzlement and deepfelt irritation, and it developed, as really good questions do, from annoyed fascination to serious
interest. The intellectual puzzlement was just that expressed by Augustine: What sort of a being, if
it was a being, could be so handily familiar in daily usage and so fugitive to the grasp of thought?
Here I did as all my fellow humans do: I make time, kill time, manage my time, waste time. To be
sure, I've never "done" time, though but for the grace of God I might have. I know that time heals
all wounds and ravages all the beauties of the world.
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But if I ask myself what it is that does this, I
�see and touch nothing and think of less. That is at first just a puzzling and then an engaging state
of affairs.
The irritation I experienced had a superficially different source. In all the departments of
life people talk of time as a force or a power, not just in the sort of dead metaphor that makes up
the unconscious poetry of popular usage, as in all the phrases cited above. No, they mean it
literally, especially when they are talking of the so-called "phases" of time. "Phase" will be the
most important word in this lecture. It is my word -- different authors use different words -- for
the three parts of time, past, present, future. Perhaps I should have said the three parts of human
time, for I will argue that only human, or human-like, beings have pasts and presents and futures.
It is the future with which these people mostly play infuriating havoc. They say and they
inean that there is a future coming and our business is to form a reception committee for it. Some
see this Future with a capital Fas a doom, as in Yeats's great poem, "The Second Coming":
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Far more of our contemporaries see it cheerfully as a benefactor, though a totally manipulative one:
It is the Information Age or the Global Age or the Age of Megacorporations, you name it, and our
duty is to be ready or to be run over by time. They engage in what I call to myself proactive
passivity. This time-mode -- the adjective, incidentally, is "temporal," so I will say, this temporal
mode -- strikes me as paralyzing the human will, and that is one form of immorality.
So besides the intellectual desire to understand the nature of time and whether it is a being
or a nothing, I also began to think about time in its human effects. Almost everyone who has lived
for some time has neat observations about these effects. For example, I have been at this college
forty-one years or almost fifteen thousand days. Sometimes it seems like forever and sometimes it
seems like a day. What accounts for this mad elasticity of time? But besides these timernminations there is also that sense I have of the important moral consequences of not thinking
about the nature of time, about accepting what seem to be abuses of our phase-nature. In fact, a
new hero of mine, Octavio Paz (whom I did not in fact discover for myself but through one of our
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�Mexican alumni, Juan Villasenor) put my thought much more expansively than I would have had
the courage to do. He says in his book on India:
I believe that the reformation of our civilization must begin with a
reflection on time.
Recall that I am still laying out the possible profit of telling you about my book, and here is
the last one, chiefly to myself. Imagine what a pleasure it will be to come on campus and to be
able to fall easily into a conversation about this magical subject with some proportion of the people
that live and learn here -- with the more virtuous part, I might add, those who come to Friday night
lectures.
Now let me tell you of two discoveries or devices -- it's always hard to tell whether it's one
or the other -- about which the book crystallized. One was the discovery -- and I became
persuaded that it was a discovery, was really there to be found-- that writers on time who lived
millennia apart in time and who were worlds apart in thought were at crucial moments driven into
the same understanding, or at least the same problem. Once I had discovered one such pair of
time-twins I came on three others. And finally I came to believe that amongst them they pretty well
established the perennial possibilities and the pertinent problems concerning time. In a moment I
will tell who these writers are and what deep notion each pair shares. But let me say here that it
'
was a blessing to find such a principle of selection. For it is hard for most of us to think about
these enigmas without help. The trouble is, there is too much help on offer. I own a bibliography
of time which tells of nearly two hundred thousand books and articles written between 1900 and
now. Of course, much of it is piffling, but much of it is, I am sure, though!1'ul. I chose four great
writers, and they paired quite naturally with four more, and by good luck these are the eight among
the ancient and modern writers generally agreed to have the deepest theories. The pairs, then, are
Plato and Einstein, Aristotle and Kant, Plotinus and Heidegger, Augustine and Husserl. Since
many of you will not have read them, though all but Husserl are on the Program (and he ought to
be), I'll present their time-theories as simply and as unencumbered by terminology as possible.
But I'll omit completely telling you about one pair, Plotinus and Heidegger, because it is too tricky
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�to do, although their similarity on the point of time is most spectacular in view of their diametric
opposition on everything else that matters.
The other discovery was that a human effect which never ceases to enchant me, namely the
images that arise before the mind's eye in our imagination, had a certain remarkable similarity with
our sense of time, a formal sort of similarity. Images are absent presences or present absences;
they are not what they are, they are made of Being and Non-being. What I mean is that any image,
but particularly a mental image, presents someone or something not actually present. To imagine
an absent friend is to have him there, but not really. Time as well, it turns out, has this curious
character of being and not-being, of being there but not really, of being present only in its absence.
My all-time favorite time-saying is by the priceless Yogi Berra. When someone asked him: "What
time is it?" he replied: "You mean now?" It is the wisest of answers, because you can't tell time,
and yet we do. It is always and never Now.
So the book began to have two parts. One part was a study of these eight philosophers for
the purpose of seeing what kinds of answers could be given to the question "What is time?" and
what problems were inherent in the answers. But studying, while a help to thinking, and for most
of us an indispensable help, is not thinking, since to understand what others think is simply a
different activity from the thinking that goes directly, without intermediary, to the question. So in
a second part I tried to go directly to the question, having absorbed all the help I could.
Therefore in this lecture, too, after telling what some of the best writers I could find have
thought about time, I will try to tell what I think. I should say right now, lest you be disappointed,
that what I conclude first and last is that it is a true mystery. I mean a potent effect whose
characteristics are poignantly clear but whose nature is finally unfathomable. You can specify a
mystery but you can't resolve it.
If you have a huge field of apparently possible answers to a question, it clears the decks
somewhat to begin by removing the answers that are simply unacceptable. In thinking about the
ways time is spoken of, it seemed to me that whatever else is said, time is spoken of either as
5
�occurring in nature or as being within the human being. Time is either external or internal, or
perhaps both.
External time has attracted by far the greater interest. Time is written of in religion, where
it is a great question how an eternal God acts in created time. Time is treated in history, where it is
a great question whether the times make history or people do. But above all time is a great subject
in physics, where the best-grounded and most remarkable theories of time are developed.
Without question, the physicist who has done most to make other physicists and people in
general think about time is Einstein. The work I chose to examine is his 1905 paper on what came
to be known as the Special Theory of Relativity. \Vhat struck me first was that every mention of
time was in quotation marks. This habit conveyed to
me that I was dealing with the most careful
and thoughtful of writers, one who knew that time in physics is a most problematic notion.
Einstein says right away:
It might appear possible to overcome all the difficulties attending the
definition of "time" by substituting "the position of the small hand of
my watch" for "time." And in fact such a definition is satisfactory ....
At least it is satisfactory when we are talking only of time here and now. Before Einstein,
physicists had believed what everyone believes: that it is the same time throughout the world, that
every other Here simply has the same Now as my Here. This situation was called simultaneity and
was regarded as a chief feature of external, I mean natural, time. Einstein goes on to show that for
any stationary Here far away from my own, it takes some calculating to synchronize our watches.
And when we are moving relative to each other one of our most entrenched senses about time is
overthrown, namely that what time it is is independent of our state of rest or motion. Einstein's
theory turns out to have to do entirely with the measurement of time -- what my local clock and
your local clock tell under different physical conditions. That is why Einstein puts "time" in
quotations: He is warning us that not the nature of time but its measurement is at issue.
Now I'll jump back two and a half millennia and quote to you what is the most famous, .
most often cited definition of time. It comes from Plato's dialogue called Timaeus. Timaeus is a
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�made-up character, a visiting physicist. He and some of Socrates' friends have planned an
amusement for him. On the day before Socrates had produced for them a picture in words of the
ideal political community -- some people think it is the one set out in the dialogue called The
Republic. Now Timaeus will reciprocate by painting for Socrates' entertainment the cosmos, the
ordered world within which such an ideal city might fit. In the course of giving a mathematical
account of such a cosmos, Timaeus says this about the way the maker of the world introduced time
into it:
He planned to make a movable image of eternity, and as he ordered
heaven into a cosmos, he made an image of that eternity which stays
one and the same, an eternal image moving according to number.
And that is what we call time.
What Timaeus is saying is that the heavens move like a great cosmic dial and that this motion
allows us to tell time.
So the mythical early physicist and the greatest of modem physicists are saying the same
thing: Time is what the clock tells, in one case the cosmic clock, in the other a local watch. And so
say all working physicists in between. It is a working, a so-called operational definition of time,
and it works just fine -- until you begin to think about it. That time is what the clock tells is what
one might call a dispositive definition. It disposes of time as an issue. But if you turn it around
and try to say that the clock tells time you're in trouble. Time never appears on the face of a clock.
Nor does it appear anywhere else in nature, ever. All other natural phenomena appear somehow to
sight or hearing or touch. Of time not a trace.
What does appear is motion. An analog clock is a standard cyclical motion. A digital clock
"
is a standard
progressive motion. Clocks are calibrated motions. There is no time actually used in
physics and none that actually appears in nature. There is much more to be said about this
shocking claim, and I'm sure you'll want to argue it out in the question period.
Among other points then to be made, the seniors, who have read Newton, might want to
point out that Newton, at least, does stipulate true natural time, an equable flux that comes before
motion. And I would answer that it is not only as physicist but also as theologian that Newton
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�puts time into nature. For this so-called absolute time, which has no <:>bservable features, is
probably not so much in nature as in God's mind, in that part of God's mind, called his
"sensorium," with which he is receptive to all of nature, its infinite spaces, its primary forces, its
ultimate bodies. My point at the moment is, however, only to reinforce a conclusion I came to:
Wherever time is seriously considered, mind, soul, consciousness and sensibility come on the
scene. Time can only be internal, meaning within a mind, possibly God's mind.
So I disposed to my own satisfaction of the vast majority of theories of time. Intricate and
interesting as they are, they are really theories of motion, not of time, and they don't tell what time
is. But time is the sort of subject for which every settling of the mind in one respect is punished by
a complementary problem popping up in another. You can, and I think you have to, take time out
of nature, b·ut I am not so perverse as to claim that the outside world isn't full of variations:
locomotions, processes, alterations. The mystery that has now popped up is that we have no idea
what is really going on in this time-deprived world. Let me show you what I mean.
Human time, internal time, will be distinguished by its phases, past, present, future. But
nothing in nature, except perhaps the near-human mammals, apes and dolphins, has a past or a
present or a future. Edwin Muir says in a poem called "The Animals":
But these have never trod
Twice the familiar track,
Never turned back
Into the memoried day.
All is new and near
In the unchanging Here ....
Animals and sticks and stones do not have a past, though they might be scµd to be their past. But
I, for one, just cannot imagine what it is like to live in the unchanging Here and not the have
memory, how such a being gets itself into and out of existence, in short how anything can change
without having phases of time. But then again the effort is love's labor lost: Hmv could I have
empathy with, feel my way into, that which has no inside? So the outer world becomes in this
'fespect opaque, and this is the price to be paid for making a philosophical choice. In corning to
conclusions in philosophical inquiries, I want to say as an aside, it is always a matter of what we
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�can best live with for the time being -- which is why all philosophy as carried on by human beings
is ultimately moral philosophy.
There is perhaps a solution to the timelessness of nature. It is a commonplace for writers
o.n time that there are two kinds of time. They might be called succession-time and phase-time.
Phase-time is dynamic in the sense that the human present, about which time breaks into past and
. future, continually shifts -- as Yogi Berra's counter-question, "You mean now?" makes clear in its
unavoidable absurdity. Succession-time, on the other hand, is static. It is merely the endless chain
of before-and-after, established once and for all. It' is time all by itself, no one's time, the time of
all events taken only with relation to their succession and to nothing and nobody else. Perhaps
nature does have its time, succession-time. But even the successions of nature tum out to be more
intelligible as causal than as temporal sequences.
This is the moment to introduce Aristotle, who produced the first extensive treatment of
time ever, in Book Four of his Physics. Here is what he says time is:
Time, then, is not motion but that by which motion has number.
Aristotle seems to be making spectacularly short shrift of that mysterious power, time. It is
nothing but an attribute of motion . Then he says what sort of attribute:
Time ... is the number of motion with resnect to before and after.
L
'What th~ deep meaning of all this is can't come out unless we follow up what Aristotle means by
motion, number, before-and-after. But we might guess at two problematic elements of this
understanding of time. .
The first, which is by far the less deep of the two but is endlessly dis~ussed, is this. If
time is the number of motion as a progression in which the parts come before and after, if it is in
fact the succession-time I just introduced, it must somehow share in a chief feature of motion,
namely continuity. Physical motion borrows this feature from the fact that it takes place over
distance. Distances are representable as mathematical lines, and these lines, as the freshmen have
just begun to see, must be continuous -- no elements can be missing. So time, as Aristotle himself
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�emphasizes, is continuous, like a line. Wherever you cut the line you get a point that belongs to
both parts of the cut. This point is the Now. Time is in every way like a line of geometry: It lies
upon its points, each of which is a Now. The only difference is that the geometric points are static,
whereas the Now moves forward, ever the same in its features, ever different in temporal location.
But as you know by now, a point is that which has no parts, so the Now has no parts . .Therefore
it has no extent, no bulk, no force, no presence. Therefore the point-Now of the mathematical
model of time is as far removed as anything can be from the humanly experienced present, which
is vivid, full, and altogether the most impressive phase of time. Insofar as time is continuous it is
not very human.
But then Aristotle has also said that which will make time totally discontinuous. For time is
a number by which motion is counted, and a number is a collection of completely discontinuous
units -- there is no way one unit can be tangent to another. Motion, locomotion at least, is bound
to distance and borrows from that fact its continuity. But number is bound to something else
which reinforces its discontinuity. Many things in the world are collections of items. Aristotle
mentions herds of horses and flocks of sheep. Other things, such as distances of all sorts, can be
marked off into artificial units. All these things have a number that belongs to them. But nothing
in nature gets its number unless someone is counting. Aristotle says that it is the soul that counts.
So time, in order to be the number of motion, requires a wide-awake counting soul. Now I shall
say a sentence, or rather a question, which is underlined in my typescript: When the soul is
countin2. does it take time to do it? Does it get its numbering from some motion? What distance
does that psychic motion cover?
Aristotle is in big - and I must say unacknowledged - trouble. Time in nature is only the
number of motion, but what is the counting that announces that number? I don't think he knew,
but perhaps in the question period someone will make his case.
Now let me leap two thousand plus years ahead. For Aristotle time originates with the
counting soul. To my mind, Aristotle's true modem successor, the one who takes Aristotle's
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�thought and turns it thoroughly and precisely upside down, is Kant. Here is an aside: This kind of
inversion of thought, so that it is the same in name but utterly different in significance, is the chief
moving force of the philosophical tradition we study at this college. By "force" I don't mean some
magical attribute of the passage of time, but the way of proceeding that is congenial to those
immersed in this tradition. At any rate, whatever time is, if it has power it has it only as an aspect
of human consciousness.
Back to Kant. You will be relieved to hear that I do not plan to tell you what is in the
Critique of Pure Reason, Kant's founding book, although everything in there. is sooner or later
related to time. In any case, the Juniors will be studying it in spring, and it is that which makes
February a month of delights. Instead I will focus on a few sentences which show what it is that
brings Kant so very close to Aristotle in the letter, though he is worlds apart in meaning.
Kant regards time as a constitutional part of our receptive capacity, our ability to take in
what is given to us. Such a capacity is called "sensibility," and we are so made that whatever
comes to us, the world of nature especially, comes in the form of temporal sensibility. The
Critique is a great work of philosophical art, and I omit the many factors that feed beautifully into
rounding this notion out, in order to concentrate on just one thing: When we ask what it means that
nature comes to us in the form of time, the answer is that whenever we think about nature we begin
by noticing quantities, and we do that first of all by numbering-- not top-of-the-head counting, but
a deeply interior kind of beating out of units that add up into a number. Here is Kant's word on
what is happening in this counting: "I generate time itself .... "
So Aristotle and Kant agree that time is a kind of psychic beating or counting. It does not
save Kant from the question I asked of Aristotle that he calls time a form of the sensibility. Is this
form, I now ask, itself static or is it fluid? If it is static, how does it produce the psychic flow of
pulses? If it is fluid, is there yet another time behind Kant's deep constitutional time? Let me say
right now that all the authors who put time within the soul run into this trouble. And those who
put the origin or ground of time outside of the soul run into other and worse troubles.
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�Both Aristotle and Kant have been primarily interested in what I have called successiontime, the steady chain of before-and-afters found in nature, though apprehended by our counting.
Now is the time to speak of human time, phase-time.
To my mind, Augustine is the greatest writer on time -- and the most beautiful one. Here's
another aside: Very broadly speaking, philosophers come in two kinds, those who inquire serenely
and hopefully into a subject they long to know and believe they can approach and those who
question severely and disenchantedly a matter they think is ultimately hopeless. Augustine
certainly has travails of the soul, and I would not be unfair to call Husserl, who takes up two
millennia later exactly where Augustine had left off, a fusspot. But both are not so much driven as
led by faith in their subject, and I want to say that these are the philosophers I trust and prefer to be
with.
Augustine wants to know what time is because it is the human counterpart of God's
eternity, the eternity of the God he has just found and acknowledged. But there is nothing exalted
about his questioning -- it is very down-to-earth. He loves to sing hymns, and the question is:
How do I measure times, the long and short syllables, the lengths of the stanzas? Distances are
easy to measure. They stay put while you lay a measuring stick alongside them. But the moment
slips away, the past is no longer, the future not yet, and there is no way to lay a time-stick along an
elapsed time. Lengths measure lengths, motions measure motions -- what measures time? Here is
his answer, as I said, to my mind the most illuminating thing ever uttered about time, a new
discovery, as he himself says:
Time is nothing else but a stretching out, though of what I do not
know. Yet I marvel if it be not of the mind itself.
Our mind or soul is distended and that makes it capable of holding time, so to speak. How
distended, how stretched? Here is Augustine again:
This then is clear and plain, that neither things to come nor things
past are, nor should we properly say: "There are three times, past,
present, and future." But probably we should say: "There are three
times, a present of things past, a present of things present, and a
present of things future" .... The present of things past is memory,
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�the present of things present is sight [or perception], the present of
things future is expectation.
So we can measure times gone by and times to come because they are now present to us. But the
solution of the measuring problem is the least of it. What Augustine has done is to tell what makes
a human being temporal, how time is in us.
To be human is to be present and to have things present before or within. Yet another
aside: Certain so-called postmodern writers, ta19ng their departure from Heidegger, think that this
is a very derivative way of approaching human Being and that to think of human beings as
containing presences within and confronting things present without demeans the originality of
existence. But Augustine does think that to exist is both to be in the present and to be in the
presence of things.
Augustine's book on time in the Confessions is preceded by a book on memory, and this
book is the indispensable preparation for his understanding of time. For there he shows how we
can also be in the presence of absent things: We have the whole spacious world, its fields and
palaces, within us, not, however, the things themselves but their images. Here you can see how
the imagination, as a power for making the absent present, is essential to our inner sense of time.
For with it we can have memory of past times and also expectation of future things, since
expectation is a forward-directed imagination. And since much of what has happened to us is now
present to us or is now recoverable, we can not only measure time somewhat as we do space,
which is all there simultaneously. We can also see how our mind is a temporal image of God's
mind, who holds all creation toget~er there at once, in the eternal Now.
a
To be human, then, is to have mind so stretched that it encompasses in its present both
memory and foresight. One way to depict that condition is in a diagram like a coordinate system.
The horizontal axis is the time of the world, of Creation; it is succession-time. God knows how it
works; we don't. Astride of this horizontal coordinate sits a vertical stretch of line, our mind.
·Where the two intersect is the moment of sight, of perception, our point of intake for the world.
The segment below 'represents remembered events, dropped out of sight but not out of mind. The
13
�part above represents the dreams and plans we now have for the future -- and that is all the future
that actually exists. As the world passes by, our memory line grows longer and our expectation
line shortens. Then one day it ends.
Husserl, who actually draws diagrams of this sort, in fact marks one of his lines as the "tug
towards death." It is not, however, one of the axes he is marking in this way, but one of the
oblique lines with which he connects the horizontal axis of succession-time and the vertical axis of
phase-time. These oblique lines show how each perception offered by the horizontal successionline sinks away into vertical memory in an orderly and continuous manner, without any scrambling
or dislocation. Husserl's time-diagrams are clever and complex, and I had a lot of fun -- fun
bordering on agony, that is -- working them out. But I didn't give you any handouts, because then
you'd be trying to figure them out now instead of listening; I should know.
Many of you will not have heard of Husserl, and I'll say just enough for my purpose. He
is the founder of a way of inquiry called Phenomenology. Its chief feature is that is excludes all
questions of existence and reality, such as whether time is real. Instead a Phenomenologist pays
attention to the appearances within consciousness, articulating and ordering them. Our sense of
time is a perfect subject for Phenomenology and Husserl's lecture-series known as The
Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness is the great first-fruit of his method.
Husserl makes hundreds of acute observations, but his main advance on Augustine is to
puzzle seriously over the extent of the present. Recall that the point-Now of mathematics is too
skimpy to live in, but consider also that an extended present is going to be part past, part future.
Husser! finds a way, fairly technical, to show that there is a discernible immediate past and an
immediate future that are so bound in with the present as to give room, so to speak, for perception,
so that there is time for a time-sequence, say a melody, to be taken in. He shows how the present
has time for the world to impress itself on us.
One last word about Husserl. The horizontal axis, which represented the world's time for
Augustine, represents an internal time-flux, a continuous sort of subjective succession-time, for
14
�Husserl. For he is withholding all claims about the reality of the world and its time, and attending
only to our inner experience, to our internal time-consciousness. In trying to understand this
internal flow Husserl is drawn into questions beyond Phenomenology. The question that finally
preoccupies him is the familiar one: How can this flux, which is one aspect of our sense of time
and for him the deepest, be spoken of? Are we fluid through and through, or is this flux grounded
in a stable form? But how can a fixed form be the source of a flow? Husserl, a man who is
willing to admit ultimate perplexity without losing faith in the worth of his problem, says:
For these things we have no names. ·
Now is the time for me to say what I think time is -- maybe it would be more sensible to
say "how time works."
I thiiik that phase-time is the fountain and origin of all time. Every phenomenon of time is
derivative from the fact that we have past, present and future. To me the most astounding
circumstance of our temporal life, surpassingly strange but apparently unavoidable, is the crux and
center of the three phases: the present. All that is ever real for us, all that is really there, really
present; occurs in these point-by-point moments of presence. This is the instant of perception
when we see and hear and touch the world. The rest, the long stretches behind and before, is
absence -- what has gone by and what is yet to come.
Human life would therefore be very pointillistic and poor if present existence were all we
had. Happily there are ways of being that are even more potent than present reality and momentary
existence. There is the actuality of imaginative memory and of imaginative expectation. The
present of perception is the point of intake for the novelties that the world offers to our senses, but
the past and the future are also present to us as images, as memories of things past and plans for
things to come. These are the present actualities, the powerfully present absences that give
coherence and resonance and significance to the moment They also make it possible for us to
measure time directly, not by observing external motions as of the hands of the clock which never
displays time at all, but by the thickness of the image-pictures we flip through or leap over to get to
15
�moment from which we want to estimate a stretch of time. Our memory is like a laminate of
transparencies or a carousel of slides, and my claim is that this accumulation we call the past and
this projection we call the future is what produces our inner sense of time. And this thickening of
the present by past and future is what Augustine calls "the stretching of the mind."
Now note that I have described the present as punctual, instantaneous, momentary. And
this description seems to be supported by the observations of all kinds of people, perhaps poets
above all. The Nows that matter are somewhat isolated - instants of recognition, moments of
meaning. In his book The Labyrinth of Solitude Octavio Paz calls the Now "explosive and
orgiastic" and wonders how it fits into ordinary historical passage.
But much of the time of our lives passes in seeming continuity, and this sort of time, the
time that seems like a continuous passage, usually called duration, has to be accounted for as well.
I think it works as follows.
Our present appears punctuated by the ever-varying world and our perception of it. Now
. we see our friends, now they've disappeared around the. corner; now we hear one note, now
another. But there is another time experience that we become conscious of when we are deprived
of most external sensation or when our inner images are pushed out of sight by fear and anxiety.
Or we can deliberately close off our senses and empty our minds to concentrate simply on our
inner duration. What then comes to the fore is a sort of inner pulsing, the very beat of our mere
consciousness, empty life itself. I am trying to describe the soul's aboriginal counting that both
Aristotle and Kant discovered. This inner beat then is the origin of that succession-time that is
mirrored in the before-and-after of physical motion and that plays so large a role in our practicaL
life.
Now most of the time we are not taking note of this pulse, or paying much attention to our
inner life at all. The beats recede and merge as in a long perspective; time's passage appears
continuous and acquires all the characteristics and problems of a line in space. Then,
16
�retrospedively, time is thought of -- not felt -- as a continuum that is continuously cut by a pointlike Now, the kind of Now in which nothing can happen.
So my description of time, which leaves time as what I call "a well-specified mystery,"
ends with the point-Now. And that is where a review of the various pathologies people attach to
the phases of time begins. I'll give the sketchiest summary of our time-troubles, partly because
time is short, partly because every one of us has a lot of personal experience with this aspect of
time, and it will make a good subject for the question period.
One way, then, to think of the way people wreak havoc with the perceptual present is that
they treat it as a mere, point-like Now, monotonously empty and featureless, while racing
unrestrainably forward. To try to live in this Now is to long to fill it with strong stimulation and
increasing novelty. Now-life is the pathological counterpart of present-life.
Similarly some people deprive themselves of the image-filled memory that gives the present
its anchor of significance by rushing to keep up with novelty and trashing not only their own past
but that past which their communities have in common, their external memories.
And finally, some people are so dominated by a future that is supposedly coming at them
that they give up what they really care about to make themselves into ready servants of this
oncoming power. But according to my understanding the future is nothing but the dreams and
plans we currently have, and as far as the humanly-made world is concerned, nothing is coming
but what we actively or passively agree to. It is that passivity which is, to my mind, the greatest
time-pathology.
Arid now time's up.
17
�
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Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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What, Then, Is Time?
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Typescript of a lecture delivered on September 4, 1998, by Eva Brann as part of the Formal Lecture Series. <br /><br />Brann's lecture is based on her book <a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780847692927/What-Then-Is-Time">What, Then, Is Time?</a>, published by Rowman and Littlefield in 1999. <br /><br />The typescript of the lecture was reprinted in <a href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/553">The St. John's Review, volume XLV, number 3 (2000)</a>.
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Brann, Eva T. H.
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Annapolis, MD
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1998-09-04
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LEC_Brann_Eva_1998-09-04
Deans
Friday night lecture
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Continuing the Conversation
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Continuing the Conversation is a web and podcast series produced by St. John's College. Episodes 1-20 were released in 2023. <br /><br />More information about the series is available on the Continuing the Conversation page of the St. John's College website: <a href="https://www.sjc.edu/continuing-conversation">https://www.sjc.edu/continuing-conversation</a>.
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2023
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English
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Annapolis, Md.
Santa Fe, NM
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52:52
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Louis Petrich + Jonathan Badger: Pursuing the Eternal Present
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Louis Petrich + Jonathan Badger: Pursuing the Eternal Present is episode 4 of the Continuing the Conversation series and podcast. The episode was published on February 15, 2023.
Does a contemplative life bring us closer to the divine, as Aristotle believed? Is it the highest form of human life or is it self-centered and lived at the expense of others? Can one lead a contemplative life while living in the real world? Philosophers, artists, mystics, and students have long pursued lives of solitude, contemplation, and creative exploration, only to encounter a recurring set of practical obstacles and vexing moral questions. In this episode of Continuing the Conversation, Annapolis host Louis Petrich and tutor Jonathan Badger explore a conversation that honors the pursuit of “the eternal present” in Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence (based on the life of the painter Gauguin), while exploring its attendant questions with equal concern and gravity. This episode also includes conversation on works by Goethe, Rousseau, Thoreau, and Aristotle.
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Badger, Jonathan N.
Petrich, Louis
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St. John's College (Annapolis, Md.)
St. John's College (Santa Fe, N.M.)
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Santa Fe, N.M.
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2023-02-15
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Maugham, W. Somerset (William Somerset), 1874-1965. Moon and sixpence
Solitude in literature
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1712-1778. Rêveries du promeneur solitaire
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English
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CtC_Ep4_Badger_ac
Tutors
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Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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formallectureseriesannapolis
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wav
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00:55:11
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1001 Nights of Marcel Proust
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on February 11, 2011, by Patricia Locke as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
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Locke, Patricia M.
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Annapolis, MD
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2011-02-11
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sound
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Proust, Marcel, 1871-1922. À la recherche du temps perdu
Arabian nights. Selections
Storytelling
Sleep. Stages
Sleep. Psychological aspects
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English
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LEC_Locke_Patricia_2011-02-11_ac
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Text
THE POWER & GLORY OF PLATONIC DIALOGUE
In Book One of his A1emorabilia, Xenophon reports Socrates conYersing \vith the
sophist Antiphon. Towards the end of their comrersation, Socrates speaks of sharing
wisdom with one's friends:
... just as someone else takes pleasure in a good horse or dog
or bird, so I take even more pleasure in my good friends, and
should I possess anything good I teach it, and I recommend
my friends to others from whom I believe they \vill receive
some benefit regarding \'Utue. And the treasures of the wise
men of old that they have left written down in books,
unfolding the scrolls, I carefully go through them in common
with my friends; and should we see anything good, we single
it out, and we consider it great gain should \Ve [thus] become
helpful to one another. (1.6.14)
Xenophon comments: ''\Vhen I heard these things, he certainly seemed to me a
supremely happy man and someone to conduct those heeding him into a good and noble
life." Xenophon's testimony to the ,·alue of books in their relation to friends is striking,
gi\·en his upright character and worldly competence-a man fully capable of successfully
leading others in the grimmest of life and death circumstances. He must have had rather
special books in mind.
\Vhat, then, is im,olved in reading Plato's dialogues together as friends, carefully
turning their pages, seeking out the treasures that hmre been written down by a wise man of
old? What ought 1.ve be after? What \voul<l Plato ha\·e us find? \Vhat would he ha\'e happen, as
the result of our reading? The ans\ver to such questions cannot be straightforward, but the
dialogue form of Plato's writings-graciously and thankfully-makes unm·oidable our
consciousness of what it means to read them. Looked at a little more carefully, they also
make unavoidable the question of what it means to speak, ,-1:rite, or read in the name of
philosophy, and-from another angle-they encourage meditation on what it means to
speak, read, or write at all. To presume that we already know what a dialogue is for, \vhat
philosophical speech really aims at, and what we should be getting out of reading Plato, is
therefore to ignore, perhaps even to violate what I shall be suggesting to you are Plato's wise
and manifold purposes. In particular, your single greatest practical failing as readers of
Platonic dialogue \vill regularly be the assumption that you can remain spectators of its
dialectical drama, disinterested onlookers, that you can remain aloof from its proceedings to
pick and choose among the thoughts you imagine the drama to be presenting to you. Your
single greatest theoretical failing \Vill regularly be to suppose that you know the nature of the
philosophical life. I do not doubt that Plato both understood and allO\ved for the fact that
many people would easily make both these sorts of mistake, each in his O\vn way, but that
should not lessen your resolve to be counted among the readers he most wished for.
�CARL PAGE
THE POWER &
GLORY OF PLATONIC DIALOGUE
PAGE-:!
Tonight I want to assemble some reminders to help stop you falling short of Plato's
potential friendship. I hope to do that, principally by recalling hO\v thoroughly strange the
dialogues are and by reflecting a little on why that might be. From the n:ry start, therefore,
you can see that my speech \Vill be far more practical and erotic, i.e., aimed at nudging your
habits and ideals, than it \Vill be doctrinal and theoretic-which is to say, aimed at informing
you of something. Jn this respect, my speech about Platonic dialogue reduplicates the
central character of the dialogues themselves.
A few procedural obsetTations. First, my main design is to present a vie\v of Plato
and his philosophical activity, rather than to justify my interpretation of them. I confine
myself to presentation, partly because of ti.me, but mostly because I think justification comes
up as a serious question only after one is convinced that something is interesting enough to
warrant that sort of effort-should circumstances require. It is the interest I would like to
pro,-oke first. My second note is a confession. Although much of \vhat follO\vs could be
called methodological, I often find myself impatient and ungenerous with such reflections,
with abstract worries about how one ought to do things instead of getting on with doing
them. Methodology, critique, and meta-theory tend to be airy and undisciplined, they lend
themsefres to indecisi,-e, apparently endless bickering, they e:acourage an odious sort of
intellectual smugness, and their attention to matters of form is frequently at the cost of
return to the concrete content (whose understanding they were originally supposed to serve).
N e\-ertheless, any serious \vell-directed \vork does need orientation, does need some
understanding of what it's about, and this is especially important for those who have only
just begun. In philosophical matters, the Delphic injunction to know oneself looms as large
over Socrates as it does over Kant, notwithstanding their disagreements over how best to
fulfill the responsibility. It seems, therefore, one must at some point or other run the risks
of transcendental narcissism for the sake of self-knowledge. Third, some of the topics I
shall explore \Vill sound like nriations on the familiar, perhaps eYen tired old Straussian
themes of esotericism, noble lies, persecution of philosophy, and the rest. But not e\·eryone
here has heard these important refrains. I intend to repeat my \Trsions of a few of them
eloquently and incisively, along with a couple of riffs I hope no one has heard before. I
deliberately refer to "my \'ersions" of these refrains because I disagree with an underlying
assumption commonly at work in their interpretation: that philosophy is by nature politically
alienated and must therefore exercise a condescending accommodation, compelled by
necessity, to the city and to ordinary human life. Some of my reasons for this deep
disagreement are \VOYen into \vhat follows, though I do not make them thematic. One last
introductory word. I shall not hesitate-rather shamelessly perhaps-to speak on
philosophy's behalf. By my acknowledging this presumption in advance, you can at least see
that I appreciate what might be questionable about my immodesty.
THE ODDITIES OF PLATONIC DIALOGUE
A moment ago I hinted that there is something important in the very fact of Platonic
dialogues, something that goes beyond and maybe even upsets the conventional meanings
�CARL PAGE
THE POWER
&
GLORY OF PLATONIC DIALOGUE
PAGE-3
typically associated with philosophy books and their academic study. This needs to be made
explicit.
PU.TONIC ANONYi\IITY. The dialogues arc fully dramatic, i.e., they portray logoi in
action and deeds of speech but never disembodied assertions. This form is unusual and was
noted by Aristotle near the beginning of the Poetics, \vhere he speaks of "the Socratic
conversation,'' classing it together \vith the mimes of Sophron and his son Xenarchus
(1447b10). Sophron was a fifth-century Syracusan writer, reputedly admired by Plato. His
mimes were dramatic renderings in \'erse of everyday people, designed to be revelatory of
their characters. Plato's dialogues are either directly performed, simply narrated, or narrated
within a performed frame, but in all cases not a \vord is said in Plato's own voice, except the
titles. The dialogues not directly performed permit external comment by their narrators, but
there is neYer-unlike the passage from Xenophon with \vhich I began-any authorial
comment from Plato himself.
In this respect, the Platonic corpus is like the body of Shakespeare's plays. Just as \Ve
must wonder exactly how far Prospero, for example, can be taken to speak for the Tempest's
author, or I Iamlet or Lear, so too must we wonder hO\v far Socrates or Parmcnides or the
Eleatic Stranger or Timaeus or the Athenian Stranger can be taken to speak for Plato. This
question was known to Diogenes Laertius in the third century A.D., though many
contemporary readers seem to have forgotten it. Despite the unremitting anonymity,
hO\vever, it must be added that the dialogues are known to be Plato's and were circulated
from the start under his authorship. We arc therefore meant to notice that the dialogues
contain no direct word of Plato's O\vn. He addresses us, but he does not declare himself.
Ancient rumours of secret Academic teachings notwithstanding, in his own time Plato was
just as reticent about his ultimate insights and purposes, providing almost no other clues but
the dialogues themseh'es. They are like "the lord, \vhose oracle is at Delphi,'' that "neither
reveals nor conceals, but gives a sign" (Heraklcitos, Frag. 93) and, like the sibyl herself, '\vith
ra\·ing lips, uttering things unlaughable, unbeautiful, and unperfumed, they reach \Vith their
\"oice across a thousand years, because of the god" (cf. Herakleitos, Frag. 92). So, Plato
whispers an intriguing name into our ears-Phaedms (\vhom e\·eryonc knows to be very
beautiful), Theaetetm (whom everyone knmvs to be very clever), Afeno (whom everyone knows
to be very bad); either such names or sometimes a provocative title-Socrates' Defense Speech,
An Intimate Drinking Par!J, Cizilized Order, Reg11lations,-then he draws the curtain back, to
disappear, not off-stage but behind the masks, bringing life to each and every one of his
drama/is personae-the personae Platoms.
LOGICAL DERANGEMENT. The god-inspired oracle at Delphi uttered things
"unlaughable, unbeautiful, and unperfumed," the very same qualities we meet with in Plato's
oracular dialogues. Before fully realizing that strange fact, an experienced and competent
reader might well approach the dialogues assuming that philosophy is meant to be or at least
ought to include the art of telling, insightful speeches, that a philosopher's discourse should
be more accurate, more illuminating, more comprehensive, and more self-conscious than
any of our other ways of talking. Plato's dialogues, ho\vc\•er, present quite a different face,
despite their being finished works and despite how plainly philosophy is their centre of
l l
:!I)
/ I) 8
�CARL PAGE
THE POWER &
GLORY OF PLATONIC DIALOGUE
PAG E -4
gra,·ity. Individually and as a whole they are, at first sight, if not a conceptual chaos at least a
tangle of conflicting and unrcsoh'ed accounts, often at cross-purposes with one another, and
sometimes in ways their speakers seem not even to appreciate, let alone understand. I list
the most ob,·ious features.
Many of the dialogues are aporetic, i.e., they lose their way and never seem to find it
again, no matter how serious the resoh·e with \vhich they began. One tends to get used to
this, but the failure of comfortable closure~,·cn in the manifestly great works, such as the
Rep11b/ic-reliably irritates any classroom of first-time readers; as, indeed, it should. Some of
the dialogues that seem more doctrinally committed, more like "proper" philosophy, e.g.,
Parmenides, Sophist, are experienced by many competent readers, at least initially, as rather
boring through much of their length, occasionally to the point of unreadability. A good
handful of dialogues hardly seem like dialogues at all, if "dialogue" be understood as an
earnest effort at inquiry in common. At crucial points in almost all of them, the
philosophical argument relics on images and metaphor, conwntionally the tools of poetry.
Worse still, poetry itself seems regularly to be denounced, while nonetheless used
throughout. fa·en writing itself is declared some sort of mistake. Also at crucial points, the
speech will sometimes turn with utter logical seriousness to myth, to what are acknowledged
within the com·ersation as fanciful talcs (Repuhlzi.~ Gorgias, Phaedo, Phaednd). And yet, all these
myths and images rub cheek by jowl with the most abstruse forms of technical
argumentation and intricately developed analyses, sometimes lasting for pages and
pages-pages that cause painful conceptual squinting, e,·en for the most discursi,·ely facile
of readers. Yet again, logical precision can at almost any moment gi,·e \vay to outrageous
fallacy, blatant non-sequitur, and shameless ad hominem attack. Occasionally, the whole show
seems a logical farce-as in the Crary/11s, the E11th)'demm, and parts of the Protagoras for
example-yet everyone in the dialogue keeps a completely straight face. There seems to be
no overall plan to the dialogues as a totality; one more or less would not seem to ruin their
effect, and there is no single dialogue that might count as their culmination or key.
Nevertheless, many are linked dramatically \vith one another, both temporally and topically.
Worse still, some topics seem to be treated inconsistently across different dialogues, and
worse again, the topical coherence of individual dialogues has seemed to many readers to
lea,•e much to be desired (Rep11blzi.· and Phaedms have gi,·en this impression for centuries).
Neither can one help but wonder at the apparent naivete with which the interlocutors so
often proceed, only infrequently stopping to "define their terms"-as \VC like to say--often
plainly making large and questionable assumptions, sometimes agreeing not to pursue deeper
investigations, and so on, all the while talking about precision and whether we really know
what we think we know, how different knowledge and opinion are from one another, and
what indispensable value there is in self-knowledge.
Finally, as if it were n ot sufficient that \VC never hear directly what Plato himself
thinks, the character of Socrates-clearly a protagonist, though not for that reason
equinlcnt to Plato-is depicted \vithin the dialogical drama as notorious for hir irony. Let
me say straightaway, ho,ve,·cr, that Socrates' irony docs not mean that he isn't serious in
what he does say or that he says the opposite of what he thinks, either for amusement or
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social co1wenience. Socrates' irony is that he kno\vingly ne,·er says all that he has in mind,
and that he will on occasion knowingly let his speeches and his deeds contradict one
another, both in the present and across dramatic time. Plato's irony is similar, if not
identical, in spirit. It is an irony that Aristotle described as "graceful and generous," an
a,·oidance of pretension, especially in matters that are " unclear and apt to cause no small
impediment" (Nicomachean Ethics 1127b22-31).
In sum, the logical or account-gi,·ing, truth-telling face o f the dialogues presents a
confusing, sprawling, eclectic, thoroughly unsystematic gallimaufry of irritatingly teasing
hints at philosophical depth and meaning. Beware of becoming blind to this obtrusive fact.
Everyone has heard that the whole of Western philosophy is nothing but footnotes to Plato,
so the dialogues must be magnificently crafted speeches. Right? Well, they are, but not in
the way you might expect. Their ,·cry ugliness, their rebarbati,·e outward appearance is itself
a manifestation of the greatest craft. It is great, because we haYe all-by which I mean all
serious readers since Plato wrote-kept coming back in amazement and expectation to these
astonishingly ugly things. You \vill often hear it said that Plato is a master stylist, and indeed
he is. He is a master stylist because he can and regularly does with facility and com·iction
imitate eYeryone else perfectly, from Aristophanes' humour, to G o rgias's nai\·e urbanity,
from Lysias's oratory to Protagoras's logic, from Hippias's vanity to Alkibiades' disarmingly
attractiYe hubris. Yet the dialogues themselves remain lopsided, ungainly, "unbeautiful and
unperfumed." They are nothing that we expect, either as ordinary readers or as readers with
m ore sophisticated views about the nature and tasks of philosophy. Plato's intensely ironic
dialogues, then, are just like the ironic Socrates, \Vhom Alkibiades describes for us in the
Symposium. Completely ugly on th e outside- short, snub-nosed, goggle-eyed-yet
nonetheless suffused with a hidden harmony. Like the Silenus figures Alkibiades goes on to
mention, the dialogues are cleverly contrived statuettes, ugly satyrs of undisguised desire on
the outside but on the inside filled with images of gods. Alkibiades saw the gods in Socrates,
but on account of his hubris tic ambition to command Socrates' eros, he failed to make those
gods his own. Like\visc, the reader of Platonic dialogues must abandon the urge to possess.
Blundering, thoughtless lonrs, groping after the satisfaction of their O\Vn, preconceived
lusts, \Vill get nowhere.
Socrates seems to b e a sort of
conversational vulture, always hanging around to see if he can tum the carrion of ordinary
conversation into a philosophical feast. More particularly, he seems to be a sort of psychic
vampire as well, circling around all the promising young men, always whispering with some
one o r a few of them off in a corner, as Kallikles fo r example accuses him in the Gorgias. In
both cases the hope and promise seem ne,·er fulfilled. There is simply no Platonic dialogue
between two mature philosophers; Zeno and Parmenides happen to be present together with
an immature Socrates in the Parmenides, while the mature Socrates is present but does not
engage the Eleatic Stranger in the Sophisl and Stalesman. As for any dialogue that acti,·ely
engages truly potential philosophers, one might look to the Republic but Plato's dialogues
furnish no clue as to the later fate of either Glaucon or Adeimantus, while in the case of the
Parmenides, the promising Socrates is for the m ost part an onlooker-th o ugh he is
THE ABSENCE OF :tl!ATURE PHILOSOPHY.
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undoubtedly educated both by what he sees and by the brief exchange that crushes his
fledgling account of Ideas. It is fair to say overall, then, that while Socrates is forever
interested in getting philosophy going and that as a mature philosopher he is clearly superior
to all those he actively questions, \Ve ne\'er really see philosophic conversation underway in
full sail, top-gallants flying. Moreover, this omission is explicitly brought to our attention in
the Sophist, whose intriguing prologue leads the eager reader to expect a third dialogue
Philosopher once Sophist and Statesman arc done. The apparent promise, however, remains
unfulfilled. There ne\'er was such a dialogue published, and we are provoked to wonder if it
ever could have been written. We are also invited to think about why sophist and statesman
should be the topics to eclipse so bright a sun as that.
The common spectacle of the Platonic dialogues is at least the deferral of fully
realized philosophy and more often than not the outright failure of philosophy even to show
signs of a healthy beginning. On the other hand, Plato himself is standing somewhere
beyond that absence and failure, a position he underlines for us by \vriting himself out of a
scene in which everyone would most have expected him to appear-and where he was no
doubt present in fact-namely Socrates' swan-song and death, the scene that Plato
dramatized in the Phaedo. Whate\'er else, therefore, that Plato takes his own philosophizing
to be, it cannot be what is represented in the drama of his dialogues. In particular, philosophy
as Plato means it to be understood cannot be a simple equivalent to "Socratic conversation."
I mean that last assertion to be a little shocking. The dialogues are often thought to
be mirrors or representations of real, li,·ing communications, or at least of some idealized
version of foring, philosophic communication. i\foreover, this mirror image is by itself
somehow supposed to dra\v us too into the same sort of living communication, as if the
imitation became the deed in us by our seeing it. But Plato did not seek to encode the living
communication of philosophy by imitating it via the drama that is constructed in and as the
dialogue. This is worth stating bluntly: Plato did not write dialogues because he thought that
the proper form of philosophy \Vas the Socratic flim-flam that takes up so much of them.
The dialogues are designed to make up for the fact that Plato cannot be here to talk with us
as he would most desire. They are the monological half of a philosophical communication
that must compensate for the fact that one of the interlocutors, perhaps the wisest one, is
absent. The dialogue is first and foremost a logos, Plato's logos. That it is dramatic and so
on, is all internal to the fact of its having been written dO\vn and published as an artfully
contrived speech by one man to the entire world.
This does not sit well with a common contemporary view that there is nothing else
that should emerge from Socratic inquiry except more Socratic inquiry, that the full, mature
form of philosophy--disappointingly but somehow only accidentally missing from the
dialogues-would be a conversation between Socrates and his equal in logical refutation. To
cut a very long and depressing story short, current intellectual orthodoxy claims that the best
reasons available to human beings are ahvays and in principle immanent to the contingent
circumstances of their inquiries, that our deepest thoughts cannot but be fully conditioned
by tradition and circumstance in \vays that make them inevitably finite and parochial, that all
insight can never be more than a single perspective, a point of vie'v taken from within a
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limited horizon. This posture has the following peculiar result: to the extent that there is
nothing absolute available in the contingent play of opinions, to that extent it starts to seem
absolutely better to be able to refute an opinion than to assert or maintain it. Human life on
the practical le\Tl no doubt calls for provisionally acceptable conclusions, but on the
philosophical or theoretical level all assertions turn out to depend on the critically
complacent failure to have discovered their refutations, \vhich if not around today surely will
be tomorrow--or so the fallibilist predicts and insists with alarmingly fanatical, not to say
incoherent conviction. It thus also follows that the theoretically open mind ought to be an
empty mind, a mind fortified with a sturdy arsenal of techniques for preventing any opinion
from lodging within it. To ha\'e any opinion at all is to risk the embarrassing accusation of
intellectual naivete. Whatever its own merits, this is not the view represented by Plato's
Socrates or his dialogues. Although Socrates claims to lack \visdom-in the teeth of the fact
that no one, either inside or outside the dialogues, belie\·es him when he does so-it is still
\visdom that he loves, not the lack of it. Contemporary critical thinkers love the lack, and
this tempts them into making a fetish of transcendental detachment and to indulge an
infinite, unfalsifiable suspicion for what Socrates in the Apology calls his "human wisdom"
and \vhich elsewhere turns out to be the science, note that word, the science of erotics.
There is, hmvever, a more substantial point of comparison. Although both Socrates
and the contemporary critical thinker agree that most people are unhelpfully opinionated
(which is by no means the same as to say that all their opinions are \vrong), the critical
thinker imagines that the fitting response is to work hard on disinterested mind-skills for
keeping all tempting beliefs up in the air, for keeping the naivete of commitment at arm's
length. For Socrates, on the other hand, the fact that most people are opinionated is a much
deeper, murkier problem, tied up \vith what souls most deeply want and what they most
deeply fear they can't get. The examination of genuine opinions, i.e., the deep-seated
convictions you ha,·e about what is true, good, and beautiful, the com·ictions \vhose belief is
not a matter of choice, the examination of those sorts of opinions is a far more delicate
matter than testing for reasonableness----e,·en if self-styled logicians kne\v precisely what that
really is, which they obviously don't. I say that so confidently because I have never yet heard
of a logician helping anyone understand Plato, or Hegel, or Nietzsche, for example-all of
whom I take to be entirely reasonable thinkers. They haven't done much for Aristotle either.
Plato makes the need for something else especially clear by having his Socrates talk about
two unusual and hitherto unrecognized arts: psychic midwifery in the Theaetetus and
philosophical rhetoric in the Phaedms. The reader is also meant, of course, to notice how
often those same arts are portrayed at \vork throughout the dialogues, both by the characters
and by Plato himself. Philosophical inquiry turns out to be a far more complex acti,·ity than
tying people in argumentative knots or never being at a loss for a clever or merely correct
reply. It includes a moral, soul-tending dimension that pays attention to pedagogical,
rhetorical, ethical, and political matters as well, in addition to the surface dimensions oflogic,
analytic technique, and epistemic responsibility.
TRA...:"JSITION. I have briefly considered Plato's artfully contri\·ed anonymity, the
constant baffling of our logical expectations, and the dramatic absence of philosophy in a
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mature form. These obsenrations, together with the phenomena of irony, both Platonic and
Socratic, plus a glimpse into certain soul-tending arts, all point to the partially hidden yet
systematically intrusive presence of philosophizing in a more complex, shadowy form than
Socrates' public \vrestling matches or the Eleatic Stranger's diacritical gymnastics. Plato
speaks through indirection and means to indicate that philosophy cannot and ought not to
speak as straight as one might at first suppose. This initially unsettling conclusion finds
several well-known echoes in the Platonic epistles. "There is no composition by Plato, nor
will there e,·er be one, but those now said to be his belong to a Socrates grown young and
beautiful" (314c). And then in a great and famous passage from the Seventh Letter.
But this much I can certainly declare concerning all these
writers, or prospective writers, who claim to know the
subjects which I seriously study, whether as hearers of mine
or of other teachers, or from their own discoveries; it is
impossible, in my judgment at least, that these men should
understand anything about this subject. There does not exist,
nor will there e\·er exist, any treatise of mine dealing
therewith. For it does not admit of verbal expression like
other studies, but, as a result of continued application to the
subject itself and communion therewith, it is brought to birth
in the soul of a sudden, as light that is kindled by a leaping
spark, and thereafter nourishes itself (341 b)
Nevertheless, Plato wrote dialogues all his life, taking astonishing pains m·er their
intricate construction. He cannot therefore ha,·e thought them superfluous or trivial, despite
his recognition of their necessary limits. By all normal standards of truth-telling coherence
the dialogues are manifestly deranged; my task now is to address the partly hidden method in
their apparent madness.
PHILOSOPHY IN THE IRONICAL MODE
According to the reports of antiquity, Aristotle wrote Platonic-style dialogues in the
earlier part of his career. They are, regrettably, lost-all the more regrettably, seeing that
Cicero praised them as golden (though what else should we expect from someone \vho spent
the greater part of his early years in the Academy teaching rhetoric?). What we ha,·e from
Aristotle are documents that may reasonably be thought of as treatises or at least notes to
treatise-like expositions. As it happens, there is nothing in the Aristotelian corpus as we
have it that can confidently be taken as published "\vriting in the manner of Plato's dialogues
and it is certainly the case that much of what we do have presents an aporetic, tentative, less
than declarative face. Even so, and with all due allmvance for hints at even Aristotelian
indirection in what seem to be far more straightforward texts, the Aristotelian writings bear
witness through much of their bulk to an expository, more recognizably academic style of
philosophical speech than the baffling Platonic form. The comparison shO\vs that Plato
perfectly well understood what it would mean to write philosophy in that more
straightforward mode-and that Aristotle kne\v perfectly well \Vhat it would mean to write in
the ironic, self-deprecating dialogical mode. In neither case, then, is the form a stylistic quirk
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or an historically dictated necessity. Moreo,·er, for both Aristotle and Plato it was a
conscious decision to write at all, since Socrates, just as self-consciously did not.
DIALOGUE YS. TREATISE. What is at stake in this stylistic difference between
dialogue and treatise? At first glance, the Aristotelian style of telling, philosophical speeches
gives one reliably direct ways of talking about and thinking about the ordered, eidetic
structure of things, both human and non-human. E\Tn if one accepts none of his specific
metaphysical results or if one prefers to emphasize the open-ended, aporetic character of
certain of his inquiries, Aristotle's noetic tools and categories have proven themseh·es of
permanent worth. The notions of substance, essence & accident, form & matter, actuality &
potentiality, together with Aristotle's interpretative specifications of aitia, arche, kinesis, p!Jche,
phronesis, epzsteme, and praxis are all ingenious and Yirtually indispensable devices for anyone
interested in the peculiar business of philosophical articulation. Aristotle's insights
constitute a huge fraction of our philosophical patrimony, and amount to a legacy we should
receive \Vith both gratitude and respect. While at least equally deserving of gratitude and
respect, Plato's ironic form of philosophical telling does not emphasize in the same way the
ordered structures that may be seen and understood. Rather, Plato points to \Vhat it is like to
be seeing structure, what it is like to be moved by truth, to be astonished by beauty, to aim at
and hope for the good. Not only that, Plato also indicates the manifold \Vays in \vhich
human beings variously fail and fall short in their attempts to be knowing and wise.
Actuality and achievement rule in Aristotle's philosophic art, eros and lack in Plato's. The
one emphasizes what may be understood, the other the fragile, unsteady soul that does the
understanding. Aristotle is thus the philosopher of detachment, Plato the philosopher of
integrity. Correspondingly, the danger of Platonic philosophizing is self-obsession and the
narcissism of intelligent desire, while the danger of Aristotelian philosophizing is selfforgetfulness and the indulgence of theoretical hubris. Strange as it may seem, although
Aristotelian exposition puts a premium on truth-telling, in the end it is more guarded.
Aristotle tends to suppress the erotic, the madness of self-transcendence and the nuances of
self-knowledge. In particular, he muffles what is dangerous about philosophy, whereas Plato
is comparatinly open about it. Aristotle prm·ides many theoretical insights for which one
can be very thankful, yet it is \VOrth recalling that on the death of Alexander he had to flee
Athens, pursued by an indictment for impiety. For help in understanding that disturbing
fact, one will find more extensive guidance in Plato.
In distinguishing an eidetic emphasis from an erotic one, I do not mean to say that
the two modes are rigidly correlated with dialogues and treatises, as if Plato never really
presented a philosophical idea or Aristotle never worried about the integrity of thinker and
thought. Platonic dialogues can in places be as expository as Aristotelian treatises can in
places be ironic and full of finesse. Both modes have their relative purposes and merits.
Sometimes, one is simply ready to hear an idea, to be told how it is \vith things, to be shown
where the joints of the world are. At other times, and for different reasons on different
occasions, one needs to understand the circumstances of such truth-telling. "Aristotelians"
and "Platonists" have quarreled over these matters for centuries and \vill, doubtless, brawl
for centuries more. As a matter of temperament, different human beings find themseh·es
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favouring one emphasis rather than the other, but both dialogue and exposition are equally
flexible in the hands of masters. In fact, I am quite sure that philosophic masters need to be
masters of both. Let me just state then that masterful philosophical articulation, in thought
or in speech, requires equal command of \Vhat I shall call eiddics and erotics. As just
suggested, eidetics correspond to the objects of contemplation, the intelligible nature,
structure, and wholeness of things. The dimension of erotics includes how the soul is
disposed to think and to act, and how responsible it remains to itself and its conditions as it
engages both. As it happens, i.e., just as a matter of historical fact, the artful irony of Plato's
dialogues as we have them communicates far more about philosophical eros-and its
failings-in relation to the truth than do the Aristotelian writings we have. No doubt
Aristotle could have told us more, and has probably told us more than is usually realized, but
I think that the matter of fact rests on a matter of principle, namely, that Platonic dialogue is
truer to the manifold needs and realization of lucid, philosophical existence. In particular, it
is Platonic dialogue that can more reliably save us from ourselves, since it is \vith respect to
the erotic dimension of human endeavour that \Ve keep getting in our own way, that we are
the originating sources of our O\Vn unnecessary wanderings and corruption. Eidetics tend, in
comparison though by no means mindlessly, to take care of themseh-es--one sign of \vhich
is that they're more teachable.
Plato hides, though not with complete invisibility, behind his
characters. Chief among them is a character, namely Socrates, not only notorious among his
fellow players for his irony but plainly to us his spectators coy, manipulative, and far from
even-handed. Taking courage from the apparent straightforwardness of Aristotelian
exposition, we can hardly forbear an exasperated cry: Why all the fuss? Why the teasing, not
to say irritating indirection? What prevents philosophy from speaking forthrightly, from
saying all she means? Must philosophy ahvays play false, or perhaps play games, with our
truth-telling hopes and ambitions? In short: what, if anything, calls for Platonic irony? If we
cannot answer such questions, then Plato can be left to his idiosyncratic, sibylline whimsies.
Unsurprisingly, the dialogues themselves furnish many clues to a more generous
understanding. Gi\Tn that writing dialogues cannot be all there is to the philosophical life, it
\Vill be helpful to consider such writing in light of that li"\·ing \Vhole. As I read the dialogues,
actual philosophical life has four principal domains of responsibility: work, pedagogy,
guardianship, and civics. By work I mean master-work, the full, unimpeded realization of
philosophical insight. By pedagogy I mean the husbandry of potential and apprentice
philosophers. By guardianship I mean the preservation of philosophy against both external
assault and internal corruption. By civics I mean philosophy's citizenly life and duty within
the larger human community that gives it birth. All four domains suggest good reasons for
philosophical indirection, for less than unqualified truth-telling, though I shall not here be
able to pay full attention to them all.
ORIGINS OF IRO:t\TJ:'.
The most common initial excuse offered for Platonic irony, for \vhy the dialogues
seem so ugly and manipulative and confusing, appeals to pedagogy, to the requirements, as it
is commonly formulated, of getting readers to think for themselves. Certainly, in any
worthwhile education and a fortiori any philosophical education, mere instruction is not
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sufficient for understanding. Instruction alone leaves us, as Nietzsche put it, with a bellyful
of undigested knowledge-stones; enough to calm our hunger for a while perhaps, yet
ultimately unable to nourish and satisfy. To the extent, therefore, that the dialogues aim at
guiding and training potential philosophers, it can safely be expected that they do more than
instruct, that they challenge when we get lazy, inspire when we are daunted, and that they
somehow aid proper noetic digestion. As usually understood, however, this encouragement
"to think for oneself'' is interpreted as the development of critical thinking skills, skills that
may permit you to grind down those knowledge-stones but which do nothing to help you
assimilate whatever truth they may have contained. One must also be wary of supposing that
such pedagogical aims, even when understood in the best sense, exhaust the possible reasons
for dialogical irony, that teaching determines the boundary of Plato's communicative intent.
It does not.
There is another, deeper difficulty with the idea of thinking for oneself. Namely,
that everyone already does; it's part of the problem, not the solution. To quote from
Herakleitos once more: "though the logos is common, the many live supposing themselves
to have a special understanding" (Frag. 2). At the most important level, then, irony or
stimulating indirection is a proper part of philosophical pedagogy not so much because
young learners need tricky help with the hard work of assimilation-which they certainly
do-but because we human knowers are constantly prone to collapse into that state of
consciousness Hegel identified as self-certainty. Once in such a state, we can usually only be
levered out again with well-meaning, i.e., noble, lies. Being in the know, the natural
condition of the human soul, is so obviously our greatest adaptive advantage that we keep
getting entranced by partial realizations of our wonderful capacity, we keep generalizing our
local insights into global wisdoms. But how is such self-satisfied conviction to be m oved,
led out of itself, educated? How does one come to recognize that one does not know?
Hegel's dialectic, to the extent that it may be thought of as containing a pedagogical response
to the problem, is a logical bludgeoning that has turned out to be all but useless, except in
the case of a uniquely motivated not to say perverse few. Socrates, in contrast, seduces many
a complacent soul-though not every one--out of its proclivity to noetic self-satisfaction
with all manner of charms and deceits, as does Plato in tum at another level of refinement.
The essential psychagogical trick in most cases is to make the higher truth look somehow
attractive within the perspective of the lower, more confined horizon. Plato's Eleatic
Stranger classifies such tricks as belonging to that species of the image-making art that works
with phantoms (fantastics) rather than with likenesses (eikastics). The distinction is made in
a dialogue entitled Sophist (236c).
Philosophy's strictly educative concerns, however, have definite limits, since not
every soul is capable of fully realizing her promise. We moderns do not like to hear things
like this, partly because we tend to think that reason ought by and large to be perfectible by
methods universally available to all and partly because we h ate to think that possibilities are
limited or that freedom alone might not suffice for realizing the good. Plato is more hardheaded. Serious attraction to philosophy is no guarantee at all of its fulfillment, as may be
seen, for example, in Apollodorus of the Symposi11m, who was at least wise enough to know
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this fact about himself. Furthermore, while Socrates will converse with whoever comes his
way, he does not undertake to teach everyone. Some souls he passes on to others, often
guided by the admonitions of his daimonion, his "divine sign." His daimonion, of
course-his little daimonic thing-is an inflection of the daimon eros, in whose affairs he is
expert. So Socrates will sometimes help and sometimes tum aside those who will never be
able to manage all that philosophy requires. As with most serous matters, it is a risk-y sort of
discrimination, easily incurring public odium. In Socrates' case, that risk is the essential
meaning of the historical accident that wrapped his erotic daimonion up into the civic charge
of impiety, of importing new-fangled gods, an innovation partly responsible for his
execution. As a final point it needs to be noted that infatuations with philosophy are not
always so benign as Apollodorus's. The tyrannical ambitions of Alkibiades and Kritias, for
example, both gifted intellectually, were blamed on their association with Socrates, while
Plato's Seventh Letter--from which I have already quoted--exists principally on account of
the havoc wreaked on philosophy's public, indeed international, reputation by Dionysius the
Younger, Tyrant of Syracuse, in his efforts to make Plato's wisdom his own.
My guiding question is whether or to what extent the irritating indirection of Platonic
dialogue can be understood as exercising philosophical responsibility. The particular
demands of teaching provide some plausible grounds, but there are others. Some of these
are rather easy to overlook, once inside the comforts provided by contemporary academic
freedoms. But not only are those freedoms hard-won and in need of constant maintenance
(a task for which philosophy, in virtue of its disciplinary competence regarding the relation
of theory to practice, is the proper guardian), neither is peace the uniform condition within
our necessarily parasitic Republic of Letters. Academic politics is notorious for its pettiness
and intolerance-itself a hardly accidental fact-but more significant are the manifold
theoretical disputes over demarcation, hierarchy, and methodology across and between the
various disciplines. Regarding these foundational and procedural reflections, philosophy's
competence and even presence is held in deep suspicion by the positive disciplines. Within
the so-called university, faction it would seem is the norm-no matter what ideals one might
prefer or hope to see there.
Not everyone can be fully philosophical, you might think that's a shame; not
everyone wants to be philosophical; well, that's their choice; but not everyone wants
philosophy around. That's dangerous. Hence the need for what I called philosophical
guardianship. Both philosophy and what is philosophically best in all of us cannot rely on
being left alone. In either the personal or the political case, there are several intrusive
challenges to philosophy's well-being within its larger community: the psychic community of
manifold desires on the one hand; the civic community of individual agents on the other.
The fights in both cases depend on a hunger fo~ wisdom. The Platonic dialogues emphasize
two main sources of intrusive challenge, and though I shall discuss them mostly in terms of
the civic paradigm, the Rep1Jb!ic's own brilliant likeness of city to soul should keep the psychic
paradigm equally in mind. According to Plato's dialogical imagery, then, the challenges come
(1) from the other men of logoi, of whom the two main classes are poets and sophists, and
(2) from the men of the city, who share with philosophy an ambition for the noble but
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disagree on the location of its highest form. The latter challenge also has two arms : that
philosophy subverts decent, conventional politics (Anytus, Kleitophon), and that philosophy
is adolescent, laughable, and unmanly (Kallikles, Thrasymachus). Adeimantus, who stands
for what is necessary and best within the large yet still limited horizon of the city, bluntly
restates these two accusations in the middle of the Rep11blic: philosophers are either useless or
depraved. They therefore deserve no place in human community, let alone to be enthroned
as its only competent kings. Perhaps the clearest overall Platonic symbol of the political
challenge is the dialogue entitled Socrates' Defense Speech, while an emblem for the challenge
from the men of logoi may be found in that gigantomachy mentioned in the Sophist, that
never-ending battle between the hard-headed, aggressive "motion men"-whose general, so
we learn in the Theaetet11s, is Homer-and the gentler, more generous "friends of the forms."
Plato's implied account of the nature and grounds of these several challenges, I
cannot examine in detail here but it is, I think, tolerably clear that the predicaments are, in all
cases, serious and abiding ones. Astute Protagorean prudence, Hippian technical
competence, and effective Gorgian rhetoric all seem far more beneficial-both in
themselves and certainly to their practitioners-than Socratic elenchus could ever be.
Socrates' wisdom appears only to numb people and make them angry or unhappy. Homer,
Sophocles, and Aristophanes all seem more inspiring and companionable than philosophy's
austere explanations and deflations, from which the gods are missing and in which, if the
divine be mentioned at all, it seems aloof and indifferent to human concerns. Too much
talk, and talk for talking's sake are indeed shameful and unmanly, while delving too deeply
into the origins of things does indeed run risk of undermining civic loyalty, familial respect,
and even the self-confidence that is a necessary condition for any worthwhile deed. All these
tensions have a symbolic focus in that disturbing scenario at the end of the Rep11blic's most
memorable image: the philosopher returning to the Cave would be set upon and killed by
those still shackled there, if they could get hold of him. Their opinions are not so true as
they imagine them to be, formed as they are by the shadows cast from artifacts and statues
of real things carried above and behind them by poets, sophists, and politicians, and they
would react with hostile fear if they knew. Yet the lesson is not that the Cave-dwellers are all
contemptibly ignorant and wicked; it is that pure wisdom is unbearable to the incompletely
enlightened soul. I say "incompletely enlightened" because too bright a light is unbearable,
only to those who can already see. There is both a fire and muted daylight in Plato's Cave.
Athens that prided itself on its freedom of discourse, its accomplishment in tragedy and its
welcome to the sophists, nonetheless executed Socrates and indicted Aristotle. Philosophy
cannot be an unqualified human good, because it is not unqualifiedly safe to tell the truth.
We all know this already. Frankness is a gift and honour reserved for close friends, and even
there it's difficult. Nor should we be surprised to learn that the truth is dangerous, if-as we
hear so often-that knowledge is power. Socrates let himself be executed to vivify these
sorts of unsettling facts for all thoughtful souls to come, knowing that Plato was there to
write about it in a way that would keep the recognition safe within the memory of
subsequent generations.
11/20/98
�CARL PAGE
THE POWER & GLORY Of PLATONIC DIALOGUE
PAGE-14
The several differences between what is philosophical and what is not are none of
them merely qualitative; they are fraught with threat and anxiety of an order that civility
alone cannot control because their roots lie deeper than the city. Furthermore, Plato's
sustained attention to the various assaults on philosophy suggests that none are to be
regarded as accidental, that there are good if incomplete reasons why philosophy should
suffer from them and it is therefore incumbent upon those pursuing her to understand the
justice within such fates. To the extent that the assaults are not accidental, the need for
irony in dealing with them is more than politic accommodation. Philosophy needs to make a
peace with politics and poetry, with the healthy decency of civic life and with the consoling
charms of comedy and tragedy, but such peace is at best a very unstable friendship of
unequals. Moreover, the instability is reproduced within the individual soul as well. Each of
us must make his uneasy peace both with the needs of practical life and with the
enchantments of art, if we are to live as thoughtfully as possible. The ironical Socrates in
Plato's ironical dialogues can be seen constantly negotiating these inequalities and their
attendant dangers. Budding philosophers can be thankful for the tips.
Guardianship and pedagogy deal, respectively, with the privations and the potentials
of philosophizing. Actual or fully-fledged philosophizing remaius. Insofar as irony entails in
some sense a playing false, it might seem that irony could at best be only conducive to and
never constitutive of philosophy's focal activity-which might for the moment be
characterized as consorting with the truth. Yet irony belongs here too, I think, at the heart
of philosophy's defining concern.
Philosophical account-giving or truth-telling has to be ironical to the extent that what
philosophy is obliged to mean cannot in principle be given all at once. Philosophical
comprehensiveness entails primacy, universality, and lucidity, i.e., its truth-telling must be a
self-illuminated knowledge of ultimate principles in relation to what is. Among other things,
this implies that any philosophical account aims at simultaneous knowledge of the
conditions that make possible and justify its thematic claims; it must not only tell the truth,
but somehow also tell the truth of its telling as well. These conditions for the possibility of a
speech, however, cannot be given along with the content of the speech-at least not in the
same, linear, thematic way. Hence the logical necessity for a two-faced mode of speaking:
one aspect to declare what one wants to say, the other aspect to show that one knows
exactly how and why one can say it. Such a two-faced mode of speech is properly called
ironic because it cannot state all that it means at once, though it is not thereby prevented
from evoking the wholeness of the understanding it articulates--on the condition, that is, of
a generous listener with an eye for reading between the lines. Failure to appreciate that
philosophy requires at least this sort of irony easily leads to measuring its discourse by a
mathematical standard, since the latter is a reasonable measure for interim, though never for
primary, insightfulness. Similar failures have also been responsible for many a foolish trek
across the transcendental desert in search of presuppositionless beginnings. One further
consequence is that philosophical speech, because both primary and comprehensive, cannot
be univocal in principle. This is the deep ground of philosophy's ancient quarrel with poetry
and why metaphorical speech is so emphatically integral to the texture of Plato's dialogues.
11/20/98
�CARL PAGE
THE POWER & GLORY OF PLATONIC DIALOGUE
PAGE-15
I have just argued that fundamental speech, and this would be in whatever situation we
find ourselves moved to give it, has to be two-faced. It follows that univocal speech-i.e.,
the speech that gives the appearance of managing to say all that it means-is not only
secondary but also contingent upon that primary equivocation. Univocal speech is therefore
radically unstable, bounded and made possible in its qualified way by a tacit agreement not to
press inquiry beyond a certain point. Part of our human experience of this fact is the
disturbing discovery that plausible arguments can apparently be made on both sides for
virtually anything-the so-called dissoi logoi of the ancient sophists-and that almost no one
is ever persuaded by rational, i.e., purely univocal, words alone. In the absence of
philosophy or fundamental speech, any assertoric stand thus depends as much on the will to
maintain it, on agreement to abide by the axioms that make it possible, as it does on the
content of those axioms themselves. Perversely, then, it becomes possible to take a stand in
words without the corresponding insight and so too without the corresponding resolve or
choice that deemed the axiom worthy--or, rather, one takes a stand with an alternative,
unspoken resolve. That's why Aristotle said that the difference between the sophist and
philosopher lies in their resolve, their proairesis, not in the arguments they give. Yet note that
even philosophy cannot logically repair the breach caused by any such willful detachment of
speech from the soul's orientation and insight. In other words, philosophy cannot in words
alone compel the sophist to come out of hiding. This is an important lesson of Plato's
Sophist and it is also the reason Thrasymachus blushed. That is, Thrasymachus eventually
had to betray his sophistry once he had committed himself to the theoretical probity of
"precise speech." It was a noble and educative blunder. In sum, therefore, human logoi can
never by themselves reveal the soul that makes them-and so we must pay as much
attention as we can to deeds as well. One of the most important resources of Platonic
dialogue is, I suggest, their ability to let us see how speeches are anchored in a soul's resolve,
despite the fact that a soul's true love cannot in principle be deduced from the things it says.
TRANSITION. Philosophical insight depends on a complex of conditions, both
extrinsic and intrinsic, to which I have pointed under the topics of work, pedagogy,
guardianship, and civics. In their light, I have sketched several ways in which irony is native
to how philosophy must deal with what is non-philosophical, with what is potentially
philosophical, and with the truth itself. Unlike Athena, human wisdom does not actually
spring fully formed from the head of Zeus-though what the myth means to say is that
wisdom, once she has arisen, cannot be fully explained in terms of genealogy alone. Also
unlike Athena, human wisdom has no nectar and ambrosia with which to fortify itself against
the many forms of mortal decay. This means that no matter how like a goddess, pure
theorizing on its own is by definition irresponsible. It also follows that no part of erotics can
be set aside on the plausible yet mistaken grounds that eidetics are philosophy's only proper
concern. Socrates' erotic science may be shady and ironic, yet it nevertheless belongs to
philosophical life quite as essentially the rest. With this granted, however, it will always
remain to consider when and to what extent one need or ought to talk out loud about such
things. I accept, therefore, that my entire speech, no matter how correct it may be, remains
11/20/98
�CARL PAGE
THE POWER &
GLORY OF PLATONIC DIALOGUE
PAGE-16
vulnerable to being judged either tactless, or trivial-to the extent that it does not emphasize
eidetic content.
WHY PLATO WROTE DIALOGUES
Philosophical truth-telling,. the sustaining activity of philosophical life, has to be twofaced. Hegel's impressive dialectical logic is a concerted effort to smooth out this
acknowledged need for irony, an attempt to resolve self-illuminating insight into a special
sort of discursive linearity, into a proof that manages to demonstrate its axioms as it deduces
its theorems. His experiment in philosophical discourse is weak, however, on two main
counts. First, the logic of Hegel's proof is in the end not as methodical as hoped for, indeed
required. Ingenuity is still needed in order to make the crucial transitions, an ingenuity that
Hegel from time to time facilitates with quite remarkable philosophical poetry. A further
sign of this same weakness is his embarrassment over giving introductions, which he knows
he should not in all strictness use but which he writes anyway. Moreover, since the
introductions are where Hegel encodes the suppressed erotics of his philosophic art, i.e.,
what he means to be doing as a man here and now in love with philosophy, that's exactly
\vhy everyone finds them so intriguing and often more interesting than what follows. Plato
avoids the dialectical inconsistency of such introductions, remaining truer to Hegel's own
insight that philosophy cannot ever in principle begin to prove itself, that it cannot put itself
on trial before the tribunal over which it presides as judge. Perhaps Hegelian dialectic comes
as dose as philosophical discourse ever can to an exhaustive, rationally systematic, univocal
self-explicitation. The question, though, is when or whether we really need such a thing.
Plato wrote a defense speech for philosophy, but he quite deliberately named it after
Socrates, not himself. The second major weakness of Hegelian dialectic is it's being so
forbidding and dull. This is an important criticism. It says that H egel's philosophy by and
large fails, as I noted earlier, to seduce, fails to enflame theoretical eros, fails sufficiently to
help us make insight our own. Platonic dialogue, in contrast, is remarkably seductive-the
unattractive patches notwithstanding. In fact, part of its seductiveness is to make itself
confusing and exciting by turns, whereas Hegelian dialectic plods along in the same old
difficult way page after page. Knowing that Plato can be wonderfully lucid and inspiring
from time to time, forces the reader to seek a reason and so too a meaning for the times
when the text is experienced differently. There is nothing more inspiring than the suspicion
of a hidden life, 1me vie inconnue, half-hidden depths in which we might swim if only we can
prove strong enough.
Platonic dialogue is a complex three-dimensional speech, rather than a linear,
discursive one. Its axes are drama, argument, and character, all three of which follow their
independent but mutually interpenetrating logics. Take book one of the Republic. Why does
Polemarchus interrupt? How does his account of justice follow up on the account his
father, Cephalus, seemed to give? What is the relationship between Polemarchus and
Cephalus? Who is the better man and why? What things seems good and best to
Polemarchus? What things most noble? What is there in a man like Polemarchus that
inclines him to think of justice and friendship in the way he does? H ow exactly did he get
1 1 / 20 / 98
�CARL PAGE
THE POWER &
GLORY OF PLATONIC DIALOGUE
PAGE-17
talked into agreeing that justice is trivial and base? Are his mistakes consistent with the
partial goods for which he stands? What do Socrates' examples tell us about Polemarchus's
mistakes? What is Socrates trying to do for Polemarchus? To what extent, if any, is he
successful? Why does he care about Polemarchus at all? Why does Socrates argue so
fallaciously in proving that justice does no injury? What did he understand about
Polemarchus to know he could get away with the fallacy? Why is Polemarchus so
enthusiastic in his final agreement to be a "partner in battle" with Socrates? How does all
this relate to Polemarchus's action at the very beginning, when he waylays Socrates and
Glaucon? How does it fit with his later interruption, in book five, when he objects to
women and children in common? What is Plato showing 11s about the limits of
Polemarchus's understanding of justice? About its merits? Why is Polemarchus there,
between Cephalus and Thrasymachus? And so on. Not until you have some reasonable
answer to all of these sorts questions, and scores besides, can you have begun to understand
Plato's meaning, his logos, in these four or five pages. You need to become proficient in a
multivariable calculus that simultaneously integrates along the three dimensions of drama,
argument, and character to produce a shimmering hologram of meaning. This dimensional
complexity allows the dialogue to mean more than what it says in its arguments and to reveal
more than its narrative depicts. It opens up a maximum of triangulation between uncertain
souls and their shifty speeches.
Aporia, then, is superficial. It belongs to only one or two of the relevant dimensions
and is therefore only an aspect of the whole. The characters may be in perplexity, and
maybe the reader is too, but Plato is not. His pictures of perplexity are too finely drawn to
be themselves expressions of the depicted anxieties; they are too precisely located and
elaborated not to be the subject of a higher-order interpretation. What foolishness would
impel Ol!JOne to spell out ignorance and error so intricately, and with such great pains at so
great a cost of time, if he did not have a view of what they meant? For all the reasons
examined above Plato conveys his interpretations obliquely, but that does not mean the
dialogues bear out no logos. On the other hand, Plato's logos is a delicate and subtle thing,
not easily separable from the theatre it animates. It is a sure sign of having failed to
understand Plato fully when one is forced to leave or dismiss any single part of the dialogue
as incidental, as wrapping, as form rather than content. Plato does not dress up otherwise
independent, philosophically sober propositions in gaudy, entertaining dramatic garb, as if
through some aesthetic quirk he liked to do it that way. There is indeed the thing that he
means to say, but it is not captured by the naked propositional bodies you might take to be
under the theatrical fancy-dress. As I have just indicated, for example, the philosophical
meaning of Polemarchus is more than the partially correct proposition that justice is doing
good to friends and harm to enemies. Among other things, he casts significant light on how
and why the proper discipline of spiritedness is integral to philosophy, and why friendship is
the soul of justice. Quite in accord with a principle Socrates announces in the Phaedms,
everything in the dialogue is meaningful and everything serves the overall meaning Plato
would communicate.
11/20/98
�CARL PAGE
THE POWER & GLORY Of PLATONIC DIALOGUE
PAGE-18
This raises yet another matter of philosophical tact. According to what I have just
said, it should be possible to spell out Plato's meaning in non-dramatic terms. To be a
correct translation, part of such an exposition would have to be ironical and it would have to
encompass at least the sense of all the implied erotic elements as well as the eidetic ones.
Nothing obvious prevents such a gloss, yet even if correct, it remains to ask whether such a
flattened out account could do all or even much of the work Plato intended and which the
dialogues have, in fact, done and continue to do. The answer would have to be, I think, no.
In one sense, Ideas-by which I mean the fundamental an:hai and intelligible structure of all
things-are just not a problem; the predicament is that human souls for the most part fail to
be ruled by them. That's something no amount of theory can fix.
I asked the question: what, if anything, calls for the strangeness of Plato's dialogues,
what could justify their indirection? A natural instinct, on first hearing such a question, is to
look for reasons that might force or compel the response, reasons why things could not be
done in any other way. In the present case, however, the instinct is misleading. The serious
grounds for Platonic indirection I have considered do not, I think, necessitate the dialogue
form. Without being necessitated, however, Plato's dialogues are a beautifully effective
response to the many things philosophy always finds needing to be done. In my own view,
they are the most beautifully effective response we have yet witnessed.
A beautiful, noble, and effective response to abiding necessities is certainly grounds
for praise, but this is not all there is to admire. By the ambiguous testimony of his letters
and by the seamless consistency of his dialogical irony, Plato could not have been writing as
an intellectual to express his thoughts or as a scientist to circulate his results. Perhaps it is
hard to imagine there could be any reason for writing left, besides vanity or madness. Yet,
Plato worked at something, and no one has ever doubted, despite the derangement and
indirection of the texts, that they are all somehow for the sake of philosophy. I add: for the
sake of keeping philosophy alive and well. Plato wrote for the love and care of philosophy,
for its realization and well-being in living souls as well as in real cities. He saw clearly in
what senses its husbandry, preservation, defense, and even its central truth-telling activity
called for-though without necessitating-something like his two-faced books. Among
other things, he aimed at philosophy's survival as a cultural entity in the tradition we think of
as Western civilization. In this he was successful. Unbelievably successful, as may be seen in
the fact that two-and-a-half thousand years later: here we all are, still vitally interested in what
Plato had to communicate, in what a man like Plato understood the life of wisdom to be.
Moreover, we keep being affected by his enigmatic communication, both directly as we study
and through myriad historical reverberations at work behind the scenes of our own present
educations. Even after all this time, we keep taking good things away from his amazing gift.
The dialogues, then, are the instruments of Plato's mega!opsuchia, the unhurried means of a
rare but great and noble deed, the sort of deed yearned for by all men of the highest human
excellence. Plato's great-souled project was to create the real, on-going world in which we
are all now able to carry on with philosophy; he cleared the space, he gave the laws, he holds
up the firmament.
ll /2 0 i 98
�CARL PAGE
THE POWER & GLORY OF PLATONIC DIALOGUE
PAGE-19
As a great-souled man, all honour and praise are Plato's due but we cannot expect
him to be impressed by such external rewards. His ambition was for a deed large, beautiful,
and impressive in itself. The reward for such deeds is the overwhelming pleasure of actually
doing them, though that too is hardly the central reason for which they are undertaken. No
great-souled deed can be great, if it cannot be described in terms of a single-minded
devotion that transcends selfish purpose. Yet it does not follow from this that devotion to
such an end is purely selfless. The great-souled man is himself fi1!filled by his devotion to
what transcends ordinary ambition. Thus, Plato wrote not only for others. He also wrote
for the love and care of philosophy in regard to himself, in regard to his own glories and
satisfactions as a wise, superior, and fortunate man. He also wrote his dialogues as an
exhibition of prowess, and for the sake of joy in the exhilarating exercise of his own powers
and command. In the end, Plato wrote dialogues for the same reason God created the
world: because he co11/d. No one, absolutely no one, has come anywhere near matching him
since.
11 /2 0 / 98
�
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Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
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The Power and Glory of Platonic Dialogue
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on November 20, 1998, by Carl Page as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
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Page, Carl, 1957-
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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1998-11-20
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Plato. Dialogues
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LEC_Page_Carl_1998-11-20
Friday night lecture
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Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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Reading Genesis Chapter Three
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Video recording of a lecture delivered on September 2, 2022, by William Braithwaite as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Mr. Braithwaite offers this description: "The Garden of Eden story, about Adam and Eve, what they did and how they were punished for it, is the authoritative source for the Christian doctrine of original sin. Before St. Augustine and St. Paul appropriated it for this purpose, however, the story belonged to the Hebrew Scriptures of the ancient Israelites, and Judaism has no dogma of original sin. But even before ancient rabbis put the story in writing many centuries ago, it may, some scholars suggest, have circulated orally.
If we try to imagine who first told the story, and to whom, and with what end in mind, what would we take it to be about, and what truth might we find in it? What does the story say to those who are not Christians or Jews, whether of another faith, or even atheist or agnostic? Seeking reliable speculations on such questions is the work behind this lecture."
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Braithwaite, William T. (William Thomas)
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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2022-09-02
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Bible. Genesis
Eve (Biblical figure)
David, King of Israel
Parables
Solomon, King of Israel
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English
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LEC_Braithwaite_William_2022-09-02_ac
Friday night lecture
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1
"YOU ARE THAT!"
The Upanishads Read Through Western Eyes1
© Robert Druecker, February, 2008
The original title of this lecture-"'You Are That! "'-was a quotation, from the
Chandogya Upanishad, of an exclamation made several times by a man named "Uddalaka" to
his son Svetaketu. The "That" refers to a realm or state of being, known as "Brahman." One
who experiences it is called a "knower of Brahman" (brahmavid). Uddfilaka was a knower of
Brahman, speaking to his son out of his direct experience.
The classical Upanishads are expressions of and invitations to this direct experiencing.
So, understanding them is a matter of understanding what that experiencing is like, not a matter
of believing or knowing some truths about the world. Thus, the lecture, in elucidating the
meaning of its title, will convey a sense of the experience of Brahman, which is what the
Upanishads as a whole are about.
But, of course, their ultimate aim is not simply to produce understanding in this sense, but
rather to eventuate in the actual experiencing of the Brahman-realm. Even Sankara, the most
highly esteemed expositor of the Upanishads, a man noted for his theoretical acumen, wrote: .
One should consider theoretical reflection as 100 times more efficacious than
oral instruction, and meditation as 100,000 , times more efficacious than
theoretical reflection. As for [the direct experiencing of the Brahman-realm],
it has consequences which defy all comparison. ·
The revised title of the lecture is: '"You Are That!': The Upanishads Read Through
Western Eyes." For I have followed Aristotle's recorrimendation to begin with the things .best
.
.
.
.
known to us; where 'us,' in this case, ~efers to the St John's community. Thus,Part One will
give a sense of what the Brahman-realm is like by elaborating on an analogous experience in
Homer and Aristotle. Part Two, much of which will be delivered on Tuesday afternoon in the
Conversation Room, will elucidate the experiencing of Brahman in a more direct way.
�2
Finally, many of the writings in the Upanishads are dialogues involving a knower of
Brahman. Yajfiavalkya is the central figure in the conversations in the oldest Upanishad. In
working on this lecture, I have asked him, as a knower of Brahman, for some help. So, during
the lecture Yajfiavalkya will be providing us with his sense of what it is in Homer or Aristotle
that is analogous to the Brahman-realm.
�3
Part One: vos1v and Jl.w:iul (Conjunction)
A.Homer
Homer frequently refers to human beings or gods waking up to, or realizing, the full
significance of a situation (voEtv) or to their ability to do so (v6oc; in some uses). 2
Paradigmatically the verb in the aorist expresses an individual's sudden flash of insight.
Resisting his parents' entreaties, Hektor has held his position, as he watches Achilleus coming
toward him. He is pondering what might happen should he retreat or should he offer to return
Helen; but then Achilleus closes upon him: "And trembling took hold of Hektor when the
realization suddenly struck him [what single combat against Achilleus really meant], and he
could no longer stand his ground there, but ... fled, frightened ... " (I, 22.136-37). 3 When the
progressive aspect is used, it conveys the process of pieces gradually fitting together to form a
wholly new picture, as when Theoklymenos tells the suitors that the ·realization is dawning upon
him that there is an evil on the way which they will not be able to avoid (0, 20.367-70).
Because of the intensity of the character's involvement in the situation, the experienced
shift in significance is often accompanied by strong emotion, as seen in the Hektor-example
earlier. When the insight concerns an individual object, instead of a situation, then the
realization is always accompanied by such emotion; it is as if the shift in the meaning of the
situation were compressed into a single thing or person. So, Menelaos, having caught sight of
Paris, leaps down from his chariot. Then "when [Paris] realized the full significance of
· Menelaus standing there among the champions, the heart was shaken within him'~ (I, 3 .29-31~
the full significance being that Menelaus is drawing near, full of an overwhelming desire to kill
Paris.
�4
'Realization of significance' has a variety of meanings that spread over a directional arc. 4
A character begins in a situation in which he has already seemingly recognized (ytyvrocnct::tv) the
surrounding things or people as definite individuals that are familiar. Then their real significance
is awakened to, a corresponding emotional impact is experienced, and a way of dealing with the
newly perceived situation comes to light and the will to do so arises. Thus, the present naturally
extends itself into the future. When the primary meaning is at either end of this arc, the other
parts of the arc are co-present. Thus, when the emphasis is on present clarity of mind, as when
Kirke tells Odysseus that no magic can work on his ability always to realize what is the real
meaning of the situation in which he finds himself, the insightful character of his future aims,
plans, and actions is also on her mind (0, 10.329). Or when the accent is on willing an action in
the future, it iilVolves a clear vision in the present (e.g., I, 144-49).
The realization of significance may or may not be prepared for by a thought process. But
when it is, it itself is distinct from the preceding reasoning, in the same way as 'seeing' one of
Euclid's proofs is different from figuring out how it is justified in terms of previous propositions.
Yajfiavalkya now observed to me that realizing Brahman, too, could be characterized as
including an emotional response, joy (ananda), and a way of acting, calm responsiveness to the
whole situation.
The realization may penetrate to great depth and extend {ar in space and time, like
Theoklymenonos's referred to earlier or like that involving Athena when she speaks to Achilleus
as he is drawing his sword to kill Aga.inemnon-the breadth and depth of which took a whole
Dean's Lecture to elucidate a couple of years ago.
The more intense the situation and the deeper and broader the realization, the more likely
it is that the characters are raised above their ordinary abilities, so that they are able to see almost
�5
all the implications and consequences of the situation with unusual clarity and to act with
extraordinary foresight. This experience of being raised above the ordinary is a divine
manifestation. 5
Homer most often mentions Athena and Apollo in such moments. For instance,
Odysseus's sudden realization of the true meaning of return-its being the right time to reveal
himself to Telemachos-is the presencing of Athena (0, 16.155ff). And Hektor's sudden
waking up to danger when he was about to oppose Achilleus is Apollo's manifesting himself (I,
20.375ff). These two examples point to the difference between the two gods. Athena remains
untroubled and serene in the midst of action while she is discerning at every juncture what the
instant requires, is planning the deed with precision, and is poised and ready to bring it about
energetically. Apollo, on the other hand, is associated with a cognitive attitude of stately
objectivity and a ranging gaze, distance and freedom, clarity and good form. He is the god of the
saving, or preserving, awareness (crcocppocruvri) expressed in the Delphic dictum, "Know
thyself," meaning, 'Realize what human beings really are, that is, how great a distance separates
them from the omnitemporal gods' (HG, 216-17, 215, 52, 57, 59, 78-79, 66). Yajiiavalkya
remarked that such traits as serenity in the midst of action, the freedom of a ranging gaze, and
saving, or preserving, awareness pertain to the Brahman-realm as well.
In a manifestation of Athena or Apollo, the god is revealed as the very essence of the
realization. That is, the realization's ultimate meaning is that it is a ray of the divine illumining
· human life. Homer realizes that the complete lucidity in which we sometimes act Is a connection
. with something superior to us, even though we think of it as a quality of our own minds. In
decisive moments what a warrior realizes is both himself and the deity together (HG, 7, 247, 174,
184-85) . .Yajiiavalkya commented that in the Upanishads, this non-separateness of the human
�6
and 'divine' is known as "non-duality" (advaita; BU, N.3,32): "Whoever meditates on a
divinity that is other (anyiim) [than himself], thinking, 'This [god] is one (anyah), I am another
(anyah),' does not know ['I am Brahman']." (BU, 1.4.10).
Homer's recognition of moments in which the divine and the human are non-dual is
sharply opposed to a view that would see Athena and Apollo as external 'causes' of the events he
is narrating (HG, 213). Yajiiavalkya said that, somewhat similarly, we are invited to awaken to
Brahman not as an external cause but rather as what is most profound in our experience.
When the god is present in moments of non-duality, the warrior's ego and personality
recede into the background (HG, 241f). That sort of impersonality, which also characterizes our
moments of experiencing the truth of a Euclidean proposition, is inherent in the Brahman-realm,
according to Yajiiavalkya.
The divine coming-to-presence has been said to occur at "the critical moment when
human powers suddenly converge, as if charged by electric contact, on some insight, some
resolution, some deed." Lightning comes forth from the clouds to strike buildings or trees which
have risen from the earth; so, too, the divine suddenly emerges from the background to shock an
individual only when the individual has gone forth from himself toward the background (HG, 6,
210, 195). Yajiiavalkya noted that the instant1of recognition of the Brahman realm is _also
compared to "a sudden flash oflightning" (BU, 11.3.6; cp. KeU, IV.4). Moreover, he thought
that the going-forth toward the background might be, in some way, analogous to a 'movingtowards' Brahman, going-forth involved either in practicing meditation or in coming to wonder,
'Who aml?'
While, in the examples given so far, the divine manifestation has come _in an awakening
to significance or in an elaborating of a plan, this should not lead us to think that deity is
�7
encountered in the inward turn. The appearance of the goddess is not, for instance, Achilleus' s
pondering whether to kill Agamemnon or to check his anger (I, 1.193 ), but rather the resolution
of his introspection in a flash of certitude (HG, 174, 48). Yajfiavalkya agreed that introspection
neither characterizes the Brahman-realm nor is a means thereto. However, there is, he said, a
different sort of inward turn which can facilitate its realization.
There are many instances in which a god is there, at a moment when none of the
characters is aware of it. But at times, when awakening to the full significance of his situation, a
warrior may realize that his very awakening is itself the manifestation of a god. An interesting
example occurs when Poseidon appears to the Aiantes in the likeness ofKalkas. At first neither
brother is aware of the presence of a god; but, after Poseidon departs like a hawk, Aias son of
Oi:leus realizes that some god, whom he does not recognize, has addressed them, while
Telemonian Aias notices only his own increased strength and energy (I, 13.43-80). On other
occasions the human being recognizes the god by name--sometimes only after the encounter, but
sometimes already at its inception (HG, 207-08).
A god may be especially 'close' to a particular individual in that the human being
regularly displays the qualities of the particular god, as Athena acknowledges Odysseus does (0,
13.330-32; HG, 192-95). There is even one person who seems to be fully awake to
divin~
presence-Homer himself, who
sees events through and through even when the participants see only the
surface. And often when the participants sense only that a divine hand is
touching them the poet is able to name the god concerned and knows the
·
secret of his purpose. (HG, 195-96)
According to Yajiiavalkya this variation, .among human beings, in the frequency with which, and
degree to which, they notice the divine presence in moments of waking up to meaning matches a
corresponding variation in noticing Brahman.
�8
So far in Homer we have emphasized cognition. This is appropriate in that cognition in a
broad sense is the way in which we come to realize Brahman. However, it gives a distorted
picture of the world as Homer depicts it. For there are many gods-Ares, Aphrodite, Poseidon,
Hera, and others-who manifest themselves in the world in addition to the two who are
especially associated with realizing significance. Moreover, the appearance of a deity often
involves an inner phenomenon other than awakening, as when Hektor's body is "packed full of
force arid fighting strength" (I, 17.211-12) or when Athena puts "courage into the heart" of
Nausikaa (0, 6.140). Yajfiavalkya said that these phenomena of enlivening, energizing, and
strengthening were included, along with realization, in what the Upanishads call the "Inner
Controller" (antaryamin; BU, III.7.1). 6 Also, that Homer realized that they, too, were divine
manifestations shows that he did not think of non-duality as limited to cognition.
Second, a deity often manifests itself by affecting a character from outside. Most
notably, Patroklos's aristeia was put to an end by Apollo, who "stood behind him, and struck his
back and his broad shoulders with a flat
~troke
of the hand so that his eyes spun" (I, 16.791-92).
Yajfiavalkya pointed out that events like this might be echoes of Brahman as "pouring forth," or
"emitting," all things (MuU, I.1. 7). He added that just as Homer recognizes the one Apollo both
in his striking of Patrdclus and in Hektor's realization referred to earlier, so the Upanishads
express the realization that the inner controlling and the outer emitting are one, in stating: "This
Self is ... Brahman" (BU, II.5.19).
�9
B. Aristotle and Averroes
Now for help in thinking through the experiences highlighted by Homer, we turn to
Aristotle. In moments ofrealization, we are in a state of what he called "being-at-work," what
I'll call 'activity.' Activity is "complete over any time whatever"; it is not a temporal
phenomenon. In distinction from it, a motion "is in time and directed at some end ... and is
complete when it brings about that at which it aims" (NE, 1174a15-21). For example, whereas
the activity of dancing is 'all there' at each moment, the motion of learning to dance is complete
only when you've actually become a dancer.
Homer's gods Athena and Apollo are manifested in activities of ours which would be
"choiceworthy in themselves" (NE, 1144al) even if they didn't make anything in addition. The
active state of our ability to awaken to significance is what is best and most powerful in us and is
"either divine itself or the most divine of the things in us." When it is directed toward the most
divine, timeless things, it is a pure beholding (NE, 1177a13-21).
One living in this state of activity would be living a life that "is divine as compared with
a human life." Hence, Aristotle said, "one ought to immortalize" (NE, 1177b25-34). That is,
one ought to be as much as possible in this best state of activity, that of the immortals, like
Athena, in Homer or that of the impersonal divine in Aristotle. Wlien we are in that state, we are
for a period of time in the same state as the divine itself is in, over the whole oftime. 7 Moreover,
"each person would even seem to be_this [best state of activity]" (NE, 1178al). "[A]nd so the
person who loves and gratifies this is most a lover of self' (NE, l 168b33).
Yajfiavalkya commented that the Brahman-realm, too, has the characteristics of not being
a temporal phenomenon, of being a sort of pure beholding, and of being our true self. Moreover,
it, too, is impersonal, not divided up into essentially different Athena-moments and Apollo-
�10
moments. Finally, knowers of Brahman, living the life of their true self, are leading a life that
transcends the human. Thus, most of us live in ignorance of our true self.
But whereas Aristotle agrees formally with the implication of Apollo's "Know thyself,"
that we are ignorant of our true self, yet Aristotle's recognition of the true self as divine seems to
contradict Apollo's insistence on the separation between the human and the divine. Yaj:fiavalkya
said that when a similar contradiction is voiced in his tradition, the response offered is that the
contradiction is only apparent. Someone who took the "You" in "You are That!" to refer to his
ordinary sense of self, would be engaging in self-inflation. Students are encouraged to ponder
'Who am I?' as a practice, in order to shift them from the ordinary to the true sense of self. So,
Yaj:fiavalkya said, he and Aristotle could both take "Know thyself' in a double sense: 'With
respect to your ordinary sense of self, think mortal thoughts, but recognize that the true you is
divine activity.'
In On the Soul Aristotle began to sketch what might be entailed in realizing the
Aristotelian analogue to "You are That!" namely, the immortalizing involvement in the best
activity. One of Aristotle's foremost interpreters, Averroes has worked out a detailed portrait in
color, which fills in Aristotle's black-and-white sketch in a way that has interesting parallels to
'the Upanishadic picture. To that portrait'we now turn.8
We shall now refer to this best state of activity by its customary name in philosophical
texts, "intellection." In Aristotelian fashion Averroes began his account of intellection with what
is clearer to us and ended it with what is clearer by nature. There are three main figures in his
initial portrait-the "material intellect," the "disposed intellect," and the "agent intellect."
Averroes followed Aristotle's comparison of intellection to the action of a craft, in which
some material, like clay, receives a form, say, that of a bowl (OS, 430al0-14). When I acquire a
�11
simple intelligible, such as, 'straight line,' it is received as form by the material intellect-which,
not being corporeal, is material only in the sense that it serves as material-for. My disposed
intellect, 9 now having the acquired intelligible as an active disposition ('€~t~), is in what Aristotle
calls a first state of maintaining itself(' sxciv) in (' f,\I) its completed condition (r€A.o~), with
respect to this intelligible. Henceforth, we shall misleadingly say that it is 'in first actuality.'
The accomplished dancer, when not actually dancing, is a dancer in first actuality. When she is
actually dancing, she said to be a dancer 'in second actuality.' So, too, when I am actively
contemplating the intelligible 'straight line,' perhaps in the course of a demonstration, my
intellect is in second actuality.
According to Aristotle, "the soul never engages in intellection without an appearance"
(43 la24), which Averroes takes to mean imaginative appearance. 10 Thus, when I am led up to
(' cnayroyft) a particularly suggestive instance, say a good image of a straight line, that image is
what specifies that the material intellect will receive the intelligible 'straight line.' Averroes said
that the material intellect, as so determined by my imagination, 11 is "conjoined" with it and that
my disposed intellect is precisely this conjunction of the material intellect with my imagination.
One of the unusual features of Averroes's interpretation is that according to him there is
only one material intellect. My disposed intellect and your disposed intellect are the results of its
conjunctions with the different images in our respective imaginations; we actualize it differently.
In this way the one material intellect is said to be incidentally many. 12 Moreover, since my
imagination is corporeal, therefore, the intelligibles of mundane things in me and, consequently,
my disposed intellect itself are generable and corruptible. 13 Yajiiavalkya observed that one
might also say that the one Brahman is incidentally many individual selves (jfvatman).
�12
Now, before the intelligible 'straight line' can be received by the material intellect, what
is irrelevant in the image in which it is 'embodied' must be taken away ('acpmpsro). This
abstraction brings it into the state of actual intelligibility. To elucidate this act of abstraction,
Averroes referred to another of Aristotle's comparisons: The passage from potential to actual
intelligibility is like a color's transition from potential visibility to actual visibility when the
lights in a room are turned on. The 'light' that illumines the darkness of the image, producing
the abstraction of the latent intelligible, is the agent intellect.
However, this picture of the agent intellect as shining from the outside onto a potential
intelligible embedded in an image is only the way it first appears to us. Averroes said that if we
consider its role in the intellectual insights we have when we draw conclusions from the
intelligibles that we have acquired-perhaps, that one and only one straight line may be drawn
between two points-we come to a deeper view. In reality the agent intellect is related to the
intelligibles of my disposed intellect as form to material. It is somewhat as though the agent
intellect were a light 'full' of Color itself. What really happens when it shines on an image is
that the image's conjunction with Color itself draws out of the latter a particular color, one which
)
had been potentially within Color itself. Then that particular color is received by the material
intellect. Even in my acts of intellecting simple intelligibles in the world, the agent intellect is
incidentally in partial conjunction with my imagination. 14 I am to a degree intellecting it, so that
it, then, is at work as the form of my disposed intellect. 15
For Averroes this understanding of the agent intellect meant that it is itself the source of
the intelligibility of the corporeal world. For since the image arose on the basis of sense
perception of things in the world, the potential intelligibles in my imagination are due to the
potential intelligibles in the things in the world. Consequently, he took the agent intellect to be
�13
Aristotle's unmoved mover from the Metaphysics (1072b18-30; 1075a5-11). Hence, there is
only one agent intellect; and it is its very activity of unchanging, eternal self-intellection.
Correlatively the potential intelligibles of things in the world are their actualities, their being-atwork maintaining themselves in their respective states of completeness. The agent intellect is
responsible for their potential intelligibility in the following sense. For each of them its state of
completeness is the closest state to the agent intellect's self-intellection that its materials are
capable of attaining. 16 Yajiiavalkya noted that the agent intellect as responsible for all
intelligible being is somewhat analogous to the one source of all existence in his tradition.
But how can the self-directed intellection of the agent intellect be responsible for our
intellection of the intelligibles in things outside of itself in the world, when it and the object of its
intellection are absolutely one? As reflexively turned toward itself, it is not aware of the
multiplicity of the potential intelligibles of mundane things as such. Yet it nevertheless does
comprehend them, somewhat in the way that the craft of pottery-making, in a sense,
comprehends the forms of all the bowls for which it could be responsible. But to be actively
responsible for the intellection of this intelligible on this occasion, the agent intellect must also
be 'turned outwards,' as it were, away from itself, in order to shine on the appearances of
mundane things, in hu'man beings' imaginations.
As outward-turned, prior to illuminating the appearance, it seems to be lacking any
intelligible. And yet any one of them can be brought into focus from itself by an image. Thus,
surprisingly, the agent-intellect-as-turned-outward is pure potentiality, pure material-for; it is the
material intellect.
Ill order to appear as such, that is, as empty of intelligibles of mundane things,
it must become "temporarily ignorant of itself." 17
�14
This self-forgetfulness is concretely realized by its conjunction with our imaginations.
By virtue of that conjunction, the agent intellect becomes 'ignorant' of being the self-intellecting
source of all intelligibility; it appears, instead, in each of us in a double form-first, as our
partially actualized receptivities for intelligibles (our disposed intellects) and, second, as light
eliciting those intelligibles by abstraction from our images. At this point Yajfiavalkya interjected
that the agent intellect's ignorance of itself seems to be in amazing agreement with the role of
ignorance in the Upanishads: A knower of Brahman "knows knowledge and ignorance, both of
them, together" (IU, 11). For Brahman, too, turns outward, so that ignorance, that is, awareness
of multiplicity, is one of its aspects. 18 But Brahman is both knowledge and ignorance; the two
are inseparable. 19
From the human point of view, as I learn more, the agent intellect becomes the form of
my disposed intellect to an ever greater degree. In this way my three principal differences from
it will decrease. First, in acquiring more intelligibles, my disposed intellect becomes less and
less a partial view of the agent intellect. Second, in advancing to intelligibles which are less and
less referred to the corporeal world, my disposed intellect becomes more pure.
20
Third, in
coming to ever more encompassing intelligibles, it approaches the agent intellect's unitary
VlSIOn.
Ultimately, while still "in this life,"21 I may arrive at the point where I have acquired all
the intelligibles. 22 Then I will have achieved a state of complete conjunction23 with the agent
intellect. My disposed intellect will have lost all traces of individuality, 24 which are what made
it my disposed intellect; it will have perished as such. All of me that is not intellect is "cut off'
from my intellect, which is identical with the agent intellect. 25 In this sense the state of complete
conjunction has been said to involve an "existential break" from the world.
26
Once again
�15
Yajfiavalk:ya was surprised to recognize in this existential break an analogue in the Aristotelian
tradition, at such a deep experiential level, to a prominent feature of the realization of Brahman.
In complete conjunction I experience myself permanently27 as shining forth intelligibility,
but this 'myself is not the self! used to think I was. For the conjunction removes what had been
preventing my recognition of the ag~nt intellect as being my form. 28 Averroes said that then the
agent intellect, united with us as our form, functions as our sole operative principle. 29
We
might wonder what life in this state of conjunction would be like. One suggestion is that I might
experience it as "a wakeful loss of rationality," a loss of consciousness of my humanity. 30 I
would not be engaged in thinking things out; I would not be conscious of myself as an
individual, as a member of the human species.
Alternatively, guided somewhat by his own experience, Yajfiavalkya proposed that
perhaps I might be aware of myself (what Aristotle in the Ethics poi.rited to as my true self)
engaged in self-intellection, while simultaneously being aware of experiencing my ordinary self
involved in its everyday activities against this backdrop. Yajfiavalkya mentioned two
possibilities, the second of which was not analogous to his own experience. First, in each
instance of intellection, I could perhaps experience the agent intellect as transitioning from
unitary self-intellection to the offering of an aspect of itself to my imagination. Second,
analogous to the end of the path outlined in the Yoga-Sutras (that is, kaivalya), 31 it could be that
engaged in self-intellection I ignore and desist from everyday activities, and so, ultimately,
wither away and die_. 32
�16
1
NEH-supported lectures given at St. John's College, Annopolis, on February 15 and 19, 2008 and
dedicated to the memory of Ralph Swentzell, who did so much to further the study of Eastern Classics at St. John's
College.
2
This and the following few paragraphs are based on K. von Fritz, "NOO:E and NOEIN in the Homeric
Poems," Classical Philology 38. (1943), 79-93.
3
The translations from Homer are based upon those listed in the bibliography.
4
This "directional arc" is analogous, at a higher level, to Merleau-Ponty's arc intentionnel on ~e level of
sensing (Merleau-Ponty, 158).
5
The following few paragraphs are based on W. Otto, The Homeric Gods: The Spiritual Significance of Greek
Religion (New York: Pantheon Books, 1954).
6
The Inner Controller is depicted mythologically as follows:
He entered in here right to the tips of the nails, as a razor slips into a razor-case ....
When he breathes he is called 'breath'; when he speaks, 'speech'; when he sees,
'eye'; when he hears, 'ear'; when he thinks, 'mind.' They are just the names of his
actions. Whoever meditates on any one of these does not know [the Self], for [the
Self] is not completely active in any one of them. One should meditate on them as
[being] simply the Self (BU, 1.4.7)
7
Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1075a7-l l: "So, the condition the human intellect .. . is in at some period of time
... is the condition the intellection that intellects itself is iii over the whole of time." Cf.: "For the gods, the
whole of life is blessed, and for human beings it is so to the extent that there is in it some likeness to such a
state of activity" (NE, l l 78b25-26).
8
I am indebted to my colleague, Michael Blaustein, for a: very fruitful recent conversation about Averroes.
This section is based upon the works of Altmann, Black, Blaustein, Hyman, Ivry, Leaman, and Zedler
listed in the bibliography. Leaman and Zedler have been particularly helpful for the early part, but I have
taken most of it from Black. In the later part I have relied heavily on Blaustein's working out of the details
of the relation between agent and material intellects and have made significant use of Altmann and lvry,
especially the latter's thoughts about conjunction while we are still alive. However, responsibility for any
.
errors that there may be in the interpretation of Averroes is mine alone.
9
OSl...11 Y ~('aql bi al-ma/aka), which means intellect in natural disposition, aptitude, faculty; intellectus
in habitu.
10
Also: "the intellective [part of the soul] intellects the [intelligible] looks in appearances" (43 lb2).
I accept Nussbaum's (1978) suggestion about the meaning of <pavwia. It is based on such
passages as the following 428al, 7, 14ff, & 29ff; b30fi), wherein the link between <pav•o"ia and <paivi::cr0at
seems compelling.
11
In fact, for Averroes the imagination or, more properly, the cogitative power-which, together with the
imagination and memory; prepares what is given in sensation, so that, when illumined by the agent
intellect, the intelligible look can appear through and in-form the material intellect-is a fourth intellect, the
passible intellect (LC, 449.174, cp. 409.640).
"The cogitative power has the following functions : it can make an absent object appear as though
present; it can compare and distinguish the re-presented_objects with each other; it can judge whether a
given re-presented object bears a relation to a directly presented sense intention" (Zedler, 1954, 441).
12
Zedler, 1951, 175.
13
Yet because the human species is eternal, the succession of human souls in which intellection ofintelligibles of
mundane things occurs ensures the continuity ofintellection in the material intellect and the omnitemporality of the
intelligible looks of mundane things as such. Through the repeated presentation of potential intelligibles in
imaginative appearances, this succession "provides a replica in time and in matter of the eternal" intellection of the
agent intellect (Zedler, 1951, 173). It is possible that the belief that souls migrate into different bodies in succession
is a reflection in the form of popular myth of the truth of the omnitemporal unity of the material intellect in the
multiplicity of disposed intellects (Altmann, 82).
14
The agentintellect in this incidental connection would be what Aristotle referred to as the intellect that enters
from outside the door": "It remains then that intellect alone enters additionally into [the seed of a human being]
from outside the door (0upa0ev) and that it alone is divine, for corporeal being-at-work has nothing in common with
its being-at-work" (De Gen. 736b27). Cf:
�17
But the intellect seems to come to be in [us] while being an independent thing, and not to be
destroyed... . [I]ntellecting or contemplating wastes away because something else in us is destroyed,
but it is itself unaffected (without attributes). But thinking things through and loving or hating are
affections (attributes) not of the intellect but of that which has intellect, insofar as it has it. For this
reason, when the latter is destroyed, the intellect neither remembers nor loves, for these acts did not
belong to it but to the composite being which has perished; the intellect is perhaps something more
divine and is unaffected (OS, 408bl8ff).
What Averroes actually says is that the incidental connection constitutes a "disposition" [ ..il~I
(Isti'dad), which means readiness, willingness, preparedness, inclination, tendency, disposition, propensity;
dispositio] of the agent intellect, but one located within human souls. It is a disposition to receive the
intelligible looks of mundane things. Thus, the material intellect is in reality the agent-intellect-as-havingsuch-a-disposition-in-human-beings.
15
"[T]he material intellect is perfected by the agent intellect and intellects if' (Blaustein, 285; italics
added).
16
Based on Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1072bl2: "[I]t is beautiful and in that way a source."
17
Blaustein, 214-15.
18
Aurobindo, 61-62 and 94.
19
Aurobindo, 58 and 72.
20
When my disposed intellect is actively engaged in intellecting an intylligible look, it is also intellecting
itself, since, as Aristotle points out, the intellect is one with what it intellects, in that the second actuality of
both is identical, as lumber's being built is one with the activity of building. In contemplating itself as
informed by the intelligible look, my intellect is also directed toward the image, which specified which
look was to be received, in the same way in which, when we look at a painting, we are directed toward the
scene which we see in it. However, since the mundane thing toward which the intellect is directed via the
image is not pure intelligibility, therefore, the disposed intellect's self-intellection is not pure selfintellection; its act ofintellection is not absolutely one with its object ofintellection (Blaustein, **). In this
way it differs from the self-intellection of the agent intellect. For the object of the agent intellect's
intellection does not point beyond itself.
21
lvry, 83.
22
What had been my intellect would now be either fully (Blaustein, 272, 283) or partly assimilated to the
agent intellect. That is, either 'I' would be engaged in intellection of everything intelligible or, having
abandoned all the contingent aspects of my intellection, I would be focusing solely on its formal aspects,
which are supplied by the agent intellect, so that I would be participating in an aspect of the formal
governing source of the whole (Leaman, 101-03).
23
Ji......wl (ittisal) = connectedness, unitedness, union; juncture, conjunction, link; connection; contact [from
J.,..._, (wasala) =to connect, join, unite, combine, link, attach]. Continuatio =a following of one thing after
another, an unbroken series, a connection, continuation, succession [from continuare =to join together in
uninterrupted succession, to make continuous]. Wasala may be a reformulation of Aristotle's 0\St~.
Altmann (83) states that the notion reflects Plotinus's cruvfut-rEtV [=(tr.) join together; II (intr.)
border on, lie next to; combine, be connected with]. Consider: "[W]e lift ourselves up by the part [of the
soul] which is not submerged in the body and by this conjoin at our own centres to something like the
Centre ofall things .... [W]e must suppose that [our souls conjoin] by other powers, in the way in which
that which is engaged in intellection naturally conjoins with that which is being thoroughly intellected and
that that which is engaged in intellection ... conjoins with what is akin to it with nothing to keep them
apart" (Plotinus, VI.9.8.19-30).
Altmann (83n) also mentions that Plotinus refers to his experience of union as a contact ('acpi]).
However, in Averroes "conjunction" is to be distinguished from "union": ..ib.wl (ittihad)= oneness,
singleness, unity; concord, unison, unanimity; combination; amalgamation, merger, fusion; union [from ..i:.._,
(wahada) =to be alone, unique; II to make into one, unite, unify; to connect, unite, bring together,
amalgamate, merge]. In Greek the corresponding word is 'tvmcru; = combination into one, union.
24
In its perfected state as engaged in intellection of the agent intellect, the disposed intellect is called the
"intellect that has arrived" (intellectus adeptus).
25
Blaustein, 272.
26
Altmann, 74, characterizing the position of Averroes' teacher.
27
Ivry, 83.
�18
28
Blaustein, 284. Cp. further: "[T]he material intellect's awareness of itself even when it is not thinking of
any intelligible form .... is itself kind of actuality, however empty. Averroes claims that this kind of selfawareness is in fact the obverse of the [agent] intellect's fully conscious awareness of itself; the material
intellect's awareness of its own potentiality is a dim awareness of its actuality as the [agent] intellect."
29
It is interesting to note that with respect to conjunction, the agent intellect exercises all four kinds of
responsibility that Aristotle describes in the Physics. It is responsible for my attainment of conjunction in
functioning as my end (tf:A.oi;). Moreover, it is responsible for the motion oflearning, by which I approach
conjunction; for my learning is really its producing intelligibles in me by revealing itself to me as the form
of my disposed intellect (Blaustein, 276-77). Since the agent intellect is what I am more and more coming
to intellect and, so, to be, it is also responsible for conjunction in the way a form is. Finally, it is also
responsible as material, since the material intellect is ultimately identical with it. The same could be said of
Brahman, with the key difference that its responsibility is not limited to the realm of intelligibility.
30
Blaustein, 272.
31
Patafijali, IV.34; see also Feuerstein's comment (p. 145). Kaivalya is "the aloneness" of seeing.
32
Finally, as far as Averroes' position with respect to individual immortality goes, there are two interesting
possibilities. He may have thought that the only immortality was the impersonal immortality of the state of
conjunction and that philosophers were orienting their lives accordingly. The belief in personal
immortality on the part of ordinary people would then be the closest approximation to the truth of which
they were capable. On the other hand, he may have held that while a few intellects may attain conjunction
of, all souls are immortal (Zedler, 1954, 451-52). There is a somewhat similar divergence in the
Upanishadic tradition between Sankara's position that the individual self is in a sense unreal and
Ramanuja's view that individual selves, while not independent, are real.
a
�19
Part Two: Cit (Pure Awareness)
To begin the final section, we return to Aristotle. In the Nichomachean Ethics, he states:
[O]ne who is seeing is aware ('mcr8cive-rat) that he is seeing, and one who is hearing
[is aware] that he is hearing, ... whenever we are perceiving [we are aware] that we
are perceiving and whenever we are engaged in intellection (vocoµev) [we are aware]
that we are engaged in intellection (l l 70a29-3 l). 1
To what aspect of experience is Aristotle pointing here? The prevalent view has been that he
means that, say, perceptual consciousness is accompanied by a reflection on, or a thought about,
that consciousness:2 'I know that I'm looking at you seated there before me.' However, this
seems to occur only intermittently. Hence, an alternative interpretation has been proposed3 that
perceptual consciousness is always selfaware, aware (of) itself,4 but not conscious of itself,
although, at any given time, we may notice selfawareness to a greater or lesser degree.
Yajfiavalkya emphasized to me that it is only through diligent practice that I could learn to
recognize the difference between reflective consciousness and selfawareness in my own
expenence.
To clarify the difference bet_ween selfawareness and reflective consciousness, we shall
draw upon some descriptions of experience by the philosopher J.-P. Sartre. 5 Consciousness is
necessarily always aware (of) itself, but precisely as being conscious of an object beyond itself.
"[T]his awareness (of) consciousness ... is not positional; that is, consciousness is not for itself
its own object. Its object is outside or'l.t by nature .... We shall call such a consciousness
'consciousness of the first degree' ... " (S, 23-14). In this lecture 'consciousness' will always
-mean positional consciousness, consciousness of ari object.
Let us take as an example of first-degree consciousness my perceptual consciousness-ofthe-microphone-on-the-lectern-say, in the mode of staring-at. 6 That perceptual consciousness
is not an object for itself, whereas the mike-on-the-lectern is an object for it. But in each such
�20
act of consciousness, there lives an attentive presence by virtue of which the consciousness is
aware (of) itself. When, as is usually the case, the attentive presence goes unnoticed, we
experience only a dim awareness (of) consciousness.
Yaj:fiavalkya interjected that in his tradition this awareness is called the "witness" (sakshz;
SU, Vl.12-14) and the selfaware quality of consciousness is called "self-luminousness"
(svajyotir). He added that this is what he was referring to when he said: "'You cannot see the
seer of seeing; you cannot hear the hearer of hearing; you cannot think of the thinker of thinking;
you cannot perceive the perceiver of perceiving'" (BU, IIl.4.2). And: "'It is the unseen seer, the
unheard hearer, the unthought thinker, the unperceived perceiver. Other than this there is no
seer, ... hearer, .. . perceiver"' (BU, 7.23). I responded that Sartre seemed to agree with him that
this awareness cannot be the object of consciousness: This sphere "is a sphere of absolute
existence, that is, of pure spontaneities, which are never objects ... " (S, 77).
As opposed to this selfaware, first-degree consciousness-of-objects, which makes up
most of our waking lives, there arises from time to time "a consciousness directed onto [the firstdegree] consciousness, [that is,] a consciousness which takes [the first-degree] consciousness as
its object." Sartre calls it a "second-degree" or "reflecting consciousness." Whereas in the
previous case there was no duality at all to synthesize, here "we are in the preserice of a synthesis
of two consciousnesses, of which one is consciousness ofthe other." When I think, 'Staring at
this mike on the lectern is wasting time,' this act of reflective consciousness involves a synthesis
of the thinking consciousness and the reflected-upon consciousness-of-the-microphone.
Moreover, just like a first degree consciousness, second-degree consciousness, here, my
thinking, is selfaware (S, 28-29).
-
When the thinking consciousness posits the previously unreflected-upon staring
consciousness as its object, it is not its own staring that it is positing. What the reflecting
�21
consciousness exclaims about the staring, concerns not itself, but the staring consciousness,
which is reflected upon. Hence, what reflecting consciousness is turns out to be selfaware
consciousness of another, prior, selfaware consciousness, which, in tum, is consciousness of an
object that is not a consciousness. It is truly re-fleeting, that is, bending backwards, to look at an
earlier moment of consciousness.
The fact that it is not its own staring that the thinking consciousness posits in reflecting
on the staring consciousness raises the question whether the I that seems to be thinking "is that of
the consciousness reflected upon" and not, in fact, an I supposed to be "common to the two
superimposed consciousnesses." Indeed, one suspects that the reason why every reflection
possesses a sense of self is that the reflective act itself gives birth to the sense of self in the
consciousness that is reflected upon (S, 28-29). 7 Sartre offers an example in order to test this
hypothesis:
... I was absorbed just now in my reading. I am going to seek to recall the
circumstances of my reading. . . . Thus I am going to revive ... also a certain thickness
. of un-reflected-upon consciousness, since the objects were able to be perceived only
by that consciousness and remain relative to it. That consciousness must not be
posited as the object of my reflection; on the contrary, I must direct my attention onto
the revived objects, but without losing sight of the un-reflected-upon consciousness,
while maintaining a sort of complicity with it and making an inventory of its content
in a non-positional way. The result is,,not in doubt. While I was reading, there was
consciousness of the book, of the heroes of the novel, but the I was not inhabiting that
consdousm;ss ... (S, 30; second set of italics added)
Here Sartre reawakens the original selfaware consciousness and dwells in the awareness.
That awareness is also a precondition for reflection. Should he reflect, 'I was absorbed in
my reading,' then, instead of dwelling in the awareness-component of the original consciousness,
he would, as it were, transform it into an act of consciousness, the object of which is the original
consciousness, (of) which the awareness was aware. An I is present to that second-order
consciousness. 8 So, we m~y call it 'self-consciousness.'
�22
Sartre goes on to propose how, based upon this I
of self as
or reflection, I go on to construct a sense
aunity, first, of states, like, for example, my hatred of Peter, then, of actions, like my
playing a piano sonata or driving to DC, and, finally, of qualities, like my spitefulness. For
instance, let us suppose a first-order consciousness of disgust and anger, together with the
perception of Peter. If the self-consciousness reflected only on what was appearing in the firstorder consciousness, it would be thinking, 'I feel disgusted with Peter.' But instead, the angry
disgust at Peter appears as a profile, or perspectival view, of a disposition, 'hatred of Peter,'
similarly to the way in which a house will show itself to me in different profiles, depending upon
where I am standing. The hatred appears to be showing a 'side' of itself through the momentary
experience of angry disgust. For the self-consciousness the angry disgust appears to be
emanating from the hatred. On a later occasion, perhaps, the hatred will itself appear to
refledion as an actualization of a quality of spitefulness, which is in Me (S, 45-46, 51, 53). But
in neither case does the self-consciousness realize that the hatred or the spitefulness is arising in
the moment of reflection; rather it supposes that the state or the quality was already there in the
first-order consciousness. 9
This process resulting in a sense of self leads me to say things like "my consciousness,"
when in fact "[t]he I is not the owner of consciousness; it is the object of consciousness" (S, 77).
Yajfiavalkya noted that a process of construction of the sense of self (aham-kara) figures
prominently in the Upanishadic tradition, too. It leads to the arising of many fears and desires,
which, in turn, function as barriers to the realization of Brahman by keeping us 'glued' to
objects. I responded that here, too, there is a remarkable agreement with Sartre, who wrote:
"But perhaps the essential role [of the sense of self] is to mask to consciousness its own
spontaneity. . . . Hence, everything happens as if consciousness ... were hypnotizing itself over
that sense of self, which it constituted" (S, 81-82).
�23
Usually we do not notice the awareness-aspect of consciousness because we are so taken
up with what is appearing to consciousness. Yet on occasion awareness may stand out in our
experience. For instance, some people are engaged in a heated discussion at an outdoor cafe. A
nearby car suddenly backfires. Several of the participants may be so caught up in the
conversation that they don't even notice the loud sound. Others may be startled and shift their
attention to the street. But someone who was anchored in awareness would notice, but not be
jarred by, the sound.
Another example: On a good day the football quarterback Joe Montana, at the top of his
game, would experience a pass play as follows. 10 He was conscious of the linemen rushing at
him, of his receivers running downfield, and so on. But instead oflooking with hurried, anxious
glances, he experienced an awareness spread over the whole unfolding scene. All the players
seemed to be moving in slow motion, and everything appeared with great clarity and
distinctness. He was keenly aware of his own body, the motions of his limbs and an overall
sense of relaxation, as his arm drew back and the ball headed toward the receiver. 11 Taken by
itself this example may mislead us into thinking that awareness is dependent on the attainment of
a certain l~vel of skill, in this case, that of an MVP quarterback. But the previous example and
the following one make it clear that this is not the case.
A third illustration: Some automobile drivers-when they are not too distracted by their
thoughts--experience freeway traffic as follows: 'First, one driver cuts me off; then a slowpoke
is holding me up. My consciousness narrows to focus on the offending driver; and, irritated, I
react by honking or suddenly changing lanes.' Another driver may perceive the same cars on the
beltway as if they were moving in a force field. She is aware of that field as calling forth the
alterations in her driving required in order to maintain a smooth flow of traffic.
�24
A fourth instance: "Surgeons say that during a difficult operation they have the sensation
that the entire operating team is a single organism, moved by the same purpose; they describe it
as a "ballet" in which the individual is subordinated to the group performance ... ~· 12
The following story shows a transition out of awareness into consciousness:
Suppose a woman is engaged in sewing something. A friend enters the room and
'begins speaking to her. As long as she listens to her friend and sews in [awareness],
she has no trouble doing both. But if she gives her 'attention to her friend's words and
·a thought arises in her mind as she thinks about what to reply, her hands stop sewing;
if she turns her attention to her sewing and thinks about that, she fails to catch
everything her friend is saying, and the conversation does not proceed smoothly. In
either case . . . . she has transformed [awareness] into thought. As her thoughts fix on
one thing, they're blank to all others, depriving the mind of its freedom. 13
This example enables us to avoid the misconception that awareness is incompatible with words.
For it was a shift in the way in which she attended to speech, or to her sewing, that led to the
woman's loss of the ability to attend to both simultaneously.
A final case, as described by Merleau-Ponty (1945): Being most of the time in the
consciousness-mode, we live in a world that "only stirs up second-hand thoughts in us." Our
mind is taken up with "thoughts, already formulated and already expressed, which we can recall
silently to ourselves and by which we give ourselves the illusion of an interior life. But this
supposed silence is in reality full of words rattling around." However, occasionally we may
"rediscover primordial silence, J.nderneath the words' rattling around." Then we pass from the
mode of consciousness-of-objects to dwell in awareness. We experience "a certain emptiness,"
"a certain lack which seeks to fill itself," to be transformed into speech (213-14). Then there can
emerge "an authentic word, one which formulates something for the first time"-such as "that of
the child who is pronouncing her first word, of the lover who is discovering his feeling" (207..,
08), or of "the writer who is saying and thinking something for the first time" (214). In the mode
of awareness, we can live through a sort of original emergence.
�25
Words usually serve to keep our thoughts moving within already formulated articulations.
They could be said to function like "preciptitates" (Niederschlage) 14 of previous 'chemical
reactions,' whether our own or others'. However, when awareness becomes prominent, it acts as
a catalyst, which facilitates a fresh chemical reaction.
All the examples manifest an awake, keen involvement in experience together with an
absence of the sense of self and of self-focused emotions and motivations from the foreground.
And each of them foregrounds a different property of awareness in turn-'unstuckness' to
objects, 'spaciousness,' not merely in the spatial and the temporal senses, responsiveness to
dynamic qualities of the surrounding field, organic connectedness with who or what 15 is in the
field, moving out of awareness with the arising of a directing I, and a sense of emptiness out of
which newness arises spontaneously.
We might say that a good seminar could give evidence of some of these signs of
increased awareness. If over time the participants have developed seminar skills, as the surgical
team developed surgical skills, it could become experienced as a ballet. Along with the
development of those skills, some of the members may have cultivated their awareness to some
degree, paralleling the range of levels of awareness in the operating team. That cultivation may
e_nable them to experience "a certain emptiness," from which an "authentic word" may emerge
with greater frequency.
Such characteristics of awareness as those listed above have-led people in certain
pursuits, such as martial arts, to seek to cultivate it, so that it will become reliably foregrounded.
In developing a painterly vision, 16 for instance, one must learn to forget what things are, in order
to see how they are actually appearing to the eye, which means, how they are coming into being
before our eyes. As Merleau-Ponty says of Cezanne: "It is the mountain that he interrogates
�26
with his gaze. What exactly does he ask of it? To unveil the means, visible and not otherwise,
by which it is making itself a mountain before our eyes." 17
We might expand on this account in the following way. As a potential painter's
awareness becomes more prominent, she no longer sees things as already 'finished off,'
but~
instead, as having a potential for greater 'aliveness.' It is as if they were calling to her to join in
their emergence. Then she may heed the appeal and begin to paint. Now it is this particular .,
piece of fruit before her that she captures "coming into being before [her] eyes" in such a way
that it can do so later before our eyes. 18
Another example of the cultivation of awareness is found in psychoanalysis. Freud, in
his recommendations on the proper attitude to be adopted by the analyst, counsels a state of mind
characterized by, first, the absence of reasoning or
deliberate attempts to select, concentrate or understand; and [second] even, equal and
impartial attention to all that occurs within the field of awareness. . . . This technique,
says Freud, " .. . consists simply in not directing one's notice to anything in particular
and in maintaining the same 'evenly suspended attention' (as I have called it) in the
face of all that one hears ... " 19
That is, the analyst deliberately withdraws from consciousness-of-objects and dwells in the
awareness component of consciousness. This open attentional attitude is to be distinguished, on
the one 1hand, from a merely passive attention, in which the mind wanders freely from object to
object, and, on the other, from a focal attentional attitude, searching for a particular meaning. 20
Partly because evenly suspended attention was criticized as unattainable,21 Freud's prescriptions
to practice it did not become integrated into psychoanalytic training programs.
However, Wilfred Bion, probably the most thoughtful psychoanalyst of the latter part of
the twentieth century, forcefully advocated this practice in the following terms:
[T]he capacity to forget, the ability to eschew desire and understanding, must be
regarded as essential discipline for the psycho-analyst. Failure to practise this
discipline will lead to a steady deterioration in the powers of observation whose
maintenance is ~ssential. The vigilant submission to such discipline will by degrees
�27
strengthen the analyst's mental powers just in proportion as lapses in this discipline
will debilitate them.
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
To attain to the state of mind essential for the practice of psycho-analysis I
avoid any exercise of memory.. . . When I am tempted to remember the events of any
particular session I resist the temptation.... If I find that some half-memory is
beginning to obtrude I resist its recall.. ..
A similar procedure is followed with regard to desires: I avoid entertaining
desires and attempt to dismiss them from my mind. For example, ... it interferes with
analytic work to permit desires for the patient's cure, or well-being or future to enter
the mind. Such desires .. . lead to progressive deterioration of [the analyst's] intuition.
[There is an aspect of ultimate reality] that is _currently presenting the unknown and
unknowable [in the consulting room]. This is the 'dark spot' that must be illuminated
by 'blindness' [that is, ignorance]. Memory and desire are 'illuminations' that destroy
the value of the analyst's capacity for observation as a leakage of light into a camera
might destroy the value of the film being exposed. 22
The effect of not following this discipline is to interpret what the patient says in terms of
what the analyst wishes or already 'knows,' thus closing her off from what may be emerging for
the frrst time in the current hour. Bion's psychoanalytic state of mind is comparable to Socratic
ignorance. Both represent an opening of oneself, in a conversation, to notice possibilities
springing up that would otherwise remain unthought.
Another area in which a practice has been advocated for the enhancement of awareness is
philosophy. In the early twentieth century, Edmund Husserl proposed pursuing wisdom by
following a path that he called "phenomenology." By this he meant an account of the things
I
appearing to you precisely in the way in which they actually appear.
Philosophy students sometimes think that studying phenomenology entails mainly
reading books. However, learning to see the things appearing to you precisely in the way in
which they actually appear takes practice. Martin Heidegger, Husserl's best known student, had
great difficulty at the beginning of his study of phenomenology.
It concerned the simple question how thinking's manner of procedure which called
itself "phenomenology" was to be carried out.~ .. My perplexity decreased slowly ...
only after I met Husserl personally in his workshop .. .. Husserl's teaching took place
in a step-by-step training in phenomenological "seeing" which at the same time
demanded that one relinquish the untested use of philosophical knowledge.... I
�28
myself practiced phenomenological seeing, teaching and learning m Husserl's
proximity after 1919.23
The phenomenological seeing that one would practice is founded on an act called "the
phenomenological reduction." While it was instituted in the service of phenomenological
philosophy, Husserl was aware of the effect it could have by itself upon the person practicing it:
Perhaps it will even turn out that the total phenomenological attitude, and the
[reduction] belonging to it, essentially has, first of all, the vocation of effecting a
complete personal transformation, which would, in the first place, be comparable to a
religious conversion, but which beyond that contains within itself the significance of
being the greatest existential transformation to which humanity as humanity is
called.24
Yajiiavalkya noted that the designation "greatest existential transformation"-like the earlier
"existential break" associated with conjunction in Averroes-fits the experience of "waking up
to" (pratibodham) Brahman as well (KeU, II.4).
In characterizing the phenomenological reduction, I shall borrow the descriptions of the
later Husserl's closest collaborator, Eugen Fink, because they are vivid and strongly suggestive
of awakening to Brahman.
25
The phenomenological reduction is a two-part act (F, 41). Husserl
called the first component of that act a "disconnection" (Ausschaltung), or an "epoche," a
suspension ('s7toxft), of the "natural attitude," the attitude in which we take things for granted, or
as a matter of course (selbstverstdndlich).
Disconnection means that you deliberately abstain from all beliefs; you inhibit your
accepting of all the things you take as what 'counts' (Geltendes) for you (F, 3 9-40). You cease
living in acts of positional consciousness in Sartre's sense. As we observed Sartre doing, while
remaining disconn.ected you turn your attention from the objects of consciousness to the
consciousn~ss-of-objects.
You are not caught up with objects, but are attentively.'spread' over
the whole of consciousness~of-objects, without positing that as
an object. And you alter your
mode of attention from an active searching-for to a receptive letting-things-come. You are
�29
learning to do something involuntary, somewhat like preparing to receive "the visitation of
sleep," which comes in the way as the god Dionysus visits his followers, when they no longer are
distinct from the role they are playing. 26 You are not gradually acquiring things in the way the
disposed intellect acquires intelligibles.
The disconnection includes the "nullification" of the sense of yourself as an empirical
human being-it "un-humanizes" (entmenschlicht) you-in that it "lays bare the ... onlooker"
"already at work" in you, into which you now "fade away" (F, 40). In the terminology of this
lecture, you disidentify with your sense of self; and you pass into awareness rather than in
consciousness. Yajfiavalkya interjected that, involved in the realization of Brahman, there is a
similar correlation of the "de-construction of the sense of self' (nir-aham-kiira) with a fading
away into the onlooker, that is, the "witness," which was already at work.
You are now in a position to notice precisely what appears to you in just the way in
which it appears. As with Freud's evenly suspended attention, all the phenomena are treated
equally; none is assumed in advance to have priority over the others. As in the case of painterly
vision, you are not imposing your knowledge on your experiencing; you are operating 'prior' to
your identification of things or events. Your going backwards involves a sort of reversal of the
outward-turning action ofthe~agent intellect. For, viewed on one level, the agent intellect
elicited intelligibles from their latent state in the appearances, while the disconnection goes back
behind those intelligibles, which, due to language, are already at work in our ordinary experience
of the appearances. In its receptive attentiveness the disconnection has an 'empty' relationship
to experience, perhaps somewhat like the agent intellect in its 'empty' state as material intellect.
The second component of the phenomenological reduction is a leading-back, the reducing proper. 27 In it, "while explicitly inquiring backwards behind the acceptednesses ... with
respect to your belonging to the world," the onlooker blasts open (sprengen) with insights your
�30
"being held captive by your captivation" (Befangenheit) with the world. You experience this as
a "breakthrough" (Durchbruch; FK, 348). As a result you discover for the first time that
underlying all of your experiences has been a primordial conviction (Urdoxa in Husserl), an
unformulated, implicit acceptance of the world and of yourself as belonging to it (F, 40-41 ).
Here "world" refers, not to the collection of all things, but to what is originally given as a
universal background, i:h the way a horizon is given for vision. While particular beliefs of yours
may have occasionally broken down, that did not shake your implicit acceptance of the horizon.
You are now sharing in the onlooker's awareness of the world, which is the "universally
flowing and continuing [world-]apperception," the "underground" (Untergrund) out of which
every act of consciousness springs up.
In this sense phenomenology is said to make the
ultimate ground of the world available to an experience (FK, 349, 352, 340),28 one in which we
experience "how ... the world is coming about for us."29
Yajfiavalkya accepted that painterly vision, evenly suspended attention, and the
phenomenological reduction are at least partial Brahman-experiences, ones that go beyond the
spontaneously arising Brahman-moments on the football field or on the highway. However, he
pointed out two differences. First, they are cultivated in the service of other ends, painting,
healing patients, or pursuing wisdom, whereas realization of Brahman is the supreme end (BU,
IV.3.22), pursued for its own sake. Second, in the other contexts awareness is to be actualized
only on particular occasions, before the canvas, in the consulting room, or in the
phenomenological "workshop," whereas one remains continually in the Braliman-realm.
I responded that, according to Husserl, in going about the course of ordinary life, the
phenomenologist has the epoche as "an active-dispositional30 attitude to which we resolve
ourselves once and for all" and which "can be actualized again and again,"31 like the dancer's
repeated re-actualizing of the dancing that she has as a first actuality. I told him that this raised
�31
the question for me whether the knower of Brahman could be said to be Brahman in this
dispositional sense.
In the Upanishadic tradition you may engage in a meditative practice, in which you could
pass through several stages. At the beginning you deliberately concentrate and turn your
consciousness inward, whil~ endeavoring to dwell more and more in awareness. 32 You need to
keep reminding yourself to notice the awareness, which is always there. Initially you cannot
accomplish this while you are doing something else, because a thing or event always captures
your attention.
After a while you will be able to maintain this centering of yourself in awareness. While
· your mind gradually has become dominated by awareness, you still occasionally experience
moments of conscious reflection on the immediately preceding moment of awareness. 33 You are
now "allowing the mind to fluctuate." 34 The following analogy may convey some sense of what
that is like. "Suppose a neighbor were to ask you to look after her children .... When the
children come you could take one of three different courses of action." You could abandon
responsibility by telling them that they can do whatever they want as long as they don't bother
you. Or you could try to control them by telling them what to do and not to do. Or, finally, you
could~
allow the children to play. This "allowing" is not active, since you do not interfere. It
is not passive, since you are present with the children ... in a total way. It is like a cat
sitting at a mouse hole. It appears to be asleep, but let the mouse show but a whisker
and the cat will pounce. It is only by allowing that one truly understands what
allowing means.
'Allowing' brings awareness to the fore in a way that pushing away and controlling do not. 35
You are aware of movements from focused to unfocused consciousness, of shifts from perceptual
to thinking consciousness, of fluctuations from consciousness-of to empty awareness, and so
�32
forth, as well as of the reversals of all these. "Allowing is ... , so to say, what fluctuating
awareness is 'made of.'"
Eventually no reflection is experienced any more; this total wakefulness, completely
purifies one of the 'sleepiness' which is what the 'habit' of consciousness really is. 36 To be
aware you don't have to be conscious ofsomething; nor do you need to be someone, much less
someone special. 37
Positional consciousness-of-objects, which was first for us, here shows itself to be, in
fact, a derivative of non-positional awareness, which is what is first in itself. Initially
consciousness seemed to have the component of awareness; but now we may say that awareness
sometimes manifests itself partially in the form of consciousness-of-objects, while in itself it is
pure awareness (cit). Again, this is quite analogous to what Averroes said of the agent intellect.
In itself it is pure, having no reference to the world; but, through its outward turn, it conjoins
itself to our imaginations, resulting in the emergence from it of particular intelligibles.
Upon emerging from this absolute silence, you may be so forcefully struck by something
in the world that you consciously recognize that you are just pure awareness.3 8 You
momentarily become conscious of this objectless being "present with the children ... in a total
way" as yourself. You are now conscious of havib.g arrived in the Brahman-realm.39
Yajiiavalkya interjected that this recognition is what is expressed in the words: "I am Brahman!"
(BU, I.4.10). He added that this experiencing of pure awareness is what he was referring to
when he had said:
· "Though then he does not see [any thing], yet he does not see while seeing. There is
no cutting off of the seeing of the seer .... But there is no second (dvitfyam), no other
(anyad), separate from him, that he could see .... When there is some other (anyad),
then one can see ... the other." (BU, IV.3.23 & 31)
�33
I said to Yajfiavalkya that, according to this account, pure awareness seemed to be empty.
He responded that while it is empty of objects, it is full in the sense that it is an experiencing of
the moment-to-moment "going forth of things in different directions" (vyuccaranti), like "sparks
from a fire" (BU, 11.1.20). Alternatively it is an experiencing of the whole's springing forth
(sambhavati), which is like a spider's emitting (srjate) of a thread of its web or like plants'
springing up from the earth (MuU, 1.1.7). It is as if in pure awareness we had 'gone backwards'
to a point just 'before' things, self, and world emerge. I told him that what he'd said reminded
me of a passage in Sartre: "Thus, each instant of our conscious life reveals to us a creation ex
nihilo .. .. this inexhaustible creation of existence of which we are not the creators" (S, 79).
Yajfiavalkya continued by pointing out that what he had just said about pure awareness
being full is conveyed by the traditional name for the Brahman-realm, 'saccidananda.' The
three parts of the one word express the oneness of pure existence (sat), pure awareness (cit), and
pure joy (ananda).
Since there is no 'of,' as in 'consciousness-of,' awareness is pure sat rather
than being conscious of it. I said that Fink seemed to be giving voice to the same experience
when he referred to the unique identity of the onlooker and the universally flowing worldapperception (FK, 355). As "there is ... no other (anyad), separate from him, that he could see,"
so there are no objects to separate the onlooker from the flowing world-apperception.
Yajfiavalkya's report about the oneness of existence and awareness brought to my mind
something in the Thomistic branch of the Aristotelian tradition, which could make that oneness
partly understandable to me. I mentioned it to Yajfiavalkya: Thomas understood each of us to
·exist by virtue of a separate act of is-ing (esse), which is other than our essence, our humanity. A
human being is, not by virtue of being human, but by participation in, or reception of, is-ing
from, absolute Is-ing, just as a piece of wood that is afrre is so by participation in Fire (ST, Q.3,
A.4r). Absolute Is-ing is like the Sun, and a human being is like some part of the air. Each
�34
individual instantiation of the intelligible human essence remains illuminated, that is, continues
is-ing, only as long as absolute Is-ing is shining on it (ST, Q.8, A.Ir). That is why Thomas states
that what we ca// 'creation' is, in fact, an ongoing "flowing out, arising, springing out"
(emanatio) (ST, Q.44, A.Ir) from absolute Is-ing. This much ofThomas's view can help us to
understand how the Upanishadic experience of cit is an experience of sat.
Jacques Maritain applied Thomas' s understanding of the distinction between esse and
essence to interpret the experience of the knower of Brahman in the following way. 40 In
reflecting consciousness we experience our soul in its acts. What we experience in reflection is
not our intelligible essence but rather our self "prisoner of the mobility, of the multiplicity, of the
fugitive luxuriance of the phenomena and the operations which emerge in us from the night of
the unconscious-prisoner of the apparent self'(I45-46). But, as we have seen, the cultivation
of awareness, instead of consciousness or reflecting consciousness, enables those on the path to
realizing Brahman to pass from ordinary self-conscious experience "to an exceptional and
privileged experience, emptying into the abyss of subjectivity, ... to escape from the apparent
self, in order to reach the absolute Self'(I46). These practitioners "strip themselves of every
image, of every particular representation, and of every distinct operation to such a degree that ...
they reach not the essence df their soul but its existence, substantial1 esse itself'(I 48), "by an ...
annihilating connaturality"(I46), in the absolute silence of total wakefulness.
[F]rom the fact that existence is ... limited only by the essence that receives it ... one
can understand that this negative experience, in reaching the substantial esse of the
soul, reaches, at once, both this existence proper to the soul and existing in its
metaphysical profusion and the sources of existing, according as the existence of the
soul . . . is something that is emanating and is pervaded by an inflow from which it
holds everything.... It is the sources of being in his soul that the human being reaches
in this way." (153-54)
Thus, through practice, in experiencing pure awareness (cit), the knower of Brahman
has come to experience herself as the inflow of is-ing flowing out from abso.lute Is-ing
�35
(sat). One might say that the transition from experiencing myself as witness to
recognition of pure awareness is like going from having my finger on the pulsing of
the world to recognizing my finger as the pulsing of the world. Yajfiavalkya added
that Maritain's interpretation at least clearly distinguished the Sun of Averroes's
outward-turned self-intellection of intelligible essences from the Sun of outflowing
selfaware existence.
Now we are in a position to say that when Svetaketu realizes "You are That," he is
experiencing himself as the outflow of sat and recognizing as his true self pure awareness (of)
the moment-to-moment flying out of sparks, which are 'on the way' to becoming things-and
that this recognizing is that very going forth. Moreover, in this recognition Svetaketu is what is
recognized: "One who knows the supreme Brahman becomes that very Brahman" (MuU, IIl.2.9;
cp. BU, IV.4.13) and "becomes this All" (BU, I.4.10).
As earlier we wondered what the daily experience of the state of complete conjunction
would be like, so now the analogous question arises with respect to the Brahman-realm. In the
discussion of the phenomenological reduction, I had raised the possibility that we could acquire
pure awareness as a first actuality, in the sense of an active disposition. The knower of Brahman
would then alternate between pure awareness and consciousness-of, in the way that I can 'turn
on' my contemplation of the Pythagorean Theorem as I wish. This suggestion would parallel
Aristotle's experience that we are for intermittent periods of time in the same state as the divine
itself is in over the whole of time. The difference would be that instead of turning from one
mode of consciousness, say, perceiving or thinking, to a different one, intellecting, the knower of
Brahman would alternate at will between two different ways of total experiencing, between
consciousness and pure awareness. It would be somewhat analogous to looking at the.well. known duck-rabbit ambiguous figure and seeing it now as a duck, now as a rabbit.
�36
However, Yajfiavalkya said that living in the Brahman-realm is, instead, like a
hypothetical double seeing of both the duck and the rabbit at once, rather than like a seeing of
them in altemation. 41 The knower of Brahman is engaged with consciousness-of while
simultaneously remaining in the realm of pure awareness. The following analogy conveys
something of this:
The ordinary person only sees the reflection in the mirror but the realized person sees
the reflection as well as the mirror. "For instance you see a reflection in the mirror
and the mirror. You know the mirror to be the reality and the picture in it a mere
reflection. Is it necessary that to see the mirror we should cease to see the reflection
in it?" Similarly, the realized one continues to experience the world in his realized
state. Thus the realized person appreciates ''the distinctions" of sound, taste, form,
smell etc. "But he always perceives and experiences the one reality in all of them."42
Brahman-knowers' experiencing of the everyday world inthe mirror of purified awareness
enables their keen yet calm involvement in that world. In the analogy we could take 'seeing the
reflection' to stand for consciousness of the world, and 'seeing the mirror,' for pure awareness.
When I see the mirror along with the reflections, the latter are not being viewed 'from outside,'
as they are in the mode of consciousness, but rather as emerging out of awareness. One might
also apply the analogy to the self by saying that knowers of Brahman experience their ordinary
selves, too, as being virtual images cast by the mirror.
,
1
The mirror analogy may be applied to the modes of experiencing other than those
encountered specifically in meditative practice. Consciousness-of-objects-whether perceiving,
sensing, emoting, evaluating, thinking, and so on-and self-consciousness, too, are like a vision
of things in the virtual space of the mirror. There are two fundamentally different modes of
consciousness-of-objects, depending upon whether or not the object in question is an object in
the true sense. When it maintains itself throughout a succession of acts of consciousness of it, it
is an object in the etymological sense that it is something set or put (-jectum), before or over
against (ob-) the act of consciousness. This setting-over-against is what is meant by 'subject-
�37
object duality.' Such an object shall be referred to henceforth as an "Object." It has an identity,
to which we may return again and again.
The following example illustrates the different layers that may arise in perceptual
consciousness-of-Objects. It begins with the emergence of an hnplicit Object from the
background, continues with a prepredicative explicating of it, and goes on to various layers of
predicative development in the following way. While I am engaged in seminar, someone's
coffee cup may emerge from the margins of my consciousness and may attract my attention and
become an explicit object of consciousness. My attention may travel from its color to a figure on
the side, and then to its overall shape, and so on. 43 Then my interest may awaken sufficiently, so
that I think, 'The cup has a circular figure on the side.' This shift represents a transition from the
cup's just previously having become implicitly determined as having a circle on its side to its
being grasped in an active identification as determined by the circle on its side. 44 Then I may
think, 'The fact that the cup has that circular figure on its side is puzzling. I wonder what it
stands for.' My thought may subsequently be led to such Objects as 'the circular,' 'shape in
general,' and 'property.' 45
'Prior' to such perceptual consciousness of Objects and its developments, there is a
sensory consciousness of objects, which has beer\. vividly described by Erwin Straus. 46 We sense
objects in the same way in which we respond to the dynamic quality of a tone, which is "a state
of unrest, a tension, an urge, almost a will to move on, as if a force were acting on the tone and
pulling it in a certain direction."47 We are in a symbiotic relation (200) with the 'tones,' to which
we respond with incipient movements as we do to dance music (239). This pre-linguistic,
flowing realm is the ground from which Objects emerge (204). We live simultaneously in the
. Objective and the sensory and may experience the tension between them, as the latter resists
being fit into the former. Some people may be especially attracted to the loss of their stance
�38
over-against Objects, of their self-consciousness, and of the sharp distinctness within the
Objective realm (284, 275). Precisely because of its lack of subject-Object duality and selfconsciousness, sensory consciousness is occasionally mistaken for awareness by beginners.
However, it is just another mode of vision of the reflections in the virtual space produced by the
mrrror.
All of the above are distinctions that can be clearly seen in the vision of that virtual space.
In addition to seeing these, the knower of Brahman sees the virtual space and its reflections as
emanating from the mirror. This second sort of seeing is pure awareness. While awareness is
never totally absent from our experience, we notice it to varying degrees.
Usually the degree to which we notice it is very minimal as when we seem to be, in
Sartre's words, "hypnotized" by what we are conscious of. This is our 'default' mode of
experiencing. When we are reading, thinking, conversing in seminar, dancing, gazing at a
sunset, or "even stretching out a hand to open the door," we are absorbed in that moment's
action.
48
When we are self-conscious, we are also absorbed in the self-consciousness. In
absorption, awareness seems to have gotten lost; but it has only receded into the deep
background.
In some special moments, which have been called moments of "flow," 49 awarenes~
becomes prominent in an incidental way. We have not deliberately pursued it; it just happens.
The flow experience may be spontaneous, as in the earlier examples of the driver and the woman
sewing; or it may be skill-related, as in the examples of Joe Montana and the surgeon. One
might say that, in the case of the skill-related flow experience, through practice the body's usual
resistance to intended action is overcome. As a result consciousness as over against the body
disappears, allowing awareness to become prominent. We move out of flow when the over-
�39
againstness arises as the 'I' becomes active either in reaction-'Wow! This is so exciting!'--or
in action-' If I bear down, I can keep this going.'
As we saw in relation to painting, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology, prominence of
awareness may be deliberately cultivated in order to be able to engage in some pursuit. Here
awareness is practiced, so that the practitioner comes to experience the witness as a disposition.
Having it as a.first actuality, he or she can then activate it when engaging in the activity for the
sake of which it was developed.
Finally, in the double seeing of the knower of Brahman, pure mirror-awareness is
permanently prominent as a second actuality; and there is a 'loose,' 'unstuck,' clear
consciousness-of-objects as well. This is said to be the state of one "freed while alive"
(jfvanmukta; cp. BU, IV.4.7).
In virtue of the oneness of sat and cit, this double seeing is one with the out-flowing of
existence. Thus, the freedom manifests itself in that one's awareness is active, or creative, with
respect to the world, on the one hand, and one's action is responsive, or receptive, with respect to
it, on the other-a reversal of the usual receptivity of consciousness and activity of action. 50 In
the realm of action, this freedom is freedom to respond without a 'hitch' to the vectors in the
field of experience, wliich are analogous to the directional arc involved in realizing the full
significance of a situation mentioned in Part One. These field vectors include what Yajfiavalkya
takes Aristotle to be referring to when he speaks of feeling feelings or performing actions as
required (8c:i), in the required cases, with respect to the required people, in the required way, and
for the required reasons (NE, 1106b 17-2 7).
Another way of putting this is to say that the freedom of the knower of Brahman
manifests itself in the ability to be able to move freely through the world with grace and
effortlessness, which is called 'saving awareness,' crocppocruvri: 51
�40
For crocppocruVT) is precisely the virtue of general and unself-conscious self-possession,
of universal grace and effortless command neither specified by particular action,
which would transform it from crocppOcrUVTJ to some particular virtue, nor checked by
any opacity, which would translate it into a mode of self-control. What could work
better for its model than a pure [awareness ]?52
Knowers of Brahman have no inner barriers, which could get in the way -of their spontaneously
allowing what is called for by the current moment to emerge.
In conclusion, we note certainformal parallels between the role of Brahman in the
Upanishads and that of the agent intellect according to Averroes. First, each is the sourceBrahman, of all existence, and the agent intellect, of all being, that is, of all intelligibility.
Second, both are "self-luminous" and are responsible for 'seeing' in some sense. Third, the nondual relation between the individual self and Brahman is like that between the disposed intellect
and the agent intellect. Fourth, a 'self-forgetting' 'outward turn' 'occurs' in the case of each of
them. Fifth, both the experiencing of Brahman and the experience of intellection could be said to
involve a breaking-free from my ordinary captivation by the images on the walls of a cavelike
dwelling, an engagement in a practice, and, ultimately, an existential breakthrough to
"immortalizing." In that breakthrough, in both cases, I deconstruct my ordinary sense of self and
discover my true self as being both non-private (that is, not mine alone) and non-dual with
respect to the true self of others.
However, there are fundamental differences in other respects. Whereas in the one case
the captivation is by opinions and by the perceptual world and is broken through in becoming
free for intelligibles, involving a gradual movement of theoretical study, in the other case it is
captivation by the mundane way of experiencing objects, whether in sensory, perceptual, or
intellectual consciousness; and it is broken by a sudden shift from involvement in consciousness,
whether first-degree or reflective, to pure awareness, a shift which may be experienced on a path
of cultivation of awareness. Moreover, the nature of the one, impersonal, true self of us all, in
�41
which we share non-dually in our immortalizing, which for Averroes is the self-intellection of
the agent intellect, is pure awareness according to Yajfiavalkya. Finally, on the one hand, the
material intellect may realize conjunction with the agent intellect, which is the source of all
intelligibility in the world. On the other hand, in the Brahman-realm pure selfawareness realizes
that it is non-dual with the continual springing up of all existence, both sensory and intelligible,
of the world as a whole, including but not limited to the intelligible realm.
Yajfiavalkya thought that the following comment on Aristotle by Mr. Klein might
provide a fruitful direction to pursue in the question period: The receptive aspect of "vm:iv ... is
the state of wakefulness, a state of preparedness and alertness .... Nouc; ... when it is ... one with
the v01rr<i .... [o]nly then can be said to be wakefulness 'at work' ... " 53 Looking back to the
beginning, Yajfiavalkya wondered how Homer's realization of the full significance of a
situation, 54 Aristotle's reception of an intelligible, and Averroes's complete conjunction with the
agent intellect's self-intellection would compare, with respect to their degrees of wakefulness,
with dwelling in pure awareness.
I asked him how he would respond. He said: 'Perhaps the major difference between the
Upanishads and our three W estem thinkers might be that for the former the state of empty
"receptivity is supreme, that is, even more wakeful than "wakefulness at work."'
I rejoined: 'I'm not sure that I've really understood Averroes. But it might be that his
account of complete conjunction is a good partial depiction of Brahman. Insofar as Mr. Klein
was directing us to the experiential living-through of the moment in which the empty, receptive
intellect is one with the revelation of what is a profile of the full, unitary agent intellect, we do
seem to be pointed toward a face of Brahman, as it were, namely, the intellectual one.'
Yajfiavalkya had the last word: 'What you may be overlooking is that the empty,
receptive material intellect is an appearance of the outward turning of the full source of
�42
determinacy, the agent intellect, whereas, in the case of Brahman, the full and determinate is an
appearance of the outward turning of the empty.'
1
Compare: "Since [in all cases of seeing and hearing] we are aware ('mcr0av6µE:0a) that we are seeing and hearing,
it must either be by sight that we are aware [for example] that we are seeing or by some other [sense]" (OS, 425bl 112). "To each sense there belongs something special and something common. For example, what is special to sight
is to see, [what is special] to hearing is to hear, and similarly with the rest. But there is also a certain common power
that goes along with all of them, by which one is also aware that one is seeing and hearing (for it is not, after all, by
sight that one is seeing that one is seeing ... )." (On Sleeping and Waking, 455a12-5)
2
We may speak of self-consciousness in the sense of consciousness of myself only 'after' the construction of the
sense of self, which is discussed below.
3
By Kosman, who also made reference to Sartre's La Transcendence de !'Ego. I had been planning to use Sartre to
introduce the notion of selfawareness (seen. 4) as an alternative to anything in Aristotle. However, Kosman's
article, which I came across a couple of months ago, made it possible to cite Aristotle himself in order to introduce
this notion.
4
I write 'selfawareness' and 'awareness (of) itself' to suggest that the relationship between awareness and what it is
aware (of) is not the same as that between consciousness and the object of consciousness. I am following Sartre's
practice in L 'etre et le neant (pp. 18-20), where he writes 'conscience (de) soi' to refer to what I am calling
'selfawareness or 'awareness (of) itself'.
5
In La Transcendance de I 'Ego, from which the quotations are taken, Sartre uses only one word, 'conscience,'
which I have rendered as 'consciousness' when it is positional and as 'awareness' when it is non-positional.
Moreover, he does not here write 'conscience (de),' as he did later (see footnote 4).
Gurwitsch (1941) endorsed most of Sartre's position, to which Schiltz then objected. They debate this
issue further in Schiltz and Gurwitsch.
..
6
What is said will apply as well to consciousness that is imagining, remembering, judging, thinking, intellecting,
feeling, or evaluating.
7
See footnote 9.
8
The last two sentences represent my understanding of Gurwitsch (1985), 5, second paragraph).
9
Gurwitsch (1941) pointed out that this account of the arising of the sense of self is inconsistent with the fact that
reflection can accomplish no more than to render explicit the content of the reflected-upon consciousness (332-33).
He later (1985) offered a corrected account of the construction of the psychical empirical sense of self (15ff). It is
based on the recognition that both states and "qualities designate psychic constants, i.e., regularities of experience ...
rather than mental facts which themselves fall under direct experience" ( 15), as they do in Sartre.
10
I remember many years ago reading an article by him in The Washington Post, in which he described his
experience in somewhat these terms.
11
These characteristics are similar to those in the example of the violinist in Csikszentmihalyi: "A violinist must be
extremely aware of every movement of her fingers, as well as of the sound entering her ears, and of the total form of
the piece she is playing, both analytically, note by note, and holistically, in terms of its overall design" (64).
12
Csikszentmihalyi, 65.
13
Bankei, 58. I have substituted "awareness" first for "the Unborn" and then for "it," referring to her Buddha-mind.
14
This is Husserl's word (1964), passim.
15
It need not be living beings with respect to which we experience the connection: "The [mountain] climber,
focusing all her attention on the small irregularities of the rock wall that will have to support her weight safely,
speaks of the sense of kinship that develops between fingers and rock .. ." "This feeling is not just a fancy of the
imagination, but is based on a concrete experience of close interaction with some Other ... " (Csikszentmihalyi, 64).
16
A popular book on learning to draw, tells us of a subjective state that artists speak of, which is characterized by "a
sense of close 'connection' with the work, a sense of timelessness, difficulty in using words ... a lack of anxiety, a
sense of close attention to shapes and spaces and forms that remain nameless." It is important for the artist to
experience the shift from the ordinary state to this one. The student is encouraged to set up the proper "conditions
for this mental shift" and to become "able to recognize and foster this state in" himself (Edwards, 46). These
characteristics correspond quite well with the qualities of a consciousness in which awareness is in the foreground.
17
Merleau-Ponty (1961), 166, translation modified.
�43
18
The articulation in this paragraph emerged in a conversatibn with Nina Haigney, just a few minutes before I
delivered this lecture. It was an example of the sort of thing it attempts to articulate-a conversation, with
awareness to some degree in the foreground, allowing for the experience of"a certain emptiness," followed by the
·
emergence, in two people, of an, a least relatively, "authentic word."
19
Epstein, 194. The quotation from Freud is from "Recommendations to Physicians Practicing Psychoanalysis"
(1912).
20
Epstein, 195.
21
By Theodore Reik in 1948; see Epstein, 199-201.
22
Bion, 51-52, 55-56, 69.
23
M. Heidegger, On Time and Being, quoted in Ihde, 15; italics added and translation corrected at one point.
24
Husserl (1962), 140.27-33; to maintain consistency of terminology, I substituted "[reduction]" for epoche.
25
The same view is conveyed, in different language, by Husserl himself(l962), Sections 37-42.
26
Merleau-Ponty (1945), 191, where, however, the expression is not being used to characterize the
phenomenological reduction.
27
The distinction between disconnection and reducing proper parallels that in the Buddhist tradition between
mindfulness (sati) and seeing distinctly in detail (vi-pa§yana).
28
Cp.: "And so also must the gaze made free by the epoche be .. . an experiencing gaze" (Husserl (1962), 156.1315.
29
Husserl (1962), 147.29-32.
30
I take habituell to correspond to an adjectival form of 't~t<;.
31
Husserl (1962), 153.36-37 and 140.19-20.
32
Sekida, 62 and 93. This stage in the yogic tradition involves eight members, the last three of which are
concentration, meditation, and in-stance (samiidhi), which is opposed both to ex-stasy and to our ordinary counterstance vis-a-vis objects (Patafijali, II.29).
33
Sekida, 93; cp. Patafijali, I.42 and 44: coincidence wit hreflection (saviciirii samiipattih)
34
The quotations in this paragraph are taken from Low, 149-50; italics added.
35
When allowing the children to play, you are not caught up in their playing; so, you have a kind of distance from it.
Yet you are 'with' them, accompanying them. Thus, your distance is of a different kind than the distance that occurs
in Objectivation, where the Ob-ject is over against you (discussed below).
Moreover, while it might seem as though the Objective, perceptual world were free of captivation, when
compared to the dynamic, sensory realm (discussed below), in fact, the former is grounded in the primordial doxa of
the latter.
36
Sekida, 62 and 94. The role that this experience of pure awareness plays in the upanishadic tradition parallels that
of the "aloneness of seeing" (dr§eh kaivalyam; Patafijali, II.25) in the yogic tradition (Patafijali, III.50; IV.26 and
34).
37
Low, 40.
38
Sekida, 95.
39
This account ofrealization of Brahman is based on zen sources. However, as Shear points out, this experience of
awake, pure selfawareness lacks any empirical qualities or content. As a result differing references to it as the ·
Brahman-realm or Buddha-nature are not pointing to qualitative differences in the experience (1983, 57-59; 1990,
392).
40
The page numbers given in this paragraph all refer to Maritain, Quatre essais.
41
Carter, 54. Sekida, 91-97, also depicts the corresponding state in the zen tradition in this way.
Carter proposes the comparison with binocular vision. It is interesting that Bion, too, uses this analogy
(Grinberg, Sor, and Tabak di Bianchedi, 35-36).
42
Sharma, 43; first two sets of italics added. The quotation is from Ramana Maharshi as reported in D. Goodman,
ed., The Teachings ofSri Ramana Maharshi (NY: Arkana, 1985), pp. 42, 41.
43
Cp. the description in Husserl (1964), 124-25
44
Cp. the description in Husserl (1964), 206-08
45
Cp. the descriptions in Husserl (1964), tt#58-61, 80-82, 86-87 and in Husserl (1950), #10.
46
The page references in this paragraph are from Straus, Vom Sinn der Sinne.
47
Zuckerkandl, 19.
48
Sekida, 91. .
49
Csikszentmilalyi.
50
YUASA, 68.
�44
51
I believe that Kleist had the same phenomenon in view when he reported Herr C.'s words after two anecdotes,
one about a graceful dancer who lost his grace when self-consciousness arose and the other about a bear, who
effortlessly parried every thrust of Herr C. 's rapier with a graceful swipe of his paw:
' ... [I]n the same degree as, in the organic world, reflection becomes more obscure and
weaker, giace emerges there ever more radiant and supreme.-Yetjust as. :. the image
in a concave mirror, after withdrawing to infinity, suddenly comes right in front of us
again, so when consciousness has, as it were, passed through an infinite, grace will
again put in an appearance. Hence, it appears most purely in the human bodily
structure that has either no self-consciousness or an infinite self-consciousness ... '
(Kleist, 67)
That is, in our terms, grace emerges in the realm of animal, sensory consciousness, a realm which we can
experience, but not enter completely (Straus, 284). And it emerges again in the realm of pure self-awareness, in
which we are no longer caught up in first- or second-degree consciousness.
52
Kosman, 516; the ending in the original is "a pure, objectless knowledge."
53
Klein, 65.
54
Another question to pursue might be whether Homer's realization of full significance became narrower and more
limited in passing over into intellection.
ABREVIATIONS
BU
Brihadtiranyaka Upanishad
CU
Chtindogya Upanishad
F
Fink, E., Sixth Cartesian Meditation: The Idea of a Transcendental Theory ofMethod.
FK
"Die Phanomenologische Philosophie Edmund Husserls in der Gegenwartigen Kritik."
HG
Otto, W., The Homeric Gods: The Spiritual Significance of Greek Religion.
I
Homer, Iliad
IU
Isa Upanishad
KeU
Kena Upanishad
LC
Averroes, Long Commentary = Commentarium Magnum in Aristotelis De Anima.
MuU Mundaka Upanishad
NE
Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics; translation altered in some places.
0
Homer, Odyssey
OS
Aristotle, On the Soul; translation altered in some places.
�45
S
Sartre, J.-P., La Transcendance de /'Ego: Esquisse d'une descriptionphenomenologique.
ST
St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, Latin text, Volume II, containing Ia, QQ.2-11.
TU
Taittitrfya Upanishad
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_ _,The Odyssey of Homer, tr. R. Lattimore (New York: Harper and Row Publisher, 1967).
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Martinus Nijhoff, 1950).
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O.P., ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964).
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(Albany: SUNY Press, 1987).
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(Milwaukee: Marquette University, 1968).
_ _,"Averroes and Immortality," New Scholasticism 28 (1954), 436-53.
_ _,"Averroes on the Possible Intellect," Proceedings of the American Catholic
Philosophical Association 25 (1951 ), 164-78.
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�
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You Are That!: The <em>Upanishads</em> Read Through Western Eyes
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Typescript of a lecture delivered by Robert Druecker, Annapolis tutor on February 15, 2008, as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
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Friday night lecture
Tutors
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https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/fc0c2b22d1a57702f792092af79d90ee.pdf
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PDF Text
Text
“Walking the First Steps of His Camino with John of the Cross –
An Exploration of the Dark Night of Sense”
Robert Druecker
INTRODUCTION
John outlines a road, or camino, which one could walk who is seeking to arrive at union with
God, insofar as it is possible in our present life. According to John what is possible in this life is a union of
my powers and faculties with God, but not a permanent one (AMC II.5.2). The camino is known as the
Dark Night of the Soul. It has two major aspects—the Dark Night of Sense and the Dark Night of Spirit.
This lecture deals with the first of these.
According to John a verse from one of the Psalms (46:10) is saying to us: “Learn to be empty of
all things, that is, both internally and externally, and you will see how (cómo) I am God” (AMC II.15.5).
External things are things the soul experiences through its senses, feelings, and imagination. As the soul
moves into this first dark night, it actively works at releasing its hold on all particular things. Then at
some point, it notices that, independently of its wishes and efforts, it is being led away from its efforts
to let go into an experiencing of its tight grip gradually turning into a relaxed open hand. The soul is then
entering the passive dark night of sense. It begins to experience God as flowing into it. Correlated with
this sensed inflowing is the soul’s awakening to ways in which God is manifesting his divinity in the
world.
The lecture will be in four sections, with a conclusion. For the most part I’ll be taking you along
with me as I begin walking the camino.
Section I: THE STRIPPING OF OUR ATTACHMENT TO THE SENSES
1
�In the active dark night of sense, we “strip” ourselves of our attachment to the senses. John uses
the following analogy, in order to clarify the meaning of this stripping:
AS night deprives the eyes’ sight of the light which allows visibles to be seen by it, SO
the dark night deprives the senses’ apetito of the savor, or liking, which allows things to attract it
(based on AMC I.3.1&4).
John’s word apetito here means something like our word “dependency,” as in a drug dependency, or
“addiction” – an immoderate desire for something. 1
According to the analogy, my soul still has things, but is empty of them, in the sense that it is not
preoccupied with them. As John puts it: “Although it is true that the soul cannot help hearing and seeing
and smelling and tasting and touching, this is of no greater import, nor …, is [the soul] hindered more
than if it saw it not, heard it not, etc.” (AMC I.3.4). When the light of my preferred flavors is turned off,
my personal preferences for and concerns with things are deactivated. I now use things simply for their
practical value and to satisfy my true needs.
By being detached from my preferences and likings, I don’t fill my soul with images or memories
of things, with hopes and wishes for them, with plans to get them, and so on. The reason, the inner
logic, for turning off the light is precisely in order that my soul not become already filled up. For then
there would be no “room,” no “space,” for my soul to become filled with G’s “light” in becoming
enlightened (AMC I.4.1).
The way it works is that if I’m not occupying myself with enjoying and pursuing particular things,
then I’ll be filled with “food” that will allow me to taste “all” things. (AMC I.5.4), in a newly experienced
state, called “loving awareness” (AMC I.5.7). For dependencies and enlightenment are contraries, as are
closing tightly and opening loosely. The dependency orients me toward what is finite, determinate,
particular, limited, thing-like, creat-ed, being (ens, that which is) (AMC I.4.2). This orientation makes it
John of the Cross: Selected Writings, ed. Kieran Kavanaugh, O.C.D. (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), p. 61, and San Juan de la Cruz, Obra
completa, I, ed. Luce López-Baralt and Eulogio Pacho (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, S.A., 1991), pp. 125-26.
1
2
�difficult for me to become transformed into what is in-finite, in-determinate, general, un-limited, nothing, creat-ing, act of be-ing, of “is-ing,” (esse = ser, the is of that which is)—as I must if I am to realize
union with God (AMC I.4.3).
So, dependencies lead me, ineluctably, to turn toward the creaturely and, simultaneously, to
turn away from the creative (AMC I.12.3). John says that when you turn toward some thing you stop
“casting yourself on the all.” Moreover, if you are to hold the all, you have to hold it without wanting
anything (AMC II.13.12). Thus, the deadening of my preferential likings allows me eventually to turn
toward “the all” and to do so without wanting to get something out of it.
Note that it is not the particular characteristics of the thing or of the liking that are relevant
here. Even likings for religious and devotional activities and objects can bind me to and fill my soul with
determinate, particular things, in the same way (AMC I.5.2).
The way John sees it, there is a deepening sequence of involvements—from savoring and liking
(gustar) to tasting and knowing (saber can mean both at once), from there to possessing (poseer), and,
finally, to being (ser) (AMC II.13.11)—so that the light of gusto comes to anchor me—my understanding,
my sense of self, and my will—in being like the creaturely (AMC I.4.2).
Section II: THEOLOGICAL REFLECTION ON TYPES OF UNION
In order to help us better understand the background for the contraries of closing and opening
or of emptying and filling, John shares a theological reflection on union with God. There are two major
sorts of union. One is the substantial union of God’s dwelling in each creature. This union is always
there. The other is a union-by-likeness of the soul with God, a union that arises through a transformation
of the soul. This second union is there only when there is a likeness of love, that is, when God’s and the
soul’s wills are “con-form in one,” when the soul is transformed into God through love (AMC II.5.3).
There are two varieties of the second union, first, a union with respect to my acts of will and,
second, a union with respect to my habitual disposition of will. Union-by-likeness-of-act and union-by3
�likeness-of-disposition are the two versions of the second type of union. Hence, in order to live one or
the other kind of the second union, I must strip myself of my creature-focused acts or dispositions of
understanding, liking, sensing, and willing (AMC II.5.4).
What continues throughout is an ongoing sense of the substantial union, one which does not,
however, become thematic for me, one which I do not consciously register. It, nevertheless, contributes
to motivating my entry onto the camino. Then as I go on walking, my recognition of the substantial
union grows.
John uses another light analogy in order to illustrate this theological reflection. A smudgy and
dirty window on which the sun is shining appears dark, as we look through it; the sun lights it up only
fairly dimly. A clean and pure window on which the sun is shining, on the other hand, appears bright,
completely illuminated by the sun. In this second case the ray of light will transform and en-lighten the
window, so that, according to John, the latter will “appear to be the same ray and will give the same
light as the ray,” even though its nature is other than that of the ray. John says that the window is light
“by participation.” The soul is the window; the light is the divine “light of God’s esse (ser),” God’s act of
be-ing, or “is-ing,” 2 which is always “shining” on the creature (AMC II.5.6).
Perhaps we might say that substantial union refers to God’s dwelling in, lighting up, or is-ing
forth, the creature in each instant. Then when my soul becomes cleansed, it is able to become aware of
this indwelling, of God’s continual creating of me; and, simultaneously, it can allow this creative activity
to show itself clearly in the world.
Section III: FOUR SHIFTS IN THE WAY OF LIVING A SPIRITUAL LIFE
John introduces the word modo, in order to refer to the way I am walking along the
camino, or, more broadly, the way one is living one’s spiritual life. My mode includes my ways of
In many languages other than English, the form of the word itself shows whether it is referring to a being, a thing which is, or to an act of being, of “is-ing”—for instance, ὂν : εἶναι :: ens : esse :: étant : être :: Seiendes : Sein. In these cases one can immediately see whether the referent
is the “is-ing one,” the “is-er,” on the one hand, or its “is-ing,” on the other.
2
4
�apprehending, feeling, liking, enjoying, sensing, acting, responding, etc., my “how,” as I am walking.
Many religious people think that the modo appropriate to the camino is just any kind of self-reformation
or withdrawal from the world. But what they are actually seeking subconsciously is, according to John,
to have a feeling of delightful communication with God and of consolations from God. They are, in fact,
pursuing themselves in God, rather than searching in God in himself (AMC II.7.5). But John tells us that
as I walk I will not only eventually leave behind my beginner’s ways but will also abandon every such
personal mode, or way, as I come to “possess all modes,” when I “pass beyond the limits of my nature.”
Only if I accomplish this, will I become able to “enter what has no mode,” namely, God (AMC II.4.5).
John focuses on at least four prominent ways in which I may be living the devotional life as a
beginner—I rely on my faculty of imagination; I center my practice on discursive meditation; I make an
effort to keep on working hard, in order to make progress along the spiritual path; and, finally, I relate
myself to God in a way that reflects my earlier relation to my parents and significant others. I, as
beginner, am expected, at some point on the camino, to notice the indications that I need to move on
and to leave behind these four ways of practicing my religious life. If I follow through and do so, I’ll
change from being a beginner to being a proficient, in John’s vocabulary. This shift will coincide with my
transitioning out of the active Dark Night of Sense into the passive Dark Night of Sense.
It is important to note that for John “the imaginative faculty and the fantasy” are each an
“internal bodily sense” (AMC II.12.1). They are the primary senses that are active in meditation. For in
John’s vocabulary, meditation is “a discursive act through the medium of images, forms and figures,
made up and imagined by” the imagination and fantasy. It is discursive in that it involves a mental
running about (dis-cursus), going from one religious image or devotional object to another (AMC II.13.4).
5
�In discursive meditation, for instance, I may imagine and meditate on “Christ crucified” or “God
seated on a throne.” In doing so I wish to become inspired by thoughts and feelings that may arise in
response to that object (AMC II.12.3). In The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, 3 we read:
FIRST EXERCISE …. seeing the place. Here it is to be noted that, in a visible contemplation or meditation—as, for
instance, when one contemplates Christ our Lord, Who is visible—the composition will be to see with the sight of
the imagination the corporeal place where the thing is found which I want to contemplate…, as for instance, a
Temple or Mountain….
John’s directive, though, is that “the soul will have to empty itself of these images.” For it can
fantasize or imagine only what it has previously sensed through the external senses, namely, created
things. But created things “can have no proportion to God’s esse (ser)” (AMC II.12.4). That is, meditating
and imagining ultimately orient me toward and preserve my similarity to what is limited, particular,
determinate, and creat-ed—even though it is true that, at first, they had motivated me to step onto the
camino (AMC II.12.5).
I may be engaging in devotional work with my imagination when I am meditating discursively.
Or, alternatively, I may perform a daily ritual or recite particular prayers, such as saying the rosary. In
these ways, too, I am working at generating the proper emotions and motivations for leading me to turn
to God more often and to deepen my love for God. Although I see myself as working, in these ways, to
gain “spiritual sustenance,” John tells me that such nourishment “does not consist in working (trabajar)”
of any sort. At this stage I am not being “fed” through imagining, meditating, reciting prayers, or doing
spiritual reading. I must rather “allow the soul to be in quietude and repose” (AMC II.12.6).
Unbeknownst to me an opposition has arisen between what I think I’m doing and desire to be
doing, on the one hand, and what I am actually doing, on the other. For it turns out that even my initial
project of stripping away my preferences and likings (DN I.7.5)—or, in fact, any aspirations, or efforts
3
Trl. Fr. Elder Mullan, S.J. (NY: P.J. KENEDY & SONS, 1914), trl. modified; [45] - [47], italics added.
6
�(pretensiones), to please God or to have a more intense sense of God—is actually distracting and
drawing my soul away “from the peaceful stillness and sweet ease” (DN I.10.4).
A beginner who once or twice lets herself go and rests in such inner calm often reacts by forcing
herself to get back to work on the devotional project. In John’s view this betrays a misunderstanding of
her current location on the camino. Because she has not made the shift of modes, she thinks that in not
meditating she is being idle and lazy (AMC II.12.7). She may subconsciously have what has been called “a
gaining idea,” 4 an egoistic expectation of spiritual gain. She thinks she is here and God is there, and she
is making an effort to get there. Her sense that she was getting closer to gaining the sought-after
closeness to God used to give her emotional support (arrimo). But, now, when her devotional life has
lost its “juice” (DN I.7.5), she feels negligent or sinful (DN I.9.6; 10.4 & 2). She thinks, If I don’t feel I’m
working, that must mean I’m not doing anything at all (DN I.10.1).
However, in my enjoyment of the new state of “stillness and idleness, or ease (ocio) (DN I.10.1),
I may, instead, feel that there is no progress for me to make. I may gradually realize that if I let go of my
sense of myself as the doer, gave up caring (descuidado) about any inner or outer works, and stopped
“trying to do anything” (DN I.9.6), then I would be where I thought I was heading.
The shift in modes to which the beginners are being invited at this point is the major shift from
the active dark night of sense to the passive dark night of sense. In the latter, John says, “their faculties
are at rest and do not work (obrar) actively but rather passively, by receiving what God is working (obra)
in them” (AMC II.12.8). The difference is like that between continuing to labor at the work (obrando) of
4 S. Suzuki, in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (NY: Weatherhill, Inc., 1973), p. 41: “We say our practice should be without gaining ideas, without
any expectations, even of enlightenment. This does not mean, however, just to sit without any purpose. This practice free from gaining ideas is
based on the Prajñā Pāramitā Sūtra. However, if you are not careful the sutra itself will give you a gaining idea. It says, "Form is emptiness and
emptiness is form." But if you attach to that statement, you are liable to be involved in dualistic ideas: here is you, form, and here is emptiness,
which you are trying to realize through your form. So ‘form is emptiness, and emptiness is form’ is still dualistic. But fortunately, our teaching
goes on to say, ‘Form is form and emptiness is emptiness.’ Here there is no dualism. When you find it difficult to stop your mind while you are
sitting and when you are still trying to stop your mind, this is the stage of "form is emptiness and emptiness is form." But while you are practicing
in this dualistic way, more and more you will have oneness with your goal.”
7
�walking the camino, on the one hand, and enjoying (gozar) that walking as a resting in the end-state, on
the other (AMC II.14.7).
John points to three “signs” that I am now being invited to accept and experience this major
shift. One is that, to quote a song by the Rolling Stones, from a while back,
I can't get no satisfaction
'Cause I try and I try and I try and I try.
Precisely because I continue in my mode of trying, I find that I no longer feel satisfied after engaging in
my activities of fantasy and imagination and of discursive meditation. A second sign I notice is that I
even feel disinclined to take them up again. The third sign is that I now actually like to remain alone in
inner peace (AMC II.13.2-.4). My familiar devotional life has become “arid.” I experience life-giving water
only when I am at rest, not at work, not meditating, not imagining.
John highlights typical reactions that beginners may have when their familiar devotional modes
become “tasteless” to them. Some may become irritable and peevish, like a spoiled child; others may
blame themselves for the loss of taste and feel angry at themselves; yet others may “kill themselves,”
figuratively, by performing physical penances (DN I.5.1 & .3; 6.1).
When I consider what I now prefer and compare it with what I used to like to do, I notice
something very interesting. Remaining in inner peace is something I cannot do, or, rather, something I
can do only by not doing (wéi wú wéi 為無為, Dao De Jing 63). I can enjoy it only if I don’t seek to enjoy
it. As John says: “It is like the air which escapes as soon as one wants to grasp it in one’s fist” (DN I.9.6).
If I want to do anything on my own, I will only end up blocking the refreshing idleness (DN I.10.5). If I
come to notice what John says is there in my experience, I may vaguely sense that instead of having to
work to attain my goal I am already there.
According to John all the changes in mode are the result of God’s taking my soul out of the state
of beginner and placing it in that of proficient, making me a “contemplative,” instead of a meditator (DN
I.1.1).
8
�John proposes an analogy that can serve to characterize all four modes, and especially the last
one, which we’ll look at now. The beginner’s sense of self-in-relation-to-God has been like that of an
infant in relation to its loving mother. She “warms her infant with the heat of her breasts, nurses it with
good milk and tender food, and carries and caresses it in her arms” (DN I.1.2).
Based on its experience the infant has formed a complex of feelings, attitudes, dispositions,
images, memories, behaviors, etc., in relation to its mother. We shall borrow a term from Carl Jung and
call such a complex an imago. Then we could say that the infant had formed—and was still forming—its
Mom-imago. In going beyond John’s analogy, we might introduce a parallel Dad-imago, a voice of
authority, forbidding and judging, punishing and rewarding. According to Jung, even much later in adult
life, when the parents are dead, the individual still experiences them as powerfully present in their
imagos, “as important as if they were still alive.” His or her “love, admiration, resistance, hatred, and
rebelliousness still cling” to those imagos, which often bear little resemblance to the way the parents
actually were, so transfigured are they “by affection or distorted by envy.” 5
My beginner’s religious experience of God has been characterized not only by feeling comforted
and nurtured, giving rise to an analogue of the Mom-imago, but also by feelings of prohibitions, of
rewards, of reprimands, and of forgiveness, generating an analogue of the Dad-imago. My complex
sense of who-God-is-in-relation-to-who-I-am will be referred to as my God-imago.
As is the case with Jung’s parental imagos, my God-imago is not limited to a visual image or to a
representation or concept of God, but includes the emotions I feel and the memories and attitudes I
have developed in relation to God. From the cradle on I have been unwittingly fashioning this Godimago from strong feelings, attitudes, and meanings, originally called forth in me by my everyday
exchanges with my parents, and other family members, neighborhood and school friends, and so on.
5
C. G. Jung, Jung Contra Freud: The 1912 Lectures on the Theory of Psychoanalysis, trl. R.F.C. Hull (Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 52.
9
�These real and fantasized interactions have made their contributions to my God-imago. I, as beginner,
have come to sense God as a living entity whose experienced “communications” to me I interpret as
they show up my thoughts and feelings and in the events of my life. 6
At the beginning of the camino, my initial love of God was needed in order for me to become
capable of taking the initial steps of working at stripping my dependencies of the liking for sensory and
temporal things (AMC II.7.2; 14.2). But the feeling of God’s presence led me to relate to God as to an
actual individual entity (ens), though an invisible, non-worldly one. This, in turn, led me to desire
consolations and rewards or to fear reprimands and punishments from the “God” that I’d projected. I
tried to “manage” my relation to God in a transactive way. But the God-imago to which I have oriented
myself cannot be similar to or proportionate to God (AMC II.4.3). For no creature bears a likeness to
God’s esse (ser), although there are “traces” of God in creatures (AMC II.8.3).
For this reason John’s analogy implies that a shift away from my God-imago is needed. He
depicts it as follows:
As the infant grows bigger, the mother gradually takes away the pleasure of her caress, and, hiding her gentle,
delicate love, puts bitter aloe juice on the sweet breast, and putting the infant down from her arms, makes it walk
on its own feet, so that, by losing the attributes of an infant, it may give itself to more important and substantial
things (DN I.1.2; cf. 1 Cor 13:11).
Just as the mother’s weaning induces the infant to alter its Mom-imago, so does God’s intervention of
“weaning” bring on the new experience of distaste and aridity. I hear this tastelessness as a “call” to set
aside my old God-imago, which accompanied my previous devotional practices. Now I leave behind i)
feelings of dejection when God seems no longer to be consoling me, ii) concerns to obey God by
This understanding of the formation of the child’s God-imago follows the view of Ana Maria Rizzuto, first presented in “Critique of the
Contemporary Literature in the Scientific Study of Religion” at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (1970).
“God-imago” is used above instead of her term “image of God.” Rizzuto says she introduced her notion of the image of God, in order to
distinguish it from the philosophical-theological concept of God. In contrast to the image of God, “the concept of God comes to us through
whatever teachings, readings, liturgies, etc. have been presented to us.” “Although concept and image may converge in some respects, they
may also diverge significantly in others.” Rizzuto later expanded her account in the book The Birth of the Living God: A Psychoanalytic Study
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
6
10
�following spiritual maxims, or iii) feelings of closeness from meditating on my favorite religious images
(DN I.3.1).
In walking on its own feet, my soul reorients itself away from looking off to its God-imago, as
Comforting, Prohibiting, Rewarding Parent. Instead, it becomes sensitive and responsive to the way in
which it is now taking each step on the camino on which it is walking. What I used to feel as the
disobedience of prohibitions I now re-experience as a barrier to beginning to live a life beyond the
natural.
Ideally my soul soon comes to realize that its previous mode was motivated by “fondness for
itself and for all things” (DN I.Exposit.1). It senses that, at bottom, as John puts it, it wanted God to want
what it wanted. So, what it did not enjoy was not God’s will and what it liked was God’s will. It was
measuring God by itself (DN I.7.3). Now God is weaning it “from the breasts of all these enjoyments and
likings” (D I.7.5), and from its God-imago in toto.
Section IV: INTO WHAT DO THE FOUR CHANGES OF MODO SHIFT?
Having considered the four modes out of which I, as beginner, need to pass, in order to become
a proficient and to enter the passive dark night, we now look at the into-which. There is a single mode
into which God is leading my beginner’s soul. That one mode has been referred to above as the inner
peace of contemplative, loving awareness.
John writes that the state of contemplation is one of “attention,” of “awareness (noticia)” 7
which is, first of all, “general …, without particular intellectual insights (intelligencias) and without
When speaking about contemplation, John of the Cross doesn’t regularly use the ordinary words (conocimiento, conocer, saber) that are
translated as “knowledge” or “know.” Instead, he uses a word, noticia, which is the Spanish translation of the Latin notitia, derived from a verb
meaning become or be acquainted or familiar with, be aware of. He seems to have in mind the sense in which Augustine notitia in his
Confessions.
Augustine first used the verb in Book VII.x.16 in reference to an experience in which he entered into what is innermost (intima) in
him and “by some sort of eye of [his] soul … saw … unchangeable Light.” He then says: “One who has become aware of (novit) the truth has
become aware of this Light, and one who has become aware of this Light has become aware of eternity. Love has become aware of this Light.”
Eternity is not the sort of “thing” of which we can acquire knowledge, whether cognoscentia or scientia. But, as least briefly, he and his mother
7
11
�understanding (entender) what [the attention and general awareness is] about,” and, second, “amorous
and tender (amorosa)” (AMC II.13.4).
It is general not in the usual, conceptual sense, according to which a genus is more general than a
species. Or it is not that I’ve turned from imagining this or that individual devotional image on my wall to
recognizing a group of them as particular instances of a certain kind of religious object. 8 Rather when my
mind is not focused on objects, either sensory or conceptual, it is turned toward “the all,” in a state of
“clear and simple” awareness.
Contemplation might be experienced as “amorous and tender” in being like a look of warmth and
mutual understanding between two friends, in contrast to an objectifying gaze. It would be analogous to
an affectionate caress, as opposed to a medical palpation. 9 An artist recognized her periods of amorous
awareness, when,
by the way in which one looked at a thing, it was possible to bring about an intense feeling for and belief in its
living reality. … a complete transfiguration of the common sense, expedient view where … people and things
existed mainly in terms of their usefulness; it brought a change to a world of living essences … offering a source of
delight simply through the fact of being themselves. In short, it was a transfiguration comparable in a small way
to the transfiguration of falling in love. 10
My amorous and tender awareness, then, would be “a transformation of the world,” 11 in which I
experience people and things as more alive and more real, in the way a lover or an artist does.
became aware of, or “touched,” “the Wisdom by which all things were made,” which is “eternal” (IX.x.24). Thus, our experiencing eternity
much more like touching than grasping or grabbing, as in conceptual knowledge.
Later in Book X (xix.28 – xxiii.23) he uses both verb and noun in conjunction with his desire to come in contact with God and to
remain attached to Him. He realized that in order to pursue that desire he had “to pass beyond memory” (xvii.26), to awareness.
Here Augustine used notitia to refer to awareness of the following things:
1) of the blissful life, which he was seeking, in seeking God, and which all human beings want: “Where have they become aware of
(noverunt) it? … I don’t know how they became aware of it and so have it in I-know-not-what notitia.”
2) of numbers, which human beings have in a different kind of notitia, than that of the blissful life.
3) of eloquence, which even some who were never eloquent wished, from an inner notitia, to have, when they happened to
experience others being eloquent.
4) of joy, the notitia of which stuck so fast in his memory that he could be mindful of it, even when he was sad. All human beings
have had an experience of joy, and that’s what they call the blissful life. It is the notitia of that which they have in mind, when they want the
blissful life.
The above examples suggest that John of the Cross may be using noticia to refer to a preconceptual, undifferentiated sort of
familiarity, an awareness that is obscure in that sense.
8 Here John is not using “general” to refer to knowledge by concepts—as in “the concept of body includes heaviness”—as opposed to
particulars known by perception—for instance, “this book is heavy.”
9 The two examples in this sentence come from Erwin Straus, who offers a wonderful discussion of the contrast between detached and involved
awareness in Vom Sinn der Sinne (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1956), pp. 329-350.
10 M. Milner (Joanna Field), On Not Being Able to Paint (Madison, CN: International Universities Press, 1957), p. 21, italics added.
11 This is how J.-P. Sartre characterizes the way emotions alter our experiencing of the world. See his The Emotions: Outline of a Theory (NY: The
Philosophical Library, 1948), pp. 52-58.
12
�Moreover, in the state of contemplation, I do not experience an object of consciousness, do not
encounter anything as if it were standing opposite to me, the subject of consciousness. Contemplation is
“pure” in the sense that it is “pure of object-plus-subject.” My awareness is one with that of which there
is awareness, in a unity out of which both subject and object subsequently emerge. As a state of mind
without “yet a subject or an object,” it is prior to the correlation of subject with object: 12 “The moment
of seeing a color or hearing a sound … is prior not only to the thought that the color or sound is the
effect of an external object or that one is sensing it, but also [prior] to the judgment of what the color or
sound might be.” 13 In this sense contemplation would be an immediate experience. 14
At the very beginning of each moment of awareness,
there is a fleeting instant of pure awareness just before you conceptualize the thing, before you identify it…. It is
that flashing split second just as you focus your eyes on the thing, just as you focus your mind on the thing, just
before you objectify it, … and segregate it from the rest of existence…. just before you start thinking about it—
before your mind says, “Oh, it’s a dog.”
Instead of focusing on what I perceive, imagine, or think, in order to cognize it, label it, and think about
it, in contemplation I “experience a thing as an un-thing … experience a softly flowing [instant] of pure
experience that is interlocked with the rest of reality.” 15 Understood in this sense contemplation can be
seen to open me to what is in-finite, in-determinate, un-limited, un-thing, and, thereby, to prepare me
for selfaware union with the divine creating, God’s esse, or is-ing, as was stated in Section I.
CONCLUSION
My soul is “holding” its “direction-toward (advertencia) God together with [its] loving God.”
John analogizes this holding-together to my holding my eyes open, in order to allow the light “to be
communicated passively” to me, just as God “is being communicated passively to the soul.” This “divine
12 William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism and A Pluralistic Universe, “DOES 'CONSCIOUSNESS' EXIST?” (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1971),
p.5. Also: “The relation itself is a part of pure experience; one of its 'terms' becomes the subject…, the other becomes the object.”
13
NISHIDA Kitaro, An Inquiry into the Good, tr. M. Abe and C. Ives, modified (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 3-4; italics added.
14 Such selfawareness is not to be confused with self-consciousness—the reflective I think which “must be able to accompany all my
presentations” (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B132)—in which pure contemplation first splits into subject and object. “Selfawareness” is an
attempt to translate into English Sartre’s “conscience (de) soi,” which he uses to refer to the pre-reflective I think. See his “L'Être et le Néant:
Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique (Paris : Éditions Gallimard, 1943), p. 20.
15 Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, Mindfulness in Plain English (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2011), p. 132; italics added. One way to
sense what this instant of pure experience is like would be to compare “what you see with your peripheral vision as opposed to the hard focus
of normal or central vision” (p. 132).
13
�light” “is being poured” into my soul (se le infunde), in a way beyond the natural (AMC II.15.2-3).
Thereby my will “is changed into life of divine love” (LFL 2.34). Now my soul experiences what God
stated in the Psalm referred to in the introduction: “you will see how (cómo) I am God” (AMC II.15.5).
My soul sees how God is God in seeing the world in a fresh way, beyond the natural.
In order to convey how God is God, John (LFL 4.6) turns to the depiction of Wisdom in the Book
of Wisdom (7:24-27): “‘Wisdom is more mobile than all movable things’ … because she is the origination
and root of all movement; and … ‘remaining within herself stable and permanent, she makes all things
new (innova; καινίζει).’” He says that this means that “Wisdom is more active than all active things.” In
this movement, according to John, my soul is the moved. It has been “awakened from the dream of
natural vison to vision beyond the natural.” From its new perspective—from which it is seeing how God
is God, how Wisdom is Wisdom—it has the loving, general awareness (noticia) of that stable divine life
as originating and as making all things new, each instant. Each instant it experiences creatures’
movements as being in tune (armonía) with God’s moving (LFL 4.6), as emanating from “God’s being-atwork (ἐνεργείας)” (Wis 7:26).
Key to Abbreviations
AMC – Ascent of Mount Carmel
DN – Dark Night
LFL – Living Flame of Love
14
�
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Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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Walking the First Steps of His Camino with John of the Cross: An Exploration of the Dark Night of Sense
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Typescript of a lecture delivered on November 11, 2022, by Annapolis tutor Robert Druecker as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Druecker describes his lecture: "According to John a verse from one of the Psalms is saying to us: Learn to be empty of all things, both outward and inward, and you will see how I am God. Outward things are things the soul experiences through its senses, feelings, and imagination. As the soul moves into this first dark night, it actively works at releasing its hold on all particular things. Then at some point, it notices that, independently of its wishes and efforts, it is being led away from an active doing into a receptive undergoing. Its tight grip is gradually becoming a relaxed open hand. The soul is entering the passive dark night of sense. It begins to experience God as flowing into it. Correlated with this sensed inflowing is the soul’s awakening to ways in which God is manifesting his divinity in the world."
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Druecker, Robert
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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2022-11-11
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A signed permission form has been received stating: "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a copy of my typescript available online"
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John of the Cross, Saint, 1542-1591. Noche oscura del alma. English
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Purgative way to perfection
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English
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LEC_Druecker_Robert_2022-11-11
Friday night lecture
Tutors
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https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/a9152d8c3d33dffbb94407e3f8bb01dc.mp4
f2fa870f99f78ab33c0cdbea8682b6e4
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Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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Zoom video conference
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01:22:39
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The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Looking in Freshman Lab III – Looking Into The Constitution of Bodies: How Does the Supposition of Particles Help Us to See?
Description
An account of the resource
Video recording of a lecture delivered on April 13, 2022, by Annapolis tutor Robert Druecker as part of the Formal Lecture Series. The lecture is the third in a three-part series on Freshman Lab.
Note: The title frame at the beginning of the lecture reads Looking in Freshman Lab II, but the lecture is Looking in Freshman Lab III.
Druecker describes his lecture: "This is a lecture specifically for first-year students. It will tell a story of how the presupposition that particles exist is used and made precise by a succession of chemists, from Lavoisier through Mendeleev. Does it enable us to see anything new in the phenomena we encounter in the laboratory? How does its contribution to seeing compare with that of Archimedes’ and Pascal’s mathematical approaches to weights and fluids?"
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Druecker, Robert
Publisher
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
Date
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2022-04-13
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A signed permission form has been received stating: "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a copy of my typescript available online"
Type
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moving image
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mp4
Subject
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Particles
Chemistry--Study and teaching
Chemistry--Experiments
Relation
A related resource
<a href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/7629">Looking in Freshman Lab part I (typescript)</a><br /><br /><a href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/7350">Looking in Freshman Lab part I (video)</a><br /><br /><a href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/7628">Looking in Freshman Lab part II (typescript)</a><br /><br /><a href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/7627" title="Looking in Freshman Lab part II (video)">Looking in Freshman Lab part II (video)</a><br /><br /><a href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/7630">Looking in Freshman Lab part III (typescript)</a>
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English
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LEC_Druecker_Robert_2022-04-13_ac
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/ac54c4a9f8e21ccd6096baa14b782f2f.mp3
90735c35823694c77438ef15e1f0a1e9
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
Sound
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audiocassette
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00:54:50
Dublin Core
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Title
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Octaves: The Variety of Sameness
Description
An account of the resource
Audio recording of a lecture delivered on September 19, 1997 by Elliott Zuckerman as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Creator
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Zuckerman, Elliott
Publisher
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St. John's College
Coverage
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Annapolis, MD
Date
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1997-09-19
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Permission has been given to make this available online.
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sound
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mp3
Subject
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Music theory
Language
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English
Identifier
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LEC_Zuckerman_Elliott_1997-09-19_ac
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/e69cfd4b302a71f33edc2994888691f4.mp4
19e81d94888bc4f519a01f57c4160c5f
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
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mp4
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00:56:10
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Moments in the Liberal Education of Frederick Douglass from <em>My Bondage and My Freedom</em>
Description
An account of the resource
Video recording of a lecture delivered on August 26, 2022 by Joseph Macfarland as part of the Formal Lecture Series. First formal lecture of the academic year, previously referred to as the "Dean's Lecture", but now called the "Christopher B. Nelson Lecture".
Creator
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Macfarland, Joseph C.
Publisher
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St. John's College
Coverage
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Annapolis, MD
Date
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2022-08-26
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Permission has been given to make this available online.
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moving image
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mp4
Subject
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Douglass, Frederick, 1818-1895
Education, Humanistic
Slavery--United States
Slaves--United States--Education
Language
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English
Identifier
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LEC_Macfarland_Joseph_2022-08-26_ac
Christopher B. Nelson Lecture
Deans
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/8daf28e6162f65ee6c3f662f61c820a2.mp4
44f4029c52262d4f8ad896c43ca85095
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
Moving Image
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mp4
Duration
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01:02:03
Dublin Core
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Perceptual and Deliberative Imagination in Aristotle’s <em>De Anima</em>
Description
An account of the resource
Video recording of the <span>National Endowment for the Humanities lecture </span>delivered on April 22, 2022, by Annapolis tutor Jason Tipton as part of the Formal Lecture Series.<br />
<p class="x_MsoNormal"><span>Mr. Tipton describes his lecture: "Many animals, Aristotle claims, live by imagination. In an important way, we can understand that imagination is the product of the process of perception and the condition for noetic activity. It is both an end and a beginning. Imagination is proto-cognitive and supra perceptual. The task will be to disentangle imagination from perception and understanding so that we might see the proper unities that come to be."</span></p>
Creator
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Tipton, Jason A.
Publisher
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St. John's College
Coverage
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Annapolis, MD
Date
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2022-04-22
Rights
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A signed permission form has been received stating: "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library."
Type
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moving image
Format
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mp4
Subject
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Aristotle. De anima
Imagination (Philosophy)
Contributor
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Macfarland, Joseph C.
Language
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English
Identifier
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LEC_Tipton_Jason_2022-04-22_ac
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/f0ad61f8a58ce280b730e638c1c90471.pdf
cbcbec0adcf644670e9ddc57e39ba3d5
PDF Text
Text
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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/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
Text
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pdf
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18 pages
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Reading Genesis Chapter Three
Description
An account of the resource
Typescript of a lecture delivered on September 2, 2022, by William Braithwaite as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Mr. Braithwaite offers this description: "The Garden of Eden story, about Adam and Eve, what they did and how they were punished for it, is the authoritative source for the Christian doctrine of original sin. Before St. Augustine and St. Paul appropriated it for this purpose, however, the story belonged to the Hebrew Scriptures of the ancient Israelites, and Judaism has no dogma of original sin. But even before ancient rabbis put the story in writing many centuries ago, it may, some scholars suggest, have circulated orally.
If we try to imagine who first told the story, and to whom, and with what end in mind, what would we take it to be about, and what truth might we find in it? What does the story say to those who are not Christians or Jews, whether of another faith, or even atheist or agnostic? Seeking reliable speculations on such questions is the work behind this lecture."
Creator
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Braithwaite, William T. (William Thomas)
Publisher
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St. John's College
Coverage
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Annapolis, MD
Date
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2022-09-02
Rights
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A signed permission form has been received stating: "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: make a recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John’s College Greenfield Library; make a recording of my lecture available online; make typescript copies of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John’s College Greenfield Library; make a copy of my typescript available online."
Type
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text
Format
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pdf
Subject
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Bible. Genesis
Eve (Biblical figure)
David, King of Israel
Parables
Solomon, King of Israel
Language
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English
Identifier
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LEC_Braithwaite_William_2022-09-02
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/afafde9a2dae43b98b911a93dfee3f49.pdf
969f3058d093fecd2ffe45d260eabab2
PDF Text
Text
Looking in Freshman Lab III – Looking into The Constitution of Bodies:
How does the supposition of particles help us to see? 1
LAVOISIER’S PROGRAM FOR GENERATING SEQUENCES OF EXPERIMENTS LEADING TO FACTS AND
IDEAS, BASED ON MEASURING WEIGHTS (1789)
In his “Preliminary Discourse” 2 Lavoisier lays out guidelines for how to arrive at knowledge in
the physical sciences in general and in chemistry in particular. Students should follow the same course
as “nature follows in the formation of a child’s ideas … [T]heir ideas ought to be only the consequence,
the immediate continuation (suite) of an experiment or observation” (0.6). According to Lavoisier the
child’s first ideas, engendered by its sensations of its needs, are of objects appropriate for satisfying
those needs. Insensibly over time, as a result of a sequence (suite) of such sensations and observations
of suitable objects, the child generates a succession “of ideas, all bound to one another.” As with the
child so in chemistry, if one were “an attentive observer,” one “could, up to a certain point, even find
again” in the sequence of sensations, observations, and analyses “the thread and the linking
(enchaînement) of those ideas, bound to one another, which constitute the totality of what we know” in
chemistry (0.5). 3
In accord with this account, we might say that Lavoisier will aim to show us a sequence of
sensations and observations of experiments and a corresponding sequence of ideas, which he generated
from them. In his case following “the course that nature follows” appears to consist: i) in linking “the
facts and the truths of chemistry in the order most appropriate for facilitating the insight (intelligence)
A Wednesday Afternoon Lecture, delivered at St. John’s College, Annapolis, on April 13th, 2022.
For all translations from the first chapters of Lavoisier, Antoine Lavoisier, Oxygen, Acids, and Water, H. Fisher, ed., C. Burke and M. Holtzman,
trls. (Santa Fe: Green Lion Press, 2019) was consulted and often followed word for word. The references in parentheses are to chapter and
paragraph number in that translation.
3
Dans notre première enfance nos idées viennent de nos befoins; la sensation de nos besoins fait naître l'idée des objets propres à les satisfaire,
& insenfiblement par une suite de senfations, d'observations & d'analyses, il se forme une génération sucçessive d'idées toutes liées les unes aux
autres, dont un observateur attentif peut même jusqu à un certain point y retrouver le fil & l'enchaînement, & qui constituent l'ensemble de ce
que nous savons.
1
2
1
�of beginners” and ii) in ensuring that the consequent ideas “derive immediately from the facts” and
“from experiments and observations.” This arrangement would be “the natural linking of experiences
and observations” “from the known to the unknown” (0.5, .6, .8, .10, .11).
As with the child our “sensations give birth to ideas” and ‘’ideas ought to be only what … follows
immediately an experiment or observation” (0.6). Then we are not led “to draw conclusions which by
no means derive immediately from the facts,” (0.8). By presenting the facts and ideas in this way,
Lavoisier will enable us, if we are attentive, to find for ourselves the thread binding those ideas to one
another. In coming to see this connection, we should be in a situation somewhat like that of Goethe’s
reader—mentioned in the first lecture on looking in Freshman Laboratory—who can follow similarity
through its transitions, by holding in her imagination a temporal sequence of appearances, until she can
derive them from one another.
Based upon our experience in the lab up to this point, the interpretation of “derive immediately
from the facts” is that our awareness of an experiment, whether we performed it or read Lavoisier’s
account of it, gives birth to an idea in us. The experiment suddenly “makes sense” to us. But it wouldn’t
have done so absent the foreknowledge we had acquired through experience. In this respect there is an
analogy with Euclid’s sequence of propositions. A given proposition at the place where it is enunciated
appears to derive immediately from the preceding propositions in the sense that given our familiarity
with the earlier ones, in some cases, insight into the truth of the later one may be born in us as we read
it. 4
Following Lavoisier’s course involves, first, describing all the equipment used in each experiment
and telling the step-by-step story of what was done and what occurred throughout. That story includes
both observations and notes of the qualities of the substances involved in the experiment and of the
The analogy could be extended to include Euclid’s postulates. Just as Euclid needs to request that we admit them, if we are to have the
sequence of insights generated by his propositions, so Lavoisier has to ask that we admit his “principle” “that, in every operation, there is an
equal quantity of matter before and after the operation” (see below), as a condition for the possibility of ideas being born in us immediately in
response to his experiments.
4
2
�weights of all of those substances. Other relevant quantities, such as temperature, pressure, and volume
of gases must also be recorded. 5 In addition, one experiment, even if repeated several times, would not
be sufficient:
Chemistry furnishes two means for determining the nature of the constituent parts of bodies: composition and
decomposition. When, for example, water and … alcohol… are combined, creating … eau-de-vie, we are entitled
to conclude therefrom that eau-de-vie is composed of alcohol and water. But the same conclusion can be reached
through decomposition, and we ought to be fully satisfied in chemistry only as far as we have been able to bring
together both kinds of proof (3.3).
Much of Lavoisier’s focus will be on concluding—from experiments in which he observes and
measures especially the weights of the substances before and after the experiment—to a fact that a
particular substance, having weight W, has been composed from two (or more) other substances, having
respective weights w1 and w2. For instance, after his first description of a pair of decompositionrecomposition experiments, Lavoisier writes that it “does not give us exact ideas about the proportion”
of the weights of the component substances (3.14). So, he goes on to perform a further experiment in
the same series, as a result of which one can determine that the one substance “diminishes by an
amount in weight exactly equal to that by which [the other] is increased” (3.25).
In the course of describing the next set of experiments, having noted that “since nothing with
weight passes through the glass,” Lavoisier writes, “we are entitled to conclude from them that the
weight of whatever substance has resulted from this combination … had to be the same as the sum of
the weights” of the substances that were there before the combination (5.7).
He only later 6 states the “principle” upon which he bases this claim: “Nothing is created, …; we may
posit in principle (poser en principe) that, in every” experiment, “there is an equal quantity of matter
before and after” the experiment, “and that there are only changes, modifications” of matter. 7 He is
In their papers at the end of Equilibrium and Measurement, Marotte and Gay-Lussac reported having done this.
Antoine Lavoisier, Oxygen, Acids, and Water, H. Fisher, ed., C. Burke and M. Holtzman, trls. (Santa Fe: Green Lion Press, 2019), p. 57, note to
5.7.
7 Traité Élémentaire de Chimie, T. 1er (Paris : Cuchet, Libraire, 1789), Ch. 13.
5
6
3
�positing this principle underneath his feet, as it were, like a foundation on which to stand, in order to be
able to investigate. A student 8 put it this way: “you have to find a foundation—which does not shift
around as much as what you are trying to see—on which to discover something new amid what is
shifting.” In this respect Lavoisier seems to be illustrating the following words of Socrates to Glaucon: “a
soul … is forced to seek on the basis of sup-positions (ἐξ ὑποθέσεων)” (Rep 510b). At a minimum
Lavoisier has recognized that such a sup-posit-ion is a necessary condition for being able to learn
anything from chemical experiments by keeping tally of the weights involved in them.
In spite of the support provided by the principle, however, just after having concluded to the
sameness of weights before and after the above experiment, Lavoisier goes on to write that “no matter
how conclusive this experiment may have been, it was not yet sufficiently rigorous,” due to the fact that
it was “not possible to verify the weight” of the resultant compound. “We can only conclude to it by
way of calculation, in supposing it equal to the weights of” the ingredient substances. “But however
evident this conclusion may be, in chemistry and physics it is never allowable to suppose something that
can be determined through direct experiments” (5.9). So, as long as all the weights involved in an
experiment are determinable by some experiment, he does not rely on what he can conclude by
standing on the principle he has posited. For physical scientists have “often supposed instead of
concluding,” and “these suppositions, from one age to the next, … acquire the weight of authority” (0.9).
We might say that when he concludes, Lavoisier encloses together all that he’s observed,
measured, and noted throughout an experiment, in order to come to a fact, which would be the
conclusion, or end, of the experiment. The act of concluding would then be a shift from taking
“composition” as meaning the process of putting (poser) two substances together (com) during an
experiment to viewing it as signifying the qualitative and quantitative make-up, or composition, of the
outcome of an experiment.
8
Katherine Bates in Freshman Lab class, 2020.
4
�For instance, from having made (ayant fait) a certain weight of white flakes out of a given
weight of oxygen and another of phosphorous, one is entitled to conclude to the fact (fait, factum) that
a certain weight of white flakes is made (est fait) of a given weight of oxygen and another of
phosphorous. A decomposition experiment of unmaking the white flakes would allow concluding to the
fact from an un-making. On this literal understanding of “fact,” it would not be correct to say it’s a fact
that a given substance is elementary, since no making or unmaking has shown that to be the case.
However, in view of the principle, such an enclosing-together is possible only if the “walls” of
the “enclosing room” let nothing come in or out, at least in the course of the experiment. That is, we
would have to suppose something which could not be determined through direct experiments, namely,
that “the great walls of the capacious world” are closed, in the sense that they cannot, “suddenly torn
asunder, have burst apart” 9 and have allowed material substances to pass through them in either
direction.
An example of particular ideas that derive immediately from a sequence of facts, each like the
one in the above example of white flakes, might be the idea that this kind of white flakes, which is found
to have various acidic properties (5.18), is a compound substance, or, to take another case, the idea that
water is a compound substance, composed of hydrogen and oxygen, approximately in the ratio of 1g :
5.2555g (8.12). In Lavoisier’s usage such ideas are “consequences” that we “draw” (0.8). An example of
a general idea would then be compound substance.
Perhaps, in the case of compound substance, it is as if we now not only were looking at these
white flakes and remembering them as the concluding frame of a “film strip” of the just performed
composition experiment, but also were seeing, as such a frame of a generalized film strip, any substance
for which such a sequence of experiments had revealed that instances of it were made of two or more
component substances.
9
Lucretius, De rerum naturae, VI.122-23: divolsa repente maxima dissiluisse capacis moenia mundi.
5
�We may take Lavoisier’s figures along with the accompanying text as a musical score in two
different ways. In one way they tell us how to “play” each experiment in our imaginations, picturing the
equipment, the ingredient substances, the sequence of steps and events, and the outcome. We may
write down his numbers for height of mercury, volume of a container, and weights of substances and
then do the calculations. Finally, based upon trust in his report and in his results, we may see that the
burning of phosphorus, which we had considered an alteration of one substance, can be analyzed as the
composition of one substance from two others.
Moreover, we may also see that having kept track of the change in volume and of the weights of
the substances we can conclude to the fact that, for example, 45 gr of phosphorus and 69.375 gr of
oxygen composed to make 114.375 gr of white flakes (5.7). Furthermore, based upon trust that Lavoisier
has done many repetitions of this experiment, we can draw the consequence that such white flakes are
composed of phosphorous and oxygen, roughly in the ratio 1 : 1.54 by weight. So, we now have the idea
of such white flakes as a substance composed of two other substances in this weight ratio.
In the other way of taking the musical score, we “play” Lavoisier’s score in our laboratory, with
equipment similar to his. Here we trust only what we observe, that is, see and measure. Thus—it is
hoped—we arrive at the same conclusion, consequence, and idea, but upon a different basis. In either
way through his “score” Lavoisier has given any human being access to the facts and ideas he has
generated. In that sense these latter are objective.
We also recognize that in addition to the resultant general insight that, in some cases, at least,
apparent alteration might be analyzable as the composition or decomposition of substances, Lavoisier
must have relied, in advance, upon three supplementary insights: 1) that this analysis could be most
productively carried out by keeping track of the weights of the substances involved, 2) that a condition
for the possibility of this keeping-track is the supposition of the principle that, in every operation, there
is an equal quantity of matter before and after the operation, and 3) that another condition for the
6
�possibility of this keeping-track is the supposition that the vessels used in the experiments are
impermeable to the passage of the substances involved.
One way to imagine the generation of these insights would be as follows. Suppose we had left a
piece of moistened steel wool in a jar with a top on it. When we return after several days, we notice not
only the rusting of the steel wool but also a sensation of air being sucked into the jar as we unscrew the
top. It would seem as if something had happened to the air, a reduction in amount, simultaneously with
the rusting. Perhaps we could repeat this experience on a larger scale, using a bell jar, inverted over
mercury, weighing some dry steel wool, before and after the period of several days, etc. If when we
calculated we found a significant reduction in the amount of air and a significant increase in the weight
of the steel wool, we might think that the rusting might be a combining of the steel wool with
something in the air. We could then go on to figure out how much of a reduction by weight the air
underwent and compare that with the weight gain of the steel wool (cp. CB 6). 10 We could note along
the way that our calculations would not be valid, unless we had made Lavoisier’s suppositions.
INTERLUDE: GAY-LUSSAC’S RECOLLECTION OF IDEALLY EXACT LIMIT-NUMBERS (1808)
Before returning to Lavoisier, we shall glance at a paper 11 by Gay-Lussac, which is read about a
week after Lavoisier is finished. Gay-Lussac generally proceeds in accord with the course recommended
by Lavoisier, of beginning with observations and experiments, concluding from them to facts, and
deriving ideas immediately from the latter. He did, however, introduce a new feature. The students
sometimes claim that Gay-Lussac introduced mathematics into Lavoisier-style chemistry. What are they
thinking of?
Gay-Lussac began by noting a contrast between the behavior of gases, on the one hand, and, on
the other, that of liquids and solids, which had been revealed by the experimental work of Edme
The Constitution of Bodies (Annapolis, MD: St. John’s College, Printed Spring 2021), p. 6. Future references to this manual will be noted “CB,”
followed by the page number.
11 “Memoire on the Combination of Gaseous Substances with Each Other” (1808), CB 37-42, translation modified in places.
10
7
�Mariotte. Mariotte showed that the same reduction in pressure, say, by 2/3, applied to volumes of any
two different gases, say, hydrogen and oxygen, would produce the same expansion of an increase by 2/3
in each of the two volumes, so that for an expansible container of a gas at any given fixed temperature
the product of the pressure-number and the volume-number remains the same, as its pressure and
volume vary. In contrast, as Gay-Lussac noted, “the same compression applied to all solid or liquid
substances would produce a diminution of volume differing in each case” (CB 37).
Thus, while the variations in volume of liquids and solids, with changes in pressure, “have
hitherto presented no regular law,” independent of the nature of the liquid or solid in question, the laws
of the variations in volume of gases are “equal and independent of the nature of each gas.” This
recognition probably led Gay-Lussac to the intuition that he could see something new by simultaneously
narrowing his gaze to experiments involving only ingredient gases and shifting his focus from Lavoisier’s
weight-experiments to volume-experiments. He writes that it is his intention to show thereby that gases
“combine amongst themselves in very simple ratios” (CB 37).
Gay-Lussac thinks that the cause of this key difference between liquids and solids, on the one
hand, and gases, on the other, is that the particles of the former are drawn close to each other by an
attractive force, which is not present in the case of gases (CB 37). Imagining the particular attractions
between particles makes for a complicated picture when we look at volumes of solids and liquids. In
addition, it is a picture which we cannot actually see because we don’t know anything about the smallscale details of the attractions which would allow us to predict any determinate experimental outcome.
So, in effect, Gay-Lussac “hears” attractions between particles as “noise.” That noise is silenced when he
listens only to gases and their volumes. Then, Gay-Lussac “listens” to the regularity Mariotte had found
to be independent of the natures of particular gases.
Gay-Lussac presents the facts from which his idea arose. He performed an experiment with a
colleague in which they found an “exact ratio of 100 of oxygen gas to 200 of hydrogen gas for the
8
�[volume] proportion of water.” This result led him to suspect “that the other gases might also combine
in simple ratios” by volume. In the next four experiments he performed, Gay-Lussac found that in two
of them the volume ratios of the combining substances were 100 : 100 and, in the other two, 100 : 200
(CB 38-39).
He goes on to offer “some fresh proofs, after which he states:
Thus it appears evident to me that gases always combine in the simplest proportions when they act on one
another; and we have seen in reality in all the preceding examples that the ratio of combination is 1 to 1, 1 to 2,
or 1 to 3 (CB 41).
He adds that when the result of the combination of two gases is a gas, its volume is also in a very simple
whole-number ratio with that of each of the components (CB 41; cp. Avogadro, CB 43).
Analogous to Archimedes in his first treatise, Gay-Lussac has found a way to see ideal-exact
limit-formations—in his case, to see, in chemical experiments, the unit and assemblages of units
(ἀριθμοί). When he looked at the ingredient and resultant gas volumes in his and others’ experiments,
“the thought occurred to him of another thing”—a unit or two units or three units—a thing not found in
his sensory experience, something as if he knew it “from before.” Socrates would have said that GayLussac “is recollecting that of which he grasped the thought” (Ph 72e-73cd). For instance, Gay-Lussac
saw the volumes of nitrogen gas and oxygen gas that combined to form nitric acid gas as “reaching
after” the One and the Two, respectively, but “in a condition of falling short” of them (Ph 74c-75b; italics
added). Edmund Husserl would have claimed that the unit volumes that Gay-Lussac saw were examples
of ideally exact limit-formations, like those encountered in Lecture II. 12
The last three of Gay-Lussac’s proofs are based upon the results of experiments performed by
Davy, in which the weights of the combining substances and of the resultant substances were given. In
order to “hear” the corresponding volumes, Gay-Lussac must reduce the weight ratios in each case to
volume ratios. He reverses Lavoisier’s procedure (see, for example, Lavoisier 3.25) for translating a
Husserl, op. cit., pp. 22-23; The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological
Philosophy, tr. D. Carr (Northwestern: 1970), pp. 25-26.
12
9
�measured diminution in volume into the corresponding diminution in weight. Gay-Lussac divides the
observed weights by the known densities of the gases in order to determine the volume ratios of the
experiments.
For instance, Gay-Lussac then heard, or, to shift metaphors, saw, the volumes of nitrogen gas
and oxygen gas that combined to form three nitrogen compounds as “reaching after” the One and the
Two, respectively, but “in a condition of falling short” of them (Ph 74c-75b; italics added)—like a chalk
mark reaching after the Straight. For the actual experimental results for these three compounds were
that the nitrogen volume was to the oxygen volume as - 2 : 0.99 and 1 : 1.089 and 1 : 2.047, respectively.
Gay-Lussac comments:
The first and the last of these [ratios] differ only slightly from [2 to 1], and [1 to 2]; it is only the second which
diverges somewhat from [1 to 1]. The difference, however, is not very great, and is such as we might expect in
experiments of this sort; and I have assured myself that it is actually nil (CB40). 13
This assurance suggests that hearing, or seeing, ideal-exact volume-units can allow us to correct
values arrived at by measuring weights. In an application of his new approach—without having to
perform any experiments, but simply by viewing a weight-experiment, through the lens of volume—
Gay-Lussac corrected the accepted density of carbonic acid gas.
Cruickshanks had experimentally determined its value to be 0.9569. When Gay-Lussac looked at
the volume results of an experiment by Berthollet, in which 200 carbonic oxide + 100 oxygen → 200
carbonic acid, he concluded that the relation of the densities is dcoxide = dcacid - ½doxy. Since the latter two
densities had been well established 14 by many experiments as 1.5196 and 1.1036, respectively, GayLussac saw that the density of carbonic oxide gas had to be .9678. The elimination of weight-noise—
“Reducing these proportions to volumes we find—
Nitrogen Oxygen
Nitrous oxide
100
49.5
Nitrous gas
100
108.9
Nitric acid
100
204.7
The first and the last of these proportions differ only slightly from 100 to 50, and 100 to 200; it is only the second which diverges
somewhat from 100 to 100.”
14 CB 41, n. 17.
13
10
�each experiment involving a particular kind of chemical reaction yields slightly different weight
relations—allowed Gay-Lussac to hear the ideal-exact sound of the volume, by which he could correct,
in the second decimal place, the previous value, which depended on weight-experiments.
In his experiments Lavoisier was measuring magnitudes, as dealt with by Euclid in Book V of The
Elements. Now Gay-Lussac is counting numbers, which Euclid treated in Book VII. Gay-Lussac has, thus,
opened the realm of chemistry to include the discrete as well as the continuous. This new seeing of units
and numbers of units in chemistry may be what the students glimpsed when they said that Gay-Lussac
had introduced mathematics into chemistry.
LAVOISIER AND THE ROLE OF IMAGINATION (1789)
We return to Lavoisier in order to consider the role of imagination in chemistry. In accord with
his aim to rely on what we observe and conclude when we perform experiments involving weighing,
Lavoisier wanted to avoid being led astray by the imagination. With respect to the things we want to
come to know, he presents “imagining them” as an alternative to his program of “observing them”
(0.41). Moreover, Lavoisier specifically warns us of the dangers of the imagination, “which constantly
tends to carry us beyond the true … [and] invite[s] us to draw consequences which by no means derive
immediately from the facts” (0.8). Especially “in the case of things that can be neither seen nor felt, it is
of the utmost importance to guard against the deviations of the imagination, which always tends to soar
beyond the true and which has considerable difficulty in confining itself within the narrow circle that the
facts draw around it” (1.10). Thus, what we imagine, in that it leads to consequences not immediately
derivable from the facts, stands squarely opposed to ideas, which do so derive by insight.
For instance, while Lavoisier spoke of particles, he did not go on to imagine what they might be
like in detail. “Lavoisier’s ‘particles’ are simply small portions of a substance, not necessarily either the
11
�smallest possible portions or even of uniform size.” 15 He drew no consequences from any suppositions
about the nature of the assumed particulate nature of matter.
Nevertheless, under certain conditions, he does draw tentative consequences, in an interesting
way, from imagining the behavior of particles, namely, their separation by warmth (1.1):
It is understandable that since they are … continually invited (sollicitées) by warmth (chaleur) to separate from one
another, the particles of bodies would have no connection among themselves and that there would be no solid
body if they were not held back by another force that would tend to bring them together and, as it were, to link
them to one another….
And so the particles of bodies can be considered as obeying two forces, one repulsive and one attractive,
between which they are in equilibrium (1.3 & .4; italics added).
This imagined picture—which involves considering-as—does not seem to acquire the status of a
consequence that Lavoisier would or could legitimately draw. On the one hand, he imagines “a real,
material substance, an exceedingly subtle fluid that insinuates itself throughout the particles of bodies
and separates them.” Yet the grounds for speaking of it are that the phenomena of bodies’ changing
state as they are warmed up or cooled down are “difficult to understand … without admitting that they
are the effects” of such an imagined substance. So, that substance would appear to be a supposition of
a different kind than his sup-position of the principle mentioned above as a foundation for the chemist
to stand on. He states: “Even supposing that the existence of this fluid were an hypothesis, we shall see
in what follows that it explains the phenomena of Nature quite felicitously” (1.7). “Explaining” must be
distinguished from concluding or drawing a consequence. The hypothesis of a subtle fluid would help us
to imagine a picture of what might be going on “beneath” or “inside” those things we can actually see
and measure in the lab.
“Since the sensation that we call warmth is the effect of the accumulation of” this imagined
substance, “whatever it may be,” Lavoisier names it, as being the cause of warmth (Lat. calor), “caloric.”
Yet in the same paragraph, he assures us that
15
Lavoisier, Op. cit., p. 13, note to 1.1.
12
�rigorously speaking we are not even obliged to suppose that caloric is real matter; it suffices … that it be a
repulsive cause of any sort that separates the particles of matter, and so we may view its effects in an abstract
and mathematical way (1.8).
Lavoisier seems to be inviting us to fantasize anything whatsoever as long as it helps us to imagine what
could be happening when bodies change state with changing temperature. Ultimately, whatever we
imagine will have to agree with any empirically established mathematical functions that express change
of matter as a function of temperature, as well as with the ideal gas law, which we have already
encountered in Ch. VI of Measurement and Equilibrium. 16
While the above account “determines the idea that we ought to attach to the word ‘caloric,’”
Lavoisier wishes to “give correct ideas of the manner in which caloric acts on bodies” (1.10). In the
course of doing that, he reports that caloric “plays in some way the role of solvent” in the case of every
gas, in that it “tends to separate” the particles of all bodies, opposing their attraction (1.28 & 1.30).
Since, in dealing with abstract things, we should not over-rely on the help of sensible
comparisons, Lavoisier offers several ways in which we may form a picture of these opposing
tendencies: “we picture (figure) to ourselves,” now a vessel filled with little lead balls into which a very
fine powder … has been poured,” now pieces of different kinds of wood, submerged in water (1.31-.34).
This use of the imagination to picture sensible comparisons clearly does not risk carrying us beyond
what is true.
These comparisons may call to mind that earlier in the lab Theophrastus, Aristotle, and Harvey
analogized the working of plant parts or animal organs to that of products of art. In those cases, though,
we could actually look at the part in question and see the similarity in it, somewhat as we can see a
particular expression in a face. However, the substance that Lavoisier is looking at in his imagination
bears no visible trace of anything expressive of lead balls or pieces of wood. We are imagining them
alongside or inside the phenomena we are looking at in the lab. Putting it that way is suggestive of the
16
Measurement and Equilibrium (Annapolis: St. John’s College, printed Fall 2020), pp. 128-30.
13
�transparencies that Archimedes and Pascal used to bring about an essential seeing in the lab. In the case
of Lavoisier, however, what we fantasize allows us to picture what could be happening below the level
of appearances that could account for them.
Lavoisier’s final discussion of caloric in Ch. I is based on the twin suppositions of the existence of
particles of matter and of particles of caloric. Having stated that caloric is both an elastic fluid and the
cause of the elasticity of bodies, Lavoisier poses the Socratic question, “what is elasticity”? It is the
property that “the particles of a body have of moving away from one another when they have been
forced to draw near,” a “tendency … that manifests itself even at very great distances.” That air can be
highly compressed presupposes that particles of air are already quite far from each other. But we know
from experiments that they tend to move even further away from each other. The only way to explain
that effect is by “supposing that the particles make an effort in every direction to separate” (1.44).
There may, in fact, be such a real repulsion between the particles of elastic fluids, since it would
be consistent with the phenomena, but Lavoisier thinks that such “a repulsive force … is difficult to
conceive” (1.45). Trying out another supposition leads him, finally, to the thought that
the separation of the particles of bodies by caloric is due to a combination of different attractive forces, and it is
the result of these forces that we seek to express … when we say that caloric communicates a repulsive force to
the particles of bodies. (1.46)
At the very least we may say that Lavoisier’s imagining of caloric did not lead him to cling to a
fixed supposition of what is going on “behind” or “inside” the things we can see with our eyes. He is
flexible in the ways in which he imagines the supposed action of caloric. He keeps his eye,
simultaneously, both on the phenomena and on the supposed separation of gas particles with increasing
warmth. He encourages us to play around with different suppositions, without mistaking any of them for
“the true” picture.
14
�DALTON’S SUPPOSITION OF ULTIMATE PARTICLES, OR ATOMS, AND MAKING USE OF THEM (1808)
(NOTE: The terminology used in the discussion of Dalton and his followers will be a translation
into a more modern terminology, established by Cannizzaro, 17 in which “atom” refers to a single
hitherto un-cutable, or in-divisible particle, which may or may not be attached to other particles by
attraction. And “molecule” refers to a separate particle, one not joined to other particles by attraction; it
may consist of one atom or of many.)
Dalton’s first great insight is that “we have hitherto made no use of” the pre-supposition that
each material thing is made up of a great number of atoms. There are two different uses that Dalton has
in mind, first, using experiments to make the particle picture more determinate and, second, using the
particle picture to propose and correct experiments.
First, chemists have not “inferred” from their experimental determination of the relative weights
of the ingredient and resultant substances to “the relative weights of the ultimate particles or atoms of
the [different kinds of] bodies” involved (CB 20-21). If they had done so, they could have seen i) how
many atoms of each kind of elementary substance were in molecules of various compounds, ii) the
relative weights of different elements in those compound molecules, and iii) the relative molecular
weights of the various compounds (CB 21).
The second use that chemists have not made of atoms is dependent on the first. For since the
chemists had no accurate, determinate atomic-molecular picture, they had no way of using particles “to
assist and to guide future investigations, and to correct their results” (CB 21). His claim is analogous to
saying that until he worked out the mathematics of the motions of heavenly bodies, Ptolemy could not
predict the date of a solar eclipse.
17 “The conception of [Avogadro and Ampère] contains nothing contradictory to known facts, provided that we distinguish, as they did,
molecules from atoms; provided that we do not confuse the criteria by which the number and the weight of the former are compared, with the
criteria which serve to deduce the weight of the latter; provided that, finally, we have not fixed in our minds the prejudice that whilst the
molecules of compound substances may consist of different numbers of atoms, the molecules of the various simple substances must all contain
either one atom, or at least an equal number of atoms” (CB 53).
15
�Dalton’s second great insight was that it was impossible to make any use of the presupposition of
atoms as long as chemists were thinking of molecules of, say, water, as being of diverse weights. Just as
Lavoisier could not make any real use of experiments, unless he sup-posed that there is an equal
quantity of matter before and after each experiment, so, too, experiments won’t be able to show
anything about the relative atomic makeup of substances’ molecules, unless we sup-pose 18 that
the ultimate particles of all homogeneous bodies are perfectly alike in weight, figure, &c. In other words, every
particle of water is like every other particle of water; every particle of hydrogen is like every other particle of
hydrogen, &c.... (CB 21).
We might say that Dalton has introduced into the world of presupposed, imaginary atoms the
supposition of ideally exact atoms. So, all ingredient and resultant substances will now be seen, at the
same time, in a double vision--both as weights, continuous magnitudes, in the lab and as atom-units of
different kinds, discrete multitudes, in the particle world. In this respect his seeing is like that of Euclid
and of Archimedes’ first treatise. The difference, though, lies in that things—in particular, things in the
material world—are thought of as “reaching for” and “falling short of” (Phdo 75ab) the exact limitformations of Euclid and Archimedes, whereas Dalton thinks of atoms as (tiny, invisible) things that
make up the actual material world. Thus, Dalton is not led to think of his homogeneous particles by what
he sees in the lab, in the way that Cebes might be led to think of Simmias by a picture of him or by a face
glimpsed in a crowd. Dalton isn’t viewing the substance in the lab as an image (εἰκών) of a number of
atom-units. He might, while looking at the particular substance, be supposing a huge number of
identical molecule-units. But the substance could not be said to image them. Moreover, at least so far,
the number of identical molecule-units would also be quite indeterminate.
18 Dalton’s word is “conclude.” The grounds for his conclusion are that “from what is known, we have no reason to apprehend a diversity in
these particulars” and that “it is scarcely possible to conceive how the aggregates of dissimilar particles should be so uniformly the same.” For
it is not conceivable to Dalton that, due to the great number of atoms in any body weighable in the lab, it could be impossible for chemists to
distinguish between the sameness of all atoms of each element and a distribution of the specific gravity of each element that is represented
graphically in the shape of a bell-curve.
16
�How well does Dalton execute his program and use his supposition of homogeneity? He shows
how chemists could go about determining the atomic makeup of molecules and relative atomic weights
of elementary substances and relative molecular weights of compound substances. First, in order to
guide chemists in deducing such “conclusions” from experimental “facts already well ascertained,” he
proposes “general rules” like the following:
1st. When only one combination of two bodies can be obtained, it must be presumed to be a binary one, unless
some cause appear to the contrary.
2d. When two combinations are observed, they must be presumed to be a binary and a ternary. (CB 22)
The first two pairs of conclusions that he goes on to mention are “1st. That water is a binary
compound of hydrogen and oxygen, and the relative weights of the two elementary atoms are as 1 : 7,
nearly” and “2d. That ammonia is a binary compound of hydrogen and [nitrogen], and the relative
weights of the two [elementary] atoms are as 1 : 5, nearly…” (CB 22). He accompanies his statement of
the conclusions with “arbitrary … signs chosen to represent” the atoms and their composites, as shown
in Figures 1a & b PLATE IV (CB 24-25).
PLATE IV. This plate contains the arbitrary marks or signs chosen to represent the
several chemical elements or ultimate particles.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
Fig.
Hydrog., its rel. weight 1
Azote, 5
Carbone or charcoal, 5
Oxygen, 7
Phosphorus, 9
Sulphur, 13
Magnesia, 20
Lime, 23
Soda, 28
Potash, 42
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
Fig.
Strontites,46
Barytes, 68
Iron, 38
Zinc, 56
Copper, 56
Lead, 95
Silver, 100
Platina, 100
Gold, 140
Mercury, 67
An atom of water or steam, composed of 1 of oxygen and 1 of
hydrogen, retained in physical contact by a strong affinity, and
supposed to be surrounded by a common atmosphere of heat, its
8
relative weight = ............................................ …………………
An atom of ammonia, composed of 1 of azote and 1 of hydrogen =
6
An atom of nitrous gas, composed of 1 of azote and 1 of oxygen =
12
An atom of olefiant gas, composed of 1 of carbone and 1 of hydrogen = 6
An atom of carbonic oxide composed of 1 of carbone and 1 of oxygen =
12
Figure 1a
17
�Figure 1b
Hence—given Lavoisier’s principle and the results of his and other chemists’ composition and
decomposition experiments, in which the weights of the bodies involved were ascertained—if we
presuppose atoms and suppose them to be homogeneous in Dalton’s sense and apply his heuristic
general rules, then both the relative weights of many atoms and the numbers of them in the molecules
of various compound bodies do follow as “conclusions.” In this way Dalton’s vision resembles that of
Ptolemy. 19
The manual directs our attention to a conclusion that follows directly from Dalton’s supposition,
without any need to apply his “general rules” to particular experiments. There was a debate, 15 years
This is true, provided Ptolemy’s mathematical apparatus be interpreted simultaneously as showing that for which the motions of the
heavenly bodies reach while falling short of it and that which enables the astronomer to say in advance where a given body will be in the sky on
a given date. But there is a difference between the two visions, unless Ptolemy be interpreted as considering his cycles and epicycles to be
invisible material bodies.
19
18
�after Lavoisier’s Treatise, between the chemists Berthollet and Proust as to whether or not substances
react and combine in definite and fixed weight ratios. For example, if 2 gm of substance A reacts with 16
gm of substance B, then 2½ gm of A will react with 20 gm of B, and so on, so that the ratio of the weight
of A to the weight of B is 1 : 8 in every case (CB 33). Lavoisier had pre-supposed that this was so, but
Berthollet claimed to have demonstrated experimentally that compositions of two substances occur “in
all ratios, up to [an] extreme value which … varies with the temperature.” Proust, though, claimed to
have found “fixed ratios” in his experiments (CB 104). 20
On the basis of Dalton’s supposition, Proust must be correct. For if every molecule of water is
made of the same number of homogeneous oxygen atoms and of the same number of homogeneous
hydrogen atoms, then in a given amount of water, say, one million molecules, the weight ratio of oxygen
to hydrogen must be the ratio –
(atomic weight of oxygen)(number of oxygen atoms per water molecule)(1,000,000) :
(atomic weight of hydrogen)(number of hydrogen atoms per water molecule)(1,000,000).
Whether or not Dalton’s “general rules” are “adopted as guides,” the ratios always have to be the same,
on the basis of his supposition. So, in imitation of Gay-Lussac’s correction of Cruikshank’s experimental
determination of the density of carbonic oxide gas (CB 41), Dalton could correct Berthollet’s empirical
claim. This might be like telling an astronomer, who reported having seen an eclipse of the moon
between 10:05 PM and 2:44 AM on a given night, that she must have fallen asleep for an hour and ten
minutes, because it had actually begun earlier, according to our mathematical calculations.
20 The manual adds a second necessary conclusion that follows directly from Dalton’s supposition of homogeneity, without reference to his
general rules, namely, the Law of Multiple Combining Proportions: “From Dalton’s doctrine of atoms it follows that whenever two elements
unite in more than one [ratio] there will be small whole number ratios among the [weights] of the first element that combine with a fixed
[weight] of the second—whole number ratios because the various [weights] of the first element that combine with a fixed [weight] of the
second must always represent whole numbers of atoms; and small because according to Dalton the most prevalent combinations may be
presumed to be those between the least numbers of atoms” (CB 30).
19
�AVOGADRO’S “ONLY ADMISSIBLE” HYPOTHESIS ABOUT SIMPLE GASES (1811)
Avogadro saw that in order to use particles, as Dalton wished to do, chemists needed to
eliminate Dalton’s guesswork, that is, his arbitrary, general rules, as heuristic “guides” (CB 22) to
determine the relative number of particles in compounds (CB 46). Avogadro’s key insight is that it is
necessary to provide “Dalton’s system … with a new means of precision through” connecting it with
Gay-Lussac’s discovery of small whole-number ratios of ideal-exact unit-volumes of gases (CB49). Then,
still looking through the Daltonian lens, Avogadro will be able to see the particles more clearly.
To review where we are at this point: we are supposing that all atoms of any given element are
identical, that all molecules of any given compound are identical, and that at STP all boxes of any given
gas contain the same number of molecules. The density of most gases have been determined by
experiment, as described above. Finally, as Gay-Lussac had shown, gases combine in very simple wholenumber ratios by volume. 21
Avogadro, with all of that in mind, realizes that “viewing” Daltonian particles “through” GayLussacian boxes gives him a way to bring the Daltonian picture into better focus. It makes particles, as it
were, into learnables (μαθήματα), about which one can learn, apart from doing experiments. He sees an
apparent necessity in the relationship between “the relative number of particles which combine and …
the number of composite particles which result,” on the one hand, and, on the other, “the ratios of the
quantities of substances in compounds.” 22 Avogadro believes that introducing a mathematics of
numbers of particles and boxes will enable him “to confirm or rectify” Dalton’s results (CB46).
This insight immediately leads him to another: “It must then be admitted (Il faut donc admettre)
that very simple ratios [or relations] also exist between the volumes of gaseous substances and the
21 “The combinations of gases always form in very simple ratios (rapports) by volume, and that when the result of the combination is a gas, its
volume is also in a very simple ratio with that of [each of] its components” (CB 43).
22
“The ratios of the quantities of substances in compounds would appear to be able to depend only on the relative number of particles which
combine, and on the number of composite particles which result” (CB 43; italics added). Avogadro’s word “quantities” may cover both weights
and volumes. If quantities—weights or volumes—of two gases combine to form a third, the ratios of the first to the second to the resultant
“would seem to be able to depend only on the relative number of particles” in the first, the second, and the resultant volumes, respectively.
20
�numbers of simple or compound particles which form them” (CB 43; italics added). Getting milage out of
the simplicity of the relationship between lab experiments involving boxes of gases and pictures of the
numbers of atoms or molecules composing gases would be easiest if it turned out that, for all gases at
STP, the number of particles per box were identically the same. For then the weight ratio of two boxes,
or equivalently, the densities of two gases, would at once also show the relative weights of the two
gases in the compound molecule. In a way, the boxes would be acting like magnifying glasses, or lenses.
In order to see that, consider Figure 2. Suppose that it turned out that for every gas there were
DALTON’s supposed molecules
1 imagined molecule of oxygen
⃝
1 imagined molecule of hydrogen
AVOGADRO’s lens to ‘see’ weight
of Dalton molecules in Gay-Lussac
boxes
1 box of 100 imagined molecules of
oxygen
GAY-LUSSAC’s unit boxes of gases
weighed in the lab
1 box of 100 imagined molecules of
hydrogen
1 actual box of oxygen
1 actual box of oxygen
ﬦ
Weight of 1 oxygen molecule
-----------------------------------Weight of 1 hydrogen molecule
=
1/100 of weight of 100 oxygen
molecules
-----------------------------------=
1/100 of weight of 100 hydrogen
molecules
Weight of 1 box of oxygen
-----------------------------------Weight of 1 box of hydrogen
Figure 2
exactly 100 molecules of it in one Gay-Lussac box. Then the experimentally determined weight ratio of a
box of oxygen to a box of hydrogen (see left column) would have to be the same as the supposed weight
ratio of one oxygen molecule to one hydrogen molecule (see right column), because the lens shows that
the former ratio is the same as the ratio of the weight of 100 oxygen molecules to 100 hydrogen
molecules.
21
�But could Avogadro learn the relative numbers of particles per box of two different ingredient
gases that result in a compound gas? He claims that the hypothesis just stated in the previous
paragraph, “which presents itself first in this connection,” is not only the first to present itself and the
simplest but also “the hypothesis … which even appears to be the only admissible one” (CB 43).
How could he have learned that no other hypothesis could be admitted? Avogadro devotes
most of the rest of the first paragraph to hypotheses about the possible distances of gas particles from
each other. 23 But he summarizes these speculations by stating that “in our present ignorance of the
manner in which this attraction of the particles … is exerted, there is nothing to decide us a priori” for or
against any one of these hypotheses.
However, he concludes that “the hypothesis we have just proposed relies on that simplicity of
ratio between the volumes of gases in the combinations, which would appear to be unable to be
explained otherwise” (CB 44; italics added). In other words, the necessity of the simple relationship
between experimental boxes and numbers of particles—itself, the necessary result of bringing GayLussac and Dalton together—forces him to reject any hypothesis other than the simplest one. 24
Dalton’s first “object” had been to make “use of” the presupposition of particles, in order to
determine the relative weights of particles and the composition of composite particles (CB 20-21).
Avogadro can claim that relying on his new lens, or hypothesis, he was able to “see,” in all volume
experiments involving gases, the relative numbers of ingredient and resultant molecules involved, and
so, also, their molecular weights. In this way his first hypothesis makes the supposed, invisible realm
distinctly and determinately visible.
23 If you think of gas molecules as floating freely, unattracted by each other, then there is no reason to think that two boxes of different gases
would contain different numbers of particles.
24 In order to see that Avogadro’s hypothesis is the only way to arrive at this simplicity, one would have to work through all the known
experimental results involving gases, while trying out different numbers of molecules per box. For each trial the supposed molecular
composition of each gas would have to remain the same in all reactions. In doing this Avogadro seems to have seen that the simple relations
follow only from one hypothesis about the relation between number of molecules per box, namely, that a box of any gas contains the same
number of molecules.
22
�CANNIZZARO’S DETERMINATION OF A TABLE OF MOLECULAR AND ATOMIC WEIGHTS (1858)
Avogadro’s hypothesis lets us “see” the relative molecular weights of gases, “even before their
composition is known,” since the molecular weights have to be proportional to the experimentally
determined densities of the gases, as we’ve just seen. Cannizzaro’s first insight is that instead of focusing
on particular reactions and particular compounds “it is useful” (giova) to view all the elementary and
compound gases together and, in particular, “to refer” the molecular weights (or, densities) of all gases
to that of the lightest gas (CB 56), namely, hydrogen.
He sets up a ratio scale of relative molecular weights. Since it is a scale of relative, not actual,
weights, the weight-number to assign to the smallest molecule is completely arbitrary. With later
considerations in mind, he assigns to hydrogen the weight-number 2 on the scale, rather, than 1. All
other molecular weights will be determined by their ratios to that of hydrogen = 2. Then looking at unit
volumes through Avogadro’s lens, Cannizzaro can make a table of the molecular weights of all gases,
relative to this unit.
For instance, in order to determine the relative molecular weight of any gas, all he has to do is
look up the density—that is, the weight per box—at the same temperature and pressure, of hydrogen
and of the gas in question. Since
(molecular weight of gas x)/(molecular weight of hydrogen, viz., 2 = (density of gas x)/(density of hydrogen),
he has only to multiply the density of gas x by the density of hydrogen gas and then to multiply that by
2. And he has determined the molecular weight of the gas.
Cannizzaro list the molecular weights of some gases in the right-hand column of Figure 3 (CB
56).
23
�Names of Substances
Hydrogen
Oxygen, ordinary
Oxygen, electrised
Sulphur below 1000°
Sulphur* above 1000°
Chlorine
Bromine
Arsenic
Mercury
Water
Hydrochloric Acid
Acetic Acid
weights of the molecules referred to
the weight of a whole molecule of
Hydrogen taken as unity.
1
16
64
96
32
35.5
80
150
100
9
18.25
30
weights of the molecules referred to the
weight of half a molecule of Hydrogen
taken as unity.
2
32
128
192
64
71
160
300
200
18
36.50†
60
Figure 3
Cannizzaro’s second insight is that we must clearly distinguish between the criteria used just
now to arrive at the weights of all the gas molecules from those that yield the weights of the atoms and
the numbers of them in the molecules (CB 53). Avogadro—in the course of using his “lens” for looking
through equal boxes, at same temperature and pressure, in order to see molecular weights—had been
forced, in considering the composition of water, to recognize that a molecule of elementary oxygen
contains two oxygen atoms.
To see this let’s suppose, again, that there are 100 molecules of any gas in one box. In the
composition experiment, one box of oxygen combined with two boxes of hydrogen to form two boxes,
that is, 200 molecules, of water. If the oxygen molecule consisted of only one oxygen atom, there’d be
only 100 oxygen atoms available for forming 200 water molecules—not enough!
So, Avogadro “supposes” that the molecules “of any simple gas whatever,” like oxygen, are “not
formed of one single” atom, “but result from a certain number of these molecule joined together in a
single one” (CB 45). He also supposed that for instance, if oxygen and hydrogen molecules were,
respectively, O2 and H2, then one atom from each box of oxygen and of hydrogen would have to join to
compose one compound molecule; so, there would be 200 water molecules of the composition H2O,
since there are two boxes (200 molecules, or 400 atoms) of hydrogen and only one box (100 molecules,
or 200 atoms) of oxygen.
24
�But if oxygen and hydrogen molecules were, respectively, O4 and H2, then two atoms of oxygen
would have to join with one hydrogen atom from each box of hydrogen to compose one compound
water molecule. So, there would be 200 water molecules of H2O2. In either case the number of water
molecules “becomes … exactly what is necessary to satisfy the volume of the resulting gas” (CB 45), 25
that is, two boxes of water. Perhaps it is the principle of simplicity, reminiscent of Dalton, that decides
him in favor of H2O.
In order to determine molecular formulas in a more systematic and reliable way, Cannizzaro
considers in one view all of the elements that can be produced in gaseous form. In agreement with the
argument of Proust and the conclusion from Dalton’s supposition, he begins with fixed, determinate,
experimental ratios between the weights of the two component substances in a given compound.
Then the weight of the molecule is divided into parts proportional to the numbers expressing the [experimentally
determined] relative weights of the components, and so we have the [weights] of [the components] contained in
the molecule of the compound, referred to the same unit as that to which we refer the weights of all the molecules
[namely, hydrogen = 2] (CB 57).
This method allows him to construct the following table, shown in Figure 4 (CB 58):
Name of Substance
Hydrogen
Oxygen, ordinary
Oxygen, electrised
Sulphur below 1000°
Sulphur above 1000° (?)
Phosphorus
Chlorine
Bromine
Iodine
Nitrogen
Arsenic
Mercury
Hydrochloric Acid
Hydrobromic Acid
Hydriodic Acid
Water
Ammonia
Arseniuretted Hyd.
Phosphuretted Hyd.
[molecular
wt (H’s = 2)]
2
32
128
192
64
124
71
160
254
28
300
200
36.5
81
128
18
17
78
34
[weights of the molecule’s components]
2
32
128
192
64
124
71
160
254
28
300
200
35.5
80
127
16
14
75
31
Hydrogen
Oxygen
”
Sulphur
”
Phosphorus
Chlorine
Bromine
Iodine
Nitrogen
Arsenic
Mercury
Chlorine
Bromine
Iodine
Oxygen
Nitrogen
Arsenic
Phosphorus
1 Hydrogen
1 ”
1 ”
2 ”
3 ”
3 ”
3 ”
25 “When particles of another substance unite with the former to form a compound particle, the whole [compound] particle which should result
is divided into two or several parts (or separate particles) [each]composed of half, quarter, etc., the number of elementary particles going to
form the constituent particle of the first substance, combined with half, quarter, etc., of the number of constituent particles of the second
substance, which should combine with the whole particle (or, what comes to the same thing, [combined] with a number equal to this [last
number] of half-particles, quarter-particles, etc., of the second substance); so that the number of separate particles of the compound becomes
double, quadruple, etc., what it would have been if there had been no dividing, and exactly what is necessary to satisfy the volume of the
resulting gas” (CB 45).
25
�Calomel
Corrosive Sublimate
Arsenic Trichloride
Protochloride of Phosphorus
Perchloride of Iron
Protoxide of Nitrogen
Binoxide of Nitrogen
235.5
271
181.5
138.5
325
44
30
35.5
71
106.5
106.5
213
16
16
Figure 4
Chlorine
”
”
”
”
Oxygen
”
200 Mercury
200 ”
75 Arsenic
32 Phorphorus
112 Iron
28 Nitrogen
14 ”
In order to understand Cannizzaro’s procedure, let’s suppose that the relative weight ratio for
producing 100g of arseniuretted hydrogen has been found by experiment to be weight of arsenic : weight of hydrogen :: 96.15g : 3.85g.
Cannizzaro would divide the relative molecular weight, 78, of arseniuretted hydrogen into two numbers,
a, representing how much of the 78 is due to arsenic, and h, representing how much of the 78 is due to
hydrogen. So,
78 = a + h.
But also, since the 78 is to be divided in the same proportion as the 100, he knows that
96.15g : 3.85g :: a : h.
Solving these two simultaneously 26 tells him that the breakdown of the molecular weight of
arseniuretted hydrogen into the weights of its component elements has to be 75 parts from arsenic
atoms and 3 from hydrogen atoms.
At this very moment Cannizzaro says the following to his students (CB 59):
‘Compare … the various quantities of the same element contained in the molecule of the free substance and in
those of all its different compounds, and you will not be able to escape the following law: The various quantities
of the same element contained in different molecules are all integral multiples of one and the same quantity, which,
always being integral, ought rightly be called [the atomic weights relative to that of hydrogen as 1] (CB 59,
underlining added). 27
For instance, if we look for chlorine in the right column of Figure 4, we see that the number it
has been found to have is 35.5 or twice that, or triple that. So, 35.5 must be chorine’s relative atomic
weight; and its molecule must be diatomic; and, for instance, there must be three chlorine atoms in
26
27
If a + h = 78 and a/h = 96.15/3.85 = 25, then (78 – h)/h = 25. So, 78 – h = 25h, and 78 = 26h. Or h = 3 and a = 75.
His actual words are: “ought rightly be called atom.”
26
�protochloride of phosphorus (molecular weight = 138.5). A similar search for phosphorus tells us that its
relative atomic weight must be 32 and that there must be one phosphorus atom in a molecule of
protochloride of phosphorus. It is easy to see that we can now “express all chemical reactions by means
of the same numerical values [that is, these relative atomic weights] and integral coefficients” of them
(CB 60). That is, we can write reliable, accurate chemical formulas for such compounds. For the present
example of protochloride of phosphorus, the chemical formula must be PCl3. 28
MENDELEEV’S CONSTRUCTION OF THE PERIODIC TABLE (1870-71)
Mendeleev points to his fundamental insight right at the beginning of the excerpt in the manual.
In order to make the “inadequacy” of current atomic doctrine in chemistry “disappear,” he will “put at
the foundation of the study of the main [physico-chemical] properties of the elements their [relative]
atomic weights,” which Cannizzaro had worked out, less than 10 years before Mendeleev set to work.
Mendeleev’s bringing two previously separate realms into relationship may remind us of Avogadro’s
advancing to a new insight by bringing into relationship Gay-Lussac’s perception of small whole numbers
of boxes of gases and Dalton’s supposed ideal-exact atoms. Mendeleev indicates several steps by which
he came to his insight.
Chemists had long recognized certain “natural groups” of elements based on their physicochemical properties. For instance, lithium, sodium, potassium, rubidium, and cesium had been referred
to as alkali metals; they are good conductors of heat and electricity, are highly malleable and ductile,
have very low boiling and melting points and shiny surfaces, and are distinguished from other metals by
their lower densities and softness. Beryllium, magnesium, calcium, strontium, and barium were known
as alkaline earths; they are solid, hard, dense, and usually shiny, are less reactive than metals, are often
insoluble in water, and are found in the earth crust. Fluorine, chlorine, bromine, and iodine are non-
28
It is, of course, clear to Cannizzaro that the numbers may have to change as future empirical discoveries are made.
27
�metallic, have relatively low melting and boiling points and generate salts (ἅλς) when they react
chemically with metals; they had been grouped together as halogens. Other natural groupings were
“analogues to sulfur,” including oxygen, selenium, and tellurium; as well as analogues to nitrogen,
including phosphorous, arsenic, antimony, and bismuth (CB 81).
Initially the elements were put in groups due to their similarities with respect to these
properties. Then some chemists noticed among pairs or triples of elements of high atomic weight,
analogues to pairs or triples of elements of much lower atomic weights. This noticing of analogues “gave
the first impetus to compare the different properties of the elements with their atomic weights” (CB 81).
For example, the physico-chemical properties of cesium (w 29 = 133) and barium (w = 137) were
analogous to those of potassium (w = 39) and calcium (w = 40). With respect to such properties, they are
proportional, in the sense that
K : Cs (among alkali metals) :: Ca : Ba (among alkaline earths).
In other words, within the natural group of alkali metals, the ways in which K differs from Cs, in its
physico-chemical properties, is analogous to the ways in which Ca differs from Ba, in those properties,
within the group of alkaline earths.
Such analogies led to the insight that the way a given physico-chemical property alters, as we
consider, one after the other, the elements of increasing atomic weight within one natural group, may
often occur in parallel with corresponding changes in other natural groups. That insight, in turn, led to
“thinking of classifying all the elements according to their atomic weights,” as determined by
Cannizzaro, in order to see what might be revealed. Mendeleev reports that when we do this “we find
an astonishing simplicity of relationship” (CB 82).
29
The letter “w” will stand for relative atomic weight, according to Mendeleev’s figures.
28
�His illustration of that simplicity is the arrangement, shown in Figure 5, in two horizontal rows of
all the elements of relative atomic weight between 7 and 36, “in arithmetical order according to their
atomic weights.” He looks in two different ways at these rows.
Li=7
Be=9.4 B=11
C=12 N=14 O=16 F=19.
Na=23 Mg=24 Al=27.3 Si=28 P=31 S=32 Cl=35.5.
Figure 5
First, when he looks at a row by itself and attends, one by one, to the different physical and
chemical properties, he notices “that the character of the elements changes regularly and gradually
with increasing magnitude of the atomic weights” (CB 82; italics added). For instance, the
characteristics—whether qualitative or quantitative—of the elements in the row change from left
to right in the following ways:
i) from being basic to being acidic;
ii) from metals, through semi-metals, to non-metals;
iii) from being good conductors of heat and electricity to being insulators;
iv) from being lustrous and shiny to being dull;
v) from a boiling point of 1330°C rising in the middle and then falling to -188°C;
vi) again rising, from a melting point of -180°C, to a maximum and then falling to -187°C;
vii) density, too, rises to a high point and then falls, as shown in Figure 9;
viii) a graph of the relative atomic volumes [that is, the relative atomic weight (weight per atom)
divided by its density (weight per unit volume) = relative volume per atom] would be U-shaped
ix) and, finally, a graph of the volatility would also be U-shaped (CB 83-84). (See Figure 6 for viii and ix.)
Na
Mg
Al
Si
P
S
Cl
vii) Density:
0.97 1.75 2.67 2.49 1.84
2.06 1.33
viii) At Vol:
24
16
14
10
11
16
27
Figure 6
Second, when we compare the patterns of change, from left to right, along the top row with
29
�those along the bottom row, we find that “the character of the elements changes … in the same
way in both series, so that the corresponding members of them are analogues.” In this example,
the patterns of change are the same for all nine characteristics listed above. Thus, lithium and
sodium, the respective members of each series that are highest in basic character, metallic
character, luster, and conductivity are the leftmost ones, are also at the beginning of rising curves
of the graphs of melting and boiling points and density, and so on (CB 82).
Finally, Mendeleev stresses the importance of the forms of the compounds that are formed—in
order along each of the two rows—with oxygen and with hydrogen. The forms of these compounds
present regularities that are familiar to chemists from their experimental work. As we look from the
beginning of either row, “the corresponding elements in the two series have the same kind of
compounds” with oxygen: That is, two atoms of the given element combine with the following numbers
of oxygen atoms—1, 2, 3, … respectively, a uniformly increasing sequence of whole numbers, as the
atomic weight of the element increases. For instance:
The seven elements of the second series give the following higher oxides capable of forming salts:—
Na2O,
Mg2O2, Al2O3,
or MgO,
Si2O4,
P2O5,
or SiO2,
S2O6, Cl2O7,
or SO3.
Thus, the seven members of the above [second] series correspond in the same sequence to the seven generally
known forms of oxidation (CB 83).
Moreover, beginning with the righthand member in either row and moving left, a similar pairing
of compounds with hydrogen occurs—hydorfluoric acid (HF) and hydrochloric acid (HCl) are 1 : 1; water
(H2O) and hydrogen sulfide (H2S) are 2 : 1, and so on, up to 4 : 1..
Mendeleev states: “This regularity proves that the above comparison of elements presents
natural series in which it is impossible (нельзя) to assume any intermediate members” (CB 82-83;
italics added). The arranging of the elements in the order of increasing relative atomic weight has led
Mendeleev to see a new necessity, or rather impossibility, such as we might find in mathematics.
He goes on to present such pairings for all the elements. That he can do so “indicates a close
30
�dependence of the properties of the elements on their atomic weights.” As we have seen from his
example and as he goes on to show, all the individual relationships of the dependence of physicochemical properties on atomic weight are “periodic.” “First, the properties of elements change with
increasing atomic weight; then, they repeat themselves in a new series of elements, a new period,
with the same regularity as” in the series we just went through in detail (CB 84). Mendeleev is using
“period,” in the sense familiar to us from Ptolemy. Just as a heavenly body has different positions over
time and returns to its starting point, after completing one period, and then begins a repetition, a new
period, so a given physico-chemical property has different values as we consider, in turn, elements of
increasing atomic weight along one row, and returns to a value near its starting value, after completing
one period, and then begins a repetition, a new period, at the first element of the next row.
Once Mendeleev had thought to arrange all the elements in the order determined by their
atomic weights, these repetitive patterns suddenly became visible to him, as a picture of wave-like
motions. His experience might be analogous to suddenly seeing something appear in Figure 7.
Figure 7
31
�Mendeleev next goes on to show how he found the complete periodic dependence of the
physico-chemical properties on the relative atomic weights (CB 85ff). He lined the elements up in rows,
like the ones we’ve considered. Table II, in Figure 8, shows all the elements in eight columns—
Figure 8
the eight natural groups—and twelve rows. Rows 2, and 3 are the two complete series we’ve already
considered. However, the remaining elements revealed their periodicity only when Mendeleev lined
them up below one another in longer rows, in the following way:
Row 4 (group I-VII) + Group VIII + Row 5
above
Row 6 (group I-VII) + Group VIII + Row 7
above
Row 8 (group I-VII) + Group VIII + Row 9
above
Row 10 (group I-VII) + Group VIII + Row 11
Thus, one circuit begins with K and Ca’s properties and ends only with those of Se and Br; a new circuit
begins with Rb and Sr’s properties and ends with those of Te and I. And so on.
32
�Mendeleev concludes by returning to what Dalton saw as the second use that chemists had not
made of particles—using them “to assist and to guide future investigations, and to correct their results”
(CB 21). Perhaps Mendeleev thought that by his time it was not particles, but relative atomic weights
that still had not been made use of. He says that in order for a law, like his periodic law, to acquire
scientific importance its logical consequences have be useful, in the sense that they “explain the as yet
unexplained, give indications of hitherto unknown phenomena, and [allow] one to make predictions
that are accessible to experimental verification” (CB 89).
He does all that in the rest of his article. For instance, the element indium had been discovered
in 1867 and assigned the relative atomic weight of 75.6. Mendeleev saw that there was no open slot in
the periodic table for an element of relative atomic weight 75.6. But by comparing its compounds with
those of other elements, Mendeleev saw that indium would have to be placed in an open slot in in
Group III, row 7, with atomic weight about 113 (CB 91-92).
Moreover, Mendeleev investigated the empty slot in Group IV, row 5. He saw that there had to
exist an element of relative atomic weight “about 72” in that slot. Based on the known physico-chemical
properties of the elements in the slots around the empty one, he predicted the properties that the yetto-be-discovered element would have to possess. About 15 years later the element germanium (Ge), of
relative atomic weight about 72.5 and possessing those properties, was discovered (CB 93-95). Perhaps
chemists experienced this discovery as somewhat like reading a novel, coming away with a very precise
sense of the main character, and then meeting someone at a party who strikes us as perfectly fitting the
fictional portrait. It might seem as if we knew him “from before.” Would Socrates say that we are
“recollecting,” but in some to-be-determined different sense (Ph 72e-73cd)?
What do we make of Dalton’s seeing supposed particles—not actual chalk marks on the
blackboard or lines drawn on paper—as ideal-exact limit-entities, in the realm of μαθήματα, of objects
of study leading to insightful learning? Do they eventually lead to acts of insight into the actual material
33
�world, in the way that Archimedes’ learn-ables about weight or Ptolemy’s about motion do? How does
the way in which they allow us to see more in the world compare with the way Archimedes’
transparencies refine our vision?
Do Mendeleev’s successes in making use of the supposed particles and of their relative atomic
weights show that atoms and molecules are not merely supposed but also actually existing entities in
the material world?
34
�
Dublin Core
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Description
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Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
Text
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pdf
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34 pages
Dublin Core
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Looking in Freshman Lab III – Looking into The Constitution of Bodies:
How Does the Supposition of Particles Help Us to See?
Description
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Typescript of a lecture delivered on April 13, 2022, by Annapolis tutor Robert Druecker as part of the Formal Lecture Series. The lecture is the third in a three-part series on Freshman Lab.
Druecker describes his lecture: "This is a lecture specifically for first-year students. It will tell a story of how the presupposition that particles exist is used and made precise by a succession of chemists, from Lavoisier through Mendeleev. Does it enable us to see anything new in the phenomena we encounter in the laboratory? How does its contribution to seeing compare with that of Archimedes’ and Pascal’s mathematical approaches to weights and fluids?”
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Druecker, Robert
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
Date
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2022-04-13
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A signed permission form has been received stating: "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a copy of my typescript available online"
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text
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pdf
Subject
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Chemistry--Study and teaching
Lavoisier, Antoine Laurent, 1743-1794
Chemistry--Experiments
Mendeleyev, Dmitry Ivanovich, 1834-1907
Cannizzaro, Stanislao, 1826-1910
Avogadro, Amedeo, 1776-1856
Relation
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<p><a href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/7629">Looking in Freshman Lab part I (typescript)</a><br /><br /><a href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/7350">Looking in Freshman Lab part I (video)</a><br /><br /><a href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/7628">Looking in Freshman Lab part II (typescript)</a></p>
<p><a href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/7627">Looking in Freshman Lab part II (video)</a><br /><br /><a href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/7682" title="Looking in Freshman Lab part III (video)">Looking in Freshman Lab part III (video)</a><br /><br /><br /><br /></p>
Language
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English
Identifier
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Druecker_Robert_2022-04-13
Tutors
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